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Aug. 13, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:28:17
20210813_heather-mac-donald-on-covid-fear-and-power-embraci
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Vaccine Skepticism and Lockdowns 00:14:10
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Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show.
Today, Heather McDonald.
Oh, I don't know if you've read Heather McDonald, but if you haven't, you must.
The woman's got facts.
She has done her homework and her research.
And you look at her academic history.
That explains it.
That's, I guess, how one gets into Yale for one's BA and Cambridge for one's master's and Stanford for one's JD.
She's a lawyer, too.
So, very, very smart woman.
What's interesting about her is she just, A, yes, she has data, but B, she comes from things from just a new perspective.
You'll hear it in this interview.
Like, she's going to come at things from areas where you didn't expect her to come from.
And you learn from Heather.
You hear a different point of view, right?
One that you don't hear from every talking point or talking head.
On cable news or the normal journals you go to.
Anyway, so loved this discussion.
I was planning on doing this whole thing with her on cops.
We didn't even get to cops.
We didn't even get to it because we had so much to go over.
Anyway, I know you're going to find the interview fascinating and Heather fascinating.
She's the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
She writes for City Journal, which you know I love, among other places.
And she's written several amazing, amazing books, including The Diversity Delusion from 2018, which I recommend, The War on Cops 2016.
Also, recommend Are Cops Racist 2010.
Can you believe we didn't get to cops?
So much to go over, but it's a whole other show.
We did get to so much else going on in the news, and we'll start it in 60 seconds.
Heather McDonald, I haven't been this excited since Douglas Murray came on.
Oh, man.
Well, that's a little scary.
We'll put Douglas Murray out of our minds for now, but thank you so much for having me on.
Let's start here.
I read a really great piece by Wilfred Riley in Tablet Magazine yesterday, and he called it The Assault on Empiricism.
And this is a subtitle From Crime to Climate Change, the Hostility of Movements to Data is Making It Impossible to Address Real World Problems.
He's talking about how we're living in a post truth world and how it's really affecting our ability to make important decisions and have important discussions on things that matter.
From COVID to crime, you've been railing about this too.
There are actual data that we can consult to solve a lot of our problems.
When it doesn't line up with the narrative, we ignore it.
So let's start there and on COVID.
Because even though you're a conservative and you write a lot of stuff that conservatives love, you're taking on both sides and their refusal to not get hysterical when it comes to COVID disinformation.
Can you explain?
For a while, it seemed like progressives had cornered the market on hysterical, anti rational policymaking.
For the majority of the COVID, Period, we have seen the biggest failure of policymaking in American history.
Our leaders have refused to balance costs and benefits.
They have focused monomaniacally on one.
Kind of risk, which is the risk from COVID, ignoring the costs of lockdowns on much more serious aspects of human life, such as child development, the very possibility of economic activity and the creation of economic and human capital.
They've told us, you know, they've kept us focused on rising case counts, ignoring the fact that deaths still are not comparable really to cancer deaths or heart disease.
And so we were.
Given again and again phony data and hysterical rhetoric from the media and indeed the public health establishment to really keep the population in fear.
And sadly, it was a very docile population.
My biggest obsession is the idea of wearing masks outdoors, which has zero scientific basis for it.
You simply cannot get infected outdoors.
Infection requires a concentrated viral dose.
And yet, you still see people, at least here in Irvine, California, jogging by themselves with nobody for the next square mile wearing outdoor masks.
And I despair.
I despair at the ignorance of the populace and their willingness to engage in this safetyism ideology.
But recently, to my dismay, some of my fellow conservatives have engaged in the same sort of irrational.
Innumeracy in trying to present the vaccine as a threat greater than COVID, which it clearly is not.
The people that are vaccinated have a virtually zero risk of dying from COVID.
They have a minimal risk of even getting infected by COVID.
And yet, the anti vaccine movement is refusing to balance.
Those risks and has reversed itself.
Conservatives were rightly celebratory at Trump's rapid development, Operation Warp Speed, of the vaccine.
That was a medical miracle.
And they accused, they even accused the drug companies of putting off their application for emergency authorization until after the election, because at that point, conservatives thought that developing a vaccine was a good thing that would.
Help Trump and rightly so.
Now they're portraying the vaccine as this globalist conspiracy to kill millions of people because it's being administered under Biden.
So both sides now, I think, have basically lost their minds and are taking us in a direction that is not science based.
I think anecdotally that there's a faction on the right that's doing that.
I think most Republicans would say, okay, you know, the vaccines work.
It's not a small number that's doubtful and skeptical about the vaccines, though.
It's not.
Whereas I will say, when it comes to masking on the left, there's just, I think they've captured most of the left.
You know, sort of maybe some center lefties are more on the side of reason when it comes to the indoctrination in schools and the masking and the obsession with vaccines for children under the age of 12, even now that they're really pushing for.
I don't know.
I just feel like the hysteria on the left is still louder when it comes to COVID.
Well, that's true.
And what I find so amazing about this alleged third wave of Delta is that I would have thought by now that progressives would just be sick of it.
As I am, would be just fed up and say, to hell with it, let's take our chances.
And yet they seem prepared to do this endlessly, indefinitely.
There's no end in sight.
And clearly the authorities are itching for the opportunity to shut things down again.
I generally believe, Megan, in taking people at their words and not going to a second level of moving into sort of conspiracy theory explanations that are more abstract than the stated reasons.
The stated reasons.
In this case, for the lockdowns, are an excessive obsession with one particular type of risk.
It's safetyism.
It's as the late and unlamented Governor Cuomo said at the beginning of the pandemic if we save just one life from these lockdowns, they will have been worth it.
Well, that is, of course, an absurd calculation because there are lots of activities that we undertake, such as driving on highways, that we know will generate about 40,000 deaths a year if we wanted to save.
Just one life from highway deaths, we would shut down highways.
We go forward because we have balanced the risks and the costs.
But at this point, the left seems prepared to do this indefinitely without any kind of balancing of risk and cost.
It is quite astounding to me.
And the costs in the long term are going to be very, very high.
They already are.
What I'm most concerned about, Megan, is the widening of the academic skills gap.
We know that Black and Hispanic children have been the least involved in education.
They have not had the learning pods that more affluent parents have created for their kids.
And the wider that the academic skills gap grows, the bigger the excuse that we're going to give to the left to claim that any economic and socioeconomic disparities are due to racism rather than that academic skills gap and behavioral differences.
That they helped create by these lockdowns, these interminable lockdowns.
I mean, the thing that's sticking in my craw is when they reopened public schools in New York, and it took forever.
I mean, I have lots of friends who have kids in the public school system in New York who are just at their wits' end with the nonstop closures.
By the end of the year, my one friend's kid was going to school four hours a week, four hours.
And still these teachers were out there protesting Heather with.
Caskets saying, you know, if you force us to go back in there, we're going to be in caskets.
And then it turns out 40% of those teachers have refused to get vaccinated.
40% of the ones with the little caskets are like, I'm not going to take it.
Let's see, we'll bargain.
We'll bargain over it, said Randy Weingarten.
They want money.
Well, let's not forget the healthcare workers.
I frankly was nauseated from day one at the outbreaks of horn blowing and gong pounding.
That happened every night at 7 p.m. in New York that lasted for months and months.
And healthcare workers are just as vaccine resistant as teachers.
You know, I've often thought that conservatives are too quick to demonize teachers.
I think in many cases, we don't want to talk about the challenges they face with kids that are completely unsocialized thanks to the breakdown of the family.
And we blame the teachers' unions for things that maybe be.
Beyond their fix, sometimes because America turns its eyes away from the breakdown in Black inner cities.
But I have to say that the reaction of teachers' unions to this pandemic and their complete self involvement, as you say, Megan, has really.
