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Aug. 16, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:21:35
Sidebar with author Heather Mac Donald - "When Race Trumps Merit" - Viva & Barnes
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This is Pudge.
Walking on the sidewalk.
Very proud of myself.
Yes.
Oh, don't get heavy yourself.
Yes.
Very nice.
Oh, you got tangled up.
Keep going.
Oh, now she's giving up.
Okay.
Well, that's a daily exercise.
Now she's going to make a poo-poo or a pee-pee.
Oh, no, wait.
She's not.
She's already done that in the house.
Oh, yes.
We'll start.
We can start.
Let's get this out of here.
We can start with, I don't know.
Good news or happy stuff tonight because otherwise we don't always have to start with a Jagmeet Singh or Justin Trudeau or something that makes you want to gag.
And we're going to enter...
It's going to be an interesting discussion tonight because a lot of you know who Heather MacDonald is.
And the topic of what I have discovered after having come to the States to live here temporarily for the time being, the racial question in the United States is...
It's been imported as a political wedge issue in Canada as well, despite Canada not having the same history as America to the same extent.
But it's one thing that I have not yet gotten used to.
Racial tensions in the United States.
Seems to me I remember a time when the racial question was not everywhere, where it was not a constant political wedge issue at all levels.
And it certainly wasn't the case that...
Everything was driven by diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Heather MacDonald has written a new book called When Race Trumps Merit.
You just know that putting the word Trump in the title is going to piss off a lot of people.
We're going to talk about that.
Standard rules, everybody.
You all know the rules here.
These things, these wonderful highlighted comments called rumble rants or super chats on YouTube.
YouTube takes 30% of those.
Georgia has a Republican governor.
Wouldn't he issue a pardon for Trump if he's convicted?
Barnes might talk about that tonight or tomorrow.
My understanding is that the governor at the state level doesn't necessarily have the same pardon rights, but I might have misunderstood something.
Whatever.
We'll try to get to the questions if there are any specific for Heather tonight.
What else?
This is gonna be fun.
This is gonna be fun.
We're gonna end in about 15 minutes on YouTube and bring it over to Rumble exclusively.
Let me just make sure that we are currently successfully live on Rumble.
We are.
And successfully live on Locals.
Are we good?
Because yesterday I forgot to put the link in.
Yes.
Good.
All right.
Without further ado, because both guests are here.
I seem to be underdressed in our Viva Fry merch.
Barnes is looking dapper.
Heather is looking dapper.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to bring in Barnes first.
Heather, I'm bringing you in in 3, 2, 1. And I'm going to go to the bottom here so that if I want to pull up comments or questions, it will not interfere with you.
Alrighty, this is it.
We're live.
Heather, thank you for coming on.
I listened to over two podcasts with you today.
And the one with Jordan Peterson is amazing, but I think we're going to get into some of the factoids discussed in there at some point tonight.
Before we get into any of this, I'd like to just, you know, for those who may not know who you are, 30,000-foot overview to let the public who might be seeing you now for the first time know who you are.
Oh, no, you want me to say that?
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on, David.
It's an absolute honor to be with you guys.
As an academic monkey, I had aspired always to be a professor.
I could think of no greater good than being able to read books all my days and teach them.
But I became disillusioned with the academic theory that I had uncritically absorbed as an undergraduate, known as deconstruction or post-structuralism.
And I still sort of kept feeling like I wanted to get into academia.
As the decades passed, identity politics rose up, reared its ugly head, and destroyed any possibility of students being able to lose themselves in beauty.
They were told that they should be narcissistically obsessed with their own race and identity and sexual identity and only read books that conform to those identities.
So I ended up slowly working my way into journalism and initially started writing on Cultural matters, postmodernism and poststructuralism, and eventually started doing real reporting, which I wish I'd done as an undergraduate, as a student reporter,
and cut my teeth during the Giuliani years in New York City, before Giuliani became an insane person, when he was actually the most cutting-edge, insightful and creative mayor and even governor in the United States at that time, taking on the Poverty industrial complex, taking on crime, bringing crime down to levels that no police chief or FBI or government law enforcement agency ever believed possible.
And then you mentioned the ubiquity of the race issue.
I first started writing about policing in 1999 with the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City, a tragic shooting in which a West Ghanaian immigrant was shot 41 times by NYPD undercover officers.
And so I've been since then covering a whole range of issues from law enforcement to still what's happening in academia and certainly the wholesale war on merit that is American race politics.
How much have things changed in terms of the perception of police abuse issues?
It seems like it's gone back and forth where, at times, issues of police misconduct haven't been adequately addressed.
Now there's almost automatic demonization if it fits a certain political profile of case.
In your professional experience, how have you witnessed that shift in the court of public opinion and particularly within academia and the media?
Well, first of all, let me just say, Robert, that your coverage of the Derek Chauvin case was absolutely essential.
I couldn't have understood what was going on without it, so that was really a massive public service.
I would say that for the last 30, 40 years...
The discourse has been almost unremittingly anti-police, with the one exception of the surge, temporary surge of support for law enforcement after 9 /11, which for many officers came as rather bitter fruit because they had just been going through this phony idea of driving while black, which held that if the police stopped more black drivers...
For speeding or running red lights, the only allowable explanation was racism or so-called racial profiling.
It was never allowed to be even investigated whether blacks, in fact, speeded more, sped more, or ran red lights more.
Objective tests, red light cameras tell us that those are the facts, and yet now red light cameras are deemed racist.
So the era when...
We truly had racist policing and certainly the history of the police above all in the South in maintaining the gratuitous cruelty of de jure segregation and maintaining what was in fact a white supremacist culture.
Those days are well beyond us, thank heavens.
Right now policing is professional.
People are going into the profession because they want to help.
I've spent time in police academies.
These are good people that believe in public service.
And so I don't think by any means we have a systemic bias problem or a systemic brutality problem.
Nevertheless, that is certainly in inverse proportion to the degree to which that the bias problem is real.
As that problem diminishes to de minimis importance, the rhetoric about the police becomes ever more noxious.
Heather, you're born and raised in Los Angeles, California, or not Los Angeles?
Yes, Los Angeles.
Absolutely.
I spend my summers now in Orange County, Irvine, but I was raised in Los Angeles.
Very briefly, what did your parents do, and how long did you spend in LA before heading over to New York?
And then the follow-up question is going to be, how much has LA or California changed in your lifetime?
But starting from the beginning, what did your parents do?
Or what do they do?
My father was a lawyer who'd also been trained as an accountant, and he was sort of the right-hand man of a...
I'm a Midwestern industrialist.
My father came from Chicago with Marcellus Jocelyn to California.
