Feb. 21, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Yeah, well, equity is another, it's a synonym for the sort of the obverse, which is racism and white supremacy. | ||
| I've been hearing more, my ear is more attuned to Biden's endless repetition of systemic racism. | ||
| And they're the same thing. | ||
| I mean, equity is the response to systemic racism. | ||
| Equity means Uh, quotas, it means the destruction of meritocratic standards. | ||
| It means you hire and promote on the basis of race, not on the basis of qualifications. | ||
| And any institution which does not show a proportional number of blacks or Hispanics is thereby by definition | ||
| systemically racist and engaged in bias. | ||
|
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, | ||
| a contributing editor at City Journal an author of "The Diversity Delusion." | ||
| Heather MacDonald, welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great sort of being with you, Dave, as close as we can be. | ||
| As close as we can be at the moment, but that's a good place to start because you are a New York City girl, but you have fled New York City to go to California during a lockdown. | ||
| What's going on over there, Heather? | ||
| Who would believe it? | ||
| But actually, New York is more insane, at least than Orange County. | ||
| I'm in Irvine. | ||
| And here, at least, I can swim, which is very important to my mental health, my overall health. | ||
| New York City is in a state of utter hysteria. | ||
| My pool makes it virtually impossible to swim. | ||
| So here, it feels a little saner. | ||
| Without restaurants in New York, without the opera, there's really no point in being there. | ||
| And of course, it is turning into a situation of maximal squalor, crime, threat, people getting assaulted on the streets. | ||
| So I don't know when I'm going to go back, frankly. | ||
| I bought a one-way ticket out here. | ||
| And still waiting for any reason to go back and I don't see one. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| For the people that would say, who in their right mind would go to California in the midst of all of this? | ||
| We found one person and she's coming from New York. | ||
| So that kind of says it all. | ||
| Look, everything that I've talked to you about over the last couple of years, you've been on the show a few times. | ||
| It seems that everything that you've been writing about, that you've been studying, all of these things, they seem to all be kind of coming to fruition. | ||
| Right now, so we're gonna try to hit on a whole bunch of stuff, but I guess first, since you fled New York to come to Cali, are you surprised in any way that these big government progressive lefty policies are ruining these cities and states? | ||
| No, what I have been surprised by is how perfectly the response to this pandemic mirrors political preexisting categories. | ||
| It's very curious. | ||
| That there is something truly fundamental, constitutional in the way people view the world, that there should be so clear a distinction between red state individuals, who by and large are lockdown skeptics, and then in the blue states, the willingness of vast majorities of the population to put up with rules that are utterly arbitrary. | ||
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I mean, they're made up out of whole cloth. | |
| The distinctions about when you can go out, how many people you can have at a table, it's ridiculous and yet the passivity of the population before this is completely remarkable. | ||
| So it seems like there is in fact something very profound in the way people's psyches are constructed with regards to their attitudes of either credulity or skepticism Towards the assertion of elite power. | ||
| And I am very grateful to you, Dave, for giving me the opportunity to say, | ||
| "I told you so!" | ||
| (Dave laughing) | ||
| And you have too. | ||
| Those of us who've been warning about the landslide of poison | ||
| that's been coming out of the university for decades, and people kind of turn their eyes away and they say, | ||
| "Oh, ha ha ha, it's so funny, these snowflakes." | ||
| It's not funny, guys. | ||
| The whole safetyism ethic that is a feminist, a feminine ideology of victimhood and the aversion to risk and entrepreneurship that we see in universities now with this whole Wellness initiatives and people needing safe spaces, that is COVID writ large. | ||
| It's the safetyism ethic against the spirit of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. | ||
| You're giving me so much to work with there. | ||
| So as someone that loves numbers, because you're always diving into the actual numbers of what's going on in our inner cities, what's happening at the places of, at this point, quote, unquote, higher ed, et cetera, et cetera, was there any point When the lockdown started roughly a year ago at this point, 11 months ago at this point, was there any point where you saw numbers that made sense to do all of the things that we've done? | ||
| So, you know, that first two weeks I was on the show saying, let's do the two week lockdown because every expert said two weeks to flatten the curve. | ||
| I said, I'm not an expert in this, but I'm gonna bring on some experts to talk about it. | ||
| But I was worried from beat one about the never ending extension of all of this. | ||
| Did you ever see numbers that were like, oh, okay, this is what we have to do right now. | ||
| Well, Dave, I don't wanna like toot my own horn here, but I have to say, I was first out of the gate among conservatives in lockdown skepticism with a piece in the new criterion that was compared to what, and it was putting what were then the numbers in context of other types of deaths that we put up with. | ||
| I mean, 40,000 highway deaths a year That we could eliminate entirely by reducing highway speeds to 20 miles an hour. | ||
| We don't because we are willing to say there will be 40,000 lives lost. | ||
| We value our efficiency and our convenience more. | ||
| And I have to say the distinction I drew earlier between liberal and conservative views wasn't completely accurate because I was Rambly attacked by many conservative writers for being willing to kill off grandma. | ||
| But no, we saw in March, the Italian health agency published data on the characteristics of coronavirus decedents. | ||
| Nothing has changed since March 2020. | ||
| Average age 80. | ||
| Almost three comorbidities being obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and then others like cancer. | ||
| Nothing has changed. | ||
| We knew almost from the start that this was a disease that targeted the very elderly. | ||
