The Megyn Kelly Show - Bud Light Backlash Grows, Mr. Beast Fallout, and Race Trumping Merit, with Michael Knowles and Heather Mac Donald

00:00:00.580 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.900 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:16.480 I hope you had a better weekend than Budweiser did.

00:00:20.140 Oh my gosh, I'm dying to talk to you about that case.

00:00:22.800 There is so much news to get to today and we have two of our favorites.

00:00:26.440 I love our guests today.

00:00:28.140 Later in the show, I will be joined by the one and only Heather MacDonald, the most fearless commentator in America.

00:00:34.740 I really think she is. And that's a tough lane because people are getting more bold.

00:00:38.740 But none is so bold as Heather MacDonald.

00:00:41.440 This will be her first interview about her absolutely amazing new book, Everything by Heather is Worth Reading.

00:00:47.920 And that includes her latest offering, which we'll get to.

00:00:50.260 But we begin with another favorite of The MK Show, and that is The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:57.440 Michael, welcome back. You are just as bold as Heather MacDonald, but you're a lot younger, so you can't yet have the title of number one.

00:01:04.800 I am happy to play number two to the great Heather MacDonald. It's a great honor in itself.

00:01:10.860 I thought you'd feel that way. Okay, we got to kick it off with Bud Light because after we wrap the show on Friday,

00:01:15.680 the CEO of Budweiser put out that pathetic, rambling, empty air sandwich of, I can't even call it an apology,

00:01:29.100 an attempt to dissuade people from hating his company and him.

00:01:33.900 It was an utter fail. And then they tried to release an ad to cover up any hard feelings.

00:01:41.100 Let's show the horses again. Look at the pretty horses. See, we're all about America.

00:01:44.780 So let's let me just start with his statement for those who missed it.

00:01:48.060 Right now, I'll give the audience a couple of highlights in case they were living their lives and not paying attention to what the CEO of Anheuser-Busch said.

00:01:55.860 His name is Brendan Whitworth. Whitworth. And he said, as the CEO of a company founded in America's heartland,

00:02:05.160 drink. Okay, we're going to drink every time he tries to appeal to their working class base.

00:02:10.400 Booze it up there with, oh, I was drinking out of that just this morning. Bailey Wire left us tears.

00:02:15.620 Okay. As the CEO of a company founded in America's heartland more than 165 years ago,

00:02:20.720 I am responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew.

00:02:26.000 We're honored to be a part of the fabric of this country.

00:02:30.140 Drink. Anheuser-Busch employees, more than 18,000 people, blah, blah, blah.

00:02:34.200 We have thousands of partners, millions of fans, and a proud history of supporting our communities.

00:02:39.080 Military. Go ahead, sir.

00:02:43.100 First responders. Go ahead. Sports fans.

00:02:47.180 And hardworking Americans everywhere.

00:02:49.840 We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.

00:02:56.320 We're in the business of bringing people together over a beer.

00:02:59.700 Then he goes on for this, for good measure.

00:03:02.100 My time serving this country. Here we go.

00:03:04.640 Okay. The fact that he's a veteran, that's supposed to appease anybody's objections.

00:03:09.120 Taught me the importance of accountability and the values upon which America was founded.

00:03:13.040 Freedom. Hard work. Respect for one another.

00:03:15.900 What does any of this have to do with their...

00:03:17.840 Yeah. Knolls is just in a permanent downpour right now, down his throat.

00:03:23.500 As CEO of Anheuser-Busch, I'm focused on building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage.

00:03:28.680 I care deeply about this country, this company, our brands, and our partners.

00:03:32.160 Blah, blah, blah.

00:03:32.700 I'll work to... I will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation.

00:03:38.860 This is an utter fail.

00:03:40.760 None of this appeases any of us who objected to their bizarre Dylan Mulvaney campaign, embrace of wokeness, and of a person who spends his life essentially mocking women and womanhood.

00:03:53.860 None of it. And the closest he comes to an apology is, we never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.

00:04:00.540 Well, you are, you were, and you haven't apologized.

00:04:04.440 So, Michael, what do we make first of all of the statement?

00:04:07.980 Megan, I don't know what Anheuser-Busch is paying to its crisis communications consultants right now,

00:04:13.580 but I'm happy to take even a fraction of that for better advice than they've gotten, which is,

00:04:19.700 shut up. Stop talking. You are only making things worse.

00:04:26.080 And frankly, they could have stopped about a week ago.

00:04:29.520 Do you remember a week ago, Anheuser-Busch came out, and they leaked through anonymous sources to the media

00:04:35.940 that the people who were in senior leadership positions, they didn't know anything about this.

00:04:41.080 It was a rogue VP of marketing who engaged in the Mulvaney campaign.

00:04:45.620 Listen, conservatives, Budweiser's really on your side.

00:04:49.420 Okay, we're going to sort this out.

00:04:51.000 And I never believed a word of that.

00:04:53.280 One, because Budweiser had already made a statement essentially defending the ad campaign.

00:04:58.720 But two, because this is exactly the kind of gobbledygook that crisis communications people always cook up.

00:05:04.480 It allows the company to placate everybody, not totally to satisfy anyone in particular.

00:05:10.260 They say, look, the senior people, the old fuddy-duddies, they're on the conservative side.

00:05:15.600 The young whippersnappers who are going to take over the company someday, they're on the progressive side.

00:05:20.180 And okay, move along, move along.

00:05:22.020 Now, if they had just left it at that, probably Budweiser could have recovered from this.

00:05:27.280 They lost something like $6 billion in market cap one day.

00:05:30.240 It would have jumped right back up.

00:05:31.680 These things happen.

00:05:33.740 But it's because they keep digging on this losing issue and they refuse to pick a side.

00:05:39.340 On certain political issues, we can meet in the middle.

00:05:42.700 Issues like taxation, you can find the number in the middle.

00:05:45.960 On issues like immigration, you can find the number in the middle.

00:05:48.540 On certain issues, you can't meet in the middle.

00:05:51.700 And transgenderism happens to be one of those issues.

00:05:54.560 Either women exist and men can't become them, or women don't exist as a real category and

00:06:02.280 anybody can become a woman if he says he's a woman.

00:06:05.520 You have to pick a side.

00:06:06.640 Either women will be allowed to have their own bathrooms or they won't.

00:06:09.280 Either women will be allowed to have their own sports teams or they won't.

00:06:12.680 On this issue, if you stand in the middle of the road, you will be hit by a truck, as is

00:06:17.360 happening to Anheuser-Busch right now.

00:06:19.180 By the way, he's all about America and his service to America, and we were founded in

00:06:25.540 America's heartland.

00:06:27.160 This company is owned by the Belgians.

00:06:29.720 This is a Belgian company now.

00:06:31.320 OK, so it may have been found in America.

00:06:32.880 Just spare me with your America by American.

00:06:35.340 No, this is not an American company.

00:06:37.320 It's HQ is in America, but this is a Belgian company.

00:06:40.140 When you buy Anheuser-Busch products like Bud Light, you're paying money to the Belgians,

00:06:44.580 not some guy who served his country, I'm sure honorably, who's now sitting in America

00:06:48.660 but working for some Belgians.

00:06:50.180 So spare me on your stupid horses, OK?

00:06:52.680 And on that point, Megan, by sponsoring Dylan Mulvaney, Budweiser insulted women.

00:06:57.360 But by issuing this statement, they've insulted Americans.

00:07:00.220 Do they really believe that Americans were so stupid, were such yokels, that if you throw

00:07:05.680 out a few platitudes about hard work in the military, that we're going to forget everything?

00:07:10.180 Give me a break.

00:07:11.580 Thank you for saying that.

00:07:12.920 It's so annoying.

00:07:14.440 Screw you and your stupid, empty platitudes.

00:07:16.540 I mean, I read this, I'm like, oh, your little, you know, market-tested buzzwords on what's

00:07:21.320 supposed to stir up our patriotism.

00:07:23.620 Too late, sir.

00:07:24.760 The buzzwords we were looking for are, I'm sorry, we screwed up, and this woman, whatever

00:07:30.840 her name is, VP of marketing, is fired.

00:07:33.180 Her ass is fired.

00:07:34.280 Because whether she dreamed this up or not, she clearly approved it.

00:07:37.040 It happened on her watch.

00:07:38.560 Do something to show us you get it.

00:07:40.880 Because, by the way, it's not just the ad campaign that has people very angry.

00:07:45.260 That's number one.

00:07:46.480 But her comments on that podcast about how, which is too fratty, this brand is outdated.

00:07:52.660 Talk about not getting your audience base.

00:07:55.000 What do you mean by fratty?

00:07:56.120 Are most of your customers out there drinking beer from condoms like you did when you were

00:07:59.980 in college, ma'am?

00:08:01.160 Because I've seen the videotape.

00:08:02.320 I never did that.

00:08:03.200 I went to Syracuse University, Albany Law School.

00:08:05.180 Never once.

00:08:05.760 Good luck trying to find a picture of me drinking out of a condom.

00:08:08.220 Didn't happen.

00:08:09.080 All right?

00:08:09.860 So spare me your judgment on your customer base.

00:08:12.780 But that's what she's trying to say, Michael.

00:08:14.100 They're disgusting.

00:08:15.120 They're deplorable.

00:08:15.940 It was another deplorables moment.

00:08:18.120 It was a deplorables moment, and it was a moment of these elite, liberal power players

00:08:25.000 taking their customer base for granted.

00:08:28.080 Because they assume that the frat boys are going to keep drinking Bud Light, and they assume

00:08:32.340 that construction workers are going to keep drinking Bud Light, and they assume

00:08:35.360 that everybody who goes into a bar and just wants a cheap, light beer is going to continue

00:08:39.500 to order Bud Light no matter how much we're insulted because, oh, you know, who cares what

00:08:43.700 those people think?

00:08:44.440 And I think they were truly shocked at the degree of organization here by the people who

00:08:50.140 have been insulted, and I think they've been surprised at some of the other beer companies

00:08:54.520 coming out yingling through some great corporate shade at Bud Light.

00:08:58.840 They posted a picture of yingling beer in front of an American flag with a sunrise, and it

00:09:04.560 said, the yingling has been making beer here for almost 200 years.

00:09:07.800 We support America.

00:09:08.860 We make good beer.

00:09:09.960 We're independently owned.

00:09:10.880 That was pretty much the whole ad.

00:09:12.440 And I think that yingling was getting ahead of this because they're afraid that my friend

00:09:15.820 here, Jeremy Boring, is going to start Jeremy's lager pretty soon.

00:09:19.800 100%.

00:09:20.240 There is obviously, there is a background here of conservatives finally saying, no, you're

00:09:26.300 going to insult regular Americans and tell us to teach our daughters to shave their face,

00:09:30.780 or we're going to start our own razor company.

00:09:32.420 You're going to insult ordinary Americans and try to trans the chocolate bars.

00:09:36.540 Okay, we're going to start our own chocolate company.

00:09:38.220 And it's only a matter of time before the beer industry gets this message, too.

00:09:42.200 This person who is on their beer can has made a mockery of womanhood and girlhood for literally

00:09:48.960 the past year and has been celebrated by far lefties all across the country.

00:09:53.560 But to see what's supposed to be a mainstream beer company do it was a bridge too far.

00:09:59.160 That's why they're having the reaction they are.

00:10:01.280 He needs to apologize if he wants to save his company and he won't do it.

00:10:06.020 Instead, we're getting the horse's ad, which was, oh, I'm sure it was just completely coincidental,

00:10:11.300 put out right after his statement.

00:10:13.320 Here it is.

00:10:15.800 Brewed for those who found opportunity and challenge and hope in tomorrow.

00:10:23.440 The horses.

00:10:24.720 Raised by generations.

00:10:27.440 Willing to sit, share, risk, remember.

00:10:35.760 Horses.

00:10:36.320 This is a story bigger than beer.

00:10:42.820 This is the story of the American spirit.

00:10:48.720 Okay.

00:10:49.380 There was a 9-11 reference and notice who they showed in there.

00:10:52.540 Two white guys, one with a beard and baseball cap, sitting on a porch in what appeared to

00:10:56.160 be middle America.

00:10:57.160 And in no world does Dylan Mulvaney, dressed as Eloise, then prance out onto their porch with

00:11:02.960 them and have a beer.

00:11:04.180 Those two guys would be like, who the fuck are you?