Sort of pulled the veils away from my eyes, and I would think would discredit them completely in the eyes of the public across the board.
I'm not sure that's happened, but it certainly should happen because they are acting with just again scientifically ungrounded self interest and showing themselves not at all interested in the development and education of children.
Yeah, and it doesn't matter now, it's almost It's almost across the board.
You've got governors like DeSantis and Abbott in Florida and Texas pushing back on some of this.
But even in the South, in the legit South, we're seeing them go along with these mandatory masks for children.
And you would think that they would be a little bit more right leaning.
No.
Clay Travis was in the news this week.
He's taken over, he and Buck Sexton for Rush Limbaugh in most of Russia's markets.
And he stood up and said, We don't want mandatory masking for our kids.
Well, the school board voted seven to three against him, mandatory masks coming back to Tennessee.
And where he is.
And then we saw this is in Oklahoma, the school board, because the school boards, they seem just as leftist as Biden and his administration.
Whenever I hear up the school board, I'm always stunned at who gets on there.
And the right needs to start fighting back.
The people who are on the side of reason, forget left or right.
Listen to this school board member.
Her name is Linda Sexton, who is very upset that there might be some parents who want to send their kids to school without a mask.
I want to pursue the legal avenues that we have to defy Governor Stitt because it's just not okay for kids to commit murder by coming to school without a mask.
And when it comes down to it, it's possible.
They will cause a death of another child because they come to school without a mask.
That's not okay.
I don't know what we can do about it, but I hope it's something.
We've got to think hard and we've got to think fast.
So Linda's an idiot.
Heather, help me.
I mean, we have learned something about the American psyche that is very depressing, Megan.
Fearful Culture and Hysteria 00:02:26
Any shred remaining of rugged individualism and a proper appreciation for risk, for entrepreneurship, for creation, for the drive that makes civilization possible has disappeared from a vast portion of the population, not everybody.
But what I think this shows us is how.
Fast and wide the feminization of our culture has gone.
I'm generalizing and I'm not speaking about anybody's daughters in particular who may be just as hard headed and rational as everybody else, but generally, the aversion to risk, the unwillingness to think rationally about problems and being emotionally driven.
And cautious, susceptible to fear.
You know, James Damore, this poor smart computer scientist at Google, was fired in 2017 for writing a fact based 10 page memo suggesting that sexism may not be the reason why there's not 50 50 male female gender ratios in Google's engineering and computer science departments.
This memo.
Apparently, made Google's female employees feel so unsafe that he had to be fired.
Now, one thing that Damore did in this memo was quote something that has been known for decades by psychology, which is that one of the so called big five traits.
Of human psychology, the personality traits.
One of them is known, sadly, the phrase got Damore canceled as neuroticism.
That is sort of a fearful personality, fearful of risk, seeing threats everywhere.
And psychiatrists have observed for years that females score much higher on the neuroticism scale than males do.
What we've been living through for the last two years is an Outbreak of hysterical neuroticism.
Disinformation at the Capitol 00:15:49
We have accepted our leaders imposing completely arbitrary limits on economic activity.
They would pour numbers out, pull numbers out of the hat.
You know, Cuomo, there he was with his tier, they've all come up with their color tiers with utterly arbitrary numbers that if the infection rate is 5%, then you can't do anything.
If it's 10%, you can do nothing.
And if it's 20%, You have to dig your ground, dig a hole in the ground, and stay there.
They were making these things up, and yet the populace went along with it.
And we see now people, you know, willing to play this game and to go back to something I was saying it's about fear, but it's also about power.
That is sort of the second level of a conspiracy type explanation that I'm less willing to undertake, but I can't avoid it at this point.
It allows not just authorities.
Power over citizens, but it allows citizens power over each other.
You know, we've all been rebuked by the Max Nazis, and that is inebriating.
You know, we don't always have power, and it's a rush, it's a thrill to be able to order other people around.
And so that's part of it as well COVID has deputized everybody to feel justified in enforcing.
Mandates that are not just draconian, but utterly irrational.
And even Biden, who knows, he knows he has no power to issue a federal mask mandate for the country.
And you're a lawyer, I'm a lawyer.
We both know that's not possible given our system of federalism.
And he didn't just come out and say, No, I can't do it.
He said, Oh, well, you know, it doesn't necessarily look like it's in my wheelhouse, but, you know, we're looking at it.
We're looking at it.
Well, it should be a very short look, sir.
Because you don't have the power.
But to your point, there's almost nothing they look at now and outright rule out.
Like, look what he just did on the eviction moratorium.
He said, I can't do it, and then he did it.
Now we've got the possibility of a federal mask mandate everywhere.
Are you kidding?
Not just on the federal properties or the TSA or what have you.
I mean, there will be a revolt in the country if he tries something like that.
Well, I hope so.
We haven't seen it yet.
Europe is odd because they've had.
Even more insane rules than here.
The ones I find particularly ludicrous are radius rules, you know, that you can't go beyond five kilometers or 10 kilometers of your house, which doesn't make sense.
Like, if you think this is a big threat, you would want dispersion.
You wouldn't want everybody clustered in population centers.
But, like, is the idea that beyond 20 or 10 kilometers outside of your house, the COVID just becomes really dense and oh my God, you're going to die?
So they've had these really ridiculous rules.
On the other hand, They have had massive protests there.
I mean, the pictures are stunning that filling all of Berlin, all of Munich, all of Paris.
And except for those first outbreaks in Michigan when Whitmer was.
Deciding that you could buy lawn fertilizer but not a lawn chair or vice or paint and not, and not you know, an oven mitt or something.
Uh, there's been relatively little pushback, I think.
Maybe because there's sort of we have more safety valves with the red states being more rational when it comes to this, so people could feel like they have the exit option from their blue state tyranny.
But I hope that there will be a revolt because, as I say.
I'm just sick of this.
And I would think everybody would be sick of this.
But have they forgotten what normal life was like?
But the masks are just infuriating, infuriating.
And I've said from the start that the reason they want us to wear masks outdoors is because it deputizes every American and turns them into a walking billboard of fear.
If you see everybody wearing masks outdoors, your natural conclusion is that.
We are surrounded by death.
And so it's important to have a visual representation to get back to the Wilfred Riley article that you brought up and us living in kind of a post data world.
What I've noticed is we're living in a world of fictional simulations, this hyper reality that is at odds with reality.
What was the three months of razor wire around the Capitol?
But security theater.
It was theater to try and give reality and factual basis to a fiction.
The fiction is that white supremacy is the biggest terrorist threat facing this country and is our biggest threat of violence, as Biden's security agencies have said.
That is ludicrous, Megan.
You know it.
Most people know it.
And yet we had this drama, this staged.
Piece of theater that the Capitol was engaged in to try to pretend that the idiotic, deplorable, absolutely despicable January 6th riot was not just a one off of a bunch of idiots that got out of control, completely misunderstood their role of citizens, but represented some ongoing lethal threat, which it does not.
It's the same thing with the idea that it's white supremacists who were going around clubbing.
Asian elderly, Asian helpless people.
That's why the press jumped on the Atlanta spa killings, turned them into what they were not, pretended it was about white supremacy when it was about a young man who was sexually tortured by guilt, had nothing to do with race or the Asian nature of his victims.
But that too was another piece of security theater to give meaning and some kind of physical reality to the lie.
That America today is defined by white supremacy.
Yes, and if you look at, I think that may be one of the things that my memory serves that Wilfred looks at in that piece is the attacks on Asians and how that got blamed on white supremacy.
And if you look at just the past year, the number of attacks on Asians, prior to this past year, it was kind of, most of the attacks were black on Asian, as you break it down by race, but it was about kind of 27% black, 24% white perpetrators.
