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April 12, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:03:05
The Hidden Truth Behind Affirmative Action with Richard Hanania | The TRUTH Podcast #10
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All right.
My good friend, Richard Hanania, I've gotten to know you over the last couple of years.
We had a mutual friend, Chris, who I went to law school with, has been a great friend and ally of mine and vice versa, a fellow basketball fan we were in law school.
But he told me, he always told me, there's this guy, Richard, you really need to talk to him.
You know, Chris is not with us on the right, right?
He's somewhere else on the political spectrum, but independent thinker.
But he always said, you know, these two guys need to get together.
He finally put us together.
And I think you got, you were helpful in getting me my first TV hit.
I've been now on TV, like literally hundreds of times in the last couple of years.
I think one of my first or second TV hits, you connected me with some producer long before I was doing television.
So that was cool.
But then I wrote Woke Inc., and there's, you know, widely acclaimed book.
It was really positively received, number two on the New York Times bestseller list.
And then there's just like this really critical review that just throws the water on the spreading fire of Woke Inc.
And who do I read?
It's none other than Richard Heneno, which I got to say I respected because I get praise from a lot of people.
I get thoughtless criticism from a lot of people, but thoughtful criticism.
That's worth something, actually.
And so, you know what?
I learned a couple of things from that piece you wrote.
I've actually taken some of the points and run with them.
Even since writing Woke Inc.
and Nation of Victims, who would have ever thought we're human beings that evolve our thoughts?
They're not static over time.
And you're one of the people, one of the rare people I have to thank for pushing me beyond where I was Even as recently as two years ago.
And, you know, I know you're the same way too.
You're one of those rare people who's open to doing this thing that we don't do often enough in our discourse, which is changing our mind.
So we're going to get into a, you know, we're going to get into a controversial topic today.
But before we do, you know, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I know about you, but, you know, we've never really had a I think we share that in common.
Yeah.
Tell me about yours.
So, yeah, Vivek, I mean, that was a nice sort of rundown of our history together.
Yeah, I was approached by American Affairs to review Woke Inc.
And I wasn't thinking, oh, Vivek will like this or maybe Vivek won't like this.
I just sort of put out there when I was thinking about this because I had thought about these Woke issues for a while.
And you actually – I was impressed because you reached out to me and we actually started talking more after that.
I'm like, oh, this guy's not going to want to have anything to do with me again.
I thought most people, I think 9 out of 10 people probably would have had that reaction.
So the fact that you took something from it, you weren't mad about it, I mean, you just developed your ideas over time.
I was really, really impressed with that and we've been, of course, in touch ever since.
So my background is I'm sort of a lapsed academic.
I thought I'd be going into academia.
I got my PhD in political science from UCLA. I had a fellowship for a few years at Columbia.
I'm still affiliated with the University of – I got affiliation with the University of Texas right now.
But I started writing more for public consumption.
I really didn't like academia.
I didn't think that – it wasn't just the politics stuff, which most of your listeners will know about.
It's more that the sort of the – even if that didn't exist, it's the sort of the narrowness of the topic.
They want you to settle in, research one tiny aspect of sort of human experience or human existence.
And if you want to say anything that's substantial about the world, you have to draw from a lot of things.
You have to draw from anthropology, psychology, politics, economics, right?
These things aren't separate.
These separations are artificial.
And so I started just writing stuff on the Substack, writing stuff for various publications, and it got a lot of attention.
And I said, wow, this writing for a broad audience, saying what I think and being able to take ideas – As they come, change my mind, not being hemmed in by a topic or a method or whatever.
This is much better than what I was doing before.
As far as what drives me in all this, I'm a big fan of human civilization and human progress.
We both share the immigrant background.
My parents, they came here as adults from Really, in poverty.
And, you know, you see the differences between regions in the U.S. and between populations.
And, you know, if you have a historical perspective, you're like, wow, even people who are poor today are infinitely better off than people who were 500 or 1,000 years ago.
And the question is, you know, how we got here and sort of how we could maintain what's valuable and how...
Can we sort of incorporate new technologies and new challenges that come up?
So I've always found these questions sort of fascinating at a very broad sort of meta level, and I feel lucky to be able to write on the topics that I care about.
Yeah.
I think one of the things I respect about you is you're willing to change your mind.
When I look at a lot of my peers in the profession I'm in, very few people have the courage to do that, right?
This is something that bothers me about the Republican Party today.
Before we get to talking about affirmative action, and that is definitely the theme.
I mean, you're the man to talk to about that.
It's a core issue for me.
We'll get to that.
But there's something about even talking about affirmative action that we ought to talk about first, which is this idea of courage.
What does it mean to be courageous?
Teddy Roosevelt had this expression, right?
Speak softly and carry a big stick.
To be honest with you, I look at most of the other Republicans today, even the other presidential candidates, and what I see, or would-bes, and what I see is a sad perversion of that.
Speak loudly and carry a small stick, which is to say that you become entrenched in a position, speak only to your tribe, speak Puff your chest and say, you know what, if NBC News is mean to me or whatever, I'm not going to talk to them.
I'm only going to talk to the people who already agree with me and then boast about free speech without actually living it.
I was on CNBC last night.
We had a sparring debate with a former Democratic US senator with a host that was, you know, didn't love a lot of what I had to say, but I respected them having me on and I returned that by actually showing up.
One of the things I love about you, and I try to embody this as best I can too, is courage isn't acting courageous and puffing your chest after actually having prepped with all of your political consultants to then talk to a bunch of people in a home state that are rallying behind you and standing up and cheering.
It's actually engaging with the ideas that you disagree with and even the people who criticize you.
And we just don't see that anymore.
I mean, I think it's just mostly missing in our politics.
I mean, I think one of the would-be entrants to this presidential race, whose actions I love, it disappoints me.
And part of me hurts as an American when we say that, oh, I'm not going to engage with somebody who says things that I disagree with.
What's your honest take on that?
Yeah.
So, I mean, the courage thing is interesting.
You know, when people say, oh, you know, you're very courageous to say this and that.
I say, well, you know, there's men out there who go fight wars, who go die in this or do that.
And, you know, I write for a living.
I mean, me and you, you know, we're not in the space where we're, you know, losing our lives or, you know, risking our lives on a daily basis or anything like that.
So, you know, I think the least we can, you know, the least we can do, the least we owe the world is to actually say what we think.
Yeah.
And, you know, not be scared.
Let the chips fall where they may.
You know, I discovered when I started writing things that, you know, there's a market for that.
I mean, maybe it's not always the best strategy, but in a world where sort of everyone is just sort of putting their finger up to the wind, being the one person who doesn't do that, I mean, it gives you a little bit of a… I think Trump 2016 really scrambled people's brains for how politics works.
They said, oh, you know, Republicans believe X, Y, and Z, and this guy is saying, you know, the opposite of that.
Oh, they're not going to like him, and it was – It was more, I think, a lot of the – they just liked the attitude.
They liked someone who said stuff who – no matter how the Trump movement and how the presidency turned out, they just liked someone who said stuff who got attacked for it and just stuck to his guns.
