Heather MacDonald joins me to discuss her new book, "The War on Cops: How to Stop Cops from Becoming Racists." She's also the author of several other books, including "The Diversity Delusion" and "Are Cops Racists?" She's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and writes for City Journal.
00:02:45.560From crime to climate change, the hostility of movements to data is making it impossible to address real world problems.
00:02:53.340He's talking about how we're living in a post-truth world and how it's really affecting our ability to make important decisions, have important discussions on things that matter.
00:03:02.040From COVID to crime, you've been railing about this, too.
00:03:06.720There are actual data that we can consult to solve a lot of our problems.
00:03:09.920When it doesn't line up with, quote, the narrative, we ignore it.
00:03:14.200So let's start there and on COVID, because even though you're a conservative and you write a lot of stuff that conservatives love, you're taking on both sides in their refusal to not get hysterical when it comes to COVID disinformation.
00:03:32.360For a while, it seemed like progressives had cornered the market on hysterical, anti-rational policymaking.
00:03:40.200For the majority of the COVID period, we have seen the biggest failure of policymaking in American history.
00:03:48.760Our leaders have refused to balance costs and benefits.
00:03:51.880They have focused monomaniacally on one kind of risk, which is the risk from COVID, ignoring the costs of lockdowns on much more serious aspects of human life, such as child development, the very possibility of economic activity and the creation of economic and human capital.
00:04:13.860They've told us, you know, they've kept us focused on rising case counts, ignoring the fact that deaths still are not comparable, really, to cancer deaths or heart disease.
00:04:25.540And so we were given again and again phony data and hysterical rhetoric from the media and, indeed, the public health establishment to really keep the population in fear.
00:04:40.820And sadly, it was a very docile population.
00:04:44.960My biggest obsession is the idea of wearing masks outdoors, which has zero scientific basis for it.
00:04:52.200You simply cannot get infected outdoors.
00:04:56.340Infection requires a concentrated viral dose.
00:04:59.500And yet you still see people, at least here in Irvine, California, jogging by themselves with nobody for the next square mile wearing outdoor masks.
00:05:08.940I despair at the at the ignorance of the populace and their willingness to engage in this safetyism ideology.
00:05:17.620But recently, to my dismay, some of my fellow conservatives have engaged in the same sort of irrational innumeracy in trying to present the vaccine as a threat greater than COVID, which it clearly is not.
00:05:42.040The people that are vaccinated have a virtually zero risk of dying from COVID.
00:05:50.660They have a minimal risk of even getting infected by COVID.
00:05:54.880And yet the anti-vaccine movement is is refusing to balance those risks and and has reversed itself.
00:06:07.500It rightly conservatives were rightly celebratory at Trump's rapid development operation warp speed of the vaccine.
00:06:19.920And they and they accused they even accused the drug companies of putting off their application for emergency authorization authorization until after the election, because at that point, conservatives thought that developing a vaccine was a good thing that would help Trump.
00:06:38.220And rightly so now they're portraying the vaccine as this globalist conspiracy to kill millions of people because it's being administered under Biden.
00:06:50.900So both sides now, I think, have basically lost their minds and and and are taking us in a direction that is not science based.
00:07:01.920I think anecdotally that there's a faction on the right that's doing that.
00:07:06.640I think most Republicans would say, OK, you know, the vaccines work.
00:07:10.900It's not it's not a small number that's that's doubtful and skeptical about the vaccines, though.
00:07:15.820Whereas I will say when it comes to masking on the left, there's just I think they've captured most of the left, you know, sort of maybe some center lefties are are more on the side of reason when it comes to the indoctrination in schools and the masking and the obsession with vaccines for children under the age of 12.
00:07:33.460Even now that they're really pushing for.
00:08:10.300Again, I generally believe, Megan, in taking people at their words and not going to a second level of moving into sort of conspiracy theory explanations that are more abstract than the stated reasons.
00:08:22.460The stated reasons in this case for the lockdowns are an excessive obsession with one particular type of risk.
00:08:34.000It's it's as the late and unlamented Governor Cuomo said at the beginning of the pandemic.
00:08:39.980If we save just one life from these lockdowns, they will have been worth it.
00:08:44.600Well, that is, of course, an absurd calculation because there's lots of activities that we undertake, such as driving on highways that we know will generate about 40,000 deaths a year.
00:08:56.920If we wanted to save just one life from highway deaths, we would shut down highways.
00:09:02.040We go forward because we have balanced the risks and the costs.
