Heather McDonald joins me to talk about her new book, The Diversity Delusion, about the Me Too movement, the quest for racial and gender diversity on campus, and why white men are under a death sentence in the culture today. She also talks about why we should care about race and gender quotas at the university level and why the idea that white people have a long history of dominating the U.S. political system is a myth. And why it s time for white people to take a seat in the United States so they can stop dominating the country and start to take back the seat that has been taken by white people for centuries. Thanks to Heather for coming on the show and for being a rare guest on The Sunday Special with Ben Guest. Hit me up at with any questions, comments, suggestions, suggestions or suggestions. Tweet me to let me know what you thought of the Sunday Special! or to say hi! Ben Guest Timestamps: 4:00 - Why white men don t have a seat at the table 5:20 - What does it take to be a white man in America? 6:30 - Why we need to stop dominating American politics? 7:10 - How white men should take up the seat? 8:00- Why white people don t matter? 9:15 - Why it s not white? 10:40 - Is it time for them to take up a seat on the table? 11:10- What is the problem? 15: What is white privilege? 16: What does white privilege really mean? 17:15- What are we fighting for? 18:40- How white people really need to do? 19:30- What do we know about white people? 21: Is it a white guy s role in American history? 22:30 22 - What is a white person s role? 25:00 27:10 26:20- What s the problem with white men need to be white people in the world? ? 29: Is there a white male privilege in the market? 35:00 | What s a white woman s role model? 31:10 | White men are not a victim of white men have a right to a black, white man s place in American society? 32:30 | What does a black person have to do it?
00:00:00.000Simply by virtue of being on a college campus, you have at your fingertips the thing that Faust sold his soul for, which is knowledge.
00:00:10.000And yet students are encouraged to think of themselves as victims.
00:00:14.000Here we are on the Sunday special with Heather McDonald.
00:00:24.000And I cannot wait to ask her about her new book, The Diversity, Delusion.
00:00:27.000We're going to talk about the Me Too movement.
00:00:29.000We're going to talk about racial diversity on campus, the quest for diversity.
00:00:32.000We'll talk about policing and crime, all sorts of great topics with Heather MacDonald.
00:00:36.000But first, let's talk about what's smart.
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00:01:51.000So let's talk about your book, The Diversity Delusion.
00:01:54.000So first of all, why should anybody care about college campuses?
00:01:57.000I mean, what I hear from a lot of conservatives is that Basically, college campuses are a place for the fringe, people get out of college, and then they are ensconced in the real world.
00:02:04.000They have to pay taxes, they have to be integrated into society, and gradually they become more conservative.
00:02:09.000So why are we wasting all this breath worrying about race and gender pandering at the university level?
00:02:14.000Because we're all in Gender Studies 101 now.
00:02:18.000If anything should have told us this, it was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, where you had a direct transmission belt from academic rape culture nonsense into the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:02:32.000The whole belief survivors mantra that was put out there with a hashtag during Brett Kavanaugh, that is the identical travesty Destroying due process, destroying the presumption of innocence that now reigns supreme on college campuses.
00:02:50.000White males basically are under a death sentence in this culture today.
00:02:55.000There's not a single mainstream institution that is not using radical race and gender quotas to hire.
00:03:02.000Again, this is something that comes out of the identity politics of the university.
00:03:09.000I'm very familiar with that argument that, oh, the market will take care of it.
00:03:12.000And Michael Barone, a wonderful Washington journalist, wrote a whole book about that that seemed plausible at the time, that there's soft America, which is the universities, and hard America, which is the rigor of the marketplace, and that all these black studies majors and women's studies majors would just have to grow a backbone as soon as they got out.
00:03:33.000Unfortunately, that prediction has not hold true.
00:03:36.000It's the universities that are remaking the academic world in their image.
00:03:41.000Well, a lot of folks on the left would sort of counter this by saying that, you know, not only does white privilege exist, not only do white people have a long history of dominating politics in the United States, but the statement that, for example, white men are under serious assault in the culture, that that's overstated.
00:03:56.000White men are still doing generally okay.
00:04:01.000By the way, white men have a long history of dominating a lot of institutions in the United States, so isn't it time for them to take a back seat?
00:04:07.000No, the only thing that should matter is merit.
00:04:11.000I don't care what happened in the past.
00:04:13.000There is no way that lowering your meritocratic standards in order to compensate for real or perceived and phantom racism or sexism in the past does us any good today.
00:04:27.000And it's simply not the case today that white males are dominant.
00:04:32.000There again, there's not a single mainstream institution, whether it's the media that is not twisting itself into knots for diversity, for running bylines by diverse names, content, publishing houses are scrutinizing their publishing lists to engineer diversity.
00:04:51.000You basically As a white male, you have to be something that we heard about for blacks in the 90s.
00:04:58.000You have to be twice as good to get looked at.
00:05:10.000This is something that is very real and is transforming our culture.
