Marty Griffin Show hour 03 062426

Okay, folks, Brandon McGinley from the Post Gazette, filling in for Marty today. I want to address two very potent things that Mark, caller Mark from the north side raised before the break. One, which order should I do this in? I'm going to, I'm going to address the question that he asked directly first. He directly asked me if I can understand why, by and large, black Americans do not trust white Americans. And the answer is, yes, absolutely I can understand. And more than that, I think that it is in many cases, broadly speaking, justified. The history of black people in America is one of broken promise after broken promise. often promises made by white Americans and by white American power structures. Also, and that's left, right and center, by the way. That's left, right and center. That's not, it's not about ideology. It's not about partisan. It's about broken promises, left, right, and center. And then also, because we live in a still largely de facto segregated, especially the city, to be honest, unusually so in this city, but cities around the country, the racial geography of America is still very, very de facto segregated, not by law, but a lot of it is the residual effects of law, and people naturally will identify with and favor the interests of people who are close to them, physically, familiarly, in their neighborhoods, And so in a, in a de facto segregated country that is, you know, not as much as it was 50 years ago, but still substantially so, there is absolutely scope for being for there being distrust across racial lines. If you suspect that everyone is favoring those who look like them and those at least as importantly who live near them. And this leads to issues not just of race, but of class and of. the inability to identify across those lines. So yes, I can absolutely understand why, by and large, black Americans would be distrustful of white Americans. This is something that when I think about actually, which I think I do with some regularity, I struggle to figure out what a solution might be. The best that I've ever come up with is that you can overcome. Those that broad distrust on a person to person basis. It's very difficult to do it on a scale, but it is possible on a person to person basis. And so. It's not a great solution because it doesn't scale very well. It's not something that you can take and turn into a political program or even a social or cultural program. But it is something that individuals can practice. But it is important to recognize when you do practice it that there is a lingering distrust.

And it's unfortunate. Hey, Brandon. Yes, Trev. And I want to commend you because I think that you handle that well because that topic, when you talk about racism, when racism comes in or you talk black, white, Latino, whatever, we as Americans, we kind of get skittish. Yes. And you don't want to address that topic and forgive me, PJ or Marty or whoever's listening if I overstep my bound when I say this. But that is something that we have to address. Yeah. You have to speak about that. You have to find some type of comfort when you're speaking about it. Because as I heard what you just said, Again, you handled that eloquently. Well, thank you. When it comes to the race thing, and you talk white, black, and those aren't the only two races in this world. Of course, yeah. You said that there's a distrust. And I think that I think just me personally is more from perspective and experience. Yes. You said that a lot of people may tend to vote or to align with someone. who's in their community, who looks like them, and who they're comfortable with. I think nowadays, this is my personal opinion. Yeah. It's not that. It's experience. Yes. And you, as you and I were conversing. Yes. And we were talking about broken promises. Yes. You alluded to somebody who's studying to become a lawyer. Once you get out of school and you have a $50,000 debt. Yeah, $200,000 debt from law school at least. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're expecting a job to where you can get a return on your investment. Mm-hmm. That's not happening in America now. Yeah. Yes. Well, there's so much distrust to go around. And I think that a point that was also lingering in my mind that I hadn't, I wasn't sure if I was going to get to or not, but I'm glad you brought it up, is that it's not just, I described the distrust in the abstract, but there's also the much more concrete distrust of experience, of being treated badly. of seeing a person's face their countenance change when you enter the room like that that's a very common experience and that is something that you know I really don't like doing this, but I'm going to say, as a white man, it's a bit of a cheap, but it's, yeah, it is important. I do not go all the way with certain, you know, aspects of wokeism and so on, but something that I have written about in the past and that I will happily say.

