Feb. 16, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Are we heading towards a point of no return and how do we get back from this? | ||
| This is the most difficult thing. | ||
| The way we actually demolish identity politics, and again the founding engine of this is disparate impact, we have to counteract the myth of bias. | ||
| That as long as the only allowable explanation for socioeconomic disparities is The Ta-Nehisi Coates view of the world, the Michelle Alexander view of the world, that everything is driven by bias. | ||
| The AOC world. | ||
| They win! | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin, and unless I've been impeached by a completely partisan vote, this is still The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, a quick reminder to click the subscribe bell so you guys have a small chance of seeing our videos right here on the YouTube. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is an author, political commentator, and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Heather MacDonald. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's such an honor, Dave. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on. | ||
| I'm glad to have you back. | ||
| Had you on about a year ago. | ||
| And the people, they love you. | ||
| That's what I learned. | ||
| That's what I learned in the YouTube comment section. | ||
| It's just the aura of being in your presence. | ||
| There's so much love coming at you that it a little spills over. | ||
| All right, well, you're killing it in the scarf game today. | ||
| So I feel like I have to be very sharp. | ||
| Thank you, it's such a brilliant. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| So one of the things I wanted to start with here is something that we discussed briefly for about five or 10 minutes in our last interview. | ||
| You are a secular conservative. | ||
| And I think a lot of conservatives seem to think that that is either an oxymoron or just simply cannot exist because conservatism has to have some sort of religious underpinning. | ||
| So I thought that would just be an interesting place for us to pick up the conversation. | ||
| I base my conservatism on empirical truth, on what I've observed in life. | ||
| I can talk about the necessity of the two-parent family because we can see empirically what happens when the marriage norm breaks down in communities. | ||
| I support most traditional values because I think we have a history of stability when those are honored. | ||
| I don't think it's particularly stable to rest a set of political principles or moral principles on the basis of revealed wisdom. | ||
| That this holy book supports this. | ||
| I'll notice this. | ||
| People who I respect enormously, Dave, whether it's Dennis Prager or Michael Medved, that are making the argument that you cannot have a moral society without a foundation of religious belief, I would ask them These are two brilliant Jewish thinkers. | ||
| Why don't you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? | ||
| It's revealed truth. | ||
| The New Testament says that this is gospel. | ||
| They don't believe that. | ||
| So basically, if you're going that far with religion and you're saying you need this revealed truth, this belief to organize a society, why not the next level of the revealed truth or whatever the next level is or something like that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They will not take it as simply necessary truth, the fact that the New Testament claims to be the word of God. | ||
| Why don't they believe that? | ||
| They're basing their same belief in the Old Testament on the same claim that the New Testament makes. | ||
| They just choose to be agnostic or atheistic about one of those holy books. | ||
| I could apply the same challenge to their belief that the Old Testament is the revealed truth because it's simply self- Self-validating. | ||
| So I would look for a different set of principles that does not depend on one's suspension of disbelief and an acceptance that something is revealed truth for my moral code. | ||
| So with that being said, does it matter to you if the end result is the same, right? | ||
| So I'm gonna guess that on most of the important issues of the day you probably agree that in large part with both Dennis and Michael Medved | ||
| and most conservative thinkers that maybe come from a more religious background. | ||
| So at the end of the day, when it all washes away, do you think it really matters? | ||
| Do you think that's sort of a long-term problem? | ||
| No, I guess if we arrive at the same place, I think it's a problem for that segment of voters | ||
| or thinkers who don't find those appeals particularly interesting. | ||
| But I'll be very honest, Dave. | ||
| Part of my resistance to this is simply I don't find claims of petitionary prayer and the idea of a personal loving God consistent with what I see what I call the daily massacre of the innocents. | ||
| To me it's a very hard claim to make that I should expect God to pay attention to my well-being when he's willing to allow horrific things to happen to people far more deserving and | ||
| innocent than I am. | ||
| So for me, it's partly just a truth value. | ||
| I cannot stomach what appears to me to be a patently false claim about a personal loving God. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I've mentioned that I've had John Kasich in here, who's the former governor of Ohio and presidential candidate, obviously. | ||
| And when I asked him about faith, he said something that sounded sort of almost flippant, but I thought it was really actually pretty insightful. | ||
| He said, you know, some people can do it with God, I just can't. | ||
| And I thought that was actually like, you know, for a certain set of people, where you're able to sort of always sort of Maybe go back to your intellectual side. | ||
| Some people just sort of get tired of that. | ||
| Does that make sense to you? | ||
| Well, and I also think it's a very, I think it's genetic. | ||
| I know that I am not particularly predisposed towards metaphysical questions because I don't think they can really be answered. | ||
| So the idea of what started the universe We can't really answer that. | ||
| I think that to say, God, that's just a placeholder for ignorance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That doesn't help. | ||
| I may have to get you in here with Prager to discuss it. | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| You get infinite regress. | ||
| So where did God come from? | ||
| It's just putting off that moment of ignorance a little bit further. | ||
| So I don't find those questions particularly relevant. | ||
| On the other hand, I recognize that for much of humanity that is a very deep need to ask these basic questions about origin | ||
| and end point, where are we all headed? | ||
| What is the meaning of life to me? | ||
| Anybody who claims that he doesn't find meaning in life when there is Mozart and Haydn, | ||
| to invoke a Dennis Prager favorite, or Beethoven or John Milton or Aeschylus | ||
| or Anthony Trollope. | ||
| Or just waking up with purpose for whatever you do. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| Trying to do the best you can do. | ||
| I don't find life meaningless for one second. | ||
| Yeah, so does it worry you then when Republicans, or more broadly, conservatives, talk about God all the time? | ||
| Or now that we're seeing sort of a huge fracture in what's happening with the left, they're like completely afraid to even mention God or anything like that. | ||
| Bernie, I think, is basically an atheist, although he won't really say it, because I think there would be political repercussions. | ||
| But are you, like, does that make you sort of feel not totally at home with the conservatives? | ||
| Well, you know, I grew up in a very secular environment, and so it was a novel discovery to me in the 90s when I was in a more conservative writing circle, and I grew up as a default liberal. | ||
| I hadn't been exposed to religion. | ||
| I mean, it is an amazing thing. | ||
| I had been educated on the coasts. | ||
| I didn't realize how different they were. | ||
| So in one sense I'm very parochial and I hadn't been exposed to the degree of religious faith. | ||
| I guess I find it I'm always amazed what, to me, seems parochialism when I hear, especially Christians in a political environment, getting up there and talking about Jesus as God. | ||
