Jan. 23, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
51:47
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a self-described secular conservative and the author of The Diversity Delusion, Heather MacDonald. | ||
| Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm so grateful to be here. | ||
| Thank you so much, Dave. | ||
| I don't know how this hasn't happened already. | ||
| How did we not? | ||
| You're on the road all the time. | ||
| You're a hard man to connect with. | ||
| We've been on the road together. | ||
| We did Berkeley together and we survived. | ||
| Surprisingly attentive and polite crowd. | ||
| It's kind of a disappointment, actually. | ||
| It was. | ||
| We had dinner before and we were like, oh, you know, it'll be fun if we get some protestors. | ||
| Because there's a nice amount of protestors where it can be enjoyable. | ||
| Then there's like the circus amount where it's not fun anymore. | ||
| But we were kind of like, oh, we'll get some. | ||
| And we got a few, but nothing. | ||
| Nothing much, and of course, they're so stupid, they don't realize that in protesting somebody, they're just increasing the visibility. | ||
| So if they really wanna destroy all conservative opposition, they should just stay quiet, you know, and let us fade into the woodwork. | ||
| On that note, we'll spend the next hour trying to gin up some opposition to your ideas. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Okay, so first off, I came to know about you when you spoke, or you were to speak, at Claremont McKenna University back in 2017, And you were gonna give a talk on Black Lives Matter, and why don't you just tell the people what happened? | ||
| Because that was the first time I found out who you are. | ||
| Well, I was going to talk about the fact that there is enormous support for the police in minority communities. | ||
| I've spent a lot of time in police community meetings in Harlem and South Central L.A., and from what I hear from those good people is that we want more cops. | ||
| We want the drug dealers off the corner. | ||
| I smell pot in my corridor. | ||
| Why can't you do something about it? | ||
| There's kids hanging out fighting, whatever happened to truancy and loitering laws. | ||
| And so I was going to present a different narrative from the Black Lives Matter narrative. | ||
| A few days before my scheduled talk, a call went out on Facebook to shut the fascist, white supremacist, homophobe, queerphobe, Muslimphobe down. | ||
| We will not allow the fascist, racist McDonald to have a platform. | ||
| So, initially they thought they'd move the venue because where I was speaking had too many plate glass windows. | ||
| They decided to keep it in what's called the Athenaeum. | ||
| But I was put into what was essentially a safe house on campus waiting for my talk. | ||
| I could hear the drumming and the chanting grow louder and louder. | ||
| I couldn't see what was going on. | ||
| It was a disconcerting experience. | ||
| Uh... and I was escorted into the room uh... with a police escort through a hidden tunnel. | ||
| I did not know at the time that about two hundred students had surrounded the building to prevent anybody from entering to attend the talk. | ||
| So I spoke to an empty room. | ||
| The police were inside the building. | ||
| At some point they decided that They couldn't guarantee my safety any longer because people were pounding on the plate glass windows. | ||
| So I was taken out through the kitchen with police escort into a waiting police car and zipped away. | ||
| So I ask you this not because I know you don't want to play the victim card. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| But I think it's important for people to realize that this has happened to so many people who I know, including me. | ||
| And actually, I'm very proud to say that I spoke at Claremont McKenna a few months after in that very room. | ||
| And they made it very clear that the whole point of the night was that they never wanted what happened to you to repeat again. | ||
| So they actually did do what a university is supposed to do. | ||
| But just, can you tell me, I mean, you strike me as a totally lovely, pleasant person, that people have the, they just make up what you think, and that then you're treated like this. | ||
| It's just not fun, right? | ||
| I mean, to put it mildly. | ||
| No, it's not fun. | ||
| You know, it really is something to... Because we can joke about it, like, oh, we love it, and protest or, you know, whatever, but... | ||
| Well, with mobs, you don't know what's going to happen next. | ||
| And again, I am so reluctant to say anything that can be attributed to a victim ideology, because that is used against me. | ||
| But I did have a remote sense of what it feels like, what it felt like to be in the French Revolution, and hearing the mob, because people in crowds can become completely irrational. | ||
| You know, I don't know that they're making up who I am because, well, I certainly am not against black lives, but my message to them, as they understand it, is tantamount to being against black people. | ||
| The groundwork for this insane delusion that is used against speakers is an even crazier idea, which is that students on college campuses today are at literal threat of their lives from circumambient racism and sexism. | ||
| This is a delusional idea that is put into these students' heads Sort of K-12, because the identity politics is happening sooner and sooner, but it is certainly reinforced by diversity bureaucrats on campus that are in a codependent relationship with these narcissistic students who want to elevate their status into the top dog victim on campus. | ||
| You know, it's funny, I did a talk at University of New Hampshire, and protesters were screaming at me in the middle and disrupting me, and they have no problem using their free speech to infringe on your free speech, of course. | ||
| And somebody started screaming that we could be killed when we walk out of here! | ||
| I thought, we're in the middle of New Hampshire. | ||
| Nobody's getting killed when you walk out of here. | ||
| And certainly, if you don't behave in any criminal behavior, absolutely nothing is. | ||
| But they've concocted a story in their mind, and it's very hard to deconstruct a story for these people, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, I guess so, because again, we're in a very weird position in our culture generally where the classical virtues venerated strength and accomplishment, perhaps to a fault, you know, because you had warrior cultures. | ||
| And for centuries, the main calling for males for accomplishment was war. | ||
