*****Watch on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v2xdg7m-bret-and-heather-180th-darkhorse-podcast-livestream.html*****In this 180th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.We begin by discussing Bret’s 2021 conversation with RFK Jr., which DarkHorse released this week—why the delay, and what revelations are therein? Then we discuss adjuvants in killed virus vaccines, and whether the i...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 180.
No question of the primeness of that number.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
I am.
Do you know what today is?
Yes.
Work with me.
Do you know what today is?
No, what's today?
Today is day 13,279 of being a dude.
a 13,279 being a dude. - Really?
Really?
You did the math? - I did do the math.
OK.
I think I did it pretty carefully.
OK.
But anyway, I think that's kind of a big accomplishment.
Being a dude.
Being a dude.
OK.
Well, congratulations, sir.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, it's quite something.
You know, it's a rush.
Yeah.
If you're watching on YouTube, consider switching to Rumble.
That's where we are streaming as well, and that's where the chat is.
We are going to try to not do so much at the top of the hour from now on and get into the heart of the show.
But I will say it is summer, which is much more salient to me than how many days Brett has been a dude.
And today we are going to be talking about... I mean, I'm very, very pleased with your dudeness and all, and that you've never imagined that you could have changed it, but you know, I've kind of gotten used to it.
It doesn't change as rapidly as the seasons, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, really not at all.
OK, so today we're going to talk a little bit about this conversation that you had, Brett, with RFK Jr.
back in November 2021, and which we released in Dark Horse this week.
Talk a little bit about that.
We're going to talk about adjuvants and allergies, and we're going to talk about affirmative action, and any other words beginning in A that we might come up with.
But that's the plan for today.
Alabaster.
We're not talking about alabaster.
I don't even know what it is.
Oh my god.
It's going to be like that.
Okay, so we're going to return after today's episode with a Rumble-exclusive Q&A, as we are going to be doing whenever we do Q&As.
It's going to be on Rumble only, so please consider going to Rumble now if you're on YouTube, joining there.
And of course, if you're just listening, continue just listening.
We've got new merch.
Zach is going to show it.
It was prompted by something that you said a couple of live streams ago, and it is at darkhorsestore.org.
PSYOP until proven otherwise.
There's the artwork, and it's on shirts.
It's on a backpack, I think.
It's on stickers.
And it's on this handsome gentleman on the shirt.
That's a little bit meta.
Yes, I believe I was... This artwork is on all of the things.
All right.
I'm going to I'm going to recenter myself.
Are you?
I am.
And how many days have you been a dude?
13,279, if my calculations are correct.
And is that inclusive or exclusive?
Wow.
It has a margin of error of five days.
Oh, I attempted to get the leap years correctly calculated, but I did not do a careful job.
So it's possible that I'm off by a couple days here or there, and as you point out, we don't know whether we're counting today.
And I mean, you know, I think in some sense we shouldn't count today because we don't know that I'm going to be a dude for the full day until it's over.
Yes, we do.
Well, actually not.
I was thinking of You know, death, which can come at any time for you.
I'm not expecting it, but if it did, that would mean... I hope it is many, many decades in the future, but at that point you will be a dead dude.
Interesting point.
This brings up my point about the mind-brain distinction, which we will save for another day.
I mean, like, this is nothing that we're going to be talking about today.
We won't go into sex and gender at all, but dude... Yes.
...is a description of sex.
Not just that, at least the way I've calculated it.
Dude is a description of sex, thus having nothing to do with mind.
It's, it's... Well, no, no.
So the way I calculated it, dude is something that happens On your 18th birthday.
Wait, what?
The definition of dude, which- So I didn't- I didn't think about the number you produced at all.
That was starting at 18?
I was sort of expecting you to calculate- yeah, of course.
Um, and a dude- What was your number?
13,279.
Um, but dude, for the purposes of my calculation, was defined as adult human male, be or otherwise.
Wait, what?
Adult human male.
Be it or otherwise.
What does that mean?
Male or female.
Either one.
Because that's how we use it in our house.
Because we grew up in California and we know how to properly use this term.
How many days do you think you've been a dude?
13,279.
I'm going to be embarrassed if I'm way off.
Yeah, I mean, not all of them were good.
Most of them were.
But, you know, it varies.
That's the thing about life as a dude.
Yeah, that's about right.
You're in the neighborhood, at least.
I'm in the neighborhood.
Thank goodness.
So, dude is man, which is, again, reflective of adult human male.
Male is about your sex, not your gender.
Yeah, but we use the term interchangeably in our household.
It's not a sex-based term.
But then you haven't been a dude since you were 18, then.
You were a dude before that.
I don't think so.
I think it's kind of like you would refer to a child as sir, but you don't really mean it.
We've got a 17-year-old son.
Yes.
You've called him Dude a lot.
Oh, totally.
But it's, you know, first of all, I know he's headed this direction.
And second of all, it's sort of, it's an honorific.
Here I was trying to clear the decks, get rid of all of the other stuff at the top of the hour, but no.
No, here we are.
I'm testing the audience here to see if they can handle different stuff.
Well, consider them tested.
Yeah.
Okay, so we have sponsors.
For whom we are, for whom?
For which?
For that!
We are very grateful.
All of whom have products or services that we actually and truly vouch for.
We always start these live streams with three right at the top of the hour.
Here we go!
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Dentifris is a word that I learned upon looking into Nobs.
Actually, I learned it from you.
You learned it from me, didn't you?
I mean, I'd heard it before, but I figured it was just a fancy word for toothpaste.
But no, dentifris is anything you use to clean your teeth.
It could be toothpaste, but also powders or, in fact, Nobs.
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Excellent.
I love ads with references.
I like putting primary scientific literature into our ads.
It makes me happy.
I once wrote a poem with a reference, but that's a story for a different day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I remember this, I think.
Yeah.
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Again, that's Biome, American Hartford Gold, and Seed.
For whom we are grateful, all of them.
And also grateful to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Absolutely.
For the conversation that you had with him back in November 2021, and for many other things besides.
Indeed.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit about the conversation that I had with Bobby Kennedy Jr.
in November, and in particular, why it was that we didn't release it until now.
Now, I will say, I was never planning to keep this secret.
In fact, I made a little video that explained some of my reasoning that I placed on my Twitter subscriber feed, so subscribers could see it.
And Twitter behaved very oddly with respect to this post.
Subscribers saw it, but it was invisible to people who did not subscribe, which is not the way Twitter is supposed to function.
I have no idea what that was about.
But it's still up.
It's still up.
People, if you want to subscribe, you can see it.
I may at some point show it to the public just so you can see I wasn't pretending or anything like that.
But what interested me was that there was a lot of discussion about nefarious motives that would have caused us to release this now.
Why now?
Why not in November 2021?
Nefarious?
Okay.
Well, I don't know.
People alleged that we had been paid by somebody, that we had coordinated with the Kennedy campaign.
None of this is true.
So anyway, I thought I would just clear up the mystery.
So, right, not true, but also if we had, which we didn't coordinate with the Kennedy campaign, how would that be nefarious?
Well, you can imagine... One can apparently imagine that there would be... Well, I mean, people can hurl crap at you all you want.
They can, and I mean, look, I think this is a useful lesson, because in this particular case, you, the audience, can't really know any more than you can know anywhere else.
But you and I are in a perfect position to know for certain exactly why we did what we did, and that none of the things that are being hypothesized are true.
But the idea that people are so primed to see nefarious motives that anything that is in any way out of the ordinary or seems to help somebody that they don't like is instantly triggering of hypotheses.
So, first of all, let's clear up what happened.
Bobby Kennedy came to our house.
You can see in this podcast, it is our old studio in the sauna that we used to have in Portland.
And we had what I thought was a fantastic conversation.
The problem is, if I can just recap the history here for people who maybe haven't followed us for very long, You and I, once upon a time, were professors of biology and our careers as professors at a state school, which you would think is a very safe career, came to a spectacular end when the college went into full meltdown
Uh, at least in part surrounding our opposition to, um, policy proposals that were being advanced at the college that it was our obligation to object to because they weren't good policy proposals.
So, that was the first time our income evaporated.
The second time that happened, when after COVID began and you and I started unpacking the biological details of COVID, we inevitably ran up against the preposterous features of the narrative that we were all being given about repurposed drugs, about the origin of the virus, about vaccine safety and effectiveness.
And, um, as... It was well more than a year after COVID began, well more than a year after we'd been doing these live streams, um, that, you know, our income was once again evaporated.