00:11:09.140 This is a corporate identity crisis about an identity crisis of sexuality.

00:11:16.000 That's what this is really about.

00:11:17.080 What is Bud Light going to be?

00:11:19.440 No one can be all things to all people.

00:11:22.920 If you are a man, that means that you are not a woman.

00:11:25.960 And if you're a woman, that means that you're not a man.

00:11:28.020 And if you're the blue collar, hardworking company, then you're not going to be the

00:11:32.560 fae, liberal, preposterous company on the coasts.

00:11:37.300 You've got to pick.

00:11:39.520 Identities are defined by limits.

00:11:41.740 So Bud Light has had a great, successful corporate career just being the good old guys,

00:11:46.460 standard American beer.

00:11:47.740 We're staying out of all this crazy politics stuff.

00:11:50.100 Then they decided to transition.

00:11:51.760 Now they're going to be a woke beer company that addresses the most fringe extremist elements

00:11:57.140 of the radical left.

00:11:58.380 Okay.

00:11:58.960 They're free to do that, I guess.

00:12:00.720 But that means that they're giving up their old identity and they're going to have to pay

00:12:05.020 for that at the liquor stores.

00:12:07.540 You're so right.

00:12:08.220 That's so well put.

00:12:09.040 They're like a trans apple martini, you know, appletini.

00:12:13.040 We know you're still Bud Light, but they're transing themselves to try to get a different customer

00:12:16.920 base.

00:12:17.280 And guess what?

00:12:18.020 That customer base makes up less than 1% of the population.

00:12:21.860 So good luck with that.

00:12:23.440 Bud Light is the new Zima, Megan.

00:12:25.660 The new Zima, which we didn't need a new Zima.

00:12:28.260 One was plenty.

00:12:30.660 Enter Donald Trump Jr., who has a podcast now.

00:12:35.660 This was remarkable.

00:12:38.100 And if I may say, pretty transparent.

00:12:40.920 I'm dying to get your take on it.

00:12:42.400 I saw Matt Walsh tweeting about it all weekend.

00:12:44.340 Um, Donald Trump enters as somewhat of an apologist for Bud Light.

00:12:50.100 And here's why.

00:12:51.480 Listen.

00:12:53.260 Anheuser-Bus totally shit the bed with this Dylan Mulvaney thing.

00:12:57.900 I'm not, though, for destroying an American and iconic company for something like this.

00:13:04.000 When I actually look into it, I'm not going to blame the whole company for the inaction

00:13:07.680 or the stupidity of someone in a marketing campaign that got woke as hell.

00:13:12.040 And we looked into the political giving and lobbying history of Anheuser-Busch.

00:13:18.440 And guess what?

00:13:19.960 They actually support Republicans.

00:13:22.260 In woke corporate America, Anheuser-Busch supports Republicans.

00:13:27.100 Just two things, and I'm going to give it to you.

00:13:30.500 Number one, as I point out, this is not an American company.

00:13:32.620 It is not an American company.

00:13:35.000 Number two, you blame me.

00:13:36.680 And I'm not going to blame the entire company for the actions of one woke employee.

00:13:39.880 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:13:41.020 The CEO runs the company.

00:13:42.880 The CEO is responsible for everything that happens on his watch.

00:13:45.520 And if the CEO were upset about what the marketing department did here, there is zero evidence

00:13:52.320 of that.

00:13:53.220 Someone needs to get fired at a minimum.

00:13:56.540 If you're not going to issue the apologetic, groveling email to your fan base, at least

00:14:02.020 fire somebody so they get that you understand they're upset.

00:14:06.780 Go ahead, Michael.

00:14:07.600 I don't know if Don is trying to play a little good cop to the rest of our bad cop here and

00:14:12.940 try to keep those Republican donations from Bud Light coming on in, especially obviously

00:14:17.180 as his father is running for president again.

00:14:19.600 But the timing is really unfortunate here because whenever Don made that statement, at

00:14:25.020 the very least, shortly thereafter, or at the very most, rather, shortly thereafter, the

00:14:29.260 CEO makes the statement in which he acknowledges and doesn't quite apologize, but recognizes that

00:14:35.060 it's politically divisive.

00:14:36.360 And it's just really, really weak.

00:14:37.580 So I agree with you.

00:14:38.560 Now it's not enough for the VP of marketing to get fired.

00:14:40.860 I think probably the CEO has to get fired at this point.

00:14:44.000 He is now complicit in all of this.

00:14:46.400 And it's a misreading of the moment because while maybe Anheuser-Busch has donated some

00:14:51.080 money to Republicans in recent years, they're doubling down.

00:14:54.700 They are endorsing this radical gender ideology.

00:14:58.440 And so they've forced our hand.

00:15:00.580 And especially this is an issue that we are winning on with the American people because

00:15:04.840 it's just so manifestly absurd.

00:15:06.820 And this is one of the few times that conservatives have actually been able to impose consequences

00:15:12.480 on woke companies for going rogue and appealing to the fringe left.

00:15:17.540 And so this is not the time to concede.

00:15:20.460 This is not the time to give it up.

00:15:22.340 We need to show that there are consequences for these kinds of actions.

00:15:25.960 And when we're on the brink of actually doing that, potentially even a leadership change

00:15:31.120 at Anheuser-Busch, now is not the time to do it.

00:15:34.080 Whatever donations Anheuser-Busch is making to Republicans, it's going to be offset by a

00:15:39.440 slew of donations, either that will come in from companies who are pleased that conservatives

00:15:43.500 are standing up with a spine here.

00:15:44.820 Or as of now, if Anheuser-Busch is going to be the pro-Dylan Mulvaney company, I don't

00:15:50.940 think you can bank on a lot of those Republican donations in 2024 or in the future.

00:15:55.720 Oh, my God.

00:15:56.600 Well, so so there was a report, was it the National Republican Congressional Campaign

00:16:01.120 Committee was about to post an ad in solidarity with the Bud Light boycott and then pulled

00:16:06.020 it down once it got revealed by that Donald Trump Jr. was against the boycott and that

00:16:14.620 they made a lot of donations to Republicans.

00:16:17.240 I guess somebody let them know, hey, this is one of your donors and they pulled it.

00:16:20.440 And now today, Ted Lieu, one of the most contemptible people in Congress, posted a picture that is

00:16:27.400 like the best advertisement for Coors or Heineken you could ever want or Yingling.

00:16:33.960 Let's go with them.

00:16:34.540 A nice Pennsylvania beer right where my husband's from.

00:16:38.520 It's him and three others.

00:16:40.560 We'll put we'll put it up here sitting there with their Bud Light cans directly facing the

00:16:44.860 camera.

00:16:45.240 I mean, it just had like little actors.

00:16:47.160 You know, they they wanted to do what you did as a kid, Michael.

00:16:49.660 They wanted to be little actors in front of the camera with their Bud Light cans, except

00:16:54.120 they're mature adult men posing with their Bud Light.

00:16:58.300 It's the worst advertisement for Bud Light literally ever.

00:17:01.920 So here's Matt Walsh's tweet.

00:17:03.260 Let me ask you if you agree with this.

00:17:04.540 This is from 416.

00:17:06.860 The only corporations we can possibly hope to influence are the ones that donate heavily

00:17:10.820 to Republicans.

00:17:11.940 The others don't give a damn what we say or think.

00:17:15.000 So any Republican pushing for us to leave Anheuser-Busch alone because they donate to

00:17:20.100 Republicans is really telling us to give up the fight against corporate wokeism entirely.

00:17:25.280 Pay attention to those taking this position.

00:17:27.900 Lots of valuable lessons being learned right now.

00:17:30.900 Do you agree with that?

00:17:32.560 I think it's fair enough.

00:17:33.780 Although Matt might overstate just how Republican Anheuser-Busch has been.

00:17:39.060 Big corporations play both sides.

00:17:41.440 In fact, that was one of Donald Trump's campaign lines in 2016 when people would knock him for

00:17:46.500 donating to Democrats.

00:17:47.420 He said, look, I'm a big business and I play both sides and we grease the wheels wherever

00:17:51.040 we can.

00:17:52.000 And I'm sure that's what Anheuser-Busch has been doing.

00:17:54.660 I think to give Don Jr. the benefit of the doubt, the most charitable read here beyond

00:17:59.400 just trying to protect some campaign donations for Trump and the Republicans would be this

00:18:04.700 line that a lot of conservatives in recent years have tried to push forward, which is

00:18:08.780 that we oppose cancel culture.

00:18:11.760 And we don't want there to be any politics in the economy and in business.

00:18:16.720 We just, we want to ignore it.

00:18:18.280 We're not going to play the same game that the left does when the left goes after companies

00:18:23.540 and boycotts them for not being sufficiently woke.

00:18:26.160 And I just think that ship has sailed.

00:18:29.220 There, there's, there is no neutrality here, especially when we're talking about an issue

00:18:33.040 that can't have a moderate position, either men or men or, or men can become women.

00:18:37.080 And, and furthermore, all of the companies are engaging in politics.

00:18:41.300 Politics just means public life.

00:18:42.820 And, and we're debating really fundamental stuff in the country right now because we

00:18:47.080 can't even agree on what a woman is.

00:18:49.880 We can't agree on what language we speak.

00:18:52.080 We can't agree on what we believe in.

00:18:53.340 We can't agree on borders.

00:18:54.280 We can't agree on anything.

00:18:55.160 And so there's no running away from that.

00:18:56.960 There's no neutrality.

00:18:58.160 The only way out is through.

00:19:00.480 And if you ever want to restore a sensible country again, where we don't need to be litigating

00:19:04.940 gender politics on beer cans, you're going to have to make companies, even companies

00:19:09.720 that have been somewhat friendly, you've got to make them pay the consequences.

00:19:13.480 Because if, if there's no, if there's no stick to the companies, then the carrot isn't going

00:19:18.680 to do much good.

00:19:20.140 You know, the, the thing I think Junior's missing is the second piece of it.

00:19:25.500 I think her name was Alyssa.

00:19:26.580 I can't remember her last name.

00:19:28.080 It's hard to pronounce.

00:19:29.600 Heinerscheid.

00:19:30.200 Thank you, Steve Krakauer.

00:19:33.180 He's missing that she had her Hillary deplorables moment about their customer base too.

00:19:38.260 That I guarantee you, the Republicans that Anheuser-Busch has donated to are the Mitt

00:19:43.400 Romney types.

00:19:44.520 It's going to be establishment type Republicans.

00:19:46.560 And there's not that there's anything wrong with them, but that's not Trump's base.

00:19:50.240 You know, Donald Trump Jr. should be thinking about how Donald Trump's base is thinking.

00:19:54.960 The Kid Rocks of the world, right?

00:19:56.500 The Travis Tritts of the world, the John Riches of the world.

00:19:59.820 These are country stars who have thrown out their beer off their, their Bud Light off their

00:20:03.400 tours.

00:20:03.640 Um, and like, those are the ones who get that this company apparently hates them and hates

00:20:10.300 their fan base and hates Donald Trump's fan base.

00:20:13.640 Like there is, Donald Trump has enough donations.

00:20:16.340 He got $10 million in the wake of the indictment.

00:20:18.900 Like he doesn't need Anheuser-Busch's Belgian money.

00:20:21.940 Um, they need to stand with their base.

00:20:24.660 So I think that was a rare political misstep by, uh, team Trump on where the base is.

00:20:30.700 They don't give a damn about prior donations on something as important like this.

00:20:34.760 But the first time ever, the GOP base that objects to these crazy wokeism things is making

00:20:39.720 some progress, Michael.

00:20:40.860 They're making some progress, right?

00:20:42.900 And it's not time to let up.

00:20:45.000 Um, it's a good case to be made for, for doubling down on it.

00:20:48.420 And don't forget, one of, one of the arguments for the Trump campaign is the guy is a brash

00:20:52.920 New York billionaire who doesn't give a damn what the established powers say.

00:20:56.960 And so I get that now we're in a different world.

00:20:59.640 There has been a more established campaign apparatus.

00:21:03.060 The, the RN, he's obviously been involved with the RNC for a long time, but, but no,

00:21:06.660 the magic of Trump is I don't need your Anheuser-Busch money.

00:21:10.060 I'm not going to let you insult my people.

00:21:11.920 I'm not going to let you completely upend our whole culture.

00:21:14.700 No, thanks.