And so, yeah, there's something about courage and just sort of – I think we've gotten away from that.
I think maybe 100 years ago, maybe you'd read the great books.
Maybe you'd read about Greek tragedy.
You'd read about the Bible.
You'd have this sort of moral instruction.
I think we've gotten away from that.
I think there's a big mental health crisis that I was recently writing about.
It's not just a social good.
It's good on the individual level.
Honesty is just good for the soul.
Not everyone can be 100% on us all the time.
You're running for office.
I don't think you're going to say every single thought that pops into your head.
But look, on the spectrum from complete honesty to just sort of being a sniveling politician and just going with the wind, I think we need more people to just go more towards honesty.
I think for an individual level and a societal level.
I'm going to get pretty close to sharing what goes through my head, actually.
And I reserve the right to – Correct for things that I think are wrong because part of the way you explore your own understanding is to get your ideas on the table, hear the best arguments and response.
And I just think we have this stultified culture of fear that stops us from doing that.
You know, you did talk about the mental health crisis too.
So many side eddies here, but...
You see it especially among young Americans, right?
And I think that one of the things that is causing it, I think, is – one of the things I said when we launched the campaign was we have this hunger for purpose and meaning and identity at a moment when patriotism, faith, family, hard work, the things that used to fill that void have disappeared.
But I think it's like two rivers that collide.
Okay, that's one of the rivers.
The other river that's colliding is this culture that makes young people in particular afraid of expressing themselves.
It's like a whitewater rafting analogy.
When two rivers collide, you have a rapid that's not twice as powerful, but ten times as powerful as either of them alone.
And I think that that's part of what's fueling this so-called mental health crisis.
I think it's fueled by this sense of lost sense of purpose with a suppression of your ability to express yourself.
Those two are on a collision course.
It's no surprise that depression and anxiety and even addiction are on the rise, especially amongst young Americans who suffer that.
What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, you know, Jonathan Haidt's, you know, Substack has a lot of good recent stuff on this.
Yeah, I mean, if you look at the sort of depression, what's happening, you might notice people who are our age or older, even a little bit younger, might not notice it.
But if you look at what's happening to like, you know, people 12 to 20, they are in bad shape.
I mean, really, any poll question you want to check, you know, you want to check suicide numbers, you want to check rates of depression.
The last 10, 15 years have been really bad.
Part of it is probably social media.
I recently came to the conclusion in a piece.
But part of it is also these ideas that have sort of, I think, taken hold of the last 15 years.
I mean a lot of the evidence points in that direction.
It's hit young girls the worst.
It's hit people who identify – young people who identify as liberal the most and – And a lot of the stuff they believe, I mean, it's just – they believe the life is as bad as it's ever going to be.
I mean, their belief about inequality is worse than ever.
The climate crisis is going to – maybe there's something – there's environmental issues.
But just the catastrophizing of the media of the last 10, 15 years driven by algorithms, driven by social media, driven by general hysteria in the culture, it has not been good – it's not good for people.
And I think politicians, political leaders, they have a role to play.
I mean they can go along with this wave.
I think that's why you do see a lot of negativity.
I think that a lot of the negativity on the right and the left is driven by people sort of sensing this in the population and just going along with it.
But politicians could – I hope so.
I mean, rarer than not, but I hope so.
So I'm doing this thing.
So on this topic of courage, let's get into the topic we were going to talk about, which is affirmative action today.
I think it's a passion of yours and mine to end affirmative action in America for once and for all.
It's weird, though, Richard, I think that most Republicans, like nearly all Republicans I talked to, and actually a good number of people who aren't Republican either, agree with this policy.
And yet, I don't think, you can correct me if you have knowledge to the contrary, I don't think there has been, ever, a single Republican candidate for U.S. president that has expressly committed to To ending affirmative action in America, which is weird because it's one of the things a US president can actually play a role in effectuating.
Certainly no elected president has done it.
What do you think is going on there?
And then let's get into the meat and the history and the debate and the thick of the debate around this too.
So you're – I mean this is something that I've been thinking and writing a lot about.
My book Origins of Woke has actually an entire chapter on Republicans and civil rights law and what's actually happened here.
So first of all, the issue of affirmative action, it's sort of – It's a thing where they will – they're afraid to talk about it in any real detail and when you – and they have actually talked about it but at the most abstract level.
So like politicians have said like, I'm opposed to quotas.
Now even democrats, if you go to liberal democrats, they'll say they oppose quotas too.
If you go to Alina Kagan or something, they'll say quotas are illegal.
So it's a very – at the very abstract level.
Okay, but it's quotas.
I mean it's just – Exactly, exactly.
There's no doubt about it.
This is the – Quotas with window dressing.
Literally, I mean, in the executive order 11246 that you talk about in those regulations, they talk about goals and timetables.
You have a goal.
And a timetable.
You have goals and timetables, yes.
Not a quota.
And it will say in the exact same document, no quotas.
You have goals.
You have goals and a deadline.
Yeah.
You have a mandate and a deadline to deliver it by.
And it's funny.
I mean, you could like – you have to set the – you could set the goals yourself on time fields.
But look, if they're not happy with it, they'll come after you.
Of course.
It's quotas.
Exactly.
Let's just have – let's talk about the issue.
It's a racial quota system.
Yeah.
And to people who don't know Executive Order 11246 who are new to this.
So that's an executive order implemented by Lyndon Johnson.
That means it didn't go through the democratic elected process of the lawmakers.
Right.
Lyndon Johnson, by executive order, said that basically anybody who does business with the federal government, federal government contractors, it's not a small segment, it's about 20% of the U.S. workforce covered by companies that fit this description have to effectively adopt these race-based quota systems in order to be able to do business with the federal government.
And every president since Lyndon Johnson Including every Republican president from Nixon to Reagan to Bush 1 to Bush 2 to Trump could have taken a pen and crossed it out, and they didn't.
And I think the reason is fear of political backlash, but it's weird to me.
I mean, some of them have said as much.
The policy advisors, I've pressed them on this as to why not.
They said we don't want to die on that political hill.
But it's weird because they've died on so many other political hills from controversial failed wars to all kinds of other things.
I mean, Trump...
I think there's a difference between being unafraid and appearing to be unafraid.
But he certainly appeared to be unafraid.
And yet would not touch this.
It's a sort of third rail, untouchable issue.
Like, what do you just on the psychology of the...
Let's get into the substance in a minute.
But just on the psychology of the politics of this, like, why is this a sacred cow you're not supposed to touch?
Because I'm all over this.
And if I'm making a mistake, I'm still going to keep doing it.
But I at least would like to know what it is because I can't even figure it out what exactly is stopping a Republican Party from doing what its base wants to do and even what most of these people in private will agree with me on.
So I mean the history here is even more interesting than that.
So not only – I mean did Nixon not get rid of this executive order.
He expanded it.
It was actually the modern affirmative action regime came directly.
Wait, say more to me about that.
I should know this and I don't.
So it was the Philadelphia plan.
Basically, it's really funny.
Oh, okay, okay.
I think I've heard of this actually.
Okay, what was it?
