The Great America Show - February 01, 2023


THE MARXIST LEFT IS TRYING TO TURN US INTO A TERRIFIED, COWERING TOTALITARIAN STATE BY USING EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL SAYS HEATHER MAC DONALD


Episode Stats

Length

54 minutes

Words per Minute

134.9017

Word Count

7,315

Sentence Count

374

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

28


Summary

A group of white cops beat a black man to death in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, and no one has been charged for the crime. What happened to make these cops so bad that no one will ever be charged?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs, and welcome to The Great America Show.
00:00:04.580 Good news. The Biden regime says the COVID emergency ends on May 11th of this very year,
00:00:11.420 a little over three months from now. I guess we shouldn't get too excited, though.
00:00:16.480 Biden has said before that COVID is over, only to have one of his helpers at the White House come
00:00:21.660 out and say, not so fast. We'll see if this one sticks. Lots of talk about war. Word is Russia's
00:00:29.300 making advances now in eastern Ukraine, but at a high cost, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
00:00:35.980 The Ukrainian military says they're killing so many of the invaders that the bodies of Russian
00:00:41.180 soldiers cover the battlefield. Well, despite those heavy casualties, the Russians are still
00:00:47.120 retaking lost ground in the eastern Ukraine. President Biden shipping more weapons to Ukraine,
00:00:53.120 but those M1A2 tanks that he promised Zelensky aren't being sent. Turns out Biden promised
00:01:00.160 those tanks before the Pentagon did an inventory. It turns out we don't have enough tanks to ship
00:01:06.460 over there. And about those jet fighters that Vladimir Zelensky wants? No dice. Biden says he
00:01:13.440 can't send them. F-16s might cross Putin's red lines, and that wouldn't be terribly smart
00:01:19.240 to Mr. Biden or his State Department or his Pentagon. Because one of the Biden's generals
00:01:25.440 is now telling everyone that he thinks will be at war with China in two years. He says he doesn't
00:01:32.500 want to be right. He hopes he'll be wrong. But there's a news break nonetheless. What that general
00:01:38.740 didn't do was say who he thought would win that war that he thinks will start in 2025. The answer
00:01:44.700 isn't clear, which should concern all of us. You would think that with a war raging in Europe,
00:01:50.680 the head of NATO would have better things to do than travel all the way to Asia to make a
00:01:55.700 proclamation about China's preparations to carry out a blitz attack on Taiwan. NATO Secretary General
00:02:03.240 John Sultenberg did just that, saying that Xi Jinping is learning from Putin's war against Ukraine,
00:02:10.160 suggesting China may soon attack Taiwan, but with full force. My point is this. How many advanced
00:02:18.000 missiles, $40 million tanks that are the best in the world, how many of our troops do we want to
00:02:23.640 ship to Ukraine when NATO and the European Union should be defending Ukraine? Why does Biden insist on
00:02:31.000 acting like the Marshall Plan is still in effect? That the United States isn't being crushed by the
00:02:36.680 Marxist Dems who have driven our national debt to backbreaking levels, and the prospects worsen
00:02:42.480 steadily that we'll be in that war in Asia soon. The euros are perfectly capable of defending
00:02:49.240 themselves, and the Biden regime is sending money, advanced weaponry, and munitions to Ukraine.
00:02:55.620 Not only that, but Biden has withdrawn 200 million barrels of oil from our strategic petroleum reserves,
00:03:02.600 which are now at the lowest levels in almost four decades. Hardly the strategic approach
00:03:08.800 to prepare for an increasingly likely war that none of us wants. Maybe that's the reason a recent Gallup
00:03:15.940 poll shows that the dysfunctional Biden government is the number one problem in America, followed by
00:03:22.860 inflation, immigration, and the economy in general. Not a pretty picture, is it? Well, not such a pretty picture
00:03:30.380 in Memphis, Tennessee, either. Those five policemen who beat a man to death, the video is sickening,
00:03:36.660 and then we learn those five cops weren't even held in custody. They were out on bail while facing
00:03:42.840 murder charges in the death of Tyree Nichols. Five black cops killing a black man. What sense does any of
00:03:50.440 that make? What was going on in that moment? There has to be a lot more than we know. And now reports
00:03:57.360 that two more Memphis cops and two sheriff's deputies have been relieved of duty, and three
00:04:02.560 fire department EMTs have been fired. A total of 12 people now involved at this point in what is
00:04:10.420 a murder investigation. And not a word about why the head of the police department and several
00:04:15.760 supervisors aren't being questioned and investigated as well. Memphis obviously has a cesspool for a police
00:04:23.120 department. And no one should kid themselves. This is about sadistic cops and leaders who permit the
00:04:29.680 abuse of their citizens. Everything else the national media is spewing as an effort to enlarge Memphis
00:04:35.400 to a national problem and make the Memphis incident smaller. But that incident is only getting bigger.
00:04:43.040 Memphis is a city of about 700,000 folks. A million and a half people live in the metro area.
00:04:49.320 Memphis residents are 60% black, and the city has one of the highest poverty levels in the country.