| My view immediately is, well, there are Jews around, you know, at the very least, and there are Muslims. | ||
| How can you be so confident that everybody in this audience is of that particular faith? | ||
| And I also would notice simply that religion has been tamed by the Enlightenment. | ||
| It has now been taught to mind its manners and sit quietly in the corner. | ||
| We all, you know, the great kissy-wissy between Jews and Christians that we all now talk about the Judeo-Christian environment, a heritage, and perhaps rightly so. | ||
| That's a novel thing. | ||
| Right, it wasn't like that. | ||
| It wasn't like that for a long time. | ||
| There were things called the Crusades and a whole bunch of other stuff. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And all these religious supporters are saying we cannot live without it. | ||
| They are conveniently overlooking what the history of religion has been in our tradition | ||
| and still is in many other places that have not gone through the Enlightenment. | ||
| The concept of tolerance is not a religious concept. | ||
| It's an Enlightenment concept. | ||
| And religion in the West has been a religious concept. | ||
| has been forced to accept tolerance, which is a very good thing, but that is not an idea that is inherent to religion. | ||
| Right, so I don't want to be Prager or Medved's lawyer at the moment, but I think what they would say is that it was all the religious stuff that organized society that allowed us to get to the Enlightenment so that the Enlightenment could then, you know, unfurl all these good ideas. | ||
| Well, I don't think Christianity or Judeo-Christianity has any necessary monopoly on moral virtues. | ||
| I think there's a certain core sense of, I don't know any culture that says murder is okay, but every culture starts to make certain distinctions. | ||
| What? | ||
| They don't last that long. | ||
| Right, but it's fun for a moment, you know, you get to give in to your most aggressive tendencies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where do you think Trump falls out on this? | ||
| Because I don't think anyone really thinks he's a religious person or perhaps even a believer in any real sense of it, yet Christians or evangelicals especially really seem to like the job that he's doing. | ||
| Well, I don't think he has particular principles or deep thoughts about much of anything. | ||
| I think he's a chameleon. | ||
| He takes on the coloring of what is convenient at the time. | ||
| So whether he believes or not... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think he's thought much deeply about it either, and it doesn't really matter, but certainly he's willing to speak that rhetoric in order to get that vote. | ||
| And it's an interesting question. | ||
| I mean, we're more ready to have a gay politician probably than somebody who is an avowed non-believer, which is interesting. | ||
| So taking the other side of this, as we watch sort of this, internal civil war of the Democratic Party between the socialists and the last few remaining decent liberals, or whatever you want to call them. | ||
| I do see a connection between, not necessarily belief, but they no longer have any sort of guiding principle that they believe in, other than the state. | ||
| Do you see something like that? | ||
| Not that you need God or you're gonna have the state, but because they have something, they have almost nothing. | ||
| It's starting from nothing other than the state. | ||
| They just want that state to grow and grow and grow. | ||
| Well, you're sort of making an argument that I hear a lot, which is that the left, progressives, liberals, are relativists. | ||
| They're moral relativists. | ||
| That's not what I see. | ||
| I see an absolute dogmatism. | ||
| They just have a different set of values or virtues in which they are absolutely convinced. | ||
| I mean, they think that they know the truth of America, and that truth is one of endemic, enduring white supremacy. | ||
| And that everybody, unless he has been proven otherwise, is filled with bigotry and hatred. | ||
| So I see them as judgmental, as the worst caricature of Puritans. | ||
| So I wouldn't say it's an amoral view, and it's not one that is particularly individualistic. | ||
| It's group-based and identity-based. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does it seem to you that the remaining piece of whatever the Democratic Party is that this just can't hold. | ||
| I mean, AOC, who I think is pretty much wrong about everything, she did say something a couple of weeks ago that I thought was relatively insightful, which is that she basically, as a socialist, they still call themselves democratic socialists, but they'll get rid of that first part soon enough, but that she shouldn't be in the same party as Joe Biden. | ||
| And that strikes me as actually true. | ||
| What are these people doing in the same party? | ||
| Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton should not be in the same party, that this thing just can't hold much longer. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I think that that's, the gravity is with the AOCs, and I would love to see a very strong defense of the free market system, of individual entrepreneurship, of the nobility and bravery and courage of entrepreneurs. | ||
| But is there literally any Democrat? | ||
| But I don't think they're gonna make it. | ||
| I mean, is there any, even Biden, like he's the last vestige of it, right? | ||
| No, they won't, they won't, they won't. | ||
| So what do you think that is? | ||
| That would lead someone like Biden, that you know that he's not one of these people. | ||
| What do you think that is, that weakness point? | ||
| I think that the idea that there is a Western culture has been so devalued. | ||
| There's a constellation of complaints Of accusations that are deeply intertwined. | ||
| And it is involved with identity politics. | ||
| I think that the identity politics is what's going to take this culture down. | ||
| But I think to support capitalism, you are leaving yourself open to supporting white male capitalism and white male entrepreneurship. | ||
| And so I think what Biden fears Would be less being accused of being a hard hearted vulture on the body politic as being somehow involved in a long tradition that led to colonialism, that led to imperialism, and that leads to oppression by white males of everybody else. | ||
| So that's what I think is going to prevent him from giving a strong-throated and full, full enthusiastic defense of the values of capitalism. | ||
| And for me, the question is, again, as we mentioned before, The Mark Benioff sales force, you know, the Jeff Bezos of the world. | ||
| When are they going to demand a candidate that will defend their right to become billionaires legitimately because they created products that the world over is hungering for? | ||
| Isn't it pathetic then we see Tom Steyer up there and he's like begging, he's like a little puppy dog around Bernie, just like me, like, well, it's because he doesn't want to get sent to the gulag once Bernie's in power, right? | ||
| Right, yeah, no, no. | ||
| Politicians, I mean, they still have this incredible power, you know, and he's not about to say, He occasionally invokes that I did create something, and of course, he has to have his humble roots. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right, right. | |
| But he's not about to say, I did something that you guys wouldn't have a clue to do, which is mastering the supply chain. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Do you think it's funny that the billionaires that are thought of as the good guy billionaires, so, you know, Bill Gates is thought of as good, let's say, Warren Buffett is thought of as good, you know, Koch brothers bad, or whoever the right ones are bad. | ||
| but the ones that are thought of as good, they sort of think that they can give away enough money | ||
| or say enough things that it will save them, but it will never save them, right? | ||
| In the eye, ultimately, of the base, no matter, they could give away everything, | ||
| they could destroy their fortunes and empires, and it just, it will never end. | ||
| Yeah, and there's this sense-- | ||
| Do you think they just don't realize that? | ||
| Or it's like you just have to do it no matter what 'cause you wanna survive? | ||
| Ah, do they not realize it? | ||
| Yeah, I don't. | ||
| They don't really have a choice, but they are playing with fire. | ||