Evaporated?
By YouTube demonetizing us.
Yeah, and I've forgotten exactly where it happened, but either after the Corey podcast or the Malone Kirsch podcast, um, YouTube demonetized our channel and it has never been remonetized.
So the Okay, so having had Bobby Kennedy Jr.
through YouTube and YouTube killed it within an hour.
They demonetized both of our channels and they never fixed that, even though they were obviously wrong about these issues.
Okay, so having had Bobby Kennedy Jr. to our house and had a very good discussion in the heat of the pandemic at the point when a tremendous amount of firepower was directed at us over our dissident stance on various issues of so having had Bobby Kennedy Jr. to our house and had a very good discussion in the heat of the pandemic at the point when a tremendous I and we thought it was too risky to release that podcast, and so we didn't.
Now, It wasn't strictly about YouTube.
There was lots of stuff pointed at us across many domains.
We don't know the nature of it.
All we can tell is that a huge amount of money was spent to slander us and others and to prevent audience from ever finding us.
So in the midst of that environment, we made a decision that it just wasn't safe to release this podcast.
The we is you and Bobby?
Is that the we you're talking about?
Collectively, we in... it was not Bobby.
Bobby would have been okay with releasing it because he had in large measure already paid the price of his stances in public.
So he was ready to go.
But we, those of us involved at Dark Horse, which is a tiny number, just decided not to release it.
The Other question is why now?
Right?
And the answer to why now is, to be honest, I had forgotten.
It wasn't that I didn't know that we had recorded the podcast, but as I was watching other discussions with Bobby Kennedy, it occurred to me, hey, actually, we have a discussion with Bobby Kennedy, and it covered lots of stuff in a way that I thought was Frankly, not done elsewhere, and so it just seemed like time to release it.
Was it safe?
I don't know.
But it seemed like a different environment than it was in November of 2021.
So anyway, that's why.
Nobody paid us.
No nefarious motives.
Yes, it was somebody accused us or demanded that we prove that it had actually been recorded in November 2021.
You can obviously tell that changes in facial hair, different studio.
We don't own that building anymore.
All of those things.
So that's the long and short of it.
I did want to continue, though, and talk a little bit about at least one of the things in this podcast, which I strongly advise people to take a look at.
It's really good, and it also provides some interesting insight into where our mindset and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's mindset was in November 2021.
It's also before his corrective surgery for the wobble in his voice, which has changed his voice.
So anyway, this is an interesting look into a moment in the past, not so long ago, when things were different.
In the podcast, actually pretty early in the podcast, we discuss an issue that you and I have discussed on this podcast many times since.
We may have discussed it before then too, I don't remember.
But the issue is one of the particular technologies involved in the construction of modern vaccines.
And the one that... Bobby lays out a very good description of why the vaccine landscape looks the way it does at a technological level.
And what he says is that traditional vaccines involve attenuated versions of a live virus.
That that has a positive side.
The positive side is it produces a very robust immune response.
The negative side is because you are using a live version of a pathogen, even though it's been attenuated, you can't control how it evolves once you have injected.
And in fact, there is substantial evidence that a large fraction of the cases, for example, of polio in the world today are actually downstream of vaccine-induced polio.
So that's a terrible story, right?
You don't want to inject something that gets away from you by evolutionary selection.
The alternative has been to use inert, either dead viruses or pieces of dead viruses.
And the problem with that, it solves the evolutionary problem, But it creates a difference.
It solves that particular evolutionary problem.
Yes, it solves the problem of the pathogen getting away from you because you're not injecting a pathogen, you're injecting something that can't evolve because it doesn't reproduce.
The problem with the fragments or dead viruses is that because you are not actually The immune system does not react in a significant way.
It treats it as a mundane garbage collection problem rather than an infectious agent.
And so it does not develop a robust immunity.
It creates a very weak vaccine.
And so what was discovered was that irritating the immune system with an adjuvant Causes the immune system to wake up and react and so you can get a robust immune response to the antigens in the vaccine without running the risk of selection taking your pathogen and making it... Increased safety in the domain of reduced pathogenicity of the antigen that is being injected.
Right.
Now, I must say, I did not have a deep relationship with the idea of adjuvants prior to COVID and all of the investigation surrounding vaccines that resulted.
In the aftermath of that, I feel that the story of vaccines as we find them today in the market, is a very revealing story.
It is a story that illuminates many of the problems that we have in academic science.
It illuminates the problems that we have in governmental policy.
And let's just put it this way.
In the podcast, I actually say that I love vaccines and that my skepticism of the COVID vaccines has me alarmed because this is a technology that I have actually lectured on as a huge benefit to society.
Not the COVID vaccines, not mRNA vaccines, but traditional vaccines.
Traditional vaccines.
I wouldn't say that today.
I would say it very differently, as I'm sure you would.
I would say the underlying fundamental technology at the heart of a vaccine, alerting the immune system to a pathogen that it has yet to encounter so that it is well prepared when it does encounter it, that is a beautiful, elegant mechanism.
Priming the immune system.
Priming the immune system with information could hardly be more elegant.
However, The hazards involved in either creating a pathogen that can evolve or needing to use adjuvants to trigger a robust response, or in the case of COVID, some third technology where we hijack your cells and turn them into vaccine factories, none of these things...
Yeah, none of these things are... Or no, not vaccine factories, partial virus factories.
Yeah, we basically use a pseudovirus to hijack cells, which then results in those cells being targeted.
None of these things are safe in principle, right?
They all carry significant dangers.
And in fact, I learned from a more recent discussion By RFK Jr., that the origin of pharmaceutical legal immunity surrounding vaccines was based on the argument that the production of vaccines, that vaccines were inherently unsafe.
And therefore, if the government wanted pharmaceutical companies to produce them, that it needed to immunize them from legal liability, right?
And much architecture is downstream of that, but nonetheless these are some of the most robust immunity we have.
Yeah, no breakthroughs, but no breakthrough cases.
Oh, it's almost too good.
Yeah.
But so anyway, what I wanted to say is, I think many of us are now rethinking what we understood about vaccines.
You and I wrote into our book that these were one of the three great medical triumphs of human history.
And let me just say, I talked a bit about, last week on Dark Horse, about the failure of any of the vaccines in the current childhood vaccination schedule as produced and enforced.
I don't know about Enforced.
As produced and recommended by the CDC, none of them have been tested against placebo.
And I ran through a couple of examples.
And then I wrote about that somewhere also in my sub stack this week.
That's specifically the issue.
And in that, I walked through some of my personal history, and it's also yours, with regard to our approach to vaccines.
How enthusiastic we have been, and precisely, as you just said, how How enthusiastic I remain, and I hear you remain, about the core idea, the central idea, while recognizing that inherently, put aside the mRNA, the new third version for the moment, But either of these, you know, the traditional, the... Attenuated.
Yeah, attenuated vaccines have the risk of, you know, the virus or the pathogen evolving in you into, you know, and making you sick with the disease itself.
or the dead or partial virus or other pathogen requiring adjuvants in order to trigger your immune system enough.
There are risks in both cases.
Neither of them are inherently safe.
But I continue to believe that at least in that first category, that original category of vaccine, that there are vaccines that have done far more good than harm.
I guess, you know, one doesn't know how to engage in the proper level of skepticism when you discover that you've been hoodwinked.
Over and over and over again.
So what I would say is, here's what isn't safe and effective.
For-profit pharma being in charge of the production of these things and then the testing of them.
That's clearly not safe.
In fact, it's lethal.
As for whether or not vaccines can have a risk-reward ratio that makes them favorable, I still believe that they can, but what I am certain of is That we need to set a high bar for the establishment that a vaccine is worth the risks that come with it, right?
We need a robust academy that can test that question and we need governmental regulators that Prevent the release of you know a vaccine that seems to have a marginal benefit isn't worth it because the risks that come along with it that may Be hard to detect or aren't worth it.
So I would like to see this technology leveraged well For humanity on the basis of net benefit that is well established in careful tests that are not corrupted.
Yes all of that said the reinvestigation Of vaccines, how they are produced, and my own history with them has me in the following predicament.
I, a professor who have literally lectured on this technology and told my students how marvelous it is, believe that I was, in some sense, misled in a way that I often talk about with respect to other topics, right?
Where you come to believe the diagram in the textbook, right?
Diagram in the textbook that describes how vaccines are produced and work It's not to talk about adjuvants typically, right?