So Nixon had a plan that he's going to split the white construction workers who are excluding black people, the labor unions from the Democratic Party.
So it was actually – and then the Democrats actually revolted in Congress.
And the Democrats and Republicans were going to actually overrule this by legislation.
And Nixon talked the Republicans into not doing it – and he specifically told us, look, this is going to split labor and the civil rights group.
It was almost like too clever by half.
And so he just went after the construction industry.
His labor department under him – apparently, it doesn't appear he knew this, but the labor department extended it from construction to all federal contractors.
There's no record that Nixon even knew.
So it's funny.
It just started as a war against labor unions.
It ended up being extended through the civil rights bureaucracy to everybody.
Nixon, a Republican, expanded the Johnson-era executive order-driven racial quota system.
Exactly.
And the history of this is just so fascinating because it started out as a way to split the labor unions, the construction workers, against the civil rights people.
Basically, the labor unions were this closed space where it would be father to son or whatever.
And then Nixon came in and basically said, you're going to have to have basically racial quotas because you've been excluding black people for too long.
Really?
Exactly, yeah.
From the unions?
Yeah.
So it's like a divide and conquer to fight the unions.
It was a divide and conquer.
The unions versus the civil rights establishment on the Democratic side.
The Democrats in Congress pushed back on this.
So Democrats and Republicans were actually going to overrule this, and they were going to pass a law saying that Nixon couldn't do this.
He talked the Republicans – Couldn't do – and what is the this?
Require quotas in the unions.
Exactly.
Require the goals and timetables.
Goals and timetables means quotas, so I'm just going to keep saying quotas, but I'm going to keep saying quotas because I think it's intentional to call it out for what it is, but I got you.
Yeah, if someone Googles the Nixon support quotas, you'll find all these quotations.
I am against quotas, and everyone else will say it's a lie.
Yeah, so these racial quotas.
And then...
So then that's how he could – he talked the Republicans into this divide and conquer strategy on the left.
Then his labor department expanded it from – this was just construction, government-funded construction contracts.
They expanded it to all federal contractors and from the historical record – All it says is you must take affirmative action to make sure you do not discriminate race, gender, sexual orientation.
So that doesn't actually say quotas or timetables or anything.
It could be read as just a non-discrimination, very basic thing.
And so this really took off.
So the Labor Department under Nixon is the one that actually implemented the goals and timetables for the private sector.
Not Johnson.
Not Johnson, no.
Johnson signed the EO, but the EO became the basis of what Nixon did later.
Under the same EO, under the authority of the same EO, the 11246. Exactly.
So Nixon didn't put out a new EO, he was just implementing the Johnson.
It was just implemented.
And that's where the goals and timetables came in.
Exactly.
But it's a way of effing up the unions, basically.
Yeah.
That was the start.
Dividing, conquer, and beat the unions by giving them a taste of their own medicine kind of thing.
Right.
And then the expansion, it seemed like there were real ideologues who believed in affirmative action, who wanted to expand it, and Nixon wasn't even paying attention at that point.
This was almost coming up to Watergate, so he was busy with other things and doing that.
Yeah, but each side was sort of using the other.
Yeah.
So Nixon thought he was being cute, and they were just like, great, let's just make this useful idiot who's distracted by this other stuff upon to permanently enshrine race-based quotas in America.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And do you think that – was there any split in the civil rights movement advocates about this possibility or will most just be like, yeah, absolutely, let's take it and run?
It depends on when in the history you look.
So before the Civil Rights Act, and, you know, who knows how much of this is politics, how much of this is genuine belief, but when the Civil Rights Act was, you know, was being debated inside, everyone said, you know, nothing like affirmative action.
Colorblind.
Yep.
That's my understanding of what the rhetoric was around the Civil Rights Revolution.
Yeah.
And it switches, I mean, almost on a dime.
I mean, by, you know, two, three years later, you have the EEOC. It needs something to do.
Nobody is putting up whites-only signs or anything.
I mean, nobody's saying they're discriminating based on race.
So very early, they start using statistical discrimination.
They say you don't have enough black people.
In the early 70s, we're talking now.
We're talking, yeah, late 60s, early 70s.
It really takes off.
Griggs v.
Duke Power.
So 1971 was the case that said an IQ test, even if there's no intention to discriminate, it could be discriminatory if one group does better than the other.
So that was a 1971 case.
The EEOC thought it would lose that case.
It said that the statutory history of this is so clear that we're probably going to lose, and then we're going to have to decide what to do.
And they actually won at the Supreme Court, believe it or not.
People were sort of sleepwalking into this stuff.
People weren't really paying much attention.
So just to understand, the EEOC was on the side.
It was sort of the plaintiff in this case.
Yeah.
Pressing the idea that because there were disparate outcomes based on IQ tests or intelligence tests of some kind that were used, aptitude tests, that that could itself be evidence of actual discrimination and therefore be a civil rights violation.
Exactly.
And the EEOC brought the case still thinking it was a long shot, is your point.
Yeah.
And then they ended up winning.
Yeah, exactly.
And this is which court, who's under which justice?
This was the Burger Court, I think.
Burger Court, okay.
Either Warren or Burger.
I don't know.
Warren or Burger, yeah.
Okay, and so they uphold it.
Yes, they back up what the EEOC was doing.
Without finding evidence of direct discrimination.
Well, actually, they actually, they did have they did have –
They're saying basically if there's anything that causes a disparate impact, you could still – it's a presumption.
It's a presumption of discrimination.
You could still overcome that presumption, but you know how expensive and uncertain that is.
That's just going to naturally lead to quotas and other kind of affirmative steps to make sure that you have some kind of racial balancing.
But yeah, that was the big case.
I mean, I don't know how deeply you want to get at this, but the 19 – Deeply is the answer.
The statutory history is so interesting because – When they were debating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Illinois had its own version of the EEOC, and they went after Motorola precisely on this basis.
Some black guy didn't do well on a test.
The Illinois version of EEOC came and said, okay, this is evidence that the test is discriminatory.
So this is a state-level, like, equal opportunity thing, says disparate outcomes case in Illinois.
Yeah.
And so this became a major story.
And they debated this in Congress.
They're like, is this going to happen when we pass the Civil Rights Act?
They're like, no, this cannot happen.
They go out of their way to say, you can have a professionally valid psychological test.
It's called the Tower Amendment.
Added by Senator Tower of Texas.
They went out of their way to say explicitly that this would not happen.
In the Civil Rights Act?
Yes.
There is something called the Tower Amendment, yeah.
So the Tower Amendment is in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is, yeah.
Because the Illinois case predated it.
Exactly.
Oh, wow.
And so there was a big New York – the New York Times at the time – And what did they say?
Like literally you can have facially non-discriminatory tests.
As long as they were not designed or used to discriminate.
Now, the courts can – you've been to law school.
You know how courts can play with that.
They weren't designed or used to discriminate.
But the legislative history was specifically – Well, I think that's socially fraught territory if you get into the point of saying that something could be facially discriminatory ex-ante.
If it's just an aptitude test, to know that that would be facially discriminatory ex-ante is very dangerous – I mean, you see where I'm going with that?