| I mean, they have to realize that to the extent that they continue feeding this. | ||
| And Mark Benioff is just a great example. | ||
| There he is in in San Francisco promoting this idea that the San Francisco is not done enough to help the homeless. | ||
| And, you know, we need to save the children and whatnot through just endless bulking up of the bureaucracy without dealing | ||
| with the profound questions of norms, public norms of behavior, you know, he probably thinks he | ||
| can buy exoneration, but it's just it's not going to happen because, again, it's | ||
| all connected. | ||
| You know. | ||
| The same left that has been dominating homeless politics in San Francisco for decades, the Coalition on Homelessness, they are connected to the entire woke discourse, whether it's regards to illegal aliens or white supremacy or male Toxic masculinity, it's all part of the same thing. | ||
| So let's shift actually towards the homeless portion of this, because I watched this morning a talk that you did about the San Francisco situation, which everyone knows is horrific. | ||
| I've told this story a million times, but when I was there about a year ago, I went out to dinner with a friend and we were at Morton's Steakhouse. | ||
| So it's a nice street we're on, supposedly nice street. | ||
| Our car got broken into right outside the restaurant. | ||
| They stole my bag and my notebook and all this stuff. | ||
| And I took a picture. | ||
| of the broken glass, and I tweeted it out, and I kid you not, I got hundreds, if not thousands of responses, basically all saying the same thing. | ||
| Dave, what kind of idiot leaves a bag in a car in San Francisco? | ||
| Because there is such an epidemic of break-ins that regular people know not to leave a bag in a car. | ||
| What is happening up there? | ||
| Well, it's happening across the country. | ||
| We're in a massive process of de-norming. | ||
| We are unraveling every standard in the name of racial justice. | ||
| So what happened in your car, that's a product largely of Proposition 47, one of the ballot initiatives in California that downgraded a whole bunch of felonies, including felony theft, to misdemeanor status. | ||
| Because of the problem of criminal laws having a disparate impact on minorities. | ||
| Do you think the people that are pushing these laws, that it's the road to hell is paved with good intentions always, do you think that they really think they're doing something good even though all the evidence always points to the fact that it gets worse after these policies? | ||
| Yeah, I don't I don't I think I've you've said yourself. | ||
| You're not a big fan of conspiracy theories I'm not either. | ||
| I really I take people at their words. | ||
| I think that they really do believe that the over representation of blacks in prison is due to criminal justice racism and that we're throwing a whole bunch of Trivial offenders in prison, which is not the case You have to work very hard to get yourself a prison sentence most any big city you're triaged out You know, if you steal somebody's car, a D.A. | ||
| is going to be completely uninterested in you. | ||
| You have to steal it at gunpoint with the driver still in to get a big city D.A. | ||
| interested in actually prosecuting your case as opposed to just giving you probation and sending you on your way. | ||
| But no, I think that they really do believe that the criminal justice system is racist and that the way to solve that is to not prosecute. | ||
| Not put people, and defang the police. | ||
| And of course, the problem is, yes, there's a vast over-representation of blacks in prison, but the thing we should be concerned about is that blacks are victimized by crime the most. | ||
| And I go to community meetings in inner-city neighborhoods all the time. | ||
| Those good, law-abiding, bourgeois residents of high-crime neighborhoods beg for more police protection. | ||
| Those are the voices that never get heard. | ||
| So when these policies are put in place, or like in New York City, de Blasio has now done this thing where you're allowed to jump the turnstile. | ||
| They will not stop you. | ||
| So it's like, you're basically saying to everybody that pays, right? | ||
| And I lived in New York City most of my adult life. | ||
| I never jumped a turnstile. | ||
| You're basically saying if you pay, you're an idiot. | ||
| Like, why should you do it? | ||
| And so they're actually encouraging more and more people to not follow the law. | ||
| I know, and AOC has as well. | ||
| I mean, this is really, for a politician to defend turnstile jumping should be, that's an impeachable offense. | ||
| Social norms are fragile and respect for the rule of law is the essence of a civilization. | ||
| We lose that and you get third world anarchy with everybody trying to game the system. | ||
| You know, queuing is a thing of beauty. | ||
| We take it for granted, but for people to be able to quietly wait in line and wait their place as opposed to trying to you know, get to the top and just muscle everybody else out, | ||
| break the rules, whatever, to get ahead. | ||
| That is a, you know, has been a sort of normal condition. | ||
| And for respect for the rule of, for the law is incredibly precious. And to say it doesn't | ||
| matter, and the police should walk on by, you are playing with fire. You are on the road to anarchy. | ||
| Do you sense that we're in a much more precarious place right now? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Related to that than we've ever been, or at least, or maybe in the last, let's say, 50 years, something like that? | ||
| Well, we had this extraordinary revolution that nobody foresaw in the 1990s. | ||
| In the 80s, the reigning wisdom on law enforcement itself was that police could do nothing about crime, that crime was a product of inequality and injustice, and until you solve poverty and economic inequalities, all the police could do would respond after the fact. | ||
| So why even bother? | ||
| So this is like why New York City, and especially Times Square, was a drug den when I was growing up going into the city. | ||
| Because police would just walk on by. | ||
| The FBI publishes an annual crime report. | ||
| Throughout the 80s they had a disclaimer saying, well of course we know homicide is a social problem that the police can't solve. | ||
| So the 90s had this incredible profound moment where that whole ideology of passivity Before social anarchy was turned on its head and you had Mayor Giuliani coming in, Giuliani in his good days, I don't know what's happened to him now, it's very depressing to me, but he was one of the greatest mayors, if not the greatest mayor New York ever had, and his police commissioner William Bratton said, no, we are actually going to, the police are going to lower crime by enforcing the law. | ||
| And we learned that enforcement matters. | ||
| You change people's behavior, you deter Criminal offending. | ||
| And they started paying attention to those low-level crimes in Times Square. | ||
| The squalor, the turnstile jumping, the graffiti, the urinating in the streets. | ||
| And they changed public norms. | ||
| And the whole broken windows theory is correct. | ||
| And even if it doesn't prevent higher level crimes, it's what people in High crime neighborhoods beg for, they want public order on the streets. | ||
| And now that is all being thrown away. | ||
| And again, the reason is disparate impact. | ||
| So, all right, so as someone that deals in fact, and that's what your books have been about, and that's why my audience digs what you do. | ||
| Do you ever find that sometimes facts just aren't enough to change the discourse? | ||
| So it's like, all right, well then, okay, we could probably move on. | ||
| So how do you deal with that then? | ||
| 'Cause I find this to be the most, sort of strangest place for conservatives to be right now, | ||
| which is that most of the facts seem to be on the conservative side of things at the moment. | ||
| It just seems to be reality right now. | ||
| But I think conservatives have a really hard time breaking through either the cultural part, | ||
| I think that's actually really changing right now, partially 'cause of Trump. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| But sometimes facts just aren't enough, right? | ||
| I mean, I was telling you, right, when you sat down, we were talking about the homeless thing, the Target that's a half mile from my house. | ||
| There is a massive homeless encampment, massive. | ||