is that it is all but impossible to understand the experience of a black person or of a woman. And it is important to attempt as far as possible to understand why someone whose experience is different from yours might approach the world differently and have different anxieties and fears about how they enter the world that I will never have to address personally on my own. Correct. And that's... And a lot of that comes down to basically like taking seriously whenever somebody you trust tells you like, yeah, I don't like walking down that street because I've like I've had white people, you know, snarl at me on that, you know, in that neighborhood or a woman says I don't like being an elevator with, you know, with a man by like as easy for me to be like, well, that's silly, you know, I'm the nicest guy in the world. But like. women have had experiences that I will never have. And so, like, that's, to me, that's just, like, basic, that's just basic. This is another word that I don't love to use, but I think this is basic, this is where the word works. It's just empathy. That's trying to understand the experience of another and why they would come to live and experience the world the way they do. You're absolutely correct. And if I may, I don't mean to speak over you because it's your show, not my life. No, no, no, no. This is great. I think we misstep as a people. is that you don't take time to step back and try to understand where someone else is coming from because you're already preparing your defense as to why you may have been perceived to take a certain position. Yes. Yes, exactly. Yes. And I, um, you know, I think it's important to understand. This is partially what I was just doing with the stuff about the left-wing activists and so on, which was a little punchy and perhaps in places in the generalizations a little unfair. But part of the whole point of that was to try to understand why. people come to the positions they come to hold and often sometimes it's because of you know i think often actually it's because of negative experiences it's because they we'll talk i'm going to talk about overpopover production of elites after the break but um and sometimes it's sometimes positive experiences sometimes it's negative experiences and sometimes i think it's a sometimes the beliefs you come to are positive reactions to reality, but sometimes they're actually not very constructive. And that's where, that's kind of where I'm coming down a little bit on some of my criticisms of the left. But, yeah, but there's so, this is, this is deep depths we can plumb here. We'll do a little more after the break.

All righty folks. Brandon McGinley from the Post Gazette filling in for Marty Griffin this afternoon, about 1220. Oh, my goodness. So we had a great talk with, Trevin and I were talking before the, before this break, you know, getting into race in America. You know, just some, some real, real, real good conversation. And, you know, It's the kind of thing we could spend the next hour and a half on. I'm going to pivot a little bit. I know I've lost a couple of callers because we've been having such great chat, and I'm really, really glad we've been doing it. I want to pivot a little bit to something else that Mark said back before the break, two breaks ago, Mark from the north side. Also, said that he felt that there were folks around Cory O'Connor who were during the campaign and even now who were kind of twisting him and his agenda to something that is beyond the pale of the Democratic Party, something that if it were out in the open, would not be welcome among Democrats. I think that is actually a little bit myopic. Some of the most, and I assume what's being referred to here is a significant openness to property development, real estate developers, a much more proactive and cooperative approach with the free market, with private enterprise. I assume that that's what was being referred to because that's obviously there. I mean, there's a, I will tell you right now, I went to a breakfast hosted by the Big Developers Association very early in Corey's term. and the two leaders of the city's Economic Development Office were there presenting. That would have been completely out of bounds under Ed Ganey. And I suspect, to be honest, if not out of bounds, it would have been unusual under Bill Paduto. The city really kept the development community at arm's length for a long time. And I think we are so used to that that seeing a more of a spirit of partnership seems like an aberration, seems like a violation of like, you know, Democratic Party principles or liberal principles. And, but I don't actually think that's the case. I think that if you look at other cities where even. mayors who code as quite left wing have been successful, they have not been contemptuous of real estate developers. They have not gone out of their way to kind of, you know, step on the toes of the people who build the city. They have pursued progressive priorities while also maintaining positive working relationships with the corporations, the developers, the private sector actors who make a city work. A city cannot work, especially a shrink, well, Pittsburgh may or may not be shrinking in terms of population, but especially a kind of stagnant-ish rust belt town.

