Feb. 19, 2023 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
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SUNDAY SPECIAL: IS DIVERSITY OUR STRENGTH WITH HEATHER MAC DONALD
On this week’s Sunday Special edition of Human Events, Jack Posobiec is joined by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald to discuss the crumbling systems of our society and whether or not they’re caused by diversity, equity and inclusion. They dive deep into the Tyre Nichols tragedy and conversation surrounding his brutal passing, discussing the Memphis Police Department’s affirmative action hiring strategies as well as solutions that can result in both merit and excellence for the Unit...
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of the Sunday special here on Human Events.
Now, we talk a lot about, on the program, the collapse of complex systems.
We've really seen an acceleration of this in the last two to three years.
Why is this?
Why do complex systems collapse?
How do complex systems collapse?
Well, as the famous quote goes, Gradually, and then suddenly.
Heather McDonald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Times bestselling author.
And she has a new book, When Race Trumps Merit.
In the wake of George Floyd's death, all of the major institutions of American society and culture, from corporations and universities, to media and entertainment, to the arts and sciences, have embraced the view that the only way to reckon with what of course exists is systemic racism, And that's to ensure equality, equality of outcome.
We must put diversity and the needs of diversity ahead of every single other expectation in our world.
No system, no standard is more important of a metric than to measure our civilization by that of diversity, because diversity is our strength, no matter the consequences.
And so in response to this new, what we've called here on the program, Sort of a civic religion.
We take it as a matter of faith that this must be the new orientation of our entire society.
I wanted to bring Heather MacDonald on, and we're excited to have her joining us today for the full Sunday special.
Heather, thank you so much for joining us here on Human Events.
It's wonderful to be with you, Jack.
Thank you so much.
So, just answer, I'd love to get your response to that.
Is diversity our greatest strength?
Is diversity the greatest virtue of Western civilization?
No, it's not.
The greatest virtue of Western civilization is achievement, accomplishment, exploration, the scientific method, constitutional government.
None of those things have any inherent relationship to diversity.
If we want to be truly honest about the empirical data, we would draw on Robert Putnam's work that showed that, in fact, local communities become increasingly distrustful of each other.
There's less Less philanthropy, less charity, the more diverse they are.
But even apart from that empirical work, the fact of the matter is, is that the reason that we keep talking about diversity right now, it's a code word.
If you really want to understand what this discourse is all about, diversity is a code word for racial preferences.
Any institution that is saying, oh, we're in the pursuit of diversity is telling you that it is taking aim at meritocratic standards, because sadly, given the academic skills gap, you can have diversity or you can have meritocracy.
You cannot have both.
And so we've seen just this week, just this very week, one of the biggest stories that's been out there, at least online or in some corners of The information environment has been this East Palestine train derailment.
It had these this this vinyl chlorine on it and there was a controlled burn.
People are very worried about what the potential aftereffects of that be.
Erin Brockovich apparently is headed down there in terms of all of this.
But a lot of people have said, you know, a lot of these train derailments have gone up exponentially in recent years.
We're actually seeing a point where I pulled the stat just from Statista and I Didn't even believe that over 900 people were killed in railway accidents just last year.
So in 2021, 900 people were killed by this.
That's certainly more than the systemic racism that we were told of of unarmed black men killed by police.
And yet, for some reason, we don't hear about the year on year systemic issues with our railways.
And a lot of people have said to me, you know, is this is this a cyber attack?
Is this the Chinese Communist Party?
Is it Russia?
Is it some other actor?
Is it Iran that's attacking us?
But unfortunately, what I think we're seeing from the data is this isn't an attack.
The call is coming from inside the house.
It's ourselves.
And railways aren't the only system that is collapsing.
Yet certainly it is one of the biggest ones that we've seen.
And unfortunately, of course, our media doesn't pay much attention to it because it's in a part of the country that, what can we say, just doesn't generate the clicks in Appalachia the way that if it were on the coasts or in one of the big cities.
But I'd like if you could address that question.
Are we seeing these this systemic collapse as as a symptom of this issue that you're talking about?
Well, first of all, I want to fill out with some numbers the comparison that you rightly gave, Jack, between the number of people killed in train derailments, 900 last year, to the number of unarmed blacks, which is the main focus of much of the left-wing media and our left-wing politicians at this point.
The alleged wave of police brutality and racism Last year, there were seven allegedly unarmed blacks killed by the police.