Let's just acknowledge that that is vastly disproportionate because the black population is.
13%.
The white population is about 60, 65%.
So, you know, it's not.
Yes, okay, I pulled it up.
Here it is, Heather, from his article.
He says, okay, according to the most recently available national crime data, That involves Asian American victims.
27.5% of violent attackers were black, 24.1% were white, 24.4% were Latino and other combined, and 24.1% were Asian, Asian on Asian crime.
In a separate data set focused only on the 98 most prominent recent attacks on Asian Americans, he says he found that 29% of the attackers who were identified in racial terms, 71% were people of color.
That's what it was 71% were people of color.
So the numbers go way up when you look at what's happened this past year.
But of course, that's all white supremacy.
Up next, I'm going to ask Heather about AOC's latest statement about how traumatic January 6th was, but she loves to talk about January 6th and her trauma.
It's all about her and her trauma.
Oh, and white supremacy.
What does Heather think of that?
Next.
Can I just jump back to the January 6th thing with you for a minute?
Because it is true that the left and people like AOC and the media love to go back to it.
I mean, they cannot get enough of January 6th.
And the trauma and the report.
We're actually seeing news reports on journalists and their ongoing trauma.
Some talking about how the Capitol building was like their girlfriend.
And now they have to go back in every day.
And it's so triggering and they can barely do it.
And then you've got people like AOC, who every day wakes up and thinks of another imaginary crime that could have happened to her, even though she wasn't in the relevant building during the attack.
And here is her latest offering in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash.
I think one of the reasons why that impact was so doubled that day is because of the misogyny and the racism that is so deeply rooted and animated that attack on the Capitol.
You know, white supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways.
There's a lot of sexualizing of that violence.
And I didn't think that I was just going.
To be killed.
I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.
So, what sounds like what you're telling me right now is that you didn't only think that you were going to die.
You thought you were going to be raped.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought I was.
Are you joking?
No, it's part of a CNN puff piece.
It's called, like, Being AOC or something.
They're doing a long, like, documentary on her.
So now Dana Bash does an AOC puff piece involving, I thought I was going to be raped.
I thought I was going to be killed and white supremacists and all the misogyny and you name it.
But wasn't she the one that was not even in the building?
It claims she was.
Turns out she was in the.
The Ray Barn office building, or something.
It's amazing.
They're just shameless.
That's the biggest set of non sequiturs I have ever heard.
It doesn't matter.
They can take any event now, like I'm buying yogurt at the store.
That's about white supremacy.
It's just because they are obsessed.
They do not want to talk about the actual problems.
The biggest problem we have today is the academic skills gap.
Every academic standard, every behavioral standard, every criminal standard has disparate impact.
The left does not want to address that problem.
And so instead, they have made the search for white racism the dominant activity of the elite establishment, whether it's in academics, whether it's corporations, law firms, banks, big tech, you name it.
I mean, come on, this January 6th riot had nothing to do with racism, sexism, misogyny.
It was a bunch of people who believed that the election was stolen.
I happen to not believe that.
I am not persuaded by any evidence that there was systemic rigging going on.
There were mistakes, I'm sure, made.
There was perhaps garden variety fraud.
But I don't believe it was rigged.
But they seriously believe that.
And they believe that the government was illegitimate.
Therefore, it's an epistemological problem because those of us who criticize that action often do so from the perspective that the rigging narrative was wrong.
But if you really believe it, I mean, if you believe Trump's words, then things are very seriously askew.
That doesn't give you license to tear the Capitol down.
In any case, that's what this is about.
But it's a disinformation problem.
That's your point.
It's a disinformation problem.
That's how I see it, too.
They got sucked down into YouTube rabbit holes.
It's what's happening with COVID on a lot of the disinformation that's out there.
It doesn't mean I think it should be censored, but certainly it's happening.
And they started to believe that he really was going to become the president.
And all they had to do was show up at the Capitol and take their country back and so on, whatever.
It doesn't mean that there were no white supremacists there, but it wasn't about white supremacy.
They want to turn everything into white supremacy.
What's going on?
All you have to do to take down an individual or an institution today, Megan, is use one fatal word white.
That's it.
We are now seeing every accomplishment, every summit of sublimity that Western civilization has given us torn down in the name of fighting phantom white supremacy.
I've been following a lot what's been going on with something that is the dearest thing to my heart, which is classical music.
But the logic of this is as if you needed another reason to read Heather.
The stuff you, because I don't follow this world at all, and the stories coming out of the music world, thanks to you, are shocking.
Sorry, go ahead.
What's happening to classical music is worthy in its own right, if you love this tradition, but it is also emblematic of the strategy and tactics that are being used to take everything down.
The claim is that the classical music profession currently is racist, that it's discriminating against Black musicians.
A claim that is patently ludicrous on his face because every orchestra auditions musicians behind a screen.
So, nobody, the people choosing the musician, do not know that musician's sex or race.
So, somehow that now has been turned into racism.
The fact that it's all about outcome, they don't care about intent.
All they care about is, quote, impact.
So, if the numbers in the orchestra don't Adequately, in somebody's random view, reflect diversity by necessity under critical race theory, under Ibrahim X. Kendi's view of the world, it's racist.
Right.
But so, those of us that have held on to some shred of respect for evidence know that that's a ludicrous claim because you can't be colorblind and not know somebody's race and still be discriminating against him because of his race.
I mean, let's just assert that, Kendi notwithstanding.
But the other claim against classical music is that.
The composers in that tradition were overwhelmingly white, and therefore they all are defined by white supremacy.
But anything coming out of Europe, whether it's art history or architecture or science for that matter, because of the demographics of Europe, will be overwhelmingly black, white, excuse me.
There simply were no blacks in Europe of any number until the 20th century, the late 20th century.
And so That gesture, that rhetorical gesture, though, gives people the power to simply cancel entire traditions.
Nobody uses the same logic when it comes to canceling African drum music, which is exclusively Black.
Or Indian, East Indian classical music, which was created by and for and with Indians or Chinese classical opera.
It's only the demographics of Europe that are used against it.
And what is particularly preposterous, Megan, the extraordinary thing about the Western classical tradition, partly because it's notated, it's written, the fact that it's based on written scores allowed for.
Canceling Musical Traditions 00:15:16
Stylistic development over 500 years that is simply mind blowing.
The difference between a Renaissance motet and Stravinsky, or even between a Bach passion and a Chopin nocturne, is galaxies away.
Each composer is extraordinarily individual in the pathos, the longing, the eros that he has.
Brought to the world, and we are allowed to follow the movement of the human mind through his music.
To unite all of these into one thing, which is just whiteness, shows such ignorance, such aesthetic blindness and deafness.
It is mind blowing.
But that is the logic.
Whatever you love, if it has come out of Europe, it is coming down under that logic.
And so we better be prepared, Megan.
To stop kowtowing to this and say, this is not about race.
This is about greatness and creation, and we are not going to cancel our culture.
Yeah, and the beauty of humanity and the amazing works that have been produced over the years.
It's so crazy that we've gotten to this place where if there's any racial disparity at all in any industry, the answer is to throw out anything created by a white person.
And this manifested itself, well, many times, but you wrote an article on June 10th.
Called Resisting Racial Demagoguery.
And I highly recommend that everybody read it, City Journal.
And it's about what happened with the Tulsa Opera and a composer named Daniel Bernard Rumain.
Is that how you pronounce it?
I think so.
Can you tell the audience what happened with Daniel Rumain?
Well, Daniel Rumain is the epitome of the Black Lives Matter activist in classical music today.
His career is based on race baiting.
He writes works like I Am a White Person Who Blank.