00:04:56.040 Second highest, in fact, overall, and in child poverty. Memphis also has the highest crime rate
00:05:02.940 in the nation. And yes, the city is a Democrat stronghold. A Democrat has run the city for ages,
00:05:10.100 and in this crisis, we hope the Memphis police unions will stand up for what's right and not try to
00:05:16.840 cover up for those in uniform who tore up a young man's life. They'll be under immense social and
00:05:23.140 political pressure to do just that. Let's hope that Memphis can come together to assert that standing
00:05:29.060 up for law and order isn't racist, that calling for peace and reason isn't hate speech. They're
00:05:35.840 necessary conditions to have a peaceful and prosperous community. Our guest today is Heather McDonnell,
00:05:42.560 brilliant social critic, attorney, best-selling author, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan
00:05:48.480 Institute. And welcome back, Heather, to The Great America Show. How have you been?
00:05:53.680 I've been great, Lou, except I haven't been talking to you for a while, so there's been a slight
00:05:57.120 lack in my life, but now I feel full and satisfied. So thank you for having me on.
00:06:03.820 Well, it's great to have you here. Thanks so much. And I want to talk about, you know,
00:06:08.760 a great comment that you, of many, a constant flow of great comments that you make and remarks
00:06:15.800 just in discussion. And when you talked about it is not hate speech to defend the republic,
00:06:24.320 to defend America, I thought that was such a wonderful statement and a wonderful motto.
00:06:30.260 It is the case that if you defend American values today, you're something of, well, I don't know,
00:06:39.900 a hateful person, a despicable person, certainly a deplorable. Do you think that's changing or not?
00:06:50.300 It's not changing because not enough people, especially in the professions, are willing to
00:06:55.880 stand up for the truth, to stand up for the very tradition and profession that they have worked
00:07:02.960 their lives for. It's still a few iconoclasts that are willing to say that the police are not racist.
00:07:12.280 It is not hate speech to say that Americans have the absolute right to enforce border laws,
00:07:19.580 that parents are right to have oversight, the final, the first and the final say over their
00:07:27.860 children, that it's not hate speech to say that you cannot change somebody's sex by castrating that
00:07:33.620 person. Far too many people are simply terrified to speak the truth. And the left is in the business
00:07:43.780 of turning us into some kind of terrified, cowering totalitarian state by using several forms of
00:07:54.520 emotional blackmail. And this is the series of steps they take, Lou, in order to shut down speech.
00:08:02.480 First of all, too many of us went along with the idea that college students are somehow unsafe.
00:08:12.360 You know that they're like, they're in jeopardy of their lives being on a college campus, which is
00:08:19.620 the most preposterous idea. There is no safer place in the country, in the world, than an American
00:08:29.680 college campus. These students are coddled. They are privileged simply by virtue of the fact that
00:08:36.340 they have at their fingertips the thing that Faust sold his soul for, which is knowledge.
00:08:41.340 But too many adults on campus went along with this idea that if a student is upset by something,
00:08:51.680 he is unsafe. And then they also went along with the idea that speech with which you disagree,
00:08:59.740 if you are the dominant progressive class, may be characterized as hate speech. And then,
00:09:07.380 here's the final step. If it's hate speech, and again, what is being characterized as hate speech
00:09:14.160 is something like, well, yes, America was racist in the past, but it is not racist today. That is not
00:09:22.880 our endemic trait. Yes, we have a terrible racial history, but we have made amends for that history.
00:09:31.340 To say that second part is now hate speech. And if you say that second part, which is that
00:09:38.360 the reality today is not white privilege, it is black privilege, you are both engaged in hate speech,
00:09:46.120 and as hate speech, you are engaged in assault. It is no longer speech, it is behavior and may be banned.
00:09:53.720 I was just going to say, thought crimes now are crimes. We're moving in that direction, aren't we?
00:10:05.040 We are. People are getting, they're finding their PayPal accounts shut down, their crowdsourcing
00:10:14.080 accounts are shut down, they're kicked off of media sites, but they are being followed. You know,
00:10:22.120 there's going to be more and more, I'm sure, types of punishments of not being able to spend your own
00:10:29.080 money, not being able to go where you want to go. And all because of this emotional blackmail
00:10:36.660 saying, well, if you don't, if you don't agree with me, you're hurting me. And you know, if you're
00:10:43.280 not using my, the gender pronouns, which I in an act of sheer, aggressive power hunger are trying to
00:10:54.260 impose on the world, you're going to put me at risk of suicide. You know, it's absolute emotional
00:11:02.720 blackmail, and nobody should go along with it. It's emotional blackmail, and on a lower level,
00:11:11.560 it's pure nonsense. There is no intrinsic logic to any of this. And to think that corporate America
00:11:24.220 has consumed this and is now spitting it out, and by that I'm talking about all of this left-wing
00:11:33.180 Marxist blather in the form of ESG and CRT and a whole new left-wing initiative that is brought to
00:11:44.920 you by your friendly globalist corporation. And that, of course, influences everything that's
00:11:51.860 happening in Washington, D.C., because they are the preeminent donor class, aren't they?
00:11:57.660 Yes, and I don't see why there's a single parent out there in America that knows what's going on,
00:12:02.980 which is using any Disney product whatsoever. Believe me, parents, Disney is expendable.