It talks about the underlying technology, which is elegant.
If you had told me that there were ingredients in the vaccines whose purpose was to annoy the immune system, to agitate it, I would have said, well, How much downside is there to doing that?
Right?
Now, in the podcast that we just released, the November 2021 podcast from The Vault, Bobby Kennedy reveals that he, his spasmodic dystonia, the...
I think it's dystonia.
The wobble in his voice, he did not know.
He had no reason to think that it was the result of a vaccine injury until, as a lawyer who was working on the question, he ended up reading, I think, the insert of a flu vaccine, which specifically named the condition he had as a known side effect.
So that was very late.
This did not trigger his interest in it.
But nonetheless, he came to think that Quite possibly he was suffering from a vaccine injury himself.
Now, I also wonder if several pathologies that I have might be the result of this.
In particular, allergies, which have had a pretty significant impact on my life.
The three That our most important are long-time listeners will know I have a severe wheat allergy triggered by even the tiniest contact with wheat.
A little wheat in a soy sauce that somebody includes and doesn't think about wheat because it says on the bottle it's made of soy.
That's enough to trigger me, right?
Why do I have a wheat allergy?
My ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years.
I also have a pretty debilitating allergy to grass pollen.
On days when the grass is flowering, I, you know, I just become a drippy mess.
Become so sad.
Yeah, not obvious why that would be.
Sorry, just like tears flowing, it looks like sadness.
It's not good.
And then there is the fact, which I've talked about years ago on the podcast, That I have an allergy to marijuana.
Right?
It's an allergy that until my current thinking on vaccines, I credited to overuse of marijuana.
But I now wonder if what's going on in all of these cases is that you are injected with a vaccine that is based on antigens rather than living pathogens.
It comes with an adjuvant.
That adjuvant wakes up your immune system and it starts reacting to molecules that it finds present in your system.
Whether that's things that are leaking out of your gut and are exposed to your immune system, in the case of wheat.
Whether it's pollen that has entered your lungs because you're breathing it in.
If you happen to have gotten vaccinated during grass flowering season.
Right.
Or if, you know, you are using marijuana and you're smoking it.
So just to put a little interesting color on this, here's the thing about my marijuana allergy.
And A, my marijuana allergy, in the end, I hesitate to say this because I can't believe that it would actually be net positive.
I don't think it is net positive, but it certainly did make it easy to quit.
So, you know, here's the question.
If If I smoke pot, I react, I get a ton of mucus in my lungs.
If I eat, I'm too old to have done edibles, I guess, or I quit before edibles were a thing, but pot brownies were a thing.
If I eat a pot brownie, my lungs fill with mucus, which is interesting immunologically, right?
What it means is that the locus of my allergy is in my lungs, and even if the antigen comes in from the backside through the blood supply, It still triggers that mucosal immunity in my lungs.
So the question is, did I get a shot, probably a flu shot, in college?
Or one of these shots you needed to travel.
To travel, that's also possible.
Yellow fever, rabies or something?
Yeah, I'd have to go back and look.
The most likely is flu shot, because I got a lot of them, which I now worry was not such a good idea.
They're not very effective shots, and the idea of revaccinating in the same antigenic neighborhood again and again is suspect to me now.
But... Yeah, I'm not sure that they were so common then.
What?
Flu shots.
I got them.
In the early 90s?
In any case, the overarching point here is we have an epidemic of allergies.
Right?
Now, I've heard some rather compelling explanations.
We talk about, you know, the hygiene hypothesis.
We talk about the absence of parasitic worms that we have.
The IgE system, that's the Ig immunoglobulin E, is particularly associated with allergies.
That system is not busy because we don't have worms and it can be caused to react to things that are not actually pathogens.
But the question is, Given the number of allergies, is one of the important factors the environmental context following an injection with an adjuvanted vaccine?
Is that why I have an allergy to wheat?
Is that why I have an allergy to grass?
Is that why I have an allergy to marijuana?
And, oh go ahead, No, I mean the prediction, of course, is that you would not see an uptick in allergies following vaccination with live attenuated vaccines.
If they also do not have adjuvants, then why would they need them?
Yep.
So that vaccines without adjuvants are at least far, far less likely to produce other kinds of immune responses developing.
Although, you know, it's possible there would be some because you are triggering the immune system to respond to some degree.
But The adjuvants produce a sort of a generalized, like, oh my god, what's going on response in the immune system that the prediction is, will then have broader, more far-reaching effects with regard specifically to things like allergies, asthma, potentially other health effects as well.
Absolutely.
So that raises a question about how we ought to be testing these things, and against what.
In other words, you know, the net effect is really what we care about, right?
You do care about your immunity to the pathogens in question, but the question is, how much cost are you willing to pay for that immunity?
For a one-year immunity to a flu that you will get, it will suck and you will get better, Right?
Would you pay with a lifetime of allergies, of seasonal allergies?
You know, could you reduce the effect of the seasonal allergies by immunizing at a moment that was low allergen?
Could you, you know, have an air filter that filtered a large fraction of the air that you breathed in the two weeks following a vaccination?
There are lots of things that we could potentially do.
Well, but also dietary concerns, right?
So to your point about, is it possible that your gluten allergy and that many other people's rise in dietary allergies is related to an effectively inflamed immune system following vaccination?
That doesn't inherently mean that those vaccines with their adjuvants are something that should never be given to anyone again.
That's a separate question.
But at the very least, it is quite possible that a much reduced diet in the wake of, and I don't know if that means two days, two weeks, a hypoallergenic diet in the two days, two weeks, I don't know what the right time span would be, following vaccination,
Might then mean that you would develop fewer food allergies down the road once you resumed eating your normal diet after your immune system had calmed the fuck down, right?
I would also, you know, again, there are many things.
Is there a protocol, like you're describing, that would be helpful?
There's also the question of what is the threshold of benefit with respect to the pathogen in question that needs to be reached to deal with an amorphous concern about various environmental sensitivities that you might develop.
But, I would point out, those are not just quality of life concerns, which are not minor, right?
The pathology that I suffered before discovering that I had a wheat allergy and the pathology that I still suffer when I end up eating wheat without knowing that it's there, that is a significant degradation in quality of life.
Absolutely.
This is also a question of life and death, right?
Lots of people, we know people who have died from asthma, right?
Which is an allergic response in most people.
So, you know, we're talking about a serious degradation in quality of life and the loss of many lives to an undescribed pathology that may well be, and I would point out, once you know That the technology involved in vaccines involves inflaming the immune system to get a more robust response.
It is an absolutely obvious hypothesis that some fraction of the overactivity of the immune system is the result of that very same technology.
Absolutely.
And this is a different point, but related and critical, which is that much as when adults decide to travel someplace where, for instance, yellow fever is endemic, and either have a choice to make, or the choice is actually you can't go there if you don't get this vaccine, it is a different kind of choice to make, they, we,
end up carefully assessing all the parts, which is how bad is the disease?
What are my chances of exposure to it?
What are the chances of if I'm exposed, I will get it?
If I am exposed and I get it, is there treatment available?
Will I have access to the treatment?
What's the CFR?
How bad is the disease and what are my chances of getting a bad case of it?
We do that as adults when we make decisions about, for instance, the vaccinations that we get when we travel, especially to tropical regions, as you and I have spent a lot of our time, especially in our 20s, doing.
But as I was talking about last week, the proliferation of vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule from a handful when we were children getting vaccinated to an incredible number
Now, has never, so far as I remember from when our own children were young, nor have I ever, you know, heard in mainstream circles, been accompanied by a discussion of, oh, okay, the CDC is recommending a new vaccine for disease X. Let us tell you about disease X. Let us tell you.
How it manifests, how common it is, whether or not there's treatment aside from the vaccine, you know, whether or not your child is actually at risk of being exposed to it.
And all of those are actually highly relevant to a question of whether or not this is the right thing to do for the health of a person.
It's not just, this disease is something that we have a vaccine for, therefore you get it.
If you live in Los Angeles, and you are never leaving Los Angeles, no one is suggesting to you that you get a yellow fever vaccine.
No one, okay?
If you live in Los Angeles and you are 30, no one is suggesting to you that you go get a new polio vaccine or smallpox vaccine, right?
We understand this and yet we are labeled, we are vilified, we are labeled as anti-vaxxers, we are vilified for saying It's not sufficient that you, the company with a financial interest in making sure that as many people as possible take this thing, assure me that your product is good against a disease that I don't know anything about.
