All Episodes
Previous Next
June 3, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:13:47
Confessions of a ‘Compulsive Truth-Teller’
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this special edition of Radio Renaissance.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and it is my great privilege to have with me Professor Joseph Kaye.
Today is May 27th, the year of our Lord, 2022.
I'm delighted to have you with us, Professor.
And I will say only that you have been a faithful and dependable and brilliant contributor to American Renaissance for years now.
And for that we're deeply grateful and it is a pleasure and an honor to have you face-to-face for this opportunity to probe your always fertile and entertaining mind.
Could you tell us a little bit about your background?
Well, I grew up in New York City, and like many people of my age, I was exposed to the trials and tribulations of a changing city.
And then I moved to New Jersey.
I left the city under duress, and my academic career was a checkered one.
I didn't do particularly well in college, but eventually I got straightened out and I became an academic.
I taught for many decades at top schools, beginning in the late 60s.
So, I was present at the creation when the schools began their racial transformation.
I can remember the first students coming in under special admits and special programs.
By the time I left the university, this transformation of the university was going full bore.
Apartments had already been created, special deans were beginning to appear, and since that time I've been retired, and I've observed it fairly close, but at a distance.
What was the approximate date at which these special efforts were made to bring in diverse students?
It was the late 60s.
Every school that I know of Had some kind of recruiting mechanism to bring in students.
In some cases, the seeds of the disaster were planted by the, interestingly enough, the quest for authenticity.
One case that I know of, they explicitly turned down the middle class white blacks For people from the inner city who were considered to be, at that time, more authentic Negroes.
Somehow, the authenticity was defined as their rejection of the usual norms of civil society.
And why they did this is beyond me, but nobody seemed to question it at the particular school that I was at.
Everybody knew that if you wanted blacks, you had to get authentic blacks, okay?
And these were people who were edgy, just about always to commit violence of some kind or another.
I see.
The most fuggish ones who were not serving time, in other words.
Right.
I guess maybe they would go to the post office and look at the pictures and say, this looks like a good student.
Why don't we recruit that person?
Well, at least you don't hear so much about that these days.
They want blacks that they think will succeed.
They don't even have to be homegrown American blacks.
Well, I'm not sure that that's actually technically correct.
I've heard a number of stories, and I've seen a little bit of data on the thing, that a fairly large number of the blacks at the better schools are from either they were born overseas in the Caribbean or Africa, or they have a parent who was born overseas.
And the figure I have seen is about 20% of American blacks, okay, in one form or another have an overseas connection.
Either one or both parents were born overseas.
Now this is all part of what I call the adjustment process.
Universities talk one way and then they adjust on the other.
In other words, they actually learned their lesson that recruiting thugs in the ghetto just didn't turn out very well.
They did learn that lesson, and they are getting out of it.
And I suspect, the last figure I had seen was from Professor Gates of Harvard.
Henry Louis Gates.
He was a classmate of mine.
Really?
He said that at Harvard, two-thirds of the students, black students, had some overseas connection.
Now, I do know that this is creating a fissure among blacks.
It was a disturbance about a year ago between the American blocs.
They have various names for themselves.
Americans descended of slaves and the blocs from overseas.
Now, the irony of that is that the blocs from the Caribbean, their ancestors suffered a far worse form of slavery than the Americans.
I mean, the carnage in places like Barbados was enormous.
Yes.
Well, at the time, in the late 1960s, when this first wave of what came to be known as affirmative action, what a euphemism if ever there was one, when this first wave came in, was it assumed among the people who were engineering it that with a little Massaging and sandpapering and a little executoring, they would turn out just like whites in the suburbs.
Well, I taught at top schools.
And there, these people believed that they could change anything, okay?
That they could split the atom, send the man to the moon, square circles, and invent a perpetual motion machine if they were just properly funded.
The self-confidence of these people for social engineering was remarkable.
So they really did think that they were going to take these fellows who could hardly speak standard English and then turn them into... Part of it was that they themselves were insulated from this.
One of the interesting things about the Warm poverty was that so many of the people who were pulling the levers and changing the gears and never had any experience with poverty
And most of these people never knew.
Now, as we all know, southerners would be telling these northern geniuses, let me tell you something.
I went to school with these people.
I know them.
You're going to be disappointed.
No, they would respond.
We are so smart.
Okay, we can square a circle and send the man to the moon.
Well, you know, I always liken this to, oh, for example, the way the Scandinavians used to explain to us how to treat black people.
And they didn't have any experience with them.
It's like people living in deserts.
Gunnar Myhrvold.
Yes, Gunnar Myhrvold.
His book is remarkable.
It's gone through multiple editions and sold more than a hundred millions of copies.
Why they would get a Scandinavian sociologist to Tell us about Americans.
When you can get any good old boy, he'd be happy for a few pats on the ribbons to explain the reality.
I don't understand it.
Well, I used to liken it to someone who lives in a desert explaining to people who live in the jungle how to deal with trees.
But we had the same phenomenon in the United States.
People who lived up in Yankee land, who had never had to deal with blacks in large numbers, just thought that, well, all the problems are because these wicked Southerners mistreat these darling Negroes.
And if we get our hands on them, they'll just turn into wonderful, wonderful people.
So I'm sure that was a lot of it.
I call it genetic engineering.
And you have people out there whose title should be genetic engineer.
Now, of course, it works in agriculture.
Anybody who's familiar with the Green Revolution knows you can grow tacos in the desert.
If you just move this gene to that gene.
And in fact, the grocery stores today, I suspect that There are probably very few products in the grocery stores that are found in their natural state.
Cheetos does not grow wild.
I suspect that if you were in the School of Agriculture in the 1960s You would say, well, you know what?
We have bred cows with an extra rib, okay, because the rib is so valuable.
We have taken Indian maize, okay, and we've made it into now you can make corn pops out of it.
And so, why not with human beings?
Except that the people in the ag school knew that you got them to grow an extra rib not by giving them remedial rib courses.
You actually did it through genetics.
They at least knew that.
Well, the thing about that was that genetics is part of the old eugenics mentality.
They go hand in hand.
And my feeling was that this power to shape the race was so deeply ingrained in the mentality that they were not conscious of the thing.
And so if you ask these people, are you eugenicists?
