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Jan. 23, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:22
DELETING THE EVIDENCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep753
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Coming up, it's the day of the New Hampshire primary.
I'll talk to pollster Stacey McCain of the Rasmussen Survey about what we can expect in terms of the results and also public opinion on the border.
I want to ask why January 6th defendants who delete their data are sitting in jail right now, while the January 6th committee, which has been deleting data, seems to be getting away with it scot-free.
And I'll also explore whether stereotypes are as inaccurate as the media tell us or whether they bear a fairly close relationship to reality.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to my channel.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
There's a lot of different items I'd like to address in today's podcast.
The New Hampshire primary going on today.
There is the interesting decision by the Supreme Court, interesting and to me kind of appalling, in which the Supreme Court basically tells the Biden administration, you can go in and stop Texas from erecting border fences.
You can take down those fences.
You can cut that wire.
And so I want to talk about that.
I also want to talk about January 6th.
Now, the first two topics I'm going to save, because I have on the podcast, uh, Robert Stacey McCain.
He's a pollster with the Rasmussen reports.
So I'm going to talk to him about the New Hampshire primary and also about the border fence decision by the Supreme Court.
I want to focus in this opening segment on some new information about the January 6th committee.
Now we've... I've said often, and I think long believed, that the January 6th Committee was a propaganda operation.
And now what do we mean by a propaganda operation?
What we mean is that the January 6th Committee had access to a lot of information.
If this was a genuine investigation, they would be like, alright, let's interview people, let's look at all this footage, let's try to figure out what happened on that day, and how it happened.
And if things went wrong, how they went wrong, and who is responsible.
So, this is a kind of investigation that, by the way, occurs all the time in other areas.
If somebody, Debbie and I watch a lot of these crime shows, you see a body, and you begin by asking, Well, how did this happen?
When did it happen?
Who did it happen to as the victim?
And then what can we figure out based upon what's here?
And based upon what we can learn about who actually did it?
We're not going to just make presumptions.
We're not going to go out to sort of sell a narrative.
We're going to try to determine what the truth is.
And then based upon that, we will do arrests and take people to trial and so on.
The January 6th committee could have done that, but from the beginning, they had no interest in doing that.
Rather, in this vast ocean of information available to them, their strategy was, let's try to cull out a handful of images, a handful of statements, and then, out of those, we will craft our narrative.
It's almost like the January 6th committee decided, instead of being a judge or a jury and making a decision based upon all the facts, we will be sort of like the prosecution.
And we will treat the Trumpsters and Trump as people to be prosecuted, except there's no defense.
There's only a prosecution, and we're the prosecutors, and to some degree, we are also the judge and we are also the jury.
Now, here is some additional proof that that's what was going on with the January 6th Committee.
The House Select Committee, the January 6th Committee, has been deleting its own files to conceal evidence.
And when did they do these deletions?
Right before they were compelled to turn over these files when the Republicans took over the House of Representatives.
Remember the January 6th committee began with the Democrats in charge.
And so they were like... Fine.
We've got all this information.
We've got all these files.
We've got all these terabytes of data.
But then, oops, in the midterm, the Republicans take the House very narrowly.
But nevertheless, according to House rules, the January 6th committee now needs to turn over all this data, all the documents from its investigation to the Republicans.
And so, there are four terabytes of data, and the Republicans get the package, and they open it up, and they realize, we've only been given two terabytes.
And so, they then begin to look to see, well, where are the others?
And they're like, we don't have them. We don't have them.
Turns out that...
That the Republicans have now figured out, this is Representative Loudermilk, his committee has figured out that two of the terabytes of data have been deleted.
And deleted and encrypted just days before the files were turned over.
So this is an obvious effort to conceal evidence.
And so, Representative Loudermilk, unable to get them from Benny Thompson, from the head of the committee, basically hired some software experts and said, listen, let's go into this.
Let's find out what they deleted because no deletion is really permanent.
If you're good enough, you should be able to recover the files immediately.