And I say allegedly unarmed because the Washington Post that keeps these records defines unarmed extremely broadly to include somebody who may be grabbing an officer's gun.
So, and you can have an even more startling comparison that's that seven allegedly unarmed blacks killed by the police versus In 2020, which is the last year of our best data, 10,000 blacks killed in criminal homicide, virtually all killed by other blacks, not by the police and not by whites.
As far as whether the infrastructure breakdowns are the result of, let's be honest, what we're talking about here is lowered standards, racial preferences in the name of diversity.
I'm frankly agnostic on that point.
It's too soon to tell.
I don't know if railroad engineers and conductors are being chosen on the basis of race, if bridges were built and, you know, switching mechanisms were built with the goal not of excellence, but of diversity.
But I can tell you if they were, that would absolutely be a recipe for catastrophe.
Because again, You can have diversity, you can have meritocracy, you cannot have both.
The reason we're talking about diversity is because left to purely meritocratic standards, our top institutions will not be racially proportionate.
Why?
Not because there's racism in hiring standards, racism on the part of managers or gatekeepers, but because of the academic skills gap. 66% of black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of 12th grade math skills.
What's partial mastery of 12th grade math skills?
Being able to do a simple arithmetic calculation, being able to understand a linear relationship on a graph.
66% of black 12th graders do not even possess partial mastery of those skills.
And yet our narrative, our national narrative is to look around
At various elite institutions, whether it's a Alzheimer's research lab or a cancer research lab, a medical school, an engineering school, a physics PhD program, and say, if there are not 13% black PhDs or cancer or Alzheimer's researchers in those labs or building our bridges or flying our planes, it must be because of racist gatekeepers.
And Jack, As long as racism remains the only allowable explanation for ongoing racial disparities, everything is coming down.
You speak about civilizations that collapse inwards.
We are collapsing ours at an unprecedented rate.
It is all coming down.
And the point of my book is to provide an alternative explanation for those racial disparities and say that Western civilization is not the problem.
The problem right now is a culture that does not value academic achievement.
That's what must be solved and not to tear down the scientific method and colorblind standards of achievement.
One of the phrases that I've heard just in reading about this, about that dynamic that you've discussed right there, this idea that the only explanation that we are allowed to, uh, that we are allowed to give or that we are allowed to hear for any of these things of the, of the disproportionate representation.
So, and this is wokeness.
So wokeness is defined as, uh, believing that disproportionate representation in institutions is the result of systemic racism.
I actually heard this.
This is great because, um, from, from an atheist commentator and he said, well, that's just That's just an argument of racism of the gaps.
So you found a gap somewhere, and so therefore you just defined it by racism because you don't actually have an explanation for it.
Therefore, this is like when, uh, when, uh, you know, he's comparing it, of course, to when, when believers would say, this is the God of the gaps when they're talking about evolution or an intelligent design.
Um, and I thought it was interesting that of course, from an atheist commentator that you would, he would compare the two because you're taking it as a matter of faith.
You're taking it as a matter of belief that it must because of racism, and you would ignore all sorts of empirical data that could obviously explain something else.
To your point, education standards, testing standards, since No Child Left Behind was passed in the early 2000s.
You go look at Baltimore reading rates and graduation rates.
It's deplorable.
It's absolutely deplorable situation.
And yet the answer that we're always told is the racism of the gaps.
And, you know, in racism, one of the first Riots that I actually covered right when I was getting started all the way back in 2015 was the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore I live in the DC area and that's something that was nearby and I remember when Freddie Gray died this situation was all blamed on racism and I was struggling to find where the racism could be stemming from with a black mayor a black DA a black chief of police all black officers or
or officers of color.
And I couldn't quite be sure where the racism was stemming from in this situation.
We saw the same thing in Memphis just recently.
I'd like to get into that later and set it up for after the break.
But it seems to be this fallback position and that if you question it, you yourself will be described as a racist.
Well, America turns its eyes away from the just very tragic and horrific cultural breakdown in the inner city.
It's not just no child left behind.
It's not just Common Core, whatever the conservative bugaboo was.
This is something much more profound.
It's an oppositional culture.
The, you know, conceit about acting white.
You're acting white if you're actually studying in school and doing your homework.
This is very, very bad stuff.
And it is resulting in, it's not just Baltimore reading, the black students across the country are not prepared.
Only 6% of black 12th graders are prepared for college according to the ACT.
6% when you take into account science and math and reading.