00:12:12.820 There is a wealth of children's literature coming out of Britain and America in the early part of the 20th century
00:12:21.780 that is glorious, beautiful. I am so grateful that my parents read me Wind in the Willows,
00:12:28.540 Charlotte's Web, Winnie the Pooh in their original forms with their glorious illustrations by Ernest Shepard,
00:12:37.140 not the bastardized Disney versions, you know, Alice in Wonderland, E. Nesbitt books, Wizard of Oz.
00:12:48.700 There's 13 Oz books that are all more wonderful than the next. You can do much better by your children
00:12:55.960 by reading to them the classics and filling their ears with language than parking them in front of the
00:13:04.020 Disney Channel or showing them a Disney cartoon with its increasingly terrible soundtrack. I'm sorry,
00:13:12.060 I'm going to alienate a lot of viewers here, but Frozen is not a great set of songs.
00:13:20.680 But Disney is in the vanguard of the left and many other corporations are as well. It is harder to
00:13:28.760 decouple from Amazon, and I confess that I have not done so. I don't order much, but there's times when
00:13:36.900 I do. But it's not actually all that surprising, Lou, because every year colleges are belching forth
00:13:45.220 another group of brainwashed graduates who go to corporations to work, and the CEOs are terrified of
00:13:54.860 them. The CEOs are also terrified by their dopey left-wing wives, and they're terrified by the New York
00:14:02.320 Times, and they just see it as a lot easier to kowtow to the loud voices within them and outside of them
00:14:11.660 and gain their virtue points than it is to say, we're going to steer clear of all things political
00:14:18.960 and hew to the tradition of vibrant market exchange without feeling like we have to bludgeon
00:14:29.140 the public with our virtue signaling. The virtue signaling, it must leave some exhausted in our
00:14:36.820 society because there is so much of it going on in the media, each one more sanctimonious than the
00:14:43.140 other, each one more trying to project more righteousness than any saint that is familiar
00:14:51.320 to anyone. This is a remarkable period in our history. It is, and I laugh at it because, as I say here
00:15:00.900 too often, when you finally cross the penumbra into the absurd, all you can do is laugh. And we are now
00:15:12.640 in that we have gone well beyond the penumbra. This is a time of just extraordinary madness in this country.
00:15:21.160 It is, and it is a whole group of people preying on another in this society. And then it's other groups
00:15:31.220 preying on other groups. It is chaos in a sociological, in our society. It's just unbelievable.
00:15:40.820 Well, Lou, I envy you your good spirits and your sanguine personality. And I don't want to be a
00:15:51.220 downer here in a black cloud, but I have to say part of the way we got to this point is that too many
00:15:59.180 people were laughing. We went through that whole period when we first had trigger warnings and
00:16:05.260 microaggressions. And, and, and, uh, undergraduates were saying they couldn't be asked to read Ovid,
00:16:13.000 the great metamorphoses, one of the marvelous, uh, early Latin works that, that provided thousands of
00:16:22.120 years of inspiration to subsequent painters and poets and sculptures, sculptors, uh, that is just a
00:16:29.740 phantasmagorical understanding of the constant flux and transformation in, in reality. But students
00:16:39.320 saying, Oh, we can't read Ovid because it, it portrays, uh, abductions of Jove and, and Jupiter,
00:16:48.660 you know, abducting, uh, lovely nymphs for his, uh, sexual pleasure. And if we read this, we will be
00:16:57.180 struck dead ourselves and, and, and, and people laughed and said, Oh, these silly snowflakes,
00:17:03.420 uh, just let them get to the corporate world and they'll wise up quickly because they'll be in
00:17:10.300 hard America rather than soft America. And people complaining about the cafeteria food,
00:17:17.300 you know, they're being served tacos and this is cultural appropriation because it wasn't served
00:17:23.060 properly or, or soggy Chinese food. And that this was also upsetting to them because it wasn't cooked
00:17:30.000 properly. We were all laughing at that. No, I'm sorry. It's not, it was not funny then. And it's
00:17:35.860 not funny now. These people are deadly serious. There's nothing that, uh, you know, they've said
00:17:43.740 they were going to do that they have not done. And so it's, it's time to start not brushing it off
00:17:52.080 and, and looking away, but realizing that as long as we fail to defend our traditions against what
00:18:01.520 is, I think the most powerful charge today, which is that of endemic racism, uh, the left wins,
00:18:09.780 it is all coming down. It's not just a question of tearing down statues,
00:18:15.620 including of the founders, including of Frederick Douglass. It's a question of tearing down the very
00:18:23.300 possibility of raising your children to have a love of life, of being able to read literature
00:18:31.740 and experience the sublimity of expression and wit and irony that the greatest authors can give us
00:18:41.440 of seeing beauty and art. All of that is coming down and being replaced by anger and hatred of the,
00:18:49.260 uh, that is the only thing that the mob has to offer, which is tearing things down and not building it
00:18:56.300 up. And mob, uh, is very much a part of our daily existence. Now, when we watch, uh, Hakeem Jeffries,
00:19:08.220 uh, talk about how unified the Democrat party is as, uh, Speaker, uh, McCarthy, uh, steps up to take the
00:19:16.460 gavel, uh, he, he's talking about conformity, not, uh, unity. He's talking about an absence of dissent,
00:19:24.640 uh, uh, tolerated, uh, uh, there's just no toleration for dissent in the Democrat party.
