The Matt Walsh Show - Discussing Systemic Racism With Heather Mac Donald

00:00:00.000 And we're joined today by Heather McDonald. She's the author of the recent bestseller When Race

00:00:04.680 Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty,

00:00:08.540 and Threatens Lives. Heather, thanks for joining us. It's an honor, Matt.

00:00:13.260 Yeah, thanks for being here. In fact, it's fortunate we're talking today because there

00:00:16.980 are a couple issues that have recently come up that I wanted to ask you about.

00:00:20.100 But first, you've been speaking out against the race hustlers and the anti-racist grifters for

00:00:27.280 a long time, of course. Just from a general perspective, how do you assess the state of

00:00:33.420 that movement, of that scam right now, today? I think it's still very strong, Matt, despite the

00:00:41.160 Supreme Court ruling. Now, you and I are both innate pessimists. But I'm sorry, I do not see

00:00:46.960 any cessation of it. Amazingly, the STEM fields, medicine, continues to pump out daily statements

00:00:54.120 about medicine being racist. Somebody just sent me Case Western Reserve Medical School saying,

00:01:00.260 we need to change the curriculum of our medical school because of the demographics of our student

00:01:05.040 body. We need to be teaching humility. We know what that means. I'm quoting them verbatim. I'd never

00:01:10.340 heard that one before. But one can guess that it means whites have to go around apologizing for 0.96

00:01:17.660 the alleged racism that leads to disparate outcomes. Recently, the Oakland District Attorney

00:01:25.380 in Alameda County gave a training to the victim services units about how to not be harmed by white

00:01:34.160 victims. The idea is that if a white crime victim is seeking redress, that somehow that's going to

00:01:41.040 threaten staff of color. So the war on Western civilization, simply because it is deemed too

00:01:50.660 white and too male, the war on standards, simply because they have a disparate impact on blacks,

00:01:57.660 I do not see it falling off at all. And I don't see conservatives willing to stand up to the race 0.65

00:02:06.360 hustle and articulate what's really going on. So when you see or you mentioned the Supreme Court

00:02:11.960 ruling, but even many of these corporations that it seems anyway from the outside have some of them

00:02:20.440 have started to de-emphasize some of the DEI stuff. They're pushing pretty heavily for a couple of

00:02:25.100 years. When you see that, you don't see progress. You see what's happening. Are they just kind of

00:02:32.000 pivoting because they realize that certain methods aren't working or what? Well, they still have

00:02:38.500 their narcissist young employee workforce that has been brainwashed by K-12 education and put a

00:02:46.680 finishing touch in college that is on the lookout for phantom signs of racism and sexism. Those employees

00:02:55.260 are not going to go away. And corporate wives are not going away, which pushed their husbands to 1.00

00:03:01.880 be more woke. So maybe they're going to, you know, we have now Edward Blum, who brought the suit

00:03:08.680 against Harvard and University of North Carolina doing lawsuits against various law firms that have

00:03:16.000 blacks only fellowship programs. And he just brought suit against West Point for having racial

00:03:21.840 preferences and admissions. If I were an optimist, I would say, yes, you know, bring it on. We'll sue people

00:03:27.400 into submission. But that's piecemeal. And it also puts an undue faith in the judiciary. You know,

00:03:34.480 one of the most disturbing moments for me in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that that tried to,

00:03:42.200 you know, run a a absolute superb jurist out of the country, basically, was when you had

00:03:49.560 the students at the Harvard and Yale law schools protesting with signs that said, believe survivors,

00:03:57.300 that ethic that a female who claims sexual assault is entitled to automatic belief is the antithesis of 1.00

00:04:05.340 due process. Those graduates of Harvard and Yale are being pumped onto the federal judiciary

00:04:10.600 at way disproportionate rates. If they don't change their thinking, and I have no reason to think they

00:04:16.160 will, we can't assume redress from the courts in the future. So I just think it's going to take a

00:04:23.300 hell of a lot more honesty than I'm willing to, than I've been able to hear from our leaders.

