The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 467. Plagiarized by Harvard's President

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00:01:30.200 Hello, everybody. I'm speaking today with Dr. Carol Swain. Dr. Swain was a professor of political science

00:01:39.480 and professor of law at Vanderbilt and also worked at Princeton. Now, she came from a backwoods family,

00:01:47.660 12 kids, mother in some distress, dropped out of school when she was in grade eight, then

00:01:55.520 got, went back to get her GED, then a two-year community college degree, then a four-year degree.

00:02:01.340 She stacked up five degrees and ended up with a very stellar academic career. She's published or

00:02:12.880 edited 12 books, including one that's been cited by the Supreme Court three times. Very solid person

00:02:20.600 from an academic perspective. Why is she interesting? Well, she's interesting for all those reasons,

00:02:26.300 but she's also interesting because she happens to be black and she also happens to be the target of

00:02:35.340 plagiarism by Claudine Gay at Harvard University. Now, you may remember that Claudine Gay was the last

00:02:40.320 president of Harvard University and was asked to step down, not least because of the revelation of her

00:02:49.220 proclivity, pronounced proclivity for plagiarism. And one of the major sources that

00:02:55.860 Gay relied on was Carol Swain. And so we're going to talk about that. Join us.

00:03:04.620 Well, Dr. Swain, thank you very much for agreeing to speak today to me and to everybody who's watching

00:03:10.800 and listening. I guess we should probably start with a little bit of description about who you are

00:03:16.440 and where you came from, what you're doing.

00:03:18.300 Well, everything about me and the positions I take in the world, I know it's rooted in where I came

00:03:27.060 from. And I was one of 12 children born and raised in rural poverty in southwestern Virginia. I spent the

00:03:35.560 early part of my life in a two-room shack with no indoor plumbing. I dropped out of school after

00:03:41.260 completing the eighth grade, married at age 16. And then in my early 20s, I earned a GED, which is a

00:03:51.440 high school equivalency, went to a community college, got the first of five degrees. I graduated in 1983

00:03:59.340 with a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude. I never intended to become a university professor.

00:04:05.900 I struggled with shyness most of my life and people came into my life. They steered me and I

00:04:14.320 became a professor, but it's not something that I ever saw happening for myself. Many of those people

00:04:21.120 were white men, white professors who encouraged me. They never treated me like a victim, but I grew up

00:04:29.460 at a time in America where we were told, if you worked hard and got an education, you could make

00:04:36.580 something out of yourself.

00:04:38.520 So let's delve into that a bit more. So that's quite a twisty journey, that's for sure. You were

00:04:45.540 married at 16 and you went back to college at 23. Is that right, 23? Had you had children by then?

00:04:51.840 I think I probably was 23 when I went to the four-year college, but I had my first child at 17.

00:05:03.400 And so in my early 20s, I had three children. One died of a crib death, the sudden infant death

00:05:13.440 syndrome. And I struggled with depression, suicide gestures. And it was a medical doctor

00:05:21.000 who turns out to have been Catholic. He was five years older than me. He was the first person

00:05:28.600 to tell me that I was intelligent, I was attractive, I could do more with my life.

00:05:33.460 And based on his encouragement, I earned my high school equivalency because I remembered that when

00:05:39.540 I was in school, that I did really well. And later, there was an African orderly from Sierra Leone,

00:05:46.080 a Muslim who told me that he attended college with a lot of people who were not as smart as I was,

00:05:53.040 ought to go to college. And so those two people helped change my life. But along the way, I came

00:05:59.780 through the educational system at a time after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed. And so there was

00:06:08.760 recruitment of talented minorities with the emphasis on talented minorities. And I benefited from an

00:06:18.640 environment that I was intelligent, I worked hard, I caught people's attention. And when I earned my

00:06:25.160 bachelor's degree at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, graduating magna cum laude, I was working

00:06:31.000 full-time nights and weekends at the community college library. And so I don't have a lot of sympathy

00:06:37.620 for this DEI and all this stuff about minorities. I can't do because I know what I did do.

00:06:44.700 Right. Well, it certainly seems like you came from, well, you might say almost an archetypally

00:06:50.440 unlikely background, right? Poor, multi-children, no, no, you said no running water, no indoor plumbing.

00:06:58.340 Right.

00:06:59.300 Married very early, very early children. Okay, so here's a question for you. You had these two guys,

00:07:05.300 you talked about this physician and you talked about this Muslim gentleman who saw something in

00:07:12.420 you and then encouraged you. Okay, so first question might be, what do you think they saw in

00:07:19.380 you and how did they see it? And then the second question would be, why did you believe what they

00:07:24.920 told you when it was encouraging and complimentary, right? So there's two mysteries. They saw something

00:07:31.100 in you, but you also obviously decided to, what, take a big risk. Now, you said you remembered that

00:07:39.300 you had done well in school. So you had that going for you, right? You sort of had that in your back

00:07:43.920 pocket. But it's easy to brush off encouragement, you know? And I mean, you had every reason, as far as

00:07:50.140 I can tell, to presume that, well, there's just no way you could do it. That was beyond you. It was too

00:07:55.580 late. You already had children. That time had gone. Like, there's a million rationalizations that you

00:08:01.060 could have used instead of going to get your GED and then going to community college. So why did you do

00:08:06.660 it? Well, first of all, my mother would say that I was different from her other children, that I was

00:08:12.780 always serious. But as a child, I had a sense of urgency. And I also felt like that I had been dropped

00:08:22.660 from outer space. And I was watching my family like a participant observer. My mother said I would

00:08:29.740 hide behind furniture because I was terribly shy. And I would peer out at people. But I had a sense

00:08:36.400 of urgency and was very serious, but then ended up, you know, feeling trapped, getting married, not

00:08:45.060 because I was pregnant, because I saw that as a way out. And I had, during the time that I was a child,

00:08:55.560 we missed a lot of school. One year, my siblings and I missed 80 of 180 school days. And that had to do

00:09:02.980 with the weather being bad. We didn't have proper clothes or shoes. And so we stayed home until the snow

00:09:10.060 melted. We all failed. And I recently noticed, as I was trying to work on a memoir, that I failed

00:09:18.320 three times in elementary school. But we could, my older sister and I could miss, you know, two weeks

00:09:24.280 of school, come in and make an A or B on a test. And so I remembered that I was smart at one time, but I

00:09:32.460 had forgotten until this medical doctor who happened to be white, who was five years older

00:09:40.800 than me. And I didn't know that at the time, but we have reacquainted in the last five years.

00:09:46.400 He remembered me. He said he always wondered what happened to me. He was not on social media,

00:09:52.540 and he obviously was not watching conservative news.

00:09:56.580 Right. Okay. So you remembered that you had done well in school and your first step was to take

00:10:04.440 the GED. And how long did it take you? That was, you had to make up four years. You said you stopped

00:10:09.740 in grade eight. You had to make up four years. And so how long did it take you to get your GED? And

00:10:15.140 how did you manage to persist? And also, did you have support around you? Like, was your husband

00:10:20.580 supportive? Was your family supportive? Did you have people who were also encouraging you apart from

00:10:25.160 these two gentlemen? Well, I can tell you that most people say if they didn't know it was a true

00:10:29.740 story, that they would not believe it. But with the GED, I studied a book at home, and I was told that

00:10:38.400 I had one of the high scores that they had seen. But in math, I barely passed. I was in the 34th

00:10:47.160 percentile. And if I had been in the 32nd percentile, I would have failed the math portion. And in

00:10:54.940 graduate school and doing my time at the community college, math and statistics, that was a challenge.

00:11:02.080 But I took media math at the community college. And as far as people who encouraged me,

00:11:12.120 certainly when I reached the community college, there were plenty of encouragers. But I never sought

00:11:18.120 to become a university professor. My first degree was in a business. I wanted to be an artist.

00:11:24.260 Yes, I have art talent. But I was told to be practical. And I can tell you one thing that

00:11:29.460 made me different, I think, than a lot of young people. Sometimes I run into people that are wired

00:11:35.980 the way I was, is that if there was an authority figure that gave me advice, I was prone to follow

00:11:44.440 the advice. And so if they told me that it was not practical to do art, I chose business. And that

00:11:51.260 was more challenging. But I ended up getting my two-year degree in business in two years. And then

00:11:57.720 for the bachelor's degree, it was criminal justice, because I love those courses, and political science

00:12:04.980 for the master's and PhD. And then later, I went to law school for a one-year program at Yale.

00:12:12.800 And I never, again, sought to become a university professor. My motivator was to be able to get a

00:12:21.640 good job so I could support my family. I had been in bad marriages, and I saw an opportunity that if I

00:12:29.300 got educated, I did try to distinguish myself. I made a decision to be an honor student at

00:12:36.640 Roanoke College. And I studied, I purchased and checked out books on how to make A's in college,

00:12:45.060 how to do essay exams. And I also watched how other people dressed. And I had people comment that I was

00:12:51.620 dressed inappropriately for a student. I was dressing like a professor as a student, because I was watching

00:12:57.620 other people trying to figure out what they were doing. And so if I, my successes had a lot to do

00:13:03.500 with, I've had great mentors over the course of my life. And even now, I have mentors. I don't think

00:13:10.160 you get too old to have a mentor. All right. So you finished your two-year degree in business, and then

00:13:16.680 you were pursuing criminal justice, and then political science and law. When did the idea, I remember,

00:13:24.020 you know, when I decided to go to graduate school, this was at the University of Alberta,

00:13:28.540 where our tracks parallel each other to some degree in terms of our age. And, you know, when I went to

00:13:34.560 graduate school, when I started considering graduate school, I didn't know anyone who had ever gone to

00:13:38.780 graduate school. And so it was quite a mystery to me, the whole situation. And I started to associate

00:13:44.420 a little bit with a psychology lab at my last year at the University of Alberta. I guess that would be

00:13:50.480 in 1983. And that's when I formulated the ambition to pursue a graduate degree. You finished your

00:14:03.020 business degree and then your four-year bachelor's. How did you come across the idea of going off to do

00:14:10.640 graduate work? And then maybe you could wind in the story about your mentors as well and describe

00:14:17.180 exactly, you know, what role they played and why they were important. It's really important to have