00:19:30.780 They are moving in lockstep on every issue in every form. Uh, their hates are all the same.
00:19:37.740 Their loves and passions are all the same. Uh, and most are in many cases perverted. Uh, this is a
00:19:45.900 terrible time, uh, for, uh, uh, for dissent and for argument and for, uh, uh, disagreement. Uh,
00:19:53.660 as we see right now in the Republican party, I believe the Republican party actually is, uh,
00:19:59.580 ignition has been achieved. There is now a semblance of, uh, of real robust argument and
00:20:07.580 disagreement out in front in public, whether it be the battle over the speakership, whether it be the,
00:20:12.760 the bargaining over what would make him speaker. Uh, this is a, this is a Congress that for the first
00:20:20.000 time I actually have hope that the Republicans may be something other than country club Republicans,
00:20:25.700 uh, ordered here and there, uh, at, uh, in quick step by the chamber of commerce and the business
00:20:32.960 round table. Things are getting better in so many ways in this Congress. So I have in that at least
00:20:39.880 some hope that was absent, uh, just a short time ago, your thoughts. Well, as far as uniformity,
00:20:47.340 we, we remember the statement, uh, by somebody in Congress several years ago, which is if you're,
00:20:55.020 uh, you know, not taking democratic positions, you're not black or you're not female or you're
00:21:01.540 not gay. There was absolutely a sense that any non-conforming black who does not think that the
00:21:10.460 main problem facing blacks today is white racism, uh, he's just not counted. Uh, and, and, and so
00:21:18.320 there's just pariahs, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, uh, Glenn Lowry, Jason Miley, they're,
00:21:26.880 they're turned into pariahs. And I, I would agree. You said earlier, there's no logic to what the left
00:21:34.800 is doing. I know what you mean. If you're using logic in its real meaning to say that if we were
00:21:43.040 to approach this, uh, with expectations of rationality, they are so against the evidence
00:21:52.860 and, and so anti-empirical that in one sense, a true statement on the other, there is a consistency
00:22:00.380 in what the left is doing. And it is all about, uh, sending out the single message that everything
00:22:10.940 in our world today is the product of racism and white supremacy and that any self-professed victim
00:22:20.500 group should not be acknowledged to have any agency or any responsibility for, uh, a member of
00:22:30.380 that group, any responsibility for his or her life outcomes, that there's nothing that, that culture
00:22:36.840 or that individual can do. I think those are lies. I think right now, the biggest problems we have
00:22:44.120 with both racial disparities and socioeconomic disparities are almost exclusively the product
00:22:52.920 of culture and a failure of personal responsibility. But the left is insisting with a consistent logic
00:23:02.900 that, uh, racism defines America and they are trying to tear every meritocratic institution down.
00:23:13.320 I've been writing a lot about STEM and medicine, uh, and the medical schools and the medical professional
00:23:20.240 organizations, the AMA, the American Association of Medical Colleges, all medical schools. They're all
00:23:28.160 exercising vast racial preferences. They're admitting black and Hispanic students with standardized test
00:23:36.320 scores and GPAs that would be automatic automatically disqualifying if presented by white and Asian students.
00:23:43.520 And then those racial preference beneficiaries get passed along throughout their medical careers.
00:23:50.480 We're, we're destroying grading systems in order to cover up the persistent academic skills gap.
00:23:58.380 We've the, one of the important medical licensing exams has discarded grades and gone to a very crude
00:24:08.960 pass fail system because grades had a disparate impact on blacks. So, uh, you know, we are really,
00:24:15.680 really playing with fire here by, by the left pursuing to its logical end, the idea that only racism explains,
00:24:26.640 uh, socioeconomic and racial disparities today. Absolutely. And, uh, if I wasn't clear,
00:24:33.520 what I was talking about is the intrinsic logic of the policies, uh, and the precepts of, of the,
00:24:39.520 the left in this country, the Marxist Dems, uh, which I, I think is wanting to say the least.
00:24:46.000 Uh, you're no, you, you raise another is always important point. And that is, we are confronted with
00:24:53.040 an education, higher education system right now. That is, um, it is, it wants, uh, stolid, uh, atrifying, uh, and indolent, uh, staffed with indolent, uh, professors and so-called scholars.
00:25:11.360 And the admissions departments are, are confronted with a very simple issue. They cannot, uh, according to the admissions people I have spoken with,
00:25:22.000 there's a reason for these, uh, changes in, uh, admission programs, uh, and, uh, and, uh, at least the screening.
00:25:31.040 And that is that, uh, and I'm going to say this out loud and people are going to be outraged, but, um,
00:25:38.000 the, the highest testing groups, demographic groups are Asian, uh, and Jewish students. Uh, and I've actually heard
00:25:47.600 admissions officers say out loud to me that in point of fact, their school would be made up of Asians and
00:25:56.240 Jewish students. If they didn't have some way to, uh, if you would, uh, leaven, uh, the, the body, uh,
00:26:05.920 the association, uh, uh, of all those students, uh, it would be impossible because they would be the
00:26:12.240 highest, uh, highest, uh, achieving in terms of schools, uh, standard tests, uh, as well as essays.