| But the classical virtues, again, celebrated heroism. | ||
| We now are in a very strange position in this culture where we venerate victims. | ||
| And so if you can arrogate to yourself some victim status, and certainly the burgeoning category of gender identity is a mark of these students desperate to find one final way of being transgressive that will not be immediately assimilated into a new diversity sinecure. | ||
| But there's no way they're going to give up that sacred, rarefied status of victim. | ||
| And again, there's nothing more tolerant than an American college campus if you're not challenging the orthodoxy. | ||
| But this is the most tolerant environment in human history. | ||
| for society's traditionally marginalized groups. | ||
| It actively celebrates those traits that can still get you stoned or killed elsewhere. | ||
| So to think, you know, as Brown students said, occupying the president's office, well, it was hard for them to go to classes because they were focused so hard on staying alive at Brown. | ||
| It's similar to New Hampshire. | ||
| I mean, this is certifiably insane thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And unfortunately, there aren't enough brave to push back on this, and then it becomes this self-fulfilling thing, because then the teachers start feeding into it, and the whole other thing. | ||
| So before we go too deep on that, and I wanna do all your greatest hits here, because you have no fear talking about, really, what I think are the hot button issues of the day, but you describe yourself as a secular conservative, and that is not a phrase that I hear very often. | ||
| And as I've, you know, as I come from the left, and I still consider myself liberal, as I've been more embraced by, say, conservatives, A lot of people that knew me from way back when, they'll go, ah, but Reuben, they're just waiting to turn on you because they're really religious. | ||
| They don't really like the gays and whatever else. | ||
| So can you sort of describe how you came to a place that you describe yourself as a secular conservative? | ||
| Because I don't think people really think that exists. | ||
| Well, I guess I was always secular. | ||
| I wasn't always conservative. | ||
| So what does secular mean to you, first off? | ||
| I'm very unreligious. | ||
| I am, to be honest, probably perhaps too fanatically unreligious. | ||
| I simply do not agree with the idea that we're overseen by a personal loving God. | ||
| I find petitionary prayer a completely narcissistic activity that anybody would dare | ||
| think that a personal God would care about his cancer when there are people being mowed | ||
| down in earthquakes and landslides, what I call the daily slaughter of the innocents, again on | ||
| a daily basis. | ||
| So I grew up not in a religious environment and never even really thought about religion. | ||
| To me, it's interesting. | ||
| I can retroactively look at my experience growing up and be sort of amazed at it. | ||
| It is a verification of what religious people talk about with the bi-coastal elites. | ||
| Because I grew up in L.A., I went to a lot of schooling in the East Coast, so I was in kind of a liberal elite culture. | ||
| I don't recall knowing anybody who was religious until I came to New York in the 90s and started thinking of myself, realizing that I was conservative because I'd always been a liberal by default. | ||
| And in that environment, especially with National Review, I started meeting religious people for the first time. | ||
| What did they make of a secular, even if you were liberal in a classical sense, but let's say a burgeoning conservative at that point, what did they make of a secular person? | ||
| Well, I guess my first piece about this was for the American conservative, and I just wrote a piece saying, you know, the Republicans and conservatives who are so closely yoking conservative ideology with religious belief are making a mistake, because I know a lot of very smart conservatives who are not themselves believers either. | ||
| And to say that the only way you can be moral is to believe in God, I think is a mistake. | ||
| So I then had participated and founded a blog called Secular Right that was founded by Razib Khan and others. | ||
| I was never a pariah or drummed out of the movement at all. | ||
| I got some Sort of sarcastic comments from major figures, like, so how's that atheism thing going, Heather? | ||
| But I can't say that I was ever really punished for it, but I think I was regarded as a curiosity. | ||
| Yeah, so obviously we're gonna talk about so much of what's wrong with the postmodern left and the progressives, but let's just talk a little bit about what's going on with the right these days. | ||
| Broadly, let's say the conservatives, the old school liberals, the libertarians, the rest of it, I'm finding it to be the center right, let's say, an extremely open group of people who are really willing to do this, dive into ideas and agree to disagree and all of that. | ||
| Have you always found it to be that way? | ||
| Well, again, I haven't thought of myself. | ||
| I mean, I know you're saying you got a little bit of pushback, let's say, or some joking about being atheist. | ||
| Yeah, that's just joking. | ||
| It was not malicious, and it was not really serious. | ||
| Yes, I guess so. | ||
| Again, I consider myself kind of a latecomer to the right, but I don't think it was ever closed-minded. | ||
| I think it's now maybe more self-consciously open just because of the growing totalitarianism on the left. | ||
| So perhaps people are extra careful to Make sure that they're not excluding anybody. | ||
| But I think if you're trying to push back against some kind of stereotype that the right is a bunch of closed-minded bigots, I've never experienced that. | ||
| Yeah, I just don't see it anywhere. | ||
| It's actually quite staggering to me. | ||
| Okay, so let's just plow through a whole bunch of topics. | ||
| So we touched a little bit on policing already and the black community. | ||
| Is there anything else you wanted to add to that generally? | ||
| Well, just the Black Lives Matter narrative is false end stop. | ||
| We are not living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men. | ||
| The core flaw of any left-wing anti-cop rhetoric or the mass incarceration meme is the failure to find the proper benchmark for evaluating police behavior. | ||
| Inevitably, policing is compared to population ratios. | ||
| So, let's say in New York City, about 50% of all pedestrian stops are of blacks. | ||
| Blacks are about 23% of the population. | ||