They would say, of course not.
Eugenicists are bad.
They kill people.
Hitler.
But on the other hand, if you say, well, is it possible to take people
who've grown up in this environment, who have these traits, and transform them into those?
Of course we can.
We do it all the time.
So these people were what you might call unconscious eugenicists, okay?
And we're still dealing with that mentality.
Of course, these days, if you take people of a different, call it culture, shall we?
Ancestry.
Ancestry or culture.
And you say, well, we would prefer that you shuck certain aspects of your culture and adopt those of the dominant culture.
Now that, of course, is pure white supremacy.
So they can't do that either.
To me, one of the great signs of the times is the number of areas in which we are completely eliminating certain standards or certain expectations because certain groups can't meet them.
Right.
And the interesting thing about that is that if you hobnob, as I occasionally do, with very respectable conservatives, people who most of us would say they're on our side.
Or they should be on our side.
No, no, they really are on our side.
They, too, oftentimes share this belief that you can re-engineer people just like you can re-engineer Russians to adopt collective farms.
The favorite expression, and I know of several, is, we're going to fix the black family.
There's some very good people out there who identify as at least allies who would say it all comes down to the black family.
As soon as we fix the black family, here I have the formula in my hand, okay?
We're going to push this lever up and push this thing down, add a little bit of nitroglycerin to the thing and voila!
We will fix it.
And you try to explain to them that this is a family structure that is rooted in hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
We ain't gonna fix it in the same way that we're not going to turn Rottweilers into lapdogs.
Yes, that is where the whole logic falls down.
It goes all the way back to 1965 when Moynihan wrote his report Who, and he was remaining his hands over the fact that the illegitimacy rate among blacks at that point was 25%.
Right.
And this was a portent, this was portending catastrophe.
By the way, it's interesting on my hand, I will not reveal my connection to him, it would give things away.
But of all the people who had a finger in the anti-poverty program, he was the only one who actually had experienced poverty.
A little footnote to history.
Is that so?
So he knew what it was like.
He had grown up on Hell's Kitchen in New York, which was Irish poverty, which in some cases was equally as pathological as the black poverty today.
Alcoholism, fractured homes, things like that.
Of course, on the subject of Moynihan.
Recently, a conversation, a recorded conversation between Moynihan and Richard Nixon.
Eskimos!
No, it was not about Eskimos.
It was about Eskimos.
Well, they had some of those, but they also had conversations about what a certain group might refer to as Schwarzes.
Have you spelled that?
I've never heard that word.
Well, never mind.
Yes, I think it starts with a CH.
But be that as it may, Jensen had just written his 1969 piece and was gaining a certain notoriety.
And, oh, I believe it was the Hernstein article actually in The Atlantic that provoked this conversation between Moynihan and Nixon.
I read that article.
Yes, a very important article.
And Nixon and Moynihan are talking about this.
And Moynihan says, had sent him the article.
Nixon had read it and he says, hmm, this stuff about IQ, this is really important.
And we policymakers have to know these things, but we dare not talk about it.
We dare not talk about it.
Now, my guess is these days, policymakers don't even know these things, or they suppress whatever inklings they might have about it, far much less talk about it.
But it was significant to me.
They know though.
Well, you think they know?
Well, human beings know things on various different levels, okay?
And one of the things that allows people to survive is knowing how far they can go in a given conversation.
That if you are hiring, I mean, let's take an easy example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who I'm sure if she was asked to pontificate on the subject would deliver a stellar speech and would be reprinted in the New York Times.
But people knew that she just didn't hire black law clerks.
That's true.
They had been environmentally thwarted.
Well, there are a lot of people out there who say, look, I love the diversity and vibrancy as much as anybody else.
OK, but we're moving our operation to Idaho because the climate is better for my wife's asthma.
And lying and deception on sensitive matters is a survival mechanism.
Those who compulsively tell the truth have probably exited the gene pool a long time ago.
And the animal kingdom is filled with subterfuge.
I mean, anybody who turns on a nature channel will eventually find frogs and snakes and cuttlefish.
So deception is one of the key mechanisms found in nature for surviving.
There are even cases where, I think it's among cuttlefish, that male cuttlefish will mimic female cuttlefish.
It's called pronoun deception.
Oh, yeah.
They choose their pronouns.
Yeah, pronouns.
Cuttlefish have pronouns, and they not know, it's another, for another time.
But nevertheless, they adapt to by mimicking females to get access to other females.
Yes, this is a bit of a digression, but there is a form of moth known as Photorus,
and it actually mimics the female attractive qualities of a different form.
No, it uh...
And I can just imagine the deceived male who is heading my way, looking forward to a refreshing experience.
It's referred to in the industry as a tranny moth.
That must be it.
He's expecting a refreshing experience and then he's devoured by this creature.
It's called Photorus.
I think it emits some sort of light.
But in any case, the animal kingdom is full of deception.
On the other hand, A certain amount of compulsive truth-telling is necessary for a society.
We need, and your tagline, of course, when you write your articles, is that you are a compulsive truth-teller.
One of the ways that is handled is the court fool.
Comedians for many years have the role of being able to... George Carlin, for example, made a living on college campuses going around telling the truth to audiences that have loved this sort of stuff, okay?
And it's no accident, comrade.
That comedians these days cannot make a living on college campuses.
Oh, no.
That's one of the backbones of the comic industry.
I remember this.
They would go from college campus to campus, sell out the auditoriums, which was very easy because in many cases the students could never get enough of George Carlin or Lenny Bruce-type comedians, okay?
And they made a very handsome living.
Today, to quote some famous writer, the first thing we have to do is shoot the comedians.
Forget about the lawyers.
Well, I've occasionally seen, there is a Chris Rock routine.
Yes.
About, I think it's called, Why I Can't Stand, and then he uses a word that is verboten to you and me.
Yeah, the word.
Yes, the word.
The word.
Yes, the totemic word.
And it's quite a hilarious thing.
I've seen a number of his things.
Yes.
And there's another great one about how to avoid getting your ass whooped by the police.
And it starts with obey the law.
I don't think you could do that these days.
The war on comedy.
I mean, a number of people have pointed this out.