| Even Neil Ferguson, the author of that infamous study that was predicting 20 million dead in the United States, if we did nothing, Even he admitted that two-thirds of the people who would die in 2020 from coronavirus would have died anyway from other causes. | ||
| Now, is it happy that they die? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| But to be honest, death is the inevitable, banal, mediocre end of all life. | ||
| And when you get to be a certain age, you know, the New York Times has this maudlin section that they run periodically called Those We've Lost, and they list a 101-year-old vet of four wars, and he's supposed to be a coronavirus victim, as if he's going to live for another 20 years without coronavirus. | ||
| They do this regularly. | ||
| It was a 101-year-old Maybe a hundred. | ||
| Last of the Tuskegee Airmen. | ||
| Again, he's going to die of pneumonia. | ||
| And he's probably dying with, not from COVID, which is the other big sleight of hand that our public health experts use to try and inflate the death numbers. | ||
| Were you shocked when you got some of that pushback from conservatives? | ||
| I remember there was a specific day, very early on, maybe around April, where Ben Shapiro was on my show, and he said what we all know to be true, which is that you're gonna have to live with some amount of risk. | ||
| As you just said, in a certain amount of people, we just accept they die as part of the circle of life. | ||
| You don't want it to happen, you mitigate the risks, but this is what actuaries do. | ||
| But I saw a ton of pushback from conservatives. | ||
| And it was like, wait, since when do conservatives believe in a perfectly safe system? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And again, so I have to complicate my initial black and white sort of manichean distinction. | ||
| It is absolutely the case that a whole lot of conservative intellectuals took the ridiculous attitude that was expressed | ||
| by Governor Andrew Cuomo initially, that if we can save just one life, | ||
| there's no amount of lockdowns which will not be worth it. | ||
| Well, that is absurd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, if that had been the attitude, there would be no United States today. | ||
| There would have been nobody who took off from Plymouth Rock | ||
| because the chance of survival in the transatlantic voyage back then was about one in six. | ||
| And so it should be the hallmark of not just conservatives, but of human rational human beings to realize that you make trade-offs and that you balance one sort of risk against the other. | ||
| But yes, I was very surprised that conservatives had adopted the safetyism ethic, which is to focus on one particular type of risk Uh, to the exclusion of any other type of consideration. | ||
| And, you know, again, it gets wearisome because all of these arguments have been out there. | ||
| The argument that I've made and others have made, you've made, which is that, but what about deaths from suicide, from untreated, uh, illnesses that are in people? | ||
| Cause people are too scared out of their minds to go to a hospital. | ||
| What about the destruction of children across the globe from the poverty, from the lack of education? | ||
| We are consigning them to lives of stunted capacity. | ||
| All of those trade-offs are not being made. | ||
| So it's sort of the core of conservatism, which isn't to say that there aren't a whole lot that were just as spooked as the liberals with their masks, wearing their masks at 5 a.m. | ||
| in Central Park when there's six people spread over 800 acres. | ||
| Yeah, so you're not gonna put on a mask for the rest of this interview? | ||
| I'm gonna get my virtue from other means, I guess. | ||
| Fair enough, fair enough. | ||
| What do you think, if you had to grade the professional class at this point, if you had to grade the experts? | ||
| Because I think, actually, the next coming crisis that we're gonna have, now we just go from crisis to crisis, or at least two crises to another two, or whatever it is, is that I think that a huge amount of our experts have completely lost all credibility. | ||
| When you see videos of Fauci saying masks don't do anything, then wear a mask, now two masks, maybe, kinda, and then, you know, Biden, another 100 days, federal mask mandate, why should the people in Montana be living under the same rules as someone in metropolitan New York City? | ||
| Just sort of the elite class, do you think that they've sort of done irreparable damage to themselves? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Well, from an objective point of view, yes. | ||
| But what one has learned over this last two years or so, and we knew that beforehand, is how profoundly powerful one's pre-existing conceptions are and worldview. | ||
| So I don't think Fauci is at all discredited in that very large portion of the population that views the New York Times as as gospel truth. | ||
| You're an optimist, and you think that most people are skeptical of the liberal worldview and ideology. | ||
| I'm not so sure about that. | ||
| Right now, certainly, the liberal elites are in the seat of power. | ||
| You know, the vote for Biden, as far as I was concerned, was sadly a vote for safetyism. | ||
| It was a vote for turning America's back on its history of entrepreneurship and risk-taking and rationality and a sane attitude towards what life is about. | ||
| You know, Trump got a lot of votes, but Biden got more. | ||
| And so I don't know, I think that The whole world, as Andrew Sullivan said, we're all on campus now, and this ideology is very powerful. | ||
| The more people who graduate from college, The harder it's gonna be to turn things around. | ||
| And yet there were plenty of people, we've talked about it before, telling you and I, I mean, I remember when we did an event, I think at Berkeley together, saying, oh, you guys are making this up. | ||
| It'll just stay on college campuses. | ||
| And then what do they always say? | ||
| Then they'll go out to the real world. | ||
| Well, apparently the real world didn't have many safeties equipped. | ||
| Well, the big lie on college campuses for decades has been that the characteristic that defines America above all else is racism. | ||
| And so you have this cultivation of a victim mentality. | ||
| Where to be a female on a college campus is to be at risk of one's life! | ||
| Whereas in fact, there's nothing more privileged than being an American female anywhere, but on a college campus? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| I mean, the whole place is run by females to its utter destruction. | ||
| Or to be a, under URM as the jargon goes, and I heard today that somehow acronyms are now racist. | ||
| I didn't get the explanation, but I'm not surprised because everything is racist. | ||