00:05:13.000Well, one of the complaints that you hear about the meritocracy, and this is not just a complaint that I think exists on the left.
00:05:17.000It's now, I think, infected parts of the populist right, is the argument that meritocracy is itself a sort of tract system, that basically the society is going to break up into the people who have intellectual merit and it's going to leave everybody else behind.
00:05:31.000And the cure for that is sort of these forced diversity systems, taking into account other factors other than merit in a particular field.
00:05:38.000Because if we have a meritocracy, then the people who are the best at things are the only people who are going to succeed.
00:05:42.000What do we do with the folks who are not succeeding in a meritocracy, whatever their race and gender?
00:05:46.000Well, how about we get rid of the ridiculous idea that everybody should go to college and that the only way you can have dignity in life is to have some white-collar job that you've eked out after getting your communications or marketing major, which is a completely bogus goal for a university that's going to be a good job.
00:06:04.000They should be not involved in that type of very nuts-and-bolts vocational work.
00:06:09.000There is honor and Virtue and accomplishment in working with your hands, in keeping our society going, in making things.
00:06:20.000But we have this insane idea where we only valorize jobs that purport to require a college degree.
00:06:28.000So I think, you know, there is some problem.
00:06:30.000I'm not necessarily a utopian when it comes to robots.
00:06:36.000Leaving aside, though, whether technology will cause some major dislocation where less cognitively demanding jobs are really moved into automation, I still think that there's plenty of things for people to do that don't require a Google-level intellect.
00:06:57.000Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the ideas that are being pushed on campus.
00:07:00.000You talk about them at length in the diversity delusion.
00:07:02.000Let's talk about some of the buzzwords.
00:07:03.000So, the Me Too movement obviously has gained enormous amounts of esteem, not just on the college campuses, but also in the broad mainstream culture.
00:07:09.000You talk in the book, and more generally, about the inherent contradictions of the Me Too movement.
00:07:14.000What's wrong with the Me Too movement?
00:07:16.000Well, because it has now devolved into a quota system.
00:07:19.000If this would stay put to simply be, okay, we're going to take out the most egregious sexual harassers, that's perfectly legitimate because there are some guys that are exploiting their workplace power that have lost any sense of male chivalry thanks to the sexual liberation.
00:07:37.000And you have absurdities like like Louis C.K. masturbating in front of females.
00:07:44.000This is something that was really unthinkable, I think, in the 1950s.
00:07:47.000If that was its only goal, that would be fine.
00:07:50.000But it is immediately morphed into a system of spoils so that, again, you have Hollywood pledging for a certain amount of females in directing and in writing, script writing.
00:08:04.000Which I love because to the extent that Hollywood casts its side, its ruthless box office judgment for the sake of diversity.
00:08:12.000I love that Hollywood moguls are not going to be able to pull in the billion dollar bucks that allow them to fly across the world in their private jets while traveling.
00:08:20.000Proclaiming the need for climate change, you know, carbon taxes.
00:08:25.000But other areas that are also in the wake of the Me Too quota insanity that should worry us are things like the science fields, the so-called STEM fields, science, technology, engineering, and math, which have now wedded themselves to the idea that the only allowable explanation for the lack of 50-50 gender parity in a
00:08:47.000Theoretical physics lab or a computer engineering department is sexism and discrimination and that is simply false.
00:08:56.000I mean this is the one of the things that absolutely drives me up a wall is the assumption on the part of folks who are on the left that if there is any sort of disparity this is clearly due to discrimination.
00:09:03.000If there's a disparity between men and women in the STEM fields, it's due to discrimination, even when you have countries in the Nordic states where the amount of focus that's been put on gender disparity is enormous.
00:09:14.000And the STEM disparity is actually growing because it turns out that women don't want to join into STEM industries in the same way that men want to join into STEM industries.
00:09:21.000And this goes to a lot of the stuff that you talk about in your book and more generally, which is a cultural assumption that we've all made now, that whenever there is a disparity, it is due to discrimination.
00:09:32.000And therefore, we have to do something about the discrimination by changing the underlying policy.
00:09:36.000And that, I don't want to preemptively get to your positions on crime, but this is sort of the argument that you've made in the past about criminal law disparities.
00:09:43.000And so I want to get your broader take on criminal justice reform.
00:09:46.000Obviously, this has become a hot issue on the right and the left.
00:09:48.000The Trump administration passed a form of criminal justice reform.
00:09:52.000I first wanted to get your general take on what that criminal justice reform system was, whether that was a good idea or a bad idea.
00:09:57.000Well, this recent law, you're talking about the First Step Act.
00:10:00.000To be honest, Ben, I'm agnostic about it because I think that all sentences are arbitrary.
00:10:07.000It's not as if there's a platonic ideal for dealing meth or dealing crack.
00:10:11.000And the fact of the matter is, politically, it's very hard to ever ratchet down a sentence.