Now, maybe it's your responsibility to educate me and then I'm going to go try to find a second opinion as to what that disease is and what my actual risk factors are, but I'd also like to know.
Why we aren't simultaneously focused as much or more on treatment for the very, very rare things.
You know, we hear a lot about, you know, prevention is better than treatment.
And in the abstract, I think that's true.
But if we're talking about, especially if we're talking about children, at very low risk from things that don't actually circulate in children.
Okay, what if, what if somehow your child, um, did come down with Hepatitis B?
What is there to be done about it?
Like, how did, how did that child come down with Hepatitis B in the first place?
But like, what, what would the treatment be?
And might, for those conditions that a child is very, very unlikely to get exposed to, Wouldn't knowing that there is treatment out there be at least an approach that we could talk about as an alternative to the rapid proliferation of non-placebo tested vaccines on the childhood vaccination schedule?
The problem, what you have said, is perfectly reasonable.
It's effectively unassailable because all you're asking for is the obvious evidence that the thing is worthwhile in the context of the thing to which it's targeted, right?
The problem here, I'm increasingly aware, is that for some reason, without any discussion that I am aware of, Vaccines have become sacred.
Yep.
Right?
These are things, and you know who did this?
And all you have to do to make it into a vaccine, apparently, is to say, that's a vaccine.
That's a vaccine.
It is blessed as a vaccine.
Yes.
Abracadabra, you're a vaccine.
And that's what happened with COVID.
That is what happened with the mRNA shots, which are not vaccines.
Right.
Right?
Was that they were blessed as vaccines, and having been blessed, it was impossible to raise the obvious questions, which is what got you and me in so much trouble, right?
What you and I, I will remind people of the history.
What we said when these things were announced, at the point that we still thought these might be very useful, they might be the way that we actually got back to normal life after COVID, Right.
We figured we would we would delay as long as we would delay because that was reasonable.
We would delay in the same way that we delayed our children's vaccinations when they were kids.
Vaccinations we knew they would get, but we delayed them so that their development would be as complete as possible at the point that they got them.
But what you and I said that ran us afoul of the power structure that put us in the jeopardy that caused us not to release the RFK podcast back in November of 2021, what we said was These vaccines may very well be effective, but when they tell us that they are safe, they cannot possibly know that, right?
Now that is the mildest criticism you could possibly level, right?
We didn't say that they were harmful.
We said They don't know that they're safe because they haven't been around long enough for them to know long-term what happens if you take one, and that means they are unsafe.
Right?
It doesn't mean they're harmful, but it means in the same way that driving drunk may do no harm, but it isn't safe.
These vaccines are not safe.
And the point is, for that minimal, obvious, nearly tautological criticism, you and I were cast out as heretics.
Right?
So here's my point.
We have discovered that there is something sacred inside of our medical establishment, our scientific establishment, right?
Not even.
It's culture-wide.
Well, that's true, but the point is it is emanating from the high church of science and the New York Times, right?
And the point is we know who the bad people are.
They are the ones who will criticize our sacred thing, right?
Now, how did that happen?
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
The benefit of the doubt is that public health erected for itself a right to lie.
And the reason that it erected a right to lie, if we give it the benefit of the doubt, is that in order to avoid a collective action problem where people get the benefit of other people's being vaccinated without taking their tiny share of the risk, that we needed to tell them things were safe that were not perfectly safe.
Right?
And that was A. Bullshit.
And B, a violation of Nuremberg in and of itself.
Yes.
Right?
Public health is not allowed to lie to us about treatments that we are taking because we have a right to informed consent that, as you and I pointed out several weeks ago, was sufficient.
That implied right to informed consent before it was ever codified was sufficient to cause the Nuremberg courts to hang seven doctors.
Right.
So public health never had a right to lie to us, but it did somehow insert into the culture the right to place vaccines outside the realm of criticism, to declare anyone who violates that boundary, whether they are scientifically qualified or not, to declare them heretics and to punish them publicly, right?
To cast them out.
And that is A remarkable story, especially in light of the fact that a huge fraction of the people who are doing the demonizing, doing the work of this vaccine church, believe themselves to be Faithless and purely scientific.
Right.
Right.
And this is not how science works.
And we can now see, you know, I am proud to say that you and I played an important role in breaking the public health narrative, which was never true.
And now a large number of people are awake To this completely unscientific protection that these technologies enjoy, frankly, in the market.
Right?
This is a money changers moment.
This is a moment when the money changers, you know, somebody's coming in to flip card tables in the temple because the money changers have taken over what is supposed to be beyond that corruption.
Yeah.
All true, all true.
And, you know, I increasingly keep coming back to and thinking about a number of issues, including affirmative action, which is where we're going to spend some time now soon.
That the people who think of themselves as on the left are more likely to be thinking at sort of the population level, the collective good level, and the people who think of themselves on the right are more likely to be thinking about individual level rights and freedoms.
And I think that's true to some extent, and I can see actually shades of that in having read several of the opinions from this Supreme Court decision that got handed down a couple days ago.
Uh, but it's also fascinating because, and I've said this before on Dark Horse, um, long time ago when I was teaching, uh, with a, uh, an entomologist at Evergreen, uh, we were teaching a, we're going to be teaching a first-year program together that is freshmen, you know, brand new, fall quarter, you know, a lot of kids straight out of, straight out of high school, although we had a lot of, a lot of kids, a lot of students at Evergreen that weren't straight out of high school, but
You know, Russian college students, and we were teaching statistics as part of the program, and one of the things that I asked him, my excellent colleague, you know, what is it that you really, really want these students to walk away with after 10 weeks with us?
He said, I want them to understand how to think about populations.
And that was part of why we did statistics as part of a freshman program that was a lot of fieldwork, and most freshmen did not want statistics as part of that.
And that has stuck with me.
That line has stuck with me.
And it then became clear because I then started teaching statistics associated with the animal behavior program and mostly animal behavior.
And it was remarkable.
I'm not talking about statistical thinking or understanding whatever software it was that we were using that year.
Or how to make compelling graphics that accurately relate to what it is that you have found with the numbers.
But just like thinking at the level of populations versus individuals is actually very very challenging for people.
And yet, The people who think of themselves on the left, mostly, imagine that they are doing things that are good for the population.
And they're really not.
And I think this may come down to, I haven't quite figured out where the disconnect is, but it feels like, A, they've often got groups to find that aren't real groups.
And B, they don't understand enough about game theory to understand that whatever solution they put in place isn't simply going to be gamed by the people who will game any system.
And they'll make off like bandits and leave everyone else, you know, deserving and not out of luck.
But there's something very strange about a system in which people are simultaneously basically arguing for population-level solutions who can't actually understand what it means to be in a population or to be acting as a member of a population.
I don't know how strange it is.
It goes back to an argument that we've deployed here before.
We talked about, awkwardly enough, Team Loser and the never-ending appetite for communism.
And the argument That I would put forward is this.
Let's be fair.
Civilization does not work very well at the moment.
It leaves a large number of people bereft of useful skills.
It injures, you know, leaves lead in your water and leaves people dumber than they would otherwise be.
All sorts of things.
It betrays people.
But it leaves a lot of people in a position where, faced with the rigors of the market, they don't have useful skills to deploy.
So they, you know, at best they can sort of be a cog in this machine, and it's not a very appealing way to live.
And don't we need to help and protect those people?
Of course.
We need to fix civilization so it stops hurting people.
That's one of the prime directives of Team Blue, largely, right?
It's supposed to be.
But what has happened is Team Blue has become a corrupt entity that parasitizes that instinct and it attracts now a coalition of people who aren't really... These aren't people who have been burned and are honestly looking for a, you know, a decent way to live.
These are people who, upon recognizing that They don't have skills to deploy in the market, are interested in tearing stuff down, stealing from other people, right?
It's become a coalition.
The overarching point is that this is perpetually a source of new inventions of communism.
The reason that communism, every time it's tried, it doesn't work, the excuse is then deployed, it's never really been tried, and it will be tried again and it won't work.
Why are we seeing Marxist views suddenly showing up in Team Blue?
When we know very well that they don't work.
The answer is, if you divide the world into people who have an above-average capacity to make their way in the world as it's found, and people who have a below-average capacity to make their way in the world as it's found, you have a ready-made coalition amongst people who will be on the losing end To use the system to extract resources from others.
So it's like it's... But there's no suddenly.