And yet we know that many more are going to college under double standards of achievement that are completely pernicious.
The students that are admitted under racial preferences struggle to compete And then the diversity bureaucracy tells them, well, if you're feeling distress, if you're feeling like you're not succeeding in your classes or feel like you're not keeping up, it's because we're a racist institution, even though the very reason you're here is because we want black students so much.
So this is something that must be solved from within.
And we have to stop blaming our standards.
You know, the issue is China.
undermining our infrastructure.
Well, maybe so, maybe not, but what it is doing is competing internally and promoting its own math and science talent full speed ahead.
It is not worried about what the sex proportions there are in its gifted and talented math programs.
It is just finding its best students, throwing everything it's got at them to make sure that they are The most qualified nanotechnicians, physicists, mathematicians, computer engineers.
We, on the other hand, would rather make sure that our best talent is not allowed to succeed.
We're tearing down gifted and talented programs across the country.
We're slowing down math education.
We're deferring algebra because it has a disparate impact.
Any meritocratic standard that has a disparate impact on So-called underrepresented minorities, which is blacks and Hispanics, is now being torn down.
And any institution that is deemed too white or too Asian is in the crosshairs.
It will be torn down until we have one fatal soup of mediocrity everywhere.
Well, I can't wait, you know, until they tear down the MCATs when it comes to surgeons.
I can't wait until they tear down standards for airline pilots, for commercial air flight.
Obviously, we're seeing the results of this most directly in police forces.
I think we're seeing that very quickly because police forces have been a very early target of this, a very front-loaded target of this.
But we're getting rid of standardized testing across the board.
We're certainly, and for years, have been using racial quotas in the Ivy League system.
And I think we've been doing that for almost 100 years now.
At first, it was in one direction.
Now it's going now it's overcorrecting in the other direction.
But I'd really like to get into that a little bit more.
We've got it.
We're coming up on a break, but I want to dig into the tragedy surrounding the death of Tyree Nichols, but also describe it in such a way that I don't think anyone else is talking about.
Coming right back here with Heather McDonald.
OK, we are back with Heather McDonald, the author of the new book, When Race Trumps Merit, a By the way, Heather, is the book out yet or is it coming out?
It's available for pre-order.
You can just go on Amazon right now and order it.
It's coming out in April.
Okay, that's right.
I thought I saw that date.
Yeah, by all means, order it now.
All right, so make sure you go pre-order the book.
This is a fantastic book.
It builds off, obviously, your incredible body of work, but also digging into the latest that we've seen since the George Floyd riots.
And I think we do have to call them the George Floyd riots because the media does everything they can to prevent you from knowing that this thing happened.
And I'll actually say something.
I don't even think I've ever said this publicly.
So I was born in the 1980s.
And I can remember the O.J.
Simpson trial.
I can.
But I'll tell you something else.
I didn't know about the L.A.
riots until I was in college.
I never heard about it.
I had no idea that that had happened.
And I think I was reading some book that I had gotten at a used bookstore.
And I said, wait a minute.
There were riots across the entire city of Los Angeles in the 1990s when I was alive and I was a kid.
And I had no clue this had ever happened.
And then finally you can start digging and reading more about it.
And, you know, obviously I'm showing my age there a little bit, but at the same time I'm seeing the same dynamic play out with the George Floyd riots.
These things happen.
They happen across the entire country.
And suddenly we're acting like they didn't actually happen.
Heather, why, what's going on?
How could I have been alive at such a time as that when this was going on and yet I have no knowledge of it whatsoever.
Now, of course, you know, that age I wasn't exactly paying attention to the news, but you'd think at some point in school I would have learned about this.
Why did it take my own education and reading to find out about such a seminal event in our modern history?
It's incredible, Jack.
That's really an amazing story.
The victors write the history.
I worry about this with COVID.
You know, if the left stays in power, They're gonna write the history of COVID and the lockdowns are all gonna be seen as imminently necessary and effective and masks and whatnot.
And that's gonna be very scary.
But we certainly are involved in massive historical revisionism with regards to the George Floyd riots.
And I was not aware that the same disappear the facts technology and ideology had been applied to the LA riots, but I'm not surprised.
Because again, America turns its eyes away From inner city dysfunction, and when they do so, guess what happens?
More black lives are taken.
Those millions of hardworking, law-abiding, bourgeois blacks that want the same thing as everybody else and want safety for their children, opportunities to get forward on their own motivation and self-discipline, are left by the wayside, by our policy makers.