00:04:29.200 What do you think? So culturally, we have, there's sort of race, and then there's also gender

00:04:35.680 ideology. These two things are, there's a lot of overlap there. Of course, they're related. But what do you

00:04:42.600 think is for the left, which is the more potent vehicle for, you know, cultural domination and for

00:04:52.640 and for and for getting their ideology across and indoctrinating people into the ideology? Because

00:04:57.000 gender or race, what do you think is the more kind of potent tool for them? 0.99

00:05:00.400 Wow. And, and, and I'd also like your response to where do you think things are improving? I cannot,

00:05:06.180 I cannot put a hierarchy on those. On the one hand, the race hustle is, is, is giving an excuse to tear 0.53

00:05:14.820 down meritocratic standards across both the STEM fields, across the arts, across theater, across

00:05:21.300 classical music, certainly in the criminal justice system. If people don't understand that disparate

00:05:28.580 impact is driving this perplexing behavior of prosecutors that are declaring entire areas of

00:05:36.580 criminal behavior off limits to prosecution, they have to understand it's all driven by race. Because

00:05:42.420 if they prosecute those crimes in a colorblind constitutional fashion, they will have a disparate 0.96

00:05:48.500 impact on black criminals. And the left has decided it cares more about black criminals than black victims. 0.98

00:05:53.620 So the, the race hustle is, is allowing us to very quickly self-cancel. It is the, the suicide of the 0.98

00:06:04.740 West, but so is gender ideology. Gender ideology, what are we doing in a gay pride march, but celebrating 0.97

00:06:12.420 non-procreative sex? We are celebrating people who are not in, in choosing their, their, their preferred sexual

00:06:22.100 partners. They are not engaged in procreative sex. And, and we're, again, it's, it's part of the great

00:06:28.260 replacement theory. We are making sure that the West simply self-cancels. So they both are operating 0.73

00:06:35.780 at, at very profound levels. The one tearing down merit, meritocratic standards, the ability of students

00:06:44.900 to be pushed to accomplish at their highest level. We're tearing down gifted and talented

00:06:51.300 math education across the country. Somebody just sent me something from the Sequoia School District,

00:06:58.260 which is around Palo Alto and Menlo Park, where they are getting rid of advanced placement courses or

00:07:04.980 advanced accelerated courses in math, science, and English because of disparate impact. So we're tearing

00:07:10.740 that down, but we're also tearing down the basis of civilization, which is the family. Profiling, surveillance,

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00:08:08.740 exprssvpn.com slash WalshYT. But let me turn it back to you. Are you optimistic? And which do you

00:08:17.140 think is of greater power as a battering ram against civilization, the race hustle or the gender 1.00

00:08:24.340 ideology? Well, I'm never optimistic. So that's an easy question for me to answer. But I basically agree

00:08:32.180 with you. I do think that in certain areas, it's a little bit of a whack-a-mole thing. So there are

00:08:37.060 certain areas where they've had to pivot. And the left's very good at this. They rename things.

00:08:42.500 They realize that something is bad. The branding isn't good anymore. And so they have to kind of

00:08:46.780 rebrand. The pushback against CRT was successful in a lot of ways. But it doesn't mean that that

00:08:52.840 ideology is just going to disappear. And the powers that be in our country still realize that this is

00:08:58.120 a very potent tool for profit for them and also for control. They're not just going to give it up.

00:09:02.660 They certainly aren't. And between gender and race, I'm not exactly sure. I think it is basically

00:09:09.620 impossible to rank the two. So maybe I was asking you an impossible question, which isn't exactly

00:09:14.220 fair. Maybe I would say that long term, maybe the race hustle maybe has longer legs in the long term. 0.87

00:09:25.180 Where right now, the gender seems to be maybe the more potent tool for them at this exact moment. 1.00

00:09:31.120 So maybe that's if I had to balance the two, maybe that's the way that I would do it.