| I mean, it's like a city there now when I go to Target. | ||
| And it's like, well, we could talk about why some of the reasons that you just laid out are allowing this to expand, but a lot of people don't wanna hear that. | ||
| Well, you know, this is something that you have been thinking about for much longer than I have, of how do you change minds? | ||
| What is the nature of rational discourse? | ||
| What is its limits? | ||
| And, you know, we learn from people like Jonathan Haidt that, in fact, reason often acts as a After the fact justification for people's instinctive value systems and ways of looking at the world. | ||
| So while I would like to claim non-ironically that I have the facts on my side, and in fact I believe that, I mean that's what drives me, and it's sort of a hatred of what I call idiocy. | ||
| I have to acknowledge that the progressives would say the same thing. | ||
| They would say, my God, can't you see the relevant facts? | ||
| For me, one of the dividing lines between a conservative and a liberal outlook is that liberals or progressives will tend to see structural explanations for inequality as the most powerful ones. | ||
| And conservatives are more inclined to see individual choice, personal responsibility, personal behavior as more significant in leading to ultimate social outcomes with economic disparities. | ||
| A liberal is going to say, but can't you see the facts of people growing up in very different economic circumstances? | ||
| There's not equal opportunity yet. | ||
| So how can we possibly demand one single set of behaviors from people? | ||
| And they would not view the facts, for me, Like, probably the most profound fact of our social existence today is the breakdown of the family. | ||
| And if this continues going, you cannot have a civilization that way. | ||
| Right, but as you know... Liberals won't see that. | ||
| Right, well that's the thing. | ||
| If you say that to them, and we see this all the time, if you say that to them, what do they say? | ||
| Racist. | ||
| You're a racist, right. | ||
| So you're being extremely kind to them by saying that they're dealing in their facts, | ||
| but it's like they're dealing in their facts at just sort of a different layer | ||
| that the real facts are beneath. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I... | ||
| Generally, again, I'm not going to say that all of the hypocrisy or blindness is on one side and the other. | ||
| I will, however, say this. | ||
| I do think that the silencing tactics of liberals are not symmetrical. | ||
| I don't think that conservatives have that all-purpose You know, you've been in these environments as well. | ||
| You know all the arguments. | ||
| They have arguments. | ||
| We don't find them persuasive. | ||
| They don't find our arguments persuasive. | ||
| more open-mindedness on the side of of conservatives. But again all I can say, | ||
| you know, you've been in these environments as well. You know all the | ||
| arguments. They have arguments. We don't find them persuasive. | ||
| They don't find our arguments persuasive. How you change minds in the face of | ||
| that is the big mystery of our time. And you know I know that again I grew | ||
| up in liberal default What changed my mind is starting to do reporting and go into environments. | ||
| I started doing journalism in the 90s in this great renaissance of New York under Mayor Giuliani, who was taking on one sacred cow after another, whether it was the welfare industrial complex or the crime justifications. | ||
| And I would go to homeless shelters and I would go to welfare offices and I would talk to the clients. | ||
| And I would hear things that the left would characterize as, oh, that's just Ronald Reagan, you know, his disparagement of welfare. | ||
| The welfare clients themselves would say, you know, these welfare mothers, they're just having more babies to increase their welfare check. | ||
| And I would say, The New York Times goes here. | ||
| How did they not hear this? | ||
| Well, they don't wanna hear it because it's too counter to the narrative. | ||
| One of the most interesting examples of what you just said there, David Horowitz once told me this story. | ||
| He told me this privately, I'm sure I can say it publicly, it wasn't on the show. | ||
| But he said that he was in New York City in the early 80s when the AIDS crisis was booming. | ||
| And this is right when he sort of made his conversion from a lefty to a conservative. | ||
| And he said that they all knew it was coming out of the gay bathhouses. | ||
| You know, these people are having orgies and there's drugs and all this stuff. | ||
| And they knew it was proliferating and it was killing people. | ||
| And that basically the Republicans, the conservatives, said we have to close down the bathhouses because there's this massive public health crisis. | ||
| And the Democrats, because the road to hell is paved with good intentions, He said, you guys are a bunch of homophobes. | ||
| You can't tell gay people what to do. | ||
| So they were trying to do something nice. | ||
| We like gay people, let them do whatever they want. | ||
| The Republicans sort of sound mean. | ||
| We're not gonna let the gays do that. | ||
| And then what did it do? | ||
| It exacerbated the situation even more. | ||
| So there's a lot of that, what you just laid out there. | ||
| And I would also say, I mean, this is another classic example of the divide between liberals and conservatives. | ||
| The liberal definition is somehow this is Ronald Reagan's fault and AIDS is treated as a airborne disease without the acknowledgment that it is absolutely behaviorally motivated. | ||
| You can avoid it 100% by not engaging in certain behaviors, by acting personally responsibly. | ||
| You can say the same thing about campus rape. | ||
| Not 100% just to be totally clear. | ||
| You could get a transfusion that's True, but that's the minor part. | ||
| The real transmission was in sexual contact, and that's true in Africa for heterosexual sex as well. | ||
| But again, that reluctance to say there are things that individuals can do that Ironically, I mean, look at, just notice, they tend to be things that do conform to traditional behaviors, which is sexual prudence and modesty and self-restraint, protect you. | ||
| And again, let me just say, campus rape thing, it's the same thing. | ||
| You could avoid 100%, virtually 100%, what is called campus rape. | ||
| On the female's part, by not getting drunk and getting in bed with a guy you barely know. | ||
| Because the amount of stranger rapes going on on college campuses are minute. | ||
| They barely show up. | ||
|
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That's meaning just a guy that finds a girl walking down the street. | |
| Breaks into your room and uses knife or force. | ||
| Campus rape is a voluntary sexual encounter. | ||
| That is 100% avoidable if you don't want to get involved. | ||
| So you know that that's gonna be the part that gets clipped out of this and have the people go after you for it? | ||
| I'm happy to defend it, right. | ||
| I believe women have power. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I don't wanna give any sort of nauseating strong feminist bromides here, but the fact of the matter is is that females do have power to determine most of the outcomes of their lives today, especially today. | ||
| So then the message, though, that we hear when we hear about this campus rape epidemic, It really, I guess the way you're framing it is that it boils down to, it's almost as if the left that's pushing this, they think women have no capacity over their own lives. | ||
| Of course, it's infantilizing. | ||
| This has been pointed out many times. | ||
| The rules on campus are a male who's very drunk is responsible for his actions and the actions of the female. | ||
| A female who is very drunk has no responsibility for herself. | ||
| And she certainly doesn't have responsibility for the male. | ||
| Now I would frankly be very happy if we go through a full-throated revival of Victorian ethics. | ||
| I believe that chivalry is an important value and it civilizes males. | ||
| That for males to regard females as something worthy of respect and to reign in their power and strength to have a sense of dignity of females and of themselves. | ||
| That's a very good thing. | ||
| And I also believe it's a very good thing for females to realize that the male libido is not the same, | ||