| To be a URM, which is an underrepresented minority, is also to be at risk of one's life, notwithstanding the fact that every single college with any kind of selectivity ties itself into knots to admit as many blacks and Hispanics as possible with test scores that would be automatically disqualifying if they were presented by whites and Asians. | ||
| So this idea that racism and sexism are the things we should be thinking about most and that define everything, and are the reason to tear down Western civilization, that now is the driving force in the world at large in the United States. | ||
| Are you worried that the backlash to what you just said will actually start a new type of racism when the average white kid or Asian, and you've written a bunch about this, when the average Asian kid is going to have to consistently score quite literally, sometimes 20 percentage points higher than the average black or Latino kid, you could see why someone would become racist. | ||
| You should not become racist, but the system will have reorganized things in a way that will breed resentment. | ||
| Absolutely, and it's only a matter of logic. | ||
| All you have to ask is, well, why does every other group get identity politics and not whites? | ||
| whatever you view of that statement as a logical matter. | ||
| Now, I guess they have the whole argument about, well, blacks can't be racist because they then define racism to be something accompanied by power. | ||
| But if you're a working class white, you don't really feel like you've got a whole lot of white privilege. | ||
| But, you know, right now there's a professor in Florida who is under enormous pressure. | ||
| He may even been fired. | ||
| for talking about black privilege. | ||
| And frankly, he's absolutely right. | ||
| Again, if you're applying to Google right now, and you're a black engineer, you've got it made. | ||
| You can just write your ticket, you can ask for your salary. | ||
| Same if you're applying to be a black chemistry professor at Berkeley or Caltech. | ||
| or Harvard, the welcome mat is open for you. | ||
| Black privilege is real. | ||
| And so it is quite logical for whites to say, or Asians to say, but Asians are kind of allowed ethnic identity, but if they can somehow claim to be oppressed as well. | ||
| And it's very weird what goes on with Asian identity where they kind of want to be students of | ||
| color and then the administration says no no no you can't be students of color because you're | ||
| too academically successful but you see this at UC Berkeley where they want the victim | ||
| status but yeah it's maybe it will happen it's it's a question of sort of the Trump deplorables | ||
| versus the elite whites and how much they can suppress that but it is arguably bubbling | ||
| along under the surface. | ||
| I fear that I know your answer here, but are you surprised at all to now see that not only has this basically decimated the universities, but we're seeing this now every, well, basically in every blue city, where now all of even the private schools are being infected with all of this. | ||
| The charter schools, of course, the public schools, but basically schools that were the elite schools of New York City. | ||
| are now instead of having, you know, score-based admissions, we have equity-based admissions. | ||
| They're gonna destroy their own schools. | ||
| Well, this has been going on for a long time. | ||
| And, you know, sort of the, one of the rules of media is you have to pretend like something you're saying is for the first time. | ||
| I mean, I wrote an article years ago, decades ago, about elite prep schools like Andover and Exeter and in New England, That we're already, back in the 90s, embracing multiculturalism and telling their black students that they must think of themselves as oppressed and putting chips on the shoulder of everybody, minority student. | ||
| But it certainly is getting worse. | ||
| And what I've been researching for a while now and keep getting distracted by other things, but which breaks my heart to pieces, is the assault right now on the thing I love most in life, which is classical music. | ||
| What I've been noticing is that there's not a single guardian of our great traditions of art, whether it's a museum director, or in case of music, an orchestra conductor, orchestra manager, a superstar singer or soloist. | ||
| Certainly not the classical music press, which is willing, who is willing to defend this tradition of such sublime expression of extraordinary variety of human experience and communication from the charge that it is defined by racism and white patriarchal power. | ||
| It is ludicrous. | ||
| There's a madman at Hunter College, which is one of the City University of | ||
| New York colleges in New York City, a music theorist who's involved in a very big spat right | ||
| now over a Viennese music theorist called Heinrich Schenker. And this Hunter music theorist, | ||
| Philip Ewell, is mad. | ||
| He defines everything in classical music as a function of white maleness. | ||
| So he he says, well, Beethoven, you know, he's a he's an OK composer. | ||
| But the only reason we think of him as great is because he's white male. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| But it's happening everywhere. | ||
| Everything is being torn down. | ||
| And the people who have been given the privilege of defending and passing on this inheritance are cowards, and they have all rolled over and played dead and said, of course, our inheritance is racist, and we are now, from here on in, gonna make decisions based on the trivialities of gonads and melanin. | ||
| I'm guessing that gonads and melanin, that could be the title of your next book, first off. | ||
| Go nuts and melanin. | ||
| Do you get a lot of academics reaching out to you, telling you their version of this story? | ||
| And do they ever do anything? | ||
| I mean, what percentage do you think actually speak up? | ||
| My inbox is almost like a therapy session from these people at this point. | ||
| Yeah, they're terrified. | ||
| I just find it amazing that the left claims that, oh, cancel culture, you guys are just victim whiners, it doesn't exist. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Again, there's a perceptual divide here that is so massive, and I despair at how you bridge it. | ||
| But the left really does not think that they're censoring people, but yes. | ||
| Practically every single faculty member and every conservative student is walking around scared to death that he's going to be the next one to fall under. | ||
| And what really worries me, and Dave, you know, you are our premier exponent of free speech. | ||