| A Black Lives Matter activist or an academic often would say that shows the police are racist. | ||
| Wrong benchmark. | ||
| The benchmark is crime. | ||
| Policing is crime-driven. | ||
| Blacks in New York City commit 71% of all shootings. | ||
| If you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings, you account for 98% of all shootings in New York. | ||
| Whites are 34% of the population. | ||
| They commit 2% of shootings. | ||
| So that's the basic fallacy. | ||
| And this is a broader problem. | ||
| Right, so what would you say is the root of that? | ||
| The root of this is that I think the core difference between a liberal outlook on the world and a conservative one is that liberals will only accept structural explanations for socioeconomic disparities. | ||
| They will not ever accept a behavioral explanation, that there are behaviors, cultures that are different that explain poverty rates, say. | ||
| Conservatives Maybe to a fault are not particularly open to structural explanations and we'll see behavioral reasons. | ||
| So for instance when you look at poverty, the biggest driver in American poverty today is having children out of wedlock. | ||
| If you are a single mother, the chances are really high that you're going to be poor, | ||
| and your child is about five times more likely to be poor than if he were a child of married | ||
| parents. | ||
| And there's a whole set of choices for good or bad that people can make that almost guarantee | ||
| that you can become middle class. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| Three simple things you can do. | ||
| Graduate from high school, wait until you're married to have a child, and work at a job full-time. | ||
| Any job. | ||
| Low minimum wage job. | ||
| 73% of people who do that are not poor. | ||
| That, to me, is the basic difference. | ||
| So the benchmark problem in policing comes from not being willing to look at behavior. | ||
| And I think that is true for everything in society. | ||
| The most dangerous conceit out there is this disparate impact analysis that says that any neutral policy that has a disparate impact on racial groups must be biased. | ||
| Again, that is an analysis that only makes sense if you don't look at behavior. | ||
| So why do certain narratives then get sold much more than other narratives? | ||
| I have my own theories on this, but why is the narrative out there that the police are racist? | ||
| I mean, did the media all collude to decide the same thing and put it out there? | ||
| I mean, really, how do those bad ideas then spread? | ||
| Well, one thing I don't think is happening, I always get asked, is this all Soros? | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| Everybody wants, human beings like want agency. | ||
| Right, we want one answer. | ||
| They want one answer and they want to believe that everything is like from top down. | ||
| I don't think it's Soros money, but I think there are memes that spread and I think there are ideologies. | ||
| And I think that American culture now is very uncomfortable with inner city culture, with certain dysfunctional minority culture and doesn't, don't want to talk about it. | ||
| We want to turn our eyes away from it. | ||
| And we have the most appalling history of racism in this country. | ||
| It is really unthinkable how blind we were to the profound hypocrisy that governed so much of our polity for so long. | ||
| You know, one can't begin to understand how that could not have been obvious. | ||
| But I think our degree of guilt for that is now so great and understandable, frankly, that we're very reluctant to ascribe agency to blacks. | ||
| We want to say everything, the continuing problems, the failure to close the achievement gap, The crime disparities, which are massive. | ||
| The victimization disparities. | ||
| Blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. | ||
| That's a civil rights problem. | ||
| But nobody wants to talk about that. | ||
| Instead, we want to change the narrative to be it's all white racism. | ||
| Which is a way of infantilizing blacks. | ||
| Of saying there's nothing you can do for yourselves. | ||
| Of getting rid of the acting white culture. | ||
| We should all emulate Asians. | ||
| I pose a thought experiment. | ||
| If blacks acted like Asians for 10 years in all things, the same negligible rate of out of wedlock child rearing, the same fanatical involvement in schools, you know, drive, parental drive, study. | ||
| You're gonna go to Harvard, you know, nothing else is acceptable. | ||
| Don't get involved in games. | ||
| Well, you may not go to Harvard if you're Asian. | ||
| These drives, that's right. | ||
| Well, you're gonna have to be 10 times greater than any, better than anybody else to go to Harvard, | ||
| and you will be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If the behaviors were the same and we still saw these socioeconomic disparities, | ||
| then I will entertain institutional structural racism But as long as the behaviors are so vastly different, in California where we are now, the truancy rate for blacks is five times higher than any other ethnic group. | ||
| As long as those behaviors are so different, I think it's premature to say the only possible explanation is structural racism. | ||
| Do you think this is also that we just have this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy now between the media and our politicians? | ||
| So like, right as we're taping this right now, the LA school teachers are on strike. | ||
| And it's like, well, wait a minute. | ||
| I see all these lefties on Twitter, everyone complaining and teachers need more money and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Except it's all progressives that run California and LA forever. | ||
| So it's like, these are your guys that have been putting in all these policies that the teachers are upset by, but it's that they just, the answer's always easy, it's just more money, more money, more money, more money. | ||
| And that makes people feel good, because it's always easy to say, oh, we'll just give it more money. | ||
| And then the media does this same thing, too, where it's just, it's racism, it needs more money, and that there's no actual... | ||
| Well, there's substantive debate. | ||
| It's happening online now, but not sort of in the places that it should happen. | ||
| Do you see politicians having these discussions, honestly, anywhere? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| I mean, I think, again, nobody wants to talk about individual agency. | ||
| Nobody wants to talk about its behavioral choices. | ||