00:26:20.800 What do you think?
00:26:21.440 That's absolutely true. It's undeniably true. Again, Lou, here's how the left works today.
00:26:29.040 If any institution is not 13% black, which is the percentage of the black,
00:26:34.160 blacks in the U S population, that institution is per se racist and is discriminating against blacks.
00:26:41.680 That includes if Google doesn't have 13% black computer engineers and electrical engineers and
00:26:51.040 artificial intelligence researchers, then Google must be discriminating against all these competitively
00:26:59.040 qualified black computer scientists, engineers, and AI researchers. That expectation
00:27:07.360 is completely ungrounded in the facts. The sad fact is, and you hesitate to say this, Lou, but we have
00:27:17.040 got to speak, start getting honest about this. There is such a large academic skills gap that you cannot
00:27:24.880 have diversity and meritocracy at the same time. You choose one or the other. If you want diversity,
00:27:32.160 you have to discard meritocracy. If you want meritocracy, you cannot have an expectation of racial
00:27:39.280 proportionality. Here's the facts. About 54% of all black 12th graders do not even have partial mastery of
00:27:50.800 the most basic 12th grade math skills. They are below basic on the so-called NAEP test. And basic
00:28:01.840 means mere partial mastery. So they're below partial mastery, 54%. How, given that, and the number that are
00:28:12.560 actually, the percentages that are actually advanced and proficient are like 1%. Every year, there's about the
00:28:22.480 number of black PhDs in many, many STEM fields like engineering or neurology are at best 1%. At best. And that's not
00:28:36.640 even taking into account what sort of degree did they receive. So when you have that, when you have way over
00:28:45.760 a standard deviation of test score gap, it is simply impossible to have 13% black engineers at Google. And yet Google
00:28:58.240 itself will declare itself racist rather than be honest with the American public about these skills gaps. And yes,
00:29:07.120 the only way that colleges, undergraduate colleges, engineer anything like racial proportionality is by
00:29:17.760 having completely different admission standards. As I said, for medical schools, black and Hispanic students
00:29:25.840 are admitted with an academic profile that would be automatically disqualifying if presented by whites and
00:29:32.240 Asians. There's no overlap. That's true for most graduate programs. And it is true to a certain extent,
00:29:41.600 there's some overlap at undergraduates. But this is not a, this is not a beneficial policy
00:29:48.320 to its alleged beneficiaries. Because if you admit students who are not competitively qualified
00:29:54.880 academically, they're going to struggle. This would apply to sex as well. If MIT were to admit me because
00:30:02.320 it decides it needs more females, and let's say on an 800 point scale for math SATs, I scored 650 on my math
00:30:15.600 SATs out of 800. And I'm admitted to MIT with students who would have been admitted not because of their sex,
00:30:23.520 but because of their academic qualifications. And most of my peers have perfect math scores. They're,
00:30:29.600 they're up to 800 on their math SATs. I am going to struggle mightily. I'm not going to be able to keep
00:30:36.640 up in my classes, because the teaching is pitched to the average, which is not me. The same applies
00:30:44.160 to blacks and Hispanics. And, and that is part of the reason, in addition to the diversity bureaucracy, why
00:30:50.400 black students go around saying, oh, we're the victims of racism, we feel like we're in a hostile
00:30:55.920 environment. A large part of that sense comes from the fact that they have been unfairly and cruelly
00:31:04.000 catapulted by these damn admissions officers into academic settings for which they're not qualified.
00:31:11.280 They would be qualified to go to a school with, they share their, their academic qualifications
00:31:17.360 for their students. Just as if I had a 650 on my math SAT, there'd be lots of schools I'd be qualified
00:31:23.680 for. I'm just not qualified for MIT. Right. That's a, and that's a huge issue for the Ivy League,
00:31:31.360 for example. And they have made decisions that are theirs. And at some point we're going to see that
00:31:38.480 resolve. But it's when we're talking about the, the ethnicity, the race of the students and how they
00:31:46.640 correlate to test scores, and then how they would correlate to admissions to the very top universities
00:31:53.200 in the country. Those same universities are bringing in Chinese students from in gobs. They have, in fact,
00:32:02.800 created institutions, Confucius, uh, uh, institutes, uh, to accommodate, uh, uh, their, uh, their,
00:32:12.160 their, their, their homeland, uh, and their reach back, uh, to that homeland. Uh, but that means that
00:32:19.680 there are American Asian students who are being crowded out by that globalist view, which is denying
00:32:27.680 opportunity, uh, to American students. It's that straightforward. And when you talk about
00:32:33.840 proportionality versus merit, uh, the idea of proportionality is something that has to work
00:32:40.880 out in a free society. Not all have the same opportunity, but we are obliged to give free
00:32:47.840 opportunity, uh, as best we can, uh, to American students to do what they can with the talents they
00:32:54.560 possess, uh, and their circumstance and devil take the hindmost, you know, they're, they're going to
00:33:01.360 win in this society at some point, but they're going to win up to their level, uh, of competence and
00:33:07.200 skill, uh, and adroitness, uh, in our society. Don't you think? I would be completely objective
00:33:17.120 in my college admissions. I would simply go down the scale on the, on the objective
00:33:25.280 tests of academic skills. So if the top schools are all Asian and Jews, so be it. I do not buy the
00:33:33.040 idea that, oh, Asians are somehow boring. As far as I know, many that I know are not only math whizzes,
00:33:38.880 they're also whizzes at the violin and the piano. Um, but you know, as far as taking a lot of foreign
00:33:46.400 students, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I don't understand where this thing came
00:33:50.000 from about Asians being boring. I, what does that mean? Oh, really? Oh, that's, that's what,
00:33:55.200 that's what Harvard says. That's why that's Harvard's excuse for, for the fact that it, it, uh, has
00:34:03.440 much, much fewer Asians than would be predicted by their, by their academic qualifications.
