Contents
Guide
Praise for
Taboo
This is a book America desperately needs. Wilfred Reillys boisterous dismantling of some of the most cherished myths that animate the social justice left and the racially antagonistic right is as enjoyable as it is compelling. Taboo is a prodigious and analytical work. Its conclusions about the trajectory of American race relations are encouraging, so it is certain to make a splash. There is nothing purveyors of social discord hate more than good news.
NOAH ROTHMAN , associate editor of Commentary and author of Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America
Will Reilly has put the science back into social science by bravely addressing many verboten topics of the American scene. He lets the data speak for him rather than concerning himself with ideologies. In his latest book, Taboo, he has followed the signature frankness of his previous book Hate Crime Hoax by clearly demonstrating that there are Black men and women that refuse to be pigeonholed by the radical left. Finally, a Black intellectual has come along to challenge leftist dogma and intellectual dishonesty. Nothing is off-limits in this remarkably honest dissertation. He is a no-nonsense, tough but fair-minded scholar, and I am proud to call him my friend. We need more Will Reillys in this country.
MARC J. DEFANT , author of The New Creationists: The Radical Lefts War on Science, Society, and Rational Thought
Wilfred Reilly is one of the most interesting and exciting American intellectuals to emerge in our time. Im in awe of the fearlessness with which Reilly takes on current nostrums on race in his vitally necessary and powerful Taboo.
JOHN PODHORETZ , editor of Commentary
Wilfred Reilly spares neither the hard-left nor the alt-right as he cuts through false narratives, prejudices, and extremes. A desperately needed dose of objectivity.
STEPHEN KNIGHT , blogger at Godless Spellchecker
Taboo brilliantly treads on the sacred cows weve been conditioned to accept as established truths. Systemic racism, racist police, white privilegeWilfred Reilly dismantles these claims by analyzing the data. But he doesnt stop there. The same dispassionate and careful analysis is applied to the narratives of the white identitarian alt-right. Taboo is the much-needed book for an America intoxicated with victimhood.
ANDY NGO , journalist at The Post Millennial
Dr. Wilfred Reillys book on social taboos is compulsory for anyone seeking to better understand the most off-limits political, social, and cultural realities.
PETE TURNER , former U.S. Army spy and host of The Break It Down Show
Im sure [Reillys] compelling and honest approach to the subject of race relations in our country [] will further the needed discussion in a constructive and healing manner.
BILL MARTINEZ , host of nationally syndicated talk radio show Bill Martinez Live
The conventional wisdom is that people on the right are more likely to deny scientific facts than people on the left. That may have been true once, but not any more, as Wilfred Reilly demonstrates in this book. One of the paradoxes of the age were living in is that scientific denialism is now more prevalent among educated liberals than among uneducated conservatives. If you ask what the difference is between a man and a woman, the ordinary, unlettered person, unencumbered by fashionable dogma, will be able to tell you. An educated person will embark on a long, rambling speech and then, midway through, think better of it for fear of being cancelled by their colleagues.
TOBY YOUNG , associate editor of Quillette
As he did in Hate Crime Hoax, Will Reilly has again proven himself to be a master truth-teller and myth-buster. With clear thinking; straightforward writing; and a style that is witty, funny, and a pleasure to read, Reilly boldly confronts the social, cultural, and political barriers that have prevented an honest discussion of race and class in America. We are living in a time of a dangerously increasing mass belief in corrosive myths of systemic racism, white privilege, racist police shootings, and others. Perpetuated by media and the elites, the result has been a growing self-hatred of the United States, disdain for its values, and disbelief in its foundation. Taboo challenges these false assumptions, replacing them with truththe first step in winning back the hearts and minds of the American people. Will Reilly is an important thinker, a powerful writer, and a patriot.
MAURY RICHARDS , police chief of Martinsburg, West Virginia, and author at The Daily Caller
Professor Reillys book Hate Crime Hoax blew my mind. Too often we avoid the difficult, but in Will Reillys new book, Taboo: 10 Facts You Cant Talk About, he takes us step by step into the vitally important discussions the important facts that others avoid. The media arent doing it, but fortunately Professor Reilly is in a way that we can all understand.
LOUIE B. FREE , host of BrainFood from the Heartland
Copyright 2020 by Wilfred Reilly
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To the concept of Logosthe idea that all that matters in an argument or discussion is the provable truth, and that no areas of inquiry are off limits
Introduction
R eal oppression has almost vanished from the United States, but its ghost remains troublesome. My last book, Hate Crime Hoax, dealt with a very specific issue: the prevalence of hoax hate crime accusations in the U.S.A. However, as I put the book together, I became more aware of a broader narrative about America lurking behind the eagerness of the mainstream media to report on almost literally every incident of alleged brutal racism, of mighty activist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) using the incidents as fundraising tools, and of many ordinary liberal citizens immediately accepting them as true. I call this background zeitgeist the Continuing Oppression Narrative, or C.O.N.
The core idea of the Continuing Oppression Narrative is that not much has changed in America: racism may have become socially taboo following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but it has gone underground rather than vanishing, and in fact hardly declined at all. This one central thesis underlies all of the lesser ideas that, together, make up the C.O.N. Some of those might be: American police are waging a war on Black people, killing probably thousands of us annually; ethnic violence remains common in America, with interracial crime making up a substantial percentage of all crime with whites initiating most of it; the continued prevalence of bigotry is indicated by small but real gaps between the races (and sexes) in terms of variables like income; and subtle new forms of racism like white privilege and cultural appropriation oppress minorities as much as old-school prejudice ever did. At least partly in response to these claims, recent years have witnessed a surge in the size and noisiness of the alt-right, a rival identitarian movement which claims that Caucasians are genetically superior to people of color and that successfully integrated societies are almost impossible.