Black people, meaning, you know, write in who detests them, who oppresses them, who subjugates them.
And he has called for orchestras to exclusively program Black artists.
He wants to write a work for exclusively BIPOC, that's Black, Indigenous, people of color, members of an orchestra.
In other words, let's put it baldly Daniel Romaine is a racist.
He believes that Blacks should.
Should take precedence over all things.
So he was invited to participate in a concert that the Tulsa Opera was planning to commemorate the centennial of the 1921 race riots in Tulsa, which were horrific.
After a still undetermined incident happened between a Black and a white teenager, there was some gunfire that broke out on the part of Blacks, and then the white mob rampaged through the Greenwood section of Tulsa, which was then the Business, black business, and residential section of Poulsen burning buildings.
And the official report found that there was probably about 26 blacks who were dead.
The media reports hundreds, you know, who knows what the reality.
In any case, this was a concert that was going to have.
Eight Black singers singing works by 23 living Black composers, as well as spirituals, you know, traditional Black folk songs.
And Romaine was given one of the Plum Commission assignments of four, they were going to commission four new works.
He got one of them, and he was going to write for Denise Graves, who was one of the great sopranos of the 1990s and 2000s.
She made her Met debut as Carmen.
That performance, you know, went around the world.
She was highly sought after for many, many years.
Any composer would kill to compose something for Denise Graves.
So, Romaine, compatibly with his attitude towards life, wrote a piece called They Still Want to Kill Us, which was all about what he calls the enduring stain of racial hatred in the American white American psyche.
And it ended with the lines God bless America, God damn America.
Well, Denise Graves, who is Black, said that the final line, as much as she believes in Black lives mattering and supporting Black artists, did not accord with her personal values.
And so the pianist for the planned orchestra concert, who's Black himself, Howard Watkins, he's an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, and the head of Tulsa Opera, a composer named Tobias Picker, tried to negotiate with Romaine saying, Can you change that last line in some way that would make it possible for Denise Graves to sing it?
And he remained put his foot down, said no way.
And Graves would not do it because it did not accord with her understanding of America and racial reconciliation.
So they canceled the aria, they paid Romaine his fee, and he immediately turned around and did what Romaine does best, which is play the race card.
He actually said that the cancellation of his opera was tantamount.
To the race riot in Greenwood, that he was the victim of similar white supremacy.
Never mind the fact that it was Denise Graves, who was black, who refused to sing this, and it was Howard Watkins, the pianist, who was the go between.
He blamed everything on Tobias Pickery.
He said, This is what happens when white males run music organizations.
They should not do so.
This is about.
A white trying to oppress me.
This is a completely false narrative.
So he then got the work produced, performed on video.
I've listened to it.
You can see it online.
A black soprano, Janae Bridges, who's very involved in the Black Lives Matter in the opera movement, sang it.
The lyrics are pathetic.
The musical writing is insipid.
A composer suggested to me that one reason why Denise Graves may have balked at singing it was just because it's lousy music.
But the irony is that it actually probably helped remain because the concert that did come forward, called Greenwood Overcomes, was fantastic.
The works that were played there by such Black artists as Adolphus Hailstroke and Tanya Leon and Quinn Mason were gorgeous.
Amazingly, only one of them even touched on the Tulsa riots and racial animosity.
Most of them were songs of love, songs of loss, songs of consolation.
And the Remain piece, not just because of its political valence, which remains right, I mean, that's perfectly right, but really because of its musical mediocrity, would have been quite out of place there.
The great The ending of this story that does give one maybe a shred of hope, and I'm not usually an optimist, is that Tulsa Opera is still standing.
What we're seeing in the classical music world today and in the theater world and then the ballet world is supine subjugation.
Every institution is rolling over and playing dead, beating its chest.
Oh, we're racist, we're racist.
Every new play on Broadway this season is by a Black composer, a Black creator.
They may be great plays.
But let's be honest about why they've been commissioned.
Tulsa Opera did not cave, and it is moving forward as strong as ever.
And I wish that more of the guardians and curators of our culture would show similar courage instead of staying silent in the face of these utterly ungrounded, ignorant attacks that, again, are destroying the very thing that makes life worth living, which is the creation of beauty and sublimity.
It's unbelievable.
The whole story is unbelievable.
And in the piece, there was one piece you talked about how in the summer of 2020, this same composer, this guy Rumain, he'd been complaining on Facebook and reading from your piece about the lack of racial proportionality in orchestras.
And that's when a retired principal violinist from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra offered to tutor minority musicians in audition techniques.
Very nice of this guy, right?
He's like, okay, I didn't know that was a problem.
I'm there.
And he said, just help me secure the introductions.
I'm good.
The offer went nowhere, you write.
And can you tell us why Romaine rejected the offer of this violinist, Alexander Mishnevsky?
Yeah, he's Russian because he apparently wasn't willing to sort of take the Black Lives Matter line when he was tutoring these musicians.
It was just not sufficiently attuned to the Black struggle today.
And Mishnevsky was the principal violist of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
He is a musician with years of experience overseeing auditions.
He would have been an invaluable aid to up and coming minority string players.
And yet, Romaine didn't want to use him.
You know, the culture seems to be going one way, but more and more we see warriors standing up to fight, to become fighters.
Remember how Dennis Prager told us you need to be a fighter or at least a helper?
We'll introduce you to one fighter next in a great, great sound bite and get Heather's reaction.
We are starting to see more and more people like the Tulsa Opera push back against some of these bullying attempts.
Really?
Just in the news yesterday, a little bit, here and there.
And I don't know if it's so much corporate America, right?
I mean, Chris Ruffo, God bless Chris Ruffo and his great reporting, but he had a report just yesterday about American Express and its critical race theory training of its employees, and it was just absurd what they're making people do.
It's all the stuff that we've heard.
It was basically they have to divide themselves into oppressor and oppressed.
They've figured out where they are in the racial or sexual disparity scale and oppression scale.
And then they have to read certain books or follow certain podcasts that are going to help educate them on white supremacy in America, including one that says something like, children are not colorblind.
And I went and looked at it.
It's all about how your baby, six months out of the womb, is already becoming a racist and needs an intervention.
You need a little Robin DiAngelo for babies, I guess.
So anyway, but we are little by little seeing signs of hope, I think.
And one of them yesterday.
Came out of Loudoun County, you know, which has been sort of ground zero on teachers and parents trying to push back against critical race theory.
We've seen angry clips out of school board meetings.
By the way, there, they just pushed through some approval of.
Transgender or just unisex bathrooms, I guess, allowing that to happen.
So, you know, it's not all going one way.
But there was a Loudoun County teacher who showed up at a board meeting because she'd been told she wasn't allowed to really say how she felt.
She says no dissent to the CRT training and messaging in the schools is allowed, that she was told she's not allowed to even object to it.
So, this is a young woman.
She shows up to speak to the board.
Nobody else is there because, given all the troubles there, they took the COVID problems as an excuse to say, oh, no, no one else can come.
And she shows up in an empty room with the board sitting there.
Somebody filmed it and said, in part, as follows Listen, my name is Laura Morris.
I have been a teacher in Loudoun County Public Schools for five years.
This summer, I have struggled with the idea of returning to school, knowing that I'll be working yet again with a school division that, despite its shiny tech and flashy salary, promotes political ideologies that do not square with who I am as a believer in Christ.
Within the last year, I was told in one of my so called equity trainings that white Christian, able bodied females currently have the power in our schools, and that quote, this has to change.
Clearly, you've made your point.
You no longer value me or many other teachers you've employed in this county.
School board, I quit.
I quit your policies, I quit your trainings, and I quit being a cog in a machine that tells me to push highly politicized agendas on our most vulnerable constituents, the children.
