Adam B. Coleman, author of Back Victim to Black Victor and columnist for New York Post, Newsweek, and Daily Mail joins the podcast to talk about the enduring importance of the nuclear family and fatherhood. Adam and Inez talk about the child’s eye view, both personal and statistical, of the sexual revolution and feminism, as well as how the ever-larger group of people coming from broken families can develop confidence, competence, and resilience. They also chat about how well-off people, black and white, use racial identification to sidestep class divisions.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. I’m so pleased to have on with me this week, Adam B. Coleman. He wears many hats, but you can find his work published at the New York Post, The Federalist, Daily Mail, Post-Millennial, Unheard, Newsweek, just all over the place. You’re all over the place, Human Events, but you’re also the founder of Wrong Speak publications. You run your own Substack and most importantly, you have a book, “Black Victim to Black Victor: Identifying the Ideologies, Behavioral Patterns and Cultural Norms That Encourage a Victimhood Complex.” So welcome to High Noon, Adam. I’m so glad to have you with us.
Adam Coleman:
Thank you. I appreciate you having me.
Inez Stepman:
So I was telling you this just before we hit record, but I feel like a lot of your work, your book, you have this title, “Black Victim to Black Victor,” and you have a lot of things to say about I think race relations in the United States and how the current ideology plays into that. But at the end of the day, I feel like you keep coming back to themes about family and I think those themes are fortunately or unfortunately, I guess in the fortunate sense, they’re very broadly human and universal. In the unfortunate sense, we now see that a lot of the demographic problems that were once much more prominent in the Black community than in say the white or Hispanic communities in the United States, things like high rates of single motherhood for example, those are becoming much more universal problems. They haven’t really been improving in the Black community, but they’re also going the wrong direction in the census survey categories, the white and Hispanics, I think Asians are the only ones who are very much the opposition to those trends.
But one of the things again that I really admire about how you talk about this and I wanted to open this up with, is you are very willing to criticize the decisions of people around you and yourself with regard to family. And I want to start there because we do live in a world where it’s very common, single motherhood is very common. We have a lot of people who are raised only by their mothers. A lot of people coming from divorce or broken homes, a lot of people who are divorcees or have not lived up to the ideal of a nuclear or two-parent married household. So how do you have those conversations that necessarily involve criticizing either yourself or people that you love very much about some of these really important sociological discussions about family structure? How do you do that in a way that’s not insulting to people that you love?
Adam Coleman:
First you have to understand where they’re coming from. For most of my arguments, I understand what the opposition thinks for the people who might not agree with me. So I try to understand where their line of thinking is so I can address it, right? Because oftentimes I just say, well, this is what I think and act like their perspective isn’t a real perspective. So when it comes to single parenthood, I understand how talking about single parenthood to some women comes off as attacking women. But at the same time, I want people to understand that only saying dead beat dads only puts fault on one person, the father.
And we have to ask questions about, well, who are selecting these men? What kind of women are selecting these men? Some of these men seem good at first then turn bad, that happens. But many of them, and I’ll include my own father in this, were unavailable men or men who had no interest in having children or men who had red flags all over them left and right and were ignored and here comes the outcome of a dysfunctional home or a broken home because of it. So that’s why in the book I wanted to use my story because if I’m willing to talk about my father, my mom, my family situation, then I think I have at least some right to talk about the topic in general.
So my father was married, just never to my mother. And so right there by itself shows that the likeliness of this man being involved three children is extremely low, and that’s exactly what happened with us. We left the city of Detroit, that’s where I was born and moved to various states. My father was always in Detroit. I’d rarely see him, I’d rarely talk to him as well. So there is some aspect of putting responsibility on my father because he never really reached out to us. We were disconnected from him, but at the same time, my mother selected a married man. So there has to be some accountability on both sides. And so I never wanted to be, me woman bashing. For me it’s more of a balanced set of conversation.
Inez Stepman:
Because I think one of the things that doesn’t penetrate a lot of the mainstream discourse on this topic is the fact that there are a lot of women in America and elsewhere around the world, but particularly in America, which actually we have some of the worst statistics on this in the world, there are a lot of women who are choosing to have children without fathers. And there’s a huge class gulf in the two different ways in which that’s happening. You have wealthy women on the one hand just delaying marriage and childbirth to a point where they hit their late thirties, they decide they actually do want to have a child, they haven’t put the effort into or their focus into finding a man to do that with.
And then they start to turn to technological possibilities, creating a child for themselves through sperm donation or whatever. And then you have the completely other side of the socioeconomic gulf where you have entire communities, Black or white, again, that where the structure is matriarchal and the way of forming a family for yourself of not feeling alone in the world is actually just by having children. Men and fathers are no longer really part of what women think about when they think about forming a family for themselves.