My father had been stationed in Laguna Beach after World War II and said, wait a minute, I'm not going back to Chicago.
I didn't know this place existed.
This was even a possibility.
Marcellus Jocelyn, you can see, I was recently shooting a documentary in Redondo Beach, California.
And there's a Jocelyn Park there, excuse me, El Segundo.
There's a Jocelyn Park there.
There's one in the Santa Monica.
And so my father helped with that expansion.
Jocelyn made parts for telephone poles and also served as the executor of the Jocelyn estate.
And my mother, I had the fortune of having a mother who raised me.
I had the very good fortune of having two parents who read to me, who gave me the opportunity to have a childhood of innocence, of beauty, of being able to participate in the great classics, children's classics of British literature, Wind in the Willows, you know.
Alice in Wonderland, the American classics of Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web.
My father read to me the Tobit-Tolkien Cycle, a lot of Kipling, other Captain's Courageous.
So I was fortunate in my parents, in their understanding of the importance of exposing children to literature.
I went away to school In the 11th grade to Andover, and that was a true culture shock.
At that point, L.A. was well in the middle of divorce culture, and my parents had gotten divorced in the summer of my seventh grade.
I went to a school that was heavily Hollywood kid-oriented, so when I went to the New England prep school environment, it was amazing!
It was so traditional, and I had never experienced anything like that.
So L.A., when I grew up, Santa Monica was a sleepy town.
People mocked it for, like, being a senior citizen, retirement community.
It then went through a period of being very hip, Venice, you know, trying to emulate Venice.
And now the squalor that has spread across the city into every part of L.A. It's mind-boggling.
The San Fernando Valley was also seen as kind of a fuddy-duddy place where the aerospace industry lived.
It was clean.
It was orderly.
Now it looks like a third-world country in places.
So the change is just stunning.
And I feel like Irvine is one of the last good places left in California.
I couldn't really see living in Los Angeles at this point, not just because of the squalor, but also the traffic is utterly unbearable.
How do you contrast it to New York?
There's more, well, Skid Row, which is east of downtown Los Angeles, is like no place on earth, at least within the United States.
It is a Boschian nightmare of human depravity, and there's nothing like that on the East Coast.
Thank heavens.
And it's been that way now for decades.
I've written about...
Various efforts of the Los Angeles Police Department to enforce the law and help people on Skid Row.
You do not help drug addicts who are beating each other up and prostituting themselves and pimping each other out by saying anything goes and we're just going to ignore your dysfunction.
You do not help them that way.
You help them by saying this is not allowed.
You are not allowed to colonize city streets.
And if you've not been to Skid Row, you cannot possibly imagine it.
It's block upon block of the most depraved squalor you've ever seen.
So there's nothing like that.
But New York does have not so much the tented encampments, but it does have a lot of vagrancy.
It has something which is really unsightly.
Which is the scaffolds that are everywhere that allow vagrants to colonize under them.
And it has the very, very ugly restaurant shanties that are now apparently a place that are never going to come down.
So I would say the contrast in California is more shocking because New York has always been more urban.
And there was more to destroy, I would say, in Los Angeles.
I'm just quickly reading on Skid Row, and I'm kind of learning things that I don't think I ever knew, that it started in the 1930s because it was known for its condensed homeless population and then really took off, I guess, in more recent decades.
Has it always been bad in your lifetime or always been known for being bad and just gotten exponentially worse in the last couple decades?
Well, it was a place where the police took people that were drunks, and you had the best possible type of vagrancy housing, which was still available, which were single-room occupancy hotels, known as cage hotels.
They were extremely bare bones.
You had a bed, basically, and no private bathroom, and the police would take people there in the paddy wagons and assume that you're not going to be in the great...
Beaux-Arts glories of downtown Los Angeles, where the banking industry was and the legal industry and many corporate headquarters.
And that was a perfectly appropriate rule.
Now we have San Francisco and LA declaring, oh, well, what homeless housing means, and I use the homeless phrase in scare quotes because this is not a housing problem, as has been said.
Endlessly since the 1990s, and I'm sick of saying it myself, vagrancy is a drug addiction and mental illness problem, but let's for now use the facile moniker of calling it homelessness.
San Francisco says, okay, everybody's going to get a private apartment, including Los Angeles, with their own bathroom and kitchen and everything.
$800,000 a unit.
Sorry, never going to happen.
And there's a reason why it's never going to happen.
Because the advocates do not want it to happen.
They have a stake in keeping the streets as squalid as possible so they can continue to get completely unjustified funding where they do nothing.
They send around their feckless outreach teams to politely inquire, "Oh, sir, would you please like our services and housing?" The answer is almost invariably no.
And the most radical of the advocates want the vagrants on the street where they can serve as a visual symbol of the alleged heartlessness of American capitalism.
Robert, I just want one follow-up on that.
I had just interviewed this pastor out of Canada named Artur Pawlowski who said that he was feeding the homeless, sheltering, helping them off the streets, and he said he ran into problems with the government because he was too effective at doing what he was doing and that there was effectively an industry.
That had been built around not resolving the homelessness problem, but maintaining it and arguably even exacerbating it.
From your experience, is that the same thing in the States?
Like there's per head financing funding and there's an incentive to make it worse and actually not resolve it financially speaking?
Well, yes.
I mean, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but one does have to just note the structural incentives here.
You solve a problem.
You don't get funding anymore.
But I would say that the drive is as much ideological.
It is a commitment to radical individualism only among the dysfunctional.
The law-abiding members of society now are viewed as ATMs by our public policy makers.
I call it the great inversion.
Our public policy now has put the needs, alleged needs and interests of the dysfunctional, the antisocial, ahead of those of the bourgeois and law-abiding, the hard-working, who just don't get any attention.
You know, we're supposed to put up with crime.
I know you weren't using words to be absolutely held to every last word, but I would say any so-called homeless helper who's out there feeding people in the streets is an enabler.
That's not the way to help them.
The way to help them is first you set a rule and say, no colonization of the streets allowed.
You must move on.
Here is housing.
I mean, in New York City, there's a constitutional right for housing.
There's no excuse to allow anybody on the street.
And thanks to our judges in the Ninth Circuit of the United States out in western United States, there's also virtually a constitutional right to housing.
So all of the services, you know, pizza delivery to people's cardboard boxes or the soup kitchens just prolong the problem.
Can you explain to people what and how you're introduced to and what led you away from deconstructionism?
Away from what?
Deconstructionism.
I think a lot of people don't, you know, I've used that term before, and about half the time people are like, what are you talking about?
They have not been privileged, as one might say, with that form of education.
Oh, man.
Well, it's pretty arcane.
I hope your viewers are into this.