Very dangerous territory.
And this principle is not limited to tests.
Gail Harriot, professor at UCSD, has basically said everything is disparate impact.
Look, if you have a thing saying show up on time, you know, the odds that every race is going to show up on time, you know, at the exact same rate.
It's what I call scope three disparate Disparate impact.
So basically, she says, disparate impact.
Look, it bans everything because literally everything has a disparate impact and then gives the government basically unlimited discretion at what it goes after.
So now it's like, you know, under Obama administration, EEOC was saying, oh, it's a criminal background check, right?
They started saying you do criminal background check.
Look, all races don't have equal odds of having a A crime, you know, having been convicted of a crime, so therefore that's discriminatory.
So just about anything they want to do, now they can do.
This disparate impact principle is sort of the, you know, I call it the skeleton key of the left.
You know, when it was like COVID, it was like, oh, you want to get rid of your mask mandate?
You know, they try to apply it.
They apply it to disability law now.
They'll say- Oh, this has a disparate impact on disabled children or whatever, right?
Anything they want to do with COVID, oh, you have to close schools, you know, whatever.
Kids get COVID more if, you know, black, Hispanic communities had hardest.
Literally anything they want to do.
Disparate impact is the Trojan horse for taking the quota system everywhere.
It is a really evil principle.
I mean, it's, you know, it's facially absurd.
It grants arbitrary government power.
So what do you think actually, I mean, what you just said, you know, cuts in the other direction.
Statutorily, you would say the Civil Rights Act with the Tower Amendment argue against the idea of disparate impact being a basis for a violation.
So just delineate, put some meat on the bone here as to, well, why is that still nonetheless the prevailing norm today?
Or is it?
I mean, this is a somewhat controversial idea.
Well, yeah, the courts – I mean, the legislative history is not controversial.
There was even a – What like the state of the law today?
Is it that disparate impact can be a basis for finding a civil rights violation even when there's no discriminatory intent?
That's the entire civil rights regime.
It's not that it can.
It's the entire civil rights regime.
That's my sense of it.
But my question is, in light of what you said about the Tower Amendment, how did we get from there where the framers of the Civil Rights Acts so expressly wanted to be clear that so-called disparate impact would not be – A basis for civil rights violation.
To me, that's the statute itself to get to a regime where now if you apply a test, say an aptitude test or criminal background check that results in disparate results on the basis of race, today to infer that that's a civil rights violation, how did we get from A to B? I know Griggs was part of it, but that's one case.
A little more meat on the bone there?
Yeah, there was – so there was – yeah, so the affirmative action in contract is also sort of a disparate impact principle.
It's like all you do is you look at your employees and you say, if you don't have this number of people in this job, then you set the goal or timetable.
So it's the same – it's actually like the same sort of principle.
And how we got here, I mean, it was really neglect.
I mean, like – I think that Republicans for a lot of years didn't want to think too hard about this stuff.
And so the liberals and the Supreme Court said, okay, we agree with you.
No quotas.
The Bakke decision, right?
Diversity, not quotas.
Okay, well, that's sort of, you know, that's sort of, you know, hokey and sort of, you know, sounds nice and it could mean anything.
And so a lot of this stuff flew under the radar.
The 19, I mean, to continue sort of the history of this executive order and affirmative action, But Reagan wanted to get rid of it.
I mean, this was like a serious debate within the Reagan administration.
And he was basically told by members of Congress that the Republicans and Democrats would overturn his veto.
He tried to do something else on civil rights.
Reagan wanted to get rid of what?
Executive Order 246. Or do a new executive order that reinterpreted it to get rid of affirmative action.
Good for Reagan.
Yeah, exactly.
And he – there was something called the Civil Rights Restoration Act.
That's a whole other thing.
But he also – he did that, but then Congress overruled his veto.
So he tried to pull back civil rights law in this – which actually was a lot of this Title IX stuff came from that.
Reagan got his way on this other thing.
But anyways, just to stay on the affirmative action and contracting thing.
Yeah, so Republicans and Democrats – I mean, look, whenever affirmative action has gone to the voters – Yeah.
They said no, except one or two cases where it just barely squeaked by.
Even in places like California and Washington, it's lost.
But I think – at least during Reagan's time, it was like this bipartisan – there wasn't conservative media back then.
And it was just like somebody is pro-civil rights and somebody is against civil rights.
And I think Republicans probably didn't think about it too much.
And Reagan, because he was a little bit more ideological, maybe more in tune with conservative thought, saw what was going on here.
But Congress opposed – the Republicans take Congress in 1994. They think about getting rid of affirmative action there.
And then they don't.
They have a big fight actually within the caucus.
And how would they have done it?
Just legislatively.
Just new last statute banning any base of federal race-based discrimination.
Yeah, there was something called like the Civil Rights Act of I think 1994 and 1995. Bob Dole asked – Did never pass though.
Did not ever pass.
Bob Dole asked for an inventory of all programs in the federal government when he was a senator that use race.
And they came back to him with 160 of them.
Really?
And this was in preparation of potentially banning all of that.
But they just made a decision.
They got scared of the issue.
Gingrich and these people in Congress, they just blinked.
I can't find really a good reason for it.
They just seem to have gotten scared.
And then people just sort of forgot.
I mean, it was just – was not a live issue anymore.
Trump in 2016 says, I'm okay with – I don't think he knew what it was.
Like, Trump, I don't think, like, wants racial consciousness and hiring.
But, you know, they ask him about affirmative action and he just goes, yeah, yeah, I'm okay with it.
He probably thinks it just means, like, you know, be nice to everybody.
Yeah, but he's the president of the United States and he's setting public policy in an America First agenda.
Yeah.
And so for him to bless this, I think actually – I think it's dangerous.
Yeah.
Because it actually codifies.
I mean, if you're on the left and you're arguing for these race-based quota systems and Trump's your number one on most things, but even he turns a blind eye and says he's cool with these race-based quota systems, that's a problem.
Unquestionably, yeah.
And, you know, I was actually listening to a podcast where the head of the part of the Labor Department that's in charge of these affirmative action programs, he was on a Federalist Society podcast and he was – He was bragging about how they actually expanded it during the Trump administration.
They brought intersectionality into it.
They would say, oh, you look at blacks and you look at women, look at black women.
I mean, it's really shocking.
I talked to some people, actually, who were in the Trump White House, and I showed them this podcast of the guy in the Labor Department bragging about this.
I'm like, what's going on here?
Who was in the Labor Department bragging about it?
Oh, the head of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, OFCCP, which is the part of the Labor Department that runs the affirmative action.
Oh, my God.
OFCCC? OFCCP. CCP. Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
I love any federal agency that says CCP. Okay.
So the OFCCP in the Labor Department administers.
Yeah.
How many people do you think work there?
Probably not that many.
It's a sub-agency within me.
I'm just gonna fire him.
What do you think?
I think that would be a good plan, yeah.
I mean, just get rid of them so they can't do their job.
I think that would work.
Their job is itself a job that shouldn't be done.
I mean, that would work.
I mean, and, you know, yeah, the guy was – I mean, I talked to somebody close to the – you know, who was in the Trump White House and he said – he was shocked.