00:10:18.000But if the penalties had been set at a lower level to begin with, Which they've now been tweaked a little bit in the federal system.
00:10:25.000Nobody would be raising a hue and cry.
00:10:27.000So unlike some of my fellow conservatives that did see this as the end of the world, I don't necessarily.
00:10:33.000What I object to the most about it is the narrative behind these criminal justice reform efforts, which is the meme of mass incarceration, which is itself a stand in for the idea that The fact, which is indisputable, that blacks are overrepresented in prison is a result of racism rather than criminal offending.
00:10:54.000So, to the extent that the whole recent criminal justice reform push served to somehow legitimate that narrative, I think it's worrisome.
00:11:04.000But the actual little changes that were made in the federal prison system, and I hope my Good sources that are the former federal U.S.
00:11:14.000attorneys aren't listening because they do think it's a big problem.
00:11:44.000Our murder rate is about 22 times higher than in Germany.
00:11:50.000We have violence that is unknown in the rest of the developing world.
00:11:55.000It's mostly gun violence, but now Britain is sort of trying to catch up with knife violence.
00:12:01.000But nevertheless, with the degree of family breakdown we have, we've always been a more violent society.
00:12:08.000As you say, I would say that the Moral outrage for the progressive left at this point is any lack of proportionality.
00:12:17.000And the flip side of that is the refusal to talk about behavior, as well as preferences and skills and aptitudes.
00:12:25.000But when it comes to the criminal justice system, when it comes to policing, there is a complete taboo in talking about racial crime rates.
00:12:35.000Which is the one thing that explains the disparities in the prison population.
00:12:41.000And when people ask you about this, typically it's guised in the form of you're a racist for even mentioning any of this stuff.
00:12:46.000If you suggest that the crime rate in the black community is higher than it is in other communities in the United States, particularly violent crime, then that obviously is an indicator that you're a racist because you agree with the racist cops who are rounding up black people sort of randomly.
00:12:59.000You got a lot of that during the Obama administration.
00:13:01.000You've been getting a lot, the same amount of that under the Trump administration?
00:13:05.000No, because we're all in the resistance.
00:13:22.000You had somebody in the White House who was a very forceful and repetitive exponent of the Black Lives Matter narrative of systemic criminal justice racism.
00:13:45.000I also haven't been writing about policing quite as much.
00:13:47.000I've been focusing on the universities.
00:13:49.000But in any case, we've sort of moved on.
00:13:53.000You know, what I would say to people that say, oh, it's racist to talk about the black homicide rate, which is about eight times higher than whites and Hispanics combined.
00:14:01.000If you were to take Hispanics out of that, you'd get about 11 to 12 rate disparity between blacks and whites.
00:14:08.000Well, let's talk about the criminal victimization rate.
00:14:11.000This is the civil rights violation of our time that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.
00:14:20.000I don't see any Black Lives Matter activists protesting that, but that is a major, major disparity.
00:14:27.000The whole phenomenon of getting gunned down in a drive-by shooting, That does not happen to white kids.
00:14:35.000If it did, there would be a revolution in this country.
00:14:38.000In 2016, there were 4,300 people shot in Chicago.
00:15:09.000There is a school shooting-type experience every couple of months in the black community, and nobody gives a damn about it, except the police and the families of those kids that are shot.
00:15:24.000So in a second, I want to ask you to myth bust a little bit all of the focus on drug crime, because one of the ideas that's been put out there about crime is that the disproportionate number of people in prison is specifically because of the war on drugs.
00:15:36.000And if we got rid of the war on drugs, then it would alleviate this problem.
00:15:38.000But before we get to that, I first want to talk to you about getting life insurance.
00:15:49.000And that means that you need life insurance, because when you plot, You don't want your family taking your body and shoving you into a pauper's grave like Mozart at the end of Amadeus.
00:16:40.000Okay, so let's talk a little bit about drug decriminalization.
00:16:51.000I'm in favor of decriminalization of marijuana.
00:16:53.000I've heard arguments on both sides of that particular issue, but I'm in favor of that because it seems to me that the war on drugs has been a giant fail in a lot of ways, particularly with regard to marijuana.
00:17:02.000When I was in middle school, People were dealing marijuana on the playground and it wasn't hard to get, so it seems to me that the law enforcement community just has been unable to control the problem.
00:17:11.000There's just too much of a market for it.
00:17:13.000Where do you come down on drug criminalization and also where do you come down on the argument that the vast disparity with regard to people in prison, the so-called problem of mass incarceration, that that's the result of the war on drugs specifically?
00:17:24.000Well, let me take the second question first, which is something that I've got empirical evidence for.
00:17:28.000The other is really a hypothesis and an experiment that we're living through right now, which is what would happen if we decriminalize or legalize completely.
00:17:36.000As far as the argument that the prison population in the U.S.
00:17:39.000is driven by the so-called war on drugs, it's preposterous.