That is one of the The truth tellers, okay, have evolved into... Because what happens is, the classic fool, with the bells and things like that, is not physically threatening, okay?
Nobody worries that the fool has organized an army and is marching on the Capitol.
And so you can laugh at the fool.
Now, I suspect that in many religions, you have people who are Mentally defective in some form or shape, and they are allowed to say things because everybody knows that they're in their own way, they're harmless.
So society probably has to, for the sake of society's survival, you probably have to, it's like animals with camouflage, you have to have some institutionalized mechanism for telling the truth.
Well, I suppose.
I never quite thought of it this way, but I believe it was Shelley who said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators.
And I guess you could have said at a certain time, the golden age of comedy, comedians were the unacknowledged legislators to the extent that they were able to say things that the rest of us were not.
Now, no one is allowed to say those things.
Right.
The golden age of comedy.
I kind of collect stuff on this.
Okay.
was filled with ethnic humor.
I mean, terms like stage Irishman, okay.
Everybody knew what they want.
And so this was at a time of great immigration.
And as a result of these ethnic strife, okay, you had people on stage.
In fact, ironically, many of those was cultural appropriation.
My favorite example of that is Chico Marx, who played the role of the Italian in the Marx Brothers.
All the Marx Brothers originally had an ethnic identity.
The only one that survived is Chico.
Now Chico, to my knowledge, had no Italian ethnicity whatsoever.
His family was, they were Alsatian Jews.
But Chico got to the point where he was so Italian He was oftentimes chosen as the Grand Marshal for the Columbus Day Parade.
Is that so?
Talk about cultural appropriations on steroids!
And so what happened was that the inevitable scratching and bumping of ethnic conflict They would say in fancy terms, this was pressure relief.
So the pressures of these ethnic groups bumping up into each other in urban settings was relieved, like a steam valve.
Well, at least you could laugh about it.
And you could say, how many poles does it take to screw in a light bulb?
And how many wasps does it take?
How many feminists?
Well, you can't ask those questions anymore.
Why don't members of the junior league engage in group sex?
Because too many thank you notes.
Oh dear, oh dear.
But we can go on.
Yes, yes.
This is You laughed derisively.
Well, actually, the families that listen are pretty hardened to the truth, I think.
But why do you think the curtain has come down with such a rush and such a bang on even comedy, for heaven's sake?
Much less serious investigation of these questions.
Well, the parallel I use is these warnings that you occasionally will see.
In areas that are so dry that even throwing a cigarette butt out, they will, campsites for example, will be forbidden to have fires, okay.
They will tell, you will see signs on the highway, people don't smoke that much anymore, but I remember seeing signs, please do not throw cigarette butts out, and the people of course would, okay.
Next thing you know, thousands of acres are The fear is, okay, that we're reaching sort of a point of critical mass, that if something will happen, we'll push it over the edge, okay?
And that's why things like Buffalo, okay, are so important, okay?
The mass shooting?
Yeah, the mass shooting in Buffalo, okay.
That these, race riots used to be with whites killing blacks, okay.
The last one I think was about 1948, by the way.
Right.
Well, the so-called zoot suit riots in Detroit.
There's a long history of these things.
Yes, yes.
And there are people who are aware of this history and they see the thing bubbling up, okay?
The bush is getting drier and drier, okay?
And at some point, the fear is, okay, that there'll be an uprising.
Enough is enough, okay?
Now, the safety valve in all of this is migration.
If you really want to find out about American politics, don't ask a political scientist, ask a realtor.
Realtors have a real incentive to get it right.
Realtors who get it wrong don't last as realtors.
And that's why so much of the effort to curb racism has been directed in the real estate market.
Because realtors, by their very nature, if you ask an educator about schools, they'll tell you nonsense.
Ask a realtor, they will tell you, this one's good, that one's bad, okay?
Because they do not want to have the embarrassment of taking somebody to a school.
So, my feeling is, as long as we have freedom of movement in the United States, and we know from the recent census, That New York, Illinois are losing, Florida are gaining.
And just go there and Google Coeur d'Alene, Iowa.
I don't know.
And people talk about it as white paradise, okay?
And they're a whole... Despite the weather, which is pretty fierce.
Okay, okay.
That probably contributes to its paradisiac qualities, actually.
It's an old story.
There are ice people and there's other people.
Yes, indeed.
But there are vacations.
I mean, if you want to live white, okay, go on a cruise!
You can go on a cruise and you can live in, in fact, actually, if you want to go really deep into the history, there are cruise ships available on request, okay, that the passengers are entirely white, 99%, okay, But the staff is about half to two-thirds third world.
So this is 19th century white.
Not 20th century white.
White people being catered to by people of color who are very, very good at catering to white people.
Almost antebellum white.
But this is a little bit of a distraction.
In other words, your impression is that the screws have had to be tightened because there is so much pressure bubbling up that recognizes how awful it is.
The marketplace in particular, my guess is that companies that have been forced into affirmative action Forced to hire people they don't want, okay?
They have meetings and they pull down the stage and lock the door and say, what are we going to do with these people?
And the answer is, we've tried everything.
The only thing is, we're going, like Citicorp.
Citicorp moved to South Dakota.
The back offices of Citicorp are, I don't know if it's still true, but a couple of years ago, they just boxed the whole thing up and moved to South Dakota.
No harm, no foul.
But that's a little different, the amount, the extent of censorship these days.
I mean, they started off with the people that they called white supremacists.
I was one of the first people to get kicked off of Twitter and Facebook, et cetera, et cetera.
But then they've moved on to all sorts of other people, people who refuse to call women men or men women.
And this sort of thing, and also people who have dissonant views on COVID, this, that, and the other.
So, there has been an extension of this attempt to smother dissonant views.
Well, part of that, I think, is the boiling off process, okay?
People who work for those kinds of companies, that engage in this kind of thing, who don't share those values, they're in a tight labor market, okay?
Just simply leave.
You see this at the university.
We're people who are allergic to Kool-Aid.
Simply don't go in.
But that's such a pity.
Whenever I hear of someone who used to, well, someone like Barry Weiss at the New York Times, she says, this woke, hurried mentality just got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore.
And so I buggered off.
You hear this story over and over and over, but I want them to stay.
I want them to stay and try to knock a little sense into their colleagues.