00:21:15.820 We're going to do it on our own with, by, by sincerely appealing to the hardworking men

00:21:21.300 and women of America who have been forgotten, the people who are called deplorable, irredeemable

00:21:24.680 in the flyover states.

00:21:25.920 We're not going to appeal to them with empty platitudes.

00:21:28.680 We're going to offer them a distinct vision for the country.

00:21:31.820 And the CEO of Anheuser-Busch has, has made clear it doesn't want to be part of that new,

00:21:36.980 distinct, normal vision for the country.

00:21:39.940 And okay, see you, Budweiser.

00:21:41.360 Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

00:21:42.900 Yeah.

00:21:43.280 We got a lot of choices.

00:21:44.160 Uh, I'd rather have an apple martini than a Bud Light at this point.

00:21:47.260 Although skinny, spicy margarita has been my drink of choice of late.

00:21:50.460 The vast couple of years, I've really been enjoying it.

00:21:52.220 A little jalapeno in there.

00:21:53.240 It's very tasty.

00:21:54.220 You go too far, my eyes start to water.

00:21:55.700 Because my canned alcohol of preference is White Claw, which is already sufficiently gay

00:22:02.000 that I don't think it has to appeal to transgenderism or any other LGBT.

00:22:06.420 So it will not be going woke, unlike Bud Light.

00:22:08.960 It's so annoying, by the way, when people defending Bud Light, like we have to stand up for the

00:22:12.880 LGBTQ, whatever community.

00:22:14.420 It's like, could you just stop?

00:22:15.520 Because the LGB community is not under attack.

00:22:19.440 That, stop trying to glom on to an issue everybody agrees on.

00:22:22.360 Just stop it right there.

00:22:23.360 It's the TQ that's taking over in bizarre and inappropriate places that we object to.

00:22:28.540 So just stop trying to glom on to a battle that's already been won.

00:22:31.880 That you're not a part of.

00:22:33.400 It's annoying.

00:22:33.720 I love this idea.

00:22:35.300 Like, you know, Dylan Mulvaney walks up and he says, hey, fellas, they're really all attacking

00:22:39.800 us, aren't they?

00:22:40.980 He's like, I don't know.

00:22:41.480 Who is us, Dylan?

00:22:42.520 You're the one dressing up like Audrey Hepburn and threatening the rights and spaces of women

00:22:46.100 and making a mockery of womanhood.

00:22:48.240 Please don't lump us in with the rest of that.

00:22:51.220 Literally, Dylan put out a video that appeared to be tongue in cheek, though one can never tell

00:22:55.280 with this person, talking about how Dylan was concerned that Dylan was late in getting

00:23:01.180 Dylan's period.

00:23:03.040 Dylan's a man.

00:23:04.340 So Dylan doesn't get a period because there's no uterus that just shed its lining once a

00:23:08.540 month every 28 days.

00:23:09.480 That's how it happens, Dylan.

00:23:10.600 No matter how much you push your Tampax online into other people, you don't need a Tampax because

00:23:15.120 you're a dude.

00:23:16.480 Of course.

00:23:17.260 No, this is this is quite clear.

00:23:18.760 And I've talked to a number of my friends who identify as gay and lesbian.

00:23:22.640 And they say, they say, Michael, listen, I know that you're not on board with the redefinition

00:23:27.920 of marriage or all there are all sorts of culture war issues here.

00:23:31.380 But I think we can agree this is this is a distinct phenomenon.

00:23:35.240 And on this issue, the vast majority of Americans think this is absolutely absurd, especially when

00:23:40.880 it's applied to children, especially when it's it's constantly forced down our throats

00:23:45.000 in the culture.

00:23:45.900 And that's what Dylan Mulvaney is doing.

00:23:48.000 He is the most prominent voice for cramming this ideology down everywhere in the entire

00:23:54.840 culture.

00:23:55.580 Major, major misstep for Budweiser.

00:23:58.020 Can I ask you quickly about the James O'Keefe video?

00:24:01.060 James is now on his own.

00:24:02.540 He's separated from Project Veritas unwillingly from the sound of it.

00:24:06.280 And he did one of his first new videos following Dylan around.

00:24:11.300 Not going to lie, made me feel sorry for Dylan.

00:24:13.420 Um, but he also reported that in following Dylan, Dylan went into the women's restroom.

00:24:19.080 Then I felt less sorry for Dylan.

00:24:20.960 Um, but I'd love to get your take.

00:24:22.240 Here's just a snapshot.

00:24:23.520 I don't want to play all 41 seconds to play a little bit so people get the feel.

00:24:27.220 Do you have a comment on the story here of the women being raped by the men claiming to

00:24:33.840 be transgender?

00:24:36.440 James O'Keefe, OMG News.

00:24:38.780 Um, do you, what do you think about the women who are being raped by the men who are transgender?

00:24:45.340 Do you have a comment about that?

00:24:46.640 Please don't come in the elevator.

00:24:47.560 I'm sorry.

00:24:48.780 Um, what do you think about, what is your comment to the women who are being raped by men claiming

00:24:53.140 to be transgender, Dylan?

00:24:56.140 Okay.

00:24:57.360 So we're here.

00:24:58.340 You get how it goes.

00:24:59.440 What did you think?

00:25:01.320 It's not my tactic.

00:25:02.540 That's, that's not my approach in, in these kinds of debates, but in James's defense,

00:25:07.320 first of all, I love that after that preposterous, uh, uh, uprising at Project Veritas, that James

00:25:14.380 O'Keefe is just starting a new organization and he's going back and doing his work.

00:25:18.500 Uh, but furthermore in James's defense, Dylan Mulvaney has chosen to become a public figure.

00:25:26.100 He's, he's chosen to become a political persona in one of the most contentious fights in the

00:25:32.460 country.

00:25:32.920 And so I'm not going to be the one who's chasing people around with the microphone.

00:25:37.080 That, that is not my style, but that is what happens to politicians.

00:25:41.160 And it's usually the people on the left who are doing that kind of thing.

00:25:44.500 Occasionally some people on the right who are investigative journalists do that as well.

00:25:48.220 If Dylan Mulvaney did not want the microphones and the cameras in his face asking for his opinion

00:25:53.100 on contentious public issues, then he shouldn't have injected himself into politics, but he's

00:25:57.660 happy to take the fame and he's happy to take the money and he's happy to, to push this,

00:26:02.100 this absurd ideology on people.

00:26:04.120 Well, it is just a fact of public life.

00:26:06.900 When you inject yourself into politics, you're, you're going to be treated like a politician.

00:26:11.320 It's true.

00:26:12.260 It's true.

00:26:12.680 It's not pleasant, but I mean, I've been there.

00:26:14.400 I've, I've been chased into my home with my children all around town.

00:26:17.560 It's, it's not ideal.

00:26:18.740 It's not something I want to see more of, but Dylan is the person who injected him in the

00:26:23.100 himself into, and I am using him for this person.

00:26:25.820 And I'm, and I've been wrestling Michael, um, with whether to switch over to biological

00:26:30.840 or real, real pronouns for trans people for a while.

00:26:34.060 I'm going to have more to say about it soon, but I'm, I'm, as you would say, although I

00:26:38.700 didn't really understand the word, but you're basically, your position on this is fact-based.

00:26:43.440 It's anthropological and it's, what's the word epistemology?

00:26:48.680 Epistemological.

00:26:49.440 I know, you know, it doesn't rattle off the tongue in a political slogan.

00:26:52.720 Well, you went to Yale.

00:26:55.040 Explain it.

00:26:56.620 You know, at, at Yale, they teach you a few things.

00:26:59.540 Increasingly, they're teaching you, uh, transgenderism, but, but a few of those other things would

00:27:03.720 be that politics is based on deeper things like anthropology, which is the nature of what

00:27:09.600 it means to be human.

00:27:11.080 Epistemology, which is how do we know anything at all?

00:27:13.440 And, and all, all sorts of these questions.

00:27:15.260 And so I, I really applaud you, Megan, for taking this seriously because most people,

00:27:20.120 if they refer to Dylan Mulvaney as she, they're not making a conscious choice to do it.

00:27:24.620 It's just, there's a lot of pressure from the culture.

00:27:27.160 Dylan Mulvaney is dressing up as Audrey Hepburn.

00:27:29.140 And so that's a little bit confusing too, but it's really important because the way that

00:27:33.360 the, the left wins these kinds of debates is they manipulate language.

00:27:38.100 This is the topic of my book, Speechless.

00:27:39.900 They, they manipulate language so that they can win the debate before the debate ever begins.

00:27:46.160 You see this on illegal immigration.

00:27:47.620 If you're debating whether or not a future American undocumented dreamer has the right

00:27:54.400 to stay in America, well, he obviously does.

00:27:56.880 He's an American, albeit one without documents.

00:27:59.360 But if you're, if you're debating whether a foreign national illegal alien has the right

00:28:02.980 to stay in America, obviously he would not.

00:28:05.380 And especially here, if we refer to men who identify as women, maybe they're the nicest

00:28:10.460 people in the world.

00:28:11.340 I don't know.

00:28:11.820 If we refer to them as she and her, we've conceded the debate before it can begin.

00:28:18.760 We are granting that this person is a woman and she and her certainly have the right to

00:28:22.760 use the women's bathroom and play on the sports teams and take away the private rights

00:28:26.720 and spaces of women.

00:28:28.020 Let me ask you a follow up on that.

00:28:29.500 Um, because I read Posey Parker was on the show last week and I read at her, uh, suggestion,

00:28:36.080 uh, pronouns are hypnol, which you can Google and pull up.

00:28:40.740 It's an article that's been banned in a number of places, but you can find it's very interesting.

00:28:44.640 And then it talks about how, how do you say she can't use the women's restroom?

00:28:49.840 She can't go into the women's prison.

00:28:52.140 She can't swim on the women's swim team.

00:28:54.400 And like, it raises some good questions.

00:28:56.520 How do you, but you know, the argument on the other side is we, we tell lies all the

00:29:02.460 time to people.

00:29:03.280 Do I look fat in this?

00:29:04.400 No, you know, did, what do you think of my haircut?

00:29:07.340 It looks great, right?

00:29:08.600 Like we tell compassionate lies in polite society all the time, kind of go along with

00:29:15.360 somebody's self-delusion that they don't look fat in those teeny tiny pants, right?

00:29:20.640 To be polite or just to avoid confrontation.

00:29:23.440 So how is this different?

00:29:26.100 People do that, but they really should not.

00:29:28.920 And I'm not arguing that you ought to tell your wife that she looks fat or anything like

00:29:33.100 that, but we can use our language to speak in soft terms without outright lying.

00:29:39.520 This is what euphemisms are for.

00:29:41.280 When you say that, uh, there is a woman of a certain age rather than an old hag, you are

00:29:47.580 using nicer language, but you're, you're not lying because the, the woman is of a certain

00:29:52.500 age.

00:29:53.320 Uh, and so I would encourage people to, to, uh, speak in ways that can be perfectly polite

00:30:00.100 and courteous, but that are, that are not lying.

00:30:02.580 If you're, if your wife says, how do I look in these jeans?

00:30:04.340 You can say, you look great.

00:30:05.440 You're my wife.

00:30:05.960 You always look great.

00:30:07.040 And you can get around these.

00:30:08.040 I would know if you, if you put that qualifier on the end, I would know.

00:30:11.880 I love spending time with you.

00:30:13.500 You know, there are all ways that are a little bit, um, you're so smart.

00:30:16.800 No one even looks at your ass.

00:30:18.620 Yeah, exactly.

00:30:19.760 But, but, you know, on this issue, it really does matter because if, if you live according

00:30:25.000 to lies, you are not going to have a flourishing society.

00:30:28.620 I think what, what the leftists who are trying to make this argument, what, what they are insinuating

00:30:34.840 is that lies are comforting.

00:30:37.960 Lies will set you free and that the truth is very cruel when in fact, the opposite is

00:30:42.840 true.

00:30:43.020 The truth will set you free and lies will always get there.

00:30:45.920 It's worse than that.

00:30:46.700 Michael, they're saying it's not a lie.

00:30:48.780 They're saying, I am a woman.

00:30:51.980 I had a woman on the show, a trans woman on the show, uh, not, I don't know, like a year

00:30:57.060 plus ago.

00:30:57.700 It was shortly after we started actually.