00:09:07.000But at this point, the the left seems prepared to do this indefinitely without any kind of balancing of risk and cost.
00:09:18.520It is it is it is quite astounding to me and the costs in the long term are going to be very, very high.
00:09:25.160They already are. What I'm most concerned about, Megan, is the widening of the academic skills gap.
00:09:31.140We know that black and Hispanic children have been the less least involved in education.
00:09:39.000They have not had the learning pods that more affluent parents have created for their kids.
00:09:45.600And the wider that the academic skills gap grows, the bigger the excuse that we're going to give to the left to claim that any economic and socioeconomic disparities are due to racism rather than that academic skills gap and behavioral differences that they that they helped create by by these lockdowns, these interminable lockdowns.
00:10:08.900I mean, the thing that's sticking in my craw is when they reopened public schools in New York and it took forever.
00:10:14.820I mean, I have lots of friends who have kids in the public school system in New York who are just at their wits end with the nonstop closures.
00:10:22.180And by the end of the year, my one friend, my one friend's kid was going to school four hours a week, four hours.
00:10:29.840And still these teachers were out there protesting, Heather, with caskets saying, you know, if you force us to go back in there, we're going to be in caskets.
00:10:37.500And then it turns out 40 percent of those teachers have refused to get vaccinated.
00:10:43.140Forty percent of the ones with the little caskets are like, I'm not going to take it.
00:10:47.840Let's see. We'll we'll bargain. We'll bargain over it, said Randy Weingarten.
00:10:53.600Well, let's not forget the health care workers.
00:10:55.240I frankly was nauseated from day one at the at the outbreaks of horn blowing and and and and gong pounding that happened every night at 7 p.m.
00:11:05.580in New York that lasted for months and months.
00:11:08.660And health care workers are just as vaccine resistant as teachers.
00:11:12.120You know, I've I've often thought that conservatives are too quick to demonize teachers.
00:11:16.600I think in many cases we don't want to talk about the challenges they face with kids that are completely unsocialized thanks to the breakdown of the family.
00:11:28.560And we blame the teachers unions for things that may be beyond their fix sometimes because America turns its eyes away from the breakdown in black inner cities.
00:11:41.540But I have to say that the reaction of teachers unions to this pandemic and their complete self-involvement, as you say, Megan, has really sort of pulled the veils away from my eyes.
00:11:55.720And I would think would discredit them completely in the eyes of the public across the board.
00:12:02.060I'm not sure that's happened, but it certainly should happen because they are acting with just, again, scientifically ungrounded self-interest and showing themselves not at all interested in the development and education of children.
00:12:43.880He and Buck Sexton for Rush Limbaugh, most of Rush's markets.
00:12:47.440And he stood up and said, we don't want mandatory masking for our kids.
00:12:50.740Well, the school board voted seven to three against him.
00:12:53.560Mandatory mask coming back to Tennessee and where he is.
00:12:57.300And then we saw this is in Oklahoma, Oklahoma, the school board, because the school boards, they seem just as leftist as as Biden and his administration.
00:13:07.380When I whenever I hear a school board, I'm always stunned at who gets on there and the right needs to start fighting back.
00:13:13.280The people who are on the side of reason forget left or right.
00:13:17.640Her name is Linda Sexton, who is very upset that there might be some parents who want to send their kids to school without a mask.
00:13:27.040I want to pursue the legal avenues that we have to defy Governor Stitt because it's just not OK for kids to commit murder by coming to school without a mask.
00:13:37.200And when it comes down to it, it's possible.
00:13:42.380They will they will cause a death of another child because they come to school without a mask.
00:13:59.060I mean, we have learned something about the American psyche that is very depressing, Megan.
00:14:05.140Any shred remaining of rugged individualism and a proper appreciation for risk, for entrepreneurship, for creation, for the drive that makes civilization possible has disappeared from a vast portion of the population.
00:14:23.720But what I think this shows us is how fast and wide the feminization of our culture has gone.
00:14:34.320I'm generalizing and I'm not speaking about anybody's daughters in particular who may be just as hard headed and rational as everybody else.
00:14:43.680But generally, the aversion to risk, the the unwillingness to think rationally about problems and being emotionally driven and and and cautious, susceptible to fear.
00:15:04.220You know, James Damore, you know, James Damore, this this poor, smart computer scientist at Google was fired in 2017 for writing a fact based 10 page memo suggesting that sexism may not be the reason why there's not 50 50 male female gender ratios in in Google's engineering and computer science departments.