00:17:44.000It's a way of getting people all riled up against If I can run some numbers by you, the state prison population is our largest prison system.
00:18:16.000Nobody, virtually zero of our prison population is there for smoking a joint or even possessing joint amount of marijuana.
00:18:29.000The reason people are in prison overwhelmingly is violent crime and property crime.
00:18:34.000In the federal system, about 50% are there for drug crimes.
00:18:40.000But it's, again, 12% of the population generally.
00:18:43.000There's about 116 federal prisoners who are there for marijuana trafficking.
00:18:49.000And the other typical chestnut that we get from the Black Lives Matter anti-mass incarceration movement ... is the federal crack penalties, that these are also responsible for the blacks in federal prison.
00:19:06.000Well, guess who wanted very high, stiff penalties on crack?
00:19:11.000It was the Congressional Black Caucus who said that the crack epidemic was the worst oppression that their community had experienced in slavery.
00:19:19.000These were people like Charles Rangel, Elton Maddox in Brooklyn.
00:19:25.000The federal crack penalties before they were revised are identical to the federal meth penalties.
00:19:31.000Identical mandatory five-year sentence for an X amount of meth or crack.
00:19:37.000Well, meth is dealt overwhelmingly by whites.
00:19:41.000About 2% of meth traffickers are black.
00:19:45.000So if the crack penalties are anti-black, then the meth penalties are anti-white.
00:19:52.000So I want to get back to the college campuses in just a minute.
00:19:55.000First I need to ask you a little bit about illegal immigration, because you've written pretty extensively about illegal immigration, and one of the things that you've said, for example, is that the illegal immigration problem isn't going to stop until employers stop the illegal immigration problem.
00:20:09.000That basically e-verifies the solution to illegal immigration.
00:20:11.000I was wondering if you could expand on that, because we may have a slight disagreement on that, actually.
00:20:14.000Well, I don't think it's the only solution.
00:20:44.000So I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask employers to make sure that they are verifying that the documents that are presented to them are actually valid.
00:21:09.000We paid her for her time in coming to see us, but then we said we can't hire you, obviously.
00:21:13.000And I mean, number one, I'm not a feelings guy, but it didn't feel great to tell somebody that they couldn't be hired because of all this, but put aside the feelings.
00:21:21.000As I say, I don't really care very much about that.
00:21:23.000My basic problem is the idea that employers are supposed to enforce the law when the feds won't, meaning that if I were to find an illegal immigrant in our community and drive that person over to ICE, I would be arrested for kidnapping, right?
00:21:36.000But I'm supposed to Enforce the law when it comes to immigration in a way that the federal government and state government of the state of California will not.
00:21:43.000The state government of California will not even report it to the feds if somebody is arrested and is an illegal immigrant in the state system.
00:21:50.000So we don't even have good statistics on that and yet I as an employer will be arrested if I, not in prison an illegal immigrant, if I put an illegal immigrant on my payroll then I as an employer will be penalized for this.
00:22:02.000It seems to me that there's nothing deeply immoral about me hiring a person who wants to work for a wage But there is something immoral about the federal government forcing me to enforce the law in a way the federal government will not itself enforce the law.
00:22:12.000Well, yeah, number one, E-Verify has a safe harbor provision so that if you use the system and it turns out that somehow somebody got through, you are not going to jail.
00:22:23.000So I just don't think that it's either or, I think it's both and.
00:22:27.000I think that you do have to make sure that people cannot get through the system and get a job, but obviously sanctuary cities are an absolute abomination.
00:22:35.000I don't know of any other area of law enforcement where you have different aspects of it, refusing to cooperate.
00:22:42.000Otherwise, it's sort of a seamless web.
00:22:45.000I mean, we learned after 9/11 that one of the problems was this wall between the CIA and FBI and local law enforcement who got rid of that.
00:22:52.000For local law enforcement to thumb their nose at federal immigration enforcement officers, say, "You're not allowed into my jail," is just, it's a travesty.
00:23:04.000So, obviously, we need to get rid of sanctuary cities, and Jeff Sessions was trying to do so, and was getting blocked, of course, by every federal judge that this came up against, except maybe in Texas.
00:23:17.000But I just, I don't think, it's not burdensome.
00:23:21.000It's an instantaneous thing to be able to check an employer's I mean, I will also say openly, I am libertarian when it comes to the free flow of labor.
00:23:31.000So I don't have any problem with people coming as guest workers into the country and working.
00:23:35.000I don't have a problem with H-1B visas.
00:23:36.000I have no problem with people coming in and filling jobs that employers want to pay them for.
00:23:41.000Businesses will offshore if they are not allowed to do this and prices lower because of lower wages.
00:23:45.000So while it does, there's no question that a higher supply of labor lowers wages in particular areas of the economy.
00:23:51.000But frankly, So, is sort of my answer to that.
00:23:56.000And that is the libertarian answer, not to be callous.
00:24:00.000Well, at least when it comes to labor.