00:34:10.400 Oh, it's a rational. I see. It's a rationalization for their, uh, proportional representation, or at
00:34:16.800 least the, uh, the assemblage of a student body that represents what they want. But you can talk
00:34:23.920 to admissions officers who will say that, oh, these Asians, they're all, they're all cookie cutter.
00:34:29.360 They all look alike and they don't have the social skills. You may not have heard this,
00:34:34.240 but this is, this is something I'm sad to say. Believe me, I am not, I am not adopting this. I'm,
00:34:40.880 I'm pushing back against it, Lou, but, but it is definitely, uh, uh, um, a, a viewpoint that
00:34:49.760 is expressed in academic circles. What could be more, what could be more, uh, fair, uh, and more, uh,
00:34:59.440 obliging of American standards than to say point blank, the highest scores, the highest levels of
00:35:08.400 talent will be admitted, uh, to fight it out. Uh, and we will provide universities and colleges just
00:35:15.920 as we have for all of you, uh, in whatever the, you know, the quadrants would be in the SET score,
00:35:22.640 uh, your, uh, your, your grade scores and, you know, your class ranking, whatever that may be,
00:35:28.800 or, or your extracurricular skills. Uh, you know, I, I'm not even sure. I think that extracurricular
00:35:35.040 skills should matter much, uh, in making that decision, but that, you know, I'm not an expert
00:35:40.080 in education or sociology, but I, I would agree with you. Why not have meritocracies?
00:35:47.280 Lou, can we, you and I form a college because you're the only person I've ever met that
00:35:53.120 agrees with me 100% and I agree with you 100% on this. You are absolutely in the minority. However,
00:36:02.000 you are absolutely correct. The nauseating self-importance of these academic admissions
00:36:11.920 officers who think that they're crafting this utopian community of a little bit of,
00:36:18.720 you know, math skill, and then a little bit of, of Arkansas hayseed here and, and some musical skill
00:36:26.960 there and then some cooking interest there. They see themselves as playing this somehow divine role
00:36:34.000 that is so pretentious. I completely agree. You go down the SAT score. It would, all it would do,
00:36:43.360 the same number of people would be going to college. There would be a place for everybody in a college,
00:36:50.880 but it would be immaculately fair and it would reward the thing that should matter most, which is
00:36:58.960 dedication to learning and knowledge and, and being able to master how language works to think
00:37:06.960 quantitatively. And, and the idea that that would somehow lend itself to boringness at the top, which,
00:37:14.480 again, you may not have heard that, but that's one of the arguments against a purely objective
00:37:20.800 admission system is that, oh, these classes would just be so much, they would just be boring and, and
00:37:26.320 they'd just be a bunch of wonks. Wrong. That is, we, we created the SATs. We created colorblind, objective,
00:37:36.320 standardized testing in order to get away from prejudice and narrowness and the idea that only
00:37:46.640 the WASP elite should be attending the Ivy League schools. And we said, no, we want to blow this system
00:37:53.760 up and open it up to talent in whatever shape, color, and size it comes. And now we've turned around and say
00:38:02.400 that the SATs are the problem and that they are racist simply because not all groups score equally
00:38:11.360 well on them. But let us return to pure meritocracy, take the subjective human factor out, and for God's
00:38:20.240 sakes, take the race and sex preferences out because those help nobody and they only serve to widen divisions
00:38:29.600 and, and, and remove people from the understanding that the best way forward is their own individual
00:38:38.640 effort. And, and that sounds like America to me. It really does. Uh, the, and to look at this business,
00:38:48.480 what's happening in business with ESG, all of the concerns about environment and social programs and,
00:38:55.200 and governance, uh, this is, uh, we have a, we have a horrible, huge, monumental, uh, condition right
00:39:06.240 now that is going to be fatal to American business. I'm afraid because they have forgotten that they
00:39:11.680 wanted to be competitive. Let's see. They've gotten rid of, over the course of time, they got rid of
00:39:16.560 pensions because that made corporate America, uh, uncompetitive. Uh, they've gotten rid of healthcare,
00:39:24.400 uh, in, in most cases, uh, that was, uh, you know, uh, absolutely the best in the world, uh, for,
00:39:32.080 for their employees. They've adopted new systems because it was not competitive. They want to get
00:39:38.080 rid of social security. They want to get rid of Medicare, whatever you want to talk about.