00:30:59.400 And it was on, uh, the subject of the Connecticut runners, you know, the, the high school girls who

00:31:03.820 got beaten by these boys who ran as boys a year earlier and then just declared themselves

00:31:07.580 girls and ran and crushed that case is on appeal right now.

00:31:11.200 But this was a trans woman who said, you know, I said, I think I said biological male now trans

00:31:18.140 woman, you know, born a man now trans woman.

00:31:20.980 And this person corrected me, you know, that's not, that's not right.

00:31:25.980 What you're saying is false.

00:31:27.360 That's not appropriate.

00:31:28.240 Like they, they would actually say the truth is it's like a woman trapped.

00:31:33.820 Inside of a man's body.

00:31:35.860 That's why it's now called like affirming instead of gender reassignment surgery.

00:31:39.440 Now it's gender affirming care.

00:31:41.860 Right.

00:31:42.400 They, they do this and they, they keep changing the explanation.

00:31:45.580 The one that you've just described is the most common one, which is that my body has nothing

00:31:49.900 to do with who I really am.

00:31:51.140 And my true identity is, is immaterial.

00:31:53.900 And it's somewhere they're really referring to their souls, but, uh, because we live in

00:31:57.780 modern times, people don't talk in those kinds of terms anymore, but that's what they're

00:32:01.000 talking about.

00:32:01.780 And, and so you can examine that idea using your intellect and you can say, okay, well,

00:32:06.440 what is the relation of the body and the soul?

00:32:08.540 And can your body be opposed to your soul?

00:32:10.280 And there are all sorts of philosophical debates that have, have, uh, raged on this for 2000 years.

00:32:15.960 The short answer though is they can't be, if you look like a man, you, you are a man.

00:32:19.860 If you have the natural body of a man, you are a man, but they won't do that because the

00:32:23.320 moment you start engaging in that debate, they'll change it.

00:32:25.640 And they'll say, well, actually trans women, they have the brains of women, even though

00:32:30.100 they have the bodies of men.

00:32:31.740 But that's an, that's an incomprehensible sentence because your brain is part of your

00:32:36.200 body.

00:32:36.740 So then you're, you're saying, okay, well, part of my body is male, part is female.

00:32:40.060 So, and then the moment you say, you point that out, they'll move to a different argument.

00:32:43.560 Tomorrow, I'm supposed to debate a transgender identifying professor, triple Harvard grad, half

00:32:48.560 a dozen honorary doctorates, very distinguished scholar at the university of Pittsburgh on this

00:32:53.620 issue of transgenderism and public life.

00:32:55.960 And at the last minute, he pulled out of the debate and he pulled out of the debate, not

00:33:01.080 because he learned anything new about my position.

00:33:03.420 My position has been pretty public for a while now.

00:33:06.100 We had had a pre-debate meeting.

00:33:07.500 He seemed to enjoy the meeting and at the end of it reiterated his desire to debate.

00:33:13.120 But I think he thought better of it by the end.

00:33:15.140 And I think he realized that I'm, I'm not going to shout at him or yell or call him names

00:33:20.140 or anything like that.

00:33:20.700 I'm just going to present an argument as to why transgenderism doesn't make sense and

00:33:25.040 is bad for everybody.

00:33:26.260 And he had no answer to that.

00:33:29.220 You know, even a distinguished scholar couldn't defend this kind of thing.

00:33:33.320 And so it seems to me on the matter of being polite and compassionate and nice to people

00:33:37.680 that, that we owe it to people if we're truly compassionate to tell them the truth about,

00:33:42.700 about who they are and not to affirm their delusions, which are not going to make them happy

00:33:46.840 in the long run.

00:33:47.460 And not only is it going to drive them mad, but it's going to drive the whole society

00:33:50.600 mad as it already has been doing.

00:33:53.020 I know.

00:33:53.260 I mean, there, we've talked before about that.

00:33:55.280 There's this disorder that makes you really think you need to have your arm cut off.

00:33:58.640 And no psychiatrist would say, you're right.

00:34:00.660 You do need to get rid of your perfectly health, healthy left arm.

00:34:03.320 Only the right arm works for you.

00:34:04.740 It's got to go.

00:34:05.580 Otherwise it's going to eat you alive.

00:34:06.780 You would not be saying, yeah, dude, the left arm's a problem.

00:34:10.160 It should go.

00:34:10.780 You're right.

00:34:11.080 Your feelings are spot on, out of compassion, out of respect for the genuinely held belief

00:34:15.720 that the left arm is problematic.

00:34:17.740 You'd be like, I really hope you get the help you so desperately need.

00:34:21.080 Hope you're getting some sort of counseling.

00:34:23.340 Now let's move on.

00:34:24.960 Would you like a sandwich?

00:34:26.700 How about a cup of coffee?

00:34:28.220 You know, you, and you get off of that very uncomfortable topic because this person needs

00:34:31.740 help.

00:34:32.340 Not, not the kind that engages in the same delusion.

00:34:35.280 All right.

00:34:35.560 Let me pause you there.

00:34:36.180 I am interested in what's going on with this person who you mentioned, uh, the, the professor's

00:34:40.580 name is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

00:34:43.020 This is a man who's going as a woman and Deirdre has canceled on you as near as I can tell

00:34:49.880 Michael with a bunch of lies about why McCloskey is so terrified of you.

00:34:54.260 It's actually quite interesting what this person is claiming publicly versus what you say happened

00:34:58.100 behind the scenes.

00:34:58.860 We will let the audience in on that secret right after this.

00:35:02.000 Every time we have on Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles show, he's been canceled

00:35:08.840 someplace.

00:35:09.720 Somebody's calling him a fascist.

00:35:11.200 He's a perfectly nice man.

00:35:13.360 He causes so much trouble.

00:35:15.980 Um, and Deirdre McCloskey is not your fan or is Deirdre because Deirdre now canceled out

00:35:23.880 of this debate, uh, hosted by university of Pittsburgh, which is a public university, uh,

00:35:28.640 event sponsored by intercollegiate studies Institute, had agreed to debate you on these

00:35:32.840 issues that we're discussing.

00:35:34.020 Deirdre transitioned from male to trans female in the 1990s and is now 80.

00:35:40.820 Um, I love that you guys were supposed to debate the nature of womanhood.

00:35:44.020 No woman on the panel.

00:35:45.660 Okay.

00:35:46.200 But okay.

00:35:47.040 Um, now I'm a patriarchy wins again, Megan.

00:35:49.640 That's right.

00:35:50.200 Has dropped out saying McCloskey had no idea who Knowles was when McCloskey agreed.

00:35:56.920 And after learning more about you and your beliefs, McCloskey decided to withdraw.

00:36:01.160 Knowles is interested in stirring up hatred and violence, uh, that toward people who do

00:36:05.600 not fit his extremely conservative Catholic beliefs.

00:36:08.420 Uh, I didn't want to give him a platform.

00:36:10.700 It's sad that the intercollegiate studies Institute, once a force for liberty, decided to sponsor

00:36:14.640 this man, this fascist, which she called you.

00:36:18.020 So you say, uh, McCloskey's acting because they knew full well who you were and what your

00:36:23.380 beliefs were when they agreed to this debate.

00:36:25.920 McCloskey is acting in a lot of ways.

00:36:27.900 That's, that's true.

00:36:28.980 But, but, uh, Professor McCloskey's excuse as to why he's pulling out of this debate,

00:36:33.620 it's undermined even by his own tweets because weeks and weeks ago, uh, Professor McCloskey

00:36:39.300 went on Twitter and called me a fascist and called me an anti-Jesus Catholic, little, little

00:36:46.320 Catholic phobia in there as well.

00:36:49.200 Uh, it, it, it's ironic with the claim that I'm a fascist though, because Megan, as I'm

00:36:53.560 sure, you know, fascism is far too modern and progressive and ideology for me.

00:36:58.440 I would, unlike most people who bandy that word around, I have read the founding documents

00:37:03.640 of fascism.

00:37:04.600 I just, as I've read the founding documents of communism and all sorts of, and I'll just

00:37:08.540 tell you, Megan, fascism, it ain't for me.

00:37:10.800 Uh, but the professor knew all of this going in and had reiterated his belief that it was

00:37:16.620 important to debate me on these issues and to, to, you know, win over the, the audience

00:37:22.280 in this debate.

00:37:22.960 And then we had a pre-debate phone call just two or three weeks ago in which Professor

00:37:27.820 McCloskey, I won't say he was exactly polite to me, but we, we discussed how the debate would

00:37:32.640 go.

00:37:32.960 I explained where my stances derive from and why I just don't think that transgenderism

00:37:38.460 depicts a true, uh, understanding of human nature.

00:37:42.580 And by the end of the call, he, he was a bit friendlier and he once again reiterated his

00:37:48.600 belief that we ought to debate these issues.

00:37:51.820 And so, uh, obviously he's lying when he says that, uh, he discovered that I have no

00:37:58.460 interest in truth or something like that.

00:37:59.820 Yeah, I mean, that's, that's obviously a lie, but, but it's kind of a perfect lie because

00:38:04.540 I think actually the opposite was true.

00:38:07.360 I think that Professor McCloskey may have gone into this thinking that I was just some bomb

00:38:11.500 thrower or provocateur who was going to make a big fuss of myself, in which case he could

00:38:16.980 have maybe won the debate by seeming like the adult in the room.

00:38:20.780 But when he realized that I, I don't hate anybody, I, I'm not going to call him any nasty names

00:38:26.560 or anything, I'm just going to state my view, which happens to be the view of everyone for

00:38:31.180 all of human history, which is the men and women are different.

00:38:33.620 I think he realized that there was no way for him to win that debate.

00:38:38.160 And especially because there was so much public interest in the debate.

00:38:41.040 A lot of legislators were talking about it.

00:38:42.980 C-SPAN was going to broadcast it.

00:38:45.160 I think Professor McCloskey concluded that it was better to concede the debate before it

00:38:49.820 began than to lose in front of C-SPAN's cameras.

00:38:52.720 Well, I had Kelly McGuire, one of my crack producers, go and pull some old soundbites

00:38:58.140 by McCloskey just so we could get a feel for how McCloskey performs publicly and why they

00:39:03.500 would have been so afraid of you.

00:39:05.080 And here is Deirdre on with Dave Rubin in 2016.

00:39:11.480 This is interesting.

00:39:12.240 So it's, it's what, four, seven years ago, making claims that I think you would have had

00:39:17.680 fun taking on.

00:39:18.940 Here's one example, Sotten.

00:39:20.080 There's something that's really important for straight people to understand.

00:39:26.500 No one has regret.

00:39:29.420 A, the number of people who have a regret one way or the other, male to female, female to

00:39:35.080 male, is minuscule.

00:39:37.940 And B, if they have regret, they can change back.

00:39:42.420 It's okay.

00:39:43.140 Well, gee, you can't grow a penis.

00:39:45.360 Well, so what?

00:39:47.820 Many perfectly well-functioning men don't have penises from terrible accidents or war injuries.

00:39:55.180 Big deal.

00:39:57.100 It's how you present yourself.

00:39:59.800 It's how you live in the world.

00:40:02.500 That's what determines how society takes you on.

00:40:06.780 Big, so you lose your penis.

00:40:11.460 Get over it.

00:40:14.000 I'll just speak for myself.

00:40:16.580 That would be a big deal.

00:40:18.240 I think I would have to conclude.

00:40:20.340 And you can see that clip.

00:40:22.380 I had seen other clips of Professor McCloskey debating these issues.

00:40:26.120 He's obviously a troubled guy.

00:40:29.420 He's obviously been extraordinarily deluded on this issue of sex and gender.

00:40:34.980 So he can debate reasonably well on all manner of other topics.

00:40:39.860 He is a pretty distinguished scholar.

00:40:41.800 On this issue, he just says the most preposterous things that are completely indefensible.

00:40:47.660 And so I actually think that one of the proofs of his intelligence is that he withdrew from

00:40:52.020 this debate, because I think he realized at the end that even with all his degrees and fancy

00:40:57.820 scholarly credentials, no one can defend the indefensible.

00:41:02.900 And when one tries to do it, it sounds absurd, as the professor did there on with the debate.

00:41:07.560 Well, look at like Kendi.

00:41:09.400 He won't debate Coleman Hughes publicly.

00:41:11.700 Or he won't debate anybody.

00:41:13.020 Never mind Coleman.