| Conservative newspapers, student newspapers are so essential. | ||
| I was not a conservative As a college student. | ||
| So this was, and I don't even know back in the seventies, if there was a conservative newspaper at Yale. | ||
| I think probably not. | ||
| It was a much less political time, but they are essential. | ||
| Well, what's been going on recently with in the now that sort of seems like ancient history during the Trump era, he would nominate judges to the federal bench. | ||
| And their enemies would dig up writings of these students from their college time. | ||
| There was a guy that went to Stanford who was nominated for the Ninth Circuit. | ||
| And he wrote some very scathing and satirical pieces about multiculturalism. | ||
| Well, he was denied going forward with the nomination, not just by the Democrats, but by Marco Rubio and Tim Scott to their eternal discredit. | ||
| Naomi Rao did squeak through, but she was critical of campus rape culture. | ||
| And she had to backtrack and confess her sins and say, oh, well, of course there's rape culture when there is not. | ||
| But what I'm worried about is any student who is forward oriented and future oriented will say, I don't dare. | ||
| write the truth about what's going on on a college campus today, because that's going | ||
| to be used against me in my next job. | ||
| And so you've got a very subtle self-censorship that's going on that means that the truth | ||
| is going to get harder and harder to get. | ||
| You know, I'm reminded of an event that I did at University of New Hampshire a couple of years ago that went viral, where there was a whole bunch of protesters and kids were screaming at me, and this one girl, a brown-skinned girl, she happened to be brown-skinned, it doesn't matter to me, but I'm mentioning it because it gives context to the story. | ||
| She started screaming at me, heckling, and saying that I could be killed when I walk out of here. | ||
| And I thought, wait, it's the middle of the day in New Hampshire. | ||
| Are students being killed? | ||
| But I realized what she was saying was so emotionally disconnected from reality that there was virtually nothing that I could say to her, and it became very clear that there was nothing I could say to her to calm down, but that they had ginned up such an irrational fear in her that it had almost, in essence, taken over every other faculty that she has. | ||
| And these are the universities that are supposedly that still present themselves to these idiotic donors who keep funneling truckloads of cash into their maw to be used for more hate and victimology and destruction of our traditions. | ||
| These are the colleges that are teaching them. | ||
| This fantastical delusion that they are at risk, and it is what is now in our culture at large. | ||
| Whether it's the idea that children shouldn't be in school because of COVID, or again people, you know, I'm here in Orange County, and it's better, my pool rules here are better than New York, but otherwise, I walk in the faculty housing area of University of California, Irvine, as early as I can get out there to avoid the damn faculty members who, you know, at 6 a.m., again, you're out in this huge, fresh air. | ||
| They're wearing masks! | ||
| Are you people insane? | ||
| But that, one feels alive and being frightened. | ||
| And we also see this now with this, I would argue, completely fantastical narrative that the world is under threat from white supremacist violence and pouring troops. | ||
| They keep coming into the Capitol. | ||
| You know, they're coming into every other Capitol in this sort of deliberate theater supporting the lie that the country's biggest threat right now is these kooks that got out of control and were horribly ill-mannered | ||
| and disgusting in the Capitol, but that was a one-off and it is not the character of our country right now. | ||
| But that is another sort of safetyism lie that is now a typical product of the Academy. | ||
| Okay, so I wanna dive into that, because I know you have a bunch to talk about there. | ||
| But just before we do that, I think it'll segue sort of nicely, is you've mentioned multiculturalism a few times. | ||
| And I think when the average person hears the phrase multiculturalism, they think, yes, we should be a multicultural society. | ||
| Isn't that what we are? | ||
| My neighbor's from this country. | ||
| My aunt is from that country, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Aren't we multicultural? | ||
| But there's a distinct difference between multiculturalism and the way that America has done the melting pot. | ||
| Is that a fair statement? | ||
| And can you explain it a little bit? | ||
| Because I think people, once they hear you say, I'm against multiculturalism, they automatically think that that has some racist beginning to it, you know? | ||
| Well, the reality, the empirical fact of multiculturalism is it is not inclusive, it's not additive, it is subtractive. | ||
| It is done in the name of labeling The Western tradition, which has been encyclopedic, it has been inclusive, it has taken in people from across the globe to put that, to denigrate it, and to teach students and adults to see it through the lens of oppression, which is just tragic, utterly tragic. | ||
| And the multicultural idea is one that is antithetical to the power of the human imagination. | ||
| I don't know if there's a single more idiotic conception than the one of cultural appropriation that is trying to draw boundaries around the human imagination and say that if you're, say, a white female writer, you cannot write a novel that has a black male protagonist in it because that would be culturally appropriative. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| The greatest artists of our time have seen into people very different than themselves. | ||
| I've seen some of the most extraordinary explorations of female sexual jealousy by male writers who simply possess the feature of empathy. | ||
| So multiculturalism as practiced and as Given within our world today is not saying, yes, let's learn the great epic traditions of India or China, but rather it means that hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go, which is the Jesse Jackson infamous chant from Stanford of the 80s. | ||
| That's the reality of it. | ||
| And the other reality is, frankly, as inclusive it has been. | ||
| It is a European tradition. | ||
| And it is white, sorry, mostly, not exclusively, but there weren't a whole lot of blacks writing Renaissance madrigals. | ||
| So if you're an early music group, you know, doing Baroque Music, and you've now decided that your mission is social justice and your mission is to be an anti-racism organization, which music organization after music organization is declaring itself as. | ||