Adam Coleman:
No, you’re absolutely right. The concept of family to me is like a remix. It’s not the original, it’s some alternate version of the original. And far too often the concept of family doesn’t really mean anything solid, there’s no foundation there. And that’s why the nuclear family’s supposed to be some sort of foundation that we can abide by. But when we have, life happens, you can’t guarantee relationships. But when you have people who purposefully don’t attempt it, who think that it is a negative thing, who are outright misandrist, meanwhile they’re procreating with the very people they don’t like. So there’s something that’s off there as far as our relationship dynamics between men and women. And if you want to talk racially, I think it exists between Black men and Black women. In many ways we have trouble talking to each other. And for me, as someone who is very much into psychology, I think it stems back to childhood.
For women, the most important man, and the first man that you’re supposed to depend on is supposed to be your father. So if your father isn’t there, the man who is supposed to be by your side your entire life, and he never showed up for you, what makes you think that you can depend on any other man? And so every man past your father is equally a disappointment. And so you basically move about life that way. So you expect nothing from men. So your selection of men is also off because your father’s supposed to be an example of the type of man that you should have a relationship with based on how he interacts with your mother, that’s the basis of it. I know women who grow up with their father and they would say stuff to me like, my daddy taught me this, or my daddy treat my mom this way.
So she knows not to accept anything less than that. And when you don’t have that as an example, when you don’t have some sort of male authority within the household, you don’t respect male authority. So all these things steamroll into relationships from a female perspective, how they look at women. From the male perspective, not having their father removes their purpose. What I find often, and I think this includes myself for a period of time, you put more value in what women think of you than you do of yourself. So you’ll see guys, like women, there are guys who are players and stuff like that, but there are a certain type of guy where the beginning of the conversation starts with, where the women at? His day starts with, how do I get some? That kind of guy sees women, puts him on a pedestal, it’s a way to conquer.
And so that is his entire existence. I’ve met men like this, and it’s pretty sad that there’s nothing else besides that. And then what ends up happening is these types of guys, they’re not father material, they just procreate, they have children all over the place. They learn the gift of gab because they learn how to interest women and conquer them, so to speak. But outside of that, they’re not father figures. They don’t learn how to be real men. In many ways, they’re still boys. They are in some sort of arrested development. They behave much like teenagers. You expect a teenager coming out of puberty is horny and will just screw anything that gives them some sort of chance. But when you start seeing 30 plus year olds who act this way, and they’ve been acting this way their entire adult life, and all of their mistakes revolving around women, they have children all over the place, child support coming from all over the place, career-wise they never take off because everything is revolving around women. So there’s a lot of that that exists within our society in both directions.
Inez Stepman:
You said in a couple places online, some podcasts, that you don’t really think you’ve become a man. You’re in your mid to late thirties, right? You didn’t really consider yourself a man looking back until just a few years ago, maybe five years ago. Why would you say that, and what does it mean? Because you’re talking about how these 30 something year old men are behaving like boys. What does it mean to become a man and how is it more difficult if you don’t start out with a father to give you that example?
Adam Coleman:
So in my situation, yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m 38. I tell people that it’s probably been about five years of being a man. And what I mean by that, and I actually wrote a Substack article talking about… The title is “What Is a Man?” And so I talk about the most important things. So despite online rhetoric, a man is machismo and all this other stuff, I’m talking about essential qualities of what a man is. And then from there, everybody’s a little bit different. But I think the last piece for me was confidence. I had social anxiety, and so when you have social anxiety, that means that you’re insecure about how you’re perceiving the world and how the world perceives you, and you’re always second guessing yourself. And so with that, my confidence was low in myself, and it trickled into all different types of areas.
It trickled into relationships, maybe even my professional career to some degree. But once I was able to overcome that social anxiety, and part of it is religious for me, but the other part is just understanding that I have what it takes to succeed in life, and I don’t need to put my value into all these external things. For a period of time, I was a car guy and the only thing that made me happy was spending a bunch of money on car parts. And then after I got it and installed it, it just went back down. It’s like a shopaholic kind of thing. They get endorphin hit from buying stuff, but you’re not whole, you’re not happy, you’re not secure with yourself and all these kinds of things throughout my adulthood, I was slowly overcoming them, slowly realizing like, this approach isn’t working. I need to work on this, I need to work on that.
But confidence was the most important piece, the piece that I had to overcome, and without that piece, I wouldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t be able to go on television because I’d be second guessing myself, of what I said, stumbling over my words. I wouldn’t be able to stand and criticize people, criticize famous people or powerful people because I’d be worried about what they would say. And then I would fumble my words and maybe avoid talking about certain things because I’m afraid of this, afraid of that. I had to be sure of myself, I had to be confident. And that to me is the most essential part of manhood because from a relationship standpoint, women want a leader, women want a man that they can trust. You can’t demand trust, you can only earn it, but you need to actually do something that’s trustworthy, that’s respectful or respectable.