00:41:14.360 All these sort of advocates for these radical positions when asked to actually stand up to

00:41:19.860 someone smart on the other side who's well-versed in the issues and have a smart intellectual

00:41:25.460 exchange on it, won't do it.

00:41:28.200 That tells us a lot.

00:41:29.460 So you are going out.

00:41:31.000 Well, I should point out, Megan, ISI, after Professor McCloskey pulled out, ISI invited

00:41:36.100 like 10 or 12 leftists, transgender identifying people, prominent spokesmen for the transgender

00:41:43.280 movement.

00:41:44.280 Nobody would do it.

00:41:45.480 So we now do have a debate opponent, which is Brad Palumbo, who is-

00:41:50.580 I like him.

00:41:51.580 Yeah, nice guy.

00:41:52.960 He's a little more on the right.

00:41:54.620 He's on the libertarian side of things.

00:41:56.780 He doesn't identify as T, but he does identify with the LGB.

00:42:01.160 So he broadly defends the transgender movement.

00:42:04.800 The debate will be a little different, but it will go on.

00:42:08.420 Professor McCloskey will not have succeeded at shutting it down.

00:42:10.940 And the Democrat legislators in Pennsylvania will not have succeeded at shutting it down.

00:42:14.420 We will have a debate broadly on these issues.

00:42:16.680 It will happen at Pitt tomorrow, and the libs can whine and cry about it, but we will be

00:42:21.640 hashing out these debates at a public university.

00:42:23.320 I hope you show up drinking a Yingling.

00:42:27.060 Okay, so good luck, and we'll be watching to see what happens.

00:42:30.400 Now, next up, Mr. Beast.

00:42:32.640 I have to ask you about what's happening with his sidekick, Chris.

00:42:35.460 We talked about it on our show on Friday, and more clips are now emerging of this Chris Tyson,

00:42:40.820 who's been the main sidekick to Mr. Beast, the most popular YouTube figure by far, 144 million followers.

00:42:48.680 And his sidekick turns out to be trans.

00:42:51.520 It was this married, masculine, mountain-type guy who had the beautiful young wife, has a two-year-old baby,

00:42:59.000 and now suddenly he's a she and looks, I have to say, absurd, but is celebrating his newfound womanhood and still posting publicly.

00:43:09.180 And if you object to what you've seen or your children seeing it, you're a transphobe.

00:43:12.520 Mr. Beast, who tries to stay political, apolitical, tweeted out on April 13th,

00:43:17.780 So, okay, this is getting dicey for him.

00:43:31.980 He's been studious in avoiding this kind of thing, but it's been forced on him by his friend who transitioned and is now owning it on camera.

00:43:40.400 Just for some context here, here's a bit of his transformation, Sot7.

00:43:47.780 Why did I paint my nails? Because my pee-pee big. That's why.

00:43:53.200 Freak-up flapping.

00:43:55.540 Is that not pretty cool?

00:43:56.840 Who would have thought?

00:43:58.160 Oh, snap!

00:43:59.180 He's like, hey, guys, welcome to my vlog. We're doing monkey things.

00:44:02.960 Sean does not like this.

00:44:06.020 You know what to do.

00:44:08.180 Roger that.

00:44:08.920 Rubber Seuss. Going doc.

00:44:12.900 Hey, nice shirt.

00:44:14.220 Thanks, dude. Nice shirt.

00:44:15.500 Thanks.

00:44:15.880 He's got the headband on.

00:44:16.900 Nice shirt. Nice.

00:44:18.260 Shoes.

00:44:19.260 Oh, wow, he's different.

00:44:22.360 This man's out there saying his two-year-old baby absolutely supports him, has no problem.

00:44:28.320 Like, okay, the child has no idea what is happening.

00:44:31.320 You're inflicting damage by the day.

00:44:33.340 You have no idea.

00:44:34.740 But Mr. Beast taking a stance for his friend.

00:44:37.160 What do you make of it?

00:44:37.640 Who would have imagined that a widely admired person in popular culture with the name Mr.

00:44:43.460 Beast might have a few things that are a little off about him?

00:44:46.380 But in his defense, he's in an impossible position here.

00:44:49.700 And this guy, Chris, has put him in that impossible position.

00:44:53.020 And the silver lining to this awful storm cloud, especially for his family, is it really clarifies

00:44:59.940 the problems of the transgender movement, and all of these leftist movements, for that matter.

00:45:05.360 Which is, this guy, Chris, has decided because he has some disordered type of desire, he's

00:45:11.000 going to shirk all of his other commitments and obligations, and he's just going to pursue

00:45:15.360 his sexual desires.

00:45:17.040 But that's not how we used to think about our identities and politics and the family,

00:45:23.180 too.

00:45:23.820 We used to think of it from the position of obligation.

00:45:27.720 This man has an obligation to his wife.

00:45:30.020 He took a vow and said he would be a husband to his wife.

00:45:32.680 And part of being a husband means you don't become a wife yourself.

00:45:35.680 This man has an obligation to his child.

00:45:38.340 When you become a father, you take on responsibility, and you have a responsibility to be daddy.

00:45:43.340 And by being daddy, that means that you can't become a bizarre caricature of mommy.

00:45:49.100 You have to fulfill your obligations.

00:45:51.940 And it raises this question, why did this guy, in his late 20s, one day just wake up and

00:45:56.940 decide, after getting married, after having a kid, after being a dude for his whole life,

00:46:00.240 one day he just decided that he's a woman.

00:46:02.360 And what I strongly suspect is that one of the drivers of this is something that no one

00:46:10.000 wants to talk about with the transgender explosion, and that is pornography.

00:46:14.540 My friend Ali Stuckey pointed this out not long ago, that Chris had had all sorts of strange

00:46:19.940 posts about really bizarre types of pornography, even pornography involving depictions of children.

00:46:27.120 And I don't bring that up to suggest that he's a pedophile.

00:46:30.420 I'm not making that claim.

00:46:32.660 People can draw their own conclusions.

00:46:33.940 The only reason I bring it up is to show that the man is fluent in the language of pornography.

00:46:40.040 And so he obviously has a relationship with pornography.

00:46:44.860 And one of the undiscussed stories here, you can read it on Feminist Current, a really good

00:46:50.020 article on that feminist website, is that there are genres of pornography that encourage men

00:46:55.560 to identify as transgender.

00:46:57.360 When I brought this up on the show, many people started writing in to me saying that they've

00:47:00.500 encountered this kind of thing.

00:47:01.640 It's obviously dangerous, it's obviously disordered, and people need to start paying attention

00:47:06.160 to it.

00:47:07.380 Yeah.

00:47:07.900 Well, we talked about this as well on Friday, and it's dark, this particular kind of anime.

00:47:13.060 You know, it's chicken and the egg.

00:47:14.260 What attracted him to it in the first place?

00:47:16.300 Or did he try it out and it drove him in a direction he wouldn't go?

00:47:19.960 But once you get married and in particular have children, my position is it's utterly selfish

00:47:26.240 and inhumane to go through with this.

00:47:28.520 That's utterly selfish and inhumane.

00:47:30.340 And to pretend your child's fine with it, it's not going to cause any damage, is a lie.

00:47:35.300 It's a lie.

00:47:36.000 I know that.

00:47:37.260 Michael Knowles, always a pleasure.

00:47:38.520 Can't wait to see how it goes tomorrow.

00:47:39.840 At least you have a very smart, fun, respectful sparring partner, or so we think.

00:47:44.720 We will find out when we watch it live on C-SPAN, me and Abby.

00:47:48.400 Thank you, Megan.

00:47:49.120 Great to be with you as always.

00:47:50.720 Bye.

00:47:50.960 Good luck.

00:47:51.340 See you soon.

00:47:51.760 And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel

00:47:56.000 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our

00:48:00.140 YouTube channel.

00:48:00.900 Go there now, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly to check out all of our fun clips.

00:48:08.400 Joining me now is the absolutely fearless and brilliant bestselling author Heather McDonald.

00:48:14.680 Heather is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributor and editor

00:48:20.020 at City Journal, and she joins us now for her first interview about her new book, When Race

00:48:26.040 Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.

00:48:33.480 Heather, so good to see you again.

00:48:35.700 It's wonderful to be with you, Megan.

00:48:37.160 Thank you so much for having me.

00:48:38.960 Such a timely book, and you have brought the receipts, as they say.

00:48:43.080 Um, can we kick it off with, uh, what's happening now with racial equity, the Supreme Court and

00:48:49.660 university admissions, because there's a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court right now

00:48:54.420 that we think is going to eliminate race as an acceptable criterion for college admissions.

00:49:01.720 Right now, it's okay to use it as one of many, but it looks like the Supreme Court's about to

00:49:06.500 overturn that in a pair of cases that are, that have already been argued and will probably get a

00:49:10.160 decision in June. Um, I noted in the book, you talked, of course, about what, and you mentioned

00:49:16.080 this in your last book too, what happened in California when they got rid of affirmative

00:49:20.860 action by voter initiative in 1996 for their University of California schools. And the University

00:49:26.360 of California, having been through this experiment, and I've, I've read you, I've read Glenn Lowry on

00:49:31.060 this successfully, you would argue, successfully got rid of race as a, as a criteria for admission.

00:49:37.260 Um, now turns around and says to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of, uh, those who want race-based

00:49:43.460 admissions, it's been a disaster here. It's been a disaster. We haven't been able to get enough

00:49:49.420 diverse students. And the way they positioned it, Heather, I'd wanted to read this to you, um, was,

00:49:55.540 yes, we're racially diverse in our, in our schools, but not sufficiently racially diverse since you

00:50:01.460 said we couldn't have affirmative action. Black, this is from their amicus brief, Black Native

00:50:06.400 Americans and Latinx students, uh, are not sufficiently represented at most competitive

00:50:13.000 universities of California. And, uh, they, they widely report struggling with feelings of racial

00:50:22.140 isolation. That's their argument. They want to bring it back in California. They want to prevent

00:50:28.460 the ban, uh, across the country. What say you to this whole thing? They will try everything they can

00:50:35.480 to ignore and violate the law. If in fact, the Supreme court declares that you may no longer

00:50:42.700 discriminate against the most qualified student applicants on the basis of their race. Uh, they

00:50:49.280 will use holistic admissions. They've been setting, they've been preparing for this moment, Megan,

00:50:53.840 by saying you may not even submit SAT scores, uh, and, and they will, they will use holistic

00:51:01.860 admissions. They'll ask students to write essays that discuss their degree of oppression. They'll be

00:51:06.920 able to figure out the race of applicants and it will only continue the charade. The reason that we do

00:51:14.040 not have proportional representation in universities or any other meritocratic institution, Megan is not

00:51:21.020 racism. Standards are not racist. The problem is a vast academic skills gap. And the elites in this

00:51:31.020 country are terrified that that skills gap is never going to close and they make it taboo to discuss it.

00:51:37.260 And so these universities are in this bizarre position of claiming that they are somehow racist

00:51:44.400 institutions, that if they don't have 13% black, uh, student body at UC Berkeley or at Harvard or at Yale,

00:51:52.060 it's because they are discriminating. Well, if that's the case, tell us who's the discriminators

00:51:57.340 are and get rid of them. But the reason is not discrimination. It's the fact that for instance,

00:52:03.120 66% of black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills

00:52:12.400 defined as doing a bit able to do arithmetic or recognize a linear function on a graph.

00:52:18.760 That's the problem. And instead America is tearing down every meritocratic institution

00:52:25.380 on the phony charge of racism. It has to end. You know, the other, the other side will say

00:52:32.240 that too is caused by racism. Okay. Let's go back to K through 12. You want to talk about the 12th

00:52:36.860 graders, 66% of whom in the black community are falling behind when it comes to math. They don't

00:52:41.580 have their basic math skills. And I know your book says 50% of 12th grade black students aren't

00:52:46.280 proficient in reading either. The other side will say that too, America's racist past.