But deconstruction came out of France, and it was an idea that the main exponent of it was a so-called French philosopher named Jacques Derrida.
And he had a counterpart at Yale University, Paul DeMond.
And it was a theory that was supposedly about how language works to structure human existence and how texts work, literate.
We don't call them books anymore, novels or poems.
We call them texts.
And it was a philosophy that was unremittingly negative.
It's basic premises or claims.
And again, I don't I'm going to say things that I don't expect any viewer to understand because they are completely counterintuitive and counterfactual.
And it is to my eternal embarrassment that I ate this stuff up as an undergraduate.
So some of the basic propositions are there's no such thing as the human self.
The self is just a play of language.
Another proposition, because language is arbitrary, there's no natural connection between the word cat and a cat.
You know, in French, it's cha.
In Spanish, it's gato.
Cazza in Italian.
That because language is a set of arbitrary conventions, it therefore must always break down in its meaning.
That's just not true, but that was the thought, that the arbitrary sign was always distanced from the signified.
And most ridiculously, the thought was that literature, you may think when you read Middlemarch by George Eliot, that you are getting an unparalleled entrance into the pathos and potential tragedy of human marriage and the way that men and women can completely misunderstand each other, portray onto the other.
They're aspirations that have nothing to do with the reality of that other person.
You may think you're getting a view of the complexity of 19th century village life in Britain, the class structure, the political maneuverings.
No, no, no, that is not right.
You are wrong.
Deconstruction tells you that what Middlemarch is really about is its own failure to mean anything.
It is not about life.
Literature is not about life and love and sorrow and loss and longing and eros.
It is about drearily.
I'm going to use another phrase that I don't expect anybody to believe, but this is the sort of stuff that I was cutting my teeth on.
It is about metaphor inevitably dissolving into metonymy, which is supposedly a bad thing.
Yale in the 1970s was the breeding ground for deconstruction.
It was viewed by every literature department across the country as the most cutting-edge place to do high theory, apart from studying with Derrida at the, I don't know if you, Sorbonne or the École Normale, I think.
Yale was the place to be.
And I'd always loved language.
I'd been fascinated.
I loved Moby Dick as a high school student because the language was so crazy and so rich.
And so a theory that purported to tell me about how language worked was inherently of interest.
My peers were wise.
They actually had common sense.
Many of my peers said, This deconstruction doesn't make sense.
This is ridiculous.
And I viewed them, I looked down on them that they were just not sophisticated enough.
So I got sucked in.
I then went to Cambridge in Britain, and I studied linguistics there, among other, among Renaissance literature.
And I realized that everything deconstruction was saying about language was completely fantastical.
It was almost linguistics.
That was real.
Phonetic syntax, above all, speech act theory.
I fell in love with it.
I went back to Yale to start a PhD in comparative literature, which was, again, the cutting-edge thing to do.
Yale's conflict department was the place to be.
And to my utter dismay, I heard Paul DeMond saying the same bizarre, just macabre things again and again that Shelley was all about mutilation and decapitation.
It was very weird stuff.
And I thought, my God, these people are saying the same thing as when I left.
And it's all wrong.
What do I do now?
Because this is all I've ever wanted to be.
So I left and I eventually went to law school because I was still interested in high theory and legal hermeneutics.
So I went to law school, not because I want to be a lawyer, but because I was interested in critical legal studies.
Awful!
But I eventually got straight and started realizing that reality is much more interesting than...
The linguistic tropes and that there was actually truth out there to be pursued at least, if not attained.
Because I'm enough of a deconstructionist that I still don't believe in objective truth, sorry, except when I write.
Then I do.
But as a theoretical matter, I don't.
But when I'm writing about the police, I do believe that I'm telling the truth.
Philosophically, I don't know.
But anyway, so that was how I got out of that.
Deconstructionism has to be intrinsically related to postmodernism in terms of...
Okay, because it sounds like an iteration of postmodernism where everything is affected by...
There's no objective truths.
It's all social.
It's all patriarchal.
And when we deconstruct it, nothing means anything.
Well, yeah, I would say you're absolutely right.
Poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction were synonyms.
But I want to make one...
And this is where I feel very fortunate.
Even though I wasted much of my college years, I was not studying history at Yale because the Yale faculty have long since abdicated their intellectual responsibility to say, "You undergraduates are idiots.
You're ignoramuses.
You cannot be trusted to choose your own courses.
Here's what you're going to learn." We have at Yale or many other places.
The premier American history department in the country.
You will study history.
No, no, of course not.
I was left to my own devices.
Did I take history at Yale?
No, I missed one of the greatest opportunities.
But I was fortunate in one thing.
Deconstruction was a Mandarin science and it read the classics.
It was not about the patriarchy at all.
We read Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida Read Rousseau.
They read Plato.
They read Aristotle.
They read Shelley.
They read Wordsworth.
Nobody thought to complain.
I never thought to complain that I was not reading female authors.
So in that sense, it was a halcyon period compared to what came later in the 80s, which was a complete reversal.
I mean, it's very ironic because high theory did mutate eventually into...
Multiculturalism and gender studies and race studies, but whereas deconstruction denied the very existence of the self, the self is just a play of language.
Identity politics of the 1980s and beyond is just obsessively self-involved.
It's all about the self.
It tells students all you should be interested in is your own petty narrow selves defined by gonads and melanin.
And I'm very grateful that I at least missed that.
Now, hold on.
We're going to bring this over to Rumble.
So everyone out there, let me just share the link to Rumble.
We're going to end this on YouTube, continue on Rumble and Locals, and now it's going to start getting good because, Heather, you've segued into the next subject matter, which is going to be interesting.
Leaving YouTube, come over to Rumble.
The link is there.
That is it now.
Okay, Robert, you had a question.
When did you first witness the...
The transition in academia into this sort of multicultural, critical studies, ideology...
That very much sort of ends justify the means logic in terms of how to translating as we're witnessing in live time and the legal profession as an example.
But this sort of complete contamination of the academy to where the great books are the worst books.
You're not supposed to read them anymore.
The canon shouldn't be the canon.
They have their own canon.
Because that seemed to be almost a radical shift off of centuries of what schools like the Ivy League had been about from like the 1700s.
To the late 1900s.
And all of a sudden, bam.
I mean, even Harold Bloom is being targeted.
One of the great famous authors at Yale.
I mean, when I was at Yale, people confused him with a homeless guy.
Because, you know, he looked like he did the way he dressed.
But now, all of a sudden, he's persona non grata, along with others.
Jed Rubinstein, great law professor, who got targeted when he was helping out Bobby Kennedy on social media censorship, etc.