He was like, what is this?
They had no idea what was going on.
Somebody just told him that probably in the Labor Department probably said this is a good guy to run this thing.
And he goes and he goes to corporate America and he says, okay, incorporate intersectionality into your affirmative action plans.
From the Labor Department.
Yeah, exactly.
And like the conservative movement – So what's the nexus of – so is this guy sitting in the CCP office of the labor department or CCP whatever alphabet soup ungrammatical amalgam of random letters that end with CCP? Yeah.
He's calling up then people in corporate America to say you might be in violation if you're doing business with the federal government, if you're not meeting these goals and timetables.
Yeah, I don't know if he's calling up.
He's sending them letters saying, you know, we're going to do more, you know, spot checks.
You know, enforcement is sort of sporadic.
So they're, you know, they're increasing enforcement.
They're, you know, expanding the search of what they're looking for.
Yeah, there was no sense that this is, you know, there was no sense of like, This might be contrary – from listening to this guy, there was no sense this might be contrary to Trump's message or what most Republicans believe or whatever.
And look, conservative media dropped the ball here.
I mean like – when conservative media is concerned about things, I mean Republican politicians tend to listen.
And I think this is why this is changing.
I mean I saw just recently in Texas – Greg Abbott just sent a memo to all state agents that said, no more DEI hiring.
I mean, what took so long?
Republicans have run taxes for- What took so long?
I know, exactly.
Asleep at the switch, poll test it until you make sure it's really safe, and then you do it?
Yeah.
When this stuff has been ossified in the culture?
I mean, where are these leaders when we need them?
Yeah.
I mean, like 25, 30 years, Republicans have been in control of Texas.
I mean, all it took was one governor coming along and saying, yeah, don't do this.
I mean, a lot of this stuff is not legislation.
It's executive orders.
It's agency action.
So this makes it actually easy.
I mean, it's easy like if something you have to pass a law for, that's the most difficult thing.
So how much of the affirmative action we see in America is created either directly or I would say the combination of this executive order, its implementation, break down for me the pie chart of what you think the sources of affirmative action in America are.
So, you know, I think that it's hard to say because we've had 60 years of government regulation and then you've created a whole new culture and you've created whole new industries.
The human resources industry takes off in the 1960s out of affirmative action offices.
I mean, they just need to keep up with what Washington wants and what they're doing.
I mean, the universities – I hope we get to talk about the universities because they actually – the Nixon administration, and I don't want to even blame Nixon personally for this, but basically one of the government agencies, the precursor to education and health and human services, goes to universities and says, we want data on the race and gender of your makeup.
Columbia University comes back and says, that is against our principles.
We don't even keep data.
This is Columbia University on race and sex.
And their nexus for doing this is federal funding.
Exactly.
Yes.
This is Title VI. Because that's why I love Hillsdale College because they don't take the federal funding so they still don't do this stuff.
This is Title VI. This is not private employment.
This is a different part of the Civil Rights Act.
Title VI is the university funding.
And Columbia says if we had to collect this data, we would need a whole new bureaucracy.
We would change the kind of- They say build the bureaucracy is what they say.
They basically build the bureaucracy.
They say we're not even that kind of university.
The faculty have control.
We're decentralized.
Columbia, Columbia University.
I can't stress this enough.
This is around 1970, 71. Not that long ago, the universities are standing up for merit and for colorblindness.
And the federal government is saying no.
And, you know, the Columbia University, eventually the president writes like an open letter and says, they want us to become a race-conscious institution.
We need federal funding.
I guess that's what we're going to do.
And then they pay the money and the gravy train goes on.
Yeah.
The taxpayers and others pony up the dollars to create the bureaucracy to administer this racial analysis.
When was this in Columbia's case?
This was about 1970, 71, 72. This is nuts.
Yeah, yeah.
The universe is- Oh my God, this makes me- So if you want any evidence- This makes me livid.
We see the universities and we say, you know, oh my goodness, these people are ideologically crazy.
And to know the history that the Ivy League schools were standing up for merit at a time and the federal government just not that long ago was saying, no, you have to be another way.
I mean, that shows you sort of the power of government.
I mean, today, look- I mean, it's why I'm running for president.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
People miss this.
Thank you for – I mean thank you for focusing on it.
Somebody can actually sit in the White House.
There's not too many – there's not a ton of things you can do in shaping a culture from the White House actually.
Yeah.
But this is one of them.
Yeah, unquestionably.
It started with the federal government, but it started via executive order perpetrated through the entire culture and cultural fabric of our country to create this race-based artifice.
I mean I intend to do more than this, but if you do just one thing in your first four years in office to get rid of this de facto racism, that itself is a boon for the country.
I'm just – I'm disappointed that not only Trump, all the way dating back to Nixon, either couldn't get it done or made it worse.
And then where's DeSantis on this?
I mean, where are the other warriors in the Republican Party?
It seems like an issue they're hiding from.
My goal is to make sure we don't hide from it.
I'm making it a tip of a spear for my policy agenda.
So by the time the debates happen later this year, I don't think it's going to be avoidable for the rest of the field.
Right, I feel the same way, yeah.
But what the heck is going on?
You know, I don't even blame – the politicians are sort of a lagging indicator, right?
Politicians are responding to what other people are doing.
So I blame conservative media.
I mean, when I wrote my Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law, when I wrote the piece sort of – my first sort of idea connecting law to wokeness, people were surprised.
And, you know, I'd gone to law school with Chris Nicholson.
We were both interns at Center for Individual Rights, so I knew a little bit about the legal background.
And I wrote this, and then everyone was surprised.
Like, wait a minute.
Affirmative action is...
Even you, the first time I told you, Vivek, I remember you said, affirmative action is just an executive order.
People are like, my goodness, right?
And so Trump, when he gets rid of critical race theory, the story behind this is he just sees Chris Ruffo goes on Tucker.
He just sees it.
If Chris Ruffo had said, repeal affirmative action that night, I mean, Trump might have done that instead, but it's what he happens to see.
And he gets rid of...
So the politicians are...
They're not the most scholarly people.
They're not the ones reading I think we should change that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I hope so.
That's a very optimistic sort of vision of like, you know, politicians who actually care about ideas.
But that hasn't been the case so far.
So, you know, it's almost a more interesting question.
Like, where has conservative media and where have conservative intellectuals been on this?
And why?
Why?
What do you think is going on?
Fear?
I don't think it's fear because like, look, I mean- It's ignorance.
Like, yeah, like Dobbs, like that angered the left, like, you know, conservatives supported that and they did that.
I mean, they'll do a lot of things that clearly anger the left.
It's really, I think it's just, I mean, there's a general, the movement has become less intellectual.
Now, there's this, you know, sort of a different topic.
It really has, actually.
It's been – there's been education polarization.
Even 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, Republicans won college-educated whites in 2012. I mean, that sort of seems like 100 years ago.
But 2012, I mean, Republicans won college-educated whites.
Now, it's like 60-40 to the Democrats.