| Our mission is to be anti-racist. | ||
| Sorry, just the reality of history is There are not a lot of black composers. | ||
| The reason there's not black composers is not because of racism. | ||
| It's because that's what the demographics were. | ||
| Nobody goes to African music and says, well, we can't perform it because there's no whites or we can't do Balinese, you know, the monkey chant because there were no British whites in there. | ||
| There are certain realities of history. | ||
| And population groups, that that's just what history is. | ||
| You cannot change it. | ||
| All right, so let's shift to where you were going there about the Capitol Hill protests. | ||
| Are you telling me, Heather MacDonald, that that man with the horns and the face paint, that that guy was not the leader of a giant coup? | ||
| They weren't gonna take over the entire government that day? | ||
| Because if you watch CNN, Jake Tapper, there was an insurrection. | ||
| These people were gonna take over all of our governmental institutions. | ||
| Well, I am not going to defend them for an instant. | ||
| And I cannot state enough that as a prerequisite, prolegomena to everything I'm saying, I'm not justifying them. | ||
| I'm not making an apology for them. | ||
| But this was a one-off. | ||
| This was the moment that the left has been hoping for, that we were told was going to happen after the election. | ||
| It never happened. | ||
| And these guys got out of control. | ||
| It is also true that, as we heard with the Black Lives Matter protests, you know, we heard for the riots, the race riots that did 100,000 times more damage than happened as a physical matter and as a life matter than happened on January 6th. | ||
| The rolling riots that we saw over the summer through the fall that are now being completely rewritten out of history. | ||
| by the mainstream media, not that they acknowledged them at all at the time, but now they're being completely erased. | ||
| Those were far more destructive in terms of property damage and damage to government property than anything that happened on January 6th. | ||
| I simply do not believe that what happened then represents an ongoing terror threat. | ||
| These people are disorganized They're losers, they got out of control, and they have been in the grips of what I would say is a delusion, which is the idea that the election was systematically rigged. | ||
| One's attitude towards what went on on January 6th, to a certain extent, will be influenced by whether you believe the rigging narrative. | ||
| They believe it. | ||
| The election was systemically rigged. | ||
| That is very serious business. | ||
| That undermines the legitimacy of our government and justifies something. | ||
| It doesn't justify violence, but it justifies something. | ||
| And so that makes this whole debate about what went on complicated because there's a factual dispute at the heart of From a legal perspective, do you think Trump was inciting them when he was saying, I mean, he did repeatedly say peaceful, but I think what a lot of people are saying is, well, what did he think was going to happen when they got there? | ||
| I mean, actually, I think had things not gotten out of hand, Ted Cruz would have issued a statement that day saying, I object to this or that. | ||
| And Rand Paul would have done the same. | ||
| The day would have finished up. | ||
| And then actually what I think would happen was people would have realized it was over. | ||
| I think that's where it was all heading. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not an expert on the law of incitement. | ||
| So I don't know what the legal standards are, but it's complicated. | ||
| I mean, he's got statements. | ||
| And again, this is what's difficult is how you view what he said does depend on what your view is of the underlying claim of rigging. | ||
| You can't get around that. | ||
| If you think the rigging idea was preposterous, as I do, then, you know, for him to go and say, you know, take back the capital sounds possibly too provocative. | ||
| But if it's right, if he really was the rightful winner, and the election was stolen from him, His rhetoric looks simply factual. | ||
| So- I wanna stop you there for a second, because it's interesting, because even though you're really just talking about sort of the psychological makeup of some of the people and the behaviors related to the information that we all get, I know it's very possible that YouTube is going to take this video down, because we're really not even supposed to talk about this, even though you're fully saying that you believe that the election was legitimate. | ||
| But that's just the sort of information war that we're in related to all of this. | ||
| You know, the question, Dave, is what is this country going to look like in five years or three years? | ||
| This censorship is happening so quickly. | ||
| I mean, my mind is just blown by it. | ||
| I don't know what one can do. | ||
| And the other thing that worries me, and this comes out of the Academy again, up to now, federal judges have been pretty good in striking down free speech limitations on college campuses. | ||
| Which, you know, the things that get appealed to them tend to be the speech codes, which are by now are sort of archaic and a trivial problem compared to the much broader campus climate of censorship. | ||
| But the judges have been pretty good on First Amendment. | ||
| But what are future judges going to be like? | ||
| They're the product of this academy as well. | ||
| And during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, you had students from the Harvard and Yale law schools | ||
| protesting saying, "Believe survivors," | ||
| you know, trying to torpedo the Kavanaugh nomination. | ||
| The "believe survivors" mantra that is the absolute central plank of feminism today | ||
| is completely antithetical to due process. | ||
| It is the rejection of the presumption of innocence. | ||
| The hate speech conceit that we're seeing now, weaponized in the world at large to do censorship | ||
| when you have members of the press saying we should censor Fox News, | ||
| we should de-platform everybody because hate speech is behavior. | ||
| Speech destroys people's lives. | ||
| As you pointed out, hate speech is not a constitutionally protected or recognized category. | ||
| The judges that we are entrusting with our Constitution are the products of the Academy that is giving us these poisonous ideas. | ||
| So I don't know how much longer we can count on America the way we know it. | ||