| to be honest about the extraordinary hunger of the male libido, | ||
| and to exercise their own control over that. | ||
| But you can't have it both ways. | ||
| You can't decide that we're gonna celebrate female promiscuity at the same time that you're gonna hammer males for taking advantage of the sexual caravanserai that we've created. | ||
| Right, and then you hear these crazy stories. | ||
| I'm sure you heard the one a couple months ago about the guy and girl that got drunk and then the next morning they both accused each other of rape because they basically wanted to beat the other one to the punch. | ||
| Sure, the principles, absolutely. | ||
| Do the principles, right. | ||
| And so much of this is also just, you know, oh, I cheated on my boyfriend. | ||
| Right, you feel bad the next morning. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And then social media just brings this thing to a whole other level, right? | ||
| Because then just everyone is just at everyone's throats. | ||
| Well, we're desperate to find another example of rape culture. | ||
| It's very hard to find. | ||
| You know, in fact, again, What would be rape, like when they say we have a rape culture, rape culture really would be, well certainly it's not in America. | ||
| No, it's in India, it's in Afghanistan. | ||
| It's like being forced to be in a hut in Nepal, in rural Nepal if you're menstruating. | ||
| You know, it's a tolerance for group rape that is finally, you know, people, women in India are finally trying to sort of push back against this. | ||
| But in a lot of Afghan villages, it's, you know, the problem is now, | ||
| the female is now banned from the village because there was rape with force. | ||
| But please do not tell me that females in this country are victimized by rape culture. | ||
| In fact, females from the time that they are sentient are the target of nonstop messages of female empowerment. | ||
| You-go-girl code, girls who code, what not. | ||
| It's incessant. | ||
| It's the males in our culture today who get no positive encouragement and they are withdrawing. | ||
| You know, there's the Failure of males, you can see it in the social indicators, | ||
| is huge because-- | ||
| Suicide rates, all of it. | ||
| Absolutely, they are told that they are the bearers of toxic masculinity, and this is a very dangerous thing | ||
| that we're playing with. | ||
| What tools have you seen to get men out of it? | ||
| I mean, I think Jordan Peterson was as close to a sort of mass move to get young men out of this thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think we need more voices like you and Peterson. | ||
| And if somebody was a political genius to try and organize your followers, because they're out there, but they need to be more vocal and more empowered. | ||
| I mean, one of the things I love, but again, this is Precluded by the moment we live in, I think the Boy Scouts was one of the greatest inventions. | ||
| You know, this was an invention to try and help poor inner-city kids that were themselves the subject of breakdown of social mores. | ||
| But it gives boys a code of virtue and goodness and honesty and achievement. | ||
| But unfortunately, The gay lobby put the Boy Scouts out of existence. | ||
| Corporate money dried up. | ||
| You have never seen such a thing of beauty as an inner city scout troop. | ||
| I've been in church basements in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to see these little kids tying knots, pledging allegiance to the flag. | ||
| It breaks my heart. | ||
| That corporate America has been bludgeoned into supporting inner city scouting because the employees said you cannot support a homophobic institution. | ||
| That is, it is tragic. | ||
| All right, so let's dive into that a little bit. | ||
| So I'm with you that the gay lobby, they attacked and tried to basically destroy the Boy Scouts. | ||
| But you as a person, would you, I know you don't wanna push your values on the Boy Scouts per se, Would you have cared if there had been a gay Scoutmaster? | ||
| You, personally? | ||
|
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Uh... | |
| I wouldn't have cared on a... Because that's really what it seemed to have boiled down to when the lobby moved on them. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I would be sympathetic with parents who were worried about child abuse on a camping trip. | ||
| It's a small risk, but it is a risk nonetheless. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Let's be honest. | ||
| It is a risk. | ||
| So I would say the good compromise was keep it, you don't have to be out about it, perhaps. | ||
| But I just don't think, I don't think that issue is relevant for the vast majority of scouting, especially again in the inner city. | ||
| It's just not relevant for these kids. | ||
| They don't, whether they, what their stance is on homosexuality doesn't really matter. | ||
| Right, see, well that's the part that, so I agree, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I would want to know what the numbers bear out, I suppose, relative to like a predator infiltrating and then molesting a kid, obviously you don't want that. | ||
| But yes, I think the way that the lobby comes in and then just bludgeons them to, you gotta do what we want you to do, that's sort of destroying all the goodness there. | ||
| I'm completely in line with you on that one. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I would just say again, like it, the kids are more important than Asserting gay identity. | ||
| There's plenty of other places to have gay pride. | ||
| You don't have to do it in the Boy Scouts. | ||
| So with that in mind, are you concerned that all of our institutions are gonna succumb to this stuff? | ||
| Like, it seems like everything's up for you. | ||
| They already have. | ||
|
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No, no, it is not. | |
| I mean, we wanna be optimistic. | ||
| But we're all pretending now? | ||
| We're past that point? | ||
| Because I know you think that 2020 is gonna be the year it all crashes apart. | ||
| Well, I think it will. | ||
| Identity politics is self-defeating. | ||
| It can't go any further. | ||
| I wish I shared that. | ||
| Yes, so I'm basically, well, what I think is gonna really happen, not that it will ever burn out completely because I think it is so psychotic in nature and unhinged from reality, but I think this election will cause it to have a necessary split. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| So the split that we talked about earlier about the AOC and Biden should not be in the same party, I think enough people are gonna fully realize that, that the social justice worries will carve out whatever their thing is, and then the other sane people will have to decide, are we still Democrats or are we gonna become Republicans? | ||
| But yes, I don't know, will it crash to the point of that they're gonna give up? | ||
| Well, these people show no signs of ever giving up. | ||
| Well, again, I hate to sound apocalyptic, but again, this is a genetic thing. | ||
| I know that I'm inclined towards that by definition, but it is impossible to overstate The power of the assault on meritocratic standards in our culture today. | ||
| Color-blind, gender-blind meritocratic standards. | ||
| There's not a single institution that is not on the defensive. | ||
| If it has any kind of achievement standard that has any kind of disparate impact that does not result in exact proportional representation, whether it's 50-50 males or females, or minority-based representation, Any standard, whether it's in the STEM fields, in science, that does not result in that halcyon proportional representation is now under assault. | ||
| There might be some Christian private school, right, that has withstood some of this, something like that? | ||
| Or conservative. | ||
| Yes, in fact, I mean, I'm always cheered on whenever I see a panel that's coming out of some think tank and it's all males. | ||
| I think, ah, one last one, you know? | ||
| And frankly, let's be honest, I mean, what I track is the natural experiments. | ||
| That they absolutely explode the feminist explanation because there are a few institutions out there without any gatekeepers. | ||
| And so it allows you to test, you know, the explanation for lack of 50-50 male-female is inevitably sexist discrimination. | ||
| So let's look at the places with no gatekeepers. | ||
| A, that's Wikipedia. | ||