And guess what?
They have recovered them, but, and there's a big but here, the files are still password protected.
So the files have now been recovered, but the Democrats are holding on to the passwords.
And so Representative Loudermilk is like, you better give us these passwords, and the...
And Mike Johnson has authorized Loudermilk to take all measures to get the necessary passwords so they can figure out the information.
Because think about it. It's probably very incriminating information.
It's probably information that the January 6th committee deliberately decided to ignore, to pretend like it didn't exist.
But, of course, they did have it.
And so that's why they do the deletions.
Now, the reason this is all so outrageous is Is because there are January 6th defendants who are sitting in jail right now because they did, on a vastly smaller scale, exactly the same thing.
Now, why did they do it?
Well, it's pretty simple.
Right after January 6th, there were a bunch of guys, some of them had gone into the Capitol, and they did what people do these days, which is that they posted videos or comments on social media basically saying...
We were in the Capitol.
We were making our voices heard.
And that really shows you that these guys did not think that they were committing any kind of a serious offense.
They felt we're protesters, like the leftist protesters.
And we were exercising our First Amendment rights.
We were trying to call out our leaders.
We're trying to confront them and find out what's going on with the issue of election fraud.
So they were proud of what they did.
Or at the very least, they were happy to share information about what they did with their friends.
And then, of course, they realized, oh, I'm on the FBI most wanted list.
Oh, anybody who got into the Capitol on that day is being arrested.
So a lot of people went to their phones.
They went to their files, maybe their computers, and they began deleting information.
Let me take that down. I mean, you know, they're going to use this against me.
So in a very understandable way.
And then they were accused of what?
Well, suppressing evidence, deleting files, preventing the government from being able to investigate, interfering with the lawful investigation.
There are sort of many different legal expressions that you can use to describe this.
And judges were like, you can't do that.
You shouldn't have done that.
And so there are January 6th defendants, multiple defendants, paying a price for doing exactly this.
And yet, and yet...
Once again, we have our full January 6th committee doing this on a massive scale.
Obviously, with the approval of the chairman, Benny Thompson, what are the repercussions?
Even now, it seems like all that Representative Loudermilk is saying is, give us the passwords.
In other words, undo your offense because we've been able to get those files.
Give us the passwords to those files, but not...
Who gave you the right to delete these files?
This is a violation of the rules of the House.
You're going to be severely punished.
There's going to be motions to throw you out as a representative.
There are going to be motions to censure you for your conduct.
If this were the Democrats, that's what they would be doing.
They would be imposing severe penalties on Republicans for doing this kind of stuff.
Republicans in our characteristic form are taking a very measured approach, but a measured approach particularly at this stage of the game often means that the bad guys get to do bad stuff and get away with it.
Now there's obviously going to be some value in retrieving the passwords, retrieving the files.
It helps fill out the story of January 6th.
It helps confirm our suspicions that this committee was a complete sham.
I think history will look back and see that it was a complete sham.
But nevertheless, it is galling that they get away on the macro level what individuals are not allowed to do on the micro level.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome back to the podcast, Stacey McCain.
This is Robert Stacey McCain.
He's the managing editor of the Rasmussen Reports, but he was a veteran journalist with 30 years of experience.
In fact, I think... We're good to go.
Stacey, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Today is the day of the New Hampshire primary.
And there's been some variation, I think, in the polls coming out from different places.
I think I saw this morning that Nikki Haley is predicting that she's going to win the New Hampshire primary.
What are you looking for as somebody who studies all this as the results start to come in?
Well, the question is, is Trump going to be below 50%?
Okay, that's the real question here.
The possibility of Nikki Haley actually winning this, I think, is rather remote.
None of the polls actually show that.
I mean... And if you look at the real clear politics average right now, Trump is at 56% and Haley is a little bit below 40%.
So the question is, I mean, if Nikki Haley were to somehow keep Trump below 50%, she could claim that as a moral victory.