When I was there in the early 90s, it was getting a little bit bad, but it's nothing like what I've seen in the last decade.
I saw the beginnings of it, but I didn't see the full...
The display of it.
I mean, I had a friend of mine, Puerto Rican, who was my roommate, who kept complaining.
He goes, you know, all the Puerto Ricans here that get all the preferential treatment, he goes, you know, their parents are Spanish aristocracy.
He goes, they're not from Flatbush, where he was from.
But, you know, so I saw the beginnings of it.
But when did you see that just complete cultural insanity take over the Ivy Leagues and the academy?
Well, there's two ways to answer that, Robert.
One is the sort of more complicated way, which is that the roots of all of this really began with the rise of the self-awareness of literature professors that they're doing something special and wanting to have their own specialized discourse.
And so one could root things in the Yale School of New Criticism, which began in the mid-20th century.
William Winsat and Cleon Brooks, and their idea was we should read literary texts as self-contained objects.
We're going to focus on structure, irony, verbal, you know, tropes, metaphor, metonymy, and we're going to change the way literature had been read up to that point,
which was sort of a facile emphasis either on biography or Talking about literature at a very high level of abstraction of the moral lessons that may be gleaned from Middlemarch, say, which are there to be gleaned.
And I'm much more sympathetic to that approach than I am now to the, you know, what became deconstruction, which was focusing on one paragraph and deconstructing metaphor to metonymy, or Proust, that, DeMond did that infamously in Proust again and again.
That literature professors are as much about developing their own particular science of reading, could be seen as the start of the loss from grace, and that what they should be doing is saying, "My real goal here is to give students enough knowledge to understand why they should be down on their knees in gratitude."
Before these great books, before Milton, before Max Beerbohm, before Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, people that have an unparalleled insight into human existence and an unparalleled command of language.
And that is our goal.
It's to transmit an inheritance, as the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott defines education as.
So you could put it back there.
Or you could do it more recently.
And the '80s, you know, we did have Stanford University getting rid of its very modest and undemanding core curriculum that was focused on Western Civ.
That's when you had Jesse Jackson infamously leading the chant, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go." While Yale in the 90s may have still offered literature courses that were uncontaminated by the poison of identity politics, it was happening pretty fast.
I mean, Yale had a very strong women's studies department, and there were a lot of people doing high theory at Yale, but it was no longer high theory.
It was identity politics in the 1990s.
And things have only accelerated.
You know, there were holdouts.
I remember in my completely fatuous days as an undergraduate, looking down on the German department at Yale in the 70s, because it was still very traditional.
It still taught students that, you know, you read Goethe for the purity of his language.
You read Schiller for the sense of what it meant to be.
On the borderline between classicism and romanticism, and now every department at Yale is dominated by theorists.
But things spread.
They spread into anthropology.
Philosophy is kind of a holdout, and it's under attack from the feminists because philosophy, like economics, is still predominantly male, and therefore it must be destroyed.
Because any male institution now must be brought down.
So I would say the 90s were no longer the sort of prelapsarian period.
It was already pretty bad.
But obviously things got worse and worse in the 2000s and beyond.
Well, I get the race relations in the States.
It's foreign to me, born and raised in Canada, but now I've got some experience with it.
But it's an experience in the 2020s when everything literally is race and everything literally is racism.
If you see color, it's racism.
If you don't see color, it's racism.
And I don't have the life experience in the States to know.
Has it always been this way?
Was there a turning point?
You know, I remember Rodney King and I remember racial issues were always an issue.
You know, going back decades.
But when did it take on this form now that it's intrinsic?
It's in everything.
It's in everyone, even if they're the least racist.
Well, you do not overstate things, David.
It is absolutely everywhere at this point.
It's been building.
I don't follow the thesis of Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, who I ex-respect enormously, that everything changed in 2015.
Particularly with, like, free speech, but, you know, the whole absurd ideas that students are at risk or unsafe on college campuses.
All this was building, as I say, in the 1990s, the cops were under constant criticism for so-called racial profiling in car stops.
And we had the LA riots in 92. So the race industry, and, you know, in the 90s, there was these race hustlers in corporate diversity training that went around telling businesses like Leve Strauss in San Francisco or,
you know, Xerox that they were racist because they had an expectation of promptness for their black employees and that that meant that the...
Managers were failing to value diversity or manage diversity.
So you already had rumblings of some of the pronouncements that got people's attention after the George Floyd race riots when you had the Smithsonian Institution publishing one of these standard white privilege, white supremacy charts announcing that punctuality was a white trait and rationality was a white trait.
And individualism was a white trait and two-parent families were a white trait.
This didn't just happen post-George Floyd.
That having been said, the post-George Floyd mass psychosis was exponentially worse than anything we'd seen before when you had every single mainstream institution, banks, corporations, restaurants, symphony orchestras, opera companies.
All declaring themselves systemically biased.
And most hilariously, of course, and universities have been doing this for a long time, you had university presidents, not just Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton or Peter Salovey at Yale, but it was at, you know, Dartmouth, it was at Middlebury, it was Amherst, everywhere, all saying, oh, woe is me, we're so racist, when in fact, every faculty search at every campus today is all about trying to find even remotely qualified blacks and females to hire.
And they're using vast racial preferences to admit students because they want blacks there so much.
But at the same time, we're all supposed to believe they're racist.
And that's true of every American institution as well.
There's not a single business today in the mainstream, you know, large corporations and medium-sized corporations that is also not twisting itself into knots to hire and promote as many blacks as possible.
If you're a straight white male today, you are absolutely at the bottom of the totem pole.
You are not getting into medical school.
You're not getting your first choices into medical school.
You're being wait-listed at your first choices of law school, even if you have near-perfect MCATs or LSATs.
The reality today is the opposite of what American history was, tragically, for centuries.
It was white privilege.
The reality today is black privilege.
I should just flesh out one thing.
I do not believe in institutionalized racism.
Give me as much flack as people want for that.
There may be relics of country club stuff where they didn't want Jews any more than they wanted.
There might be that type of childish stuff.
I think it's absolutely false that there's institutionalized racism or institutional racism until I hear things like I'm trying to pull up the chart of signs of white privilege.
When I hear people say punctuality is white supremacy, logic is white supremacy, Then I tend to believe that these people are actually racist who are saying it to think that these otherwise normal, predictable, positive attributes are somehow indicative of whiteness and not of blackness.
Then I tend to think maybe there is institutionalized racism.
It just happens to be in the people complaining about it.
But I don't have the experience that you've had.
Am I wrong?
Yeah, I mean, obviously you're redefining it, but yes, one could absolutely argue that, that we keep on lowering our standards and having very low expectations for blacks, and that's not a way to close the academic skills gap.