00:39:41.920 In point of fact, corporate America right now is aligned with the Marxist left and we are headed
00:39:49.920 toward a suffocating, uh, destination, uh, if we permit it. And I don't know what the countervailing
00:39:57.840 influence is now, uh, to massive corporate power in our political system, as well as our economy,
00:40:04.640 when the unions, which were once, which were once a, uh, countervailing, uh, influence, uh,
00:40:11.840 are no more really your thoughts. It's just a decadence. We are a very decadent society. Uh,
00:40:19.840 capitalism has been so powerful. The free market has been so powerful. We have created prosperity
00:40:27.520 that would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. We became so prosperous in the 1950s
00:40:34.320 that for the first time in human history, adolescents, teenagers had their own spending
00:40:41.440 power granted on them by their parents who had enough money sloshing around to give their kids
00:40:48.160 their own credit cards or bank accounts. That was a fatal, uh, turn for the worse because then you had
00:40:56.240 the rise of youth culture and, and one of the important ways in which teenagers and adolescents
00:41:05.040 declared themselves free of parental authority because now you have corporations catering to these
00:41:12.800 idiots, these absolute idiots, whether through music or, or clothing or art. Um, and nobody a hundred
00:41:22.800 years ago would have imagined that a 14 year old, a 12 year old, a 15 year old would go out there and be
00:41:30.800 spending, have his own purchasing power. So it is now decadent for corporations to say that, that price
00:41:40.400 signals should no longer should no longer be determinative, that we should be playing around with
00:41:46.000 shareholder money to engage in, uh, political crusades that are tendentious, but at, at the very
00:41:55.600 least are not universally held. And that, that is for people outside of the marketplace to engage in.
00:42:05.840 If you want to be a, a family corporation and, and decide to give up your market competitiveness
00:42:16.080 by narrowing the types of supply chains you're going to use, okay, that's fine. But if it's a,
00:42:22.080 a publicly traded owned and owned company, really your, your obligation is to be the very best you can
00:42:30.720 in the market to, to bring goods to market, to master the complexities, challenges, risks of supply
00:42:40.480 chains, of trying to predict demand. These are noble enterprises. Nobody in business should ever have to
00:42:48.960 to apologize for the pursuit of success. And it's not just profit, but the, the pursuit of being the
00:42:59.040 best you can in your field, that, that activity of free trade, of people exchanging their goods and
00:43:08.560 services through the signaling of prices, has lifted the world out of poverty in ways that nobody ever would
00:43:18.800 have thought possible. And I'm pleased to tell you that Gallup, giving us a poll on Central and South
00:43:26.480 America, 242 million people want to come to, want to migrate. Most of them, I presume to the United
00:43:36.160 States. We brought in four to six million people in the first two years of the Biden administration.
00:43:42.400 No one knows where they are, what they do, how they're being provided for their circumstances
00:43:47.560 or location. We are looking at quite an experiment here now, as we watch governance of this country
00:43:58.160 absolutely dissolve. Your reaction?
00:44:01.320 Listen, as I said in the beginning, it is not hate speech to say that every country has borders,
00:44:11.000 and that the people who should be deciding about demographic inflows are the people living in that
00:44:18.280 country, its citizens, not those living outside. Right now, our immigration policy is not decided by
00:44:25.800 Americans, it's decided by non-Americans in their unimpeded efforts to get into the country. We could be facing
00:44:38.360 the end of America because culture matters. If we take the entire third world into this country with
00:44:47.800 people that have not been schooled in constitutional traditions in respect for, I hate to say it,
00:44:56.600 the rule of law and free speech when we're losing it so fast here, but the bourgeois values of personal
00:45:05.080 responsibility, you know, it's bad enough right now with the elites tearing down our historical values,
00:45:16.360 but it can get a lot worse. And we will torpedo the historical character of this country forevermore.
00:45:27.000 If we do not get control over our borders and have complete bright line rules, we are not obligated to
00:45:36.040 take in everybody across the globe who wants to come here. The countries that are sending us
00:45:42.120 their unwanted population, they do not take everybody in. It is an absolute
00:45:52.920 uncontroversial proposition in most of the world that nations mean something and that there is sovereignty
00:46:03.640 and there's popular sovereignty. And our white guilt is so massive in this country that we believe that
00:46:13.640 it is somehow illegitimate and racist to say we are going to police our borders and we're going to choose
00:46:23.000 our immigrants, if at all, on the basis of the traits that they can bring, on the skills they can bring.
00:46:30.440 And if they're not bringing skills that we need, or if their cultures are incompatible with our own,
00:46:38.200 we do not have to admit them.
00:46:40.440 Absolutely not. Just as Joe Biden has made it clear, he's resurrecting the North America Union concept.
00:46:48.040 And that now is the effort of Manuel Lopez Obrador, the head of the President of Mexico,
00:46:54.600 and good old Prime Minister Trudeau, the boy genius of Canada, along with, of course, the puppet
00:47:02.200 President Joe Biden. You can imagine what a witch's brew that North American Union would make with those
00:47:08.280 three, with the spoons to stir. I want to just conclude here, if I may, and it's really more of an
00:47:20.200 interruption. I hope you'll look at it that way, because I'd love for you to come back soon to
00:47:24.440 continue this discussion. But we're also looking at the foreign influence when it comes to our own
00:47:30.920 constitutional values, and that is the Vice President of the European Union saying at Davos, of course,
00:47:39.960 that the days of the Wild West of free speech are over, and made it clear that there will be penalties,
00:47:46.120 even in the United States, for hate speech, for limits to our idea of hate speech,
00:47:54.200 about as un-American as you can get it. Your thoughts?