You know, it's very strange.
The Black Lives Matter movement has decided that it cares more about black criminals than black victims.
That's it's not intuitively obvious to me what that should be.
So but they never talk about those 10,000 blacks who were killed in homicide by other blacks.
They only talk about the seven or so unarmed blacks who may have been killed by a police officer.
And when they demonize cops, what happens is more black lives are taken.
And so we're now pretending that, I mean, we are forced today, Jack, to live a series of falsehoods.
We're all engaged in this theater, this theater of lies.
We're pretending that anti-Asian hate crimes are committed by whites.
You know, that you have these rallies against anti-Asian hate and these signs all make it very clear that they think that white supremacy is the problem.
We've all seen the videos.
We've seen the videos of 90-year-old frail elderly Asians in San Francisco being knocked unconscious by black teens.
And in New York as well, in Los Angeles, blacks commit hate crimes against Asians, against Jews, against trans at far, far higher rates than whites.
And yet we're supposed to pretend that that is the threat.
We're supposed to pretend that White supremacists are on the verge of yet another riot against the Capitol.
The knockout game of the early 2010s is actually back.
I don't even know if anyone's talking about this yet.
It's actually back.
It's all over TikTok.
They don't always call it the knockout game anymore, but it's the exact same thing.
And this happened in New Jersey.
In a teenage freshman girl just recently, 14 years old, they do a knockout game on her.
As someone is filming now, that's the new additional element to it.
So it's the knockout game plus the ability to achieve social clout and social status within your community by performing one of these knockouts.
Typically the targets are, to your point, in this case, young, frail, Well, it may not be about race to you, but it certainly was to the people that were doing it.
And that's the reason that she was targeted.
And I get that.
That's that's great that you don't want to make it about race and blame everyone.
But at the same time, it can't be a one way street.
out and said, I don't want to make this about race.
I don't mean, well, it may not be about race to you, but it certainly was to the people that were doing it.
And that's the reason that she was targeted.
And I get that.
That's, that's great that you don't want to make it about race and blame everyone.
But at the same time, uh, it can't be a one way street.
And so we do actually have to talk about these things that are going on too, as well as to your point with the, with the Asian situation that we can tell who is going, there's a reason that Asian lives matter.
Doesn't take off the same way because we can all see the videos and they immediately, uh, kind of did away with that narrative because suddenly they, the videos were coming out and it didn't paint the picture that they wanted to see.
But I wanted to get into as well, this situation, uh, the war on police You know, we saw the Ferguson effect in the 2010s.
Now we're seeing what I call the George Floyd effect, because as opposed to officers that are not only staying out of situations because of the prevalence of body cams these days, we're also now seeing just a general lowering of standards for officers across the board.
And you saw this clearly in Memphis, in a situation where we're seeing that with Tyree Nichols, beating may have been because apparently the DA is investigating that it may have been because of some personal relationship.
There were photos taken when you demonize police officers, but then you still decide to have a police force and you lower standards at the same time.
We saw this in Memphis where in the name of what's the phrase?
We have to make the police force look like Memphis.
We have to make it look like the community.
Well, now it does look like the community, but unfortunately the community has a homicide rate at a certain place.
And now it seems like the police are trying to get to the same rate.
Yeah.
Let me just respond to your previous point.
You know, the New York Times finally got around to covering the New Jersey beating this morning.
Yeah.
But of course, they don't mention the race of the assailants.
Had those been three or five white girls attacking a black girl, this would have been international news.
But of course, in the reverse, it's never the case.
It is utter Shameless asymmetry to keep the narrative going that blacks are everywhere the victims of whites.
Whereas in fact, the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows through people's self reports of who's doing the victimizing in violent crime, that when you look at the universe of all interracial crime between blacks and whites and whites and blacks, blacks commit 88% of those interracial incidents.
So this is not a question of being currently a white supremacist country.
It once was.
And the history of this country is appalling.
It is grotesquely hypocritical.
We treated blacks with contempt and cruelty and just sheer nasty humiliation for far too long.
But remarkably, unpredictably, things have radically changed.
That is not our reality today.
The reality today is black privilege, not white privilege.
As for policing, Absolutely, the more the police back off under this phony narrative that they are racist to go where crime is happening, there will be more black lives taken and the police are leaving the profession in droves.