Fantastic.
Listen, conservative philanthropists, where are you?
Find that woman, create a school around her.
There's others like her.
We have to create alternative institutions.
And, you know, she will be still standing.
I'm sure she will be able to get a job.
More people have to step forward and be willing to live through the Twitter mob.
You know, in most cases, they can't take you down.
On the other hand, you know, let's notice that there have been plenty of people who have been fired.
James Bennett, you know, infamously from the New York Times editorial board for running an op ed by Tom Cotton.
Claim it calling for a federal response to the riots of 2020 that made black, apparently, running that editorial made black employees at the New York Times feel unsafe.
So, yes, people have lost their jobs, there's no question about it.
But at some point, if enough people stand up, we are going to unmask this ideology.
What really has to happen, Megan, though, right now, the only allowable explanation for socioeconomic disparities is bias.
That is what's driving everything today.
In our culture, that's why everything is coming down, is because, as you say, there is not 13%, 12% Black representation at Sullivan and Cromwell Law Firm, at Gibson Dunn Crutcher Law Firm, at Google, at Microsoft, because the average Black 12th grader reads at the level of the average white eighth grader.
The vast majority of Black eighth graders do not have even partial mastery of math and reading skills.
A gap that does not close.
There's a standard deviation of accomplishment on virtually every type of colorblind, standardized, objective test.
But we're not allowed to talk about those gaps.
We're not allowed to talk about the crime gap.
Instead, any disparity, as you say, is chalked up to racism.
And as long as that is the only explanation in the public sphere, the left wins.
Poverty vs. Meritocracy Standards 00:02:40
The left will continue destroying meritocratic standards, which you brought up earlier, that every standard is coming down because they all have a disparate impact.
That's not because the standards are racist.
It's because there are different skills levels that need to be eradicated before we can expect proportional representation.
So let's talk about what drives that.
What drives it?
Because I've heard, I mean, I've heard, I had a great debate between Glenn Lowry and I think it was Brianna Joy Gray.
And she was accusing him of being too focused on Black culture, saying, you know, it's not a bootstrap situation.
And she was saying it's poverty driven by large.
Part.
You know, she was saying, yes, there are definitely some racist structures, but she's not really a BLM type person.
She's not like a woke activist, Brianna.
And she was saying, if you look at sort of the poverty situation in America and how most black kids are raised and they don't have full bellies when they go to school and that's distracting and so on and so forth.
But I mean, to me, I was like, okay, she's persuading me that this is a real factor.
And how do we solve that?
I don't know, Heather.
I haven't studied it.
But what do you say is causing that disparity?
Immigrant children come to this school.
You know, there's a book by Ying Ma of, I forget what it's called now, Chinese Girl in the Ghetto or something, who came to Oakland.
Her parents had nothing.
She was in a predominantly black school.
She succeeded.
Her classmates overall did not.
I'm sure there were many exceptions because her parents absolutely oversaw her education.
They were fanatically dedicated to academic accomplishment.
She was not allowed to hang out on the streets at 2 a.m., she was not involved in drugs, she was not involved in gangs.
The idea of poverty, I'm in conversation now with a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District who is not too happy about the race, white privilege training that they've been having to take online, the grading rubrics, which don't allow you to assign Fs or penalize somebody for not turning in any homework or doing any tests.
And she points out that the schools that she's taught in, the Title I schools that are the Poor populations are awash in resources, whereas there's a charter school in Studio City that has a lot of Hollywood kids there that has no money at all.
The parents do all the fundraising.
They have no computers.
You know, the poor schools have one computer per student.
Identity Politics in Schools 00:09:45
I mean, Heather, so if you became president of the United States next time around, how would you start on something like that?
What's issue number one to tackle?
I guess I'm not at policy want by instinct.
I'm not sure that there's a lot of Policy that we can do.
You know, the policy wonks like to tweak tax credits, and we now have this absurd idea of the government paying families for having children with whether or not they're working or not, which is just returning us to the destructive regime of free welfare for all.
I think what has to happen is really a cultural shift.
So I guess I would use every bully pulpit I could to say that children need, on average, mothers and fathers, that males are not toxic.
I would stop the demonizing of males in our culture.
We have been taken over by the feminist ideology that says that strong women can do it all.
We regard fathers as sort of optional appendages to a family.
And the APA, the American Psychology Association, I referred previously to its work on the big five personality traits and neuroticism.
I can guarantee you, if they were doing that same study today, they would not come up with that observation, which is true, because now it has gone as left as anything else.
Several years ago, it had a whole new sort of diagnostic sickness, which was maleness.
You know, the traits of self reliance and competition. Are toxic and pathological.
I mean, we really are disappearing males from this culture, and male creating institutions have all been taken over.
The idea of putting females in combat units is suicidal if you care about defense because you're going to introduce Eros into those combat units.
The only reason we're doing that is in order to qualify more females to be four star generals.
It has nothing to do with war readiness.
You know, the Boy Scouts have gone under.
So, the traditional institutions that recognize the male virtues of chivalry and risk taking, exploration, empire building, are being decimated.
And I don't think that bodes well for civilization.
But you know what, Megan?
Being female is not an accomplishment.
It's not even particularly interesting.
And the same goes for every other type of identity characteristic.
But right now, we have our science bureaucracies that are rife.
With this meritocracy destroying identity politics, where we say it's more important that your lab be diverse than that it be the first to develop a final cure for cancer.
China, meanwhile, is ruthlessly meritocratic.
It does not look at all at sex or at ethnicity.
You get one shot at university, you take an exam, it's colorblind, it's objective, and they live with the results.
They are going to speed ahead in science and technology unless.
We can get them somehow infected with the identity politics gene, which will stop their progress as well.
Well, it doesn't, it doesn't, it's like to suggest that we don't have the opportunity, women, to get involved in STEM related careers now or university educations is totally absurd.
We have more opportunity than any place on earth.
But, you know, Abigail Schreier was pointing out in her book, her beautiful book, Irreversible Damage, and on this show too, that here's the truth a lot of women don't want to do that.
They don't want to go into those fields.
And you know what?
Here's the second part.
That's okay.
That's fine.
What I object to the fact that now that the opportunity is there, so is the shame on little girls who are like, no, I'm not into that.
I don't want to do the science and technology.
I want to go read the English literature, or I want a job that involves people and being around, you know, whatever, using my communication skills, reading and talk, what have you, the opera, let's say.
And instead, we look at young girls, or the messaging is, you're less than unless you're going to be tomorrow's scientist.
And the other point she was making, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, Heather, was one of the reasons why, and this is eye-opening for me too, because I used to lament the fact that there are so few female CEOs at the Fortune 500 and 100 level.
And she offered a different way of looking at it.
And as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, that's true.
And it was, in a lot of cases, women, they're too smart for that.
They have prioritized their family, their well-being, their friendships, their need to see their friends and the people around them.
They are not going to be, they're built differently, and they're not going to be okay with 18 hour days, six days a week for years and years and years.
And that too is all right.
You know, every time your listeners and viewers, Megan, see another one of these damn strong girls can do it all programs that are being funded by the government or by the private sector, by the Ford Foundation, you know, girls who code, you know, science for females, they should be appalled.
It is a miracle that any boys are even trying anymore because they are a disappeared population.
The idea that, that, that.
Philanthropic and government efforts still need to focus on females as if they're in a press class, as you say, is ludicrous when it comes to just sheer college completion.
Females dominate, they're the dominant population in colleges today.
Now, at the outer edges, too, of right of math cluelessness and math brilliance, males predominate.
They've got the worst math skills and they've got the best math skills at the highest ranges of the math SAT.
The male to female ratio is about 2.5 to 1.