And of course, college-educated of other races are even more democratic.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's been a sort of a brain drain from the movement and they're just, you know, even when there's like low hanging fruit of things that they can do and things they could change that's consistent with their principles and would be good politics, they tend not to pick it up.
But, you know, we're changing that.
We're part of the change that we, you know, we, you know, we're part of the change we want to see.
Exactly.
I mean, I don't believe in just wishing things into existence.
At some point, you got to actually do it.
I mean, one of my theses is that we do live in a complicated moment that's different from 1980, where the threats to liberty are plural.
They're more complicated.
They take the form of this merger of state power, corporate power, sort of cultural hegemony.
permeating different institutions even outside of government that it probably takes a leader in the White House who has a first personal understanding, bone deep conviction and constitutional commitment to actually get it done rather than just doing what conservative media tells them to do, frankly, on a given day. bone deep conviction and constitutional commitment to actually get it And so that's part of the premise for my candidacy.
But I just think that, you know, it's my expectation, actually, Richard, that everything you're saying is true about why they're not on the issue, maybe more ignorance than fear.
Pretty soon, we're going to see a trend that's already started to happen in the last couple of weeks where the other candidates in this race are just taking my ideas.
And I'm happy about that, actually.
I think that's a good thing for the country if we open the Overton window.
It could either be the Overton window of fear or the Overton window of ignorance.
But either way, to actually take on sacred cows of affirmative action, climate religion, using the military to decimate cartels, basic stuff that – Certainly nearly all Republicans, but even most Americans actually end up supporting.
So I think that'll be a good thing.
But I want to get to the bottom of how difficult it would be to execute.
I mean, for me, I think the simplest thing to do...
I'm not saying it's the only thing to do, but the simplest thing to do would just be to rescind Executive Order 11246. I mean, it seems like a good day one item.
Yeah.
Actually, I mean, it would probably be stronger to just clarify it and make it like the opposite.
Like, you can't have an affirmative action program because, look, you know, this would be consistent with...
Actually, I like that.
Thank you.
So maybe we'll make a...
rescind and replace yeah yeah so there was a little bit of this in the trump administration where they would uh you know princeton at one point i kind of like that actually a lot because if you just rescind it you mean the federal government's no longer requiring it but yeah i mean there's place it you actually are codifying the civil rights acts and you can use actually the what do you call that the uh you can use the tower amendment as your statutory basis for that executive order yeah which is to say that actually because executive orders technically have to have a statutory basis yeah great yeah well even well that's another
that's a whole kind of words the statutory basis of it but um Yeah, like Title VI, for example.
Title VI does exist.
It says, don't discriminate based on race.
And then Title IX says, you know, gender.
Discriminate based on gender.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, like, you know, this is used to push for woke stuff.
But, like, you know, technically just using the letter of the law, it should be pushed to use – look, if you – and this is what the Supreme Court, you know, hopefully is going to rule in – In the Harvard case, the problem is now, the universities are getting rid of the SATs.
I mean, we'll see.
We'll see how desperate they are.
I mean, there'll at least be market pressure.
I mean, look, if they sort of want to toss out their reputation and start taking a worse applicant pool just to practice affirmative action, they'll suffer the consequences of that at the very least.
Will they, though?
It's an experiment.
We have no clue.
I don't know that they will suffer the consequences because that becomes the new culture.
It depends.
But, I mean, markets are a thing and markets, you know, they do care about- Universities don't run on the basis of a market system.
But the, you know, the students and sort of the elite professions, you know, McKinsey still wants the best people and, you know- Do they?
I mean McKinsey has the same quota systems now.
I'm just not sure that at a certain point the free market cannot fix what it is not free to fix.
Quite literally McKinsey does business with the federal government.
That means they're bound by the same constraint.
Well, I mean, hopefully by that time you're in office and, you know, you're not- We'll change this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, hopefully we can put this in a position such that the market does fix it, is the way I think about it.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, we- I don't think this- where I'm going with this is a Supreme Court ruling, if it's narrowly construed to just being in the area of college admissions, that's a step forward.
Right.
But it doesn't actually fix the market.
The market still has its hands tied.
You need a president, that's where I'm running, among other things, to actually- Yeah.
To actually liberate the market.
Yeah, unquestionably.
So you're saying- Assuming those things happen, then the market will take care of this, sure.
Yeah.
I mean, we've had 60 years of bad policy and bad court decisions and a lot of regulations.
And then a culture shaped in the wake of it.
Exactly.
So look, I mean, it took – we've had these ideas of disparate impact and affirmative action.
We've had it for half a century now.
And it took a while to get – the entire culture has been shaped.
So if you do everything – you get in and you do everything you want in an administration, it's not going to like we're going to go back to the culture of colorblindness and meritocracy overnight.
Right.
Hopefully, the idea is 10, 20, 30 years later, right?
Next time there's austerity, they cut the HR department, they realize they cut all the DEI bureaucrats, new businesses brought up, they don't have the government on their neck, and then we have a different culture.
Nobody even at that point connects it to the policy that you implemented in 2025, right?
But that's the hope.
I mean, it's not satisfying to people.
People want to see you did policy X, and then the next day you see the world just completely changes.
But we didn't get to wokeness like that.
We got to wokeness through a bunch of bad government policies, bureaucracies created, rules created.
People stopped paying attention to the original policy.
And then you wake up one day and the world's gone crazy.
And that's less satisfying, but that's, I think, a more realistic picture of how the world works.
It's the slow motion boringdom of exactly how it happens.
That's why you've got to care about the minutiae.
Yeah, the managerial boredom.
I mean, I think you cannot fight the culture war without taking the managerial bureaucracy on that actually created those cultural conditions because it's a lot more sizzly to go after critical race theory or gender ideology or whatever as a one-off playing whack-a-mole.
It trends better on Twitter and I think it makes for a better news cycle for a politician.
But the harder work, but more important work is dismantling the bureaucratic machine that created this in the first place.
Yeah.
That's actually what I find – I mean, I'm interested in both, but that's what I find far more interesting than the content of the culture war itself.
Yeah.
That is the machinery.
That is the – Those are the weapons of the culture war, the managerial class.
Yeah.
I mean, Reagan did a little bit of this, but Clarence Thomas was the head of EEOC. They did reduce- I did not know that.
Yeah, yeah.
Clarence Thomas, yeah, before he was a Supreme Court judge.
Oh, really?
I'm in the middle of working my way through a biography of Clarence Thomas that's due to come out soon.
Maybe I haven't gotten to that part of it yet.
Yeah, and they pulled back a lot of the enforcement based on disparate impact and all this other stuff.
And so, yeah, I mean, there was a more limited version of this.
But you're right.
There are certain government agencies and government bureaucracies.
Look, if they have diversity in their name, like from a conservative, nothing good is going to come out of that.
Yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, if only if they meant the kind of diversity that you and I might actually value.
But that's not what they mean.
Yeah, right.
So, yeah, I mean, nothing good is going to come out of that.
I mean, diversity, that's sort of branding.
They used to just call them affirmative action offices.
Oh, they did.
At least they were honest about it.
Yeah, in the 1960s, 1970s.
That became a bad word.