But going on from there, they go to South Carolina.
Then they go to Nevada, Florida, and that's going to be a wipeout.
So I really think Ron DeSantis made the smart move to get out when he did and endorse Trump because that pretty much leaves it a two-candidate race.
And as we have seen, been polling for months.
Trump is winning this thing by wide, wide margins.
It seems like one of the things that's very common in the media is to measure results against expectations, so that even if you do relatively poorly, you did better than they thought you were going to, and therefore, in a sense, you are winning, or at least you've got momentum.
Do you think that there is a...
Kind of a desperate effort, both in certain camps in the GOP, but also among the Democrats and in the media, to elevate Nikki Haley and keep this race kind of hot.
Yeah. Well, first of all, you've got two biases in the media.
First of all, they love a horse race.
You know, they love competition and conflict.
So that is built into what the media likes.
But the other thing, of course, is the anti-Trump bias, the Trump derangement syndrome that has been in the media complex for a long time.
And, you know, during the day and here in my home office, I keep my office TV tuned to CNN. I watch CNN so you don't have to.
And they are just all in on the idea that somehow Nikki Haley is going to stop Trump.
And they had a few guests on there this morning who were trying to bring them back to reality where Trump has been winning this thing all along.
And there was some hope, I think, among some people.
I mean, you know, I liked Vivek Ramaswamy.
You know, I liked Ron DeSantis.
Some of the people of Ron DeSantis' teams are personal friends of mine.
So... It wasn't that I was...
There's the never-Trump camp, and then there's the only Trump camp.
I'm not part of that.
And I'm just...
Whatever the voters decide, I'm kind of in favor of letting the voters make up their own minds.
And it looks like, just looking at the poll numbers...
That the Republican primary voters have made up their mind long ago who they want.
I mean, I think you're raising an interesting point here, Vicky, Stacey, which is that the psychology of the Republican voter and the mainstream of the Republican Party was probably pretty close to the agenda of Vivek Ramaswamy, was probably pretty close to the agenda of Ron DeSantis, and is, of course, close to the agenda of Trump.
But is not that close to the agenda of Nikki Haley.
In other words, it's not that Nikki Haley doesn't come out of the Republican tradition, she does, but it's almost like she comes out of a Republican tradition, you know, as of 30 years ago, but not one that resonates that well today.
I mean, if you go to a Republican meeting today, and let's just say you're gaga about, you know, sending money over to Ukraine, you're going to get a chilly reaction at best.
Yeah, you know, one of the...
Boy, I'm trying to remember how long ago this was.
Circa 2011, my whole point was, no more Bushes, right?
Okay, that I was, you know, I think that, you know...
Generally speaking, voters and certainly conservative voters were tired of permanent war for permanent peace, which seemed to be the Bush agenda.
Open borders, unrestricted outsourcing to China, that sort of internationalist, I guess you'd call it, Or some would say globalist wing of the Republican Party.
And Trump killed that.
Okay, that is dead.
It's not coming back.
And so you see this in the reaction to the conflict in Ukraine.
I think that everybody, or most everybody, is very sympathetic to Ukraine.
They don't like the idea of Russia invading over there.
But at some point, after $100 billion, $200 billion, how many more billions of dollars are we supposed to spend on this?
And people are like, look at our border.
We're the ones getting invaded.
So why are we spending money to protect Ukraine's border and not doing anything to protect our own border?
No, exactly. I think that's a good point.
Do you hear me, Stacey? Yes, I can hear you.
I just wanted to make sure.
We may have a little delay. Yeah, no problem.
Let's talk about...
You mentioned South Carolina coming right after New Hampshire.
Now, I noticed that Tim Scott, the senator in South Carolina, has endorsed Trump.
I'm sure that was kind of a blow to Nikki Haley because, of course, that's her home state.
What are Nikki Haley's chances...
Let's just say she does okay in New Hampshire.
What are her chances in her home state of South Carolina?
Probably not good.