It's too much.
It's impossible.
It doesn't work, okay.
Having been in the university, being in, Faculty Recruitment Committee meetings.
I can tell you from harsh experience, it'll be Saturday morning.
15 of you, you're on the recruiting committee.
And you have all these folders on your table, and the Dean has told you, you know, bring him back alive, Frank Buck.
We want a black woman to recruit, okay?
Each one is worse than the next, okay?
And the goal becomes, can we find one we can live with?
The answer oftentimes is no.
If you do find it, chances are she's already received five offers.
And unless you're Harvard or Yale, even if you're a very good school, you're non-competitive.
It's that tight.
And so if you stand up and say, we can't take it any longer.
I'm sick of this.
No more.
I will die in my place rather than to agree with this kind of thing.
You will not eat lunch.
You can't eat lunch in this town, to coin a phrase from common Hollywood.
What happens is there's enormous group pressure.
Whatever it is, it's part of human nature.
We know that.
The herd mentality is very, very strong.
And if you're an outlier, here's what will happen.
Everybody afterwards will come up to you and say, shake your head and say, God bless you.
Thank you for saying that.
By the way, no more lunches.
Because to be seen with, it's not a question of they don't enjoy your company.
That if to be seen with you, don't forget in the Academy, everything operates on the margin.
On the merge.
Everything operates on it.
The fact that you're in the academy already certifies the fact that you are in the top, in a good school like where I taught, you were at least in the top 2%.
Okay, so we're not talking about people who are incompetent, okay?
And so what happens is when they deal out, whether it's research grants or everything else like that, everything is, you're competing, it's like world-class sprinters.
You know, it's a tenth of a second separates the top.
Yeah.
And so, everything is at the margin.
So, what happens is they will say, well, you know, that one over there, he's unreliable.
God knows what he will say, okay?
And what happens if he sits in the wrong place, we will get a delegation of offended students, okay?
And they're not making this up.
So, giving this person promotion might attract the attention of a state legislator.
Okay, this does happen.
Why did you promote this man? This man, you know, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about
these sorts of things. And then the university president who's testifying at the legislature
on behalf of their 135 million dollar grant, okay, says, well sir, don't worry,
we have ways of dealing with such people. That's what happens.
This reminds me of two different things.
One is, I believe it was the state legislature in Wyoming or South Dakota, one of those states, decided that they were going to pass a law to abolish the women's studies program in the state universities.
So, legislatures actually can Withhold money?
Well, what happens is in states like Michigan, Illinois, New York, okay, a very large, again, bills are passed at the margin.
It's a majority system, okay.
So, you're looking around in a hundred seat legislature and you have 40 votes, okay.
How do you get the remaining 11 votes to push it on the thing?
Okay, you trade favors, okay?
And in many cases, black legislators, okay, have what Burke used to call rotten boroughs.
Once elected... That's right.
Incorrect.
Incorrect, okay.
Now, as the great Obama found out, okay, typically in situations like that, okay, you are not going to be attacked from the right.
Successfully.
Nobody is going to run against you from the right saying, well, you know, if we had chartered schools, if we had tightened up the welfare requirement, if we enforce the law, etc.
Okay, we would be a better off community.
Running out to the right of these sinecure people doesn't work.
No, but they always fear the attack from the left.
That's what's going on right now in New York State with AOC.
They call it, it's now primary has been turned into a verb, to primary something.
Okay.
And every one of these grand old civil rights warhorses, okay, dreads the attack from the left.
So what happens is that they all show up and say, the incumbent here, he voted for a budget that included a salary raise for a racist.
Well, but at the same time, I can't remember, there must have been a dozen different state houses that forbade the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
In Florida, after Disney World went into this protracted pout about the law that prohibited the teaching of erotic education.
What they called it, Don't Say Gay.
When I first heard about it, when I first heard about this Don't Say Gay, I thought it meant they couldn't even talk about homosexuality under any circumstances.
But they're talking about limiting instructions on transsexualism and perversion.
Kindergarten through third grade, for heaven's sake.
But this is too much for the woke warriors.
But they were punished.
The statehouse stripped them of their little autonomous zone.
There are some things that can happen in statehouses.
Now we have, what is it, 24 states in the Union with constitutional carry?
There was only one back in 1980.
Statehouses can do certain things.
Getting back to the point you made earlier, those forest rangers who monitor the dry bush level, so to put up signs, no campfires, etc.
or cut down traffic entirely, are monitoring these sorts of things as telltale signs Well, I think that's really part of it.
and the tectonic thing are shifting.
The animals are behaving funny.
Water is running uphill.
Time to get out because the big one's coming.
Well, I think that's really part of it.
That the other side is increasingly worried that it's impossible to refute
what people like you and me say.
The only recourse is to shut us up.
Right.
It's to pour more superglue into the Andreas Fault.
Or stitch it up with rawhide or something.
Because, you know, we all know the geologists monitor these things.
They have literally thousands of sensors along volcanoes and earthquakes.
And they will tell you that nobody wants to go through St.
Helens again.
No more eruptions.
No more eruptions.
So the people of the New York Times are watching the spikes in the thing.
And they see a buffalo and they say, you know what?
This guy's a piker, okay?
He's a kid.
What if a bunch of people who are really well-trained show up, okay?
To a housing project in Queens someplace, okay?
And take it down, okay?
They're tired of all this kind of stuff like that.
And once it becomes normalized, the question is, is the shift into legitimacy.
That's why you have to delegitimize the people like the Buffalo Shooter and things like that.
Well, people who commit mass murder are easy to delegitimize.
Right.
You have to do it right away.
You have to do it right away.
But, but, but, but the fear, you know, that the earthquake, let's just call it the big one.
And these are tremors.
That's why, you know, the town folk are getting their torches and pitchforks, okay, and they're milling at the bar, and they're about to march up to the castle.
Now, regimes, the history of regimes falling unexpectedly, Books have been written about who would have believed that the Soviet Union would have fallen.
That's true.
And there are critical masses.
Now, the thing about it is, I go back to writing a man named John Lukash, in which he talks about the fall of the Soviet Union.
One of the explanations he uses for the fall of the Soviet Union is none of the people who were propping it up actually believed in it anymore.