And so you have to have some sort of confidence, exude that confidence for women to see so they can trust you. And once I started realizing these things, now I’m married. So bad relationship, bad relationship, bad relationship, but the common denominator was me and what did I need to do? What did I need to do to improve? And one of those areas was confidence. So overcoming these things for myself, becoming a better man, finding my flaws, fixing those flaws, addressing it, not running away from it, allowed for me to become the person that I am today. So that’s why I say it’s been about five years. And my wife, she’s always like, oh, if I knew you years ago, I was like, no, I am not the same person. I was always a good person at the core, but what you like about me today didn’t exist in the same way it does today.
I had to go through these things. And you ask, how does that hinder young men? It hinders young men because… Well, I can only speak for myself. It hindered me because I noticed that I was into a world without the tools that I needed, and I saw how much it hurt me in comparison to looking at my son, or my son is far more emotionally ahead, far more prepared than I was. He’s still 17 years old and has some insecurities about what he’s doing, but at the same time, he has me as this rock and we’re able to navigate into manhood, and I didn’t have that. So my perspective was more female oriented, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it actually helps to have me understand women a little bit better in a different way, but I didn’t know what it meant to be a man.
And so then me having my son at the age of 21, I had now to raise a boy, to become a man. And I didn’t know what a man was, and I wasn’t a man. And as I said before, I was nowhere near being the man that I am today. So I think single parenthood and growing up without your father, it makes you a deficient man into adulthood. The ways to overcome it, hopefully you have male role models, which I did not have when I was a kid. We moved around a lot, I didn’t have a stepfather, had none of that. So it hindered my growth, and it could have been far more detrimental than it actually was. I could have been a statistic of some sort. I could have ended up in jail, crime and all that stuff depending on where I lived. But it never happened, thankfully.
Inez Stepman:
So I mean, it strikes me that because you said trust is earned, it strikes me, because a lot of what you’re saying is that confidence is also earned. We have this idea that we can artificially pump people up with self-esteem or whatever. And if no one ever criticizes you or insults you or says a word that makes you uncomfortable or whatever, that by creating this bubble around fragile people, that we can make them feel confident in themselves and good about themselves. And it strikes me that you’re saying the exact opposite, which is that you felt like you were put into the world with fewer tools than a lot of people who, for example, had their fathers at home and you had to build the toolbox. And then once you felt competent in the world, then you could build your competence, confidence rather.
How do we bring that to more… because it strikes me that we have the most, least competent and most fragile generation that we’ve ever had. And I’m not even making a cheap political point here. I’m not just talking about the wokism, but in a deep way, young people do not seem to be able to cope with even small challenges, let alone big challenges in life. And a lot of them, a lot more of them in every generation are growing up without that nuclear family structure. So how do they build a toolbox?
Adam Coleman:
That’s a great question. How do you build it? Well, for one, you don’t remove the hurdles from children to such a strong degree that I think that baby boomers did for their kids, helicopter parents and all that stuff. I understand as a parent, I understand you wanting to protect your children, but so much so where they don’t have any responsibilities, you take away any conflicts that they could possibly have. You don’t teach them conflict resolution, none of that stuff. So as much as I might look at some video and the person’s freaking out because someone said a word or someone said something that they find offensive and they’re having an emotional breakdown, I get it, why they’re having an emotional breakdown because they’ve never experienced that. They have no muscle for it. When you’re a kid, let’s say you get picked on by other kids, a healthy amount with without going into the territory of bullying or even just having friends who just mock each other.
I had a group of friends who were all big and overweight, and you know what they did? They called each other fat and they would laugh about it and joke about it. And so we learned just not to take things too serious, but it’s a muscle that you build. And for a lot of these kids, they don’t have that muscle. Everybody’s just bulldozed every obstacle out of their way for them to experience. One thing I’ve learned in the past couple years is that I used to think, are they really serious when they’re having these freakouts? But I started believing that for people, let’s say, just use the example on the far left, I believe them, when they say that they’re having freakouts, I actually believe that they’re having emotional freakouts.
They’re highly sensitive because they’ve never built up that, I want to call it an immune response to life where you’re going to have to face some sort of conflict, they never had that, and their parents have a lot to do with it. They hindered their growth, they knocked these things out of the way. So it’s no wonder why you see so many young people say that they’re adulting, they feel like they’re playing as an adult, rather than actually being as an adult, figuring life out, moving about life. And I think there is a crisis of arrested development that’s happening because of it.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I really like that metaphor. I think that’s dead on of, it’s a muscle, and if you don’t use it, you don’t build it, it atrophies or it never gets built to begin with because yeah, I agree with you. I’ve had a couple of people on this podcast with two different views on that. So Mary Eberstadt, who has a fantastic book, “Primal Screams,” which essentially is making the argument that fragility comes from the breakdown and the lack of modeling of relationships between men and women, between brother and sister. So she says on the one hand, people don’t have a safe basis from which to then go explore the world. And on the other hand, we’re trying to make the world into this safe basis. And she doesn’t put it quite this way, but this is how I’m putting it. But we try to make the world into essentially what families should be, is that rock and that safe place from which to go out and explore and fall down and then come back and be sort of taken care of until you have that strong enough muscle where you can go out.