You know, the thing is, and a lot of people don't get this about South Carolina, is that there is a strong...
Establishment tendency in the South Carolina Republican Party.
You saw George W. Bush did well there.
What's his name?
Hang on a second, I'm breaking for John McCain actually did well in South Carolina.
So there is there is this establishment Terrian, you know, element.
You have like a lot of retired military people down there.
And so so there is a certain amount of establishment vote down there.
But again, if you're talking Republican primary voters, right.
You know, it's it's very hard to see Trump not winning South Carolina.
And with Tim Scott's endorsement, Ron DeSantis' endorsement, he'll have plenty of surrogates in that state to help him.
And again, then you come to Florida, Nevada...
Nevada's Trump territory.
And so as you go down the calendar, it's hard to see where does Nikki Haley win?
I don't think it's South Carolina.
What I find interesting is that just very recently in the campaign, Nikki Haley pivoted into a certain, at least moderate, embrace of identity politics.
An emphasis, you know, I grew up brown in the South.
I was teased every day for being brown.
I mean, I had to chuckle about this because somebody posted on social media her class.
And, you know, they're about...
A third of the kids are white, about a third of the kids are black.
She's sort of right in the middle of that mix.
And so I'm like, wait a minute, people chose to target you of all people?
You're sort of the, I would call it the median skin color in the class, you know, right in the middle of everybody.
So I found that odd.
But... The Republican Party has, I mean, look, Tim Scott, obviously, part of what the appeal of Tim Scott is, you've got a conservative and a Republican, but he happens to be black.
Part of the appeal of Nikki Haley, I guess, is that she's of Indian descent.
And yet, it's hard for me to see this being kind of a winning issue in a Republican primary.
Do you agree? Probably not.
You know, I think it was, I can't call her name, Libs of TikTok?
Rhea? Is that her name?
Yeah, J-R-H. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. The Libs of TikTok lady posted Nikki Haley's senior picture and said, do you think it was her being brown that she was getting teased about?
Because she looked like about 30 pounds heavier than she is right now.
And so so maybe that's what she was that she she heard them say round and thought they said brown.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
In South Carolina, but your mileage may vary.
And no, that's one thing, is that Republican voters don't want tokenism.
They don't want identity politics.
They don't want DEI quotas.
They believe in merit.
I've said about Trump, Trump is the third iteration of Of a populist trend that started after the 2008 campaign with Sarah Palin.
She was the populist voice that helped inspire the Tea Party.
And that was followed up by Herman Cain, if you remember, in the 2012 cycle.
And then Trump comes along.
What they have in common is that they are seen as outsiders, not part of the D.C. policy establishment.
And Nikki Haley, as you point out, is trying to pander to a CNN audience, trying to pander to the media, trying to pander to, I guess, people who aren't Republicans.
And that may help her get some independent voters in New Hampshire, but I don't think it's going to help in South Carolina, Florida, Nevada, and on down the line.
I think that by the time you get Super Tuesday, this thing is going to be over.
We'll be right back with Stacey McCain, Managing Editor of the Rasmussen Reports, the website rasmussenreports.com.
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I'm back with Robert Stacy McCain, the managing editor of the Rasmussen Reports.
The website is rasmussenreports.com.
Stacy, I want to talk to you about the issue of the border.
And this, of course, is red hot in the news right now because the Supreme Court intervened to permit We're good to go.
And I guess the Biden people went to the Supreme Court and said in effect that we the federal government are in charge of the border, not these Texas dudes.
And so they should not be allowed to interfere with our kind of porous border operations, I guess you'd put it.
And somewhat surprisingly, Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberals, if you will, I want to talk about public opinion on this, but before I do, what was your reaction to that Supreme Court decision?
It's not an adjudication of the overall case.
The case is still pending, but nevertheless, the court sort of said that right now, this is what we're going to decide.
And we've got a Republican majority on the court right now.
Okay. Justice Roberts, of course, he always votes with liberals on anything remotely controversial.