| And, you know, this gets to something we briefly touched on before, which is the debate around Tucker Carlson and him. | ||
| It was a very odd moment. | ||
| I mean, I love Tucker, but he's taking basically a left-wing position, which is that, you know, the plight of rural America or the opioid crisis, the disengagement of males from the workforce, Which is a very serious thing, is a result of economic policy. | ||
| And there's been people who have been pushing back against that, on National Review, David French. | ||
| Yeah, this is just in the last ten days or so. | ||
| Right, and I think in a persuasive way, which is to say, well you're doing the same kind of shift of responsibility as traditionally the left does, which is to say, well it's these large social forces. | ||
| No, well actually, again, even if we've got jobs moving off offshore, there still are individual | ||
| choices that people can make that vastly increase their chances of success. | ||
| Again, do not have children out of wedlock. | ||
| Study. | ||
| Do not get involved in drugs. | ||
| Don't become a pothead. | ||
| These are all within individual agency. | ||
| Obviously, the left doesn't want to acknowledge that because there is some sort of interest | ||
| in expanding bureaucracies to deal with dysfunction. | ||
| I mean, I've seen this. | ||
| I've written a lot about Hispanics in California and spent time in the Berendo School and Pico Rivera Middle School, which is just crawling with gang counselors and pregnancy counselors for the social dysfunction that's happening with the second and third generation Hispanics. | ||
| The bureaucracy grows larger and larger every place as a substitute for saying to individuals, you know, pull up your bootstraps and you can do it yourself. | ||
| There's an odd thing where then the conservatives and the libertarians who are against authoritarianism by nature need a little bit of authoritarian structure. | ||
| So to speak. | ||
| I had Catherine Burble-Singh in here, who's a school administrator in the UK. | ||
| She was a teacher in the inner city in London, and she realized how dysfunctional everything that you're talking about was, and the breakdown of the family, and these kids, they were malnutritioned, and they behaved horribly, and all these things. | ||
| And now she started her own school, the Michaela School, and I went there. | ||
| And these kids, in between classes, they have to walk exactly in line. | ||
| They can't speak. | ||
| During lunch, they can only talk about one topic and anyone could be called on at any given moment. | ||
| And I thought, this is so bizarre because here, this is the right kind of authoritarianism | ||
| with young people. - Right, exactly. | ||
| I thought that's actually pretty cool. | ||
| You gotta get 'em young, though. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, this is, there's charter schools in the United States like KIPP that do the same thing. | ||
| You know, everything is scripted because the families are so dysfunctional now. | ||
| again, predominantly single mothers, although there's obviously, | ||
| let me just put in the disclaimer, there are heroic single mothers out there | ||
| who are doing the right thing by their children, but I'm sorry, on average, | ||
| I'm not talking about you individual, I'm talking on average, | ||
| it's the worst thing you could do for your kid, not to have the father at the home. | ||
| But yes, this is the last chance these kids have to get socialized. | ||
| And the tragedy again, to bring back to the disparate impact idea, | ||
| something that we've just been going through with Trump's education secretary, | ||
| the Obama administration had this idea that was already bubbling on the progressive left | ||
| in education schools, that if black kids are disciplined more than white kids, | ||
| that must be because of teacher racism. | ||
| Again, you are not allowed to look at behavior. | ||
| This is the key, the left will never look at behavior. | ||
| And so the fact that black kids commit homicide at 10 times the rate black teenagers | ||
| between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at 10 times the rate. | ||
| of white and hispanic male teens combined according to federal data on homicide which is the gold standard. | ||
| I mean there's there's nothing you know at all a wiggle room in this data. | ||
| That type of disparity in socialization that leads to those types of homicide disparities shows up in the classroom as well as any inner city kid can tell you. | ||
| The Obama rule said you may not discipline black kids more and as a result Kids are running amok in schools. | ||
| They're attacking their teachers. | ||
| So basically you just put these arbitrary rules in that clearly don't fit what is actually happening, but it makes you feel good. | ||
| It makes you blame whites. | ||
| Everything, it's all the product of white racism. | ||
| So yes, I'm all for informal structure if a family cannot do it. | ||
| Again, this gets back to the secular right thing. | ||
| I hear that people say, well how do you raise a moral kid without religion? | ||
| Aristotle said virtue is habit. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was not raised in a religious family, but is it really the case that a parent says to his five-year-old son, don't hit your three-year-old brother because Jesus said not to? | ||
| Or is it just, do not hit your three-year-old brother? | ||
| You know, I think the authority from parental authority is sufficient, and you acclimate children to a set of behaviors that are self-controlling deferring gratification | ||
| By just teaching this is how we behave and through the inculcation of habit. | ||
| I don't think in raising children, I just can't imagine at what point you need to invoke the Ten Commandments. | ||
| I think that a lot of these behaviors, the Golden Rule is something that Kant talked about as something that is pretty innate to a Understanding that humans develop what is needed to function in a relatively civil society. | ||
| Yeah, I have to tell you, this is such an example of why I love doing this show, because just an hour before sitting down with you, I don't know if you know him, but I had Dr. Everett Piper on, who's the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University. | ||
| And you guys probably agree on politics at like 99%? | ||
| And yet he's religious. | ||
| And a lot of what we talked about was from a religious perspective. | ||
| But that to me is, that's the beauty of what America is all about. | ||