00:15:30.320This memo apparently made Google's female employees feel so unsafe that he had to be fired.
00:15:38.580Now, one thing that Damore did in this memo was, quote, something that has been known for decades by psychology, which is that one of the so-called big five traits of human psychology.
00:15:54.660The personality traits, one of them is known, sadly, the phrase got Damore canceled as neuroticism.
00:16:03.080That is sort of a a fearful personality, fearful of risk, seeing threats everywhere.
00:16:12.420And psychiatrists have observed for years that females score much higher on the neuroticism scale than males do.
00:16:21.980What we've been living through for the last two years is an outbreak of hysterical neuroticism.
00:16:31.160We have accepted our leaders imposing completely arbitrary limits on economic activity.
00:16:40.720They would pour numbers out, pull numbers out of the hat.
00:16:43.240You know, Cuomo, there he was with his tear.
00:16:46.200They have all come up, they're colored tears with utterly arbitrary numbers that if the, you know, if the infection rate is 5%, then you can't do anything.
00:17:40.560You know, we don't always have power and it's, it's a, it's a rush.
00:17:46.040It's a thrill to be able to order other people around.
00:17:50.240And so that's part of it as well is that COVID has deputized everybody to feel justified in, in enforcing mandates that are not just draconian, but utterly irrational.
00:18:06.880And even Biden, who knows, he knows he has no power to issue a federal mask mandate for the country.
00:19:33.120So they've had these really ridiculous rules.
00:19:35.560On the other hand, they have had massive protests there.
00:19:39.220I mean, the pictures are stunning that filling all of Berlin, all of Munich, all of Paris.
00:19:45.160And except for those first, you know, outbreaks in Michigan, when, when Whitmer was deciding that you could buy lawn fertilizer, but not a lawn chair or vice or paint and not, and not, you know, an oven mitt or something.
00:20:00.720Anyway, there's been relatively little pushback, I think, maybe because there's sort of, we have more safety valves with the red states being more rational when it comes to this.
00:20:12.100So people could feel like they have the exit option from their, from their blue state tyranny.
00:20:17.480But I, I hope that there will be a revolt because as I say, I'm just sick of this.
00:20:24.420And I would think everybody would be sick of this, but have they forgotten what normal life was like?
00:20:29.520But, but the masks are just infuriating, infuriating.
00:20:34.640And, and I've said from the start that the reason that they want us to wear masks outdoors is because it, it deputizes every American and turns them into a walking billboard of fear.
00:20:47.100If you see everybody wearing masks outdoors, your natural conclusion is that we are surrounded by death.
00:20:56.740And, and, and so it's, it's important to, to, to have a visual representation to get back to the Wilford Riley article that you brought up and, and, and us living in kind of a post data world.
00:21:10.720What I've noticed is we're living in a world of fictional simulations, this hyper reality that is at odds with reality.
00:21:21.360What was the three months of razor wire around the Capitol, but security theater, it was theater to try and give reality and factual basis to a fiction.
00:21:33.720The fiction is that white supremacy is the biggest terrorist threat facing this country.
00:21:40.640And is it a, is our biggest threat of violence as, as Biden's security agencies have said, that is ludicrous, Megan.
00:21:51.100And yet we had this, this drama, this, this staged piece of theater that the Capitol was engaged in to try to pretend that the idiotic, deplorable, absolutely despicable January 6th riot was not just a one-off.
00:22:12.660Of a bunch of idiots that got out of control, completely misunderstood their role of citizens, but represented some ongoing lethal threat, which it does not.
00:22:24.420It's the same thing with the idea that it's white supremacists who were going around clubbing Asian, elderly Asian, helpless people.
00:22:34.640That's why the press jumped on the Atlanta spa killings, turned them into what they were not, pretended it was about white supremacy when it was about a young man who was sexually tortured by guilt, had nothing to do with race or the Asian nature of his victims.
00:22:54.620But that too was another piece of security theater to give meaning and, and some kind of physical reality to the lie that America today is defined by white supremacy.
00:23:07.500Yes. And if you look at, I think that may be one of the things that my memory serves that Wilford looks at in that piece is the, is the attacks on Asians and how that got blamed on white supremacy.
00:23:17.420And if you look at just the past year, the number of attacks on Asians prior to this past year, it was kind of most, most of the attacks were black on Asian as you break it down by race, but it was about kind of a 27% black, 24% white perpetrators.
00:23:32.160Let's just acknowledge that that is vastly disproportionate because the black population is 13%, the white population is about 60, 60, 65%.