There's no suddenly there's group level solutions from the left.
That's always been part of the...
But my point is there are honorable group-level instincts that did live over on the left.
What we are seeing now is not honorable.
It is cynical from the point of view of the elites, and it is petty and destructive and not interested in our collective well-being elsewhere.
It's interested in using that excuse for theft.
And, you know, an honorable Progressive movement would be a very valuable thing, but it essentially doesn't exist, and this other thing is sucking up all the oxygen in the room that would result in it emerging.
Can we move forward?
Let's do it.
All right.
So I I could spend weeks, clearly, delving into weeks, months, years, a career, delving into the question of affirmative action and the legal precedents in the U.S.
and presumably elsewhere as well.
But I did spend a bit of time in the last couple days following the Supreme Court decision that was handed down on June 29th, two days ago, as we're speaking.
In two simultaneous cases.
This was Students for Fair Admissions Incorporated versus President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions versus University of North Carolina et al.
So the majority opinion was written by Justice Roberts and begins, in these cases we consider whether the admission systems used by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, two of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States, are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
There will be no spoilers here when I say that the majority opinion, which was 6-3, was that no, they're not.
And I will say that Justice Jackson recused herself from the Harvard part of the case because she herself had been on the board.
I can't remember exactly the title, but she had been involved enough in Harvard's Governance, that she did not feel that she could dispassionately be part of that case.
But there were, interestingly, six opinions written in this case.
There was the majority opinion by Roberts, which was joined by the other five The other five justices who voted with him, that was Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
And then this is just in the order of the 200 and something page document with everything.
It's got a summary at the top, then you've got the Roberts majority opinion, then you've got Thomas concurring in an opinion, Gorsuch concurring, Joined by Thomas, Kavanaugh concurring, and then Sotomayor dissenting, as joined by Kagan and Jackson, and then Jackson dissenting, even though she had recused herself from the Harvard part.
And so, you know, a lot of voices, and I will just, so that it's clear what I feel like I know and what I don't know, I read the summary, the so-called syllabus, and I read slash skimmed both the Roberts majority opinion, the concurring opinion by Thomas, and the dissenting opinion by Sotomayor.
Did not look at Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or Jackson.
So it's fascinating.
And I will – maybe I will leave because I've said this before, although I'm not sure – no, actually, I'm going to save for the end sort of where I think – where I've been and where I am now on affirmative action.
Not having had my position changed, although having had it been much more informed by doing this bit of reading.
Let's just go a little bit of history back, both on a couple of prime issues here.
Um, this, um, this history is borrowed from the Roberts, the majority opinion, um, by Roberts, again, which came down two days ago on June 29th.
The 14th Amendment, right?
In the wake of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment, uh, Congress proposes and ratifies it, which specifies that, quote, no state shall deny any person the equal protection of the laws.
Um, let me just have a little asterisk here.
In Sotomayor's dissent, in her dissenting opinion, she points out that simultaneous with the passing of the 14th Amendment, Congress enacted a number of race-conscious laws to fulfill the Amendment's promise of equality, leaving no doubt that the Equal Protection Clause permits consideration of race to achieve its goal.
So not the level of Bill of Rights, of, you know, of amendments, but that there were simultaneous things that happened at the same level at the same time as the 14th Amendment.
And, you know, she, of course, she and those who concur with her are using that to support the idea of race-based, of using race as one of the factors in applications at, in this case, Harvard and UNC.
Later, a few decades later, Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 comes out with Separate but Equal.
This is widely understood, I think universally understood now, to have been a shameful decision.
Yes, one of the worst in the courts.
One of the worst in the courts, as at least the two, at least Roberts and Thomas say this in their, you know, it's not that anyone is supporting Plessy v. Ferguson, right?
But that stood, the separate but equal stuff from Plessy v. Ferguson stood for over 50 years.
And then we have in 1954, Brown versus the Board of Education, which said the right to a public education must be made equal to all on equal terms.
And then, so that was 1954, Brown.
Brown v. Board of Education was 1954.
Sort of a slightly more niche part of this because that was all about segregation more generally.
in 1957, writing an opinion on a case, My notes are weird here.
Justice Frankfurter summarized what he saw as the four essential freedoms that constitute academic freedom.
This is interesting to me.
Quote, it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment, and creation.
It is an atmosphere in which there prevail, quote, the four essential freedoms of a university, to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.
That's a good list.
That's a very good list, and it gave me pause.
It made me stop, and I want to continue to spend more time on those four freedoms that Justice Frankfurter declared as the four essential freedoms of a university.
Again, once more, who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.
Some number of years later, in 1978, This is coming, I'm getting this history mostly from the summary of the 2023 decision that just got handed down.
In Bakke, I think is how it's pronounced, I'm maybe butchering that, Regents of the University of California versus Alan Bakke, decided in 1978, which was Bakke was a former Marine and I think an engineer who had applied to the UC Davis Medical School, two years running.
He was a white guy.
And he had not gotten in, and some applicants who were not white who came in with lower scores and lower GPAs, I believe, had gotten in.
And so this got all the way to the Supreme Court, and it turned out that UC Davis Medical School had an explicit quota, 16 out of every 100 applicants.
No, 16 out of every 100 seats were set aside for what was then called minority students, and that was found in University of California Regions v. Backe to violate the rights of white applicants.
Policy was struck down, and Backe was ordered admitted to UC Medical School.
That was a deeply fraught decision.
That was 1978.
There were six different opinions written by nine justices.
There are a lot of opinions written in this case this week as well, but not quite as many.
But Justice Powell's opinion back in that 1978 case Writing for himself alone became a touchstone for race-conscious admissions policies.
Powell did not find compelling three of the four claims of benefit from racially motivated admissions policies, but he did find one compelling.
He found one of the four reasons that the UC regents had put forward as compelling, which is that educational benefits flow from a racially diverse student body.
Once again, educational benefits flow from a racially diverse student body.
And furthermore, he wrote that such an interest is, quote, a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education.
And furthermore, as Justice Frankfurter had already said, such institutions can make their own judgments and selection of their student body.
So that is a classic case where A decision is made for population level.
It's not.
Yes.
It is that the population of students will be better if they are racially diverse.
That is to say that they bring in experience from different backgrounds.
Yes.
And actually, as Justice Thomas writes in his concurring opinion, Which I'll just say, I was blown away by his.
Of the three that I read in some depth, and I did not read any of them completely, but his arguments and also just the way that he wrote were by far the most finely tuned and clear with regard to making his points.
And he says, I, Justice Thomas, have been looking for the evidence that this is true for all of my career and I don't find it.
I feel at this like emotional level like there is educational benefit to having a racially diverse student body.
So I don't think I agree with him at like the emotional level, but he's saying I have been looking for what the purported educational benefits are and I don't find them.
Now I think What's doing a lot of heavy lifting there is the word educational.
And you know, education can mean a lot of different things.
But let me, can I proceed a little bit?
And interrupt at any point.
And so Powell's decision in Bakke versus the Regents of the University of California is tricky.
It's tough.
And lower courts have been trying to figure out if that establishes a binding precedent.
That was, again, 1978.
And then in 2003, We have, again apologies for pronunciation so I'm getting this wrong, Gritter versus Bollinger, who largely agreed with Powell's opinion that student body diversity is a compelling state interest, but identified a few risks of it, including that race might not be used only as a plus but also as a negative,
That is used to discriminate against certain races, which, of course, was certainly the sort of popular understanding of what was happening at Harvard with regard to East Asian students experiencing lower acceptance rates.
Once, you know, once Harvard's Harvard was using race as one of the components of of attributes for applicants and deciding who to accept.
And And in part, to offset these risks, Grutter, and there's disagreement about what this decision in 2003 actually did.
But it said, at some point, they have to end.
It has to end.
There has to be A standard that you can point to, by which you can say, at the point we get there, then it will end.
And they estimated in 2003 that 25 years from now, that would be 2028, we should really be there by then.
They didn't guarantee, they didn't promise, they presumably hoped it would be earlier, all of that.
There wasn't a, you know, a hard stop, but what they said was any policy, A, can't be used as a negative, and B, has to be finite in its temporal scope, basically.
Okay, so the first paragraph of this, I don't know why they call it a syllabus, but the summary of the document is, Harvard College and the University of North Carolina are two of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the United States.
Every year, tens of thousands of students apply to each school.
Many fewer are admitted.
Both Harvard and UNC employ a highly selective admissions process to make their decisions.