00:24:01.000When it comes to safety, when it comes to welfare, yes, borders.
00:24:04.000Right, so I want to make sure that people who are coming in the country, this is why I'm for a wall.
00:24:07.000This is why I am for criminal background checks on people coming into the country.
00:24:10.000This is why I don't believe that people should be given citizenship unless they are found to be of net benefit to the United States.
00:24:16.000But people who are coming in to work and then leaving again or sending the money home or something and not on welfare, I don't really have any problem With that whatsoever.
00:24:24.000It's an interesting kind of difference between what I would term sort of the more populist wing of the Republican Party and libertarian wing.
00:24:31.000I've had this conversation with Ann Coulter actually about her book because she was deeply concerned about undercutting the wage base with regard to immigration.
00:24:38.000I was concerned more about crime and welfare dependency among people who are coming into the country.
00:24:43.000Well, first of all, I don't think the idea that, well, you're all for importing labor, but not for other things, is a valid distinction.
00:24:52.000Because you don't just import a worker, you import a culture, you import a family, you import an entire way of being in the world.
00:25:03.000And I think, what I see, I've spent a lot of time in high Hispanic neighborhoods in California, around Santa Ana, in Orange County, East LA.
00:25:14.000And yes, on the one hand, they've had an incredible effect on, say, South Central Los Angeles, because there's more entrepreneurship in those areas than there was before.
00:25:25.000On the other hand, what I've seen is a migration of many second and third generation Hispanics into creating a second underclass.
00:25:33.000You have the highest school dropout rate in the country, the highest teen pregnancy rate among Hispanics.
00:25:42.000There's wonderful success stories of people moving up, but it is happening very slowly.
00:25:56.000But so far, that's been very hard to do.
00:25:59.000So I guess I think that Immigration simply should be in the interest of a country, but that is not exclusively about the cheapest wages.
00:26:11.000But what sort of culture do we want to be?
00:26:13.000I mean, I generally agree with that contention.
00:26:15.000I think that a better example of, and maybe a more clarifying example, is where you are on, for example, H-1B visas.
00:26:22.000Both Anne and people like Tom Cotton, Jeff Sessions, very much against the use of H-1B visas because they feel that that's depressing wages, even in high-wage industries, the use of H-1B visas.
00:26:34.000I don't really have any problem at all.
00:26:35.000I mean, frankly, I have a personal stake in the matter.
00:26:37.000My father-in-law was here on an H-1B visa before becoming a citizen of the United States, and obviously my wife is a citizen of the United States.
00:26:47.000Yeah, frankly, I'm going to punt on that, because I haven't really... I'm influenced by people like Mark Krikorian of the Center of Immigration Studies, who I respect enormously, who do say that it's without your father... I don't know a thing about your father-in-law, but... It's unfair of me.
00:27:03.000I don't like to invoke personal stories.
00:27:06.000But, you know, that this is, in fact, they just are going for the lowest common denominator and that there is no shortage of American labor for, you know, low-level computer inputting jobs or something.
00:27:21.000On the other hand, I'm also very I'm open to the argument that I've heard from my libertarian friends who were former business owners that it's not about low wages, we want work skills, and that I'm completely sympathetic to.
00:27:35.000It is undeniably the case that a lot of Americans have lost a really reliable work ethic, and a lot of immigrants do have that.
00:27:47.000You know, and we all are bargain hunters.
00:27:49.000We seem to be wired for wanting the cheapest thing.
00:27:52.000And so a lot of us are complicit in this, of wanting cheaper goods, cheaper services.
00:28:00.000But I guess I would say, on the whole, I think that We need to slow down the rate of demographic change.
00:28:09.000And I know this is getting a lot of conservative media hosts in a lot of trouble for saying things like that.
00:28:14.000But I think that a pause is necessary for assimilation and just to see how things are playing out.
00:28:21.000Because we've had some very, very radical Massive population flows recently and it's not clear to me when you combine this with our ethic of anti-assimilation how this is going to work out or is working out because I think we're already seeing some problems of that where you have even very high skilled immigrants like Asians adopting the oppositional mentality of a victim ideology which is incredibly perverse.
00:28:47.000Let's talk a little bit about the demographic change argument before we get ourselves boycotted, because I think that what you mean by that is actually not what some folks on the left would suggest you mean by that.
00:28:55.000What they think you mean by that is that we need more white people and fewer brown people, right?
00:29:00.000That was the way they would put it on MSNBC, is that when you say demographic change, what you're deeply worried about is too many black and brown people and not enough white people.
00:29:07.000And it seems to me that the argument, whether it's made by Tucker Carlson or by you or by Ann Coulter, for that matter, with regard to this particular issue, has not really been a color-based argument.
00:29:16.000It's been a culture-based argument, meaning that if somebody wants to come in and assimilate to American values, I don't care what color they are.
00:29:22.000I don't really care what religion they are, what shul or mosque or church they go to.