And so, as Larry Summers acknowledged, and this got him fired from Harvard presidency, there's a different distribution, the curves are different in the distribution of math skills.
So, we do not need to focus more on encouraging females.
What we need to do is stop telling males that they are toxic.
I noticed, however, Megan, that when you were offering a set of alternative pathways for females to the You know, either being the CEO or being the first engineer at Google, and you were saying rightly, study English literature as I did, as I still view as the highest calling one could have, or, you know, be an opera singer or be in the arts world.
How about be a mother?
You know, that too should be valorized as one of the most important things that you could do.
I feel extraordinarily privileged that I had a stay at home mother who, Knew the British children's literature classics, who read to me Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland and E. Nesbitt that filled my imagination with fairies and nature and irony and wit that these great children's books had.
Being a mother is a calling as much as anything else.
But in the career world, you're absolutely right.
I've gone around, Megan, collecting.
What I call natural experiments to test the theory that it is gatekeepers, that it is misogynist gatekeepers who are excluding females from various institutions.
And my hypothesis is that that is a bunch of crock.
And here's the best refutation of the gatekeeper, the misogynist gatekeeper hypothesis Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that anybody can contribute to, anybody can edit.
Nobody knows anybody's identity.
It is open to all.
There are no gatekeepers.
And it is a new institution.
It's not as if we have hundreds of years of misogynist Wikipedia tradition that has just told females, don't even try.
Wikipedia is like, what, 15 years old, 20 years old?
So, arose in a gender equal vibrant.
Nobody knows who's doing anything.
Wikipedia's editors are about 90% male.
Nobody is keeping females out.
They can go, they're anonymous.
Nobody's going to complain about them.
The fact of the matter is, Is that males are more interested in public affairs and in data and in their insane, like competitive baseball score statistics, which I just can't even follow.
But that, you know, and it's the same with letters to the editor, to the newspaper.
Nobody's preventing females from sending in letters to the editor, but they run at least two to one male to female.
And some do.
I mean, the point is, You're not saying that there's no woman who wants to edit on Wikipedia or be a scientist or be a CEO.
Now, I'm not saying that either.
It's just that the disparity cannot be chalked up universally to sexism and a patriarchy, that some women are more masculine in their approach to life and in their makeup, and some women aren't.
And we're Treating them all like they're these disadvantaged little violets who will never advance in life or be happy in life unless they do what the STEM technology says they must and can do.
Balancing Motherhood and Career 00:03:11
I will tell you, Heather, I've come a long ways on this because I was raised in a mostly Democratic family.
We were Catholic, so we certainly had some more traditional values.
But politically, I would say my family voted Democrat because our belief was that the Republicans were for the rich and we weren't.
We weren't rich.
Anyway, I was sort of, I would say younger in my career, I was much more into the a woman can do it all.
I can have it all.
I've got this kick ass career.
I've got a great husband.
I've got three kids.
I'm banging life out.
Like, this is great.
I can do it all.
Nobody who says otherwise is right.
And it took a long time at the height of my career with my three young kids.
All right.
Now they're all here and they're all young and they all need me because I'm the mom and they do need their mom, period.
For me to realize, I am, forgive me, fucking miserable.
This isn't good enough.
This isn't okay.
I am not okay.
I don't care.
And a lot of my guy friends, when I said I'm going to leave the Kelly file and I'm going to go do this morning show, were like, Are you insane?
You're at the height of power, of influence.
People listen to you.
You're an authority figure.
And all I could say was, I'm unhappy and it's not good enough.
And I'm not going to miss my children's.
Upbringing.
I want to be the one to do it.
I knew I didn't want to give up work.
I do enjoy working.
I love the intellectual stimulation.
So I knew that would be an overcorrection to just go home and raise them.
And nor would I be a good mother if I were with them full time.
It's just how I'm made up.
But not for one moment, as rocky as my road through NBC was, not for one moment have I regretted leaving that job and having the past, I left in January of 17, you know, having had the past four plus years with them.
I can't imagine a different life, Heather.
And now I feel a different responsibility to say to other young women, you know, many of whom listen to my earlier messages, there's so much merit in the other way too.
Like, don't be pressured into thinking you must have it all, quote unquote.
And don't believe, don't always reject that little voice in the back of your head that's telling you this job thing and being at the apex of power that's telling you that's not good enough.
That's not good enough.
You made three little lives and they need you.
And you don't get a do over.
And once you cry at their high school graduation, you know, your tears of lament won't do anything for them, for you.
You know, it's not worth it doing breaking another news story on the A block of Fox News to miss yet another recital or a moment to tuck them in at night, all of it, you know.
So I feel like my journey on this has been, I won't say complete, it's ongoing, but it's been eye opening.
Well, that is so fantastic to hear, Megan.
And I really hope.
That everyone is listening to you, and I think they are, because the feminist movement is engaged in a bunch of complete contradictions.
Employment Crises for Women 00:15:47
It is illogical, it is unbiological, it is against human nature.
The idea that somehow making partner by working, you know, billing those 2,200 hours a year, staying up until 2 a.m., pouring over discovery documents and correcting them for typos.
Is more important than, as you say, raising those three unique lives, is for feminists basically to adopt male values.
You know, it's to accept the male version of the world, which is highly competitive, which is status obsessed.
And it's the values which gave us civilization because they led to exploration and conquest, which is often a very good thing.
But, you know, what, and yet at the same time, you have feminists claiming that females are different and better from males.
You know, if we all had female politicians, we wouldn't make war anymore.
Maybe so, maybe not, but they, you know, insist that females are better.
And yet, when it comes to recognizing Specifically, female values like empathy and the ability to raise children, they refuse to acknowledge those.
But as you say, there are individual differences.
There are plenty of fathers that are far more nurturing than mothers.
There are mothers who are martinet, draconian, disciplined freaks.
And it's to the father that the child comes running for solace.
When the mother said, You idiot, you screwed up on your homework again.
But on average, again, both of us, I'm not talking about anybody's daughter.
I'm not saying your daughter is not going to be the next Nobel Prize winner in physics.
I'm talking about averages and distributions.
On average, females, mothers have a different connection to their children.
And to pretend that connection doesn't exist and that child doesn't need it because you want to make a partner or be in the C suite, it's your choice, certainly.
But don't claim that that is.
Sort of a neutral choice that isn't, in fact, all about politics and about trying to prove something.
I'm amazed, as you said earlier, Megan, the idea that we're discriminated against is ludicrous.
I have never in my life been discriminated against because I'm female.
I have been greeted with open arms.
I know to the contrary, just as the reality of our world today is black privilege, not white privilege, the reality of our world today is female privilege, not white, not male privilege.
I have been put, and we can't go by you.
You're like one of the most brilliant people alive.
You can't go by your own experience.
That's not okay.
We got to pick a more average target.
No, what I'm saying is, I've been put on panels.
I've been chosen to speak because I'm a female, because they want that female.
Yes.
It's not because of my qualifications that my qualifications are not particularly impressive, but I actually had a producer from Fox invite me on to one of their Fox Nation things that was on like interest rates or something, which I do not know anything beyond what I barely surmise.
In the newspaper.
And this female producer actually admitted to me.
I said, it's because I'm a female.
And she admitted that is the case.
Females are being advanced.
You know, we have now this phenomenon in science a stigma against mannels.
A mannel is a predominantly male scientific panel.
And no less than the head of the National Institutes of Health, Frances Collins, who has been going around for the last year beating his chest about how science is so systemically racist.
He also thinks it's systemically misogynist.
And he has declared that he will not attend any scientific conference.
I don't care if it's got the most cutting edge researchers on COVID or Alzheimer's or autism, if the researchers are predominantly male.