The big fallacy of our society today, and the one that is why I wrote this book, and it scares the heck out of me, is that any racial disparity today is per se evidence of racism.
And therefore, if there is an institution...
It does not have 13% blacks if it's meritocratic or it has an over-representation of blacks if it's a criminal justice institution.
Those institutions must be torn down.
Their standards must be changed.
In the case of meritocratic institutions, their standards must be lowered.
In the case of the criminal justice system, we have to throw out the enforcement of criminal law because it will have a disparate impact on black criminals.
And what we're not allowed to talk about in this country Is the reason for those racial disparities is not discrimination.
The opposite is the case, as I say, that every institution is trying to find as many blacks as possible to hire and promote.
The reason is the academic skills gap on the one hand and the crime commission gap on the other.
And I'm going to have to break a racial taboo and racial etiquette here.
To give your viewers a sense of what I'm talking about, because these are facts that have been kept carefully offstage so that the only thing that people see is racial disparities.
Therefore, it must be racism.
Here's the facts.
Here's the facts that mean you can have diversity or you could have meritocracy.
At present, you cannot have both.
66% of all black 12th graders Do not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills defined as being able to do arithmetic or read a graph.
6% are proficient in 12th grade math and the number of 12th grade black students who are advanced in math is too small to show up statistically.
The picture is not much better in reading.
50% of black 12th graders Do not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade reading skills.
So that means if you're Google's AI lab and you're expecting that, absent your own racism, you're going to have 13% black artificial intelligence researchers or nanophysicists, it's not possible.
They're not in the pipeline.
And for criminal law, the fact of the matter is we've all seen these videos, but we're not allowed to notice that the people that are engaged in the mass looting and the mass assaults and the flash mobs, they're overwhelmingly black.
And the victims are also overwhelmingly black.
But we have decided to give up on closing that gap through high expectations.
And yes, I think what's happened is the elites are terrified that after decades of trying to close those gaps, nothing much has changed.
They're terrified that the gaps will not close.
And so they are proleptically putting out there the only allowable explanation being racism, because they don't want to touch even culture as an explanation for those gaps.
And they sure as hell are not going to go anywhere near any question of heritability.
And to what degree when you talk about race and merit, how does it extend beyond the employment or the criminal justice system?
Well, the most scary thing is certainly what's happening in medicine.
You have medical schools proclaiming that medicine and science is racist.
And that they are racist because they don't have 13% black medical students, by and large.
The black medical student population in the country is about 6%, 7%, 8%.
And so what they're doing, and they have been doing this for years, I mean, this is what Bakke, our, you know, University of California versus Bakke, the very or racial preferences case that Justice Powell gave us the ridiculous...
Absolutely, logically incoherent doctrine of diversity in college admissions.
All the way back in the 70s, UC Davis Medical School was admitting Black students based on quotas that had vastly different academic skills than the non-preferred students.
And Bakke sued and was told, well, sorry, you know, in general, the...
Medical schools are allowed to do this in the name of student diversity.
So right now you have medical students being admitted to medical schools that are black who would be automatically rejected on the basis of their MCAT scores, which are the medical college admissions tests, the counterpart of SATs for medical schools, that would be automatically rejected if white or Asian.
Some schools are saying to black students, you don't even have to submit MCAT scores because...
If they were to have a single standard for medical admissions, there would be very, very, very few Black students who would qualify because, again, let's go back to the academic skills gap.
It never closes.
It remains in college and it remains for beyond.
And so now we've brought students in under racial preferences, which is a surefire recipe for those students to struggle.
Tragically, it is a burden.
That these self-righteous, selfish administrators put on Black students.
They are the one group of students who are catapulted into academic environments for which they are not competitively qualified, unlike their non-preferred peers who go to school with peers that have their same level of academic qualifications.
All that anybody who opposes racial preferences is saying is that, yes, Black students should go to college.
They should go to college on the same conditions as everybody else.
With a chance of being academically successful because they have the same level of preparedness of their peers.
That's not the reality today.
Now, black medical school students are put into schools for which they are woefully unprepared.
No surprise, they end up at the bottom of their class.
And so what have we done?
On the first step of the medical licensing exam, known as step one, we've gotten rid of grades.
Because Black students' grades are so low on the first part of the medical student licensing exam.
And we've gone to pass /fail so that residencies choosing their residents won't know who's at the top of his class and who's at the bottom of his class.
Pressure is on to go pass /fail to step two.
We are changing the medical school curriculum in the hope of having more classes that Black students can succeed at.
We are decreasing emphasis on clinical skills, on knowledge of drug interactions, of how to stop somebody from dying of a heart attack who comes in from a car accident.
And instead, we're increasing mandatory courses in critical race theory, in white privilege and intersectionality, in racial justice.
We have our medical Funding agencies in the federal government, the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, are now doling out medical research grants on the basis of race and sex, not on the basis of scientific merit, and not just on the basis of race and sex.
They're doling them out on the basis of whether you received WIC as a child, whether your mother received the welfare program, women, infant, and children, food program, or whether you were a foster child or homeless because these correlate with being black, this is not how you choose the person who is going to solve Alzheimer's disease in the future.
Being homeless is not a criterion of scientific accomplishment, but that's what's going on in medicine now.
We are not only jeopardizing our future medical progress, we are inevitably putting lives at risk by having racial preferences prevail up and down the medical food chain.
I'm going to weigh my words in how I say this and make this joke because it's a sensitive topic.
What you're describing sounds like idiocracy come to real life where...
It's not a meritocracy.
It's almost like you are favoring those who are least able.
There happens to be a racial component to it, but I don't think the racial aspect is the determinative aspect.
We'll get to the why in a second.
And people are failing up, and instead of it being a meritocracy, it's turning into a failocracy or an idiocracy.
What I've noticed is that when there's statistical over-representation for Let's just say Blacks in general.
We always say there has to be at least 13% representative.
Typically it has to be more than that.
Unless there's 13%, it's racism.
You go into certain athletics, like I've just taken the obvious example, and I checked the stats to make sure beforehand, 72% of NBA players are Black.
Nobody complains about the over-representation there or claims reverse racism.
And that is fundamentally, and I'm going to argue this, arguably because of racism itself where...
Nobody places any societal value on the sport, but they place some intrinsic value on the IQ test.
So when there's not the same representation there, they take it as an attack on the identity versus in basketball.
Nobody really cares.
It's just sports.
So if there's statistical not equal representation, no big deal.
Now, where was I going with that?
Well, I'm with you.
I'm with you.
But I think at the very last minute, you took a wrong turn.
I think it's exactly the opposite.