| It's like actually on the things that matter outside of what your personal beliefs are, you're agreeing on all this stuff and then you have some differences on existential questions and so be it. | ||
| Well, and it's also something that we're now playing with fire of being able to disagree amicably. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if we should all be like screaming, you know, send in the fire alarm or the fire trucks, but this growing civil violence that is predominantly on the left, obviously Charlottesville was an abomination, but I would say in terms of sheer numbers of incidents, Obviously, the right, the alt-right, the crazies took a | ||
| life which is a game changer. | ||
| I mean, that's qualitatively different than anything than following around Tucker Carlson | ||
| or screaming at Trump officials. | ||
| Nevertheless, the Antifa violence is playing with tribal hatreds in a way that I think | ||
| is extremely naive if we think that America is permanently immune from the type of violence | ||
| that still characterizes other societies. | ||
| Yeah, and nobody on the left seems to... No! | ||
| Well, first off, CNN ignores it, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And then the politicians don't say anything about it. | ||
| Okay, so let's link this to one of the other things that you talk about a lot, which is sort of what's happening right now. | ||
| very intensely, which seems like this new war on men or war on boys. | ||
| So how is this related to, it's related sort of in a racial context, | ||
| especially if you're talking about young black men, but we can separate those two things a little bit | ||
| if you want. | ||
| Well, females are determined to think of themselves as victims too, | ||
| which is preposterous. | ||
| There is not a single mainstream institution in this society, whether it's a university, a bank, a law firm, a government agency, a foundation, K-12 probably not, because there you've got a super abundance of females, but every mainstream institution is trying to hire and promote as many females as possible. | ||
| I know for sure, it is just inevitable, that I have been the so-called beneficiary of gender preferences continuously. | ||
| Feels good to admit it, doesn't it? | ||
| No, it disgusts me, frankly. | ||
| You know, there's now this whole meme about mantles. | ||
| Thou shalt not put together a scientific panel of the top cancer researchers if it happens to be all males. | ||
| You must put females on that panel. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| I really do not care who solves Alzheimer's. | ||
| If it's all females because they're the best, so be it. | ||
| But if it's all males, I don't give a damn. | ||
| Are you telling me that if you had heart surgery, you would want the best surgeon regardless of their sexuality or gender or skin color? | ||
| What kind of bigot are you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess I'm just blind to the travails of females, you know? | ||
| And look it again, females now are at least at parity. | ||
| It's very curious. | ||
| All the institutions that have a super abundance of females, nobody ever thinks to say, well, there must be anti-male bias. | ||
| You know, but anything... | ||
| Well, that's due payback or something. | ||
| I see. I see. And it's also the case, you know, in academia, if anybody says, well, there's these vast disparities of | ||
| liberals to conservatives in academia, which I frankly think is kind of a side issue. | ||
| David Horowitz, yes. | ||
| David Horowitz tells a story about going to Columbia in the 1950s and being taught by Marxists. | ||
| But it didn't matter, because mostly politics stayed out of the classroom, but they were open-minded. | ||
| And my ideal of education is frankly a pure ivory tower. | ||
| I think everybody should just be reading Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen and Milton and Trollope and Wallowing in Pastoral Poetry. | ||
| I don't think I should be invited to a college campus because me talking about policing is of the wisps of transitory reality. | ||
| That they'll get to, there's time enough after you graduate. | ||
| These are four precious years to take a deep dive into beauty, into grandeur, into sublimity, into wit, into irony, into the greatest expressions of mankind. | ||
| Not into contemporary politics or homeless politics or whatnot, but that's obviously highly unlikely to happen. | ||
| That's fascinating to me because I guess I agree with the premise that I wish college could be that thing. | ||
| And then on the other hand, when I go to these schools and I see so many kids engaged in the things that we're talking about, I always leave incredibly inspired because I'm like, oh, you guys are at least awake to these issues. | ||
| But I see your point. | ||
| It's like if they could be, in a weird way, if they could be insulated from them a little bit to get to deeper learning of the foundational things, maybe that would be better. | ||
| Yes, Aristotle and Kant and Shakespeare and Milton's Comus. | ||
| I mean, language that is so sensual that is just of almost terrifying eroticism. | ||
| They're not going to come across this later. | ||
| And so I'm grateful to the fact that when I was in college, I was an acolyte of deconstruction, alas. | ||
| I spent way too much time trying to plow my way through La Mythologie Blanche by Jacques Derrida and reading Lacan and Paul de Man, which was a grotesque waste of time. | ||
| But multiculturalism hadn't hit yet. | ||
| So I was in college in the 70s, so we read the canon without anybody thinking to complain about gonads and melanin, so I could read the best literature. | ||
| A lot of white people. | ||
| Right! | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| It didn't come up! | ||
| It's amazing! | ||
| Now you'd think that, oh, this is the first thing you ask about a book, you know. | ||
| Well, do I see myself reflected there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, therefore I'm not going to read it, you know. | ||
| Please do not expose me to a writer that is going to take me out of myself, which is something the Renaissance humanists craved and yearned for. | ||
| Anyway, the whole gender thing, the mantles, the past president of the American Physics Society put out a call to members to nominate for physics prizes and to put on panels females. | ||
| Just the most egregious, blatant discarding of a meritocratic principle. | ||
| Something that is irrelevant to physics. | ||
| So this is everywhere. | ||
| And I just reject it completely. | ||
| And the campus idea that females are at risk of rape culture on campus is equally ludicrous. | ||