| It's so, I mean, it's scary what you're saying there, but I think what I hear from a lot of conservatives is, oh, the courts are the sort of last line on this, that maybe Trump got enough judges in for now, because he did get a lot of, I mean, it was something like 400 judges, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| He got a ton of judges in, that that's the last line. | ||
| But I think you're right. | ||
| It's also that they're a function of the culture and everything else. | ||
| And the more we target individual people and then they get scared and they don't want to be called a racist, on top of the fact that they themselves may have been indoctrinated at some level, it's a scary stew. | ||
| Let me shift to something that you might find a little more inspiring then. | ||
| I was at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit right before Christmas. | ||
| And we've talked about this before, but you're a non-religious conservative, which sometimes people find to be an oxymoron. | ||
| I do not. | ||
| And we've had a couple of interesting chats about it. | ||
| But at Turning Point, they had a conservative secular coalition there. | ||
| It was the first time this group had been invited. | ||
| And there were a lot of them there. | ||
| I did an interview with them. | ||
| And as I was talking, I think I brought you up in the interview, but I see something really nice happening there. | ||
| That there suddenly is this sort of burst of secular conservatism. | ||
| And I thought you might just like to hear that. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| No, I was unaware of that. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily change a lot of the other rhetoric that comes out of a lot of conservative talk show hosts. | ||
| But, you know, again, if we really believe in being inclusive, - Well, that's a good thing. | ||
| Yeah, that seemed to be the overriding idea. | ||
| So sort of going back a little bit to the censorship part of this, | ||
| has any of the big tech censorship, the way they're trying to kick Fox off the air, | ||
| the way they're trying to get rid of YouTubers or saying that you can't talk about any of these things, | ||
| has any of that pushed your free market principles to the breaking point? | ||
| That seems to be a new place that libertarians and conservatives are fighting at the moment. | ||
| Like, oh, we should have used the power of the government when we had Trump to break up the tech monopolies. | ||
| Or do you fully believe in the free market or some combination thereof? | ||
| Yeah, this again is not my expertise and I'm, The big thing that I find so astounding with the members of the liberal elites that are calling now from censorship is their childlike inability to think in terms of principles. | ||
| They think that they will always have power and that therefore they can establish the precedent of shutting down speech that will never be used against them. | ||
| And you think, my God, you know, An adult is supposed to be able to abstract from his own situation to think in terms of neutral principles. | ||
| And I used to go around to college campuses and say to the lefty students who were, yes, also screaming and having heart attacks at my very presence there, say, do you want this power of censorship in the hands of Donald Trump? | ||
| And ironically, Trump did not try to censor people, but now you have, you know, Max Boot and Washington Post writers and heads of Columbia journalism school saying, well, you know, this free speech thing is not really so great. | ||
| We've got to get rid of it. | ||
| But what if we get Trump in 2024, God forbid, or somebody else, it's going to use it against you. | ||
| And I would, so I would say the same thing with taking on the, the big tech companies that They are private, and so I'm worried about any kind of precedent that would be used for government to go after a private entity, because we may think we're doing it for a good cause now, but the tables can always turn. | ||
| But this is something that is above my pay grade. | ||
| I leave it to you. | ||
| to figure out a way out of this mess because it's damn hard. | ||
| Yeah, I know the tech part isn't necessarily your area of expertise, | ||
| but I knew you could give me a sort of philosophical underpinning there. | ||
| But all right, so going back to a little bit more of where you focus, | ||
| we have heard Joe Biden say the phrase equity roughly 1 billion times in his few weeks of, | ||
| I'll have to get fact-checked on that, but in his few weeks of office. | ||
| I mean, equity, equity, equity. | ||
| You may remember that just, what, two or three days before the election, Kamala Harris released that video on Twitter talking about that we should all end up in the same place. | ||
| This is obviously very different than equality. | ||
| Are you kind of shocked or does it just all fit that we sort of slipped equity under the guise of equality into the system just that quickly? | ||
| Where now, if you say you're against equity, which is just sort of an imaginary position, well, of course you're racist and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, well, equity is another, it's a synonym for the sort of the obverse, Racism and white supremacy. | ||
| I've been hearing more. | ||
| My ear is more attuned to Biden's endless repetition of systemic racism. | ||
| And they're the same thing. | ||
| I mean, equity is the response to systemic racism. | ||
| Equity means quotas. | ||
| It means the destruction of meritocratic standards. | ||
| It means you hire and promote on the basis of race, not on the basis of qualifications. | ||
| Uh, and any institution which does not show a proportional number, uh, of, of blacks or Hispanics is thereby by definition, uh, systemically racist and engaged in bias. | ||
| And, and I'm fully expecting Ibram Kendi, the big anti-racist, uh, Huckster right now, who's probably the most highest paid of them, he may have even bumped out Ta-Nehisi Coates, to end up in the federal government and set up a agency of anti-racism that will go after every private institution using the completely dangerous and unjustified tool of disparate impact, which holds that any neutral process, such as saying, we expect you as a | ||
| Alzheimer's researcher to have a highly competitive knowledge of the way neurology works. | ||
| If that standard has a disparate impact on blacks, then you get rid of the standard and say, we're going to replace it with quotas. | ||
| The fact of the matter is the academic skills gap in this country is so vast that it is preposterous to claim that the lack of proportional representation in any institution is the result of bias. | ||
| The facts are these. | ||
| Black 8th graders, 54% of all black 8th graders in this country do not even have basic math skills. | ||