00:29:28.000What I care about is them assimilating to basic American values, including values of community, including values of free speech and free enterprise and non-dependency.
00:29:37.000And if you're willing to assimilate and learn English the way that everybody else's great-grandparents did three generations ago, my great-grandparents did, then that's totally fine.
00:30:07.000I think Americans—and this sounds, you know, I'll be criticized for being incredibly naive—we are so ready to be post-racial.
00:30:14.000If only the damn diversity bureaucrats would get out of the K-12 schools, get out of the pre-K schools, where they are trying to—it's amazing.
00:30:23.000I mean, I was talking to somebody who has a child in a gifted and talented school here in L.A. up in Mulholland Drive.
00:30:29.000They are now starting to do affinity group training for the youngest elementary school so that kids can start developing their tribal group identity as an early possible age.
00:30:41.000And so if people came with a sense of my goal here is to become American, nobody would give a damn.
00:30:54.000But you also see, still, cultural habits that are not the same forward-looking entrepreneurship in some of the groups you're bringing in, and that's a problem.
00:31:07.000Okay, so let's talk in a second about this multicultural ethos, the diversity ethos that you talk about in your book.
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00:32:29.000What are colleges getting wrong about diversity?
00:32:32.000Well, they define it by the trivialities of gonads and melanin, and now all the various gender identities that are being rapidly crafted by desperate students who are finding it's getting harder and harder to be transgressive and get your own personal bureaucracy to cater to your delusions about being oppressed.
00:32:58.000I think any individual is diverse, but I don't even think it should be a goal in any sense.
00:33:06.000Even intellectual diversity, if we didn't have such a monolithic... I think I would excise the word completely.
00:33:13.000I would not put in good diversity versus the preposterous, narrow, narcissistic diversity as currently defined.
00:33:22.000I think the goal of a university should be knowledge, pure and simple.
00:33:26.000And a gratitude for the greatness of the past, for the works of sublime creation that it is our privilege to have inherited.
00:33:37.000You know, but now diversity is just a code word for a whole set of things.
00:33:43.000Primarily what you mentioned before, Ben, which is this idea that any lack of proportional representation is by definition a signal that somewhere, someplace or everywhere is lethal discrimination.
00:34:00.000And it is also the diversity ideology is giving students a ground to be completely out of touch with reality.
00:34:13.000The reigning view is that to be a female Or a so-called student of color on an American college campus today is to be a literal threat to your life from circumambient racism and sexism.
00:34:30.000You know, the students occupied the president's office at Brown complaining about the fact that they had to follow such quotidian academic expectations as going to class or studying for exams because they said they were focused so hard on, quote, staying alive at Brown.
00:34:47.000Now, there is no more privileged place in human history than a college campus.
00:34:55.000I don't care if you're purple, green, or blue, or if you come from a family of $25,000 a year or $2 million a year.
00:35:07.000Simply by virtue of being on a college campus, you have at your fingertips The thing that Faust sold his soul for, which is knowledge.
00:35:17.000Every intellectual resource is open to you, without regards to your color or your gender.
00:35:24.000Every book that has ever been written, you can read.
00:35:27.000This is something that would have driven the Renaissance humanists mad with envy and desire.
00:35:32.000And yet students are encouraged by their presidents, by the metastasizing, sprawling, multi-million dollar diversity bureaucracy to think of themselves as victims.
00:35:45.000Because if you look at the history of the university, supposedly it was supposed to be what you're talking about.
00:35:49.000You know, bringing knowledge, trying to study eternal truths, looking at the universe around you.
00:35:53.000And now it's a competitive Olympics of victimhood.
00:35:56.000How did that get started and who's interested in promulgating this?
00:35:59.000Well, I think it started in the 60s when you had civil rights movements morphing into black power and schools that, for completely understandable reasons, said, boy, we've got to quickly jumpstart a black student body and employed the same technique that they're employing today, which is incredibly self-destructive and counterproductive, which is
00:36:28.000Vast racial preferences, bringing students in who do not share the average academic skills of their peers in order to fulfill a racial quota.
00:36:38.000And students that are brought in under any type of preference, it could be a gender preference, whatever, who are not competitively qualified are going to struggle significantly.
00:36:48.000So you had the creation of black studies majors, ethnic studies majors, to try and give something to these preference beneficiaries that they could succeed at.
00:37:01.000And then you had the rise of high theory, which was something initially quite remote.
00:37:06.000This was deconstruction, post-structuralism, which were very arcane and very bizarre theories about language that I unfortunately wasted my college years absorbing uncritically without any sense of skepticism towards them.
00:37:25.000And so, even though I was reading Jacques Derrida to my eternal regret, I was also reading Wordsworth and Edmund Spencer and John Milton and wallowing in language of just exquisite beauty.
00:37:41.000In the 80s, some of the core ideas of deconstruction took a 180 degree turn.