00:47:58.840 Well, I think Americans are utterly ignorant about how precious and unique the First Amendment is. It is
00:48:07.640 the case that in European countries, they are much more open to censoring ideas. Germany,
00:48:18.440 you can understand it without necessarily justifying it. They have been so bludgeoned into, you know,
00:48:24.920 ongoing, continual, unremitting, and, and, and unpurgeable guilt about World War II and Hitler and,
00:48:34.040 and his crusades and the Holocaust, that they don't feel any qualms about banning speech that they find
00:48:43.640 connected. But their definitions now of, of hate speech or pro-Nazi speech are, as you would expect,
00:48:51.560 because every government, every, every leader in human history wants more power, and he wants to
00:48:58.520 silence his enemies. And so Germany has been using its hate speech censorship laws to try to put out of
00:49:05.720 business one of the, one, what was the most important opposition parties, the Alternative for Deutschland,
00:49:13.800 the AFD, AFD. And, and so Europe is saying to us, you're going to become like us, and they're right.
00:49:25.800 That is what is happening. We are losing that bright line between what used to be America's defining
00:49:33.000 characteristic, which is the understanding that JS Mill expressed so eloquently, which is the
00:49:40.920 understanding of the marketplace of ideas. If there's an idea that you find repugnant and wrong,
00:49:48.760 the solution is not to suppress and censor that idea. It is to battle it out, duke it out in the
00:49:56.840 marketplace of ideas and, and see who's right. See who can make the best case for the rightness of
00:50:04.360 his position. If you censor ideas, uh, you're likely to keep them going underground. Um, and you're showing that
00:50:14.840 you have no faith in your own ideas. You're, you're using illegitimate power, uh, to avoid
00:50:23.000 engaging in debate. And until maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, that debate was the American way. It was
00:50:33.640 commonly understood among liberals and leftists. I mean, for God's sakes, the, it, it used to be that it
00:50:39.640 was more of the, the liberals in the left who were defending freedom of speech. And there were
00:50:45.960 conservative and Republican efforts to shut it down in the past. And now it's completely reversed.
00:50:53.320 And, and we have groups like the ACLU in, in various chapters, adopting this pernicious and
00:51:00.360 completely unhistorical and unconstitutional idea of hate speech as something that is an exception
00:51:07.560 to the first amendment protection of all speech. There is no constitutional exception for hate
00:51:12.840 speech. Hate speech is a totally malleable, totally politicized concept. The left uses it now to cover
00:51:20.280 everything that violates its orthodoxies. And we just have to say to the EU and Davos and, and, and Schwab,
00:51:29.000 sorry, uh, you can do your thing, but we believe that the best, uh, solution and weapon against
00:51:38.360 illegitimate power is freedom of speech. Frederick Douglass understood that. He said the auction block
00:51:45.000 and slave chains could not survive five years of freedom of speech if we could actually publish the
00:51:52.200 truth about slavery in this country. And he was right. Absolutely right. And, uh, as is Heather
00:52:00.280 McDonald nearly always, Heather, we thank you very much for being with us. And, uh, we always give,
00:52:06.280 uh, our guests the last word. I know that you've got a new book coming out and if I might, uh, might ask,
00:52:13.720 uh, perhaps use this one, but also to tell us about this new book that you have coming out.
00:52:18.920 Well, thank you so much, Lou. I appreciate it. It's called When Race Trumps Merit. It's available
00:52:25.160 for pre-order on Amazon on February 6th, uh, and it'll be in bookstores in April. And it, it touches
00:52:33.400 on many of the themes we talked about today, Lou, which is the fact that we are tearing down our
00:52:39.240 meritocracy in the name of diversity, in the name of equity. We are failing to, to defend, uh,
00:52:47.400 high civilizational standards, high behavioral standards. You can see it happening in the
00:52:52.440 criminal law. The reason that we're not prosecuting, the reason that police are not arresting,
00:52:57.000 the reason that we're not incarcerating, uh, is because of this dangerous idea of disparate impact.
00:53:03.560 And we need to get back to colorblind standards and say, we're going to expect people to live up to
00:53:10.360 academic achievement. We're going to expect them to live up to, uh, uh, high following the law,
00:53:17.720 obeying the law. We're not going to have two sets of laws based on color. And, and so it's a call
00:53:24.520 for America to return to what were its founding principles, principles that granted we violated
00:53:31.800 for far too long and with far too much cruelty. But now we are within spitting distance of reaching
00:53:38.840 and, and, and we should all put aside this phony concept of diversity and simply support, uh,
00:53:46.600 and, and, and strive for merit and excellence and achievement.
00:53:50.760 Thank you very much, Heather. Great to have you here. A wonderful discussion. Come back soon, would you?
00:53:56.280 I would love to. Thank you so much, Lou. Bye-bye.
00:53:59.560 Heather McDonald, great American. Thanks everybody for being with us today. And please join us here tomorrow.
00:54:05.720 Congressman Troy Nels is our guest. God bless you. And God bless America.