00:14:21.580 guidance, you know? Like, when I went to graduate school, I had a superb advisor. Like, he was

00:14:27.620 everything I could hope for. He was a really good administrator. He knew the literature extremely

00:14:31.480 broadly. He was very, very encouraging. Like, we worked together like clockwork. And it was,

00:14:36.460 I still work with him. It's 40 years later. Like, we had a great relationship. Super important. So

00:14:41.420 how did you develop the idea that you should go to graduate school? And how did you get the confidence

00:14:46.940 up to do that? Because he also said that you had to overcome shyness. And what role did your mentors

00:14:52.080 play in that? Well, first, I have to tell you that I wanted to be a store manager at the mall. I applied

00:14:59.080 for jobs after I earned my two-year degree. And I was told I needed a four-year degree. And I knew that I

00:15:05.560 needed to distinguish myself. And so I chose criminal justice because it was filled with

00:15:11.800 courses, interdisciplinary courses that I thought I would do well in. And I did. And so that's how I

00:15:17.700 chose criminal justice. And while I was getting my bachelor's degree, I started getting letters from

00:15:25.960 colleges and universities. And my advisor, it turns out he was a conservative. He exposed me to Glenn

00:15:32.620 Lowry, Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, Edward Banfield's work. And I was, by the time I was

00:15:41.600 graduating with the four-year degree, I knew I didn't want a criminal justice career. I went to

00:15:47.560 Virginia Tech thinking that I would work for the government. Like a lot of other Black people, I

00:15:52.880 would get a job with the federal government. While I was there, my professors, and they were

00:15:58.680 progressives, they really pushed me by saying that there was a critical need for Black professors.

00:16:06.120 If you can become a professor, you should become one. I was not interested. This was the 1980s. And

00:16:12.880 you may recall the 1983-84, we had a recession. I could not get a job. And that's why I applied to

00:16:21.180 graduate school. And the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill immediately admitted me.

00:16:29.040 They gave me a generous stipend, which I believe was like $11,000, which was a lot of money back in

00:16:35.900 the 1980s. And that's how I got to graduate school. But at Virginia Tech, the mentoring was important.

00:16:44.520 I started giving conference papers and being exposed to academia. But actually, pursuing a PhD and

00:16:55.400 becoming a professor was something that I followed that path when I was not able to get a job.

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00:18:37.900 Right, okay, okay. So now, a couple of things to delve into there. So you said that when you were

00:18:46.980 doing your two-year degree and then your four-year degree, that you were also working full-time.

00:18:54.100 And you said that you were learning how to be a student and reading about how to do that and

00:18:59.120 watching other people and dressing up, essentially. And so how much time per week do you suppose

00:19:07.760 you were working, let's say, in the third year of your four-year degree, if you totaled up the amount

00:19:13.760 of classes you were taking, the studying you were doing, and the job that you had? How many hours a

00:19:19.360 day do you think you were putting in that were, you know, actual work? And then for how long?

00:19:25.480 Well, for at least three years at Ronald College, I worked nights and weekends,

00:19:30.460 and it was in circulation in the library. And I confess, not many people use the library

00:19:37.760 nights and weekends. So it was a perfect job for a student.

00:19:41.420 Oh, yes. Okay.

00:19:42.100 And so I went to school during the daytime. I was working in circulation during the evening,

00:19:49.340 and I was able to get my schoolwork done. And so that's how I graduated magna cum laude.

00:19:55.440 It's not that I was some genius, but I was very focused on, I needed to distinguish myself.

00:20:01.620 And I'm not stupid. I knew that as a Black person, that if I excelled, that I would be rewarded for that.

00:20:09.480 And sure enough, you know, my first semester, it's like everyone knew my name at that small

00:20:15.980 liberal arts college that was predominantly white because I had distinguished myself. And when I

00:20:23.220 think about race, my race has advantaged me, I would say, more than it's disadvantaged me,

00:20:31.020 certainly once I reached college. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that I've always tried

00:20:36.460 to distinguish myself. I've had great mentors, and those mentors did not look like me. In fact,

00:20:43.060 my advisor is and was a Republican. I didn't know that. But when I started college, I was met by the

00:20:51.600 Black students who were already there. They gave me the list of racist professors. He was at the top

00:20:57.340 of the list. And I'm the kind of person, you throw that in the gauntlet. So they told me he was racist.

00:21:04.200 I signed up for his class first because I knew that if I could impress him, that would make a

00:21:11.760 difference. The professor was not racist, but he had high standards, and we're friends today.

00:21:18.680 Okay, so two questions still. Now, you know, you said that you were very shy. And so, but when you

00:21:30.220 were in college, you were at conferences giving academic papers. And so, what did you, how did you

00:21:37.120 manage your shyness? And then also, how did you become disciplined and able to work so diligently and

00:21:44.900 to focus? You said a little bit of that was there when you were a kid. You were a serious kid.

00:21:49.240 You had a sense of urgency. So, likely have a temperamental tilt in that direction. But,

00:21:54.660 you know, you worked very hard to get your GED and your degrees. And so, how did you learn to work?

00:22:02.540 And how did you overcome your shyness?

00:22:05.420 Well, when I was an undergraduate, as you know, most professors will set aside 10% for class

00:22:12.200 participation. And I wanted to earn that 10%. So, I would write out a question or I'd write out a

00:22:18.980 comment and I would raise my hand shaking and I would read my comment or ask my question. That's

00:22:26.020 how I got the class participation. And when it came to conferences or whenever I had to speak,

00:22:32.480 I over-prepared. Like today, you know, I can do things off the cuff, but back then I tried to write

00:22:38.580 out everything I was going to say. And I was not really, I would say, delivered of that shyness

00:22:46.740 until I was in my 40s. So, most of my life I have been shy. I also would like for you to know that

00:22:53.120 it wasn't just the doctor and the orderly who told me, you know, that I was talented. At least

00:23:01.260 three times in my life, I had complete strangers come up to me in my early 20s, late teens. And

00:23:08.160 they said, you're going to be famous someday. Do you know you're going to be famous? And there was

00:23:13.500 nothing, nothing I was doing at the time that it made any sense. Yeah. Well, there's no shortage

00:23:21.820 of strange things about life. So, you said you were delivered of your shyness about when you were 40.

00:23:27.100 So, in your 40s. So, why did you persevere? And how did you learn to speak off the cuff? And how did

00:23:35.120 it come about that you were delivered of your shyness? Before I get to that, I want to tell you

00:23:40.080 that I took psychology courses and usually made an A. I had great fear in my early 20s that I was

00:23:49.640 suffering from delusions of grandeur because I never fit where I was. And I had no idea

00:23:57.040 that I would go to college or I would become, you know, the person that I am today. And so, that

00:24:03.800 is a part of what happened, part of my background. But the other part of it is, you asked me,

00:24:14.380 how did I overcome the shyness? Yep.

00:24:17.040 I had, after I earned my tenure at Princeton, I earned early tenure on the basis of my book,

00:24:24.980 Black Faces, Black Interests, The Representation of African Americans in Congress. It was my first

00:24:29.920 book. It's the one that won three national prizes, was cited by the Supreme Court. It's the book that

00:24:35.220 Claudine Gaye plagiarized and used as a straw man for her own research. After that, the early tenure,

00:24:44.020 the prize is, I was very disillusioned. Like, I had worked so hard, like, nights. I had worked

00:24:51.140 without taking off breaks during the summers. I can remember doing everything I had to do in the day,

00:24:57.600 going back to work and being there, working overnight when the cleaning crew came in.

00:25:02.600 And I was so obsessed with getting early tenure. And I got my early tenure, but then I was disillusioned.

00:25:09.020 And I really didn't fit at Princeton. And I guess I would never fit in the Ivy League because

00:25:16.860 once I was hired and I received a signing bonus and I was a hot shot, then when I looked around

00:25:24.680 at the other people who were at the table, they spoke in these long paragraphs. And like,

00:25:30.380 if they were going to ask a question, if they were going to take someone down,

00:25:34.660 they had a particular way of speaking that was foreign to me. Like, if I was going to ask a

00:25:39.860 question, I tend to be very direct. I go straight. But I noticed the way they argued and I was miserable

00:25:47.360 and that sort of set in motion a spiritual journey. And I can say that spiritually, I was always a seeker.

00:25:55.120 I studied New Age, Eastern religion, and I had a Christian conversion experience.

00:26:02.020 I became a divine Christian believer in 1999, but it was a journey before I had this,

00:26:10.620 the culmination. And it was like I was delivered instantly from my shyness. And I would argue that

00:26:18.160 it's like, I would say God impressed on my mind that he had given me a message bigger than me

00:26:25.000 and that I should focus on the message. And when I thought about my shyness, I was always

00:26:30.460 embarrassed by my Southern accent. I was embarrassed that people could tell that I came from poverty.

00:26:38.040 And all of that kept me silent. I was embarrassed that I make grammatical mistakes at times.

00:26:43.600 All those things worked to keep me silent. But when I realized I only had to please God,

00:26:49.080 it didn't matter what other people thought. I've been talking ever since without really caring what

00:26:57.860 people think. I try to be careful. I try to speak truth. But at the end of the day,

00:27:04.060 I'm not going to lose sleep if I make a mistake or someone laughs at me. That's their problem.

00:27:09.580 It reminds me of the scene in Exodus. When Moses becomes a leader, he goes off the beaten path and

00:27:19.160 follows the call of the burning bush. And he focuses intently and follows his interest and

00:27:26.240 delves further and further into the mystery that's caught his attention. And eventually,

00:27:32.740 God himself speaks to him and tells him that he has to become a leader. He has to lead

00:27:38.060 his people away from slavery and he has to stand up to the tyrant. And Moses said,

00:27:43.500 says, I can't do that because I'm not a good speaker. No one knows what his problem was precisely.