Exactly, exactly.
That was a very important thing.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
One of the Soviet-era jokes was, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
Yes.
But see, I don't think we're at that point.
No, but what happens though is if you look at the way the The guardians live, they live in white bubbles.
Yes, they do.
So you can infer from their behavior that they know what the story is.
One could infer that they really know what the story, where they send their children, okay?
Yes.
To Sidwell Friends.
Yes, yes.
But now they've got their affirmative action show pieces too.
Right, right, right, right.
But what happens though is that carrying forward the parallel with the Soviet Union, okay?
Getting back to our initial conversation, the maestros of the engineers, back in the 60s, honestly believed that they could, if they only found the right equations.
I remember going into these anti-poverty centers.
I was on a campus that had a huge anti-poverty center.
I visited probably two or three times a week to use their computers.
I see.
Oh.
So because they were so well-equipped and well-equipped.
They had more money than Rockefeller.
And so what happened was, they really believed it.
Now, the Soviet Union, after three generations of Marxism, Soviet Union was governed by opportunists.
In fact, if you believe it, it was probably a liability in advancing up the career ladder.
And I suspect that this is what is true in the United States now.
The people who run educational systems, it seems like Detroit and Baltimore, no longer believe it.
They have mastered the art of public speaking as if they believe, but they know that for 40 years, they've been pumping in huge amounts of money.
Mark Zuckerberg gave 100 million.
To Newark, it didn't move the needle.
It was matched by another private book called The Prize, which describes this.
Yes, a total of 200 million.
And it all just ended up being beefsteaks for the boys.
So what you have now, okay, is an elite that no longer believes their own stuff.
Now, they are at the top because they're very good at convincing others they believe it.
Remember what Samuel Goldwyn said, he said about acting.
Acting is all about sincerity, he said.
If you can fake that, you have it made.
And the people who run the hedge funds and all the others.
Or matters of convincing you that white is black.
That's how they made their money.
So what I think now is they know this is a fraud.
We may differ on this.
But what happens is they have to keep it going.
Because the social cost of not keeping it going is huge.
It's like the Soviet Union.
What are these people?
What are the people in the Soviet Union to do?
Here you are, you know, you're the Commissar of Leningrad.
You head up the KGB in Moscow.
What happens when the whole thing comes down?
You wind up as a postman, you know, the lives of others.
And so what you have now is... Are you referring to that movie about East Germany?
Right, right, right.
The enormous effort to keep the The charade going.
I mean, you have people in school in the school systems in big cities.
Who are earning princely salaries for no show jobs.
But, but, if you're concerned about the social cost, the social cost of recognizing that, okay, there's this immutable 15 point difference in the average IQ between blacks and whites.
What do we do about that?
Well, we paper that over and pretend it's not there.
Or we pretend that if it is there, it's simply because white people have mistreated black people.
We're tuning and tweaking.
There's nothing biological here.
Race is all just an optical illusion anyway.
Well, ignoring all of that, is having a long term, ultimately greater social cost.
And at the same time, I would argue that a lot of our rulers aren't aware of just how intractable this is.
For example, a law like No Child Left Behind.
It was Well, it was based on the idea that every single racial group in America could be brought up to the same level.
Via testing.
Well, by teaching, testing, or by teaching.
And the idea was you're going to punish schools that failed and reward schools that succeeded and then... I hear it all the time.
Yes.
That view thrives among respectable conservatives.
But it would never have even made it through one House of Congress if the congressmen really knew that they were trying to do something utterly and completely futile.
They knew!
The American Psychological Association in 1964 testified in Congress.
And he testified exactly what you said.
I mean he this was a man who had of the American Psychological Association unthinkable today and he gave point by point on the attractability this is before Arthur Jensen Published 1969.
He gave point by point refuted this notion that we could close these gaps.
Really?
But you're talking about the 1960s now.
1960s.
Okay, this now, this has been known for decades and decades and decades by people with an IQ of at least a fried egg.
But my point is, No Child Left Behind, when was that voted?
Maybe 2000?
Under Bush, it was George W. Bush.
Yes, it was George W. Bush.
He signed it with a flourish and a hey nani nani and danced a jig and thought this is the greatest thing he'd ever done.
Futile, futile.
I believe, I believe that something like that would not have gotten to the presidency.
Truth shall make you free.
If people knew, if people knew.
And another freak.
Hey, look at Charles Murray's book, Facing Reality.
Yes, it went practically nowhere.
It was just ignored, ignored.
But and also we continue to let in all of these Haitians for heaven's sake.
If people running the country know the score, surely we would find some way to keep out low IQ immigrants.
Well, let me give you an alternative to that.
All right.
Yes.
That a taste for high IQ people is a gourmet taste.
And that if you look at, if you go through history and you can start conveniently with Amy Chua's book on World on Fire.
Yes.
What you find or Hitler's kill throwing out the Jewish physicists or Spain throwing out the Jews or any number of illustrations Jews here.
But there are many, many more.
Cambodia, killing people wearing glasses.
And Uganda throwing out the only people who could add three plus three, the Indians.
Endless examples of the same thing.
I would suggest that the aversion to high intelligence is probably genetically based.
Except that the people who actually run the show, much as we might have... Self-interest is a feeble argument when human passion Is involved one of the I if somebody knows the author of this quote, please write it in I have been finding for years.
It's some Frenchman.
He said among the human passions.
The weakest is a desire for truth.
And if you look at history and you say in how many cases have people societies entire societies knowingly shot themselves in the foot.
And thrown out to smartest people.
When Spain threw out the Jews, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent boats to Spain to collect these people.
We, of course, in the 30s brought them in as celebrities to the United States.
So, I would say that the argument About how can people be so stupid to kill off the people who make things happen?
I would say the argument should be reversed.
What unique conditions in society allow this to happen?
Go to Hungary.
In the period from 1890 to about 1905, Hungary, there's a group of people called the Martians.
The Martians?
The Martians, yes.
Like Edward Teller, von Kármán, John von Neumann, Wigner and Szilárd.
Five Martians.
They were called Martians because Edward Teller said that That nobody on Earth could be this smart.
They obviously come from Mars, but they've disguised their Martian accents by calling themselves Hungarian.
I see.
There's a very good book called The Martians.