This did happen after the Michael Brown race riots in 2014 and 2015, but it is accelerated after the George Floyd race riots.
And so you have, I think policing is in a death spiral right now, unless we can turn around the racism narrative.
Everything in our world today, Jack, if you're sort of puzzling over these weird things that are happening, and I'm not referring to Chinese balloons, but rather the lowering of standards.
Why are police not arresting for theft, for shoplifting?
Why are prosecutors refusing to prosecute for turnstile jumping or resisting arrest?
Or some sorts of gun crime.
It's all explained by disparate impact.
And that's in my book.
Disparate impact explains why we are unwinding our criminal justice system.
Because any type of colorblind, constitutional, imminently fair form of law enforcement, whether it's policing, prosecution, or sentencing, will have a disparate impact on blacks.
Not because the criminal justice system is racist, But because the crime rate is so much higher.
In New York City, blacks commit about three quarters of all shootings, even though they're about 22% of the population.
If you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings, you account for virtually 100% of all of these crazy barbaric drive-by shootings in New York City.
And so that means that the police cannot go where people are being shot by these Kids that have no impulse control, that have no regard for human life, without being in black neighborhoods and stopping people in black neighborhoods that are black, not because they're racist.
This was the, what you're saying is the exact, I forget what they called it, the leaked audio of Michael Bloomberg, the hot mic audio, where he's basically, I think it was at a private event, And he's describing exactly what you're saying.
And his point was that we've deployed more police officers to these neighborhoods because we're protecting the people of those neighborhoods, because they are at the greatest risk for crime, not because of some mythical racism of the gaps.
And yet, that was used to destroy him in the Democratic primary in 2020.
But when that all came out, I do remember, and I'll actually give him credit for this, because he knew that it wouldn't do well for him in the primaries, on that side of the aisle at least.
But at the same time, he defended it because he pointed out, look, these policies, the deployment strategies, as well as stop and frisk, took New York homicides down from something like 2,000 a year to just a couple hundred a year.
Well, he actually was even more iconoclastic and breaking taboos than that.
He said that if you look at crime rates, whites are actually over-stopped and blacks are under-stopped, contrary to what Al Sharpton and every elite law firm in the city that had sued New York for stop, question and frisk.
Because again, blacks make up 22% of all New Yorkers.
They are about 53 to 55% of all stops that the police make.
So the left gets its hands on that and he says, okay, you see that's police racism and racial profiling, but population benchmark is always the wrong benchmark.
What you want to know is what is the crime rate?
So again, blacks are 22% of the population.
They commit about 75% of all shootings.
That's the relevant, the 75% is the relevant benchmark to look at the 52 to 55% stop rate and whites, Who are about 34% of the population, commit about 1% of all shootings, and yet they are 9% of all stops.
So Bloomberg was absolutely right to say, you know, this is the opposite of what we think.
So again, we are tearing down the criminal law in order to avoid disparate impact on blacks.
But what has a disparate impact on blacks is crime.
And when you when you Demoralize the cops when you tell them not to police when you when you have prosecutors that say, well, even if you bring me an arrest, I'm not going to to bring a case because that would have a disparate impact on black criminals.
And we want to avoid mass incarceration, which is a whole nother other phony narrative that we can get into or not.
You know that that when you stop doing this necessary law enforcement, it is black victims who are the butt of the increased crime.
And then the activists don't care.
Well, here's a question, and you're the expert on this.
You've been studying this for so long.
You've been writing on this for so long.
And I'd love to ask you, have you ever at all in your travels, in your journeys, have you ever encountered a single leftist who has ever once made this argument about anything other than race?
For example, I've never heard a single leftist or activist or police reformer say the following, This police are conducting a disparate impact on men.
There are too many men that are pulled over.
There are too many men in prisons.
There are too many men getting arrested.
There are too many men targeted by police for violent crimes.
Why is it that the police have an anti-man agenda because they are so focused on this?
And, of course, someone will immediately respond to you, well, that's because men commit more violent crimes.
And then because, of course, you haven't had the years of social conditioning and propaganda to get a response to that question.
And so I've always found that useful to say, well, if you'll say that for gender, why wouldn't you apply the same standard towards ethnicity?
My guess is they would say we have not been a A female centric culture.
Yes, yes.
So we can trust what the police do with regards to males, but we can't trust what they do with blacks because we've been white supremacists.
So they figure out a way around it.
You, you absolutely have the number.
That's precisely what that would say.
All right.