00:09:35.480 I agree. I agree. And I would just I would qualify something you said, which is as a tool for profit

00:09:41.300 and control. That's true. And it is certainly true that there are a lot of race hustlers who whose

00:09:47.100 entire jobs depend on the idea that being black is an accomplishment or counterpart that being female 1.00

00:09:54.080 is an accomplishment. I do. I know that being female is not an accomplishment. And I would also say

00:09:59.380 that being gay is not an accomplishment and being black is not an accomplishment. None of those things 0.84

00:10:03.760 should qualify anybody for a job. And yet they do again and again and again. And the idea that

00:10:11.160 everything is caused by systemic racism has given birth to a vast consulting scam. But I think that

00:10:19.260 conservatives move a little too quickly to sort of an economic explanation that, oh, this is all about

00:10:26.780 profit or whatever. It is about control. And certainly we've seen that for the COVID hysteria.

00:10:33.420 But it is also I think we have to understand these are true believers. I don't think that they are

00:10:39.900 adopting a set of phony propositions that they agree as such. I think they actually are committed to the

00:10:46.860 idea that the West is endemically racist and the source of the world's problems, whereas in fact,

00:10:54.340 of course, the opposite is the case. No civilization has provided as much

00:11:01.380 surcease from pain, suffering, premature death, squalor, you know, cold famine than the West. I mean,

00:11:12.340 it's not even close. It is not even close. Everything. Just do a little inventory, leftists,

00:11:19.540 of your apartment or home right now. Do an inventory of every material, every electrical appliance,

00:11:26.260 every labor saving device, your smartphones, water. You've got clean water. You can flip on a switch

00:11:33.540 and get light. You're not overcome with darkness, which was the fate of human beings for millennia.

00:11:40.580 It's all thanks to white, overwhelmingly male scientists and tinkerers that starting in the 0.99

00:11:49.860 early 18th century, some back in the 17th century with the British society, were fascinated to

00:11:57.620 understand the world, develop the scientific method, and gave us this incredible tapestry of

00:12:06.020 excellence and comfort and beauty that we live with. Well said. I think actually you might have

00:12:13.540 just tapped into potentially one of the critical differences between going back to the race and

00:12:18.020 gender question, because I think you're right that the race hustlers, certainly on the lower levels, 0.98

00:12:25.220 are true believers for the most part, and leftists in general. Everything they say about race,

00:12:30.020 I mean, I think they do basically believe it. They're confused enough to believe it. Now,

00:12:33.460 on the other end, the people that are pushing a lot of this trans stuff and the idea that men can

00:12:40.020 be women and women can be men, I think a lot of them don't really believe it because you can't

00:12:44.980 believe it because it's so incoherent. There's no way that you really believe it, especially if you're

00:12:49.300 an educated person in science, you know that this is not true. So maybe that's one of the differences,

00:12:53.380 that the gender stuff is being pushed by people who really are entirely cynical and they don't

00:12:58.180 believe it. The race stuff is being pushed by true believers maybe. Well, I get asked this all the

00:13:03.620 time and I'm sure you do too, which is, well, tell us what the inner state, the psychology or the

00:13:09.380 epistemology of these people are. Do they believe it? And again, my instinct is to say that they do,

00:13:18.100 because I can't imagine being that cynical throughout your life, that you are deliberately,

00:13:24.180 like there's a sequence and maybe it's simply instantaneous, which is, well, I know this is all,

00:13:30.180 as you've said many times, this is an idea that represents like a nano of a millisecond of a

00:13:38.260 like cilia within the millennia of human history. And all of a sudden it becomes the new default

00:13:44.740 that men can menstruate and females can procreate through penises. This is just astounding. 1.00

00:13:53.780 But they would say that I know it's fake and yet I'm going to now go and destroy childhood innocence

00:14:04.260 through the premature exposure of children to sexuality. I don't even care if it's heterosexual 0.87

00:14:11.220 or trans or LGBTQ sexuality. Children should be in that zone of innocence. And I know, again, I am just

00:14:17.940 repeating one of the most crucial themes that you have been educating your listeners about, which is

00:14:24.260 that you as parents have a duty to preserve your children's innocence and their capacity for