And so you know that if there's a conference under the auspices of the NIH and it's 50% female, you have no idea whether those are most qualified scientists.
You only know that they're there because of their gonads and their sex.
And that is the reality in our world today.
That is undermining too.
Right, exactly.
That's the same problem with it.
We've talked about it with other guests too on affirmative action, right?
It's like a lot of Black scholars resent it because they get tarred with this you check the box.
Sort of judgment that may or may not be fair at all.
And even kids who did check the box get it.
And you're sort of up against it right from the start, right?
You're seen as sort of maybe not equal, not as good as, that you're less than, you didn't belong there.
It raises all sorts of issues that are ongoing for those kids when they actually get into the schools.
Don't leave me now.
We got more coming up in 60 seconds.
This is a good time to probably inject some of the Me Too conversation, which I know you and I too have been critical of.
But without using the label me too, right?
Because that brings up so much.
I maintain that the heart of that movement, you know, that in a way I was a part of was good.
You know, putting a stop or at least empowering women to feel like they had a safe way of objecting to their bosses pawing them physically.
I mean, committing crimes really in exchange for professional advancement or just the maintenance of one's job was a good thing.
It had been going on for a long time and it needed.
an avenue out for women that was meaningful as opposed to just, you got to suck it up and let them grab your boob if you want to get that, if you want to keep your job.
And that's why it's a case by case situation, right?
You got to look at each one and say, I don't believe her.
I do believe her.
And that's totally fine.
But that's why I was happy to see Andrew Cuomo go down this week.
I thought he should have gone down over the nursing home scandal, but no one seemed to want to pay any attention to that because they just wanted to run cover for him.
And when the women started coming forward, I was glad to see it.
Because I wanted him to go down.
I was open about my bias.
My closest friend is Janice Dean, who's been sort of leading the way.
But I also read their accounts, and I thought this guy should not be sitting in the governor's mansion.
You don't grab your assistant's breast and her bottom and shove your tongue down her throat and grab the belly of a state trooper who's protecting it, all the stuff he allegedly did, and keep that post.
This is gross.
But I'd love to know what your thoughts are as somebody who's been skeptical of the movement.
Yes, and I respect your viewpoint.
Enormously, Megan, I've mostly been a solo worker, so I've not been in that type of office environment and have not experienced that kind of behavior.
And I would never purport to question your experience with that kind of oppression.
But I will say, you know, I'm glad too that Cuomo has had his downfall.
Just listening to his, I put myself through the torture of listening to his COVID conferences at the start of the pandemic.
March and April, and they were simply unbearable.
The man is such a narcissist, and he was so wallowing in this unjustly granted celebrity and whatnot, and obviously thinks that every word out of his mouth is brilliant.
And we were subjected to little tales of his Italian grandma that got recycled multiple times, and his children, and oh, it was unbearable.
Nevertheless, I will say I do differ with you on Me Too and politics, I'll have to say, which is that.
I think that human life is in different domains.
I think there's the domain of Eros, male female relations, and then there's the public realm of politics, of leadership.
And I don't think that one is relevant to the other.
Let me put another thought experiment to you.
If it turned out that some of our greatest founding fathers, I'm just pulling a name out of the hat, James Madison.
And again, believe me, this is a hypothetical, it is not based in reality.
I'm just positing.
A thought experiment.
What if it turned out that James Madison was a skirt chaser and he pawed his wife's maid?
Would we think that it would have been better for the country?
That he be ejected from a leadership position in drafting the Federalist Papers and drafting the Constitution, in creating the most unique at that time architecture for public life, for government life, because when it came to the private realm of Eros, he acted like an entitled male and gave in to his sexual lust.
I don't think that's a fair trade off.
I think that it is a.
I don't disagree with that, but what if you took it further and said he was a rapist?
Let's take that to a greater extreme and say he was running around raping women, severely hurting women.
Then I'd say, yeah, he's got to go.
We could find somebody else just like him.
There were a lot of great guys back then.
Yeah, and I guess I would say there that I would not have a special category for crimes against women.
I would say criminals.
I'm sick of the idea that females are a particular category that should have.
You know, hate crimes around them or be treated specially.
So, yeah, if he's a serial criminal, then he's not a good person to be involved in the creation of a government.
But short of that, short of somebody going around and criminally raping people, and I would stick really much to a traditional definition of rape.
I think a lot of, I certainly do not think that what's going on on campuses fits that definition.
These are acquaintances.
And yeah, I recommend that chapter of your book, The Diversity Delusion, to people, because it does call out, I mean, We can be honest about crimes and power dynamics without classifying everything as a sexual assault.
I mean, we can, you know, and it's like, look, women are now, they classify so much on college campuses as an assault.
It can be, it can literally be a man just touching your arm when you don't want him to.
And it's ruinous for the men who get accused, and especially with no due process, thanks to Obama.
And now, once again, Biden's trying to bring it back.
I see all that.
But I do think the character of a person does matter.
And I don't know.
I mean, like JFK cheating on his wife, that's not really something I have much interest in.
You know, even Bill Clinton cheating on his wife, I don't know if I have much interest in it.
I mean, it's salacious.
So I'm interested as a human, but I don't know that I would have wanted him bounced out of office had I been one of the senators at the time.
But I think when it shows a pattern of abuse, and certainly when job advancement is conditioned on submission, that's such an abuse of power that he's got to go.
He's got to go.
Yeah, I, and I'm not sure that this is a real distinction.
I'm making it in my mind and it may be completely collapsed.
But I would say there's a difference between employment relations and then political accomplishment.
And my point is really mixing.
I think it is a narcissistic gesture on the part of feminists to say that what I think is sort of more the personal realm of sexual.
Ambiguity between males and females of the constant sort of probing, seeing what is their reciprocal interest, even if there's not reciprocal interest.
I mean, look at, I know that the just obnoxious self involvement of males who like to be the most unattractive people in the world and they keep pushing.
It's like, are you kidding me?
Look at you, guy.
You know, you really think this isn't going to get you anywhere you're attracted.
But to take that realm and to take down.
Male politicians, because as I say, the ability to negotiate, the ability to maybe be a great diplomat, to be over, you know, dealing with Cold War politics, to understand leverage.
To be able to figure out solutions, compromises among warring parties.
That is a different skill.
And it's a male skill.
It's also a female skill.
I'm not saying it's exclusively male, but traditionally it has been predominantly male.
I just think that the fact that somebody, when he's back in the office, is eyeing somebody's butt is just not relevant to his ability to lead this country out of perhaps tortuous.
Geopolitical situation or domestic situation.
How could they leave him?
Let's say we accept the allegations of all these women against Cuomo.
This is interesting to me.
I like this discussion.
Let's say we accept, because he's both, right?
He's a politician who's doing things in the political world, but then back, the women he allegedly harassed, many of them, are employees, right?
That is the employment situation.
So the number one, accuser number one, was his executive assistant, a young woman who says he grabbed her breast underneath her blouse.
Grabbed her behind, and among other things.
It's not like he can't do his job as governor having done those things, but you can't.
He has two hats.
And as somebody who's at the top of the government and the staff in the government, how could we knowingly leave him there to keep doing that to woman after woman when we know how difficult it is for the women, what a spot it puts them in, that it's not legal, it's not lawful for him to do it.
So, you can't just say, oh, well, he's really good at the other stuff, and we're going to ignore this other lane.
No, you're absolutely right.
I mean, it's very, very complicated.
And so, were they to bring an employment complaint, that may be the counterpart to impeachment.
I don't know.
So, I'm sort of dealing with just sort of the abstract categories here.
You're getting rightly so into the complexities of trying to deal with the situation as it is.
I'm just stating as a general principle, I don't think that we should say that somebody's political career should be decimated because he doesn't always keep his hands for himself.
