American Academy of Arts and Sciences-- Meeting in Los Angeles, Pepperdine University

On January 8th, 2019, I was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion at Pepperdine University with other community activists.

The keyt question focused on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship.

I received word about this event from a close friend in the academic world. He's a rock-steady conservative who has faced unprecedented persecution for researching issues and publishing the evidence. His conclusions do not align with the politicized agenda of universities today.

He has since fought back against the university that slandered him and had revoked his tenure. Since then, he has kept me in the loop to fight for the best of Los Angeles County and the state of California as a whole.

The Roundtable Discussion was quite eventful.

We covered lots of topics, like how we are active in our commuities to promote what is best for everyone. The discussion leaders wanted to focus on how we engage with the greater community as a whole.

During our time together, I pointed out that the United States is not a democracy, but a Republic, in which there is majority rule based on representative government, but that everyone's rights are protected, particularly through counter-majoritarian institutions like the Electoral College and the court system.

The discussion ended up turning to the value of citizenship itself, and how it's facing massive, rapid erosion in Los Angeles County.

Check out my friend Evan Chase, the previous President of the Beach Cities Republicans, now leader of the Better Angels Foundation:

Of course, I had my Make California Great Again hat!

 At the end of the discussion, the moderators asked for our thoughts on what we discussed, and what we had learned that day.

Here are my full remarks below:

Check this out!

Joel Pollack from Breitbart News was there, too!

Final Reflection

I really liked that the discussion went away from the easy discussion on "What are you doing in your community" to "What is hurting your communities, and what are you doing about it?"

We made sure that this issue of illegal immigration received proper attention.

We had a pretty good group of people at the meeting besides the two whom I mentioned above.

There was a professor there from one of the prestigious universities in the region. She told everyone that she had been a Democrat almost all her life, but when Obama got elected, she became a Republican. She taught her courses from a distinctly conservative point of view and did not hold back her love for the United States.

Other people in the group had headed partisan clubs, and there was one lady who headed a pro-Western Civilization community dedicated to doing what is best.

There were three black women, one black man, another Hispanic gentleman there, too, who pressed the necessity of engaging young people to embrace free enterprise.

There were three people of Jewish background who were attending the event, too, so no one could claim that there was no diversity in terms of ethnic background -- and yet the most important diversity in the room had to do with diversity of thought.

My favorite point occured when one of the women in the room said that the history of the United States is about white and black America reconciling over the history of slavery. I immediately countered that, as did another member of our discussion panel. 

This "white guilt" and race card narrative has gotten so old, so trite, and it pained me to hear this from a conservative commentator in the room. The fact is that the peculiar institution was not a monolith white-on-black problem.

There were black freedmen as much as there were white freedmen up to the Civil War. Black people even owned slaves although that sordid subject is one of the third rails of academia in history departments. The professor from a local university affirmed that the history of black America in the United States is much more diverse and complex than many realize.

In fact, one of the first slaves owners in continental North America was a black man! A prince from Gambia who came to the New World as an indentured servant, Anthony Johnston not only owned slaves, but wanted to ensure a legal framework to perpetuate slavery in colonial Virginia.

"White people" should not be walking around bearing the unfettered burden of slavery. This terrible institution is a human problem, not a stricltly American or "white" problem. 

What does make America stand out, however, is that we are the one country where white men died on fields of battle to end that evil institution. No other country has that kind of record. in which citizens, especially those who had been born in other countries to help form a new one, in which white men would bleed to make all men free.

Now that's civic activism at its most extreme!