00:52:51.240 Well, okay. That's a different discussion, uh, but let's not tear down standards. Uh,

00:52:56.920 let's make sure that those kids can succeed. Now I would argue that at some point, uh, the culture

00:53:03.940 in those communities has to change. There are vast behavioral differences as well with regards to

00:53:10.340 our students taking their textbooks home to study. Are they, are they staying home at night to do their

00:53:16.420 homework? Are they out on the streets running with gangs? Are they involved in drugs? The black truancy

00:53:22.060 rate in California is four times that of the white, of white students in California. On average,

00:53:29.060 black students spend less than a third at doing homework than Asian students. All of these very

00:53:36.000 obvious, noticeable behavioral differences in how students approach schools and how their parents

00:53:41.800 regard academic achievement make a difference. To deny that is to deny just common sense. There's a

00:53:49.920 very terrible, uh, destructive, self-destructive ideology in black communities that says that

00:53:59.140 academic effort is acting white. So if you're a black student who is studying, who is paying attention

00:54:06.020 in class, you will be demeaned as somehow, uh, you know, betraying your race. How we expect to have

00:54:15.300 equal academic outcomes when an ideology as perversely self-destructive as that, uh, is dominant is

00:54:24.520 beyond me. And it's, again, it is a violation to a certain extent of racial etiquette to talk about

00:54:31.920 these skills gaps and behavior gaps. Megan, we are very uncomfortable doing so. Whites turn their eyes

00:54:39.240 away in, in discomfort to, to look at things head on. And I, I agree that racial etiquette ordinarily

00:54:47.000 should pertain, but when we have our elites and black activists going around lodging on a daily, if not

00:54:54.800 hourly basis, sweeping accusations of white supremacy, if every institution that it does not have a

00:55:03.260 proportional representation of blacks is per se today deemed by the New York times or CNN or Harvard

00:55:10.880 or Berkeley per se racist, the time for racial etiquette and, and pussyfooting around these

00:55:18.880 underlying problems is over. The, these activists will just keep going back. I mean, if they have to

00:55:25.680 go back to 16, 19 to say, no, the racism preceded every problem you just listed, that's what they will do.

00:55:33.400 As I was reading part of the book, here's one section that you have on it. And you're not the

00:55:37.640 first person to come up with. This is not Heather McDonald. There have been full studies on this.

00:55:42.180 You know, if you get the straight A's, it's quote, acting white. There was one out of, I think it's

00:55:45.780 Columbus, Ohio. That was, um, the most well-respected and you write behavioral differences also undercut the

00:55:52.860 expectation of proportional representation. In other words, 13% black people in the, in the community.

00:55:57.240 Therefore we have to have 13% uh, everywhere, you know, in all these admissions, one third, you write of

00:56:02.800 all black males have a felony conviction. The prevalence of out of wedlock births in the black

00:56:08.100 community, over 70% of all black births out of wedlock means that a high percentage of black

00:56:13.960 females are burdened with solo child rearing responsibilities and on it goes. And you are

00:56:19.940 right, man. You're not allowed to talk about that. And if you do, I'll go back. I'll go back one more

00:56:24.660 generation to blame it all on the founders. Well, you know what? Uh, I am, I've been on a

00:56:33.300 reading project to refresh myself on black civil rights history on America's history. And I am

00:56:39.600 absolutely heartbroken and appalled by how ugly America's past was. So in one sense, there's one

00:56:46.000 aspect of the 1619 project that I agree with. America clearly was white supremacist. It was an apartheid

00:56:51.580 country and Americans until, you know, fairly recently treated blacks just with gratuitous and

00:56:58.340 heartbreaking cruelty and contempt. But we have to be able to look at the facts today. That is not our

00:57:05.120 reality today. As impossible as it would have been to predict 50 years ago, we are a different country

00:57:12.580 and, and racism is not the problem. Here's the reality, Megan, black privilege. It's not white

00:57:18.920 privilege. It's black privilege. If there is a single black student who is applying to a selective

00:57:24.220 school and is putting his race down as white, because he thinks that being white will gain him

00:57:31.200 advantage to getting into Yale or Amherst or, or Scripps, you've, I would, I'll pay $10,000 to anybody

00:57:41.020 you can find that. The reality is being black today in any mainstream institution confers an enormous

00:57:46.920 advantage. There is not a single law firm, a single bank, a single tech lab in Silicon Valley, a single

00:57:54.180 science lab that is not twisting itself into knots to try to find, hire, and promote as many remotely

00:58:02.680 qualified blacks as possible. White heterosexual males, it's over for them. They are at the bottom of

00:58:12.220 the heap. So as bad as our country's past was, but I can also say this, it, it sickens me, but it was

00:58:20.020 worse every place else. Every other empire and, and civilization in the rest of the world practiced

00:58:28.760 slavery. Africans enslaved each other. They continue to engage in genocide. Uh, there is brutality

00:58:37.880 everywhere that the other has been treated with absolute cruelty in every other civilization. So the

00:58:45.380 United States, while certainly not perfect, and we certainly betrayed our founding ideals, was no worse

00:58:51.700 than any place else. And in fact, it was a lot better. And today, the very ideals that the left is using in its

00:58:59.400 various phony, completely ungrounded anti-racism crusades, are ideals that were created exclusively

00:59:08.240 by the West. Tolerance, equality, equality under the law, due process of law, all of these are Western

00:59:16.780 ideals. You can go to Africa today, and to the extent that those ideals exist, they have been imports.

00:59:22.800 So I made two white, um, I think heterosexual males. They're little, but so far, that's how it seems to

00:59:32.560 be going. I made two. And, uh, in addition to a girl, and I understand they're going to make them pay

00:59:38.880 for sins of not even their fathers, but this country, they're going to make them pay for what

00:59:44.100 happened during the David, uh, Duke generation that, you know, was alive and well during the 1950s

00:59:49.320 and flourishing, nevermind what happened before that. And I get that their position is, so what,

00:59:55.900 so what, you know, the, the black children of America suffered enough and now the white children

01:00:01.320 are going to have to suffer. But of course it seems rather unfair that my non-racist, absolutely loving,

01:00:07.020 thoughtful boys are going to have to pay for somebody else's sins. But what say you, Heather,

01:00:11.000 to that argument that it was the black kids who had to suffer unfairly and unjustly for so long.

01:00:16.000 And now the white kids are going to have to suffer too bad.

01:00:19.320 Well, that's a very, um, clear way of putting it. I've never heard it put exactly that, but that is

01:00:25.600 absolutely the motivation here, which is a, uh, a hatred and vengeance and retribution. Uh, I guess

01:00:34.880 leave, you know, leaving aside all the equity problems, let's put us back on blacks. And, and again,

01:00:41.680 none of us were enslaving. Uh, none of us have responsibility for the ugliness of the Southern

01:00:48.280 racists who were beating up black kids that just wanted to go to school. It's horrifying,

01:00:53.460 but I'm sorry, we do not have, uh, inheritance of acquired characteristics. None of us are those

01:00:59.220 people today. And again, the reality of white behavior today is whites yearn to be post-racial.

01:01:06.720 They do not give a damn. What they look for in people of all races is, do you share my values?

01:01:13.360 Do you share my bourgeois values? My belief in patriotism and hard work, uh, self-discipline,

01:01:20.020 deferred gratification. That's what people, and white Republican voters have had one love affair

01:01:25.680 after another with black politicians, whether it's Alan West, Alan Keyes, uh, you know, Trump's

01:01:32.500 health secretary. It just goes on and on and on. Uh, we are not systemically racist, but if you want

01:01:40.480 to help blacks at some point, we can acknowledge that there was decades of mistreatment of keeping

01:01:48.580 them down, of preventing them from reading. That was all true. But today there's nothing that the

01:01:54.740 outside world can do to make them competitively qualified. You have to do the reading yourself.

01:02:02.180 The only person who can put knowledge of air arithmetics in your head is yourself. There's

01:02:08.860 no amount of compensatory transfers or trying to pull white people down that is going to make

01:02:16.520 you able to read better. The, the effort has to come from within that home. And right now,

01:02:23.980 whites have to stop apologizing, Megan. It is all coming down. I see it on a daily basis. There's

01:02:31.280 not a single meritocratic institution above all in the sciences and medicine that is not in the

01:02:38.720 crosshairs. Any institution that is not proportionally black is now vulnerable. It is all in self-immolation.

01:02:46.960 Uh, and we have to be able to present an alternative explanation for racial disparities. That alternative

01:02:53.160 explanation, which is in my book, I give data page after page of data that explain why we're not

01:03:00.820 proportionally representative, whether it's academic skills or whether it comes to crime commission.

01:03:06.020 Those one third that you talked about of all black males that have a felony conviction, those,

01:03:12.100 that those convictions are not the result of racist police. They are a result of actual criminal

01:03:18.400 offending and the dead black bodies speak for themselves. We'll address that and we'll come

01:03:24.220 back. And I want to talk about what's happening with the elimination of, uh, advanced placement and

01:03:28.560 honors classes in the high school level. And then what's happening in medicine. We have a doc,

01:03:33.740 we had a doctor on the show on Friday, a black woman extremely accomplished who was saying what's

01:03:38.340 happening in the medical field is scaring her and what Heather found would back that up.

01:03:42.400 We'll do all of that right after this. So Heather, you lay out how at the high school level now in

01:03:51.780 certain States like California and others, there's a push to eliminate, uh, advanced placement or honors,

01:03:59.820 uh, classes because they don't think those are fair to minority groups. They, because they're

01:04:06.140 underrepresented there too. They want to see absolute proportionality that 13% of the population. And if you

01:04:10.840 have a greater Latino or black population in your city, then it should be reflected in the number in

01:04:17.220 the honors classes as well. Well, this is all the idea of disparate impact that any neutral colorblind

01:04:23.000 standard that is not racially based. If it has a negative disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics,

01:04:30.600 you don't need to ask any further questions. You just throw it out. It's per se racist. Uh,

01:04:36.300 and so these objective standardized tests that allow admissions to gifted and talented students of all

01:04:43.880 races, you know, the whole purpose of the SAT when it was first created after world war II was to knock

01:04:51.760 down the traditional elitism of, uh, Yale and, and Harvard that only accepted students from, uh, elite and

01:05:02.180 new England prep schools like Andover and Exeter and said, no, let's have a colorblind background,

01:05:08.100 blind legacy, blind wealth, blind test that will allow students of all backgrounds to show their

01:05:15.520 academic accomplishments. Then. So they brought in this test and all of a sudden, Whoa, you saw these

01:05:20.780 students from the Midwest that had never showed up at Harvard before. So these tests, again, they allow

01:05:26.520 above all, whether it's Stuyvesant high school in New York city and in the lead exam school elite,

01:05:32.360 only academically, Lowell high school in San Francisco, they're predominantly Asian so much

01:05:39.320 for white privilege. If, if it's white privilege, why are the Asians whooping everybody else's ass,

01:05:45.320 including Jews, whites, and every other group? Uh, these tests are colorblind. Nobody knows their

01:05:52.040 identity, but because of those academic skills gaps, because blacks and Hispanics are way, way behind

01:06:00.040 in reading and math from almost the start of their schooling, uh, they're not passing these neutral

01:06:08.200 colorblind anonymous tests at the same rates. So we've decided that we would rather not cultivate our top

01:06:16.040 math talent than have classrooms that are not proportionally diverse. And this is suicide,

01:06:23.080 Megan. It is civilizational suicide while we're canceling our advanced math courses. Here's what

01:06:30.280 China is doing. It is finding its top math talent and it is throwing everything it's got at them. It's

01:06:37.320 putting them into math Olympiads. It's putting them into the most demanding calculus classes without any

01:06:43.320 concern about the trivialities of identity. If the class is all female, fine. If the class is all male,

01:06:50.120 who gives a damn? And China is, is ahead in every international test of math and sciences. It's leading

01:07:00.280 in many, many critical technologies that are key to military preparedness for cyber warfare. It leads in a

01:07:09.720 whole bunch of artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, because it is not held back by

01:07:15.800 this absurd disparate impact diversity conceit. Meanwhile, we're saying that instead of learning

01:07:22.280 math, students should learn about their own white privilege. This is a waste of time. It is

01:07:27.560 civilizational suicide. Yeah. It's worse than a waste of time. This is just a quote from the book.

01:07:33.480 Early drafts of the new California math guidelines under the proposed curriculum, mathematically gifted

01:07:38.040 students would not accelerate into advanced classes until the 11th grade in order to create more

01:07:43.800 exclusive, meaning racially proportional math classrooms in middle school and early high school.