Heather McDonald, officially the first person to get me to crack up on the Sunday special here.
We will be right back with you after this break.
All right, Heather, I know I promised the audience this.
I've got to ask you about the Tyree Nichols situation, because to me, it seems like a microcosm of everything that you've talked about, from viral video to the lowering of standards to the effect that this has had on policing.
It seems like this is a singular moment.
And the media has completely stopped talking about it, by the way.
And I think there's a reason for that, because they don't want people asking the very questions that you're answering right now.
Well, the New York Times, at least, is still talking about it.
And of course, they've managed very quickly to slot it into the racism narrative, not completely speciously, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, it is conceivable you could imagine a police culture that is so anti-Black that even Black officers absorb it.
So I don't think that's at all what's going on here.
But it's a little too easy for conservatives to say, well, how can this be racist if we have Black officers?
I'm particularly reluctant to use that response, Jack, because I don't want it to be any more plausible that it's racist if there's white officers that are engaged in a contested use of force.
So I want evidence either way.
In any case, this was one of the most, it is the most appalling instances of abuse of power that I've ever seen.
It is heartbreaking.
It's like watching the scourging of Christ.
I've never seen anything like it.
Of one gratuitous assault, blow, sadistic effort to destroy this man after another.
And it's a complete reversal of everything the police should be doing.
Their tactics are abysmal.
The police are the ones that are supposed to be deescalating situations.
It's Mr. Nichols who's pathetically, heartbreakingly trying to deescalate and saying, man, you know, I'm complying.
What can he do?
They're giving him contradictory commands.
I usually say you can avoid virtually every police shooting in this country if the suspect merely complies with an officer's commands.
If you don't resist arrest, you won't be shot.
In this case, I for once do not blame Mr. Nichols for taking off after the first encounter with these maniac cops and running.
I would have, too.
These people were clearly lunatic.
What is going on here, though, is not what the left tells us, which is the Ubiquity of white supremacy.
It's not what our political class tells us from the White House on down, which is the ubiquity of white supremacy.
It is a complete failure of training and of hiring standards.
I don't know at this point whether the Memphis police training is completely defective or whether these cops were so unfit to be hired in the first place That they were unable to absorb adequate training.
The left will say, well, to make their case that this was definitely an instance of systemic racism on the part of these officers and of Memphis, they say, could you imagine this beating happening to a white man?
My response to that is, and these thought experiments are all Rorschach tests of one's own worldview, I say yes.
Certainly.
Their tactics were so bad, they were so incapable of subduing a minimally resisting suspect, that I see no reason why they would not have done the same thing.
The one I always go back to is Daniel Shaver.
Right.
Right.
And Tony Timpa.
Right.
Absolutely.
Tony Timpa, another one.
Yeah.
You can think of examples right off the top of your head that for some reason, well, we know the reason, that they're just never ever brought up.
But in this case, I don't know if you saw there was a media report on a new hiring push that the Memphis police put out just a couple of years ago, right in the wake of this sort of defund the police George Floyd riot year, where it was dubbed in the media as more diversity, less brutality.
And on using that same exact framework, as we said before, that we're going to make the police force look more like Memphis.
And in order to do that, we're going to lower standards.
We are going to potentially, even in the New York Post reported this, bring on officers that may even themselves have a criminal record.
And we are going to give them waivers for those convictions to bring them on.
And I'm not directly saying, and I don't know yet, I'm sure it'll come out the trial if any of these officers were Were individuals that had a criminal record prior, but it does seem to be, to your point, this sort of soup of mediocrity that has led to situations like this.
Well, only two of the five officers were brought onto the force post-George Floyd.
Two of them started their actual career post-academy training in 21.
But so we don't know.
And there's two parallel movements going on.
There's a generalized Cops are fleeing the profession.
We need to do everything we can to recruit.
At the same time, that's like a double helix.
You know, the strands interweave.
There is, at the same time, a push for more black cops.
And we know historically that every time there's been federal consent decrees demanding diversity hiring at the expense of meritocratic standards, whether it's regards to cognitive skills tests or criminal backgrounds, The result is corruption scandals and abuse scandals, whether in Miami, in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia, they don't even have a hiring exam now.
They've gotten rid of any kind of civil service exam.
I don't know if you know, but that's actually my background.
I'm from the Philadelphia area, born and raised just a couple of miles outside the city.