00:27:51.220 But Moses certainly believed that he didn't have the talent or the ability to say what he was being

00:27:56.700 called upon to say. And God's response to that is twofold. The first part of the response is

00:28:04.240 something like, well, that's your problem. And just because you have inadequacies or idiosyncrasies,

00:28:10.240 that doesn't alleviate you of your destiny or your moral responsibility. So no excuses. Thank you

00:28:17.520 very much. And then the second part of it is he tells him to ally with his brother Aaron,

00:28:22.760 who can be his political voice. And the idea there is something like, well, you might be called upon

00:28:28.840 to do something in all likelihood and your conscience might impel you in that direction,

00:28:33.940 but you don't necessarily have to do it alone. Like you can find people around you who fill in,

00:28:39.280 you know, your gaps. Now, you said that you had quite a lengthy process of seeking

00:28:46.660 through the new age realm, through comparative religion, let's say, and that you ended up with

00:28:53.220 a Christian conversion in 1999. Why do you think your seeking led you to Christianity per se? Do you

00:29:01.500 have any idea about that? Well, you know, I'm Black, I'm a Southerner, and most Southerners are

00:29:08.920 Christians. And the people around me were either Baptists or Methodists. My family, they were Methodists.

00:29:15.580 And when I watched them, the way they lived their lives, they did not have anything that was attractive

00:29:24.060 to me. And so, I mean, I explored with Jehovah's Witnesses. I was all over the place. I was always

00:29:33.180 very spiritual. I always knew that there was something larger than me guiding my life, but I was

00:29:38.840 not ready to say, you know, this is Jesus Christ. You know, this is, I believe one God, many paths. And I

00:29:46.380 believed that for a long time, but I knew that I was different. I knew that I was set aside. And I knew that

00:29:52.860 things happened for me that didn't happen for other people. But I can say, in a way, I went back to my roots.

00:30:01.800 My great-grandfather had been a Methodist pastor. My grandmother was a pastor's daughter.

00:30:06.840 But I walked away from all of that and then returned to it in my 40s. But I always felt that

00:30:14.900 Christianity that I experienced in my youth did not have any power. And I knew that there was a

00:30:22.640 supernatural world. And I was always drawn to the New Age section of the bookstore. I was into Edgar Cayce

00:30:29.340 trying to do an out-of-body experience. I did a past-life regression. Like, I was all over the place.

00:30:35.660 And I came full circle. I believed in reincarnation for a long time, but came full circle to believing

00:30:46.200 what I believe today about Christianity and Jesus Christ being the only way. And I do believe that

00:30:53.060 God called me. He set me aside among the 12. In my early 20s, I had a lot of guilt about my success

00:31:03.420 because it didn't seem fair that out of the 12, my life was always better. Even when I married at 16,

00:31:10.120 my husband and I were building a brand new house. And it was because of a government program.

00:31:15.320 But my life has always been better than all of my siblings. And it took me a long time to get over

00:31:20.760 the fact that, you know, that I was different. And for some reason, I had a favor about me.

00:31:26.920 And when Princeton hired me, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't get early tenure. That was my

00:31:32.880 goal. I accomplished it. But then it was just so empty. And that is what, you know, the journey part

00:31:40.680 of it accelerated. But it culminated with me having a Christian conversion experience and becoming a

00:31:47.400 devout believer.

00:31:48.200 Sure. So, Carol, you said it didn't seem fair that out of the 12 children who were your siblings,

00:31:54.220 that you advanced forward in the way that you had. And you talked also about not fitting and

00:32:00.880 being different. I wanted to comment on that part first for the people who are watching and listening.

00:32:05.460 You know, it's possible to be the sort of child and adolescent who has to grow up and find an

00:32:11.440 intellectual community to fit in. And so, just because you don't fit in when you're eight or you

00:32:17.860 don't fit in when you're 13 doesn't mean there's no place in the world for you. It just means you have

00:32:22.400 to find your place. And, you know, I knew kids in my little town where I grew up where, you know, they

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00:33:34.880 Their best years were when they were 16 and 17, and everything was downhill from then.

00:33:40.440 And that's pretty fun when you're 16 and 17, but it's not so much fun when you're 30 and 40.

00:33:46.000 And so you had the reverse situation, it sounds like, where, you know, you didn't find your place

00:33:51.480 when you were a child or an adolescent, but it's pretty good to find your place as an adult because

00:33:56.720 then you have your whole adult life for that. So now you said it didn't seem fair. You also talked

00:34:02.860 about your shyness and you said that, and so it confused me a little bit because it wasn't obvious

00:34:08.640 to me whether or not you were shy or whether or not you were ashamed, right? You said you were ashamed

00:34:15.480 of your origin. You were ashamed of your poverty. You were ashamed of your accent and the possibility

00:34:19.460 that you might make mistakes. And so that's different than temperamental shyness, you know,

00:34:25.140 and I can see, therefore, why a religious revelation or conversion might help you with that

00:34:32.380 because did it free you from your shame? Is that a reasonable way of conceptualizing it?

00:34:40.800 I don't think I was ashamed of where I came from because I knew that, you know, I'm surrounded by

00:34:47.880 people like Claudine Gay who have gone to the best schools in America. And there I was coming from

00:34:55.120 nothing, high school dropout, and I was surpassing them. And so in some ways I had confidence, but in

00:35:02.440 other ways I knew I did not fit. And I can tell you even today, I don't fit in institutions. I don't fit

00:35:12.940 anywhere. And so I still feel like an outlier and it's okay. And I would say that it took me

00:35:20.500 until my forties to accept myself and realize that it was okay to be me.

00:35:27.240 And so why do you feel that you, why do you think you still feel like an outlier? I mean,

00:35:32.760 you've had a spectacularly successful academic career and also one that's associated with a high

00:35:39.340 volume of publication. So that's obviously a marker of the validity of your high impact academic

00:35:45.900 career. And so, I mean, you, you, you alluded to perhaps, you know, part of the reason why you

00:35:51.880 don't fit in, so to speak, because you're, you're definitely not descending into academia from a

00:35:59.000 multi-generational history of academics and educated people. So you're kind of a path breaker in that

00:36:05.140 regard. And obviously your familial and, and educational background isn't standard for,

00:36:11.420 you know, upper echelon Ivy league approximate academic positions. Is there more to why you

00:36:18.540 don't fit in? You're more conservative, you're Christian, you're creative. So that's, that's also

00:36:24.640 maybe all, are those things part of it? Well, when I had my most success at Princeton,

00:36:31.320 I was agnostic. And so, and I also believed in the academic enterprise. And so I did not,

00:36:39.140 I was not faking it in any way. I believed in the standards and I wanted to be, you know,

00:36:45.220 the best congressional scholar I could be. And that was who I was. But then at some point I realized

00:36:51.900 that that was empty for me. And I think that I've always been rejected. And some of that has to do with

00:37:00.600 I'm very direct, I'm very blunt, and I'm very transparent. And that makes people feel

00:37:08.320 uncomfortable. And whether we're talking about in the political world or the church world or

00:37:12.660 wherever I am, I think it's uncomfortable for people to deal with someone that isn't acting the

00:37:19.780 way they should be acting because they know the norms. And I can tell you one of the hardest things

00:37:24.820 I had to learn, and I learned it while I was at Vanderbilt Law School, is if you send someone

00:37:31.400 an email or you contact them and they don't respond, that means no. And I would just keep on

00:37:37.080 trying to get an answer until one day a dean told me, and he was being very kind to me, he said that

00:37:45.100 if someone doesn't respond, that means no. If I always respond. And so there's so much that

00:37:53.680 made me different. And I think people are uncomfortable because they don't know what I'll

00:37:58.860 say. I don't know what I'll say.

00:38:02.080 Do you regard yourself as a conservative?

00:38:05.120 I regard myself as a truth speaker. And I feel like that at this stage in my life, I have to be

00:38:14.180 positioned where I can speak truth and not worry about what anyone thinks. And I find that whether

00:38:21.080 we're talking about conservatives or liberals, people are more comfortable around those they can

00:38:26.160 control. And when you reach 70, I'm 70 now, I just don't care. I care about the world.

00:38:35.120 I care about the call on my life and ending well when I die. I would like people to say that I

00:38:42.620 ended well. But the things that people use to control other people, it doesn't seem to work.

00:38:48.860 And as far as academia, I would say that every effort was made to destroy me. And yet, you know,

00:38:56.420 it didn't work. And I think that it didn't work because it didn't work.

00:39:03.000 Well, so let's talk about that. You alluded to the situation with Claudine Gay. Now, for everybody

00:39:08.140 watching and listening, Claudine Gay was the president of Harvard University, despite being

00:39:14.820 woefully unqualified for that position. In fact, I believe after reviewing her academic record that

00:39:21.520 she's woefully unqualified to be a tenured professor at Harvard. Her publication record is thin,

00:39:27.280 to say the least. With a record like that, she likely wouldn't have got a interview under normal

00:39:34.960 circumstances at the University of Toronto for the psychology department for an entry-level

00:39:38.940 position. And so it's woefully inadequate. Now, Claudine Gay is also the person who revealed,

00:39:46.160 I would say, the absolute decay of the Ivy League system at Congress last year with the president of

00:39:57.200 UPenn and the president of MIT, and then was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal brought to light

00:40:04.460 by, publicized primarily by Christopher Rufo, who's working in Florida with Ron DeSantis.

00:40:10.620 Now, you're tangled up in that business in a major way. And so you alluded to that earlier,

00:40:16.900 and I also presume that this has at least tangential connection with these attempts that

00:40:21.840 you just described to undermine you and destroy you. So could we walk through the Claudine Gay

00:40:27.100 situation first and then talk about the other more destructive elements of your experience in

00:40:33.500 academia? We can walk through the Claudine Gay

00:40:37.720 situation first. You were very generous to her. As far as I'm concerned, her dissertation,

00:40:44.920 which was heavily plagiarized, and there she used my work to set up a straw man,

00:40:51.580 actually taking one of my conclusions to frame her research question. There was direct

00:40:58.240 verbatim pleasurism, but many ideas that were stolen. I questioned, I don't call her Dr. Gay. I called her

00:41:09.620 Claudine Gay because to get a PhD, you're supposed to have original work that you defend. And in my

00:41:18.680 position, from my perspective, if that work, parts of it is pleasurized, then there's a serious issue

00:41:26.720 there. She's only made a few corrections of her work. And the 11 articles that she published,

00:41:35.180 three quarters of them were pleasurized. I was not the only person pleasurized. I believe there

00:41:39.920 may be 20 people altogether. It's quite a few. And there are about 50 instances of pleasurism.

