Reuters Journo Fired for Criticizing BLM, Reporting True Crime Stats

BUCK: I wanted to dive right now, Clay, into… It’s fun to ask people when you’re visiting a place, ’cause I’m going to Chicago and I think it’s funny for people to hear. I mean, I’ve been to Thailand, I’ve been to Bangkok, I’ve been to Buenos Aires, never been to Chicago. This is crazy. So I just finally woke up one day and I was like, “I’m going to America’s third largest city. I had never set foot in the place; I’ve always wanted to go. I actually have some friends from New York that have moved there permanently and love it.

It’s one of those rare places that New Yorkers sometimes will say, you know, they’ve found their forever home and they like it better, some of them, sometimes. And I asked everybody, you know… I got all these great recommendations, and now I’ve even got the official social media accounts of different restaurants and things telling me go check it out. So, it’s fun to have the reach that we do, Clay, on this show.

But there are also a whole lot of people writing, “Make sure you bring a bulletproof vest, make sure you go armed, watch out, keep your head on a swivel.” First of all, I’m from New York City, okay? I’m not coming from, you know, eastern Montana where there hasn’t been a homicide in 20 years or something. I’m a guy who worked for the NYPD. I’ll be all right. But it is frustrating because the crime situation in the country right now in major cities is bad. It has gotten a lot worse, and we should look at why and we should look at why going into this midterm election. Before we dive into what do you think the primary reason is, why am I being told that I need to go armed, I need to go strapped —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — into Chicago, 900 shootings plus. Actually, it’s a little over 900 shootings, over a hundred of those dead. It’s not even halfway into the year. The city only has two and a half million people. And this is playing out in different ways in New York City, in Phoenix, in L.A., Portland, in name a city, in Atlanta, all over the place. Miami actually does not have a huge increase in homicides the last couple years, something else I looked up recently. Clay, we gotta fix this. So, how does the country fix this?

CLAY: What we need to do…? It’s a good question, and I was reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and for gun murders we hit a high that went all the way back to 1994 in 2020, and if you look at the graphics of annual deaths by homicide per hundred thousand people, it skyrocketed in 2020, and the numbers have gone up pretty substantially since 2016. What happened? BLM. All right? This is the truth.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: It’s an inconvenient truth that a lot of left wingers don’t want to acknowledge that lots of people who consider themselves, quote-unquote, “mainstream journalists” that aren’t allied with either position. Buck, the data does not lie. With the rise of the BLM movement thousands of otherwise would be still alive today — black people — who were to a large extent being protected by police officers who are white, black, Asian, and Hispanic, have been kept from doing their job and the murder rate and the shooting rate has skyrocketed.

And you can’t argue against this midterm, right? What did they say for a long time, “Oh, it’s because of the pandemic!” But when you actually looked at the data in 2020 the covid numbers were way down because people were staying home in March and April and May. These murder rates skyrocketed starting with the George Floyd protests, and they have continued to skyrocket all over the country.

New records, unfortunately, being set for murders in many different communities, lots of cities where people are listening to us right now, Buck, and they still try to argue a variety of different things. I saw somebody the other day say, “Well, this is one of the costs of inflation.” (laughs) I was like, “What? One of the costs of inflation is a rising murder rate?” I don’t know that I buy into this at all, and they’re looking for any possible explanation other than the one that is staring us right in the face which is, when you demonize police officers, people pay with their lives who would otherwise have been protected by those police officers.

BUCK: And there’s a part of me that just feels frustration. And, you know, we’re Americans. We have pride in our country and in our major cities. And it’s sad to me when I’m going to a major city — I know we got Chicagoans who are listening now — and I understand some of this is people just being a little provocative. But Chicago does have a reputation now because of all the shootings that are happening there.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And the Democrat who runs the city, the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and the Democrats who run all these other cities are failing, and the corporations that spent millions and millions — over a hundred million dollars — bending the knee and begging forgiveness of the BLM movement should know that their money… It’s not only that they did not help, that the BLM movement failed to help.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: The BLM movement made things worse. And that has to be, we have to have — I know I don’t have to this argument, they don’t have to this debate, but, Clay, instead of us just relying on the narrative — or, rather, a battle of narratives — I can turn to this excellent. We gotta get Bari Weiss on the show —

CLAY: Does fantastic work, yeah.

