July 2, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:09
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Heather, welcome back to the show. | |
| Well, thank you for having me on, Dennis. | |
| It's always an honor. | |
| That's very kind. | |
| Give me a musical thought before we get into your subject. | |
| Anything of interest? | |
| Heather and I share a profound love of classical music. | |
| Well, sadly, the field is being rocked by the same Black Lives Matter. | |
| Activism is hitting every other aspect of Western civilization. | |
| I have a mega piece coming out imminently in the summer issue of City Journal, tracking the fallacious idea that classical music is racist, both in its essence and in its current practices. | |
| You know, the idea that musicians who audition for orchestras behind a screen so nobody can see Their identity, whether it's their sex or their race or anything else or their connection to the conductor, that very practice of blind auditions is now being accused of racism, that somehow it's racist to hire without race. | |
| So anyway, the field is at risk, and none of its major leaders have stood up. | |
| And defended it against this poisonous identity politics that is being poured into it, not just by the activists, by the classical music press as well. | |
| Boy, I'm glad I asked the question. | |
| So your piece is coming out shortly. | |
| Yep. | |
| I will send it to you. | |
| Well, the... | |
| Oh, I will read it. | |
| I'd love you to send it to me, but I'll read it anyway. | |
| I have a subscription. | |
| A paid subscription, I might add. | |
| The leading music critic of the New York Times, Anthony Tomasini, actually came out against blind auditions. | |
| Right. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| It's a logical impossibility, but logic doesn't matter today. | |
| As we know, logic is simply a white male construct. | |
| It just cannot be the case that not knowing somebody's race results in racism. | |
| But that's the situation. | |
| And this is not just classical music, of course, Dennis. | |
| Every other institution, whether, you know, museums, we see the National Archives now, the National Museum of Natural History in New York City, they are all self-destroying from the inside because their leaders are cowards. | |
| Their leaders have been entrusted with preserving the greatness of Western civilization. | |
| And they are silent before this phony narrative. | |
| It breaks my heart. | |
| My heart breaks every day watching what's going on. | |
| That's exactly right, and so does mine. | |
| Your article is about the subversion of science. | |
| So go ahead. | |
| Well, the idea that race and sex are relevant to scientific research has now completely infected the Federal science bureaucracies and most academic departments. | |
| And most recent iteration of this, the National Institutes of Health, which is the premier funder of basic research in biology, in medicine, has declared that its neuroscience initiative, | |
| this is a cutting-edge, incredibly sophisticated initiative that involves Nanotechnology, you know, high-tech physics to try and image what goes on in the brain to try and understand the electrical circuitry. | |
| That from here on out, if you want to get a grant to work on this brain initiative whose possible yield is cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression, autism, you have to show that your team is going to have A suitable smattering of underrepresented populations, whether minorities, whether blacks, Hispanics, poor people, single mothers. | |
| You have to draw from so-called community-based organizations, which usually means like a homeless shelter or something. | |
| You know, if you're community-based, you're some nonprofit, you know, eating off of the government dime. | |
| And your score on your plan for enhancing diversity will affect whether you get funded or not. | |
| Now, the big fallacy of the race hustle here and in every other environment, every other corporation or in criminal law, is that it ignores what's in the pipeline. | |
| And to say, as the director of the NIH does, Francis Collins, that because blacks are 13 percent, 12, 13 percent of the population, but they only make up about 2 percent of people receiving grants from the NIH, that must mean that the NIH and other science generally suffers from structural racism is completely unscientific. | |
| It is an utter lie. | |
| The problem is... | |
| Is that there is a huge academic skills gap. | |
| We know from research, black students do homework at a quarter the rate of Asians and half the rate of whites. | |
| Their math SATs, which are a big indicator of whether you're going to end up as a scientist later on, are utterly rock bottom. | |
| The average math SAT on an 800-point scale for blacks is 454. Which is a standard deviation at least below that of Asians and whites. | |
| Very few blacks even reach the score that will predict that they get at least a C-plus in their freshman year science or math courses. | |
| And if you can't muster even a C-plus in your freshman year pre-calculus, you're not going to end up working on the NIH's neurology initiative. | |
| And then when you look at the PhDs that are graduating in science, here's some numbers, Dennis. | |
| In 2019, there were 20 blacks nationwide who received a doctorate in the neuroscience field. | |
| That's less than 2% of all such degrees awarded in the neurosciences. | |
| So when this Francis Collins, this head of the NIH, who has gone around saying he's not even going to participate in science,...conferences unless they have a lot of females and minorities on the panels because otherwise it's a mammal, which is completely taboo now. | |
| When he complains that NIH only awards about 2% Of its grants to blacks, that's completely in line with the rate at which blacks receive PhDs in the STEM fields. | |
| It is not racism. | |
| In electrical engineering, which is a feeder into nanotechnology, which is now, as I say, at the cutting edge of understanding the brain, there were one of all... | |
| There were 18 black PhDs in electrical engineering last year. | |
| That's 1% of the total. | |
| It's not racism. | |
| It is simply the reality. | |
| There's nothing one can say to all of that. | |
| Except to ask you, what is the obvious? | |
| I think the question is obvious. | |
| I hope the answer is not, but it might be as well. | |
| What will this do to science? | |
| It will absolutely crush it under the weight of mediocrity. | |
| It is mathematically proven that when you introduce extraneous criteria into a selection process... | |
| So it is extraneous. | |
| If you want to work on a cure for Alzheimer's, whether you're female, black, Hispanic, gay, whatever, it's extraneous. | |
| The only thing that matters is your scientific expertise. | |
| But if you say we have to start selecting for these extraneous criteria, you will lower your pool of employees. | |
| It is inevitable. | |
| And so we are going to weight our scientific enterprise down with dead weight. | |
| Guess who is not? | |
| China. | |
| China, in the field of science at least, is ruthlessly meritocratic. | |
| It doesn't give a damn if a lab is all male. | |
| If it's all female, who cares? | |
| The only thing that matters is it's filled with our best. | |
| That's right. | |
| Heather MacDonald is great. | |
| It's as simple as that. | |
| We'll be back. |
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