I mean, in some sense, at least I hope this is what my parents did for me. They let me make a lot of mistakes in an environment where those mistakes weren’t going to follow me for the rest of my life. And that’s really the ideal, the ideal isn’t to throw out your kid into the world and let them make errors that are going to chase them the rest of their lives, but to develop that muscle so that when the stakes are higher as an adult, when those decisions really matter and are going to have real consequences that last, that they have that strong muscle. And that doesn’t mean they’re not going to make mistakes. Obviously we all make mistakes, but to be able to have that equipment to go out. You said that many and including yourself in this, that you’re a deficient man without a father until you had to learn and build this thing on your own.
I feel like you’re one of the very small handful of people who talk openly about the pain of, those kinds of what I would call non-ideal family arrangements. And we opened up this conversation talking about how it’s harder to talk about those things because there’s such a high percentage of people. We’re no longer talking into society where we’re talking about the other, when we’re talking about divorce, out-of-wedlock childbearing. We’re not talking about the lady down the street that everybody whispers about in 1951 because she’s divorced from her husband. Right now we’re talking about all of us, if it’s not us personally, it’s our friends or our family who we love. But on the other hand, I really feel like this whole environment has created this tyranny of exceptions. And even on top of that, a lot of the people who claim to be exceptions aren’t, right? Because you can frame your story and how you talk about your life as an exception.
You grew up without a father, you were homeless a few times, your family was homeless as you were growing up. You moved around a lot. You had a lot of challenges growing up. But here you are today, you’re a successful author, you had a career in tech beforehand, you’re happily married. This is a success story. But I feel like a lot of people take that and then they deny the pain that those arrangements, and not having that nuclear family basis, and the fact that that was a source of pain in their life rather than a source of additional stability or pushing them forward into success. So you are one of the few people who talks about this. Why are you so comfortable talking about the fact that your childhood wasn’t ideal and not holding yourself up as the “exception” in that way, but rather that you have overcome these things, but it would’ve been better if you hadn’t had to.
Adam Coleman:
Therapy. No joke, therapy was really, really helpful. There’s a period of time, and by the way, I didn’t really start to get into therapy until I was an adult. My first therapist that I really actively started going to, I want to say I was 25 or 26. I was at a really, really stressful job and I started experiencing panic attacks. For a while I didn’t realize I was experiencing panic attacks. I didn’t know what to call it until one day it was so bad that I had to go home and I started going out on leave, but I was out on leave so long that, the first time I felt like I was afraid to leave my house, that’s when I knew something was really wrong.
It’s called the agoraphobia for people who aren’t too familiar. So from that moment, I was like, I got to find a therapist, I got to do something, and I started seeing a therapist. And no joke, maybe the first month of going to the therapist every week I went, I think it was three times a week, every session, just about every session, I cried. And it was all this stuff that I’d never really talked about when I was a kid, just came out. All these examples and stories just started flowing out. And my therapist was very empathetic, very nice, but it was something that I needed to go through. And I don’t think a lot of people come to that conclusion. I think a lot of people are afraid to talk about these things, and especially publicly, not even publicly, privately, they’re afraid to talk about it, but even just publicly talking about it is an even bigger hurdle.
Publicly, people are afraid to talk about it because they’re afraid of it in sounding like they’re insulting their mother and their mother is the one who raised them. And so it comes off or they’re afraid that it’ll come off as being distasteful, as being ungrateful for what their mother did, especially because their father didn’t do anything. So I think that’s why people are afraid to talk about it, who actually experience it to talk about it in public. But what ends up happening is, and the thing that I realized, once I started talking about it, other people started feeling comfortable talking about it. And I think that’s like the snowball effect. If this guy can talk about it and talk about it in a way where not a lot of people are mad that he’s talking about it because I’m not wagging my finger at people, I’m just saying from the perspective of a child, this is how it felt for me.
This is the disappointment that I had. This is what it was like. I’m not talking about the adults most of the time. I’m talking about the perspective as of a child, and you can’t blame me as a kid for feeling this way, that’s how I felt, and that’s how a lot of people feel. And then tweet after tweet after tweet and DMs that I get from other people confirming the same type of thing. And by the way, people of all shades who are DMing me and telling me that they’re going through the same thing.
I think that’s the one thing that I realized after publishing the book and talking about it more so publicly. There are a lot of people who are hurting. There are a lot of people who want to talk about it in a particular way, but no one is doing it. And that was actually the impetus for me to write my book is because even the people I agree with weren’t saying it in the right way, in my opinion, they were saying it in a very, matter of fact, well, yeah, boys and girls should have both their parents and just moved on from there, they don’t explain why. What happens when they don’t? What does it look like? How can people recognize it? What are the vulnerabilities of growing up in a single parent home? No one talks about that. No one talks about the statistics of children being molested because they grew up in a single parent household.