| Basic is defined by the National Association of Educational Progress, the NAEP, as Partial mastery of math concepts. | ||
| 54% of black 8th graders are below basic in their math skills. | ||
| 40% are below basic in their reading skills. | ||
| That is, they do not even have partial mastery of 8th grade reading skills. | ||
| That gap does not close. | ||
| It continues at the SAT level where you have a standard deviation of gap, LSATs, GMATs, MCATs, Everywhere you see that distinction. | ||
| And by the way, their response is to now get rid of many of these things, right? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| They're gonna get rid of, that's why they're getting rid of the SATs. | ||
| And my prediction is we are also eventually gonna get rid of crime data. | ||
| You are gonna have police departments, it's already very hard to get your hands on Crime offending data and criminal victimization data as well. | ||
| And that is eventually going to be repressed as well in order to further strengthen the phony narrative that the disproportion of blacks in the prison system is due to racism, not to exponentially higher rates of criminal offending. | ||
| I think when some people hear you say that, when they hear, okay, well, 54% of black eighth graders aren't at that level, or the level that they should be at, that they say, well, then that proves that there's systemic racism, if it's so disproportionate to black people. | ||
| I think at a surface level thought, I think that's what happens there. | ||
| So can you just go a little bit beneath that, maybe as a comparison to the Asian community? | ||
| Because I know you've written a lot about that. | ||
| Well, I proposed a thought experiment, which is that if blacks acted like Asians for 10 years in all regards to things that have a bearing on academic success, on success in life, such as being fanatical about schoolwork, you know, having parents that care about whether you're going to class, whether you're truant or not, taking your textbooks home, studying for the next exam, Not screaming at your teacher, beating up your teacher, not getting involved in drugs or gangs, having a very low out-of-wedlock birth rate. | ||
| If all those behaviors were the same, and then we saw the socioeconomic disparities that we do, then it would be more than enough time to start talking about systemic racism. | ||
| But right now, You have a culture, and you have addressed this, Dave, with your fantastic interview with Brandon of Blexit, an inner-city culture that stigmatizes academic effort, that celebrates violence, criminality, that is completely inimical to success in life. | ||
| When the behaviors are so different, it is way premature to talk about systemic racism. | ||
| There is a lot that can be done. | ||
| At least in theory. | ||
| I mean, we've been trying for decades without a whole lot of success. | ||
| But it remains theoretically possible to change the culture and the behaviors that I think are clearly related to the fact that we don't have absolute equity in outcomes that Kamala Harris and Biden pretend to | ||
| want. | ||
| And as long as we can't talk about those behaviors, and we keep going down this path of demanding more quotas, | ||
| more transfer payments, nothing is going to change. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, of course, the great Thomas Sowell has been talking about this forever, that that, in effect, is what the welfare state did. | ||
| Do you think there's anything, though, the government could do? | ||
| Let's say we had a government, certainly not the government we have at the federal level now, but if there was a government to come in and say, okay, We want to address these issues around the family, around generations on welfare, all of these things. | ||
| We want to address it. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I mean, I've heard some people like Candace Owens say, you just stop the programs tomorrow and you let that pain point hit. | ||
| Do you think there's a sensible policy there? | ||
| Do you say just end everything? | ||
| What's the actual action that can happen? | ||
| Government cannot do social uplift. | ||
| It doesn't know how to do it. | ||
| And of course, right now you have government, you know, the social work schools are cranking out government workers that are utterly committed to non-judgmentalism when it comes to self-destructive behavior. | ||
| Like I remember in the 90s in New York, I used to write a lot about welfare reform and would talk to these nonprofit workers and they were, adamant that they couldn't say a word about out-of-wedlock childbearing, which is the biggest predictor of poverty in this country. | ||
| If we could wipe out out-of-wedlock childbearing, re-knit families together, we'd get rid of poverty and we'd get rid of almost all crime. | ||
| And it's happening now in the white community as well among, you know, the hillbilly elegy population as well. | ||
| Charles Murray's written about that. | ||
| So government does not know how to Change people's upbringing. | ||
| So, yes, it would be a great thing. | ||
| I would absolutely back Candace Owens of going cold turkey. | ||
| And there were proposals about that for during the welfare reform era of the 1990s of at least not giving more checks, larger checks when people had more children out of wedlock. | ||
| But that was a very hard sell. | ||
| I would say government, you know what it's there for. | ||
| is providing public order, providing the basis for people to exercise their own initiative that is above all safe streets so that businesses don't have to worry about their employees. | ||
| They can set up shop and people can thrive and get where they need to go without fear. | ||
| You're speaking my language. | ||
| It's so interesting what you said about in the 90s and the social workers and they couldn't bring up the, you know, the one parent household. | ||
| It reminds me of something that David Horowitz, who I'm sure you know, have told me once when he was still a lefty in New York City politics in the early 80s during the AIDS crisis. | ||
| or he was just sort of becoming a Republican in essence. | ||
| And they knew that the AIDS crisis that in effect ground zero | ||
| was these gay bathhouses, 'cause people were having all kinds of sex | ||
| and doing drugs and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| And the Republicans wanted to close down the bathhouses, but the Democrats said, no, you're a bunch of homophobes | ||
| and you hate gay people. | ||
| Thus, they actually extended the crisis probably for years and years after that, because it's the same culture of fear in essence. | ||