Admission to each school can depend on a student's grades, recommendation letters, or extracurricular involvement.
It can also depend on their race.
The question presented is whether the admission systems used by Harvard College and UNC are lawful under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Furthermore, let me find this in this document and then once I do, Zach, you can show my, this is Robert's majority opinion.
You can show my screen here.
He writes, any exception to the Constitution's demand for equal protection, again as found in the 14th amendment, yeah, must survive a daunting two-step examination known in our cases as strict scrutiny.
Under that standard, we ask, first, whether the racial classification is used to further compelling governmental interests.
Second, if so, we ask whether the government's use of race is, quote, narrowly tailored, meaning necessary to achieve that interest.
Outside the circumstances of these cases, our precedents have identified only two compelling interests that permit resort to race-based government action.
One is remediating specific identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.
The second is avoiding imminent and serious risks to human safety in prisons, such as a race riot.
So those are the exceptions that Roberts, with the majority behind him, specify as the The compelling interest found in prior cases.
Yes.
And that's the second one is fascinating.
Hadn't thought of it.
But I think what they're saying is if you have to separate people by race to keep a race riot from breaking out, you can do it.
Yeah, you can do it.
Yeah.
No, exactly.
So the court has struck down, has basically said no, Harvard and UNC cannot continue to use race as a factor in admissions, and that ruling was based on several factors, including that Harvard and UNC's admissions policies fail the two criteria of that 2003 Gritter decision that I just mentioned.
That is, Gritter specified that race may never be used as a negative, but the First Circuit found that Harvard's consideration of race and applications resulted in fewer Asian students being admitted.
And I will say, just as a side note, it inherently has to.
Like, if you are saying, even in the most bland version of affirmative action that possibly exists, you actually have two identical students and know that's never going to be the case, and there's only one thing that differentiates them, and that is race, and you therefore just use that as one little extra plus and help out the student who is from an historically underrepresented population, you have, of course, de facto
made a negative for the student who's from an historically not underrepresented population.
And this, again, is a point that Thomas also makes.
I had already written my little rant here, and Thomas also makes this point.
This is, you know, it inherently does.
So therefore, how could you have a policy in place where you say, well, it can be used for a positive, but it can't be used for a negative?
Like, well, maybe you're talking about intent, and so you can't intentionally say, we really don't want any of those people.
But in terms of math, by making a choice for one group, you inherently are making a choice against another group.
I will steel man their argument.
Go for it.
I don't believe it.
Great.
But the basic point is you can't say Asians are overrepresented.
It counts against you that you're Asian.
You can identify a population that's underrepresented and then it disadvantages the sum total of all of the other things which are not a population.
As opposed to what was, and I did not look into it, but what I understand to have been the case, at least I think at Harvard, where in the sort of the unquantifiable category of like personality, Asian applicants were getting downgraded.
Yeah.
Right.
So that is a little different, right?
It does feel a little bit different.
There's at least an argument.
Yeah.
And then the second point is these admissions policies also lack a logical endpoint.
Outright racial balancing has apparently already been established to be patently unconstitutional.
Yeah, I have a lot more, but let's talk a little bit as I sort of reframe.
Sure.
we have failed to meet what Grutter established in 2003 as one of the, one of the conditions under which effectively affirmative action would, would be acceptable.
Yeah, I have a lot, a lot more, but let's just, let's talk a little bit as I, as I sort of reframe.
Sure.
Yeah.
The, the time point is the most.
be like, this can't just go on indefinitely point. - But I don't even think that's, yes, the court says that, but I don't, the point is it was never intended to be a permanent remedy, right?
The whole idea was to correct a past wrong.
And the glaring fact of the present is, if we still need it, does that not demonstrate that it doesn't work?
Right?
We have had this policy, and it has not effectively erased the problem.
Therefore, not a good policy.
And so the problem here is the court is ruling that it's unconstitutional.
Implying it was always unconstitutional.
I guess maybe Robert's first overriding governmental interest to correct a past wrong is the issue, the one exemption here.
But the point is, if it hasn't... And to correct a past wrong, but also, you know, the idea that there is educational benefit in a racially diverse student body.
Right.
That is present.
There is precedent for that position at the level of the Supreme Court.
Yep.
But from my perspective, and I realize you're holding back where you land on all of this, so I don't want to steal your thunder, but the concern, those of us who believe There is a serious historical wrong that is not a simple matter to undo, right?
Yeah.
I think all reasonable people would have to agree with that.
That it is desirable to undo that, right?
Those of us who believe very strongly in merit, for example, believe that it is unfair to hobble somebody at the starting line, you know, or to put weights on them and then run a race, right?
The magic of a merit-based system is most fully realized if people are well equipped to compete in the merit-based system to the extent that they have been artificially hobbled by past discrimination there is something to correct but the glaring problem in the present is It didn't work.
It had massive unintended consequences.
This is a classic of progressivism resulting in the creation of a noble program that becomes grotesque in the instantiation.
And so therefore, The real question is, well, if this didn't work, the last thing we want to do is have it become a loophole in the 14th Amendment that then becomes an addiction.
If the point is... An addiction.
Yeah, it's good.
So what we are looking for is a policy that actually stands a chance of working and that does not cause so much carnage, both in terms of Disadvantaging people who did nothing wrong and had nothing to do with past racism, and the destruction of a merit-based system, which is frankly the goose that lays the golden eggs, right?
Yes, we should fix it so everybody has access to the merit-based system and the tools in which to compete, But if you want to destroy that system in order that it doesn't embarrass people who've been historically hobbled, then the point is we don't have anything.
This is the system that generates the productivity that, yes, is not fairly distributed.
But you do not want to destroy that system in an effort to correct one of its harms, which is that it's not fairly distributed.
Right?
And fairly distributed, I do not mean Evenly distributed.
Evenly distributed would be wildly unfair, right?
You want people to be rewarded in proportion to their contribution to the functioning of that system, right?
That's what you want.
That's not an even distribution, but it is a fair distribution, and we're looking for that.
We don't have it, but this policy never did it, and so the question is, was the court correct in overturning a policy?
Were they overturning it because it hasn't worked?
And if so, you know, is that justified on the basis of the time limit that was set by the prior decision?
Again, I don't, I don't read it as a time limit.
Yeah.
They do say in 25 years, we think that this should probably be over, but I don't, And there's a little back and forth in between the majority opinion and the dissent, but I do not read it as a time limit.
But what is clear and what the dissent kind of doesn't want to talk about is that there needs to be an end point, that there needs to be a way to end it.
There needs to be something that outsiders, that anyone can look at and say, what will success look like?
How will we know when we've arrived and therefore can stop this policy?
And that is what no one seems to have.
So let's just, I'm going to focus for a little bit on the dissent.
Sotomayor says, for instance, massively eliminating race classifications did not suffice when de facto segregation persisted.
Right.
I agree with this.
However, de facto segregation doesn't exist in higher ed now, right?
And maybe some will disagree.
We got chased out of a university where we were tenured, college we were tenured, because you were, you, because I was on sabbatical, because you were arguing against segregation.
Yep.
It's literally what happened.
It's right.
It's another one of these things where it had not occurred to me that.
That's exactly what you were doing.
Right.
And and, you know, and what we were talking about behind the scenes together.
The fact of segregation does not exist in higher ed now, except where the left is creating it again.
Put that aside, you know, or in the other domains of the so-called left now control, like in journalism, like it's it's it's not it's not there.
It's it's you know, there's been There's been a push to correct, and we would argue with tools that are the wrong tools to be using, but that has created different problems often in the opposite direction from what the original problems were.
So, also to the extent that there are still inequalities by race due to historical racism in this country, and there are, right?
Admissions to institutions of higher ed is not the place to solve the problem.
You know, you don't let people in to elite institutions who actually cannot do the work based on the standards that you have otherwise created.
Because by doing so, you will create in them a legitimate inferiority complex, because they really are actually inferior, and you will create in the non-minority students a sense that, oh, people like that, whatever that might mean, can't really do the work, and most egregious of all,
You will create in the people from historically underrepresented groups, who absolutely deserve to be there on their merits, a sense that they are constantly battling the reality that other people look at them and think, you just got here because of your color.
Right.
And we've had students talk to us about this, right?
Yeah, it's the tragedy for people who are perfectly prepared to succeed and are forever dogged by the impression that they got through based on an exemption.