00:41:46.520 She's earning $900,000 a year, her Harvard presidential salary. She was allowed to keep

00:41:55.160 it. And to add insult to injury, there's a lot of insult to injury when it comes to me because

00:42:01.160 she's never apologized, never reached out to me. She's teaching a course in the fall on reading and

00:42:09.080 research ethics. Wow. Wow. Okay. So part of the reason I wanted to talk to you was because I was

00:42:16.700 following the Claudine Gay story as it so painfully unfolded. And I learned about you and then a mystery

00:42:24.360 sort of emerged for me. And maybe you can help me. It's, what would you say, dangerous ground to tread

00:42:30.620 on, but I'm going to try to weave my way through it nonetheless. You would think if you thought about

00:42:38.660 this situation rationally, and maybe even with a certain degree of cynicism, that you would be a much

00:42:45.620 better poster boy for the Democrat progressives than Claudine Gay. Because there's the racial issue,

00:42:54.940 obviously, which unfortunately in this day and age can't be overlooked. But Claudine Gay came from a

00:43:00.880 privileged background, from an economic perspective. And her family's very powerful, I believe, in Haiti,

00:43:07.280 which is already something that stirs up all sorts of questions, given the state of that country.

00:43:15.760 And she was by no means oppressed, at least on economic grounds. And you came from, well,

00:43:23.660 the archetypal rags to riches situation fundamentally. And you're making claims that

00:43:29.900 Claudine Gay used your original work to build herself a pseudo career and hasn't been called

00:43:37.980 out on it. Okay, so I don't understand why this isn't a much bigger scandal than it is. Because I can't

00:43:46.040 imagine anybody situated to be more credible than you to bring up these sorts of allegations,

00:43:53.220 which you just duplicated and even extended, you know, describing your unwillingness even to

00:44:00.180 describe her with her hypothetical academic credential doctor. And so you're obviously

00:44:07.000 not very happy about this. So what ideas do you believe that she took from you? Why does it matter?

00:44:15.040 What should happen with her? What has happened and what hasn't happened? Like,

00:44:19.840 I know she still has her tenured faculty position at Harvard. And I can't understand that. Because

00:44:25.540 if she was crooked enough to be taken out of her position as president for plagiarism,

00:44:34.540 she is clearly, if that was the reason, she's clearly not suitable to be a professor at Harvard.

00:44:41.500 Because in my way of thinking about things, being a professor at Harvard is not a lesser position

00:44:47.320 than being the president of Harvard. That's an administrative position, and it's a key

00:44:51.980 administrative position. But tenured professor at Harvard, that's a very hard thing to manage.

00:44:57.720 And you don't get to have that if there are questions, for example, about whether or not

00:45:03.200 you bloody well plagiarized all of your academic work. So, and I don't understand. Okay,

00:45:09.520 so can you help me? Tell me what's going on. Well, I can tell you that progressives never

00:45:15.200 supported me. Even when I was hired at Princeton, it was the conservative professors that were so

00:45:22.680 delighted at what I presented. And when I was hired, I had a national science, I had had a National

00:45:29.760 Science Foundation grant for my dissertation research. I had a Harvard Press contract on a book,

00:45:40.580 and I had offers of signing bonuses. I had my own short list. Back in those days, I was hired in 1989,

00:45:47.780 started in 1990. They held all professors to high standards. And to get tenured in the Ivy League,

00:45:55.560 you had to have path-breaking work. The work needed to be considered seminal. And I met those

00:46:02.140 standards. But early on, the progressives did not like me. One of the professors who is at Harvard

00:46:09.280 today, I could name her. She is a friend of Claudine Gay. But she sat me down the first week I was on

00:46:17.040 campus and told me that I acted as if I didn't need Black people, that I couldn't trust white people,

00:46:23.260 that white people would sail me down the river. And so I was never the poster child for the

00:46:31.100 progressives because I did not fit that narrative. And I was told many times that I did not need to

00:46:38.880 share my background because I've always shared where I came from. That was always an embarrassment

00:46:45.560 to the progressives. And so look at Claudine Gay. And during the time that I was at Princeton,

00:46:51.700 and sometimes I was on admission committees, I saw them pick Blacks that had weaker academic

00:46:59.540 credentials, but the right pedigree. Claudine Gay, Phillips Exeter Academy, undergrad at Stanford and

00:47:07.180 Princeton, and then the PhD from Harvard, she had the right pedigree. They have always used

00:47:14.820 affirmative action to handpick the people that they wanted. And I think about Claudine Gay,

00:47:21.120 and other minorities that I have encountered, for some reason, white progressives or the people who

00:47:31.520 run universities have always favored the angry Blacks. And they have wanted those in my mind who

00:47:38.580 had weaker credentials. And so I was never rewarded. I never received a cheered position while I was in

00:47:48.220 academia. And the environment was just not conducive to my thriving. And I left academia in 2017.

00:47:58.240 The immediate catalyst for that was 2016. I wrote an opinion piece criticizing Islam. It created a firestorm.

00:48:07.960 My circumstances changed. The university distanced itself from me. And at some point,

00:48:14.560 I realized I couldn't be my best self under those circumstances. I was not getting any younger. And so I took early

00:48:21.500 retirement. And I had to reinvent myself. I walked away from the tenure that I worked so hard to earn. And I can

00:48:29.860 tell you that I'm very sad because I love students. And I assumed that I would be teaching until I retired at a

00:48:37.980 normal age. But I took the early retirement. And I knew nothing about Claudine Gay still in my research

00:48:45.000 until December 10th, when the Chris Rufo story broke. And I was willing to give her the benefit of a doubt

00:48:52.640 because I thought maybe it was an accident. You know, I didn't realize until I started reading her work

00:48:58.920 that her dissertation itself was framed around my work and some of her early articles. And she

00:49:05.600 essentially set up a straw man using my work without doing it the way professors are taught

00:49:12.340 to disagree. Like normally, if you want to take, you can take down anyone, but you say who you're taking

00:49:19.400 down, why they're wrong. You lay out a case for that. And you certainly include them in your literature

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00:50:38.580 Oh, so okay, so I didn't understand that you had only really come across this problem after the

00:50:45.620 plagiarism scandal broke with Christopher Ruffo. Okay, so that's part of the reason why it's received

00:50:51.220 less attention than it might have. Even, see, I'm still wrestling with this because you say, you know,

00:50:57.080 you've said a bunch of things that are very provocative in the last tranche of your statements.

00:51:02.300 You know, you said you didn't fit the progressive narrative. Now, it's a weird thing. You know,

00:51:09.540 I kind of see this with Ayaan Hirsi Ali as well. You know, I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book, Infidel.

00:51:16.640 Oh, it must be 15 years ago. And I thought, oh my God, this woman, she's just unbelievable. She's

00:51:22.620 so tough. She's so forthright. She comes from this backwards African place under, you know,

00:51:29.940 fighting against extreme odds. She makes it to the Netherlands. She makes something of herself.

00:51:34.420 She's stunningly articulate. She's brave beyond belief. Like, you would presume that the feminists

00:51:41.280 and the progressives would be hoisting her up on their shoulders as a triumphant example of what

00:51:46.940 a woman can achieve, you know, on the basis of her character and the nobility of her intellect.

00:51:53.140 And yet, she's regarded with enmity among the so-called progressives. Now, and you're telling a

00:51:59.100 story that's very similar. And so, and then you added something to it that's even stranger, you know,

00:52:04.420 and really difficult to wrap your head around. So, you said, it's been your experience in academia

00:52:11.340 that the white progressives in particular, who didn't like you, were very much inclined

00:52:19.020 to pick the angry blacks, let's say, angry, resentful blacks with an ax to grind with lesser

00:52:27.540 academic credentials. Okay, so now you've got to think about, well, why the hell is that? Is that

00:52:32.400 you could imagine an element of racism, which would be, if you're going to have black people around,

00:52:38.440 you want to make sure that you have the great advantage of being able to look down on them,

00:52:43.500 at least for some reason. If they're at least of the right class, then you don't have to put up with

00:52:48.940 their annoying working class idiosyncrasies. And then, but that's so nefarious, you know,

00:52:55.740 it's so nefarious. It's, it's a kind of racism that's so, it's much worse than the racism of low

00:53:02.780 expectations, right? It's actually, what is it exactly? Is that it is just pure old-fashioned

00:53:09.760 racism. I believe that the progressives in academia, they believe that racial and ethnic

00:53:15.000 minorities are inferior. I'm sure you have heard, or you're familiar with the fact that

00:53:20.280 there are progressives who have labeled Booker T. Washingtons up from slavery as a fiction,

00:53:26.920 a work of fiction. And so the, the, the progressives, uh, they have to maintain this

00:53:34.480 thing of all minorities being victims and black people and people of color, not being able to do

00:53:40.100 anything for themselves. And when they run across those of us who defy that narrative,

00:53:45.000 there's no place for us. And in my experiences, they have always, uh, rewarded those that fit the

00:53:52.400 stereotype. Or, or who are willing to exploit it. Okay. So I think you put your finger on,

00:53:58.020 on this, the core issue here. So most of the pathology on the campuses and in the broader

00:54:04.760 political sphere that I see now, I attribute to the forceful imposition of a victim victimizer

00:54:12.140 narrative. It's pretty straightforward, right? It's a postmodern derivative of Marxism, essentially,

00:54:18.100 although the pedigree of such ideas goes way back before Marx into the French revolution,

00:54:23.780 way back before then into the biblical story of Cain and Abel, right? The resentful Cain who always

00:54:30.780 construes himself as a victim, who wants to pull down his ideal, who wants to shake his fist at God.