01:07:49.720 And you go on to point out as of 2018, China ranked number one in the international tests of K through 12

01:07:55.800 math, science, and reading known as the PISA, the U S 25th. We ranked 25th. All right. So, but let me turn the

01:08:04.040 page to medicine because that's deeply concerning. I mean, you can't, if there's any place in which

01:08:10.120 merit should rule the day, it's medicine, firefighting, and the flying of airplanes,

01:08:15.720 just to name a few, but those, this should not be touched by anything other than merit. I don't want,

01:08:21.000 whatever. I wouldn't mind seeing a big burly female firefighter who looked strong, but I don't need

01:08:26.120 to see some little life ballerina wearing a fireman's hat to feel like I matter. Um, the U S medical

01:08:32.360 licensing exam is a prime offender of this, all these problems you write at the end of their

01:08:36.920 second year of medical school, students take the step one of these. Basically they're on the way

01:08:42.040 toward, um, they're called us MLEs. Now I know about this Heather, because in another life before

01:08:46.600 there was Doug, there was Dan, my ex-husband with whom I have a very friendly relationship still.

01:08:51.080 And Dan, I was with him during medical school, internship, residency, fellowship. I always joke

01:08:55.880 that I'm the worst gold digger of all time because I helped put him through all those things.

01:08:59.560 And then we divorced, right? He started making his money. Okay. I'm sure that's the case. He's,

01:09:05.640 he's, he's saying, what do I do? It landed in a good place for both of us romantically and

01:09:12.360 professionally. Um, so he took those step ones, you take it after second year and they're nerve

01:09:17.080 wracking. They're hard and they're hard for a reason. They're trying to ferret out those who are

01:09:21.560 going to make it in medicine and those who aren't. And then there are more steps after that. And I didn't

01:09:25.000 know this, but you write in the book since January of 2022. And I was with Dan back in 1997. I'm talking

01:09:30.920 about step one has been changed to pass fail, pass fail. Okay. That's new. And the, and then you take

01:09:39.320 on the claim that blacks are being excluded from medicine because of exams like this, that they're

01:09:45.880 being excluded from medical training and from the medical field. And that's why they're underrepresented

01:09:50.360 in medicine. You have the numbers. You write from 2013 to 2016, only 8% of white college seniors with

01:10:00.360 below average undergraduate GPAs and below average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school.

01:10:07.160 Less than 6% of Asians who had those same problems in their qualifications were offered a seat in medical

01:10:11.560 school. Over 56% of black college seniors with below average undergraduate GPAs and below average MCATs

01:10:19.800 were admitted 31% of Hispanic students. That is unbelievable. So 8% of whites, 6% of Asians,

01:10:28.120 56% of blacks college seniors with below average grades and MCATs get admitted to med school. What does

01:10:34.920 that tell us? Thanks to the medical schools, all these schools are saying, if you take away racial

01:10:39.960 preferences, we will be terribly undiverse. So basically they're saying, and it's true, the facts

01:10:46.280 bear this out that virtually every minority student today in a selective school has been catapulted

01:10:53.080 outside of his actual academic skill range into a school for which he is not academically prepared

01:10:59.080 and he is falling behind because of that. You have no confidence that that doctor is the most qualified.

01:11:05.320 Now he may well be, or she may well be the doctor that you spoke to last week, Megan, but unfortunately,

01:11:12.120 thanks to racial preferences, the so-called beneficiaries of those preferences never know

01:11:18.040 am I the best candidate or am I the best black or female candidate? You and I have been the subject of

01:11:26.760 sex preferences all our lives, Megan, that cast doubt on our actual accomplishments, if there are any.

01:11:33.080 In your case, yes. In mine, who knows? But it's humiliating and it undercuts any sense of legitimate

01:11:40.280 accomplishment. And so the fact is, again, I hate to keep hammering this home, Megan,

01:11:48.600 the problem is not the standards. The problem is not the US medical licensing exam rating system.

01:11:55.080 It's not racist. Objective grades, objective standards are not racist. The problem is the skills

01:12:00.520 gaps and we won't talk about them and instead we're tearing everything down. And so now these residencies

01:12:05.960 that use step one of the US medical licensing exam to select students for the most competitive

01:12:13.640 residencies in neurology, radiology, oncology, they don't know who they're getting. A pass-fail system

01:12:21.880 is extremely crude. But the only reason we went to pass-fail, there was nobody saying the actual

01:12:28.360 grades were in any way inaccurate in assessing actual medical competence. The only problem with

01:12:36.920 the grades was that they had a disparate impact. And that is all you need to know today in order to get

01:12:43.320 rid of an objective and valid standard. One of the problems with this system is there are plenty of

01:12:50.520 black people who would pass these tests as is. You know, it's not the numbers that the these

01:12:55.080 wokesters want. But there are there are black people who work hard, who find a way, who happen

01:13:00.760 to be born into privilege, whatever it is, who would pass these more easily than you or I would.

01:13:05.960 But now they're going to have to be judged by this same. Oh, did you get in thanks to the 56 percent

01:13:11.880 thing? You know, like what that would be incredibly aggravating. You know, I think about the kids who go to

01:13:17.240 school with my kids who are incredibly bright and some of the smartest kids in the class. And now they

01:13:23.240 they're going to be judged by this. Right. This sort of hand up to people who may not deserve it.

01:13:29.320 And then that's I mean, this is a problem in general with affirmative action is it's just

01:13:32.840 everybody gets tarred with the question mark when they might not deserve the question mark.

01:13:37.880 Well, in the 1990s, a Yale law professor, Stephen Carter, wrote a book called Reflections of an Affirmative

01:13:43.720 Action Baby, and he said it haunted him. Any time he got asked to speak or got an award, he didn't know,

01:13:51.800 am I the best person for that panel or for that award? Or am I the best black that they could find?

01:13:58.520 And that is the problem. So, yes, it is a pall that hangs over any so-called victim class. You never know

01:14:07.720 are you actually the best person. But it is also something that that can work to depress effort.

01:14:16.040 I remember when The New York Times used to write fairly a little bit, a wee bit honestly about

01:14:21.960 racial preferences in college admissions in the 1990s. And it quoted some black students that said,

01:14:28.040 well, we don't need to study particularly hard because we know we'll get in anyway. And and students

01:14:33.960 know this, you know, high school students all compare SATs and they can see precisely the preferences

01:14:39.160 that you spoke of, Megan, with regards to medical schools that a Asian has one ninth the chance of

01:14:47.320 getting admitted with a certain score level as blacks. These high school seniors all know that

01:14:52.760 they're black peers with SATs that are standard deviation below their own are getting admitted to

01:14:58.280 the Ivies and they've been rejected by every school they've been applied to. And then we turn around and

01:15:04.840 we have to all play this charade to say, oh, preferences don't exist. We are forced to live

01:15:10.520 a whole set of absolutely logical contradictions and impossibilities. On the one hand, the universities

01:15:18.280 in the affirmative action case that you spoke about in the beginning, Megan, say without preferences,

01:15:26.200 we cannot survive as a diverse institution. In other words, we would have virtually no black students

01:15:33.000 without racial preferences. But if anybody within that institution says, well, there's a good chance

01:15:38.520 that this or that person was here because of preferences, then that person is a racist and must be

01:15:43.960 cast out. And we see that happening now to Wax at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who has said

01:15:49.880 she has actually spoken about the result of racial preferences, which is that the mismatch theory,

01:15:56.600 which is that students admitted to an institution which they're not competitive academically, they end up at

01:16:03.560 the bottom of their class. This happens at every single law school. The black law students end up at the

01:16:09.080 bottom of their class because they have been propelled into institutions for which they're not competitively

01:16:14.920 qualified. If they went to a law school where they were competitively qualified, instead of going to Harvard Law

01:16:21.320 School, they went to Boston College Law School, they would do perfectly well. Right. But instead flounder and

01:16:28.600 they're told by the bureaucracy to think that they're the victims of racism, which is another lie.

01:16:34.440 Well, the truth is, if you would take a step away from, you know, the obsession with race, right, the

01:16:39.240 wokesters and the people who are pushing all this for one second, they would see it like I, I did not get into Harvard.

01:16:45.240 And I would venture to say if I had gone to Harvard, I really would have flailed. I didn't do very well in

01:16:50.360 high school. I lost my dad. It was a tumultuous time. And I did not have the basis of knowledge or

01:16:56.520 learning for a successful career there. I went to Syracuse. I did very well. And based on those scores,

01:17:01.720 I got into Albany Law School, which was a fantastic law school, but it was good enough. And I wound up

01:17:06.920 thriving in the legal profession, which landed me here. Everything worked as it should in my case.

01:17:11.960 And so it's not about black or white or, you know, women or men. It's about what are your

01:17:18.520 qualifications? We're talking about certain professions that like the abandonment of merit

01:17:23.240 could potentially prove in this, that profession in particular, absolutely dangerous.

01:17:28.760 Completely. Not only are we putting individual lives at risk, but we also now are determining our

01:17:34.840 scientific research priorities based on race, not scientific needs. So the NIH,

01:17:40.920 NIH, which is the basic funder of biomedical research, is now deciding to move funding from

01:17:47.960 pure science. So trying to figure out what are the cellular pathways of cancers or trying to figure out

01:17:55.320 what's going on neurologically with Alzheimer's. This is basic science research that is extremely

01:18:01.720 complicated at this point, involves a whole set of different scientific fields, physics, sometimes

01:18:07.640 even engineering. They're moving money from that basic research that will be what frees us from our

01:18:14.600 lingering susceptibilities to crippling, debilitating disease into research on racism in medical areas,

01:18:26.680 health disparities, which is okay. It's a valid topic, although it is one that is vastly exaggerated.

01:18:33.240 I mean, I would say, actually, it is not a valid topic. The problem with health disparities in race is

01:18:39.320 not doctor racism. It's again, it's behavior, things that people can change, weight, susceptibility to

01:18:47.080 disease. But now we're going to give more funding to studying phantom racism in doctors than doing pure

01:18:54.600 science, just because more black MDs do that type of research and less pure science. This is insane.

01:19:02.680 We have the NIH doling out Alzheimer's awards based on the diversity of a research lab. Insane. It should

01:19:12.120 only be based on the scientific competence of that lab. And instead you have researchers, principal

01:19:19.640 investigators in incredibly important fields that are spending more time trying to justify their work

01:19:26.520 on diversity grounds or coming up with reasons why they can't have proportional representation

01:19:32.440 in clinical drug trials than they are explaining cell signaling in nematodes to talk about their cancer

01:19:39.960 research. It's crazy. You write in the book about how the NIH leadership of cancer labs in particular say

01:19:46.680 that your cancer lab should match the national or local demographics, whichever has a higher

01:19:51.560 percentage of minorities. And you point out about Johns Hopkins, where I was for a year when I was

01:19:57.560 married to Dan and he was doing his residency there, sorry, his fellowship there. Baltimore,

01:20:03.080 which is where Johns Hopkins is, is over 60 percent black. And you say, should Johns Hopkins

01:20:09.480 Cancer Center have 60 percent black physician administrators, which is what the NIH is saying?

01:20:14.680 Um, how like that would be a totally disproportionate number to any facility in the United States that

01:20:21.560 good luck finding it. Right. So you definitely have to lower standards in order to re to reach that.

01:20:27.320 Is that what the NIH wants? Yes, absolutely. And especially when like 10 percent of black

01:20:33.240 students actually have any basic skills in reading, but we are in Baltimore, in Baltimore. Yeah. We are

01:20:41.080 determined not to see any racial skills gaps. We're turning it away. And instead, we're determined to

01:20:47.400 blame American society, mainstream institutions for racism. So anything is vulnerable. Classical music

01:20:53.960 is vulnerable. Art museums is vulnerable. Oh, we've got to talk about that. We've got to talk about that

01:20:57.720 because this is there's a reason you talk about getting rid of beauty. And you've done so much great

01:21:01.160 writing on this. I remember we talked about some of this last time you were there, but it's not just

01:21:05.000 met. I mean, those are important fields, medicine and so on, but it's also the arts that are under

01:21:10.440 attack and that what's happening in particular when it comes to opera and the orchestras of America

01:21:17.800 is crazy. I didn't realize for a long time that most of these bigger orchestras that you see,

01:21:23.080 if you go to see the symphony to get into the symphony, to get try out for that kind of an orchestra,

01:21:27.240 you have to go behind a closed door, like behind a screen.