00:23:42.580So, you know, I pulled it up here. It is Heather from his article. He says, okay, according to the most recently available national crime data that involves Asian American victims, 27.5% of violent attackers were black.
00:23:55.86024.1% were white, 24.4% were Latino and other combined and 24.1% were Asian, Asian on Asian crime in a separate data set focused only on the 98 most prominent recent attacks on Asian Americans.
00:24:09.840He says he found that, uh, 29% of the attackers who are identified in racial terms, uh, 71% were people of color. That's what it was. 71% were people of color.
00:24:20.000So the numbers go way up when you look at what's happened this past year, but of course that's all white supremacy.
00:24:25.860Up next, I'm going to ask Heather about AOC's latest statement about how traumatic January 6th was, but she loves to talk about January 6th and her trauma.
00:24:35.080It's all about her and her trauma. Oh, and white supremacy. What does Heather think of that? Next.
00:24:40.080Can I just jump back to the January 6th thing with you for a minute? Because it is true that the left and people like AOC and the media love to go back to it.
00:24:54.460I mean, they cannot get enough of January 6th and the trauma and the report of worth. We're actually seeing news reports on journalists and their ongoing trauma.
00:25:04.900Some talking about how they, the Capitol building was like their girlfriend and now they have to go back in every day and it's just, it's so triggering and they can barely do it.
00:25:14.340And then you've got people like AOC who every day wakes up and thinks of another imaginary crime that could have happened to her, even though she wasn't in the relevant building during the attack.
00:25:22.940And here is her latest offering in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash.
00:25:27.440I think one of the reasons, while that impact was so doubled that day is because of how, of the misogyny and the racism that is so deeply rooted and animated that attack on the Capitol, you know, white supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways.
00:25:48.900There's, there's a lot of sexualizing of that violence. And, um, I didn't think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.
00:26:02.680So what sounds like what you're telling me right now is that you didn't only think that you were going to die. You thought you were going to be raped.
00:26:13.600No, it's just, it's part of a CNN puff piece. It's called like being AOC or something.
00:26:17.840And they're doing a long like documentary on her. So now Dana Bash does an AOC puff piece involving, I thought I was going to be raped.
00:26:24.080I thought I was going to be killed and white supremacists and all the misogyny and you name it.
00:26:27.900But wasn't she the one that was not even in the building? It claims she was.
00:26:31.540Turns out she was in the, the, the Rayburn office building or something. It's amazing. They're just shameless.
00:26:39.020There's that's the biggest set of non sequiturs I have ever heard. It doesn't matter. They can take any event now.
00:26:45.020Like I'm buying yogurt at the store. That's about white supremacy. It's just because they are obsessed.
00:26:51.340They were, they do not want to talk about the actual problems. The biggest problem we have today is the academic skills gap.
00:27:01.080Every, every, every academic standard, every behavioral standard, every criminal standard has disparate impact.
00:27:06.280The left does not want to address that problem. And so instead they have made the search for white racism, the dominant activity of the elite establishment, whether it's in academics, whether it's corporations, law firms, banks, big tech, you name it.
00:27:27.840Uh, I mean, come on, this, this January six ride had nothing to do with racism, sexism, misogyny.
00:27:35.760It was a bunch of people who believe that the election was stolen. I happen to not believe that I am not persuaded by any evidence that there was systemic rigging going on.
00:27:46.300There was mistakes I'm sure made. There was perhaps garden variety fraud, but I don't believe it was rigged, but they seriously believe that.
00:27:55.480And, and, uh, they believe that the government was illegitimate.
00:28:00.560Therefore it's, it's a, it's an epistemological problem because those of us who, who criticize that action often do so from the perspective that the rigging narrative was wrong.
00:28:11.660But if, if you really believe it, I mean, if, if you believe Trump words, then things are very seriously askew.
00:28:18.600That doesn't give you license to tear the Capitol down.
00:28:21.840In any case, that's what this is about.
00:28:23.440It's a disinformation problem. That's your point. It's a disinformation problem.
00:28:26.680That's how I see it too. They, they got sucked down into YouTube rabbit holes.
00:28:30.560It's same. That's what's happening with COVID on a lot of the disinformation that's out there.
00:28:34.660It doesn't mean I think it should be censored, but certainly it's happening.
00:28:37.640And they started to believe that he really, he really was going to become the president.
00:28:41.780And all they had to do was show up the Capitol and take their country back and so on, whatever.