Like this one, just can't survive by government alone. It can't survive by policy alone. It can't survive by bureaucracy alone. Zohran Mamdani can do a lot more in New York City than any mayor can do here because that's like a, it's like a $60 billion budget or something crazy like that. And New York City is bigger than most states. It's, I mean, you can do a lot there. But the city of Pittsburgh, 300,000 people. There's only so much that government can do. And you can't overtax people to do more because then people will leave because there's no incentive to stay. And businesses won't pitch up here if it's not a welcoming business environment. It's not like New York where businesses are tripping over themselves to be in New York City because it's the center of the world. As much as we like to think this is the center of the world, it is in fact not. And businesses and just people won't show up here unless we make it hospitable to them. That requires a spirit of partnership with the private sector. And other cities have seen that as well. People will often compare the, we'll compare Ed Ganey, for instance, to someone like a Brandon Scott in Baltimore. And they'll say, oh, what a shame. You know, Baltimore has this, you know, this progressive black mayor. And he is reelected and very popular. And Ed Ganey was a progressive black mayor. And he only had one term. And that just shows that Pittsburgh is racist. Now, are there issues of race in Pittsburgh? Oh, my goodness. As Trevor and I were just talking, we could go on and on and on about it. Pittsburgh is in many respects an unusually difficult place to be a black person. If only because of the mathematics of the thing, about 22, 23% black city, it's not like, it's, the numbers are not great if you want to feel at home here and have ability to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, But what happened in Pittsburgh primarily was that there was such a spirit of antagonism between the mayor's office and the city and the private sector, such a spirit of antagonism with development, with developers. There was such a spirit of antagonism with anybody who wasn't with the program. There just wasn't enough support left to sustain the mayor. They'll say, oh, you know, Corey O'Connor was so well funded and Mayor Ganey didn't have a lot of money. That just shows that, you know, it's the big moneyed interests that have taken over Pittsburgh. It's like, well, sorry, if you're the mayor and you can't make a call and get some money into your campaign account, that just shows you. That just shows that you've struggled at some of the basics of the job, which include relationship and maintaining positive relationships with as many institutions and people as possible. It doesn't mean you don't say no. That's one of the hardest things about the job, is saying no to people, people you like, people who are your friends. And that's, I think, one of the things that Corey O'Connor has learned or is learning and is going to continue to be something that he's going to have to keep learning, is saying no to people.

But if you have not, if you, if you, if the city, if the city isn't forming the kind of spirit of partnership and cooperation with the private sector that it needs to work together to make the city stronger, people are going to notice that. People are going to notice that they're going to see the stagnation. They're going to feel the lack of momentum, the lack of forward progress in the city. And they're going to respond. And the voters did respond in that primary election. And that's why we are where we are today. Doesn't mean that someone like at Ganey, either in terms of a black politician or in terms of a more left-wing politician, couldn't come back and run this city again. But the dynamic of that particular administration, the dynamic of that particular situation was not sustainable politically or otherwise. And that's why we are where we are right now. And that's going to be up to Corey O'Connor to continue to restore a sense of partnership while also not going so far that he gives away the farm. And that is the big challenge or one of the big challenges that he's facing right now. Alrighty, we've got to go to some more news and back after that.

All righty folks, Brandon McGinley filling in from Marty today. As always, you can listen to us, as you may or may not be right now, probably are, at 100.1 FM at AM 1020 K to K or in the Odyssey app. That's A-U-D-A-C-Y. Excuse me. A, U, D, A, CY, but you can also watch us online with our KDKA video stream presented by Metropolitan Window Company. Just go to KDKA Radio.com, click on watch KDKA Radio live stream, or now you can just go to our KDKA Radio YouTube page to watch everything we are doing in the studios. It is like a window into the studio. I figured that out once, because I've appeared on the Metropolitan Window Company. live stream many times in my role at the Post Gazette as a guest of Marty or Colin. And it only struck me when I was reading this one time that it's like it's a window company of sponsoring the window into the studio. And I thought that was really clever. And that is your little window into my own mind for today. Okay. Um. We ended up getting into some deep waters about questions of race in America and in Pittsburgh. And we got there actually talking about questions of kind of the sociology of progressive politics, activists seen. And I want to actually introduce a concept that I think actually there are. No single idea can explain everything that's going on in politics or society at any one time. But if there's one that I think explains maybe the most of what's going on right now, it would be this one. And bear with me, but I'm just going to go for it. The concept is called the overproduction of elites or elite overproduction. And you know it's real because it has a Wikipedia page. It has a Wikipedia page. Well, that means it's real. So the idea is basically this. It is highly socially and politically destabilizing when society produces more people with high status and high credentials than power structures have room for them to fill. Okay. So the classic example in the United States would be we have produced a ton of people with college degrees, a ton of people with advanced degrees, but there aren't enough space. There aren't enough spaces in the power structures to give those people who think they deserve high status, high economic status, high social status, the status they think they deserve based on the credentials that they have. Some of these folks end up becoming progressive activists because it's a way of expressing frustration with the system that's left them behind and a way to make a buck to pay back some of those student loans. But others just become frustrated. Others become quite right wing. Significant portion, I would say, of the young male right wing phenomenon is coming out of this exact same thing. You go to college. Maybe you get frustrated with your left wing professors, but you see it through.