Why would that become the case? Child predators look for single mothers, no one wants to talk about that. So these are very real things that a lot of people experience and no one is really willing to talk about, and I’ll say one last thing. I did a podcast one time, and this guy, I was explaining to him the vulnerability of child molestation for children who grew up in a single-parent home from a male figure who is not his father being in the home. And I was explaining some of the stats and why it’s a vulnerability. And after I was done, one of the guys on the podcast said, what you just explained was exactly my childhood. And it’s that real for people, but we’re just not really talking about it in a way that isn’t hyper-political. I’m not trying to say children should have both their parents because that’s the conservative viewpoint, I’m saying it because developmentally it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if it’s Democrat kids, they’re still children and they should have both their children, both their parents, within their home.
Inez Stepman:
We so rarely talk about any of this stuff and any of the decisions that adults make from the perspective of children. And I feel like there’s a lot of rationalization around that topic. I mean, where I grew up, it was not necessarily single motherhood out of wedlock that was the problem. It was just a very high divorce rate where, I think me and two of my friends were the only people who I knew in, obviously there were other people in the community around in the school or whatever, but out of let’s say my extended friend group, so not just the closest friends, but the 20 to 50 people you hang out with, an extraordinarily high percentage of them had divorced parents. And it gets to a point where that becomes the norm.
But I saw how it impacted a lot of them. I just remember growing up, and I remember them being in pain and taking on things that they really shouldn’t have had… A lot of them, for example, took on the role of worrying about their parents at a very, very young age, seven, eight, 10, 11. And they’re worried about comforting their parents emotionally. That’s a difficult thing for a child. It’s not to say that obviously people can overcome those difficulties, but children shouldn’t have to deal with it that young. And it’s like we don’t talk about the children’s perspective almost in any of this. It’s always about the actualization of the adults and what makes the adults happy. I mean, is this just the next generation? I mean, starting with the boomers that really started kicked off the wave of divorce and high out-of-wedlock childbearing rates, is it just the cascading effect where adults are more likely to behave like children and to be unable to take those burdens of adulthood away from children when they themselves are still…
As you said, right? It took you a longer time to become a man. I mean, is there just a cascading effect or why are we unable to talk about any of these family structure issues first and foremost from the perspective of the children in the family?
Adam Coleman:
Well, for one, everybody’s thinking about themselves and everybody who’s thinking about themselves are the adults. I mean, the reality is children can’t really advocate for themselves. The adults are supposed to be the one advocating for the children. The problem is that the adults are always thinking about themselves. They want to get a divorce because they no longer feel loved. They want to get a divorce for all these reasons that have nothing to do with violence, abuse, or anything of that nature. Everything is from the perspective of how I feel and not from the perspective of how it impacts their children. And I think we’ve lost the meaning of sacrifice. Relationships and families were about sacrifice. If I was the man who was going to the factory to work, that was a sacrifice for being away from my children. But we’ve turned that into, oh, the man has freedom to be away from his family.
And this idea that men are indifferent to their family and especially indifferent to their children, that is a sacrifice. The same type of sacrifice for the mother to be someone who maybe was on a different trajectory to do something different, but she’s saying, I choose to be home and take care of my kids. I choose to raise the next generation. I choose to sacrifice some of the things that I may want to do to take care of somebody else. So that’s why I think the roles tend to be important. Not necessarily to say that everybody’s role is supposed to be the same, but even just discussing what’s the role between me and my wife, we had to have a discussion as far as what is my role within this house? And what is your role within this house? And come to some sort of agreement. It’s a mutual agreement, mutual understanding.
But I think between the adults, everything is about what they want, and we are not sacrificing for our kids. Far too many adults are not sacrificing for the kids, they’re choosing themselves. And the one scenario that you gave for the children who are now the consoling ones for their divorced parents, that’s an extremely, extremely unfair position to put kids in. And that’s one of those things that really, really bothers me because it’s incredibly selfish to rob children of their childhood, right?
Children are not supposed to be worrying about adult things, they’re not supposed to be involved in adult things. As they get older you can trickle in certain things to prepare them for adulthood, that’s what you’re supposed to do. But for them to be the caretaker of their mother or caretaker of their father at such a young age, I think is incredibly unfair. When you have kids who don’t want to pursue something because they’ll be too far away from their mother who’s divorced, and she’ll be alone, that’s not supposed to be their concern. And some parents will allow that to happen. And I’ve talked about this before, there’s something called the son husband who is supposed to be a boy, who is supposed to take up the role as the husband, it’s a non-sexual type of relationship, a dynamic between the mother and the son.