But losing Amy Comey Barrett, that was a little bit of a disappointment to me.
Where the federal government is failing to enforce the law, where the federal government is not protecting the wives...
I don't know.
That, you know, the federal government had to go in and cut those, you know, razor wire barriers.
That made no sense to me.
Well, I mean, I'm trying to understand what might have been going on in her mind.
And my guess is that what Amy Coney Barrett was thinking was something like this.
She probably thought, well, listen, it may seem to me and to many people that the But that issue has not come before the Supreme Court, nor have we adjudicated it.
So that's a separate issue.
Let's just ask the prior question of who is in charge of the national border.
And if you answer the federal government that whether they're doing a good job or a bad job is immaterial, it's kind of like saying, who's in charge of the national defense?
So, you know, if China's attacking the United States, Texas can't mount its own militia to fight the Chinese.
This is the job of the federal government.
Oh, yeah? Well, at the end of the day, yes.
You might want to talk to the Texans about that.
Yeah, I guess that's right.
No, I'm just trying to think aloud constitutionally and try to understand what might be going on in Barrett's mind.
Here's an interesting survey that you guys did, the Rasmussen Reports, Border Security.
58% see catastrophe in Biden policy, although, somewhat to my surprise, 30% of likely voters believe Biden is doing a good or excellent job on immigration issues.
Now, I'm assuming that that 30% is the absolute hardcore of the Democratic base, and that a sizable majority of Americans will see what's happening and go, this is not good.
Yes, well, 52% give him a poor rating, and then there's about 15% that answer he's doing a fair job, and then you have a certain percentage that just don't know.
But yes, 30% actually think he's doing at least a good job on immigration issues.
But what we did...
As we took a quote from Mike Johnson, who is, of course, the Speaker of the House, we took a quote from him and give it to the survey respondents blind without telling them who we're quoting, and the quote was this, Since his first day in office, President Biden has worked to systematically undermine America's border security.
The result is a humanitarian and national security catastrophe.
That's the quote. We ask them, do you agree or disagree with that quote?
58% agree with that quote, right?
That it's a catastrophe at the border.
And that includes 44% who strongly agree.
And then you're talking about the hard core of pro-Biden voters, but 37% disagree.
So it's about a 20 point margin for those who agree with what Mike Johnson said about Biden undermining America's border security. I mean that to me Stacey is a very significant point because it's one thing to ask people do you approve or disapprove of Biden's border policy.
That's a very neutral question.
The suggestion from Mike Johnson is not merely that the policy is being poorly executed, but that they are, I read the word systematically to mean deliberately, that there is a kind of conscious assault on the integrity of the border, and you're saying that even put in that way, 58% of people go, yeah, that's what's going on.
Yes, and I think how do we understand what Biden is doing and why he's doing it?
And I think the easiest way to understand what Biden is doing at the border is to suggest that he's Taking a page sort of from Phyllis Schlafly, who famously said in 1964 that, you know, the duty of a political party is to give people a choice, not an echo.
Right. And so they had flipped that around because, of course, in 64, the choice was between LBJ and Goldwater.
So Biden was elected as being not Trump, correct?
Correct. So if Biden is the not-Trump candidate, then he has to take the not-Trump policy on border security.
Trump wanted to build a wall, build a wall, build a wall to protect the border.
And so Biden's impulse, or at least the impulse of his administration, Is to, you know, do the opposite of whatever Trump would do.
And so tearing down, you know, the state of Texas spent their own tax money to, you know, to reinforce the border.
And Biden wants to tear it down.
So, yes, I think that the policy, it's an instinct of doing the opposite of whatever Trump would have done.
Very interesting, because people have, you know, and me too, have speculated about the fact that they're trying to change the demographic composition of the country and so on.
And maybe some of that's going on.
But I think what you're saying is there's a kind of very basic motive here.
If Trump says up, they say down.
If Trump says down, they say up.
And that's the way that they've governed in the opposite manner of what Trump would have done.