00:37:48.000Deconstruction had denied that there was such a thing as a human self.
00:37:52.000A completely counterfactual proposition, but nevertheless one that lured in stupid students like me.
00:37:59.000The weird thing is that deconstruction in the 80s, some of their ideas turned into this roaring revival of the self, so now it's all about Me!
00:38:11.000As a female, I'm supposed to only want to study female writers, or I want to read books to get a sense of how oppressed females were in the past.
00:38:21.000This is just a travesty of what education should be, which is about taking our own petty selves out of ourselves into a world that is so much larger than our minds could ever have encompassed.
00:38:38.000And instead, students only want to study their sexuality, their sexual preferences, and again, they're being encouraged by this, in this, by their faculty.
00:38:49.000So the counterargument for the sake of playing devil's advocate for a lot of folks on the left is that the prevailing theory of America and of the West had been that it is a great and glorious place filled with great discoveries and freedoms and prosperity.
00:39:02.000But that prosperity and freedom has been built on the backs of a lot of different various victimized subgroups over the course of history and their plights have been ignored.
00:39:11.000And that it is incumbent on us now that we have reached beyond the point of Western civilization alone to look at all these various subgroups and recognize that they have been intersectionally victimized and we can judge them by their intersectional categories.
00:39:24.000If you're a member of several categories, then you have been victimized in a variety of ways.
00:39:27.000This means that you have an experience that no one else can understand because you yourself have been a member of these particular groups and your subjective membership in any of these groups means that we all have to judge you that way.
00:39:39.000And if we fail to judge you that way, then we are simply standing in for the patriarchal oppressive system above.
00:39:49.000What percentage wrong is that when it comes to building a better world?
00:39:53.000Well, we have not been at risk for a sort of a nationalist, self-glorifying narrative about our past for quite some time now.
00:40:03.000I don't think there's any dearth of our history books or our history courses papering over the very real, very unfathomable and hypocrisies that dominated America, for instance, for nearly 200 years, with our stunning blindness to the fact that both slavery and de jure segregation were just blatant violations of what this nation purported to stand with our stunning blindness to the fact that both slavery and
00:40:33.000And it's always just amazing to see the patience, the patriotism, patience, the patriotism, the courage with which the civil rights pioneers were willing to keep fighting to get America to live up to its ideals.
00:40:52.000But the idea that now we're still living in this world that is blind to the failures of the West, I think is completely counterfactual.
00:41:03.000I would also say what's empirically demonstrably wrong is the idea that the West is today the font of all evil.
00:41:12.000If you want to see a patriarchy, You know, go to rural Nepal where girls who are having their period are forced to stay in a hut because they're so impure.
00:41:23.000Or if you want to see homophobia, try and sponsor a gay pride march in Uganda.
00:41:30.000Egypt recently Imprisoned people at a rock concert who had unfurled a rainbow banner in solidarity with the lead singer of a rock band who was gay, and they're considering criminalizing homosexuality.
00:41:46.000The rest of the world, the non-Western world, every single day is trying to come to the West, whether legally or illegally.
00:43:12.000I always mention your name when people talk about protests at college campus because I get all sorts of attention for going to Berkeley with 600 police officers.
00:43:18.000But you've been physically accosted at places like Claremont McKenna.
00:43:21.000Can you talk a little bit about your experiences on college campuses?
00:43:24.000Well, Claremont was definitely the nadir of Yahoo students that were out there to try and feel like they had some, you know, social justice mission to feel important.
00:43:36.000I was there to speak about my previous book, The War on Cops, and to bring the message that there are many law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods who love the police.
00:43:46.000You know, I cannot go to a police community meeting in South LA or East Harlem where I don't hear We want the cops.
00:43:54.000Please get the drug dealers off the street.
00:43:56.000With all apologies to the War on Drugs, but people feel this is an oppression.
00:44:02.000And so for that, for saying that there are people who support the cops in inner city communities, and that there's no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police, because they save tens of thousands of minority lives.
00:44:16.000Starting in the 1990s through proactive policing, I was declared a homophobe, racist classist, anti-female, colonialist, you name it, by the students at the colleges around Claremont McKenna, which is a small liberal arts college in east of Los Angeles.
00:44:37.000They blockaded the Auditorium where I was supposed to speak so that no students could come and hear me enter.
00:44:44.000I was taken in with a police escort through a secret passageway and spoke to an empty room.
00:44:49.000Outside the students were pounding on the windows and chanting and drumming.
00:44:55.000And the police eventually decided, and these were large plate glass windows that they couldn't guarantee my safety, so I was escorted out.
00:45:04.000You know, these are students that have never had to live with real high crime.
00:45:11.000And it was something, you know, one can hear about the free speech crisis from afar, but to be at the center of a mob is a sobering experience because you don't know what they're going to do next.
00:45:23.000And to just feel that feral confidence in their own rectitude.