And you've also posited, which is absolutely right to do so, saying let's assume arguendo that all of these allegations are absolutely accurate.
We know darn well that that is a risky assumption to make.
But I'm changing the slant here.
But at one point, I think it's undisputed that.
One female says to him, you know, during one of these encounters, Well, you'll get us in trouble.
To me, that kind of line sounds like somebody who's complicit.
And, you know, he claims that there was flirtatiousness on the other side.
And again, let's be realistic.
The power dynamics work both ways, and females know very well how to play their sexual attractiveness for advancement and for.
Navigating Workplace Favoritism 00:06:28
Favors or favoritism on the part of males.
So I just, I'm not 100% convinced that it is cut and dried.
And, you know, I think we should be very, very wary given what we've seen with the campus rape allegations and Kavanaugh and whatnot.
But you're perfectly within your rights to say, let's posit that they're all correct.
Then what do you do?
And, but I would also then insist that, and I'm not accusing you of not doing this, that.
Let's imagine that Cuomo was a politician who understood the beauty of commerce, who understood the grandeur of individual enterprise and entrepreneurship, who was not willing to subject the struggling small restaurants in New York City and state.
To completely arbitrary shutdown orders, who was willing to speak about opportunity and the fact that students and of personal responsibility, you know, would we still say that he should go because he was too handsy?
And I felt the same thing.
You know, I thought the effort against Biden was ridiculous.
I think that that really was a case of an old school politician who was handsy.
And I was disappointed to see conservatives jumping on that.
Blowing out of proportion.
I mean, I remember pictures at the time that conservative websites and even anchors at Fox News were showing of Biden with two 80 year old women with his hands around them.
And they were saying that was an instance of sexual harassment.
But there is a creepy strain to him, Heather.
Come on.
I'm sorry.
There's something weird with him sniffing the hair, making the weird comments about the young girls.
I'm telling you, if I were in a room with Biden, I would let him meet my daughter, but I would not necessarily leave her alone in the room.
It's not like I just think he's a little creepy.
Well, let's be a little bit more tolerant.
I mean, that's another sort of feminist trait.
And I'm not saying it's yours, but a little brittle.
We're brittle towards human frailty and the variety of human experience.
I guess it's creepy, but there are different spectrums of people that are more physical with others.
And these are politicians that feel way more.
Well, look, if it's me, that's one thing.
I can handle myself and always have.
If it's my 10 year old daughter, it's a different story.
When she gets old enough, she'll learn.
Trust me, she'll be at the place where she can handle him just fine.
And guys like, but I agree with you.
Listen, I am all about shoring up strong young women.
And I hate when women and men, but really it's a woman thing for a large part, resort to playing the victim.
And even though I have been sexually harassed, I don't use that term victim.
I'm not a victim.
I wasn't anybody's victim.
I was the target of a guy who was behaving inappropriately.
And I got through it like most women do.
Wasn't prepared to make a federal case about it ever.
You know, came up many years later because the question was then asked, does he ever do this?
And I was in the position of having to say, well, you know, if we're really putting this to the test, I do have information on it.
But that's not to say I want my daughter to be put in the position where she has to handle it.
And I certainly think when you're dealing with a boss, you shouldn't have to deal with this bullshit.
And I would tell my sons, if you're in a position of power, you got to check that.
Is it the ethos?
I went to Syracuse.
You got to check that.
Don't fish off the company peer because it's totally fraught.
And there are power differentials that, especially in today's day and age, can get you in trouble.
So you could find yourself a nice girl at the bar or at church or at the mixers, but whatever, I sound like I'm 200, but not at the office unless it's somebody who's equal to you.
Well, I'm going to suggest something, Megan, that I hope you won't mind.
But as long as you're still talking about, Shoring up strong young women, you're giving ground far too much to the left.
I would say you should cancel that as a life project entirely and recognize the fact that it is not females who are struggling, gender dysphoria notwithstanding, and the herd instinct of changing.
It is males who need support.
And we should be about shoring up strong men because they are really at the, they are societies.
Scapegoats at this point.
But I will agree with you in your advice.
I will agree with you in your advice to males.
You know, I'm frankly not all that sympathetic to the males that get caught up on campuses with these ridiculous Me Too.
Sexual assault campus rape charges because they're on notice.
You know, they're on notice that they get drunk and their partner gets drunk and they get in bed, they are very likely to be charged with rape, even though they did not tie the girl down and pour drinks down her throat.
She got herself drunk and she was involved in the prelude to intercourse.
They are assuming risk.
And so when they get When the hammer falls on them, they were perfectly forewarned and they have allowed themselves to be carried away by their hormones, and it frankly serves them right.
So, all sides, I say to hell with them here, but you're right to warn your boys.
I mean, they should be celibacy.
All these boys should take an oath of celibacy until marriage.
I mean, I've said before, if my kids decided to wait until marriage, I'd be just fine with that, but I confess I don't know that it's realistic.
I know you're not religious.
I mean, you're an atheist.
I'm not an atheist, but I'm not particularly religious.
So I don't really have that sort of club to hit them with, you know, like God can see you.
God, but I'd be fine with it.
But I don't think it's going to happen.
And I do think you can navigate this world by, you know, not, I've said before to, you know, to women out there, but it's also true for men, don't be a hoe.
Like keep it in your pants.
Like fall into a loving relationship, something that's meaningful before you take that.
Cop Accountability Discussions 00:02:43
That big step.
And that's probably the best way of protecting yourself because someone who loves you is not going to baselessly turn around and accuse you of rape unless she is insane.
And ideally, you won't fall in love with an insane person if you've taken the time to figure out who this person is.
That's the best prophylactic against finding yourself in that kind of a situation.
Now, I can't believe that we are at an hour and a half, Heather, and I haven't asked you one damn question about the cops, something I've been so fired up about, something you've been amused to me on.
I've read your books, I've listened to everything.
And yet, I can't ask you to continue staying here and talking about the cops.
So, can I at least ask you to come back and we will do a show on cops?
Because you are like the foremost expert on it.
You're the person I want most to hear from about the cops.
No, you cannot ask me, Megan.
I will not come back on your show.
Of course you can.
Are you crazy?
No, I would love to come back.
Let's do a part two on law enforcement, crime rates, incarceration, criminal justice, and people like Lori Lightfoot in Chicago.
And what she has to answer for, for what's happening there.
Sadly, I feel we could put this off for another year.
And unless Biden changes his rhetoric and his policies out of the Justice Department, nothing will have gotten better.
And we will have plenty of material to talk about.
But hopefully, we'll do that before the next year is out.
Absolutely.
I'm going to make it happen.
I'm going to hound you until it does happen.
Heather, what a pleasure.
Such an interesting discussion.
Thank you so much, Megan.
This has been truly great.
And it's an honor and privilege to speak with you at such length.
Don't miss Monday because we've got Wesley Yang.
You know that name?
He wrote the big, big bestseller, The Souls of Yellow Folk, but he also, more recently, was interviewed by Andrew Sullivan and appeared in Andrew's column that, you know, I love, What Happened to You.
And he coined that phrase, the successor ideology.
And he's another sort of cultural commentator.
He's also got his own Substack who's been able to put into perspective what's happening in our country.
Really smart dude and has a way of capturing what's happening on the left right now that I have felt is very helpful, is personally meaningful.
Anyway, he'll be here on Monday, so go ahead and subscribe to the show, rate the show five stars, please, and give us a review while you're there on Apple Podcast Reviews, will you?
It'll help us out.
and it'll give me the chance to see how you guys feel about the show and i look forward to reading it out thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear the megan kelly show is a devil may care media production in collaboration with red seat ventures
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