You pay your $200,000 in debt. Maybe you get a master's also. And then, oh, boy, there aren't any jobs for people like me. There aren't. And then you blame, oh, it's DEI. Oh, it's X, Y, or Z. When, in fact, you know, lots of people are going through the exact same thing. This is a phenomenon, this overproduction of elites where you create basically a class of people who think they deserve more than they're given by society and the economy, who then become very frustrated and angry. This is, I think, a primary cause of polarization, especially among the young. This is why you see typically the youth voters tend to go not just hard left, but also young Republicans tend to be hard right. Because there's a frustration with a system that has not provided them with the status that they think they've earned. This is not the first time this has happened. This is why this is a historical sociological theory and not just a contemporary one. The idea is that actually many revolutionary moments through time, this has been the issue. This has been a primary cause of social and political revolutions. I don't want to say everyone thinks, but I think most people think because this is the kind of legend or myth that we've been taught, that revolutions bubble up from the lower classes, from the working classes, from the peasantry. So people think, oh, the French Revolution, the peasants were tired of not getting enough bread, and they rose up and they overthrew the monarchy. That's what the French Revolution was. That is 100% not what the French Revolution was. That's almost the exact opposite of what the French Revolution was. And most of, at least much of France, a peasantry supported the king. And the revolutionaries massacred tons of peasants because they didn't get with the program. And that program was designed and implemented not by the French working classes, not by the French peasantry. It was designed by, well, journalists, people like me. It was designed by a kind of white collar, middle or upper middle class, professional class who did not think that they were being treated right under the former regime, under the, under the monarchy. There were too many. credentialed, professional, middle class French citizens who didn't feel like they had a place in the current regime. And that was the primary cause where those were the primary people who led the revolution. Not everyday folks. Some of them ended up getting whipped up and joining along with it, but it's not where it started. The names, if you're a student of history, the names, you'll remember Marat and Ribus Pierre and all of this. These guys were not like, you know, coming from the French soil. They were like urban elites, but they weren't elite enough. There was no space for them at court. There was no space for them in the king's regime.

The idea is that the very similar thing is happening right now. We've produced millions of college graduates, millions of master's degree graduates, tons of PhDs. And, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to look hard to find folks of PhDs who don't have jobs right now. Because there's just not enough space in society as it's currently constructed for high status jobs for all these people with high status credentials. And like I said, some of them turn into progressive activists. Some of them turn into right wing activists. I was focusing on the progressives because that's the real live issue in Pittsburgh right now. But if you look, I mean, gosh, I mean, especially during the Trump campaign, there were some really interesting reporting about right wing circles in colleges and universities today. I've seen a little bit of it with my own two eyes. They make the conservative circles that I saw in college and was part of in college. They make them look kind of weak and nambi pambi. Who's listening to the hard right podcast? Who's listening to your Nick Fuentes? Who's listening? To Candace Owens, yeah, a certain amount of, you know, there's a certain amount of folks who are older and who are, you know, maybe, you know, not quite hip to how crazy modern media can be. I just about guarantee you it skews younger in all of these cases. Right and left. And a lot of it is because of the sense, we talked about broken promises earlier, sense of broken promises, the sense that this is a society that said, if you get a college degree, if you get a master's degree, if you get a PhD, if you get the credentials that we associate with success, then you will have success. And it turns out, uh-oh, there's not enough space. There's not enough space. It's not even so much like a question of, of economic stagnation. It's just that there's, we produce so many darn elites. You can only have so many elites. Like it's the whole point of being an elite. There aren't too many of you. And we've now, we have this slippery pole to climb up and remain with elite social and economic status. Tons of people on the poll and a lot of people who can't even get to the poll. That leads to a lot of people who are very unhappy and have the credentials who in some cases have the intelligence. A lot of people have credentials and not the intelligence. But there are enough people of the credentials, the brains, the wherewithal to do something about it. And that is where you get. especially youth polarization. That's where you get right and left wing activist classes. That's where you get a lot of upset, pissed off people who want to change everything because they imagine that when everything has changed, they'll be at the top of the slippery pole. Got to get a break, but we'll get to the phone lines after this.