| Well, I've said the big divide between conservatives and liberals or progressives or leftists is whether you see behavior as the most important determinant of life outcomes, or you see large systemic structures as the determinant. | ||
| And I'm sure there's, you know, counter examples here, but by and large, a liberal is going to say, but look, you know, there's these huge structures, homophobia or racism that prevent people from thriving. | ||
| And, and again, in the case of AIDS, I mean, it was just remarkable that we were not allowed to talk about Grotesquely promiscuous sex, and pretending that AIDS is like an airborne disease, an infectious disease, as opposed to something that is almost 100% avoidable by not doing intravenous drugs, and not engaging in anonymous sex with people who you have no idea what their STD status is or anything. | ||
| You can avoid it 100%. | ||
| But and so a conservative is going to focus on those behavioral choices that people make and be more skeptical. | ||
| And a liberal would say, how can you be so blind to the systemic structural barriers? | ||
| And that's it's again, it's one of those Constitutional divides in how we look at the world that is very hard to bridge. | ||
| Do you think the more and more you do these things, that you study these things, talk about these things, and the more we've seen so much of what you talk about come true, Do you ultimately think that it's partly just the way our brains are wired at the end, that it's just some people's fear center is this and some people's other fear center is that? | ||
| So the mask then, for some people, you walk around and go, oh man, these people are bananas, that's sort of where I'm at. | ||
| But then someone else thinks it actually in some way is giving them purpose in a bizarre sense. | ||
| That's absolutely right. | ||
| It does give you purpose and you feel like you're part of something bigger And fear is, as I say, you feel like you're alive and it also gives you virtue. | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| And I also think we're all susceptible to enormous cognitive blindnesses. | ||
| So I'm sure conservatives are just as inconsistent in their application of principles. | ||
| I mean, we've all seen the The sort of seesaw go up and down as to whether one's in favor of executive orders based on whether your guy's in office or not. | ||
| So I do kind of despair. | ||
| I mean, I have to say, and this is going to anger a lot of people and alienate a lot of people, but I have been depressed by seeing the willingness of so many people on the right To embrace what I think are just completely ridiculous conspiracy theories with regards to Dominion voting systems and to not apply the Hume test, the test for miracles of having a basic skepticism towards claims, which ask, is it more likely than not? | ||
| Is it more likely than not that there was a systemic conspiracy across all levels of government in this country? | ||
| to destroy Trump votes. | ||
| To me, that is, it's, it just, it's a step too far. | ||
| But people have selective rationality. | ||
| And so I think that kind of a libertarian view that views everybody is it's all going to come out all right in the wash, because we're all rational. | ||
| It's not quite the way it works. | ||
| And we've had people like Daniel Kahneman for years now point out the the the sort of failures of how human beings are wired cognitively and our tendency towards the agency where it doesn't exist. | ||
| I would say that's part of the religious impulse as well. | ||
| So one can only hope and make those arguments as often as one can from one's own perspective of rationality, knowing that we are, I am fallible too. | ||
| And I think we need some epistemological humility towards our own positions, | ||
| as even as we're criticizing what appear to be complete insanity on the side of our ideological opponents. | ||
| That probably is the right place to stop because it was a beautiful ending, | ||
| but I'm gonna push you one further, which is that my audience knows that I'm really trying | ||
| to help people just not feel crazy about all of this. | ||
| 'Cause the world really does feel crazy. | ||
| We're watching the close of the old world. | ||
| We're watching the beginning of a new world that is going to feel very different no matter what. | ||
| I I sense you're probably similar to the way I think of myself. | ||
| I consider myself a world-weary optimist, but really a realist more than anything else. | ||
| I think you certainly must consider yourself a realist, but can you track some sort of future that looks okay over the next couple of years? | ||
| Is there something that you can sort of see in the distance that's like, oh, we can get through this without the complete destruction of everything that is good? | ||
| The truth. | ||
| I mean, I just, and I'm not a world-weary optimist. | ||
| I'm a world-weary pessimist. | ||
| Again, this is a constitutional difference. | ||
| I can tell. | ||
| I'm not an optimist by nature, and I know that clouds how I see things. | ||
| And I find optimists crazy. | ||
| Like, how can you guys think it's going to get better? | ||
| It's not. | ||
| But let's pretend. | ||
| But no, there are ways. | ||
| The only way out of this is the truth. | ||
| Do not be cowed by the charge of racism. | ||
| I do believe that the core problem in all of our world today is the racial gap. | ||
| The idea that America is racist, white supremacist, that's driving an enormous portion of the current insanity. | ||
| We have to speak the truth about accomplishment, about culture, and Not allow our history and our civilization to be torn down based on hatred, resentment, and mediocrity. | ||
| Stick up for what you love. | ||
| I'm going to stick up for the art that I think is is greater than any of us have any right to deserve. | ||
| We do not deserve the beauty of Chopin and Brahms piano music and Mozart operas. | ||
| None of us have done anything to justify this cornucopia of sublimity. | ||
| Keep fighting for it. | ||
| Keep fighting for what you believe with respect, not violence. | ||
| But that's all you can do is just go down fighting at the very least. | ||
| Heather MacDonald, you are truly one of my favorite guests. | ||
| Your most recent book is The Diversity Delusion, which we'll link to right down below. | ||
| And you're in OC, I'm here in LA. | ||
| Maybe we meet in the middle for coffee. | ||
| I don't want to get arrested. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| We'll wear a mask, two masks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I have to wear two now. | |
| We'll double up, we'll double up. | ||
| Thank you so much, Heather. | ||
| 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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