BUCK: — on her Substack. She has a guest writer she often does, Zac Kriegman. “I Criticized BLM…” This is Zac Kriegman’s piece: “I Criticized BLM, Then I Was Fired,” and as I was reading this — this is one of the reasons I sent it to you — this guy, Clay, is the Reuters chief data scientist. Now, Reuters provides the news feed that a lot of other news organizations rely on as their news ticker, and so the narrative power of Reuters and the Associated Press even exceeds what you may have from some of the better known, other media entities out there, right?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But I was thinking about this guy, he’s not one of us in terms of his ideology, he’s not a conservative but he’s looking at the numbers and he’s looking at what BLM is saying is happening and what is really happening, and he crunched all data. And just to cut to the chase here, you know what he found out?

In a use of force situation where there could be any discussion about a police officer using lethal force, white Americans were more likely to be shot than black Americans in similar situations and circumstances. His data findings aligned almost exactly with Professor Fryer at Harvard — you brought this study up before —

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: — who also found that white Americans in a use of force situation with police are more likely to be shot, and we could discuss why that is and perception. Clay, what do you think happens when he puts that finding on the internal chat board of Reuters?

CLAY: It’s not acceptable because it conflicts with the narrative. Let’s start there, and there are going to be oftentimes… There’s lots of people listening to us who would think about this inside of their company. Even when you’re sharing raw data, even when you are just sharing what the data shows, you are in danger of being called racist, right? And most people are fearful of doing this. I’ve said it before, Buck, and it bears repeating.

Over half of all murders in America are committed by black men. Black men represent around 6 or 7% of the United States population. So you are talking… This is fact, not racism. This is direct, factual evidence: Over half of all murders are committed by around 6 or 7% of the population — even smaller than that, honestly, because most murders are committed by men. And we sometimes have fun with this data, right, in terms of sex because if you were to say, “Oh, the police are overwhelmingly sexist because they only arrest men, by and large, for violent crimes.

“Why aren’t women being arrested in proportion to their population?” Well, people would say, “Well, men are more violent. So police are having to interact with them more.” So if you tried to make a sexism argument there, people laugh at you. Why can’t you look at the raw data and say police, “By and large, are responding to violent criminals?” An 88-year-old Hispanic woman is probably not gonna end up in a violent interaction with a police officer.

A 16-year-old white kid might, right, because age and sex factor in to a large degree in terms of the overall criminal population. But you can’t talk about that in some of these woke corporations. So tell us: What happened to this guy who looked at the numbered, shares the factual data inside of Reuters? Which is ostensibly, we should say, a neutral news organization.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: It’s not like we’re talking about MSNBC right, Washington Post.

BUCK: Yes. Reuters is supposed to be the gold standard of journalism as journalism is meant to be. And of course if you believe that, you know, I got a bridge to sell you in the middle of nowhere. But this is what happened. He got fed to the diversity and inclusion H.R. machinery.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: And as I’ve said before, you Hunt for Red October, you’ve seen it, right? Great movie?

CLAY: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

BUCK: The first person that Sean Connery, when he’s Ramius, takes out is the political commissar ’cause this was a real practice in Soviet Union. There were people, whether it was on the factory floor or on the front line of a military unit, their only job was to monitor the conversations and the political fealty of other people within the Soviet Union. Essentially, “You better say the Communist Party and great and our leadership is amazing or you’re gonna end up in the gulag,” straight up.

In a different context with different severity but similar mentality, diversity and inclusion H.R. departments are kind of like the commissars. They’re there to make sure you say what you’re supposed to say, or you get fired. This guy starts having a meeting. They say it was provocative. They say what he posted was antagonistic. He said, well, can I…? Who says that? Can I actually sit and have a conversation with whoever in H.R. says that? They say no.

This was the favorite comment that I saw, just to know how crazy it was. “My unwillingness…” This is one of his colleagues who wrote on the chat, Clay: “My unwillingness to engage you doesn’t signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, ‘The KKK did lots of good things for the community; prove me wrong,’ I’m not obligated to do so.” End quote. So this is how they handle it. He puts up data and they say we won’t engage with your data because it would be like saying the KKK did good things. The argument is so stupid and so intellectually embarrassing — and you know what they did after all this? They fired him.

CLAY: Doesn’t surprise me.

BUCK: Reuters fired for sharing data in an internal chat thread. No one says the data is wrong. No one questioned the actual numbers, not allowed. That’s the country we’re in now. And, by the way, he points out, back to our initial premise here on BLM, Clay, that the narrative of police are killing all these people with no cause except racism has resulted in a lot of people — particularly or disproportionately black people — dying —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — who would not have died.

CLAY: BLM — I believe this. The BLM protests have likely led to thousands of additional black lives. And, again, this data point is important. Seventy-five percent of all people shot every year, according to Washington Post database, by police, are white, Asian, or Hispanic. How often do you hear about someone other than a black person shot by police? Almost never. Seventy-five percent of all police shootings: white, Asian, or Hispanic.