00:14:32.260 imagination as long as possible, because it will provide them a haven from despair and ugliness as

00:14:39.380 adults. But I can't imagine that people would be that cynical to say, I don't believe it, but I'm

00:14:46.020 going to pursue these policies anyway. Let me ask you, I think it's very important to equip people

00:14:54.980 with arguments. And that's what I try to do. Of course, you do a great job of that in all of your

00:14:59.540 books. Anyone listening right now, we've talked about systemic racism, and that's a big part of

00:15:04.420 the whole race hustle. I think many normal people, when they hear about systemic racism,

00:15:10.020 intuitively, they don't believe it because they can look around at society and see that,

00:15:13.780 where is this systemic racism? But what you'll hear from the other side is that, well, it's ingrained

00:15:21.300 in the system. There's the vestiges of racism in the past. The system was set up originally by racist

00:15:26.900 people. And so it's still, and you have the disparate impact, as you mentioned. So I know it's

00:15:31.140 a broad question, but how would you suggest people deal with that and respond to that argument?

00:15:37.700 Well, I would first start out, and you're right, systemic racism, but you know, there used to be

00:15:43.620 the scientific theory of phlogiston, which was this kind of colorless substance that was just assumed to

00:15:49.620 be existing. And it was used as the catch-all explanation for any physical process you couldn't

00:15:55.380 understand. And it had no existence. It was just, it was a placeholder for ignorance. And you had the

00:16:01.380 miasma theory of infection, all these things that were discredited. Systemic racism works the same way.

00:16:07.220 When you don't want to acknowledge the actual causes of disparate outcomes, which is the academic

00:16:13.700 skills gap, you invoke systemic racism, but you can never actually prove it per se. You can't find it,

00:16:21.620 you can't see it, but it's the fallback explanation. What I would first say is, okay, this idea that we are

00:16:28.660 remaining a discriminant, a racist society, show me any institution that is not twisting itself into knots

00:16:36.980 to hire and promote as many Blacks as possible. How can it be that we're told that universities say, 0.69

00:16:45.460 you must allow us to continue with racial preferences, because if we don't have them, we will not be able to get 0.94

00:16:52.980 our desired critical mass of Blacks. And so they are willing to lower their academic standards to an 1.00

00:17:00.580 extraordinary degree to admit Black students. And then the pressure is ubiquitous and constant

00:17:08.420 in every academic hiring search to find the few Blacks who have graduated with PhDs in electrical

00:17:17.860 engineering, which ends up being in the STEM fields, about 1% at most of PhDs in STEM fields are granted to

00:17:27.140 Blacks. And in many fields, there's none. But the pressure is on to hire those few that are out there, 1.00

00:17:34.660 and they get enormous bidding wars in salaries. Of course, the pressure is also on to hire females in 0.51

00:17:41.700 STEM, and females get hired ahead of males at rates like at some places three to one. How can it be that

00:17:49.940 these are racist institutions? It's literally a logical contradiction that they are so determined to have

00:18:00.580 Blacks in them that they are bending their standards. And yet, at the same time, they're discriminating 0.89

00:18:05.460 against Blacks? It does not compute. And anybody that is vaguely aware of his workplace, if he's in a law

00:18:13.620 firm, say, an elite law firm, knows that the name of the game is how do Black associates are hired out of 0.91

00:18:20.980 law school at rates disproportionate to whites. They're hired with lower class ranking. And the

00:18:27.460 pressure is constant from both the American Bar Association and internally from firms to promote

00:18:34.580 those into Blacks into firm partners. Now, of course, there are thousands of Blacks who are out 1.00

00:18:41.220 out-competing whites and Asians, thousands. They are getting by on their hard work, on their self-discipline. 1.00

00:18:49.620 So I don't want to say that this is a problem that has no exceptions. But given the reality of mismatch,

00:18:58.820 when you bring people into an institution that have lower academic skills than their peers,

00:19:04.420 they're going to struggle. And that happens both in academic environments and it happens in places

00:19:09.460 like law firms. So those Black associates who were hired on the basis of race end up leaving

00:19:16.340 the law firm because they're not keeping up. But nevertheless, you can look at the law firms and say,

00:19:21.540 all they care about is racial proportionality. And we're both supposed to believe they're racist.