| The editors of Wikipedia, there's no barriers, there's no historical preference for Wikipedia. | ||
| Oh, I know where you're going with this, but it ends up being mostly men. | ||
| It's overwhelmingly male. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because males, on average, and I'm not talking about your daughter, Ben Rubin, Dave Rubin, listener, you know, she's gonna be a Nobelist, but on average, males are more interested in facts, in things, in ideas, in accuracy, in sports trivia. | ||
| I wrote about Scrabble Championship. | ||
| that want to get involved in that discourse. Recently we saw there was the | ||
| historic matchup of three greatest Jeopardy winners. They were all male. If | ||
| you look at, I wrote about Scrabble Championship, there's no barriers to | ||
| entry for Scrabble. Like all of the winners throughout history of a very | ||
|
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short history have all been males. | |
| So if we were to take this back to what we discussed earlier, where then the lefties would maybe look at a separate set of facts to explain that, they would say something like, well, it's because we teach boys to care more about math or something like that. | ||
| And you would just say, no, that there's biology Before that, in essence. | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| Turns out the most gender equal countries are the ones that have the biggest disparities in preference for professions. | ||
| Right, so this is the Sweden experiment. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And again, This has not been the case for so long. | ||
| We've had, again, strong females together. | ||
| That has been the ethos of American education now for decades! | ||
| It is just not possible to say that females are being discouraged from math. | ||
| They are being encouraged at every single moment. | ||
| That there's any male mathematicians is a miracle! | ||
| It just shows how strong that imperative is at the extreme versions. | ||
| Again, we all know the distribution curves. | ||
| Males are the worst math dummies, but they also, at the highest end, the most math gifted. | ||
| Do you think that there's just a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that comes with a lot of this? | ||
| Like, did you happen to see a couple weeks ago Stephen King sent out a tweet that he's against diversity in arts, because of course you wouldn't want painters and authors and creative people to have to have some sort of diversity quota, but this guy's a lefty progressive, you know, the whole thing, and he's definitely for diversity quotas and all the other things, but not in arts. | ||
| And I think it's partly because he's an artist. | ||
| So it's like, not in my field, because we're creative and creativity should always rise to the top, but for you people, but in essence, what he's saying is, well, doctors and pilots and the rest of you, you should, it should be based on skin color and sexuality and blah, blah, blah, but not artists, because we're... | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| Well, I'll take it. | ||
| I mean, if he's actually willing to defend the arts, because that is... I mean, anybody who subjects himself to the New York Times arts pages, it's all it is. | ||
| It's all it is. | ||
| It's diversity. | ||
| Female and people of color diversity. | ||
| His position, it may be a narrow one, but I'll take it because... Right, because they're the colonels there, at least, right? | ||
| So then it's like maybe something can grow out of that. | ||
| Yes, but it's also, on the other hand, I really relish the fact that Hollywood is being pressed to sacrifice its best box office judgment for the gods of diversity. | ||
| You know, and are they, where, you know, they're absolutely torn. | ||
| Which do they do? | ||
| Do they choose to have female remakes, you know, that may not be the box-office sellers or may not be as good in order to placate the, you know, the Oscar bean-counting and the Golden Globe bean-counting? | ||
| Or do they just say, to hell with it, we're just going to tough it out? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it's really great. | ||
| Yeah, what an interesting time to live in. | ||
| So I sense you're pretty enthused about sort of the way the world is at the moment. | ||
| Like everybody sort of seems, everyone feels like it's crazy, it's never been worse, we hate each other more than ever before. | ||
| I mean, I think all of that is nonsense anyway, and social media makes us all feel a little crazier. | ||
| But you seem to, even though this is serious stuff, I mean, you're talking about institutions all being infected, You've got a smile on your face as you're talking to me. | ||
| Yeah, but it's a pleasure to have a fellow skeptic here. | ||
| And I would say to get back to an earlier question of yours, you know, are we heading towards a point of no return and how do we get back from this? | ||
| This is the most difficult thing. | ||
| The way we actually demolish identity politics, and again the founding engine of this is disparate impact, we have to counteract the myth of bias. | ||
| That as long as the only allowable explanation for socioeconomic disparities is The Ta-Nehisi Coates view of the world, the Michelle Alexander view of the world, that everything is driven by bias, the AOC world, they win. | ||
| But if we've lost the schools already, which I suspect you think we have, certainly at the college level, but even if we've lost all of that, Then suddenly this rosy picture gets a lot more murky, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm not a rosy person. | ||
| All I know is the way we get it back is to start giving alternative explanations. | ||
| And if people are terrified to talk about, no, excuse me, their behaviors, the education gap, I mean, what we see now, it's tragic. | ||
| Your average black 12th grader reads at the level of your average white 8th grader. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That is huge. | ||
| 40% of black 8th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, this is one of these national standardized tests, 40% of black 8th graders do not even have basic math skills. | ||
| Basic is the most, it's, you know, simple arithmetic. | ||
| Those types of statistics make this expectation of proportional representation ludicrous. | ||
| And yet, the cowardice on the part of our mainstream institutions cannot be overstated. | ||
| Within the last couple of weeks, the American Physics Association The premier professional organization for physicists came out with a completely predictable, chest-beating mea culpa, saying if we do not have proportional black physicists, it's because we are biased. | ||
| There must be bias in our credentializing, in our physics education. | ||
| These are people who were supposed to believe we're smart. | ||
| If they can't look at the data... It's anti-human, actually, in many ways. | ||
| It's anti-human. | ||
| It's saying you have no control, you know. | ||
| But what has to happen is there has to be a major change in inner-city black culture to get rid of the anti-acting white stigma. | ||
| There has to be behavioral change, a different attitude towards academic accomplishment. | ||
| But as long as the myth of bias, as long as bias is the only explanation, as long as the American Physics Association is not able to say there needs to be more studying Students have to take their textbooks home, in K through eight, less truancy, nothing is gonna change. | ||
| Do you think in a weird way that Asians might be the key to this whole thing? | ||
| That basically Asians will get fed up of being quoted against and not getting into Harvard, even though no one gave Asian people anything, just like no one gave my ancestors anything or your ancestors anything. | ||
| But Asians may just be like, you know what, Harvard is actually, everyone talks about systemic racism. | ||
| Harvard has actually put it in the system. | ||
| It's harder to get in if you're Asian, right? | ||
| And now the courts have said that's actually okay, which is bananas. | ||
| But that basically Asian people will get so fed up, even though they're not a very vocal minority, they'll get so fed up about being genuinely discriminated against that perhaps that fixes the problem. | ||
| I mean, it's almost a very backwards way of looking at this thing. | ||
| No, it's a great idea. | ||
| And indeed, the Chinese in New York now, there's also a big Chinese parent movement because Bill de Blasio and his utterly terrifying school chancellor, Carranza, are trying to destroy, again, every meritocratic standard. | ||