David, I think that it's because we do play, we value sports, and we believe in meritocracy there.
And we think we don't care what the racial outcomes are.
We want the best players.
But we somehow, like I'm asked in podcasts, well, make the case for merit.
Why does it matter?
And I'm thinking, really?
I thought this was so self-evident, but apparently it's not.
People are kind of...
Blase about, yeah, okay, we toss merit out when it comes to medical licensing, but when it comes to our basketball team, we really want our best players.
Yeah, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen by a bunch of five-foot-seven Asian males for why they're not proportionally represented in the NBA.
And we treat a lot of our...
We have these double standards for our institutions.
Sports get the meritocracy.
We just certainly don't have it in the military anymore.
The reason we're putting females into combat units is not because this is a good idea for combat readiness.
It's an absolutely awful idea.
But the reason is because we want to qualify females to be four-star generals, which requires that they have combat experience on their resume.
And so we're willing to destroy the best possible fighting force, but we're not going to demand that we have females in football because Americans understand that football, unlike war, is important.
So I would say it's an idiocracy in the sense that it's idiots that are running the show, that are so blind and so determined to be racially just and racially righteous.
That they're turning on their own institutions.
I mean, I'm just appalled on a daily...
I have cancer researchers sending me on a daily basis this scientific journal and that scientific journal that has declared that it is going to be publishing research on the basis of race or on the basis of how many scientific papers did you cite that have a black researcher involved?
The AMA, the American Medical Association, came out with an appalling statement after the recent Supreme Court case striking down racial preferences in colleges, which I think is going to be widely disregarded.
But the AMA is basically saying, "Oh, woe is me.
We're so systemically racist.
Unless we can use racial preferences, how are we ever going to overcome our own racism?" Which is all just BS.
Medicine is not racist.
It is not.
The people there just want to create betterment for human existence, for all humans, and the people who benefit most from medical breakthroughs are the poor.
How much does this open the door to kind of a political-based favoritism?
And allowing the incompetent to be in positions of power, because once you get away from merit, in other words, that racism is a useful tool to attack meritocracy.
But what if the ultimate objective, at least in part or result, is you destroy meritocracy and you allow the politically connected, the people with the right political beliefs?
To give an example like Hollywood, that increasingly has become apparent to me that most of the writers that write all this woke garbage, Part of it is that they're woke, but a big part of it is they're idiots.
They're bad writers.
They could not get a real job.
Like a lot of these young lefty journalists, social media bloggers, lawyers, others, they're just not competent people.
But it's apparent that once you get rid of meritocracy, then you open the door.
To all kinds of privileged-based systems that result in, at least, the diminishment of the technical skill and know-how and capability and competencies of the broader population.
Well, you may be right there.
I mean, certainly all of the huge consulting industry, like these DEI bureaucrats, who are often white females, The whole thing is such a charade.
There is no DEI competency.
There is nothing.
These degrees that people get now and, you know, educational management policy and diversity, creativity, it's all BS.
It's unbelievable.
These people are utter charlatans.
And so, yes, it does allow these white females to come in, but I would say really the main reason for DEI bureaucracy is besides keeping going the myth that without...
Institutional allies, a phrase that just makes you want to throw up.
Minority students and females will just be like, "At risk of their lives on a college campus!" That keeps that going.
But yes, it does allow me to argue, but I would say it's still heavily tied to the preferred characteristics of race and sex.
I don't think if you're an otherwise non-intersectional Crummy white male, you're going to benefit as much as other people will from the attack on meritocracy.
It seems like the primary beneficiaries in many respects has been white liberal women.
That, you know, it's disproportionately in the academic bureaucracy, that it's disproportionately in the human resources, the advertising, the marketing departments pushing a lot of this agenda, that they're doing it in the name of promoting or protecting minority men and minority women, but that overwhelmingly it's a...
Seems like a lot of, you know, upper middle class white women.
Is that just my impression or is there some truth to that?
No, it's true.
I mean, I would say that they're probably promoting as many blacks as they can possibly justify, but there's just a lot more, obviously, white women.
But yeah, there's definitely a huge component of the diversity trainers and, you know, personified by Robin DiAngelo.
It goes around lecturing other whites about their white privilege and telling about their own journeys, confronting their own racism.
So, yeah, it benefits them as well.
But the real threat here is the tearing down of standards because of the racial skills gap.
That's what worries me, and I'm just not going to stay silent any longer about it because things...
We are tearing down both things that really matter to the very possibility of life, you know, staying healthy, but also great traditions of literature and art and music are also coming down under this phony racism crusade.
And certainly the criminal justice system has been completely decimated.
All of the gains of the 1990s that spread from New York City nationally through the Well, this is going to be the question.
I mean, this is the toughest question to answer because it requires addressing the uncomfortable potential statistical reality.
You talk about academic discrepancies.
And then the question is going to be, if we have the audacity to recognize that on statistical averages they exist, what is the cause?
If you recognize the statistical realities of criminality without changing the definitions, without overhauling the system, so that in order to bring down what might be statistical overrepresentation of the black community as relates to certain types of crimes, change the law so that the numbers go down.
But if you address it and you acknowledge it's a reality, then the question is going to be, why is it the case?
people are going to say uh It necessarily has to be race and nothing else, which I think is a racist response because there could be a whole slew of other non-racially based reasons that might be cultural, that might be other.
What is going to be, what is the cause if and when people have the courage and the political wherewithal to say, fine, we acknowledge this uncomfortable reality, now what's the cause of it and how do we solve it?
Well, first of all, I just want to conceptually distinguish those two questions.
You know, I'm very happy to get into causes.
I would just say that as the frontline issue is rebutting the racism argument and saying, no, there are better explanations for those racial disparities.
Let's at least acknowledge that.
But the question then inevitably arises, and people then say, well, then they're going to say, well, it's still racism because of the disparities of themselves, proof of racism.
I think that the culture explanation is very powerful.
It gets you a lot of the way there.
America's history is very tragic.
In the 30s and 40s and 50s, you saw blacks...
Living up to middle class expectations and trying to integrate themselves into American society and they got beaten back and beaten back and beaten back.
I mean, the pictures of the students, you know, James Meredith wearing a suit and tie and the students in the bus boycott and the, you know...
The lunch counter boycott.
We should all look so polite and well put together today.
It's absolutely tragic.
But in the 60s, with segregation coming down and the expectation of integration for various reasons, you had instead the rise of an oppositional culture that did not say We're going to compete and we're going to abide by these bourgeois norms.
Instead, you've got the rise of the whole anti-acting white idea, which was that to emulate whites in academic achievement.
Let me just say that was not the case.