I highly recommend it.
Fast forward 30 years later, Hungary was passing a whole series of anti-Jewish laws.
Okay, Max Planck pleaded, a great scientist, pleaded with Hitler, you're destroying physics in Germany.
And he said, the Third Reich does not need physicists.
So, the question should be, the proper question should be, what allows societies, ever so briefly, Sometimes less than two decades, okay?
To treasure the best and the brightest and to reward them.
The answer is it's not, alas, it is not the default option of human nature.
Left on their own, they will take the Mother Nature.
I know Mother Nature.
She lives in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City.
I see her around.
Mother Nature does not like outliers.
Except that, much as we may despise their choices, the people who run this country, blind to so much that's obvious, be they, They have high IQs.
You cannot argue that those people who are running our lives and writing these idiotic articles in the newspapers, in fact, are stupid.
They have pretty high IQ.
And you would think that they would welcome fellow high IQ types, but it seems to me they are among this group who have fooled themselves into thinking... No, you'd make this the argument.
If you are high IQ, the last thing in the world is you want competition.
No, but they won't be competitive.
Anybody who's ever been in a university, knows the principle, you know, the first rate people hire
first rate people, second rate people hire third rate people, third rate people hire fifth rate
people. I have seen this myself on more than one occasion. It is the alpha male, but there's
the alpha male says, gee, you know what, wouldn't it be great to pal around with a whole bunch of
other high testosterone, strong, big muscular people, right?
All right, yeah.
He doesn't say that.
He says, you know what?
I want a bunch of Woody Allen people because it's in my interest to be the only alpha male.
Now, that's a hard argument.
The second-rate physicist, okay, who's barely making a living at Harvard, okay, he's not interested in promoting even how many In the academic world, which is where I learned about reality.
The question always comes, how do they ever hire a mediocrity?
Every department has a mediocrity.
The guy down the hall is an idiot.
How did he ever get a job?
And this is the white mediocrity we're talking about.
We're all white here.
White mediocrity.
How did this person ever get a job?
Well, he was the least threatening candidate.
Isn't that what tenure's for?
So you can actually hire smart people?
You see, your problem is, is that I've been called that.
No, no, I'm a hopeful idealist.
Well, the tendency for mediocrity, okay.
I said right now that the only people who've really benefited from the Biden administration, okay, are the fans of Warren Harding.
Years from now, people would say, you know what, we thought Warren Harding was the worst.
Actually, he wasn't that bad.
But now, fortunately, war has been removed.
I say when historians congregate and chide on the worst president, they will choose Biden.
And there are a lot of examples of that kind of thing.
And I think you have to look at human nature with a more critical idea and say, what do people actually do?
Do they want the best and the brightest?
The answer is, perhaps, there are, as I said before, like Hungary, and there was a period in Hungary where they all came from one school.
Well, but if you look at today's Hungary, We have something completely different going on.
Hungary is now saying, I mean, whether or not they couch things in IQ terms, I don't know, but they're saying, we want white people.
We want Hungarians.
We're not going to take your Syrians.
And I remember when Viktor Orban had that famous conversation with Angela Merkel.
In effect, he says, Angela, maybe you can keep your Syrians.
We don't want any.
We like our country the way it is.
But!
And there are still, in Eastern Europe, those poor people who languished on the other side of what we used to call the Iron Curtain, who are far more psychologically healthy than we are now.
There are a lot of them who are saying, we like Estonia the way it is.
We like Czechia the way it is.
So, it is not impossible.
Well, we're talking about somewhat different things here.
We're talking about a society of the 1% versus good people who look like us and have our culture.
Where I live in New York City, They're waging war on the elite high schools because they're too Asian.
Oh, yeah.
By the way, I know... Well, no, that's not the reason.
They're not brown and black enough.
Nobody says, get these gooks out.
That's never the argument.
We have the same thing going here at Thomas Jefferson High School.
Yeah, I live in Fairfax, yeah.
Yes, yes.
But no, it's not that too many... No one dares say that.
That would sound white supremacist.
What they say is, there's just not enough blacks and browns.
Yeah, but I really think there's a very strong... I have no data on this.
There's a very strong element in human nature to attack the people who are outliers.
This is the theory of the White Robins, you know, that when you have these birds that are born with no color, albino, they're immediately pecked to death by the other.
That when somebody shows up, and I assume that people have written cultural analyses of the mimicking of smart people, you know, the absent-minded professors, the people who are too stupid to function.
Yes, they can do quadratic equations in their head, but you know, Okay.
They can't tie their shoes.
They can't tie their shoes.
Now that, to my mind, is a perfectly healthy way of dealing with people who are great outliers.
Now the only place in American society, offhand thinking, where that is tolerated, of course, is sports.
You know, the individual who can throw a ball 105 miles an hour is worshipped.
Or a guy who can, you know, pass regularly for 3,000 yards a season is worshipped, okay?
But that's because sports is about the intellectual accomplishment, okay?
Americans have always had an ambivalent attitude towards people who are extraordinary.
Now, what happened is, is one of the benefits of the Cold War Was that we venerated people like John von Neumann and Robert Oppenheimer and others like that, because they delivered something that allowed us to survive against the Russians.
But as soon as the pressure from the Cold War, I lived through that portion.
Okay.
You may remember the 50s growing up.
We have two programs on TV, College Bowl and the Whiz Kids, okay, that celebrated extraordinarily high IQ kids and they would come on and they would all do these things, okay.
And James Conant, the president of Harvard and a leading figure in the Manhattan Project, okay, appeared four times on Time Magazine.
Four times?
Four times on Time Magazine, okay.
He was a very important individual, believed in meritocracy, and he was responsible for transforming Harvard into Harvard, as we know it today.
One of the heroes of the 50s was Admiral Hyman Rickover.
Who was an absolute manic in meritocracy, okay?
He was truly crazy mad.
Now, what happened was that that has disappeared, okay?
It's inconceivable that a hard-nosed academic who fires much of the faculty at Harvard for being subpar would ever get appeared on Time Magazine.
It would be just the opposite.
Here is the man who diversified Harvard.
Here's the man who hired people who can't read their own names.
But that's all part of what I was talking about earlier.
This insistence on excellence or competence.