I went to school at Temple University in North Philadelphia, and at this point in my life, I have two little boys and I've never once brought them back to the neighborhood where I grew up or my alma mater, and I have no plans to do so.
Well, there was the 39th district police scandal in Philadelphia in the early 90s, and a report brought in by the city found that the main reason was a federal consent decree That it said you've got to lower, you know, you've got to bring in blacks and the way they did so was to basically suspend the hiring exam.
So whites would be hired from the very top of the pool and blacks were simply admitted based on the ratios with which they took the exam, not on the basis of their actual results.
And they were going to devise a new test and they never did.
So now there is no test.
The Obama administration did a voluntary review of the Philadelphia Police Department And found that black and Hispanic cops were more likely than white cops to shoot a black suspect under what's known as threat misperception.
That is, mistaking somebody's cell phone for a gun.
You know, that could well be a result of these lowering hiring standards as well.
But that's why I say that policing is in a death spiral right now.
Because as long as racism remains the dominant narrative to explain Tyree Nichols, it means that we're not going to Solve the actual problems, which is the demoralization of cops by calling them all racist, by the lowering of hiring standards, by de-policing that led to Memphis having such a high crime rate.
And reckless driving was a problem.
You know, the five cops have said that Nichols was driving the wrong way.
The city administration says, oh, we found no evidence of that.
I'm still waiting.
I'm agnostic on that.
I'm also agnostic on drug use on possibly, you know, trying to grab the officer's gun.
But reckless driving is one of the other lesser acknowledged results of the George Floyd race riots and de-policing, where now we've had highway deaths or car crash deaths jump astronomically because we are also demonizing car stops and the The rate of car crash deaths have gone up the highest in inner city neighborhoods.
We actually have some pretty close family friends who were in a similar accident to what you're describing, who fortunately it was a father or mother, their young daughter were in the car and they were on the highway.
It was outside Baltimore and someone crashed into them at night driving the wrong way on the highway.
Oh God!
And fortunately, they all survived, but the mother was permanently disabled for life.
She'll never walk again.
She's in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
So when we go to kids' birthday parties, etc., she's in the chair.
And she's wonderful.
She's a lovely person and one of our best friends.
But at the same time, we always just think about that.
How could someone have been driving the wrong way down a highway backwards?
Well, because after Daunte Wright in Minnesota, I believe, or Wisconsin, the response was, oh, this is all because they made a car stop.
No, it's because Daunte Wright had an outstanding warrant.
They stopped him for perfectly good cause.
But now we've said that car stops are racist.
And, you know, I know a criminologist in Cincinnati who has done work ride alongs in the inner city area of Cincinnati over the Rhine.
And he said the car, the driving behavior you see is beyond belief.
You know, running red lights, racing past schools.
There was a video made by a high school principal in North Minneapolis after the George Floyd race riots, and one of her students had been recently killed in a drive-by shooting, as usual.
But her complaint was the driving.
She said, it's absolute chaos out here.
But the cops have backed off on making car stops because we hear from James Foreman at the Yale Law School that that's racist.
And we hear from, you know, the Center for Policing Equity that that's racist.
No, it's not.
It's a way to save lives.
And again, the problem is it does have a disparate impact on on black drivers who are speeding or running red lights.
We're getting rid of red light cameras because cameras, blind technology somehow turns out to be racist.
Amazing.
It has a disparate impact on black drivers.
And so we've decided that somehow The cameras or the algorithms are racist.
We have to get chat GPT running the camera so it has the proper filters for disparate impact.
Write me a poem about black traffic.
I'm afraid I can't do that, Heather.
Heather, we have one break coming up, but when we come back, I want to see how we can turn this around.
I want to give people a little bit of hope, light at the end of the tunnel.
What can we do about this?
Coming back up, final segment, Heather MacDonald.
We're here with our final segment.
Heather MacDonald, I'd like to read for you a comment from South Africa.
We all know that South Africa has largely run their country for quite some time based on these principles that we've been discussing here today.
We must have diversity, we must have diverse institutions.
This is written by William Gamid.
It is in the University of Wetasaran, Johannesburg.
South Africa's entire infrastructure is on the verge of total collapse.
South Africa now does not have functioning integrated public logistics infrastructure anymore with roads, rail, and ports all in disarray.
The lack of infrastructure maintenance corruption in which dodgy black economic empowerment companies have been gifted tenders and often built flimsy infrastructure and cadres deployed without the necessary technical skills who've been poorly looked at public assets have now been snowballed into the breakdown of the entire public infrastructure causing system failure.