I believe there’s a technical term for it, I just can’t remember it, but son husband’s very easy to remember. And when you say that to people, they’ll likely know somebody who’s in that position. Sometimes we call them the mama’s boy, where they’re always at the beck and call. But what you don’t really see is that they’re supposed to be the emotional support for their mother. They’re supposed to be the ones who are advocating for their mothers, consoling their mothers. They are the male affirmation for these mothers who are single especially. And that is a dynamic that’s happening more and more because of single parenthood. So it’s a weird situation because for those women who are doing it, they’re getting the male affirmation without the relationship expectations. They don’t have to have sex, they don’t have to sacrifice, they’re still the ones who are in the position of authority because it’s just them. But they get all the affirmation, all the care, all of the love, all the attention from someone who is theoretically, inherently supposed to love them anyways, and I think there’s a bit of that.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, we’ll get to feminism and how this fits into what you’re describing in a moment. But first, if you enjoy High Noon, consider tuning in to Federalist Radio Hour, which is a daily hot podcast hosted by one of my regular guests, Emily Jashinsky, you know her from our After Dark episodes every month. The Federalist team of fearless journalists, including Mollie Hemingway, Eddie Scarry, and David Harsanyi, all join the fun breaking down politics and culture through interviews with politicians, entertainers, and thought leaders. It’s smart, irreverent, provocative, and on the cutting edge of American political thought. Emily interviews thinkers from the right, the center, and even the left. The show covers every topic imaginable from niches like data privacy and immigration to big picture issues like feminism. If you want to be part of that conversation, don’t miss Federalist Radio Hour available every weekday, wherever you download your podcasts.
And now back with Adam. I wanted to bring in feminism to this conversation because part of the inability I feel like to talk about, talk frankly about these things is this fear that circumscribing choices or criticizing women’s choices is somehow inherently misogynistic or is bad for women, or is in some way anti-woman. We talk about circumscribing men’s choices all the time, especially with regard to sexuality. And that that’s not to say that there aren’t lots of men who bang a series of their secretaries. We’re having this conversation about Leonardo DiCaprio right now about his very young girlfriends. It’s very funny to me by the way, that our culture is so clueless and so self-rationalizing about these things that people seem unable to understand why a 50-year-old movie star would be continually rotating a selection of hot 20-year-olds as his girlfriend. The appeal of that is obvious. This is amazing to me, that people wouldn’t understand what the appeal of that is or find it somehow pathological, right?
It’s not pathological. But we talk about circumscribing male sexuality all the time. It seems like we have a very, very difficult time as a feminist society talking about circumscribing female sexual imperative or criticizing women’s sexual choices. One, I guess, why do you think that is? And two, how do you think that the inability to criticize those choices is impacting the truthfulness with which we can talk about these things?
Adam Coleman:
Why can’t we talk about it? Because I don’t know why it started per se, but criticizing women, like you said, comes off as misogynistic or as the least we’re supposed to interpret it that way. But I see it as if you have any population of people, whether it’s men, women or racial demographic or anybody, but if you have any population of people that you’re unable to criticize, that means that you’re telling me that they’re perfect and they’re not perfect. Women do great things, women have flaws. We’re all human, so we have some sort of imperfection. But if I’m not allowed to criticize you, that means that everything that you’re doing is fine, and everything that you do is good, there’s nothing wrong with what you do. And so that’s the interpretation that we’re getting in our society, especially coming from mainstream media outlets that no matter the actions of women, she can have five kids with four baby daddies.
It’s her body, it’s her choice, she could do whatever she wants, everything is completely fine. How dare you judge her, how dare you criticize her? And when someone who’s being objective saying, well, actually it’s counterproductive to what she claims that she wants to do, or here’s how her actions hurt her children, for example. Forget her, how does it affect her children by doing something like this? I’ve had the same type of criticisms for someone like Nick Cannon, who has, God knows how many kids with how many women, yet he gets a pass because he’s wealthy. It’s like, no, there’s more to having children than besides how much money you have, What’s the dynamic? What are those children learning? What’s the environment that they’re going to be around? How close are they going to be with their father? And there’s no way in hell with all those kids from different mothers, and I don’t even know where they live at, that they would have some sort of contact with him.
So for me, it’s about equality of criticisms. We talk about equality of choice. We should have equality of criticisms. No one is perfect, and if we want a better society, we have to be able to talk about the things that are wrong. But if any population of people, whether it’s women or anybody else, if we can’t discuss the things that are wrong, then what ends up happening is nefarious people will use that and keep perpetrating negative things towards that population that we’re discussing. So in my book, I discuss feminism and how it impacts Black women, and I talk about the body positivity movement. And one thing that I want people to realize is that most of the time when they talk about body positivity, especially when they show some sort of ad, maybe not most of them, at least half the time, they show a Black woman.