00:28:45.440It doesn't mean that there were no white supremacists there, but it wasn't about white supremacy.
00:28:49.900They want to turn everything into white supremacy.
00:28:52.740What's going on, all you have to do to take down an individual or an institution today, Megan, is use one fatal word, white.
00:29:03.280We are now seeing every accomplishment, every summit of sublimity that Western civilization has given us torn down in the name of fighting phantom white supremacy.
00:29:18.360I've been following a lot, what's been going on with something that is the dearest thing to my heart, which is classical music.
00:29:38.580What's happening to classical music is worthy in its own right, if you love this tradition, but it is also emblematic of the strategy and tactics that are being used to take everything down.
00:29:50.800The claim is, is that the classical music profession currently is racist, that it's discriminating against black musicians, a claim that is patently ludicrous on his face because every orchestra auditions musicians behind a screen.
00:30:09.260So nobody, the people choosing the musician do not know that musician's sex or race.
00:30:16.940So somehow that now has been turned into racism, the fact.
00:30:25.340All they care about is, quote, impact.
00:30:27.500So if the numbers in the orchestra don't adequately in somebody's random view reflect diversity by necessity under critical race theory, under Ibram X.
00:30:38.060Kendi's view of the world, it's racist.
00:30:41.180But, but so those of us that have held on to some shred of respect for evidence know that that's a ludicrous claim because you can't be colorblind and not know somebody's race and still be discriminating against him because of his race.
00:30:55.100I mean, let's just, let's just assert that, Kendi notwithstanding.
00:30:58.920But the other claim against classical music is that the composers in that tradition were overwhelmingly white and therefore they all are defined by white supremacy.
00:31:09.720But anything coming out of Europe, whether it's art history or architecture or science for that matter, because of the demographics of Europe will be overwhelmingly black, white, excuse me.
00:31:24.900There simply were no blacks in Europe of any number until the 20th century, the late 20th century.
00:31:33.460And so that gesture, that rhetorical gesture, though, gives people the power to simply cancel entire traditions.
00:31:42.300Nobody uses the same logic when it comes to canceling African drum music, which is exclusively black or Indian, East Indian classical music, which was created by and for and with Indians or Chinese classical opera.
00:31:59.080It's only the demographics of Europe that are used against it.
00:32:03.700And what is particularly preposterous, Megan, the extraordinary thing about the Western classical tradition, partly because it's notated, it's written, the fact that it's based on written scores allowed for stylistic development over 500 years.
00:32:23.560That is simply mind-blown, the difference between a Renaissance motet and Stravinsky, or even between a Bach passion and a Chopin nocturne is galaxies away.
00:32:41.440Each composer is extraordinarily individual in the pathos, the longing, the eros that he has brought to the world, and we are allowed to follow the movement of the human mind through his music.
00:32:57.980To unite all of these into one thing, which is just whiteness, shows such ignorance, such aesthetic blindness and deafness, it is mind-blowing.
00:33:13.820But that is the logic, whatever you love, if it has come out of Europe, it is coming down under that logic.
00:33:22.040And so we better be prepared, Megan, to stop kowtowing to this and saying, this is not about race, this is about greatness and creation, and we are not going to cancel our culture.
00:33:35.400Yeah, and the beauty of humanity and the amazing works that have been produced over the years, it's so crazy that we've gone to this place where if there's any racial disparity at all in any industry, the answer is to throw out anything created by a white person.
00:33:50.600And this manifested itself, well, many times, but you wrote an article on June 10th called Resisting Racial Demagoguery, and I highly recommend it, everybody read it, City Journal.
00:34:01.360And it's about what happened with the Tulsa Opera and a composer named Daniel Bernard Romain, is that how you pronounce it?
00:34:22.080He writes works like, I am a white person who blank black people, meaning, you know, write in who detests them, who oppresses them, who subjugates them.
00:34:33.220And he has called for orchestras to exclusively program black artists.
00:34:40.480He wants to write a work for exclusively BIPOC, that's black, indigenous, people of color, members of a orchestra.
00:34:51.840In other words, let's put it baldly, Daniel Romain is a racist.
00:34:56.720He believes that blacks should take precedence over all things.
00:35:00.700So he was invited to participate in a concert that the Tulsa Opera was planning to commemorate the centennial of the 1921 race riots in Tulsa, which were horrific.
00:35:14.460After a still undetermined incident happened between a black and a white teenager, there was some gunfire that broke out on the part of blacks.
00:35:26.460And then the white mob rampaged through the Greenwood section of Tulsa, which was then the business, black business and residential section of Tulsa and burning buildings.