00:54:37.060 It's a very old story. Okay. So your hypothesis essentially is that because you didn't play

00:54:45.160 the role of victim, didn't regard yourself as a victim and did take advantage in the positive way

00:54:53.000 of the benefits that the system offered you, including the mentorship of primarily conservative

00:54:59.720 people, and that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Although you said, you know,

00:55:04.440 you had people who were encouraging you and helping you, that you're exactly the sort of person that

00:55:09.700 indicates that the victim victimizer narrative is wrong. Now, do you put Clarence Thomas in the same

00:55:14.840 category? You know, I met Justice Thomas. We had a very lovely time for about two hours. It was like

00:55:22.140 meeting an old friend. It was quite striking. And I think it was partly because there are elements of

00:55:27.480 our background that were oddly similar. You know, like my father was, my grandfather was essentially,

00:55:34.840 was he a sharecropper in Saskatchewan? Close enough. He lived in a log cabin. And so I'm one generation

00:55:41.580 farther along than you with regards to, you know, the separation from poverty. But it's not that far

00:55:48.520 back in the past. I knew my grandfather quite well. He died about 15 years ago, but I knew him quite

00:55:55.540 well. And talking to Clarence Thomas, I mean, I really enjoyed speaking with him. He was extremely

00:56:00.800 warm and he had done everything he could to put his life together and stunningly successfully.

00:56:07.620 And so I think it is the situation like you and with Diane as well is you're the worst sort of enemy

00:56:13.300 for the progressives because you had the temerity to be a minority and be successful. You know,

00:56:20.340 and I see the same thing with this burgeoning anti-Semitism. The big problem with the Jews,

00:56:26.580 so to speak, is that they're a minority with the temerity to be successful.

00:56:31.100 I know.

00:56:31.660 And so, yeah, yeah. And so I see. So that's the rule. And that's the basis of this racism is that

00:56:36.820 if we're going to uphold the victim victimizer narrative, our worst enemies are minority people

00:56:43.060 who've made a success of themselves.

00:56:44.660 And you know something? I feel like that the people in academia, for someone like me,

00:56:51.860 if they can destroy us, they do. And I'm still standing. And some of the attacks on me,

00:56:59.620 most of the attacks have backfired in a way that it just gave me a greater platform. But I think being

00:57:07.000 a strong individualist, I've always been a strong individualist. And that's not something that's

00:57:12.680 welcomed. When I think about my being more conservative, I did not think of myself as

00:57:19.480 a conservative when I was in undergrad. I wrote my senior paper on affirmative action and I was

00:57:27.240 critical of it. And that was because I felt like it was hurting minorities even back then. And

00:57:33.560 certainly today I see how it has hurt minorities. And the worst thing is this diversity, equity,

00:57:41.380 and inclusion because it's like affirmative action on steroids. And I strongly believe that the Civil

00:57:48.180 Rights Act of 1964 is what benefited me, millions of other people, you know, Blacks, even some whites

00:57:56.080 and women benefited from an environment that focused on non-discrimination, equal opportunity,

00:58:02.660 outreach. I think about my success. I had an equal opportunity to succeed or fail. The outcome

00:58:09.200 wasn't guaranteed. I chose, you know, to become an honor student. I worked hard for that. I knew that if I

00:58:15.880 distinguished myself, it would make a difference. But they are just telling all minorities, no matter where you

00:58:21.260 come from, that you can't because of racism. And they are erasing the successes.

00:58:27.680 Except Asians. Yes. Well, they are considered white, honorary whites. Right. Worse than whites, maybe, just like

00:58:34.560 the Jews. So, okay. So I'm going to tell you a story because I want to get to the heart of this

00:58:40.960 matter with regards to DEI. So I worked at Harvard for seven years and I became friends with the Dean of

00:58:49.420 Admissions there. And I was very interested in predictors of future success. So I did a whole

00:58:56.500 research project at Harvard trying to identify personality and cognitive attributes that were

00:59:02.720 predictive of success in managerial positions, working class positions, creative positions,

00:59:08.140 entrepreneurial positions, and so forth. It was a pure research enterprise. And that took me deep into the IQ and the

00:59:14.100 personality literature before I knew anything about the political ramifications. Okay. So what I found

00:59:20.340 out was this. I found out, first of all, that SATs, GREs, all the standardized tests that are used to

00:59:28.980 gatekeep admission to high-level institutions of higher education were essentially tests of verbal IQ.

00:59:38.880 And now people deny that, but that's because they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

00:59:42.440 I know this literature inside out and backwards. And so they're IQ tests. Now, I talked to Dean

00:59:50.280 Whitlaw about admissions policies at Harvard. And he told me that without an affirmative action

00:59:56.820 structure, that there would be very few black people in the Ivy Leagues. And so Dean, I wouldn't

01:00:03.880 say was either a liberal or a conservative as far as I was concerned. I think what he was trying to do

01:00:08.920 was to find the best people, the best undergraduates to come to Harvard. And so now, so that's a

01:00:15.700 problem. Now, another problem is, is that if you just use SATs and GREs and so forth, you're going to

01:00:22.040 get a majority, a disproportionate number of Asians and Jews. So that's also going to happen. And then

01:00:29.640 there's a third problem. So I talked to this guy named Adrian Woodward. He used to work for

01:00:35.620 for the economist, very smart man. He wrote a book on the history of merit. And he pointed out that

01:00:44.840 if you don't use objective classifications of merit for your hiring and your promotion,

01:00:51.140 the systems that don't rely on objective merit default to dynasty and nepotism.

01:00:58.820 So you don't get some sort of egalitarian equity if you scrap objective tests. What you get is

01:01:04.560 who you know, who you're related to, who can pull strings and who can put your name forward. Well,

01:01:10.660 that's what's happening. So, but we're in a real conundrum, right? Because if we use purely objective

01:01:16.060 tests, then we don't get an equal distribution of applicants from the ethnic and racial groups.

01:01:22.620 We get a lot more Jews and we get. Yep. Go ahead. Well, I mean, I've given that a lot of thought

01:01:27.520 and I believe that racial and ethnic minorities can meet any standard put before them. But when

01:01:33.600 they started lowering the standards so far with affirmative action, people learned what they had

01:01:40.080 to do if you are black to get into Harvard or to get into the elite schools. And I can tell you,

01:01:46.060 my success story would not have been a success story if I had not gone to that community college,

01:01:51.780 taken remedial math, gone to Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, the liberal arts school,

01:01:57.300 and then Virginia Tech. And I was never in an environment where I was struggling. And my

01:02:03.980 personality is such that if I were at the bottom of the class, if I were failing a class, I would quit.

01:02:09.760 I would have quit because I needed to do well. And so they are harming racial and ethnic minorities that

01:02:17.060 have high standards that really could have been successful at a state school or somewhere else

01:02:22.280 when they bring them in to make them feel good. I believe that if you hold everyone to the same

01:02:29.780 standard, you will have fewer racial and ethnic minorities maybe. But now, you know, people have had

01:02:37.700 so many opportunities. I don't know how many fewer. But once people learn what the standards are that

01:02:44.540 they have to meet to go to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, wherever they want to go, I have confidence

01:02:50.540 in racial and ethnic minorities being able to rise to meet that standard. And even before affirmative

01:02:56.380 action during the era when there was blatant discrimination, the schools in New England, and I would

01:03:02.540 say Harvard too, if minorities were qualified, they admitted them. So they had graduates, but not in

01:03:09.580 large numbers. And now we believe that there has to be a certain percentage. I don't think there has

01:03:15.720 to be a certain percentage. The difference between back when I came through and now is equity. They're

01:03:22.620 seeking equal outcomes, and they believe that you need people in certain percentages. When I came

01:03:30.900 through, it was equal opportunity. You had an equal opportunity to succeed or to fail.

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01:04:50.800 Well, the other problem with the bloody equity idea is that there's no limit to the number of

01:05:00.000 ways you can categorize people. And so the idea that we're going to get to some sort of utopia

01:05:05.020 where every single person, regardless of how you categorize them intersectionally,

01:05:10.680 all of those people are going to be represented in every single profession in numbers equivalent to

01:05:18.660 their proportion in the population is, it's such an absurd idea that you'd have to be educated at an

01:05:23.920 Ivy League school for many years before you'd become daft enough to believe it. Even on arithmetic

01:05:29.720 principles alone, it's so preposterous. And so the question is exactly what's motivating. And it's

01:05:35.300 especially weird because it really strikes me. Okay, so there's a worse thing about this too,

01:05:41.360 as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, I was bounced out of academia about the same time you were.

01:05:46.820 And under circumstances that were broadly similar, let's say.

01:05:51.360 You were asking questions. And for me, I think that I fell out of favor when Boyne and Bach

01:05:59.780 published The Shape of the River. And I started talking about affirmative action. I wrote an op-ed piece.

01:06:06.960 I favored class-based, race-neutral affirmative action. That was not what the elites wanted. And that

01:06:13.000 was part of the beginning, beginning to the end for me.

01:06:18.660 Yeah, well, I stood up against a bill in Canada that mandated pronoun use.

01:06:23.780 And so, but I was no, I was also no fan, for example, of affirmative action, because I think it

01:06:29.140 does, I think it's clear that it does more harm than good. I think it's clear now. So there's another

01:06:34.160 way it does harm. And this is an ugly little thing too, but I believe it's true. You know, as I,

01:06:39.360 as the DEI movement gained steam, I found myself looking with increasing suspicion on anyone who

01:06:49.600 was black, let's say, or of, or gay, anybody who could have benefited from preferential treatment

01:06:58.240 under the DEI rubric. I started to become skeptical of. It was like, maybe I'd be on a panel with

01:07:04.740 someone, maybe we'd be on the same side or different sides, but that person say on the

01:07:09.980 opposite side would be the member of a favored minority. And I'd think just who the hell are you

01:07:16.660 and how did you get your position? And this really makes me ill. Well, and I saw this at Harvard too,

01:07:21.840 you know, because the black kids there that I got to know, they had an additional burden to bear.

01:07:28.240 Like all the kids who go to Harvard have imposter syndrome when they first get there.

01:07:32.900 If you don't have imposter syndrome, there's something wrong with you, right? But then the

01:07:38.060 minority kids who've benefited from the DEI approach, they've got a lot bigger helping of

01:07:44.140 imposter syndrome because it isn't exactly obvious to them and also to the people around them exactly

01:07:51.280 what they're doing there. And that's perfectly fine for the scoundrels and scamps who are willing

01:07:57.560 to twist the system to their benefit, who feel no shame for doing so. But for people who've

01:08:02.540 actually worked their tails to the bone, let's say, worked their hands to the bone in order to

01:08:08.560 move ahead and to be credible, to have that shadow of doubt cast on them is, well, that's Satan's

01:08:14.720 choice. Like there's nothing worse than punishing people for their virtues. And you punish people

01:08:21.980 who've got ahead on the basis of merit by using DEI standards.