The one good thing about the Nation of Islam is they certainly did stress self-control, deferred gratification, leading...
Godly lives, as they saw Allah dictating.
But by and large, you had more and more the sense that Blacks were going to set themselves apart and thumb their nose at bourgeois norms of accomplishment.
And we heard this for a while.
Our ears were actually open to rap, gangster rap lyrics in the 90s.
Tipper Gore, you know, started saying, "Whoa, this is worrisome stuff." The misogyny, the glorification of cop killing, of violence, homophobia, of theft, crime, that became sort of the paradigmatic Black culture.
And now, I mean, there obviously are many, and obviously for both crime and academic achievement.
The breakdown of the Black families is cataclysmic.
You cannot have a civilization that will be stable, that knows how to civilize males with a 71% illegitimacy rate, which is what it is now in the Black community.
The white illegitimacy rate overall is about, I think, 26%.
And the national average is about 44, 45%, I think.
But 71% is cataclysmic.
Remember that when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his very present warning that civil rights progress was going to come to a halt because Black males were not going to be civilized if the Black family continued to fall apart.
When Moynihan wrote that report for Richard Nixon, the Black out-of-wedlock birth rate was 23%.
And Moynihan said, this is going to mean we're not going to make any further progress because we're going to have this growing crime culture and underclass culture of drug taking, of dropping out of school, because boys are not being raised with the expectation that they should develop bourgeois habits of deferred gratification in order to marry the mother of their children or to procreate.
23% right now at 71%.
So it's three times worse.
So those things are very, very bad.
But we stopped listening to rap music.
You know, gore, sort of everybody mocked her eventually.
And we turned our eyes away.
And now, and in the 90s, you know, you had black sociologists like Orlando Patterson talking about inner city culture and the street people and the good people.
You could talk about that.
And now it's completely taboo.
You may not talk about any self-defeating behaviors of blacks.
The fact is the parents are not, to the degree they should be, monitoring their children's attendance.
Elijah Anderson, another black sociologist who was exploring inner city culture in the 90s and early 2000s, again, he could not do what he does then today.
But the idea that there's a culture of academic achievement in the inner city is just not true.
At this point, there needs to be...
The culture has to heal itself.
Yes, you know, the wider culture can continue its favored educational changes, whether it's vouchers and school choice and charter schools for the right.
Or more school funding for the left.
I have to say for the latter that that's a complete crock.
You know, many Title I schools have much higher per capita funding than suburban schools.
And it doesn't matter because the students are not being encouraged by their parents to study the hell off their asses like Asian students are.
And for the crime problem, it's the same thing.
You have a culture that glorifies violence.
You have parents.
I mean, I've spoken to a lot of I've gone to a lot of prisons and talked to prisoners and they will say, "I didn't have my father and that's a problem." There's an acknowledgement of that, but nobody quite knows how to solve the family breakdown problem.
One more, Robert, just a direct continuation of this.
In your podcast with Jordan Peterson, some statistics or facts that I was unaware of are mind-blowing, that children born to single parents, the girls go through a period on average a year earlier, something along those lines, and the telomeres in the boys are, the length is affected such that their lifespan is affected, which is...
Fascinating.
And then, you know, if you want to get to the very difficult question of IQ tests and as much as anybody believes that they're valuable, and RFK Jr. in his announcement speech was noting that there are cases where, you know, dumps were deliberately dumping materials in black neighborhoods because it was easy to do it there.
And that had an impact on the IQs of children.
And so one can sort of imagine...
That there is still a systemic racist explanation for what might be these statistical facts in as much as people could just, you know, bite the bullet and acknowledge them.
And then, you know, going to the hip-hop thing...
I agree with that.
And it's a phenomenon that we've seen for a long time.
Then the only question is, you know, there's a culture that has been promoted, that has been monetized of the rap culture, of the violence and glorifying violence, etc.
Then the only problem is who is glorifying that and who is making money off of it.
And you can look to Hollywood and you can look to talent managers.
So you might be able to actually see something of the racial interplay once you can acknowledge the hard statistics and the hard facts about this and then maybe get to a solution on it.
That's all I wanted to say on that, actually.
Sorry, but Heather...
Well, yeah, I don't...
The sort of environmental racism, I don't think that's a very powerful explanation for the skills gap or the enduring IQ gap.
I mean, it's been around for a very long time.
Steven Pinker has done a good rebuttal of the idea that lead poisoning is the explanation for black crime.
I don't think that's really the case.
But I do think that there is a heck of a lot more that can be done without tiptoeing up to the question of heritability just on the culture front alone.
And it's up to the mainstream society to stop caving in to demands to lower standards, but it's also up to leading to Black leaders to stop demanding that standards be lowered on their behalf.
The message has to be sent.
Meet the standards.
Instead, you know, we've had these disparate impact lawsuits for decades now ever since Griggs v.
Duke Power that said that if a colorblind neutral test that is being administered by an employer without any intention to discriminate nevertheless has a disparate impact on Blacks because Their academic skills are so low, we'll get rid of the test.
And so you have firefighter exams being torn down because they ask for reading levels so that firefighters can understand the chemical instructions on their firefighting materials.
We have police hiring exams being thrown out because blacks can't do well on the reading component, on the cognitive skills component.
Therefore, they're not going to be able to handle the patrol guide as well.
And most amazingly, we're throwing out teachers' licensing exams.
We just had the news here in New York City, you know, that the city's going to pay out like a billion dollars in damages to black teacher applicants who failed the teacher's test numerous times on the assumption that the very fact that they failed means it was a racist test.
I can guarantee you it was not a racist test.
Any racist questions that sort of this...
This conceit that there's all these standardized tests that are asking people about boat regattas, you know, or what you do when you're summering on Martha's Vineyard.
Those questions, if they ever existed, have been extirpated from these exams for decades.
The teachers' licensing exams are asking the most basic questions in order to make sure that teachers actually can do math.
I mean, I've seen pictures of billboards.
It's appalling.
The teachers can't spell.
They can't do arithmetic.
And yet we want to lower the standards further.
And that has got to not be...
We've got to stop that being the reflex of if blacks aren't meeting a standard, we're going to lower the standard.
We're going to throw out the standard.
Instead, the reflex has to be we're going to study our ass off and we're going to beat you at your own game.
Which is what Jews did and what Asians have done.
As we wrap up, I was going to ask where people can get your books and your texts and find your other information.
But before that answer, a lot of these bad ideas about getting rid of standards as a basis of valuation and access to various positions of influence and success derive from the universities.
If our universities aren't really serving a positive or productive purpose, should we reconsider funding them to the degree we do?
Yes!
Not just funding them.
We've got to get rid of this idea that everybody has to go to a university.