00:19:27.140 Please explain that. And here is what the explanation is that people need to hear.

00:19:33.300 And Matt, I mean, I realize that this entire conversation is very difficult for people to

00:19:40.340 observe, to witness, to participate in because we have very strong race etiquette in this country.

00:19:46.020 Another way of disproving the white supremacy argument. You know, it is not, as you've said before,

00:19:51.940 it is not the behavior of white supremacists to turn their eyes away from Black-on-white violence

00:20:00.180 and to pretend that the problem in this country is white-on-black violence when 87 percent of all 0.98

00:20:06.980 interracial violence between Blacks and whites and whites and Blacks is committed by Blacks, 0.97

00:20:12.100 when Blacks are 35 times more likely to commit a violent assault against a white than a white is 0.99

00:20:17.860 against a Black. It's not the behavior of white supremacists to not look at that. But here, 0.99

00:20:24.580 I'm sorry, these are uncomfortable facts, but here's the explanation for ongoing racial disparities

00:20:32.180 in meritocratic fields like STEM or law or corporate high-tech finance, you know, Silicon Valley engineers.

00:20:41.860 Here's the data. If you look at Black 12th graders, 66 percent of all Black 12th graders do not possess even

00:20:53.540 partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills defined as being able to do arithmetic or read a graph.

00:21:02.660 7 percent of Black 12th grade students are proficient in math. And the number who are advanced

00:21:15.940 is too small in a national sample to even show up statistically. That makes the expectation of equal

00:21:25.060 outcomes absent racism simply impossible. It cannot be done. The fact of the matter is,

00:21:34.020 you can have diversity or you can have meritocracy. You cannot have both in light of current academic

00:21:41.060 skills gaps. And any institution that loudly proclaims that it is behind diversity and diversity, equity,

00:21:49.460 inclusion, and belonging are its prime values, is telling you so de voce that it is lowering standards

00:21:57.460 and is cast aside meritocracy.

00:22:00.740 On meritocracy, the last question I want to ask you on that topic, because you talk about merit,

00:22:06.820 the need to assess people based on merit. The equity pushers will say that we can't assess everybody.

00:22:13.460 We can't assess everyone equally based on merit because we're not all starting from the

00:22:17.700 same place. This is Kamala Harris's line. And she didn't come up with it, obviously. But

00:22:22.180 the difference between equality and equity is, you know, equality is the assumption that

00:22:25.780 we're all starting from the same place. And so you just treat everyone the same and give them,

00:22:29.380 you know, let people be free. And that's equality. But the problem was that we can't do that because

00:22:34.660 some people are starting the race farther up the track. And so equity is to put everyone at the same

00:22:41.620 starting point, which means boosting some people ahead of time so that then we can have from there

00:22:47.620 an equal race. How do you how do you respond to that absurd claim?

00:22:55.460 Well, if the if the disparities diminished over time and you gave people preference,

00:23:00.580 you know, you admitted black students to selective colleges with 200 point difference in SATs,

00:23:08.020 a standard deviation. And by the end of the four years or six years they had caught up,

00:23:14.260 you know, that maybe that would be something that we should definitely consider because it would show

00:23:20.900 that, well, you can close the disparities this late in life. But it doesn't happen. In fact,

00:23:25.620 the opposite is the case. You are putting a handicap on students. It is the racial preferences are

00:23:32.420 incredibly cruel and sadistic. They are the most cruel policy of these damn college presidents and 1.00

00:23:39.300 administrators because they are putting a unique burden on black students to be catapulted in 1.00

00:23:45.700 academic environments for which they are not qualified and in which they will predictably 0.61

00:23:51.620 struggle and fall behind. This is not about race. It's simply about academic mismatch.