01:08:28.000 I agree. And I think that with the way the system is set up, it makes these students angry and they set

01:08:38.060 up these segregated spaces, these safe spaces, and they encourage, they've basically set up a system of

01:08:47.100 segregation within colleges and universities. Racial and ethnic minorities are angry. And I think they

01:08:54.220 have a reason to be angry because they know they're being used. And if you can't do the work,

01:08:59.940 of course, and you're being told that white people are responsible, you're the victim, and they've done

01:09:06.420 all these things to you. All this campus unrest, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they

01:09:11.980 have used diversity, the progressives, to bring in people who are not academically prepared to do the

01:09:17.740 work. And so they band together and now they've lowered standards to the point that if you get

01:09:23.580 your feet in the door at an Ivy League institution, many of the state schools, they're going to pass you

01:09:29.320 along. You'll get your degree, but you won't know anything. Well, the other thing that happens too,

01:09:34.640 although the decrease in standards is starting to mitigate against this, is like if you would,

01:09:40.240 I spend a lot of time studying the literature on managerial success. There's quite an extensive

01:09:46.300 business literature on managerial success. And one of the findings of the managerial literature is that

01:09:54.200 many managers fail because they're promoted to a position that they're not actually competent to

01:10:00.020 manage. The Peter principle. Exactly that. And the rule as an employer is something like,

01:10:07.100 and I've learned this the hard way with my enterprises, do not do someone a favor when

01:10:13.160 you're hiring them because it's not a favor. If you take someone and you aren't thoroughly convinced

01:10:21.300 that they're competent for the job, all you're doing is either setting them up for eventual failure

01:10:27.320 or you're downloading all their obligations to their minions who will have to work much harder under the

01:10:34.520 thumb of an incompetent who's likely to become a tyrant joylessly and without credit to pick up the

01:10:41.420 overflow. And there is nothing in that. You also simultaneously demoralize the other managers who

01:10:47.560 were hired on merit. It's a catastrophe. And so, and I see that happening in spades in academia.

01:10:55.140 And so one of the consequences of that, at least early on, was that there might've been a

01:11:00.000 disproportionate number of unqualified minority students being admitted, but the probability that

01:11:05.340 they would actually graduate was very low. So they tended to, well, and then you can understand how that

01:11:11.000 would even further heighten racial tension because if you're brought into a school and everybody tells

01:11:17.640 you that you belong there and then you fail, it's very attractive, especially if you're being shouted

01:11:24.000 at by the progressives to do this constantly, to blame something like systemic racism for your failure.

01:11:31.080 Yeah, right. Well, and you can understand why, you know, and...

01:11:35.000 And we're focused on higher education. Look what they're doing at K-12 where they're telling, you know,

01:11:43.720 minority children, they're telling everyone that math is racist. There's almost no job that you can do that you

01:11:50.920 don't need math. Even an artist needs math. And so they're taking minority students and rather than

01:11:57.580 trying to equip the ones, you know, that have the ability to learn, they're telling them that if you

01:12:03.980 are not, you know, doing well in math, it's because it's racist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and again,

01:12:10.300 that's a, you know, that's an extremely... So psychologically, that's extremely demoralizing.

01:12:16.360 Like we know that people who have an external locus of control, that's the technical term,

01:12:22.300 you may have encountered this in your psychology classes. If you believe that your life is governed

01:12:26.740 by external forces, you allow yourself to believe that, you're much more likely to be ineffectual,

01:12:32.320 depressed, anxious, and hopeless. Okay, so that's not a great outcome because you don't succeed,

01:12:37.680 plus you're miserable and you have no happiness. Those are separable things, right? And so,

01:12:43.360 whereas if you have an internal locus of control and you believe that you're an active agent in the

01:12:49.100 construction of your own destiny, then you obviously have to take on more responsibility,

01:12:53.700 but you have a lot more hope and you're much less likely to be depressed and anxious,

01:12:57.800 and you're more likely to be effectual and successful. And the victim-victimizer narrative

01:13:03.360 is an external locus of control narrative. It's like, you can't succeed. The cards are stacked

01:13:09.120 against you by evil malevolent people who perhaps were even around before you were born. There's

01:13:14.680 nothing you can do. Well, you know, and then if you do fail, it's because of these, you know,

01:13:22.040 forces that are arrayed against you. And of course, there is some corruption in the systems,

01:13:26.500 and there has been racism and ethnic bias. And so, there's some of that criticism that's true.

01:13:32.520 But as a comprehensive, explanatory framework, it, well, it's the victim-victimizer narrative that

01:13:40.140 turns the world into enmity.

01:13:42.160 Let me say this. I believe that what progressives are doing to minority communities, Black and Hispanic,

01:13:49.440 that it's criminal. And part of it is that they really do want to overthrow, you know, traditional

01:13:55.440 institutions. And the crime and the dysfunctional behavior that you find in the Black community,

01:14:02.540 progressives excuse it. They encourage it. And so, they're really using people's misery.

01:14:08.860 Even with the LGBTQ community, they're using people's misery to advance a political goal.

01:14:17.120 I don't think they care anything about any of the groups that they claim to represent.

01:14:22.260 Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. So, let's delve into that a little bit. So, there's a section of the

01:14:29.660 literature on psychopathology that includes what are called cluster B personality disorders.

01:14:39.700 Okay. So, if you have a cluster B personality disorder, one of them is histrionic. That's sort

01:14:46.940 of a derivation of the old Freudian hysteric. You're dramatic. Everything around you is a drama,

01:14:52.080 right? You're a drama queen, because it's often a female pathology, by the way, histrionic

01:14:58.420 personality disorder. So, you're a drama queen. You play the victim. You make mountains out of

01:15:05.440 molehills continually. You take a simple situation and you complicate it. And you make sure that the

01:15:11.400 attention is focused on you while you're dealing like a martyr with your difficult life. So, that's

01:15:17.020 histrionic. That's not much fun. Narcissistic, which means you want unearned social attention

01:15:23.340 and status and you'll do anything to get it. Then there's borderline personality disorder,

01:15:29.900 which is probably the most serious of all the personality disorders. And it's characterized by

01:15:35.100 a pronounced tendency to victim, victimize, and by radical emotional instability. And so,

01:15:43.740 that's not much fun. And then you have antisocial personality disorder in that category as well.

01:15:49.240 And that's more male and it leads more to overt criminality. Okay. So, now, the reason I'm telling

01:15:56.360 you that is because those are the people who are most likely to pathologize a victim-victimizer

01:16:03.840 narrative. So, if you're dealing with someone who's in that personality disorder cluster,

01:16:09.760 and thereafter power and attention, the way they camouflage that is by presenting themselves either

01:16:18.240 as a victim or as an ally of victims. So, right. So, that's fun. So, the most serious personality

01:16:27.120 disordered types are the kind who will use their own misery, even if it's self-induced, and the misery

01:16:33.260 of others to camouflage their own power-seeking. And I see a tremendous amount of that in the

01:16:38.400 so-called progressive movement. Because they are, you put your finger on it. They're using

01:16:44.340 and probably abetting the misery of others, these ethnic minority groups they claim to be compassionate

01:16:52.640 to. They're using that as a justification for their own ideology and for their own power striving.

01:16:57.760 It's, and, you know, that happens even within families, is the real cluster B types. They'll

01:17:04.200 martyr, they'll make victims out of their own children just so they can parade themselves as

01:17:09.180 martyrs. It's really ugly. It's really ugly. Well, you know, to go to something positive,

01:17:16.520 I feel like these people are strategically placed, but they are by no means the majority. And whether we're

01:17:24.500 talking about Congress that's dysfunctional, it's because the people who have common sense

01:17:30.360 have no courage, because they could stand up to the extremists. And I believe the extremists,

01:17:36.960 the ones that are driving the agenda, they are a minority, but they are placed in a way

01:17:41.960 everyone's afraid to challenge them. Yeah, well, there's no doubt they're a minority.

01:17:47.760 You know, there's no doubt there's a minority. But the thing is, you don't want to underestimate

01:17:52.220 the strategic brilliance of the approach. Because if I position myself as either a victim or an ally

01:18:01.820 of victims, which is even more convenient, because then I don't have to go through the trouble of

01:18:06.020 being a victim. But now I've got, now I'm making the case that everything compassionate and loving

01:18:14.780 resides in me. They believe it.

01:18:17.120 And so I know they do. Well, but then the upshot of that is, so I'm one of these people now,

01:18:24.720 compassionate to a fault. Now, if you oppose me, I can easily just say, well, you're against

01:18:30.800 compassion. What sort of person is against compassion? It's only the worst of the predators

01:18:37.000 that could possibly be against compassion. You wouldn't be one of the worst of the predators,

01:18:41.840 would you be? And so that's the accusations that come out right away. You know, and if those are

01:18:47.440 made out against people who have some conscience, and so the typical conservative, for example,

01:18:53.200 tends to be high in conscientiousness. If you make allegations like that, especially as a mob against

01:19:00.220 someone conscientious, the conscientious person is likely to think, oh my God, all these people are

01:19:05.500 upset with me. You know, I probably did something wrong. And maybe I am a little more sexist than I

01:19:10.320 should be. And maybe I am a little more racist. You know, the psychopaths and the cluster B types,

01:19:15.700 they have no shame. So if you accuse them of something, they don't care. But if you accuse a

01:19:20.800 conservative or someone of decent moral standing, you're going to put them back on their heels. And

01:19:25.240 that's also part of the reason that people are afraid to speak. Well, that's why the conservatives

01:19:29.900 appear at times to be losing. And I can tell you with my interactions with Harvard University

01:19:36.720 through my lawyers, you know, they don't care. Claudine Gay has one of the best lawyers in the

01:19:43.580 country. And there's been no apologies. And the insult to injury when it comes to the plagiarism

01:19:50.560 is that they have never acknowledged that Carol Swain exists.