| If these statistics that the Campus rape industry have been throwing around for the last 10, 15, 20 years were remotely accurate. | ||
| One to four to one to five females sexually assaulted during their time on campus. | ||
| That is a crime rate that is unseen around the globe. | ||
| Detroit is our most violent city. | ||
| All four of the FBI's violent index felonies, which is murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery, you put all of those together, you get a 2% violent crime rate. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Rape is like .1% of the population. | ||
| Now, obviously the campus thing is over four years. | ||
| Even so, you cannot possibly get to 1 in 4 to 1 in 5. | ||
| If that were the case, we would have seen a mass exodus of females from co-ed universities decades ago. | ||
| These highly sophisticated mothers who are right now in Manhattan paying $200 an hour to prep their girl tots to get into the most prestigious pre-K To set them on the path to some Ivy League. | ||
| They would be demanding single sex education. | ||
| You would not see on every Saturday night the girls at UVA trooping down Rugby Road to the frats. | ||
| Unless girls are stupid. | ||
| and they do not they're not strong women together and there's rape going on there not uh... warning each other which i'm willing to entertain that as an explanation but what i'm not willing to entertain is the explanation that there is a epidemic of sexual assault and females are simply I don't know. | ||
| They're accepting it or something. | ||
| It's just, it's very bizarre. | ||
| So what do you make of how, as the intersectional pyramid that is, you know, based on these varying levels of what I would say are perceived oppression, not to say real oppression, that they constantly are talking about racism and bigotry and yet they seem to be the ones enforcing it. | ||
| So I think the best example of this is what's happened over the last couple months with the Women's March. | ||
| Where it became very clear that many of the leaders were either anti-Semites themselves or seriously embracing of anti-Semites. | ||
| And yet these are the same people who would tell you that, you know, everyone else is a bigot and a racist and the rest of it. | ||
| I guess this is just the natural outcome of this. | ||
| Well, it's hilarious. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I mean, I love the internecine struggles on the left. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| It's a comedy actually. | ||
| And I always wonder, you know, when leftists get called out for bigotry or racism, does it make them ever think, well, gee, you know, I've been calling everybody else a racist. | ||
| I know I'm not. | ||
| These are false claims. | ||
| Maybe the other people, the conservatives, aren't as well. | ||
| You know, so I don't know if the New York Times is called out or even people who I really respect. | ||
| I mean, Nicholas Christakis at Yale. | ||
| He's a he's a wonderful, serious scholar, but he is a man of the left. | ||
| and even after he was-- - Well, he almost got eaten by this monster. - Right, so he was mobbed | ||
| for three hours by students cursing at him in the most vile language. | ||
| It's just the most shocking instantiation of the cultural revolution, of these students | ||
| that have been just fed their victimology for the last 16 years and nobody daring | ||
| to expect of them civil behavior. | ||
| I hope I totally get this right, but at this moment where these kids | ||
| are screaming at him at Yale, one of the girls screaming at him screams, | ||
| And it turns out that she was on the board that helped hire him. | ||
| I mean, that's how bananas the whole thing is. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But shouting, you know, you are disgusting. | ||
| And it just, it was unbelievable. | ||
| But he, even after this happened, It's sort of unfortunate he penned a missive to the student body still wanting to confirm his progressive bona fides and saying, well, of course I understand that for minority students at Yale, you know, this is a struggle, which is BS. | ||
| No student at Yale is in a struggle for psychological safety or an anti-haven from racism. | ||
| Yale, again, it is the most progressive environment in human history. | ||
| So, you know, what we've seen with Bret Weinstein and whatnot, they now are realizing they're making broader affiliations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's funny. | ||
| When I do stand-up now, I usually bring one of the IDW crew with me. | ||
| You should join me for one of them. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| But I bring Brett on several times, and most of my audience now is libertarian or conservative or old-school liberal, and he still describes himself as a progressive, and they love him. | ||
| And even though there's an absolute disagreement on plenty of the issues, and we get into all of it, from climate change to everything else, the audience cheers and applauds them. | ||
| And I always tell them, I go, Brett, you do know that we couldn't get five progressives to show up anywhere for us. | ||
| So that does tell you something about the tolerant crew. | ||
| All right, moving on from hot button to hot button, because we're in a little bit of a time issue with you today. | ||
| Let's talk about immigration, because this is obviously the thing at the moment. | ||
| What is your stance on immigration? | ||
| Well, I think low-skilled mass immigration is not a good thing for this country. | ||
| I think it's absolutely a country's prerogative to define who comes into the country. | ||
| It is not for people outside of the country to make a de facto immigration policy by their decisions to come into the country illegally. | ||
| You know, the left will not talk about the effect on Americans' wages. | ||
| It's quite bizarre. | ||
| Cesar Chavez, the farm worker organizer, was completely against illegal immigration because he realized that it undercuts the wages of of American Hispanics and blacks. | ||
| Barbara Jordan, a black congressman in 94, chaired an immigration panel totally against the levels of low-skilled immigration we had, saying it's affecting America's working classes the hardest. | ||
| And I think that we're bringing in a culture that is not in our current environment with its monolithic flows from central american mexico it's not assimilating and what i've been reporting on uh... for a decade now is the downward assimilation of the second third generation of hispanics into an underclass culture you know the conservative happy face narrative is hispanic family values well hispanics have the second highest out of wedlock child rearing after blacks blacks it's about | ||