And it's really, you know, it is not only is it tragic at the level of individuals who would survive perfectly well in a merit-based system, but it also, they are the antidote, right?
They are leading the way.
This is how it is done.
And to the extent that we hobble people who are succeeding in a merit-based system by creating the impression that something else happened, it is counterproductive to the exact thing that the policy is nominally built to solve.
Exactly.
So, you know, throw into this mix that race is a squidgy word, that, you know, race is built on something historical, evolutionary, but who calls who what member of what race now is, you know, largely up for individuals to decide.
And I believe, and I don't know if the work has been done and I would love to see if it has, and we've talked about zip codes before, but the zip code where you grew up is more predictive of your life outcome than is your race at this point.
And there's still a lot of overlap between zip codes that people don't tend to escape from and end up living fulfilling and rewarding lives and race in this country.
There is still a lot of overlap.
But socioeconomic status predicts, I believe, success more accurately than does race at this point in this country.
Right.
But the problem with that...
I agree that the zip codes are the way to see it, right?
And that is something that you can actually, like, that's confined, right?
Well, it's defined.
It is delineated.
But the point is, let's say that you could wave a magic wand and eliminate 100% of racism from the system, but change nothing else.
The point is, zip codes are still unfairly distributed by race.
That's the point.
Yep.
Is that it requires no racism whatsoever for a self-perpetuating pattern to continue.
Including, and especially, because we collect the revenue for schooling by locality.
Right.
And so, you know... That's self-perpetuating.
It is not surprising that Beverly Hills has good public schools and Watts has bad ones.
Right?
So...
That system you take away all the racism and people feel like oh, well, we took away racism but the point is you didn't take away the echo that continues to haunt new generations and That is something that demands a remedy but at the end of the day This remedy doesn't work and it creates all sorts of unintended consequences that are intolerable.
And, you know, unfortunately we're having a foolish debate in public about this, right?
You've got teams again.
Right?
And it's people who recognize that this is being used as an excuse, that it is destroying merit, that it is hobbling people who've done nothing wrong and had no participation in the racism that is being remedied.
Right?
And those people are just done.
They have no tolerance for this policy.
Then you have other people who, you know, on their best days are looking at the inequality that remains in the system, as you can see in that example about zip codes, And the point is, any remedy is a good remedy, and that's never true.
Right.
Right?
No, and this, again, is something that we keep on coming back to, and we've talked about with regard to COVID, with regard to so many things.
Like, let's recognize problem A, and someone swoops in and says, we have solution B.
And you say, ah, man, problem A is real and big, but your solution isn't the right one.
Aha, we are told.
Then you don't believe that problem A is really a problem.
Right.
No.
We know that COVID is bad, but we don't think that your treatments that you're calling vaccines are the right approach to dealing with it.
No?
We know that this country had a ton of racism in it and still has repercussions from it and still has active racism today to some degree.
But these solutions don't appear to be working.
And therefore don't seem like the right ones.
And this, you know, this, this is the point that you, that you made earlier, like, like, look, we tried it.
Yeah.
We tried it.
And this, so I will, I will say now, um, I guess I didn't ever really think that much about it, but I was absolutely in favor of affirmative action, 100%.
And people have asked both of us in the last few years, like, what have you changed your minds about really, you know, since Evergreen, since, you know, COATS, all of these things.
And this is one of the first things that occurred to me when I started thinking, like, yeah, What's wrong about affirmative action?
And the decision by the Supreme Court on June 29th of 2023 with regard to race, using race as an element in admissions at Harvard and UNC, in which they said you can't do that.
That was the right decision.
I feel certain that that was the right decision.
And I guess one more thing.
The dissent, Sotomayor's dissent, is Frankly, unfortunately, also whiny and self-indulgent, and I don't see that.
And again, I didn't read all of the opinions for the majority that concurred, nor did I read the other dissenting opinion by Jackson, but both Jackson and Kagan joined this one, so presumably, you know, signed off on it.
And this isn't particularly egregious, but Well, now I'll read it.
This is again from Sena Mayor's dissenting opinion.
At bottom, the six unelected members of today's majority upend the status quo based on their policy preferences about what race in America should be like, but is not, and their preferences for a veneer of colorblindness in a society where race has always mattered and continues to matter, in fact, and in law.
What is the word unelected doing there?
Yeah.
Everything about this is predicated on previous decisions by the court.
Also, Sotomayor presumably understands that she herself is unelected as well, as are the other two who dissented.
So we've got a Supreme Court, no members of which are elected.
We all understand that.
They are deciding issues of law and interpretations of the Constitution.
This just seems mean-spirited and Small.
Well, it's an allegation of legislating from the bench.
Interesting that it is coming from the bench.
I get that, right, but it's so hypocritical in this case.
Yeah, it is.
And writing that in, like, that is now, that's in the annals of, you know, American history now.
Like, that aspersion cast Yep, no, it's remarkable and it's absurd and tone deaf, but I did a little looking into the history of affirmative action, not at the legal level.
I was interested to discover that actually the term comes from John F. Kennedy.
Oh yeah.
And that it was explicitly about reaching a colorblind state for society.
And I think that this is actually in some ways the important litmus test.
What we have on the left, the people who are decrying this ruling, is a hyper-race conscious view of the country.
Right?
That that is a positive thing, that it is a required thing.
This is not the vision.
This is a hijacking of affirmative action, a failed policy, for a new policy which is hyper-race aware.
And that In and of itself is an invalidation, right?
That is not what the policy was designed for.
The policy was designed to temporarily be used to redress a past wrong so that it would be no longer necessary.
And to the extent that the policy did not make itself obsolete, that's really all you need to know as for whether or not it's a good policy.
I did want to say one other thing about the connection of this that you raised to our spectacular exit from Evergreen.
It is true that you were on sabbatical.
My students stood by me through that episode in which it was alleged that I was a racist.
Right.
Alleged by students who literally never met me.
There's a reason for that.
And it is because I, and when you and I were both teaching, you and I were teaching things that were highly relevant to questions like this.
We specifically did not avoid questions of race.
We talked about the fact that race is a racist instantiation of a correct biological phenomenon.
Lineage is real.
Race is a bastardization used to disadvantage people.
Right?
Traditionally it has been.
We talked about why evolutionarily that would be the case, and we talked significantly about what biology has to say about the remedy here.
And what I think folks on the right frequently get wrong is that they do not understand how much of this is Remediable if one actually looks at the deep causation.
In other words, the populations that have persistently not done well in our system are populations that were systematically disadvantaged that were effectively Had their culture scrambled in order to make them compliant, right?
And so understanding that, it's not a fun topic to think about, but understanding that history and why it has taken some groups and made it difficult for them to overcome past hobbling, It's crucial.
I don't see how we solve this without an understanding of that.
And, you know, doing what many on the right do, which is pretending that or mistakenly concluding that it is some sort of unfortunate but inherent characteristic, right?
That doesn't help.
And pretending that the only thing going on is that there are bad people stealing from good people and that transfer of wealth is the way to do this.
That doesn't work.
What we need to do is actually look the problem squarely in the eye and say, You know, populations that have faced a persistent obstacle.
What is special about the history there?
Because when you look, you find, right, it was a disruption.
And, you know, really the only model that I think will suffice here is one in which you understand that culture and genes are equally biological, right?
Because there was a lot of damage done culturally and intentionally so.
So I believe it's Thomas, in his concurring opinion, who points out that.
And this, you know, this will be this will be regarded by those who are decrying this decision as sort of standard conservatives talking points.
But but really, Thomas points out that the specific population of students who are have been Disincentivized from applying to Harvard because their rates of acceptance are going down are East Asian students, I believe.
And there's actually a lot of stuff around, too, like, what even does Asian mean?
So, you know, South Asian, East Asian, but I think it was East Asian.
I may have that wrong.
I just say Asian.
But Thomas, in his concurring opinion, says, isn't that a population that in this country, at least part of them, were literally put into camps in World War II?
And They are the ones being discriminated against now, not asking for help, but having come through that, which was heinous, which was deplorable American policy, right?
And some of the people who are downstream of exactly the people who were incarcerated by the American government on American soil, these were including, you know, American citizens, Japanese American citizens, Um, whose descendants are now having a hard time getting into elite institutions.
Because why?
Because too many of them tick too many of the boxes that make them look like really good academic bets.
That confuses the story of Caste injustice makes it difficult to pull yourself up.
It just does.
Right.
But again, I want to make this clear.