Now, mind you, Black women are about six or 7% of the American population, yet about 50% of the time they show Black women. And why is that? Black women are the most overweight population of people in this country. And I don’t see that as an insult, I say that as a fact, and I say that as a concern. So if you have the most overweight population of people in this country, you point to them and say, there’s nothing wrong with you. As they get diabetes, as they have hypertension, as they have all these things and they die young and get buried in obese caskets, you’re hurting them, you’re not helping them. And I see nefarious people who want to push particular agendas, who are trying to mask over all the ways that they hurt people because they’re able to profit off of it.
We have God knows how many organizations that exist, all these NGOs that exist, all for the sake of wanting to advance something for women, yet pushing body positivity and using Black women as the mascot to do so. And that’s ultimately where I come in and I say, this is not something that’s helping. It’s not helping anyone. And I take issue with them using Black women as the mascot for something that is completely unhealthy.
Inez Stepman:
So to wrap up this discussion, let’s bring in the class element to this, because you said some people are essentially benefiting from selling a narrative that’s actually very, very detrimental. The lack of criticism and the lack of actually treating people as adults, whether they behave like them or not, giving them the opportunity to stand on their own two feet and to be an adult and to take criticism in turn, and hopefully it’s productive criticism and not just mean criticism and gives them an opportunity to then better themselves. There does seem like there is an enormous, and again, there’s a universal aspect to this, and then there’s something that seems specific to the racial dynamic in the United States about this. So the universal version would be that we see this Charles Murray, Super Zip, Belmont and Fishtown narrative. The end of Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” book essentially says, well, the rich have to preach what they practice, because generally speaking, the wealthy part of this country does get married.
They do stay married proportionally to the rest of the country. They don’t have children out of wedlock, right? Now they have all their own cultural problems, but some of those they may avoid while, and actually obesity is a great example of this, where the obesity rate in Manhattan or the wealthy parts of the Bay Area is negligible, right? They’re all on Peloton-
Adam Coleman:
Yeah, exactly.
Inez Stepman:
Eating green smoothies. But these are the same people who are generating those ads of the disproportionately fat Black women in overly tight spandex clothes that are getting splashed over everywhere, all the billboards. So I think it’s a really good example. And then specifically within the racial dynamics of this, a lot of the programs that are held up as helpful for… It seems like the people that a lot of times liberals are counting on affirmative action, for example, to help, they think of poor Black kids, inner city, broken home, et cetera, et cetera. But who’s actually getting the benefit of those programs are often people from wealthy neighborhoods, people like Nikole Hannah Jones, and there seems like there’s a big class divide between the shield, the victim shield of a subset of Black people who are really struggling with a lot of challenges in this country, and then the beneficiaries of a lot of those racial politics, class-wise, couldn’t be more different from each other.
Adam Coleman:
You’re absolutely right about this, it is one of the things that… I wanted to first say thank you, New York Post for giving me a platform to talk about the, we call intersectionality between race and class, because they avoid that intersectionality all the time. And ultimately, wealthy people think alike. It really doesn’t matter what race they are, wealthy people tend to think alike. Successful people just in general tend to do the same things that made them successful in life. And they repeat it amongst each other, they support each other. So there’s a class element. If you’re rich, you want to live amongst well rich people. We all want to live amongst people who share some sort of value, who have some sort of class element to it, so that all of that is understood. So the idea that we have a bunch of rich people who live in Manhattan who know exactly what Black people need in this country and that I’m supposed to believe that they care so wholeheartedly about how the underclass feel.
Meanwhile, never go to those particular neighborhoods that they’re talking about, barely know anybody of that particular demographic. And everything that they do is the complete opposite of beneficial. When you call for defunding the police, while the very communities that you’re referring to say, we need more police, there’s a problem there. And so I think for some people, they are nefarious. I think for other people, they are just chasing rainbows and unicorns. And I think also the Black upper class, the Black aristocrats in our country, they use their race as leverage. They have that one social element that let’s say white rich people don’t have. Just like sport teams. If you own a sport team, you’re exclusive, right? Because there’s only 20 some odd teams in whatever league. So you have that exclusive right, and it’s a bragging right. For the Black upper class, they have that exclusive right of being Black or even just Hispanic or whatever, but they use that as some sort of leverage to get what they want.
And so yeah, they’re going to use affirmative action so they can get a spot into Harvard too. They’re going to use all of these things. Yes, we do need that. We do need equal justice. They all want to assimilate this concept of they are part of the lower class and that Black equals lower class. They perpetuate this all the time, Black equals weak, Black equals lower class. They do these things all the time, and they get away with it, and no one’s willing to criticize them because they’re Black. And everybody avoids that class element that they’re some of the wealthiest Americans that exist in this country. Actually, there’s some of the wealthiest people that have ever existed, to be honest. Yet them having a darker pigmentation lends them to have more empathy or equal empathy to someone who has all the disadvantages, who has all the hurdles in life.
