From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

I think it's moral posturing that preys on the perennial bad conscience that America and Americans have about the past misstatement of black Americans.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Dr. David

Azarad, our first guest on today's program. David is Assistant Professor and Research Fellow at

the Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale's D.C. campus. We talked at length about a piece he wrote

in Newsweek titled Contra Reparations. Dr. Azarat, thanks for joining us.

It's nice to be back with you, Scott.

The subject of reparations, David, where does this idea come from? What's the genesis of it?

I know that it's not a new idea. MLK, for example, endorsed it in his later works.

You know, conservatives in all Americans, everyone knows the line from the I have a dream speech

that we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

But MLK had many statements endorsing racial preferences and reparations, he thought that this should last

for a few hundred years, and eventually, remember, the dream is we would get to color blindness.

But let's just say that his road to color blindness involved an awful lot of color consciousness.

Again, in the 90s, there was a big push around it.

And then the most recent wave was revived by Tana Hisi Coates, you know, who up until he decided to go write

Carl McVocke's few years ago, was America's leading racial huckster.

You could say he wrote a long essay for the Atlantic, I think it was in 2014 maybe,

making the case for reparations. And it kind of took off. And now we're in the midst of,

you know, another wave of racial hysteria in this country. And so there's a lot of attention

that is being paid to this. What's amusing, of course, is that with each passing decade, the people who actually

experience slavery firsthand, while there are no such people left in America, there are no such

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