01:19:55.220 Well, we're going to do something about that.

01:19:57.240 Yeah, I think, I think your story is, you see, there's another problem with your story, eh?

01:20:06.060 This is always the case with, with situations like this. And this is really where we find

01:20:11.700 ourself. So look, here's the option that confronts people who come across your story sort of casually,

01:20:18.600 okay? They can assume that, you know, you came up from poverty and you worked your way through the

01:20:25.760 university system with merit and on the basis of merit, and you became a professor and you did your

01:20:32.600 work and it was plagiarized and it was plagiarized by none other than the president of the world's

01:20:41.340 foremost university, which indicates a depth of rot in that institution that's so deep that it's

01:20:49.020 almost incomprehensible. That's also characteristic of many other institutions. So that's what you're

01:20:54.840 asking them to believe. Or they can take the easy route out and say, oh, well, you know, Dr. Swain,

01:21:01.420 she's doing this for personal reasons. She's after status. Like, writing you off is a way easier-

01:21:08.180 Well, that's how they would write me off. They would write me off as a right-wing extremist

01:21:13.100 because Claudine Gay's defense has been, it's racism. There are racists that are going after

01:21:21.540 her. And for them to acknowledge that I'm a Black woman, you know, that has worked very hard in her

01:21:27.260 career, you know, has been distinguished as a professor, they're not going there. So they're

01:21:32.700 just totally ignoring the fact that I exist. And as far as I'm concerned, of all the people that

01:21:37.300 Claudine Gay plagiarized, I have the greatest claim against her because her dissertation where

01:21:44.480 she got her PhD that started her career was framed around my work, her early articles. And then if

01:21:51.380 you look at her, she's been fraudulent all of her life. And there's no evidence of a conscience.

01:21:57.380 And certainly Harvard University, the corporation has no conscience. They're not even willing to have a

01:22:03.280 discussion with my attorneys. Okay. So let me, I want to push back against all that because

01:22:09.420 well, it's necessary to straighten all this out. So-

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01:23:09.780 Are there people in the academic community who have a reputation that you believe to be

01:23:16.000 credible, who presume that your claims of plagiarism are accurate and justified?

01:23:23.320 Okay. Okay. Okay. So can you talk about...

01:23:27.040 Some of them are at Yale, but I don't know if they'd appreciate me giving out their names.

01:23:32.980 I think it's fear.

01:23:33.320 Okay. No, that's fine.

01:23:34.560 It's fear that has kept some people from going against Harvard. And for me, I'm retired from

01:23:40.600 academia. I'm doing other things now. And so if I were still in academia, I probably would pursue it.

01:23:48.680 But most people who still have a career in academia would be afraid to get involved. And when I think

01:23:53.960 about Harvard, and one of the things I wanted to talk about with you is I think that it's necessary

01:23:58.740 to hold them accountable in multiple ways. There are other professors other than Claudine Gay who have

01:24:05.000 plagiarized. And some of this is because of DEI. I would be very interested in someone trying to

01:24:12.840 identify a class of people who have been harmed by Harvard and the plagiarism of their work.

01:24:22.400 And so I think that needs to be pursued.

01:24:25.520 Well, the undergraduates have been harmed by it.

01:24:27.820 Yes.

01:24:28.140 You know, if they have professors who aren't bloody well qualified, who are also crooked,

01:24:34.040 who are plagiarizing, and who are teaching research ethics, then they've been harmed. Because there's,

01:24:41.140 I can't imagine virtually anything more fraudulent than that.

01:24:44.340 Well, someone needs to start a class action, you know, set up the website, try to identify

01:24:49.240 the class of people. And you need, you know, brilliant lawyers who can identify what the class

01:24:56.280 should look like. And that's something that needs to be done. I myself have attorneys. We have a

01:25:04.540 complaint for copyright infringement. It was supposed to be filed on June 24th. One of my friends who's

01:25:13.380 a distinguished professor at a university looked at it and he said, there's considerable risk to you.

01:25:19.900 You can be sued personally if Harvard makes a motion to dismiss under copyright law. Copyright law is set up

01:25:27.980 in such a way that the judge can order you to pay the court costs of the winning side. And so I could find

01:25:35.860 myself paying for Harvard's lawyers and the court costs. And I was told that with copyright infringement

01:25:45.900 and pleasurism in academia, it has not been pushed. There's really no penalty, no criminal or even civil

01:25:57.280 penalties straightforward for pleasurism. And so when Harvard was approached with the demand letter,

01:26:04.200 they responded that, that ideas, you know, can't be, you can't use copyright infringement ideas,

01:26:13.480 law to protect ideas. They said that her pleasurism of my work was de minimis, meaning it wasn't that

01:26:21.020 serious and that it was fair use. I don't know that the lawyers know who I am or they actually read her

01:26:28.340 dissertation, read my work, but they said that if we pursued it, I would be, we would be engaged in a

01:26:37.420 frivolous lawsuit and that I would be responsible for their legal fees. That gave me pause. I still

01:26:43.700 may file the copyright infringement complaint because I think I have a strong case, but financially,

01:26:52.740 I can't afford to pay for Harvard's lawyers. There's considerable risk to me and I'm paying for

01:26:59.300 my own lawyers. And so that's one thing that there's an individual action that I would like to pursue.

01:27:05.020 I'm willing to help someone else set up a class action that I would help advertise, but I'm not

01:27:12.240 sure that I should be part of the class, but there needs to be a class action against Harvard. And then

01:27:17.760 I have thought about taking my complaint and the letters from Harvard and publishing a book and just

01:27:23.400 not filing the complaint, but exposing them. And I'm sort of at a crossroads. I'm not sure what to do,

01:27:30.800 but I cannot allow Harvard off the hook. They tried to redefine plagiarism as duplicative language

01:27:37.500 and they've not done anything. Duplicative language, yeah. And have not done anything about

01:27:42.900 the plagiarists that they have on their faculty because some of them are DEI or hires. And since

01:27:50.740 they're progressives and they believe minorities are inferior intellectually, they probably believe

01:27:56.340 that the ends justify the means that if they deal with their DEI hires, that they will not have enough

01:28:01.960 black people to satisfy whatever goal they're trying to accomplish.

01:28:08.140 Yeah. So you are in a tough situation, eh? Because first of all, you have Harvard with its infinite pool

01:28:16.180 of money arrayed against you. So that's a problem. And second, sharp legal minds on her side.

01:28:23.060 But also, you pointed to the fact that there isn't a lot of legal precedent for what you're doing. I

01:28:29.100 mean, the rules for everybody watching and listening, you have to understand that in a

01:28:34.800 functioning academic community, and Harvard was certainly like this, certainly through the 1990s,

01:28:40.460 and I would say through most of the 2000s. If you plagiarized as a faculty member, even accidentally,

01:28:47.840 you were in really serious trouble. Like that was a big problem. That was, is that the prime no-no

01:28:55.420 among academic researchers? It's certainly up there in the top two or three. So, but now you're in a

01:29:03.780 situation, you see, this is very problematic because if the university has defaulted on its obligation

01:29:10.700 to pursue plagiarism rigorously, and now that's also what they're broadcasting to all their students,

01:29:16.380 by the way, they're completely devaluing the notion of original contribution, which is

01:29:21.560 the bread and butter of academic, those engaged in academic inquiry. And so they've defaulted on

01:29:28.520 their responsibility. Now you're trying to make a legal case. It's like, well, it isn't obvious at

01:29:33.480 all that the legal framework allows such a case to be made because it hasn't been, so because you have

01:29:40.520 to show, for example, that you had copyright and that her infringement actually caused you damages.

01:29:46.780 And that's a really hard thing to, that's going to be a hard thing to demonstrate in the legal realm

01:29:52.660 with regards to academic discourse, you know, because how the hell do you quantify the value of

01:29:57.720 your ideas? It's not like you have a, like a patent with a somewhat identifiable economic

01:30:04.520 price tag on it. So I can see why you have pause. It's probably better. Is it better to publicize

01:30:13.080 it widely, you know, in the manner that we're doing now with regards to a book, with regards

01:30:17.680 to the podcast circuit to tell your story that might be more effective?

01:30:21.520 Well, let me tell you this. It's not, it's, it's not about me, even though it is about me,

01:30:26.900 it's about academic integrity and what universities are supposed to stand for. And I just don't believe

01:30:33.620 that Harvard university with its worldwide influence has the right to lower the standards

01:30:38.960 because if they lowered for higher education, it's going to affect K through 12, even kids in a fifth

01:30:45.800 grade learn about pleasurism. And, and so they should not have the power to do something that's so

01:30:51.940 impactful. And of course it hurt my career because our work is based on citations. And if someone is

01:31:00.180 building their career around your work and not citing you, they're cheating you out of citations.

01:31:04.820 And then when caught, if the person says that they are being accused by people that are extremists,

01:31:12.580 you know, right wing, I think that there's reputational harm. Why is Carol Swain pursuing this?

01:31:19.520 I'm pursuing it because it's the right thing. It would benefit a lot of people, but I think I have

01:31:24.500 suffered a reputational harm, insult to injury because Harvard has never even responded really

01:31:32.160 other than the letter to the lawyer saying that I'll be sued if I go up against them and lose.

01:31:38.600 Yeah. Well, I would say, you know, it looks to me like your fight may have just begun in some sense,

01:31:45.840 you know, because, well, you, we already talked about what you're asking the public to swallow.

01:31:51.180 You know, I've been watching this billionaire, Bill Ackman on, on Twitter, and he woke up after

01:31:57.940 the devastating testimony of the UPenn, MIT and Harvard presidents at Congress. And he started

01:32:05.620 paying attention and started to understand that the, that, that the Ivy leagues need a new coat of

01:32:13.100 paint. Let's say that's what he understands. Yes. No, they need a whole new foundation. Like the rot is

01:32:20.400 unbelievably deep. And the problem with your case is that it's pivotal in indicating that,

01:32:27.720 right? I mean, you just, you, I'm sure you've looked at it from the outside, but so just to

01:32:33.220 summarize, let's say where we've been through in this discussion today, like you might not be a

01:32:40.420 poster child for the diversity, inclusivity, and equity crowd, but you're definitely a poster child

01:32:46.460 for the American dream. Right. Right. Seriously. Right. Seriously. And I love America. I love America.