| 71% of all black children are born to single parents with Hispanics is 53%. | ||
| That's really high. | ||
| when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his extraordinarily present | ||
| uh... alarm about black family breakdown in nineteen sixty five and he said | ||
| as long as so many black boys are being raised without fathers | ||
| we are not going to close the economic gap we are not going to make further progress | ||
| on civil rights because | ||
| these boys are not being socialized at that point the black out of wedlock birth rate | ||
| was twenty three percent Moynihan thought that was a crisis right now it's seventy | ||
| one percent for blacks and for hispanics it's twice that | ||
| I'll never take an opportunity not to discuss Daniel Patrick Moynihan for a second | ||
| so where are the good liberals on this | ||
| Are they just gone, or is it what you just referred to before, which is they know what happens when they've called everyone else racist for so long, so then they just cower away and disappear. | ||
| I mean, I suspect it's some version of that, because I've kind of lived through it myself. | ||
| Where are they on this being immigration or on out of wedlock, the family breakdown? | ||
| Well, on almost everything we've discussed here so far, where are the good liberals of today? | ||
| Well, again, they will not talk about behavior. | ||
| That is the dividing line. | ||
| Moynihan could. | ||
| He could say, look, there are behavioral, at this point, from here on out, we're going to see predominantly behavioral, not that obviously in the 60s there was still just egregious racism, but it was possible to say, Although, you know, even back then he was immediately turned into a pariah. | ||
| So things weren't so great back then. | ||
| He was just mobbed and that report, which could have, if it had been embraced and brought into the public discourse, would have meant that we weren't here today. | ||
| Talking, having to write these phony narratives about the fact that we still have this achievement gap and crime gap and incarceration gap. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think, again, I think people feel very uncomfortable with the continuing racial divide and they somehow have lost any confidence in saying to blacks, you have agency. | ||
| So before we skew too far off the immigration thing, then... | ||
| How do we do this conversation right? | ||
| How do we actually do it right? | ||
| It seems like right now, as it stands, we're sort of between either you want a wall and protectionism, let's say, or you want open borders. | ||
| There seems to be very little in between that, even though I think probably 80% of us, if not 95% of us, want something that's much more in between those two things. | ||
| Well, I mean, the bromide is, well, we need comprehensive immigration reform. | ||
| You know, that's sort of the safe harbor that you can say in this. | ||
| I suppose, I mean, comprehensive immigration reform is basically code for amnesty, for DACA, for the DREAMers, and usually higher levels of family and chain low-skilled immigration. | ||
| I've written for, well, we also need E-Verify. | ||
| We need to, you know, have employers have to mandatorily check the work papers, which is very easy. | ||
| It's instantaneous. | ||
| They do that. | ||
| They get a safe harbor against any kind of liability. | ||
| But I think Frankly, seeing these caravans, seeing the mobs storming, border patrol throwing rocks, trying to scale the fences, I'm in favor of a wall. | ||
| The only reason to oppose a wall is because you think it works. | ||
| That's why the liberals don't want it. | ||
| They, you know, if they think it's so superfluous and put it up, you know, what the hell? | ||
| But they actually do think it will be effective and that's why they don't want it. | ||
| But I think, again, we need to be able to talk about what low-skilled-- the fiscal cost that this mass low-skilled | ||
| poverty culture that we are importing is imposing on the American taxpayer, | ||
| whether it's through schools. | ||
| Again, I see this at the Barrendo Middle School in Pico Rivera. | ||
| All of the counselors trying to get these kids that are getting sucked into gang culture | ||
| to try and keep them on their feet. | ||
| The health care costs. | ||
| You know, now you have demographic change so much in California. | ||
| California is saying we're going to have full health care for illegal immigrants. | ||
| Mayor de Blasio in New York, full taxpayer-subsidized health care for illegal immigrants. | ||
| If the politics keeps changing this way, that's going to be more and more. | ||
| And I don't know, you know, a lot of Americans, some Americans understand that this is just extraordinarily burdensome on our society. | ||
| Yeah, all right, we only have about 10 minutes left. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now everything we've been talking about is sort of exactly what The Diversity Delusion is all about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But if I had to pick one thing to end on here, out of the book, what should we go with here? | ||
| Because I could do 20 more topics with you about all of this. | ||
| But these things are all so interestingly linked together, obviously. | ||
| Well, I would say the diversity mania, the sort of equation of the diversity mania which is present now both in universities and abroad, outside of universities, is a race and gender the most important things about the self. | ||
| I completely disagree with. | ||
| I can tell you being female is not an accomplishment. | ||
| It is not a particularly interesting status as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| The most important thing about the self Discrimination based on those characteristics is the defining feature of American society. | ||
| See Ta-Nehisi Coates, the American academic idol and the idol of the establishment, who says that destroying the black body is the very essence of America. | ||
| And third, that any Lack of proportionality of race and gender in any institution is, by definition, the result of sexism and racism. | ||
| That idea now defines university culture, but it is now spreading into the sciences. | ||
| That's what I think is the most concerning and the most amazing, because a lot of optimists, the people who want to see, you know, oh, this is fine. | ||
| There's all these firewalls. | ||
| The firewall, whether it's the free market, corporations, they'll never do this. | ||
| Or it's science. | ||