That's now white supremacy.
Right.
These are all decried as devious white man ways to keep the colored man down.
Well, a former chancellor of the New York City school system criticized the reading programs, okay?
And he said, this is just the white fetish over the written word.
Yes.
I'm not putting it exactly close enough.
That sounds exactly right.
Anti-intellectualism, anti-intellectualism, I mean.
Well, but all of this has gotten a Greatly increased impetus because there are certain groups that can't compete.
Now, MIT, during COVID, because it was difficult to take the SAT, they went back to the SAT.
And the press release they wrote explaining why they went back to the SAT made hilarious reading.
They were so apologetic about this, so defensive.
They had to go into great detail, but they said, and they said, we will still take a holistic approach to admissions.
Remember the Roman Hruska principle?
No, no.
I forget which one, but Nixon appointed some mediocrity, Clement Hainsworth, I think his name was.
to the Supreme Court.
He nominated him to the Supreme Court.
Yeah, said he'd never make it.
He was a real, real mediocrity.
Nixon didn't have good taste in everything.
Okay, and people pointed, this was back in the days when you could talk about academic integrity
when you nominated somebody for the Supreme Court.
And Roman Hruska, the Senator from Nebraska, he said, well, there are a lot of mediocre people in the United States, and they too need representation.
Did he say that?
Yeah, he actually said that.
I'm not quite sure word for word.
That must have been a joke.
Well, anyhow, from then on in, it became known as the Roman Hruska principle.
I see.
And you couldn't make a credible argument.
This was indeed made, okay.
Versions of this thing are extremely pernicious about unqualified black doctors.
I've heard, well they're good enough for blacks.
I'm sure you've heard that.
There is this strain in American society, which, look at Joe Biden and over the years, individuals who have been brilliant people, Have learned to disguise that, okay, and to be ordinary folk, okay, but they know out there among the unwashed, okay, signs of particular brilliance, okay, will not get you elected.
On the other hand.
I think a good case can be made that perfectly ordinary Americans would not have got us into some of these horrible foreign policy blunders.
Common sense.
What was it?
William F. Buckley used to say, take the first 10 names of the Manhattan phone book and put them in charge.
A Boston phone book.
All right.
And they'll do a whole lot better job than these A-kids at Harvard.
There's that aspect too.
But at the same time, The horrible damage that we are doing to our own country by, for example, saying that, oh, there's got to be X number of representation, you end up with these people who can't run a company, and we're supposed to be competing with China?
Well, again, to play a little bit of devil's advocate here, okay, if you look through American higher education, there's a very good book out on the wasps, okay, that just came out about a year ago.
And American elite universities were populated by half of the admissions people came from these prep schools, the preppies, okay?
And many of them went into Wall Street when they joined the 363 Club.
Three, six street club was you borrow money at 3%, lend it out at 6% and be on the golf course
at three o'clock in the afternoon.
I see.
And they made money by basically lending out easy money to big corporations and things like that.
Didn't take very much brains, okay.
And Wall Street more or less survived armies of people.
There's a very good book called Barbarians at the Gates that describes these brokerage firms that hire these people.
And they were mediocrities from very, very good families.
And Harvard, one of the things that Conant did, to go back to James Conant, was he fired a lot of these professors at Harvard.
These were people who were mediocrities, who'd been hired because their name wasn't Live, salt and stall, or something like that, okay?
And so we survived that kind of thing.
Much of the early CIA, for example, they were referred to as the Park Avenue Cowboys.
Well, but at this point, I just don't think we can tolerate this.
Well, what you're calling for, okay, I have written on this.
Okay, what you are referring, what you are calling for is a Sputnik moment.
I think practically every day these days is the Sputnik moment.
Well, I remember the Sputnik moment.
I actually remember seeing Sputnik in the sky.
In other words, for our younger listeners, explain what the Sputnik moment was.
In 1957, the Russians launched a satellite That absolutely shocked the United States.
Because we hadn't done it?
We hadn't done it.
We were actually not that far behind, but we were far behind.
The Russians always had the reputation as being crude, inept, okay?
You know, the Russian cars and things like that never worked and stuff like that.
They launched the Sputnik, okay.
And the thing about the Sputnik is that you could hear the broadcast signals on a certain part of the spectrum.
But more important, you can lie on your back and you can actually watch the Sputnik.
I remember doing this at Tanglewood.
At the Niagara Wood Music Festival.
Really?
But it was a tiny little thing.
You could actually see it?
You could see it.
It set off another 157 pounds, something like that.
Okay.
What the RSA sent up after that was only about three and a half pounds, by the way.
Okay.
And I remember people, this is during a concert, and all of a sudden a buzz.
Went through the audience.
Okay, there must have been maybe a thousand people there and it was like a picnic.
And everybody started pointing to the sky and you could see the thing move across the sky.
It was no, it wasn't like the fake moon landing.
This was real.
The point is, this galvanized Americans.
It galvanized them in ways that today are unbelievable.
Well, that's the point.
I think it's impossible to galvanize Americans in a favorable way.
We're too disunited.
The country could not unite to do anything.
We can't even unite to control the border with all of these hundreds of thousands.
They're going to be, what, half a million illegal encounters every month?
I have a feeling.
What could the United States unite to do today?
Name one thing.
Well, I think it's, well, ironically, okay, our ineptitude in these areas, such as the border, urban crime.
Yes.
Yes.
You name it.
Okay.
On the other side of the ledger, okay.
...are absolutely impressive technological features, like this web telescope they sent up, okay?
Yes.
You read a story about the engineering behind that kind of thing, okay?
It's unbelievable how this thing was set up.
So, what you have is... But Professor, Professor, we do have these occasionally brilliant things, but where is our high-speed train network?
In California, we all know about it.
Yeah, it goes 30 miles.
Nowhere!
Where are the kinds of bridges that are Chinese are going everywhere?
We cannot get homeless people off the... What I wrote is, we can send these incredible satellites into orbit to go back to the beginning of the universe.
But we cannot stop people from pooping on the street.
That's right, and we can't stop people from openly shoplifting in San Francisco to the point where they shut down drugstores.
Right, right, right.
And my feeling is that this must be absolutely exasperating.
We're saying it here, but others I think across the political spectrum, pretty much.