They’re one and the same. Someone like LeBron James, we’re supposed to ignore that LeBron lives in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods, who’s probably a billionaire by now, and that he’s still the LeBron who grew up in Akron as a poor kid who grew up without his father and lived with a single mother, we’re supposed to see him as still the same and just completely ignore the class element. We’re supposed to completely ignore that he gets ushered around from stadium to stadium with police presence to protect him, not to oppress him. We’re supposed to ignore all these things simply because he is Black. That is to me, the manipulation of race, because there are people who are part of the lower class who do experience certain things, who may actually experience police brutality, for example. And then you have all these wealthy Black people. Actually, I’ll give you an example.
Not too long ago, Al Sharpton wanted to say, you know what? Maybe bail reform needs some tweaks because I didn’t call for all of this. He was behind it. He was in full support of bail reform. And what started happening? First, it started affecting the poor areas. No one cared. Then they started going to the CVS in the rich neighborhoods. Now all of a sudden, bail reform, we need to gather everybody in the state to do something about bail reform because he can’t get his toothpaste. He has to call someone to get it for him, that’s ridiculous. Now that it bothers the wealthy, then now they want to do something. But when it affects the poor, they don’t care. And that’s the same for Al Sharpton, even though he is Black, but he is wealthy, he is part of the upper class, and even more so, he is part of the political establishment.
So yeah, there is a huge, I could go on it for hours about this, because it bothers the fuck out of me. But there is a huge element of class that everyone appears to ignore because there’s so infatuated with race, that Black equals poor and that white equals rich. And I could tell you, God knows how many regular, lower middle class white people I’ve met in my life who barely have anything to fucking put together, and yet we’re supposed to overlook their trials and tribulations because they are white. But Al Sharpton or Nikole Hannah Jones or LeBron James, oh, they’re disadvantaged despite having access to literally anything that they want. If they want a private airplane to go across the country, they can get it in a matter of hours. You can’t, you have to fly coach. It’s that kind of thing where we’re supposed to completely ignore the class element. And it really, really bothers me that it happened so much. And so thank you New York Post for giving me the opportunity to talk about it so often.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. One of the greatest scams ever perpetuated, as far as I can tell, is the fact that since the 1619 project, I don’t think Nikole Hannah Jones has actually written almost anything for New York Times, but they can’t fire her, right?
Adam Coleman:
No.
Inez Stepman:
What would happen if they fired her? There would be a huge racial uprising and reckoning in the New York Times. So they have to just keep paying her what I’m sure is an extraordinary salary, despite the fact that she’s, frankly, even aside from the fact that what she’s written is a bunch of crap, but she hasn’t even written for them, she’s just getting the paycheck. So at some level, you got to respect that.
Adam Coleman:
I mean, it is a hustle for sure. But we saw what happened when… I can’t remember the university, but the one university wanted to fire a professor and the uproar that came from that, or at least the uproar that she manufactured and the other upper class Blacks manufactured upon that. And that’s also one last thing I’ll say. Well, the problem is that there’s this manipulation of media because there are a lot of them within media, media is a class of its own, a lot of them with the media who portray this idea that Black people are constantly outraged for what happens to the wealthiest Black people in this country, and they’re not. They’re living check to check, going to work. Many are apolitical, many are very moderate, they’re not staunch progressives. Matter of fact, data shows that only 3% of progressive activists are actually Black. So that should tell you everything right there. BLM movement was basically a white movement.
There were more probably BLM shirts that went to the white people, then Black people. So it’s that idea, it is just race being a complete cover for the wealthiest Black people in this country. And they use people like me, someone who’s actually struggled, someone who’s actually been homeless, someone who’s fought tooth and nail to be in the position that I’m at today, to completely ignore that, no, we’re not the same, and I’m supposed to be his brother simply because we look alike. No, we’re not the same. Me and you, we have more in common than them. And that is actually something that we avoid talking about because we’re so infatuated with race.
Inez Stepman:
Well, on that note, I think I’ll wrap it up and let you go. I know you have something to do, Adam, so I’ll let you duck out for now. But thank you so much for joining High Noon. This was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Adam Coleman:
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Inez Stepman:
And let people know, once again, where they can find you. His book is a “Black Victim to Black Victor.” You can buy that on Amazon or I think a lot of other places that you can buy your books. Where else can people read your writing and see what your thoughts are on any given matter?
Adam Coleman:
Yeah, they can definitely go to my Substack, it’s adambcoleman.substack.com. Also, check out wrongspeak.substack.com for Wrong Speak publishing and all the articles that we have from regular people who just want to write. But I’m basically in the New York Post every week. I’m also a columnist for Human Events, and my goal is to out-write everybody. So I’m writing five to six times a week.
Inez Stepman:
Wow. Well, you’re certainly out writing me, so. All right. Well, thank you so much, Adam, for coming on and spending this hour with us.
Adam Coleman:
Thank you.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