| The sciences are never going to be taken over by identity politics. | ||
| Wrong. | ||
| The National Science Foundation is spending billions of taxpayer dollars funding gender studies professors to study intersectionality and microaggressions in engineering and math. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| You have Google, you know, firing engineers who dare to challenge the feminist orthodoxy. | ||
| I have worked out, I'm collecting a series of natural experiments testing the discrimination hypothesis when it comes to gender. | ||
| Because again, we look at Google and we see 20% female engineers at Google and other high-tech firms. | ||
| The diversity explanation is that's because Google's gatekeepers are sexist. | ||
| They are simply unable to spot engineering talent when it comes with female gonads. | ||
| So what we need to test the discrimination hypothesis are institutions with no gatekeepers that are wide open. | ||
| And I'm collecting examples of these. | ||
| And what they show is that there are natural differences between males and females when it comes to Appetite for competition, drive, and yes, high in math skills. | ||
| Wikipedia. | ||
| Blind editing, it's open to anybody, there are no gatekeepers. | ||
| Anybody can edit or write a Wikipedia entry. | ||
| Let me guess, 50-50 man and woman? | ||
| No! | ||
| Right, right, what is it? | ||
| Come on down! | ||
|
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13% females. | |
| The female entries are really weak. | ||
| Nobody's keeping them out. | ||
| I noticed this for Scrabble Championships. | ||
| Females predominate among casual amateur home Scrabble players. | ||
| There have never been a female Scrabble Championship. | ||
| Spelling, no, the geography bees, the winners are males. | ||
| It goes on and on and on. | ||
| History bees, the winners are males. | ||
| These are things without gatekeepers. | ||
| The fact of this, Silicon Valley, the drive that we see to create these startups, you guys in the intellectual dark web are predominantly male. | ||
| Uh... that's not that there are not individual females out there with as much competitive drive, as much empire building. | ||
| Let's take risks. | ||
| But one of the things that got James Damore fired from Google for his infamous ten-page memo suggesting that there may be Non-discriminatory reasons for the lack of 50-50 gender parity at Google. | ||
| He talked about some of the big five personality traits and he used this phrase neuroticism. | ||
| And to the lay ear this sounded very offensive. | ||
| And he said females are more neurotic. | ||
| This is a common term in psychology. | ||
| This has been around for decades. | ||
| That's one of the big five traits. | ||
| And it turns out that females are more risk averse and they worry more. | ||
| And there might be biological and historical reasons for this. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| I'm sure you know about this, but over the last couple months where Jordan and I have been traveling, we went to Sweden. | ||
| And now everyone on the left and all the socialists, they always point to Sweden as the place where they're doing everything right in Sweden. | ||
| And Sweden, which has done egalitarianism right. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| They have been completely equal men and women. | ||
| Well, now they've found out that for whatever reason, men still want to be engineers and women still want to be nurses. | ||
| So now they ran the experiment properly in that they made a truly egalitarian society, but the postmodernists and the leftists and the progressives won't let them take the results of the experiment that they did right. | ||
| And now they're trying to rejigger the society again. | ||
| And it's just absolutely incredible. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| And again, if there's more females than males in an institution, that's fine. | ||
| And let me just finish with the conservative to liberal ratio in academia. | ||
| If you point that out to the liberals in academia, that in some faculties you have a 100 to 1 liberal to conservative ratio, what they will say is, well, A, conservatives are just not interested in these fields. | ||
| Or they're not as smart. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Explanations that they will not accept for why females gravitate towards more hands-on, | ||
| relational, human-centered work, and they're just not as interested in perhaps being coders | ||
| at 2 a.m. with cold pizza in some ugly computer science lab. | ||
| The science geeks are predominantly males, and they're probably on the spectrum. | ||
| So what? | ||
| Get over it, who cares? | ||
| Big damn whoop. | ||
| All right, you're super busy, so I'm for, all right, we're gonna do this again for sure, because I feel like we just got warmed up here. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But let's end on, give me something positive out of this. | ||
| For the people that see all this, that are truly worried about it, that are emailing me every day, that care about these conversations, what are the signs that we might be getting some winds here, or that enough people are starting to wake up to this craziness? | ||
| Well, your audience, I think. | ||
| I mean, there really are people out there. | ||
| The universities, people are operating under terrified silence. | ||
| I hear from professors, I hear from faculty. | ||
| It is unbelievable! | ||
| It's like Stasi's. | ||
| It's like East Germany or Russia. | ||
| People are afraid to speak in a university which purports to be the model of human discourse. | ||
| But there are people that are pushing back against it. | ||
| And all I can say is we are not going to beat this thing. | ||
| Unless we push back against the narrative that any disparities in representation are due to racism and sexism. | ||
| As long as that narrative wins, the push for quotas, the destruction of scientific meritocracy is going to continue. | ||
| And China is going to end up whooping our ass when it comes to technological innovation. | ||
| Because when it comes to science, they care about only one thing. | ||
| Can you do the engineering? | ||
| Very strange, the people who are obsessed with our differences seem to want us to be the same more than anybody else. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| Can't expect individuality. | ||
| It's been a pleasure, Heather. | ||
| I'm sorry this was so quick. | ||
| We're gonna do it again for sure. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. |
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