We have examples of populations that have faced real disadvantages that have succeeded in our system, and we have advantages of populations that persistently struggle.
The distinction, in my opinion, is based entirely in whether or not the culture of those groups survived intact, right?
Systematic disruption of the culture of Native Americans and African Americans is the distinction.
It's not endogenous capacity.
And That is not a fun point to recognize, but it is a point that has a tremendous amount of hope built into it, because once you realize that actually there was a systematic campaign to hobble, it took place at the cultural level, and the fact is, yeah, you can have come to the U.S., you can have been ghettoized into a Chinatown or a Little Japan or whatever it was, but you kept your culture, and that culture is the bootstraps, right?
So there's hope there in some ways, but there's also a kind of hopelessness, I think, because just as you've said this often, you can't create a myth.
You can't write a myth.
You can write a story that, if it's really compelling, may stand the test of time and become a myth.
In general, you also can't invent a religion, although people seem to be working on that.
But you also can't really create a culture overnight.
So having emerged from intact cultures that were scrambled intentionally in order to create enforced compliance, what then is to be done?
Well, I mean, this is the answer, is that culture, I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know and haven't written extensively about, but culture is the secret sauce of humans.
And the interesting thing about it, right, as a biological phenomenon that is typically handed down vertically, it is transmissible horizontally, and that's why it's special.
And the point is, the real answer involves democratizing the culture that we share as Americans, right?
Why do I think of George Washington as my forefather?
He's not my forefather, right?
But he is my forefather, because he's the forefather of my culture, and it is the extent to which the culture has been distributed in an unfair way, and that that persists into the present.
Now, it's a very difficult problem to solve.
Yeah, I feel like there's two big barriers to this.
One of them is most modern American culture isn't fantastic.
That's not what I'm talking about.
And the other big barrier is, of course, that it's not actually the government or the press secretary that raises the children, right?
Or the teachers, right?
That's not their job and that's not their right.
It's the families.
So, you know, the cultural stuff exists at the family level.
You know, families bring in the culture and teach it to their children.
But absent families, you know, we may all be swimming in some kind of a general, if you're in America, like cultural American soup, but the way that you end up with the values and the historicity and the, you know, the habits of both mind and body are going to happen kind of at the individual level, largely at home.
Largely at home, except you're dealing with a... I mean, look, this is how you get to Game B, right?
Because once you realize that this is not a problem that can be remedied by minor tweaks to what we've got and we don't have to worry about anymore, you realize you're talking about a total restructuring.
But at the moment...
You're dealing with corporations that study the minds of young people to figure out how to trick them into spending money on things that harm their health and damage their minds, right?
You can't have a society in which you get rich by externalizing harm onto other people, right?
So this is one of a dozen different places that we could point to, well, yes, the family is where you get your values, But how difficult is it to pass on values when somebody just outside your door or coming in through your kid's iPad or whatever is trying to induce them to see the world upside down so that they will spend money in some way?
So we have a predatory society.
This is true, but you also need that family has to be intact.
Of course, of course.
But again, even that, even that.
Why is it that black families are more likely to be single parent families?
Right?
The answer to that question, it turns out, is tied up in a skewed sex ratio that is the result of a massive level of incarceration of black males.
What that does is it hobbles black females in negotiations between the sexes.
That is to say, if black females do not have Black males in large numbers than those who exist outside of the system of incarceration are in extra high demand.
It's very hard to get them to settle down.
So that is not a feature inherent to a population.
That is a result of circumstances.
Now, I'm not Excusing the disproportionate level of criminality, on the other hand, that is downstream.
Circumstances are perpetuating themselves because the young men are growing up in environments in which it clearly makes more sense, by most analyses, to sell drugs on the street than to go to terrible, dangerous schools.
Yeah, I mean, you know, these are dangerous conversations to have because, you know, in order to get the nuance right, you have to nail every word.
But the point is, look, Nobody chooses a life of crime who has great alternatives, right?
You choose a life of crime because it actually beats the alternatives that you do have.
And so the structure of the civilization that creates that predicament, that causes people to engage in crime because it's their better option, That's the thing that needs to be cured.
Is it as simple as recognizing that?
Of course not.
You know, we were just, Zach and I, our producer, were just talking about this yesterday in a different domain, which was sex work.
Right.
Nobody chooses it.
No little girl dreams about being on the pole.
Or worse, right?
Or selling her body for sex.
That is a choice that some people end up making because circumstances have provided a bunch of choices in which that appears to be the best one.
And in some of their cases it is the best one.
And that's terrible.
Yep.
That does not make it an awesome choice.
It makes their circumstances terrible, and something that we do have a responsibility at the societal level to consider how to address.
Something that does not involve penalizing those who are hardworking and skillful and making a go of it.
Absolutely now the fundamental at the bottom of all of this and you know, we don't really know this but Everything that I have seen tells me that people are While far from blank slates are Overwhelmingly similar in their capacity at birth and that
What happens is a wild distortion of developmental environments, where some people have the benefit of really good developmental environments, some people have bad developmental environments that teach them a very important lesson that results in them doing well.
That's also a guy rocket.
Right.
Right.
But anyway, the Let's put it this way.
The idea that there is something that we can't really talk about, you know, endogenous differences in capacity, blah blah blah blah blah, that becomes an excuse not to address the problem because it's like, well, it's genes.
But the evidence that it's genes is not anywhere near as strong as people think it is because they don't understand the problems with the term heritability.
They don't understand what it really means.
and they don't understand how it is that something can be genetically heritable and not be a blueprint that's inescapable.
Lots of genetically heritable stuff is perfectly remediable at a non-genetic level, and if that sounds like a paradox to you, that's because you don't understand what biologists mean when they say heritable.
I swear, it's a very broken term because the common parlance implications of it have nothing to do with the actual biological meaning of it.
Cool.
Yeah.
So, um, maybe, maybe, maybe that's it.
Maybe, maybe we're there.
Uh, I am, I don't know that I've ever read, uh, much of a, an opinion that was just handed down by the Supreme Court before.
I don't think I've ever had any reason to.
Um, and What I have read, what I did read of this, actually gave me some hope.
The clarity and nuance in much, but not all, of what I read in these opinions, that is again Roberts, Thomas, and Sotomayor, and the summary at the top,
Um, was remarkable and an education and, uh, that's great that we actually, uh, you know, an informed, you know, no legal background at all person, uh, who is smart can go in and read these things and go like, okay, and all I can find that, that decision that is mentioned, go find that and, and sort of cross reference and go, okay.
Yeah.
I, I agree with the majority opinion.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And, you know, the specter of a court that was not so divided that it was unlikely to overturn past precedent has been used as a boogeyman against those of us on the left for a very long time to prevent us from thinking independently about politics.
Uh, you know, at least what you see is a court being very deliberate about these decisions, which is exactly what it is supposed to do.
Yep.
Um, so anyway, it's, it's an interesting, interesting legal era.
Yeah, it is indeed.
All right, we are going to take a 15-minute break and be back with a Q&A shortly.
We're also going to be back with another live stream this Wednesday, and then another one a week from now.
So we're going to do three.
We're going to do one on Wednesday, July 5th, that's going to be, and then Saturday, July 8th, and then we're gone again for a little bit, and then we'll start our regular Wednesdays at 11 30 Pacific schedule starting Whatever that day is, I don't know.
In the future, for sure.
It is in the future, sometime later in July.
And soon, hopefully we're going to have a website where you can just check in on that stuff.
But for right now, we have, I guess it's just going to be us doing live streams for a couple times now, but then we have, you've got, you've recorded a few episodes, guest episodes, that are ready to come out with really great guests.
I mentioned last time, okay, we've got some coming out that are going to be good, and boy, you mentioned Vivek Ramaswamy, that conversation, and then RFK, you've got two presidential candidates in these recently released Dark Horse episodes, so go check those out if you need more Dark Horse before we come back to you next Wednesday.
And, you know, check out Natural Selections, which is where I write weekly.
I wrote a bit more about the childhood vaccination schedule this week.
We have, again, that new merchandise at darkhorsestore.org, PSYOP, Until Proven Otherwise, and lots of other great things.
We were lucky to be with friends on Salt Spring Island in Canada this last weekend, and I was carrying around my epic tabby tote bag.
Yes, absolutely.
Wild.
And by the way, Happy Canada Day!
Happy Canada Day!
Yeah, indeed.
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Excellent as always and tomorrow I'm looking forward to that one as well.
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