Yeah, great stuff.
Thank you very much, Stacey, for joining me.
I've been talking to Robert Stacey McCain, a managing editor of the Rasmussen Reports.
It's rasmussenreports.com.
I want to talk in this segment about DEI, but I want to go beyond the surface critique of DEI because Diversity, equity, and inclusion to look at a very controversial question that is almost never looked at, which is the accuracy, the accuracy, not the inaccuracy, but the accuracy of stereotypes.
Now, this is an important issue because when we do a critique of DEI, a lot of people will say, well, we need to hire based upon merit.
But of course, the reason we got DEI in the first place is that the progressives insist that people don't, in fact, hire based on merit.
They don't recruit based on merit.
They recruit based on stereotypes.
So in other words, the idea here is that there are pervasive And the presumption here is that the stereotypes are wrong.
They are absurd exaggerations.
They are false. And so when you use those as the basis for promoting or hiring or giving someone a federal contract, that is a departure from merit.
And so there needs to be a kind of war on stereotypes.
And you know how often when you, even in common conversation, you say something, people go, well, let's just stereotype, Dinesh.
Well, and the assumption, again, is that this is inaccurate and that the settled science, the science of statistics, the science of surveys, systematically demolishes and refutes these stereotypes.
Now, there's an interesting academic paper that's come out on this, written by two scholars, Lee Jassim and Nathan Honeycutt, and they argue that this kind of war on stereotypes is complete bunkum, is complete nonsense, that the vast majority of stereotypes that people believe are Are accurate.
And so we have to then, if that's true, and we're going to look and see if it's true, we have to say, well, how is it the case that so many people think that stereotypes are bogus?
Well, usually the people who think that stereotypes are bogus will come up with a bunch of stereotypes.
Let me give you a few.
Women are fit for nothing but child-rearing.
Muslims are bloodthirsty terrorists.
And what they will do is that they state these kind of generalities.
They usually find some examples from a political cartoon or from a commercial or a character in a movie and they go, well, that's a stereotype.
And then they go, let's compare that to reality.
For example, you know, there might be a very small percentage of Muslims who are actual terrorists and maybe a larger percentage of Muslims who are sympathetic to terrorism, but still a majority or not.
So hey, there you go, the stereotype is obviously bogus.
But what these scholars point out in this article is that that's not a real stereotype because the truth of it is no one actually believes that.
So when you're refuting a stereotype, you can't just take a cartoon or the stereotype itself is a straw man.
So for example, can you find people in our society who say, quote, women are fit for nothing but child rearing, Who- are there large bodies of people who think that?
No, there actually aren't.
So if you want to find out stereotypes, you've got to look not at a cartoon or your own invented exaggeration, but opinions that people actually hold.
In fact, people don't actually hold opinions like all blacks are thieves, or Jews are really stingy.
Every single Jew is really stingy with money.
Nobody believes these things.
So the The effort to overturn these stereotypes is essentially the overturning of a straw man.
If you want to overturn stereotypes, you've got to look at generalizations that people actually hold.
And so let's take a few, let's pose some questions that can be put before people to see what people actually think.
And then you can examine whether or not people's opinions or people's generalizations are true or not.
So here we go.
Which group is more likely to commit murder, men or women?
Your correct answer is probably men.
And not only is that the opinion of most people, that's the truth.
Here we go. Older people are generally...
More or less dash than adolescence.
Conscientious and open to new experiences.
Are older people more open to new experiences or are younger people more open to new experiences?
Most people think younger people, that's what Debbie's answering.
And that's true. It's borne out by all kinds of data.
In which ethnic group are you likely to find the highest proportion of people who support the Democrats, Democratic presidential candidates?
Whites or blacks?
The answer is blacks.
Most people say blacks, and most people are correct.
The blacks support the Democratic candidate by a much higher margin.
People in the U.S. strongly identifying themselves as Dash are more likely to go to church on Sunday.
Conservative or liberal?
Most people think. Conservative.