Alrighty folks, Brandon McGinley filling in for Marty this fine Pittsburgh afternoon. I'll be here the next two days with you as Marty continues to convales continues to recover from from the illness that knocked him out. But so glad to hear he's doing a lot better. I was here when Christine Sorensen was on the air with Larry earlier talking about how it was touch and go, but he's doing so much better. And as I keep saying, he will be right behind this mic where he belongs in short order. Speaking of Larry, do you know someone in your community who has done something extraordinary in the past year? Nominate them now at kDCA.com to be honored at this year's Larry's hometown heroes event. Love that kind of thing. As I always say, these are the people who take our communities and make them work. Every community, I know it in my own neighborhood, every community has a small core of people. Half dozen, dozens, sometimes less, sometimes more who take on the vast majority of the tasks of keeping the community strong. Of, you know, keeping an eye on the streets for kids and for bad guys. Putting on the community events, doing the beautification, making sure that the flower pots have flowers in them and they're watered, you know. When those things don't happen, communities look and become derelict. And to be honest, fewer and fewer people are doing this kind of work. And so the more that we can honor them and encourage others to do that work, the better. I'm just going to go straight to the phone line. We've got Jake from Cranberry. Hey, Jake. How you doing? Good, Brendan. Thanks for taking my call. Yeah. Real quick, the fourth leg of your stool should be anti-Semitism. And that goes for the woke left. And it goes for... crazy Candace Owens or the other group falls over there. And Jake, let me just briefly interrupt to say, because if you weren't listening an hour or so ago, I listed three kind of aspects of urban progressivism. One was anti-growth. One was kind of soft approach to criminal justice. One was a kind of woke approach. I don't really like that word, but for the sake of argument, a woke approach to cultural issues. And I lumped into that, the kind of Israel-Palestine stuff. But, I mean, just look around you. I mean, the extent of the explicit anti-Semitism on the left and the right, as you said. It's extraordinary, and it's particularly, it's affected the right, it's been there forever, but the visible anti-Semitism on the urban left.

Um, and I would argue, this is very tentative and I want to be careful about how I put this, but I would argue that the kind of attempt at kind of colorblindness that was how people tended to talk about it in the 90s, maybe early in the 2000s was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and papered over a lot of hurt and a lot of harm, but. I think that attempts to do differently have turned out worse. I mean, you can look at the data. White and black folks think that race relations in America have declined substantially over the past 20 years. Their sense of where things are going in terms of, in terms especially black versus white kind of, you know, relationships and just the sense of, of the sense of comfort together. peaked, I don't remember, I don't have it in front of me, but I think it peaked in like the late 90s, early 2000s, maybe a little bit into the 2000s and has been, has gone down since. And I just, that seems to me to be tragic and unnecessary. I, we're never going to get to, you know, the previous, the pre. And I, hey, Jake, I'm sorry, I got to let you go because I'm going to get to a news break, but the, um, The previous kind of compromise of the kind of colorblindness, like I said, I totally, I basically accept every single critique of why it's inadequate, that it overlooks long-term harms, that overlooks systemic racism, it looks over historic injustice, all accurate. And yet every other attempt to reach a conclusion has resulted in more pain. So we can talk more with that after the break.