| Get rid of it. | ||
| It's all going to be based on quotas. | ||
| So the Chinese parents there are protesting the destruction of Stuyvesant High School in broad sense. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's really a race against time because Harvard, in its recent lawsuit, defending itself against Ed Blum and the challenge to its discrimination against Asians, they assembled a big crew of Asian Harvard students who were defending preferences. | ||
| And so- Can you explain what their rationale was? | ||
| I heard a couple of versions of this. | ||
| Uh, just diversity. | ||
| And, you know, we got in, so, like, it didn't hurt us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think the rationale is that the lure of identity politics and being anti-white is the key to the elite. | ||
| The elite identity in this country now is against establishment values, and it's against meritocracy, and it's a commitment to the idea of white supremacy. | ||
| So to the extent that colleges can end up Cloning Asian students in their own image of identity politics. | ||
| And it is happening. | ||
| I mean, you can go to UC Berkeley, you know, the degree of specialization of the different ethnic groups there. | ||
| You know, so you have the Filipino club and the Samoan club where everybody, there's power in victimhood. | ||
| And, you know, the sort of laughable irony is that, so a lot of these left-wing Asian students want to be viewed as students of color. | ||
| You know, please, please, we're students of color as well. | ||
| The irony is that the administration said, no, you're not students of color. | ||
| You don't count if they're students of color. | ||
| Right, your minority thing doesn't count. | ||
| Your whites, for the sake of our quote, is your guys are white. | ||
| So the poor students are, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, why don't we get to be students of color? | ||
| But now they're super white. | ||
| They're not just white, right? | ||
| Like they're extra white now. | ||
| They trump whites, that's right. | ||
| Whites are actually, you know, get preferences over Asians. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| It's a really good question about self-interest versus ideology. | ||
| And again, the lure of ideology, and we see this also with Indians, Indian-Americans in this culture. | ||
| That'll be the next one. | ||
| They're very left-wing. | ||
| But do you think that they'll sort of suffer the fate of Chinese-Americans or something like that, and that eventually it'll turn on them too? | ||
| Yeah, they're discriminating against, I mean, the head of Google, the guy who fired James Damore for writing, you've talked about this, you know, a perfectly fact-based memo about psychological truths, things that the psychology profession has known for years about the big five personality traits, one of which, unfortunately, is called neuroticism. | ||
| Poor Mr. Innocent Damore used the word neuroticism and everybody freaked out, but that's, sorry, that's the psychology terms. | ||
| James Damore, who, by the way, had gotten a promotion for his job just two months before the memo. | ||
| He's a fantastic engineer, he would have helped Google, but God forbid he put females at risk for saying that the reason there's not more females here is because average distribution of personality preferences. | ||
| But Sundar Pichai, he's Indian American, and a lot of the school's chancellors in the University of California Uh, that are doing all of the multiculturalism BS. | ||
| They're Indian engineers, so it's very curious. | ||
| The trans thing, a lot of the parents are Indian. | ||
| So again, it shows the gravitational force of victim identity, that that is how you credentialize yourself to enter the American elite, is to buy into this idea that this is a racist and sexist society. | ||
| So you just briefly mentioned the trans thing there. | ||
| Have you read Douglas Murray's Madness of Crowds by Andy Chan? | ||
| So, you know, one of the things that I think he brilliantly does is he separates the T from LGB. | ||
| He says these things have nothing to do with each other. | ||
| Do you basically take that position and sort of see why the trans movement has sort of spun off into something that's completely not about equality now? | ||
| Yeah, it's so clearly a power play. | ||
| Why anybody takes these 14-16 year olds seriously at face value. | ||
| The desire of every adolescent is power. | ||
| It is to be able to bend adults and the world to your will. | ||
|
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And this is the most brilliant... We call this Greta Thunberg syndrome. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| But to be trans has even more power because you can trip people up in an ever more arcane linguistic thicket. | ||
| And if they make the most innocuous linguistic error, they are guilty. | ||
| And so you are, it is a way of asserting power over the world and it's endlessly fertile and fecund. | ||
| It generates more and more categories and it is something amazingly, I mean nobody thought about this five years ago and now we're all supposed to believe that this represents some essential truth about human nature where again it is just a way of Clawing to the top of the viciously competitive totem pole of victimhood and being top dog for as long as it lasts, you know? | ||
| And who knows, you know, big, big sweepstake award to whoever can come up with the next victim that will dethrone the trans identity, but it will come. | ||
| Right, and that's going to be a big one. | ||
| What that one could possibly be. | ||
| It's something fun to look forward to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I take it when Biden said that when you're going to jail, you should be able to pick which prison you go to, dependent on your decision about your own gender. | ||
| You're not a big fan of that. | ||
| No, but again, look at the power. | ||
| There you are a prisoner and you get to flip the tables and say, now you state prison authority or federal prison authority, you have to bend to my will. | ||
| It's just incredible. | ||
| I remember the time it was, Maybe summer of 2014, the Times ran a front full page editorial announcing the dawn of the trans era, that this was the new civil rights campaign. | ||
| And it's just not true. | ||
| Again, there is a very minute number of people For whom this is authentically a psychological disorder, but I think for most of it, I've talked at college campuses, and I don't really address the trans phenomenon, but in one talk at St. | ||
| Olaf, I just gave, I read a section, a piece of prose that was written by some trans guy who was all, his head was all like tied in knots because he was trying to figure out when his gay friends called each other she and her in a gay rhetoric and then they referred to | ||
| This trans person, Alex, as she and her, whether they were respecting his identity, disrespecting, and I thought, and my point was, this is so trivial. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is so trivial. | ||
| You guys should be thinking about things outside of yourself. | ||
| How about you lose yourself in the past? | ||
| That's difference. | ||
| So I, but that was my only reference to this. | ||
| And this girl came up to me afterwards and said, You're not respecting my identity! | ||
| This was just, again, another pitch for power. | ||
| It's ridiculous! | ||
| It is not something that is a civilizational This is something we should all take that seriously. | ||
| Yeah, this seems to be the one, I think, that is actually helping, let's say, our side the most. | ||
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Really? | |
| Because it is so patently absurd. | ||
| If you just can't say that there are biological differences between men and women, that doesn't make you a bigot, it doesn't make you a transphobe, it doesn't mean you hate women. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's something that we all just know, right? | ||
| My four-year-old niece knows there's a difference between boys and girls. | ||
| She's not a rocket scientist. | ||
| So something, it's almost like this one they overshot to the point that it might cause a little bit of a bounce back, which goes to, again, my prediction of the implosion of this thing. | ||
| But we shall see. | ||