Conservative, says Debbie. Cling!
Right answer. That's the truth of the matter.
In other words, that's not just the stereotype.
The stereotype is completely borne out in reality.
And you can go down the list like this on and on.
Now... The attack on stereotypes goes back to the 1950s.
I remember a psychologist at Harvard, Gordon Alport, wrote a book called The Nature of Prejudice, in which he basically said, we all know that stereotypes are wrong.
And I'm like, this is a rather startling statement by a prominent scholar, and so I sort of look for the footnote.
We all know that stereotypes are wrong.
Where's the data to back that up?
And interestingly, there is no data.
It is simply stated as a fact.
That stereotypes are inaccurate, or at least wild overstatements.
And the point that this article is making, and it's supported by a whole body of research and data, is that no, stereotypes are not wild exaggerations.
They are not exaggerations at all.
Mostly what people actually believe about groups is true.
Now, To validate this, again, you have to emphasize what do people actually believe.
Nobody believes that all men are taller than all women.
Right? If you believe that all men are taller than all women, then you're wrong.
Because you can obviously find Susie and she's 6'2", and Jake and he's 5'3".
But most people believe that men in general, or on average, are what?
3 or 4 inches taller than women.
And they're right. If you actually did a measurement of men and women at the same age, you'd find that that is roughly true.
Now, we all know that at certain ages, women actually can be taller than men, but we're talking about adult men and adult women.
Now there have been, according to this article, over 50 studies that assess the accuracy of people's beliefs about demographic, national, political, and other groups.
And this subject has been intensely studied, particularly with regard to two topics, differences between ethnic and racial groups, and also differences between men and women.
So in the controversial areas that we're talking about, obviously when we're discussing DEI as a remedy, they're talking about racial stereotypes and gender stereotypes.
And the point that the article is making is that on that topic, just as in any other topic, by and large, most people's stereotypes are accurate.
They're supported by the data.
Now, we're not discussing here whether these are nice things to believe or whether these...
We're not discussing the ought.
We're discussing the is.
We're asking someone a factual question about the world.
So, it would be something like...
Like, in the firefighters test, which group is likely to do the best?
Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans.
And you have people, they give their opinion, and then you just look at the actual result of the test.
And so, that's what we're looking for.
A correspondence between people's belief...
And reality. If you want to step back and evaluate the belief, oh, I really object to the fact that most people have that opinion, we're not asking whether these opinions are good or bad, we're asking whether these opinions comport with reality or not.
And what this article concludes, stereotype accuracy has been obtained using methods...
I'm replicated by multiple independent researchers studying different stereotypes and using different methods all over the world.
Now, that obviously raises the question, why are stereotypes accurate?
And the answer is very simple.
Stereotypes, by and large, are based upon people's experience.
So if people make generalizations, and this is something that we do from our youngest age, in fact, intellectual activity would be impossible if you couldn't make generalizations.
Water tends to be wet, and if you pour water on the ground, it's going to spread out.
A ball is going to bounce.
So you see another ball, that's likely to bounce as well.
So what happens is that based on your experience, you develop expectations.
And the expectations are not that when expectations are applied to groups...
That's when you get a stereotype, which is nothing more than a group generalization.
Now, there are cases where people's experience can be mistaken, but by and large, the point is that stereotypes are not mistaken.
People in general are correct in their perceptions.
And this is really important because it really means that the DEI kind of propaganda against stereotypes is bogus.
If you want the truth about things, stereotypes by and large are the truth, and so this big campaign to get people to abandon stereotypes, oh Dinesh, that's just a stereotype, my point is, what you're saying is that I'm making a true generalization.
Generalizations are not true in every case, but they are true across the board.
They're true in most cases.
They're true, quote, in general.
So, I think that as we see this critique of DEI, it can't just be a critique that says, merit, merit, merit.
We've got to defend the infrastructure of merit and show that when people sometimes, in evaluating merit, make generalizations, those generalizations are not necessarily wrong.
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