00:23:57.780 And let me put it in the context of sex. Let's say MIT wants more females in its undergraduate class. 1.00

00:24:07.140 And that's not a hypothesis. Of course, it does. Every school that's a tech school is obsessed with

00:24:13.700 gender. And so it has gender sex preferences. And it admits me with SATs on my math score of 600 0.50

00:24:22.820 on an 800-point scale, whereas my peers are all admitted basically with 800s, my male peers, because

00:24:30.420 they've been admitted based on merit and I've been admitted based on my sex. Well, what's going to

00:24:36.500 happen in my freshman year? I'm going to struggle because the teaching is understandably and legitimately

00:24:43.060 pitched at the average skill of my classmates, which is very high. And I'm likely to say I can't keep up

00:24:51.940 I'm dropping out of the STEM field. I'm going to I'm going to major in MIT's Gender Studies

00:24:56.180 Department. And of course, the diversity bureaucrats will be ready at hand to tell me that I'm the victim

00:25:00.980 of misogyny and rape culture. And that's why I'm not keeping up. The same thing happens with black 1.00

00:25:06.580 students. They are catapulted with much greater academic skills gaps into schools for which they're not

00:25:14.820 competitively qualified. If they had been admitted to schools with the same skills as their peers,

00:25:21.700 let's say instead of getting into MIT, they went to Boston College or Boston University,

00:25:27.620 or instead of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill went to a university,

00:25:33.540 a North Carolina State School that was less prestigious, they would do just fine. And

00:25:38.500 that's what everybody else does. You know, it's not the end of the world to not go to an elite Ivy

00:25:45.940 League school. Believe it or not, college presidents, you bunch of elitist snarling curs,

00:25:52.820 it is possible to get a decent education and to become a leader at a second and third tier school. So

00:25:59.860 the idea that because maybe we don't start ahead, we have to at the end of the at the end of the

00:26:07.540 process, lower our standards, A, it doesn't work. And B, here's what's happening when we lower standards.

00:26:16.340 We are now lowering standards for the medical school licensing exam, part one, because blacks don't do 1.00

00:26:23.940 well enough on it. So we've gone from a graded, it's called step one of the US medical licensing exam, 0.69

00:26:33.540 it used to be graded as of 2021 January, it went to pass fail basis. So we would cover up the ongoing

00:26:41.540 skills gap. Black medical students were doing the worst in their classes, they were not landing their 0.97

00:26:47.620 preferred residencies. So we've decided we'll just get rid of those standards. The pressure is on 0.96

00:26:53.060 throughout medical school, to change standards for medical licensing, the curriculum is being changed,

00:27:00.740 the honor society credentials are being changed. There's less and less time being devoted to clinical

00:27:10.660 practice and understanding how to save a body that's been crushed in a car accident, and more time

00:27:17.220 students are spending learning about systemic racism in medical school. So if you care about

00:27:25.460 whether you're going to get the best qualified doctor walking through that ER, or whether you've

00:27:31.060 got the best qualified oncologist trying to finally solve the mystery of cancer, or the best qualified

00:27:37.540 neurologist trying to save human beings from the scourge of Alzheimer's disease, it ain't happening.

00:27:44.740 The federal government is giving grants for science research based on race, not based on skill. We are

00:27:54.260 slowing down our progress. Meanwhile, China is barreling ahead at at mock speed with its math education, with

00:28:05.540 its science education, it is finding its most talented students throwing everything it's got at them and 0.99

00:28:10.900 saying, go whoop America's ass, and it is happening. 0.99

00:28:17.700 Yeah. And I would also note that you said, really, you don't have to go to Ivy League school at all, 0.98

00:28:22.980 you can survive. Actually, you can go to no school, you can go to no college at all and still survive,

00:28:26.900 as I've discovered. Well, there's a lot more we can say about this, of course, and you say a lot more in

00:28:31.780 your book, When Race Trumps Merit, and that can be picked up anywhere you get books, including Amazon.

00:28:36.580 Heather MacDonald, thanks again. Really appreciate it. I appreciate it, mate. Thank you so much.

The Matt Walsh Show - October 01, 2023

Discussing Systemic Racism With Heather Mac Donald

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