| Look at North Carolina. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, there you had this conservative state that buckled under corporate pressure. | ||
| Again, corporations, everybody thinks there's AOC thing. | ||
| Oh, big business, evil, white supremacy. | ||
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No! | |
| But you can get them to do almost anything. | ||
| Corporations! | ||
| The CEOs have wives. | ||
| Wives are a disaster. | ||
| They push husbands to the left. | ||
| And they have human resources departments. | ||
| As the Google employee said in one of the chat rooms after Damore was fired, we have to kick this thing back because our HR department, known in googly language as people analytics, because you can't just call it human resources, he said it's just an outpost of women's studies and black studies now. | ||
| So these corporations are promoting the trans thing. | ||
| Far too many parents are. | ||
| I mean, I did think that when the dictate started coming down that parents have to let their girl, their daughters, have biological males in their locker rooms and bathrooms, that there would be just pitchfork battles. | ||
| And it didn't happen! | ||
| I keep waiting for the massive rejection of this. | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| School after school district is enacting trans policies. | ||
| So you show me where, besides the Navoturova and Rowlings, that this has actually put any kind of dent in this crusade. | ||
| Well, I think Ricky Gervais' speech at the Golden Globes where he just torched identity politics and torched this very town that we're in right now. | ||
| I think the J.K. | ||
| Rowling thing. | ||
| I think Martina speaking up and then them attacking her about trans athletes. | ||
| I think it's just starting to bubble up. | ||
| Which way that goes. | ||
| We don't know, but I think people are getting a little bit braver. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Don't Burn This Book comes out on April 28th, and it's about giving people the keys to the bravery thing. | ||
| Believe me, everybody's got it in their calendar, Mark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, we only have a couple minutes left. | ||
| You plow through so much information at once that I feel like we've been talking for 10 minutes, but it's been about an hour already. | ||
|
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Okay, I don't want to go over time. | |
| What else has sort of been on your mind lately? | ||
| What is something that maybe I'm not tracking or that you think regular folks aren't tracking that you sort of see as another frontier we're gonna have to be fighting on? | ||
| Oh, man, that's a bad question without an answer. | ||
| Without an answer. | ||
| Well, you said what's gonna be the spectacular one that knocks trans off this, but is there something else that you're sort of seeing new data on or just that's piquing your interest lately? | ||
| No, I'm just paying a lot of, I still, for me, My heart lies in universities. | ||
| For me, there's no greater good than the privilege of being able to study the great works, and so I keep hoping that there will be pushback there. | ||
| I guess I've seen there are some signs of hope in a movement to start classical academies at the K-12 level that are Explicitly dedicated to teaching the great books without identity politics. | ||
| I think that movement has to be supported. | ||
| I wish philanthropists would do more to put their money behind beauty and wit and irony and greatness and sublimity. | ||
| I think that nobody's cracked the problem of the college credentializing and the The fierce hunger of these allegedly left-wing parents to, you know, credentialize their child with the most status-producing diplomas possible. | ||
| I would love to see a movement to have a revival of tutors, which used to be the way that people got educated. | ||
| So homeschooling for college kids, because we've got to shut these institutions down. | ||
| By the way, I think that's happening right now because of YouTube. | ||
| I think the amount of stuff that people are learning from pretty brilliant people, many of whom have sat in that chair and plenty of other shows, I think it's happening already. | ||
| I think people are being, well, the New York Times, did you see the New York Times piece a couple weeks ago about PragerU? | ||
| That the right-wing organization is circumventing parents and professors to teach people right-wing views. | ||
| And it's like, they try to make that sound scary, but whoo! | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's like, thank God. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I adore PragerU. | ||
| I adore Dennis Prager. | ||
| I would say he's doing basically political topics, which is absolutely necessary. | ||
| He is taking on the lies that are so distorting our world that he's not taking people through books 1 through 12 of Paradise Lost. | ||
| One needs time, one needs depth, one needs focus. | ||
| And so I would love to see, basically there's a lot of graduate schools in this department now that are not, in this country, that are not accepting white males because they know they are not going to get a job. | ||
| White male's boys are doomed at this point, unless we turn this around. | ||
| You know, I can't remember if I told you this last time you were here, but the guy who did the lighting in my studio is a, you know, we're in L.A. | ||
| here, so you get great people to do things. | ||
| He's an Emmy award-winning lighting guy. | ||
| He's in his mid-60s. | ||
| Been in the business for 40-some odd years. | ||
| Huge lefty. | ||
| Lefty, lefty, lefty, progressive, the whole thing. | ||
| We get into all sorts of political debates, and then we kind of put it aside. | ||
| It's okay, because he's a progressive of a certain age, so he doesn't have to want to kill you. | ||
| He can talk, he can talk. | ||
| He can do it, and it'll kill you at the end. | ||
| Anyway, he did our lighting, he did a spectacular job. | ||
| I spoke to him a few months ago, and he told me that he was told by an HR person | ||
| at a major studio here at LA, I won't say which studio, that as a white guy in his 60s, | ||
| he should probably think about retiring. | ||
| Yep, absolutely. | ||
| And then suddenly, oh, so then he called me. | ||
| So then what did he do? | ||
| So then he called me and he said, Dave, baby, you haven't been as crazy as I've been telling you. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Well, a lot of people process, yeah. | ||
| The Lee Siegel, this writer, had an op-ed in the New York Times recently about his depression and the America, you know, we've got this crisis of mental health, which I'm a little skeptical about. | ||
| But anyway, he said, "Well, as a 62-year-old white male, you know, I, of course, I really support the movements | ||
| that have basically made me completely superannuated." | ||
| So he sees it too. | ||
| It's just remarkable. | ||
| But anyway, I would say if there's any white males who are still doing traditional studies in graduate school and are not getting a job anywhere, they should be tutors. | ||
| Say I'll take you on the grand tour, we'll go to Rome, we'll go to Florence, we'll go to Vienna, and we will read the great books. | ||
| To keep these books alive because if we don't read them, they die. | ||
| The burden is on us. | ||
| Education is about passing on an inheritance. | ||
| And we should be down on our knees in gratitude before works of such exquisite language and insight into the human condition instead of this preposterous conceit of cultural appropriation. | ||
| I mean, some of the most profound insights into female sexual psychology and, and, and, a competition library, have been written by males. | ||
| Should I care that it's a male? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I just want beauty and insight. | ||
| So that's what I would hope is our next phase to get out of this. | ||
| Man, Heather, all I have to do is just lob 'em up for ya and you knock 'em out of the park. | ||
| It was a pleasure, as always. | ||
| We'll do this again soon enough. | ||
| And you're not big on Twitter, though. | ||
| You don't fight with everybody on Twitter. | ||
| You're on the Twitter. | ||
| Twitter is just to send out my recent writings and appearances. | ||
| A good enough reason to follow her. | ||
| It's at H-M-D at M-I. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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