They just called it affirmative action compliance.
It was basically, we're just complying with the government and then eventually became, you know, the diversity- You're talking about in the federal bureaucracy or in corporate America?
In corporate America, too.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know about- It's a compliance group.
Probably in the federal government, too, if I had to guess.
I would guess so.
And then the diversity idea came.
And then, like, you had these entrepreneurs who started saying, oh, diversity is just good business, right?
They sold their sort of expertise and- Mark Benioff or whatever he spouts off on a given day.
Yeah.
So it was like sort of a self-looking ice cream cone where the government would say – have these things and these people would come in and they'd be in the bureaucracy and it's sort of this mess that's been created with federal law at its root.
But yes, I mean the goal is you – there's things in the federal government you can attack directly.
The OFCCP, I don't think there's anything – Good that they do.
Maybe they can, you know, go after, like, explicit, like, whites-only signs if you find that among contractors, right?
Yeah, that exists a lot today.
Right.
It's like, I love these, like, made-up figments of imagination.
Well, you'll see a lot of other versions of that.
You'll see blacks-only, black-owned businesses.
Exactly.
I, in my lifetime, have not seen a whites-only sign other than, like, maybe at some, like, sort of stultified tennis club where they're referring to, like, the clothes you wear.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's part of it.
That's part of it.
They needed something to do.
They said no more racism.
People said, okay, we don't – and look, the markets, you know, people want to make money and, like, people are just – you know, like, my idea that, like, markets are fair isn't that, like, Capitalists are angels.
It's like they're selfish enough that they want to make money, right?
Yeah.
And so if you have something to produce, that's why immigrants come to this country from all over the world.
That's why my parents came.
Of every shade, every hue, every religion, every strange cultural background, every kind of food you could think of, and they succeed.
Why?
Because markets are selfish, because people are self-interested, right?
And I think Americans are good people too, but basically it's the market forces.
Actually, the immigrant thing actually brought up a point that I think sometimes gets forgotten in this.
And so the irony is that affirmative action, as I understand it, ends up helping The kids of black immigrants who came to this country in the last 50 years far more than it does the descendants of slaves.
So even if this is about dismantling systemic discrimination, we stupidly make it about your skin color than we do actually about what the original justification of affirmative action was even supposed to be, right?
Yeah.
I mean the way they – Kids who come from West Africa or whose parents or grandparents came from West Africa, they're the ones who then claimed the victimhood mantle when in fact it had nothing to do with them.
The way we classify race, I mean, it's strange.
One of the things I show in my book is these words Hispanic and Latino, they were very rarely used in the English language before the government made them a category.
So you look at Mexican-American or Cuban or Puerto Rican-American, those go down since the 1970s, and Hispanic and Latino go up.
So I have a chart that shows this right in.
It's like an amalgam of like multiple different cultures that have nothing to do with each other.
Exactly.
So the government said you're a people and then they said – like La Raza was getting all of its money basically from the federal government at the beginning.
They were getting grants from these various programs saying we're La Raza, we're the race.
It started out as a Mexican group and then they basically said, okay, we're all Hispanics.
The Asian Pacific Islander thing, I mean it's bizarre.
I mean it's the fact that there was some lobbying at some point from a – there was – Different groups tried to get included, right?
So like Indians came, they wanted small business loans.
Now, Asians get discriminated against in affirmative action in colleges.
But for small business loans, all the law says is you have to be a minority group.
So most of the minority small business loans, they go to Asians usually.
Totally.
Not blacks or Hispanics.
So they're overrepresented there.
And they lobbied.
So now they're minorities, right?
The Indians are minorities.
Pakistanis are Asians.
And then they said no to the Iranians and the Arabs.
They said, we're going to draw the line.
Draw the line.
It's so arbitrary.
They got to draw the line somewhere.
So let's just get real practical about the next couple of years.
Supreme Court is ruling on the affirmative action case, what we expect to probably come out in May, right?
Probably, yeah, June.
May, June, you know, whatever.
You know, we can play our betting odds, exactly what they'll say, but assume that there's at least some limited basis for overturning affirmative action in college admissions, but it'll give us a blueprint for what applies outside of college admissions as well.
How much easier is that going to make my job in doing the things that I've said I want to do as U.S. president?
It can be a virtuous cycle.
So the Supreme Court decision, there's a lot to be said about that.
One thing that I hope they do, and I may write about this, is that a lot of the colleges, they're saying that we're going to try to get a diverse student body, but we're going to do other things to get diverse instead of directly considering race to the application process.
According to the plain text of the Civil Rights Act, to rejig your admission system to get a certain number of black and Hispanic students, I think the Supreme Court decision should be broad enough to say, no, that's not allowed either.
I mean, it's common sense.
If you said, we want to rig the system just to have whites instead of blacks, but after you said we can't discriminate, people would see that clearly.
So a broader Supreme Court decision...
That's something along the lines of, you know, all consideration of race means all consideration of race.
You can't rejig the system and still get government federal funding.
That would be very helpful.
Yeah, and then, you know, some of the stuff like the EEO 11246 stuff could be due right off the bat.
Even like the...
There was talk in the Trump administration, and they never got around to this, but getting rid of disparate impacts, a standard for Title VI as a general matter, you could do that through executive orders or at least through the executive agencies.
There's talk of Bill Barr's DOJ doing it near the end and just sending out that sort of directive to the rest of the government, not directive or guidance or whatever.
And so, yeah, there's that.
I mean, like, you know, legislation, I mean, if you want to be really ambitious, dust off the Civil Rights Act of 1995 or whatever, 1994, whatever year it was, you know, get rid of the – there's a professor at George Mason named Dave Bernstein who talked about the separation of race and state.
Yeah, I like that.
I like that a lot, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Separation of race and state.
It should be just as unthinkable to – it's unthinkable right now to say – for a government agency to say we have too few Catholics or too many Jews or whatever.
It should be just as unthinkable to say we need more Hispanics or more Asians or whatever it happens to be.
Yep.
And I think this – I think it creates a cultural tailwind to get this job done.
It's not going to – the Supreme Court ruling is not going to get the whole job done.
And, you know, a lot of people say, oh, if you start attacking this stuff, you know, the liberals are going to mobilize, they're going to do – it's like you don't know that because public opinion is not on their side.
And when public – when they feel the wind of public opinion at their side, then they could feel that – they could feel like they can get aggressive.
When it's going against them, they have to hem and they have to haw.
They're politically self-interested actors, too.
And not all Democrats are on board.
I mean, if you explain to – even if you look at the polling, how California – I mean, I think 55% or 60% voted against affirmative action.
So once it becomes partisan, maybe they coalesce.
But there's a chance to split this, especially with the Asian population, especially even with Hispanics when you see the kind of – there's no indication that they particularly like racial preferences even though in some cases – I mean, California Prop 6C, look at that vote.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, it was basically every race, I think, either voted or close to a majority of every race voted for it.
So you're pushing – you're uniting the conservative movement, right?
It's like, oh, populist libertarians.
Like, no, we can all be on board with this, right?
You're the most libertarian to the most populist least libertarian.