01:32:54.040 Well, another one of your right-wing crimes. And so, and so, and so, and you're of the same

01:33:00.420 background as Claudine Gay, given the idiot categories that we use now. And so you're a very

01:33:09.240 credible witness testifying to the absolute corruption of Harvard, right? They actually put

01:33:17.360 this woman in as president, right? They elected her to the highest possible position, despite the

01:33:24.040 fact that she's radically unqualified and also crooked. Okay. So that's really bad. Well, it's not

01:33:31.380 surprising that you have an uphill fight in front of you because that's a bitter pill to swallow. Like

01:33:36.500 I worked at Harvard from 93 to 93 till 98, you know, and I really loved it there. The undergraduates

01:33:45.120 were great. I really liked my colleagues. They were working like mad dogs. They didn't even like

01:33:50.600 faculty meetings. They were very short so they could get back to their labs. They had a great sense of

01:33:55.300 humor. It was a very intense place. It was focused on quality. The administration served the senior

01:34:01.180 faculty, the undergraduates. It was an impressive institution and it gives me no pleasure whatsoever

01:34:08.300 to see it disintegrate and become corrupt in the manner that's clearly occurring. And I don't, I

01:34:14.920 haven't seen a case like yours. That's a bigger testimony to exactly that fact. And it's, so it's no

01:34:25.120 bloody wonder that you're not being paid attention to because you're a very bitter pill to swallow.

01:34:30.860 Well, I mean, I agree. And my personality is such that I can't walk away from an injustice,

01:34:36.860 but I want people to know that what I'm doing or what I'm trying to do is not about me. It's bigger

01:34:43.580 than me. And I feel like my life, one of the things God impressed on my mind was that he'd given me this

01:34:49.440 story, the story of my life. And it wasn't about me. And, and so whatever happens, it's like walking away

01:34:59.140 is not really an option. I don't know how it would turn out, but if there, if there's a need for, for

01:35:07.200 someone to organize or to set up the class where people can identify themselves that they've been

01:35:14.900 victimized by Harvard or maybe it's the whole, not just Harvard, other universities, they had the

01:35:20.200 same problem. The universities need to be held accountable or there's no academic enterprise.

01:35:26.640 People are just wasting their time. And, and so something has to be done. And as far as whether

01:35:35.160 or not I do an individual action, if I file a federal complaint, you know, it becomes a part of history.

01:35:42.740 It becomes a part of the record. Does Harvard want that out there? But I do that at considerable

01:35:49.840 risk to myself because I could get a judge like Judge Merchant, who threw the book at Trump,

01:35:55.700 who decides to take away my home, my retirement, everything I've worked to accomplish.

01:36:02.200 And so that gives me pause. I'm not a person who is fearful, but I'm asking, I'm asking myself at 70

01:36:08.680 years old, do you want to jeopardize your retirement? I've been, you know, dirt poor and I'm, I'm comfortable

01:36:15.280 right now. Everything's on the line. If I file this lawsuit.

01:36:20.740 Well, Dr. Swain, you know, you did say something and, and I can share my experience a little bit

01:36:26.040 with you because there's some parallels. You know, you said that the most vicious attacks on you have

01:36:34.140 eventually turned in your favor. And okay. So I actually think there's a rule there. So

01:36:40.500 look at what happens in the book of Job. So Job is in a situation where really he loses virtually

01:36:50.000 everything. Plus he becomes extremely ill to the point where his wife says, you know, there's nothing

01:36:55.080 left for you to do, but shake your fist at God and die. And Job refuses to lose faith in himself,

01:37:01.960 even though he's willing to admit to his errors. And he refuses to lose faith in providence.

01:37:07.400 And the story ends with him entering a life that's even more abundant than the one he left

01:37:13.080 behind. Now, the intervening time is a little rough, but you know, you haven't backed down.

01:37:21.020 And so my guess is, is that as long as you continue to aim up and you say what you believe to be true,

01:37:27.960 that people will rally around you in a manner that introduces you to all sorts of people you

01:37:35.300 wouldn't otherwise know, the same sort of people who are fighting the same sort of battles that you

01:37:39.960 are, and that whatever you need to provide for you in your straightened financial condition as a

01:37:47.760 consequence, let's say, of the lawfare, I think you'll find that it'll make itself manifest.

01:37:52.060 I don't think people will forget you. I know what you're saying is true. And I think about David

01:37:58.480 and Goliath and, and my faith tells me that I serve a big God. He's, he owns the cattle on a thousand

01:38:07.140 hills. Everything that I have came from him. And so I don't like the part of me that calculates and

01:38:14.600 says, do I really want to risk everything? But that's, you know, that's what I'm working my way

01:38:20.880 through. But spiritually and intellectually, I know that God has given me a platform. He's elevated

01:38:27.360 me. Even having this interview today, the way it came about, uh, through a Senator Bill Haggerty that

01:38:34.660 made the introduction, uh, everything, you know, is so providential. I just need to, um,

01:38:42.760 well, people are watching, well, you know, the other, well, no, I don't think so. I think that

01:38:49.600 you need to be afraid of the right thing. Like you're afraid that the comfort that you've built

01:38:56.040 is going to be stripped from you and that you'll be left bereft. And a sensible person would be afraid

01:39:03.880 of that. But there is a corollary to that, which is, do you want to lose your tongue? Do you want

01:39:11.520 to lose your soul? You know? And so you've actually got two things to be afraid of. And my guess, like

01:39:17.620 the reason I forayed out into the public domain in 2016 was because a pack of halfwit bureaucrats

01:39:26.000 wanted control over my tongue. And I thought, I know what happens when the lying tyrannical state

01:39:35.380 gets control of your tongue. I know what happens because I've studied totalitarian states my whole

01:39:41.080 life. And so I understand what happens when people go along with the lie. It's not good. And so I

01:39:49.680 thought, well, I don't care what happens to me. I'm not letting this pack of jack and apes take control

01:39:54.360 over my tongue. And they want me to say words that are their coinage that I despise. It's like,

01:39:59.660 go to hell, you pikers. I'm not doing it. And I don't care what happens to me. And it wasn't

01:40:05.640 because I was brave. It was because I knew that there's nothing worse than losing control over your

01:40:10.720 tongue. There is literally nothing worse. I agree. And I know that the anti-Semitism that surrounded

01:40:18.240 Martin Luther, but I feel very much like Martin Luther in feeling like here I stand, I can do no

01:40:25.420 other. Because for me, I have no option but to go forward. And I'm just wired to do what I do.

01:40:33.540 And, but it just seems that I'm always fighting a battle. It's always uphill. That's been the story

01:40:40.200 of my life. And so that's the story of my life. And here I am, 70 years old. All of this stuff was

01:40:47.100 dropped at my doorstep in December. And it has consumed me. It's taken me away from my memoir.

01:40:53.720 It has just been all-consuming. But I do believe that I can make a difference and maybe academia can

01:41:02.120 be transformed. And that in some ways we're winning the battle about DEI. I published a book in 2023

01:41:11.000 after the Supreme Court decision, striking down race-based college admissions, the adversity of

01:41:17.920 diversity. And at that time, a lot of people did not know what DEI was all about, regular Americans.

01:41:27.400 Now they do. And I argued that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs violate the Constitution

01:41:34.380 and our civil rights laws in the same way as the race-based college admissions, and that these

01:41:44.240 programs would fail. But also, we can have diversity without discrimination. And I believe that racial

01:41:52.140 and ethnic minorities can meet any standards you put before them. And that what is taking place

01:41:58.640 through the DEI regime is destructive to our whole society. And I think the critical race theory that

01:42:05.800 has painted all white people as oppressors, all minorities as victims, and all white people,

01:42:13.660 even those in Appalachia, as a privilege, that this stuff is ludicrous. Shaming little white children

01:42:20.560 because of the color of their skin, you know, that is just horrible that we would have ever done that.

01:42:27.080 We were doing it. And people were standing by it. And so these are battles that I don't even feel

01:42:33.820 like I have a choice about fighting. But I did not see the Harvard situation coming on. It has consumed

01:42:40.620 me. And so here we are. All right, ma'am. So I think that's a good place to stop. Please keep me posted

01:42:49.100 with regards to what you're up to. I'm going to send you an invitation to our Alliance for Responsible

01:42:55.220 Citizenship Conference in February, too. I'd really like you to come to that because, you know,

01:43:02.040 you'll find people there that I think you'll, maybe you'll find a place there, you know. That would be good.

01:43:08.260 It wouldn't surprise me in the least. And there's lots of people who are keeping an eye on what's happening

01:43:12.960 to you, like lots of the people I know who are watching.

01:43:16.200 Thank you.

01:43:16.960 People will be watching this podcast. So, you know, I don't know whether your best tack is on

01:43:22.540 the legal front or whether it's on the broader publicity side. But this isn't over. It's not

01:43:30.460 over. And it's not over for Harvard, not in the least. And they might think it is, but it's not.

01:43:36.480 So, good luck with your continued efforts. And I hope that this isn't enough to demoralize you.

01:43:47.680 But like I said, there's plenty of people who are watching what's going on with you.

01:43:53.120 Well, thank you. And thank you for all you do. And I do believe we can transform academia.

01:44:00.020 And it's going to affect K-12 education. And it's well worth the battle.

01:44:05.820 Yep. Yeah, exactly. All right. So, for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue to

01:44:10.500 talk to Dr. Swain on the Daily Wire side for half an hour. So, you could give some consideration to

01:44:17.120 joining us there. I think I'll delve some more into her background, a little bit more, and some more

01:44:22.640 about her ideas with regards to what might constitute a reasonable alternative on the hiring front,

01:44:27.600 since she wrote a whole book about it. And so, join us there if you'd like. Thank you to the film

01:44:32.420 crew up here in Northern Ontario. Thank you, Dr. Swain, very much for telling us what's been going on.

01:44:38.860 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 29, 2024

467. Plagiarized by Harvard's President ｜ Dr. Carol Swain

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