00:45:29.000So let's talk a little bit about the perceived threats on campus.
00:46:02.000Honestly, I do not even have a good definition for what people mean when they say rape culture because I'm unaware of the constituency that is radically in favor of rape in the United States.
00:46:12.000What do they mean by this and why are they wrong?
00:46:14.000Well I guess they would say the very fact that we have rape at all means that we're in a rape culture that somehow we are indifferent to or tolerant of or even encouraging of females getting raped or that maybe to be a little less hyperbolic they would say that the patriarchy is so strong we so devalue females lives that it results in a But you're right.
00:46:41.000I mean, I've never really tried to pin it down myself, and I'm struggling here a little bit, Ben, because it is an extraordinarily broad term, but I guess to just sort of give them the benefit of the doubt, it's shorthand for, we still live in a culture that devalues females' lives and sees them as sex objects.
00:47:02.000Yeah, and the contention is that by even talking about the fact that women are free in the United States, the freest women in human history, actually, and the most prosperous women in human history, that this is actually a threat to women.
00:47:12.000That if you talk about the prosperity of women, how women ought to do well, that this is a threat to women because we need to recognize their inherent victim status.
00:47:19.000Otherwise, we are ignoring their cruel plight.
00:47:26.000I've recently learned that white males in their desperate sort of affinity group circles, where everybody's going to trade victim points and see where they end up on the intersectional totem pole, have taken to saying, well, I think I'm on the spectrum.
00:47:39.000Because, you know, this gives them some opportunity to themselves not be strong.
00:47:43.000It's a very weird civilizational development.
00:47:46.000Because for centuries, for like all of human history, Cultures wanted to celebrate strength and accomplishment and success, and now we celebrate alleged victimhood and oppression.
00:48:00.000It's a bizarre reversal of how societies used to run themselves.
00:48:07.000One explanation is possibly Nietzsche said that Christianity was a major sort of betrayal of classical ideals in that it celebrated the original victim.
00:48:23.000And whether that's going on, that somehow in a secular way, that idea of a skepticism towards strength and a glorification of weakness is going on.
00:48:36.000But for females today to think of themselves as oppressed is ridiculous.
00:48:40.000Again, We don't want to personalize this, and one needs a balance between anecdotes and data, but I can just tell you that I have never been discriminated against in my life.
00:49:05.000I had enormous support from my professors, and ever since then, I have without a doubt been the alleged beneficiary of gender quotas constantly.
00:49:18.000Every panel, every media experience is desperate for females.
00:49:28.000Well, I don't want to get intersexual myself, but for a white female to claim that she's oppressed is particularly ludicrous.
00:49:34.000And that doesn't mean that I'm granting any legitimacy to the, well, speaking as a black female meme, because I think that just all of these little identity markers are irrelevant.
00:49:46.000But nevertheless, the female narcissistic whining is particularly nauseating to me.
00:49:53.000Well, it seems like the combination of the death of the notion of objective truth, the death of the notion of the idea of eternal truth, combined with the need for victimhood in a society where victimhood is actually kind of hard to come by, has led people to the bizarre notion that you are victimized if people disagree with you, that your politics, your views are wrapped up in your subjective self-definition, and thus, if people disagree with you, they have attacked your identity, you have erased them as human beings.
00:50:17.000This obviously comes up most commonly in the context of transgenderism in the discussion of transgender pronouns.
00:50:23.000If you suggest that there is such a thing as a biological male and a biological female and that a male cannot become a female, then you are a member of the oppressive class.
00:50:31.000How would you argue with that sort of thing?
00:50:40.000Not to argue with transgender folks specifically, but the idea that it is oppression of high order and serious consequence if somebody says that males are males and females are females, for example.
00:50:53.000I have been sort of on the margins of the transgender wars and I've not had that direct experience that people like you or Jordan Peterson have had.
00:51:01.000It's so complicated because they are making so radical a claim about the irrelevancy of biology and their right to choose their own sexual identity that
00:51:19.000In refusing to use their favorite pronouns, you are, in some sense, striking at their definition of themselves, and you're relying on your understanding of science.
00:51:37.000That's sort of the toughest one that's out there.
00:51:40.000I am much more confident in being able to say that empirically, mainstream institutions are not discriminating against females or people of color.
00:51:53.000How to navigate that bizarre act of power that is going on now with transgender people in trying to To put other people under their linguistic thrall is a challenge.
00:52:10.000But in some sense, when they're saying it's a threat to their own identity, given that that is how they're choosing to define their identity, there is something at least semantically plausible about that.
00:52:22.000Okay, so in a second I want to ask you one final question.
00:52:25.000I want to ask you specifically, as a policy expert who's focused on campuses and on crime, how the Trump administration is doing across the board on some of these issues.
00:52:34.000But if you want to hear Heather MacDonald's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:52:37.000To subscribe, just go over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
00:52:42.000Well, Heather McDonnell, thank you so much for stopping by.