I'll leave out maybe the extreme far left because they're delusional.
They look at this thing, people just marching across the board.
Anybody, I recently had to enter the United States.
I came from, I flew in from London recently.
And the ordeal we had to go through, okay, try getting a COVID test in London.
Oh, you have to go and fill out all kinds of forms to get an account at the at the at the Pharmacy.
Thank God I was fortunate enough to have the help of a little girl from Yemen who filled out the form for me.
I got my COVID test and I was able to come back into the United States.
And I had to wait in line for endless security and all this kind of stuff.
It was a good thing I knew my grandfather's blood type was on grandmother's shoe size.
Otherwise, I would have not been able to fill out these forms.
But what happened was, I was during this time, I turned to my wife every once in a while, and I said, you know what, we really should have gone to the southern border.
It would be easier than getting us COVID tested in London.
Well, this is what the great Sam Francis used to refer to as anarcho-tyranny.
There is anarchy among the great unwashed, and criminality everywhere, and tyranny of the law-abiding.
Absolutely.
And I really do think that the image of somebody saying, one day, enough of throwing the cigarette butt out the window into the Florida grasslands.
I have.
I like to imagine white people eventually getting to the point where they say, all right, we're not going to take this anymore.
And perhaps at the county level or maybe state level saying, okay, we are going to take things into our own hands and to heck with the federal government.
Let me give you a sliver of complicated hope.
I will take even a sliver.
You're so desperate.
One of the advantages of all these people streaming across the border.
Advantages?
Let me finish.
This is why I'm saying it's a complicated story.
None of them are educated in American schools.
We are not doing a cost-benefit analysis here.
I am just imagining that when Jose shows up to the United States, With all of his baggage, okay?
The one baggage he will not have is gender socially constructed.
So you'll go to Jose and say that, see that man over there?
He's actually a woman.
And the fact is, okay, That the absence of a large number of people who have somehow entered the United States outside our educational indoctrination system.
Okay.
Well, professor, they bring their children and they will be indoctrinated.
But the children don't go to school.
And you know, it's ironic.
It's ironic.
One of the reasons a couple of years ago, I wrote why so many Americans are terrified of hillbillies.
Even though Hillbillies have a stellar war record and are honorable.
West Virginia, which is perhaps one of the poorest states in the United States, has a rather mediocre crime rate.
And my guess is that most people who go to West Virginia could leave their car, leave their keys.
That's exactly right.
I think MacDougall County is the poorest county in practically the entire United States.
But if you say something about the hillbillies are coming, okay?
It terrifies the establishment.
Now the reason why, okay, one of the reasons why hillbillies are terrifying Is they have a natural born immunity against the PC BS that they get in school.
So when the teacher goes into the hillbilly school and says that people can decide to become, you know, This or that.
Well, Professor, I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap up our podcast pretty soon, and we will have to wrap up on an irreconcilable disagreement.
I don't think the Mexicans are going to save us.
Now, it's true.
There are other things, too, is that the Mexicans are, for the record here, pointing out, are following an interesting trajectory similar to the Irish.
Wow.
Let me, let me, okay, which in a narrow sense, okay, many of them are going into law enforcement for the very reason that the Irish went into law enforcement.
It's a very steady job that has slow moving movement up the bureaucratic ladder.
And it's no accident that when Tucker Carlson wants to get the word on what's really going on in LA, he calls the sheriff of LA, okay?
Who, judging by his name, is Hispanic.
That's Baca.
What?
The sheriff's name is Baca, as I recall.
No, Villanueva.
Is it Villanueva?
Yeah, I think it's Villanueva.
Maybe Baca has retired.
In any case, yes.
I don't know.
But my guess is that when these people, these idiots, talk about defunding the police and defunding law enforcement, I'm willing to bet you that 75% of the border agents are Hispanic.
I think it's, I remember seeing it was at least over half.
Yeah, over half.
But the ones out in the field particularly are suspicious.
Yes, they have to speak the local language, you know.
Right.
And my guess is, is that when you have Cousin Juan, who's in the police department, okay, okay, and defunding him is defunding Cousin Juan, okay, And people are condemning ICE.
These are not abstractions to people.
They are real.
And I think what happens is that the thrust for alternative violence intervention experts,
okay, simply reflects the reality that many Blacks cannot pass the minimum qualifications
for a police job.
Oh, but they're going to start getting them.
Well, no, no, no.
It'll make policing even worse.
Of course it will.
Like what happened in Washington, D.C.
Yes.
They are unable to fill out the reports.
Well, at some level, you're correct.
The worst poisons emanate from a number of white people at the top.
Now, these poisons are amplified by the brown and the black ones who have gone to university and been turned into professional white haters.
Yeah, not so much Hispanics.
I think it's Hispanics.
Oh, there are some of them, all right.
There are some of them.
The more you educate them, the more they hate us.
Pervasive action in California didn't do well in Hispanic-majority areas.
Well, I suspect that the Irish, this is something that has been talked about for a while, that is, is that the Irish were at one point also the wild people when they came to America.
And that the Catholic Church did a really incredible job.
Now, the Catholic Church today is worried about global warming.
And by the way... And love is love.
Yes, black lives matter.
But my hope is that many of these Hispanics take the Irish model of economic advancement.
The Jews didn't do this, but they joined highly bureaucratic organizations Whether it's teachers or the police department, okay?
And they slowly move up the ranks and they will tell you there's not a lot of pay but after 35 years you have a pension and you retire.
And what happens is those are the organizations that Black Lives Matter and others hate.
Well, these are merit-based, long-term... The Hispanics will not be as dangerous and as destructive as blacks, but they are not part of the old American stock, and some of them will attempt to be, but without that old American stock, or at least in certain enclaves, I see a dark future for Western civilization.
Wow, that'll work out.
But we will figure it out one way or another.
We will solve the world's problems.
This is the statement of the problems.
Next time, tune in and we will have the solutions.
Very good.
You're going to go.
That's your homework assignment, Professor.
You're going to write a... How long will the paper be?
20 pages?
Or maybe you can do it in five.
You're a concise writer.
In any case, it's been a pleasure having you amongst us.
Thank you very much.
It's been a pleasure here as well.
▲
Export Selection