01:21:30.920 So they don't they intentionally are are trying to pick only the very, very best musicians

01:21:36.520 no longer because that somehow where you actually literally didn't know the person's race race is

01:21:41.880 racist. That's racist, too. It never ends. After George Floyd, every single classical music

01:21:49.880 organization put out these peeling, nauseating statements, beating their chest, saying, woe is me,

01:21:56.440 we're so racist. We are in a racist tradition. Our audiences are too white. Our composers we play

01:22:03.960 are too white. We will never forget our mission today is anti-racism. No, it's not. Your mission

01:22:12.120 is making is presenting a tradition of unparalleled sublimity in as perfect a manner as you can in as

01:22:20.520 expressive a manner as you can without regard to identity. I do not, as you say, you do not need to

01:22:28.760 see some female walking through the door or a female firefighter in order to feel validated.

01:22:35.240 I don't need to hear a female composer in order to feel that I have reached some further understanding

01:22:43.160 of the movement of the human soul. If I am listening to Bach or Mozart or Chopin or late

01:22:49.480 Brahms piano music, I am experiencing feelings that I otherwise would never have had access to. And I

01:22:56.600 could not care less whether I'm listening to a male or a female composer. The same goes with the race of

01:23:04.440 composers. There are some fantastic black composers. They're not the ones that are being promoted now.

01:23:10.600 There's some real mediocrities that are out there. But music is not about race. And yet you have the

01:23:18.040 leaders of our classical music organizations, whether it's the director of the of the Metropolitan Opera,

01:23:24.520 they're all they faced an incredible budget catastrophe during COVID because they closed down,

01:23:31.320 they lost their audiences, they have no money coming in. And yet, even though they hire in a blind

01:23:38.760 fashion, they do not discriminate against any group or any sex. All these organizations that work

01:23:46.440 in near bankruptcy, hired way overpriced diversity consultants, have no musical background. Their

01:23:55.000 only expertise is that they're black. And they come in at, you know, 100,000, 200, 500,000 dollars a year

01:24:02.280 plus staff to go around saying, well, you don't have enough black musicians in your orchestras.

01:24:07.560 We don't know who's auditioning when they're black. Conductors only want the best musicians.

01:24:11.880 They don't give it their perfectionists, their tyrants, their their taskmasters. But the thing

01:24:16.680 they're not is discriminators against talent. All they care is I do. I want a horn player that won't

01:24:22.920 flood the solo in a Richard Strauss tone poem. And if it's that's a Nigerian, please come and be in my

01:24:32.600 orchestra because I want the best talent. Right. But again, they would say, well, chicken and the

01:24:39.880 egg. We we haven't fostered the arts for whole communities in the United States. We haven't lit

01:24:45.000 the fire of love for music in a lot of these inner cities. And therefore, they don't fall in love with

01:24:49.480 the cello. They don't fall in love with the violin. And they're never going to have this opportunity

01:24:53.480 until maybe we help them get into college. And then something happens and they fall in love with

01:24:58.200 it. And then maybe they're behind. And so they need they need a leg up because of the past historical

01:25:03.320 discrimination. And we'll give them that leg up and maybe they won't be the soloist. But what's wrong

01:25:07.480 with giving them a pathway into the larger orchestra when they've never historically had it? And there are

01:25:13.640 bad reasons for that. Well, actually, they did have it. There was actually there was definitely

01:25:19.960 heartbreaking discrimination against black musicians. On the other hand, there were very

01:25:23.320 many that were promoted, that were given conducting ships, uh, Pulitzer Prizes, fellowships. And in fact,

01:25:31.320 the orchestra profession since the 1960s has been bending over backwards with one inner city fellowship

01:25:38.600 program after another. To say that the contemporary, the mid 20th century orchestra was not concerned with

01:25:45.240 trying to provide educational opportunities is completely wrong. Uh, they send musicians into

01:25:51.480 schools and again, they, they give fellowships and they, they try and cultivate talent. Uh, but we,

01:25:58.520 the fault is not that we somehow excluded inner city students from music education. We've cut music

01:26:04.920 education back completely. And I talk about some black violinists who did get exposed through their

01:26:11.400 public schools back in the 1940s and 1950s in Detroit of all places. There were orchestras in, in, in

01:26:18.440 schools, two or three, sometimes a black violinist, Joseph Striplin, who now leads a community orchestra

01:26:25.240 in Virginia. He grew up, he said, with a traditional inner city single mother, but he got it in his

01:26:31.320 schools. And he, he had students, fellow students that had private lessons and he listened to them.

01:26:36.200 He said, wow, they really play the violin. I better start studying more. So the solution is, uh, yes,

01:26:42.920 better education across the board. It would be great if classical music wasn't so completely alien now in

01:26:49.800 our culture, but the solution is not to lower standards at the end of the line. Uh, and Asian

01:26:56.520 students are absolutely, again, whooping everybody's ass. Orchestras are way, way disproportionate Asian

01:27:05.080 because of the home environment that the parents, these tiger moms are saying, not only are going to

01:27:11.080 study calculus in the ninth grade, but you're going to play both the violin and the piano.

01:27:17.080 And China, um, you know, they've got 300 million students studying piano today. It's fantastic if

01:27:24.760 China ever decides that, oh, actually, you know, Harvard is not paying any attention to the fact that

01:27:29.880 I'm showing up with three instruments. I still am discriminated against that. Maybe there's no point in

01:27:35.400 my learning, uh, instruments. If it's not being driven by actual love of music, then classical music's

01:27:41.320 over. Uh, Amy Chua's book, the battle hymn of the tiger mother is just so amazing. And she, she walks

01:27:46.200 you through all of that and it, she's totally self-deprecating and delightful in it, but she

01:27:50.600 does. She talks about how, uh, one of my favorite lines is she says, if a Western, she distinguishes

01:27:55.320 between the sort of Chinese mom, the tiger mom, and the Western mom. She's like, if a Western child comes

01:27:59.480 home, uh, with a B plus in math, the Western mother might say, okay, nice try, honey. You know,

01:28:04.680 maybe you'll get them next time with an A let's go out and have fun. If, if a Chinese child ever came

01:28:09.960 home with a B in math, which would never happen. She says the parent would be getting the practice

01:28:16.840 tests all fun of any kind. If it had been allowed, the first time would be canceled. There'd certainly

01:28:20.920 be no, they're not allowed to do drama. They're not allowed to do, you can't get an A in anything

01:28:24.680 other than gym or can't get a B in anything, um, other than gym or theater, both of which

01:28:29.720 they'd prefer to disallow. I mean, she just goes through it. It's hilarious, but it explains the

01:28:33.960 great, great grades. It's a culture. It's a culture that prizes things like classical music and, and

01:28:39.400 the values that come from that kind of repetitive practice, not to mention studying. Um, it's not

01:28:44.600 something I want for myself, for my kids, but that's probably that, you know, that's why I went to

01:28:49.320 Syracuse. Um, can we talk about the docents? This is one of my favorite stories of the entire year.

01:28:53.640 The docents in Chicago. It's unbelievable. The art Institute of Chicago, um, that turns out that

01:29:00.040 they were too white. They were great. They were free. They loved what they were doing. It was a

01:29:05.560 bunch of old ladies who had devoted their lives for free to helping people go around the museum and

01:29:10.440 understand love of art fired to white hashtag museum to white. And thus it remains to this day.

01:29:20.040 White calling is the order of the day. It's museums. It's it's virology. It's it's vaccine

01:29:28.600 distribution. It's orchestras. There was a orchestra in England that fired half of its

01:29:33.320 musicians because they were too white. Let's be honest again. This is no longer the time for racial

01:29:38.760 etiquette. Uh, Megan, it is white calling. Every institution is trying to get a proportion of whites down.

01:29:44.680 Chicago had one of the most vibrant volunteer traditions in the 1950s, the Art Institute of

01:29:52.680 Chicago, which is an unparalleled collection. I recommend that everybody go while they still

01:29:56.680 can before all of the wall labels have been turned into anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-white, uh,

01:30:03.480 harangues. Uh, they've got an amazing collection of 18th century pastel portraits that I visit every time

01:30:09.320 in there. In the 1950s, Chicago, the Art Institute was in financial trouble and women got together and

01:30:17.880 and fundraised for them and did such a good job that the universe, that the Institute decided to

01:30:22.680 incorporate women into a women's board and the, they get, they thought, okay, what should we do next?

01:30:28.120 Well, how about we start education? At the time it was assumed that especially for educating children

01:30:34.040 about art, you should have paid, uh, official credentialized, uh, museum MFAs. And they said,

01:30:41.480 no, we're going to be volunteers, but we're going to put ourselves through a program that is

01:30:45.720 as rigorous as getting a Masters of Fine Arts, and we're going to do it for free. And starting in the

01:30:52.520 60s and 70s, of course, they became very concerned about diversity and they would do, you know, their own

01:30:59.160 trainings about reaching out to diversity audiences, but they brought thousands of Chicago public school

01:31:06.200 kids into the museum to expose them to the beauty of art, to try to acclimate their eyes to seeing the

01:31:13.880 vast dramatic evolution of style, which is one of the great dramas in human history of how you get

01:31:21.160 from Chartres Cathedral, uh, to the Renaissance, to Brunelleschi, to, to Beaux-Arts, and, and then to

01:31:30.200 modernism. How do you get from Giotto to John Singer Sargent? These are incredibly dramatic changes in human

01:31:37.560 expression, but in comes the, a former contemporary art curator, James Rondeau, who is a total idiot, and I say

01:31:49.080 that with factual basis and you can read his remarks in the book. He's, he sounds like he's a 12-year-old

01:31:56.600 valley girl. He and his new, uh, director of the Women's Board, herself a diversity hire, decided the

01:32:04.760 docents were too white, and so they completely terminated their docent program. They said,

01:32:10.040 okay, clean out your lockers and for a consolation prize, we'll give you two years of free Chicago

01:32:15.320 Art Institute membership. Uh, and, and so now they've got at best six paid educators who are not

01:32:21.400 going to be able to educate, bring in the students that they did, and they will be chosen on anti-racism

01:32:28.280 equity grounds, not on whether they know a damn thing about art. Oh my lord. All right, so in the time we

01:32:35.560 have left, is there any cause for hope? I realized the world exploded after George Floyd. There was a

01:32:42.520 seismic shift in the ground underneath our feet when it came to all this race essentialism,

01:32:47.240 but here we are almost three years later. Are we getting over this? Is this so baked in,

01:32:53.240 there is no getting over it? Where are we? Well, I do take hope from governors like Ron DeSantis and

01:33:00.360 some of these legislators that are pushing back. I would just add, you know, the third part of the

01:33:04.920 book is to talk about criminal law enforcement. There again, if you're confused as to why prosecutors are

01:33:09.960 not prosecuting, why judges are not sentencing, why police chiefs are saying do not enforce the law,

01:33:14.840 including against resisting arrest, everything there too is explained by disparate impact.

01:33:20.120 We've decided we would rather not enforce the law than put more black criminals in prison,

01:33:24.440 even if that means that thousands more black lives are taken, including dozens and dozens of

01:33:29.640 black children who are gunned down in barbaric shootings in their backyards, in their beds, in

01:33:35.480 their living rooms. All of this is because of disparate impact. It explains everything in our world.

01:33:40.360 Nevertheless, there is some pushback now. It is absolutely appropriate for governors to say in

01:33:47.400 elementary school, you're not going to get the damn trans ideology. Children should have innocence.

01:33:54.360 It's not about being anti-trans, whatever that means. It's about not forcing kids to rub their

01:34:01.240 noses in premature knowledge of sexuality. It is perfectly appropriate to say as a public university,

01:34:07.640 we are not going to fund these totally unnecessary diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies.

01:34:14.440 Because again, Reagan, colleges are not racist. They are the most left-wing organizations in human history

01:34:21.800 towards society's traditionally marginalized groups. They are all, every single one,

01:34:27.640 are discriminating in favor of blacks, not against blacks. Offices of diversity, equity and inclusion

01:34:34.760 are founded on a lie. They are staffed by people who have no competence. So we should continue fighting

01:34:43.000 back. So that does give me hope. Heather MacDonald, the book is When Race Trumps Merit. Thank you so much for being here.

01:34:51.800 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - April 17, 2023

Bud Light Backlash Grows, Mr. Beast Fallout, and Race Trumping Merit, with Michael Knowles and Heather Mac Donald ｜ Ep. 530

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