We're all – That is one of my goals, by the way, this unite the conservative movement, unite the country.
Yeah, exactly.
One is a precondition for the other.
Yeah, I mean, the DEI, you know, the HR ladies might not like you, but no, yeah, they're not a huge portion of the population.
They might be out of a job.
That's why they won't like me.
Yeah, exactly.
To the extent that anything can unite this country.
Unite the country mostly is the best we're going to be able to do.
To the extent that anything has 60%, 70%, there's not a lot of things like that, and this is one of them.
So, you know, I think I wanted to just close this with, like, put the law and policy and the history to one side.
Very interesting.
I learned a lot, so thank you.
I think we don't talk enough about the impact that affirmative action has on black Americans, actually.
Yes, it is on its face a form of anti-Asian racism, anti-Indian American racism, anti-white racism.
That's obvious on its face.
But I think it is starting to create this new wave of anti-Black racism that stems from resentment, that stems from a feeling that things aren't working like they're supposed to meritocratically because they're not.
But even to the Black person who would have otherwise earned his post exclusively based on merit, If I had to pick, I think the system is most unfair to that person, more so than to me, or to you, or to anybody else.
Because for us it was just that we didn't get a position.
The...
More difficult reality is you got the position but you weren't treated with the respect that you should have been because someone still condescended on you.
And it's fueling this new kind of anti-black racism that it's almost no one's fault, not the person who feels the attitude, not the person who – certainly not the person who experiences the attitude.
It's the fault of a system that created it and I think that's just the sad part in all of this.
I don't think we talk about that enough actually.
Yeah, I mean, you know, who knows how conscious this is, you know, this kind of resentment.
But yeah, I mean, a lot of these, you know, a lot of these sort of studies programs, African American studies, Chicago studies, they weren't, they didn't, you know, their origins wasn't like that of other academic, you know, fields where somebody had an intellectual interest and they were contributing something new to humanity, like, you know, psychology or whatever.
It was more like, you know, some students occupied, you know, government or college buildings like at Cornell and Berkeley, and they demanded an African-American studies program.
A lot of the time, it was like the stuff that they, because they were affirmative action, they got it to the university for affirmative action in the first place, they had to build a whole grievance department, like a study of grievance to explain their failure.
There was a big, you know, scandal at, I think it was UNC, where like they were putting all the black athletes, you know, because they got double, you know, they were athletes, so they came in with less...
You know, with worse academic records.
But they were just putting them in the African American Studies program because, like, I guess they were just – that was just what you do with people who, you know, can't cut it in other fields.
Yeah, and it sort of creates these new made-up fields and it creates this culture of condescension, right?
Yeah.
It's kind of sad, actually.
It's funny, you know, so when I was in law school, there's these two girls who I went with, and they were, you know, they're liberals.
But they were talking about another student who passed, who failed the bar, right?
University of Chicago Law School, not many people failed the bar.
So it was something they were talking about.
And they're like, oh, he's a white male.
That's very strange.
And they're like, oh, no, I heard he might be Hispanic.
And their assumption was, if he was a white male, he would have gotten to University of Chicago Law School on merit.
He wouldn't have failed the bar.
Yeah.
When they said, oh, he's Hispanic.
Oh, it sort of makes sense now.
Okay, now I understand he'd failed the bar.
And you know what?
That assumption, you might want to say, oh, these liberal girls hypocrites.
It's a reasonable assumption.
It doesn't land well on my ear, but if you think about it, they're just responding to data, to statistics.
And it's no one's fault.
It's not their fault.
It's not the fault of the black person, the Hispanic person, the white person who's on the receiving end of that difficult kind of statement.
Yeah.
It's just the fault of a system that created those attitudes, but you're not allowed to say it in public, but it doesn't change the fact that people actually think it.
Yeah.
Tom Sowell has talked about this.
He said he was an expert in cameras or something when he was in the military, and he says people would, even the most racist guys from the South would come up to him because they said, oh, the black guy learned this.
He didn't have the opportunities.
He must be really good at it.
And he noticed over the years as affirmative action became more instituted, he didn't get that kind of deference anymore.
People make different assumptions.
Yeah, I mean, there's a cost.
People are not that stupid.
I mean, people can see that you're – people, when they talk about law admissions or they talk about admissions to graduate school or universities, they know the bar is being lowered and they know what that means and they have experience.
They know who the smartest people in their classes are.
They know who got in and who maybe can't keep up with the work.
And you're not allowed to talk about it.
You're not allowed to, you know, make a political issue out of it.
This kind of like sort of, you know, submersion of like what's really going on and the sort of dishonesty it teaches.
It's not healthy for our culture, and that's why it's important to address.
And I think it is one of these issues.
You put your point on it correctly.
Motivates me even more to go after this in this Republican primary processes.
processes.
I think it can unite conservatives, right?
I think it can unite conservatives, right?
You've got the Trump wing, the Bush wing.
You've got the Trump wing, the Bush wing.
Bush actually said it well in this.
Bush actually said it well in this.
I might have criticized George Bush for a lot of things, but not for this.
I mean, I've criticized George Bush for a lot of things, but not for this.
He's called it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
He's called it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Chief Justice John Roberts famously said, right, the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, right?
Chief Justice John Roberts famously said, right, the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, right?
And so say what you will about John Roberts, say what you will about George Bush.
And so say what you will about John Roberts.
Say what you will about George Bush.
This is something that the conservative movement has been on the right, the proverbial right side of history.
We've been on it for a long time.
We've actually lacked leaders to execute.
Trump was actually a leader who failed to execute.
So for all the criticisms of Bush, and I agree with him on a lot of those criticisms, you got to call it like I see it.
Here was one where the conservative movement's been right for a long time.
You had an executive who did take a strong view of executive power who just didn't get the job done.
We're going to get the job done.
And I think that that will hopefully be the beginning of a, at long last, the beginning of an e pluribus unum reuniting of the country, a revival of the country around this idea of merit.
And I think we could do that, put the merit back in America, I joke around sometimes.
I think that's actually one of the missing ingredients in our national revival.
And I think that what you're doing, I mean, I think is part of it because people don't, I think, know how to talk about it in a way that's positive.
Oh, this black guy got an advantage.
It's unfair.
Okay, yeah, it's unfair.
That's right.
But that doesn't really motivate people to take on this uncomfortable issue.
When you say, we're going to sort of have a new national identity.
We're going to care about merit.
We're going to care about excellence.
We're going to care about doing great things.
Then you get the motivation to overcome that political resistance.
So, you know, we're going to do it in a positive way and not because we're just sugarcoating it with some positive veneer.
No, the essence of merit, the essence of excellence is itself a positive and galvanizing message accessible to anyone, no matter their skin color.
Yeah, we want to cure cancer.
I mean, we want to colonize space.
Yes, we're going to need to get the best people to do the best job.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I love it, man.
Thanks for joining.
I hope this is the first of a few that we do over the course of the next year.
I think we only covered one topic of shared interest.
We have others, too.
So, you know, let's dive deep when you're ready.
Absolutely.
Anytime, Vivek.
This is great.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming out, man.
Thank you.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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