The damage lives lost infrastructure collapse and repair costs from floods and other issues have led to hundreds, if not thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars.
Heather, I don't want that to be a preview of the United States.
I want to see it's, you know, when an addict hits rock bottom, they say that's the way for them to find the road to recovery.
So I do think that this theology of disparate impact, this theology of wokeism, whatever the correct word we're using for it is, it's become an addiction for the United States.
and certainly become an addiction for media, for entertainment, and for policy leaders.
And you've got the book out now.
You're doing your fight to turn the tide on this when race trumps merit.
And I think there is a huge part of our discussion that's being left out.
Should we simply talk about merit and excellence again?
Is that the way out of this?
Well, I want to also allude to something you said earlier, Jack, which is what happens when the MCATs start getting thrown out.
These are the medical school admissions tests to train doctors.
They're already being thrown out and we're already changing standards for medical licensing exam.
We're going to pass fail rather than graded exam because again, the medical step one of the medical licensing exam has a disparate impact on blacks.
It's coming to an emergency room near you.
You know, when you're hit in one of that horrible car crash and you're brought in, you will not know if somebody walks through your door, a doctor walks through your door, who's a so-called underrepresented minority, if he's there because of his medical knowledge or because of his skin color.
So this is happening.
What needs to happen to fight back, Jack, is people have to stop being scared of being called a racist.
And yes, we have to obviously get back to meritocratic colorblind standards And say the problem is not the standards, the problem is the skills gaps that lead to that lack of racial proportionality.
But what also needs to happen is people need to swallow hard and tell the truth about the extent of the crime gap that leads to disparities in incarceration and the extent of the skills gap that means that a cancer lab that is trying to find its most qualified students And researchers is not at this point in time going to be able to do so in a racially proportionate manner if it cares most about scientific expertise.
We have to get a president in there that will remount the federal science agencies who are now committed to the proposition that science is racist.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House recently came out with a statement basically saying that science is an inequity producing That is, it increases inequities.
This is complete ignorance.
People need to look hard at the gaps and not flinch from speaking honestly about how wide they are.
Put those STEM faculty to the test and say, why are you accusing yourselves of being racist?
You know damn well, as somebody recently told me, an astronomer, At a University of California system, UCLA said, black scientists now are gold dust.
Any faculty department that can get its hand on a black scientist knows it is now going to be a federal grant magnet.
It is going to have millions of federal dollars showered upon it.
And they will try to hold on to that gold dust as long as possible, while other science faculties, you know, Harvard or UC Berkeley, will compete and make the gold dust even more valuable.
So we have to stop apologizing for phantom racism.
It's not just the Ivy Leagues.
You said the Ivy Leagues practice racial preferences.
It is any minimally selective college.
Get back to To colorblind standards.
And I hope that Asian Americans become even more mobilized because they're the ones that are screwed the most at this point by the evisceration of meritocratic standards.
They are having to be five, 10 times as good as any other student to be admitted to a medical school of their choice, to a law school of their choice.
And for them to be told that, well, if you're succeeding, it's because you're racist or white supremacist.
I couldn't agree more.
to be telling white students that, but the Asians could be a sleeping giant that will help us beat this thing back.
I couldn't agree more.
Heather, tell people where they can follow you and how to pre-order the book, and I'm going to make sure that we pre-order that book immediately as soon as we've done the interview here.
Thank you, Jack.
Well, the book, you just go on Amazon.
You can preorder it when race trumps merit.
I have a Twitter feed that I actually don't really run.
It's it's mostly to put my writing up there.
And I don't even know what my handle is.
But if you if you Google me at Heather McDonald and Twitter, that will give you sort of a chronological in reverse order, all of my media appearances and all of my writing.
So that's probably the easiest way.
Heather McDonald, a true pleasure, true honor.
Thank you for coming on here.
Thank you for giving people the tools to be able, not just to debate this, but actually have the conversations that are going on in our country.
Because thanks to social media, for as much as we do complain about it, for as much as our lives seem to be ruled by viral videos now, it also has given us the ability to connect To run shows like this and to get information out there that is otherwise completely suppressed by the mainstream.
Which of course, as we all know, why they are constantly trying to shut down social media.
Heather MacDonald, the book is, once again, when race trumps merit.
Is diversity our strength?
Or is our strength the traditional values on which Western civilization has been built?