Based on that idea, we create these phony majors.
Nothing makes me weak more than the marketing major.
Are you kidding me?
If you want to do marketing, go start working for a corporation.
That is not what university education should be about.
University education, again, is about passing on an inheritance.
It should be filling your empty head with as much knowledge of greatness as you can cram in there for the mere four years that are available to you.
And I don't care if we have...
We should have a college population that is one-tenth the size.
College is not above all just a vocational school.
We should have vocational schools.
And it is really, I mean, we have a vicious cycle now where academia is disproportionately female.
Females are anti-rational.
I'm going to say it.
I have no apology.
COVID was the supreme female hysteria.
We jettisoned cost-benefit analysis.
We jettisoned rational risk evaluation.
We jettisoned the free market in favor of government mandates, of hysterical ideas of threat, and that personifies the female.
It got poor James Damore in trouble at Google when he said that females score higher on the psychological trait of neuroticism, something that the big five psychology traits have known for decades.
It's uncontroversial.
Damore said it.
He got fired from Google for bringing this up.
But the university now is increasingly a place by, for, and of females.
And males, amazingly, in some fields they are still succeeding because there is a difference at the very high and low end of math skills.
Males predominate among math dummies.
And they predominate among math geniuses.
This also got Laurie Lawrence Summers, booted eventually out of Harvard for raising this as a possibility.
But the university now is female-centric, and that is not a good place to be.
Many more males should be told that working with your hands, figuring out engines, tinkering, learning how to fix things, Being an air conditioning mechanic, fixing telephone poles, these are noble activities.
And you don't have to get some BS degree in marketing or management in order to have a productive life.
Well, now that you mention the COVID response, actually, that would be one of the examples where anyone wants to argue systemic or institutionalized racism.
That might be the place, but it's always coming from the Gavin Newsom's, from the Whitmer's, from the Justin Trudeau, where shut down schools.
Send kids home and it's going to disparately impact the ones that are coming from broken homes, fatherless families, inner city, more impoverished schools.
And I think Bill Gates recently recognized, you know, it's going to set back a generation of inner city kids in California compared to their private school counterparts.
Canada implementing the COVID vaccine or mandating it.
When, you know, people who don't necessarily want to take it happen to be disparately Black, Latino, Native American, Native Canadian.
That's where I can say it.
I can see the arguments for the institutionalized racism.
It just happens to be the people screaming about it that are the ones guilty of it.
But there was one question in the Rumble here from TouchTheRiot.
It says, has she, you, Heather, ever pointed out the trophim...
I know this guy.
Lysiconotid.
Lysenko, Lysenko, Lysenko dating, of the medical school, and how do they respond?
So what's the Lysenkoism theory again?
Well, Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who said that there was the inheritance of acquired characteristics because that was a theory that comported with Soviet Marxist propaganda that if you were going to create the new revolutionary worker of the future...
You had to be able to, you know, propagandize browbeat worker today and he has to pass those traits on to his children.
And so that resulted in Soviet famine.
You had science being politicized.
And what we have now is science being politicized.
We have phony explanations.
For racial disparities in health, which is racism.
No, the explanations for racial disparities in health are behavioral, higher rates of obesity.
That's why blacks had a higher COVID death rate.
It was not because their doctors were racist.
And in fact, we had, again, the reverse racism.
We had initially vaccines and medicines being distributed on the basis of race, i.e.
if you're white and elderly, you're last in line.
So the politicization of science does not end well, and that's what we're seeing here.
And as far as the COVID skills gap, it's very, very scary, David.
The skills and crime gap in the United States is what is driving the perversion of our meritocratic institutions.
It's behind everything.
And because of the COVID school lockdowns, it has gotten worse.
And that means it's going to be harder to overcome our racial divisions.
The next generation, it's going to be worse.
And this is a very scary thing.
And yes, we have our phony scientist policymakers to blame for this, that, as I say, junked rationality.
In favor of safetyism.
I used to go nuts at the moniker, the admonition, stay safe.
There's no more civilization killing admonition than stay safe.
Here's what we should have been telling each other.
Stay brave, stay smart, stay intelligent, stay courageous.
But stay safe is not a way a civilization advances.
All right.
So where can people find your book?
I know we went a little bit over what we expected, but thanks for that.
But where can people find your book and other places where they can follow your research and writing and work?
Well, the book is just usual.
You either go to a bookstore and you ask or you go on the web.
And if you use Amazon or other things, it's there too.
So just Google me and the book.
And I have a Twitter account.
I actually don't run it, but it is the best.
Source of sort of whatever I'm doing next or my writing, things that I write tend to be posted there.
I do.
I mean, the Manhattan Institute has a website with, I think it's fairly comprehensive.
But generally, I think just Googling me and maybe Twitter is the easiest way.
And certainly the book is easy to get.
I've blasted out the Amazon affiliate link to your book.
Let me just ask you this.
Is there a white pill at the end of the book or is it a...
Is there an optimistic ending to the book?
Well, that's always the requirement.
And being so means that I have to overcome my fierce constitutional predilection towards pessimism.
But I would say I'm surprised at some of the creativity that our politicians are showing us, like Ron DeSantis in Florida.
He's doing things to beat back the racial preference regime that I never thought of.
So that's impressive.
Getting rid of the DEI bureaucracy of racial preferences.
That's a good thing.
And some parents are saying you're not going to kick us out of our children's lives.
That's a good thing.
But I think what needs to happen is more people have to be courageous.
They have to stand up for the things they've worked all their lives for.
And it's very hard.
You know, at the end, I quote a cancer researcher at an Ivy League school.
Who sees what's happening to his profession, but he's terrified of speaking out against the preferences and says everything is going to take 50 years.
The whole system is going to have to collapse and be rebuilt from the ground up.
Well, we don't really want that to happen.
We have to start speaking out now.
I propose an institution that would be available when there are a few courageous guys.
I write about a...
A cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Norman Wang, who wrote an article saying racial preferences in medical training are not working.
It doesn't help the black students and it doesn't help medical education.
And he was completely sidelined.
He is persona non grata.
He's a pariah.
And I've advocated an organization that when somebody does summon the integrity and the courage to speak out against the obvious This is why we don't have racial proportionality.
Here's the facts, you know, and to be ready to come to the defense of the people that I hope there will be more of them that have the courage to not be cowed by the phony charge of racism.
Fantastic.
Heather, thank you very much.
I'll put all your links in the pinned comment.
They're in the description, but I'll put them up there.
If you don't mind, stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes out there.
Everyone who's watching, thank you all.
As always, snip, clip, share away.
And now you know.
Heather, stick around.
We'll say our proper goodbyes.
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