00:35:36.420And the official report found that there was probably about 26 blacks who were dead.
00:35:43.580The media reports hundreds, you know, who knows what reality.
00:35:46.420In any case, this was a concert that was going to have eight black singers singing works by 23 living black composers, as well as spirituals, you know, traditional black folk songs.
00:36:01.380And Romain was given one of the plum commission assignments of four.
00:36:06.500They were going to commission four new works.
00:36:08.400He got one of them and he was going to write for Denise Graves, who was one of the great sopranos of the 1990s and 2000s.
00:36:19.340That performance, you know, went around the world.
00:36:22.600She was highly sought after for for many, many years.
00:36:27.000Any composer would kill to compose something for Denise Graves.
00:36:30.820So Romain, you know, compatibly with his attitude towards life, wrote a piece called They Still Want to Kill Us, which was all about what he calls the enduring stain of racial hatred in the American white, American psyche.
00:36:48.500And it ended with the lines, God bless America, God damn America.
00:36:53.720Well, Denise Graves, who is black, said that the final line, as much as she believes in black lives mattering and supporting black artists, did not accord with her personal values.
00:37:08.100And so the pianist for the for the planned orchestra concert, who's black himself, Howard Watkins, he's an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and the head of Tulsa Opera, a composer named Tobias Picker, tried to negotiate with Romain saying, can you change that last line in some way that would make it possible for Denise Graves to sing it?
00:37:33.740And he remained put his foot down, said no way. And and Graves would not do it because it did not accord with her understanding of America and racial reconciliation.
00:37:45.820So they canceled the aria. They paid Romain his fee. And he immediately turned around and did what Romain does best, which is play the race card.
00:37:54.520He actually said that the cancellation of his opera was tantamount to the race riot in Greenwood, that he was the victim of similar white supremacy, never mind the fact that it was Denise Graves, who was black, who refused to sing this.
00:38:14.060And it was to buy it. It was Howard Watkins, the pianist, who was the go-between. He blamed everything on Tobias Picker.
00:38:21.700He said, this is what happens when white males run music organizations. They should not do so.
00:38:29.600This this is about a white trying to oppress me. This is a completely false narrative.
00:38:35.720So he then got the work produced, performed on video. I've listened to it.
00:38:43.660You can see it online. A black soprano, Janae Bridges, who's very involved in the Black Lives Matter in the opera movement, sang it.
00:38:52.260The lyrics are pathetic. The musical writing is insipid.
00:38:56.860A composer suggested to me that one reason why Denise Graves may have balked at singing it was just because it's lousy music.
00:39:03.020But the irony is, is that it actually probably helped remain because the concert that did come forward called Greenwood Overcomes was fantastic.
00:39:13.360The works that were played there by such black artists as Adolphus Hailstroke and Tanya Leon and Quinn Mason were gorgeous.
00:39:24.620Amazingly, very only one of them even touched on the Tulsa riots and racial animosity.
00:39:32.420Most of them were songs of love, songs of loss, songs of consolation.
00:39:38.040And the Remain piece, not just because of its political valence, which is remains right.
00:39:44.100I mean, that's right. But really, because of its musical mediocrity would have been quite out of place there.
00:39:49.140The great the ending of this story that that does give one maybe a shred of hope.
00:39:54.760And I'm not usually an optimist, is that Tulsa opera is still standing.
00:39:58.620What we're seeing in the classical music world today and in the theater world and in the ballet world is supine subjugation.
00:40:08.000Every institution is rolling over and playing dead, beating its chest.
00:40:28.560And it is moving forward as strong as ever.
00:40:32.080And I wish that more of the guardians and curators of our culture would show similar courage instead of staying silent in the face of these utterly ungrounded, ignorant attacks that, again, are destroying the very thing that makes life worth living, which is the creation of beauty and sublimity.
00:40:58.240And in the piece, there was one piece you talked about how in the summer of 2020, this same composer, this guy Romain, he'd been complaining on Facebook and reading from your piece about the lack of racial proportionality in orchestras.
00:41:11.700And that's when a retired principal violinist from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra offered to tutor minority musicians in audition techniques.
00:42:40.640Just in the news yesterday, a little bit, here and there.
00:42:43.340And I don't know if it's so much corporate America, right?
00:42:45.420I mean, Chris Rufo, God bless Chris Rufo and his great reporting, but he had a report just yesterday about American Express and its critical race theory training of its employees.
00:42:53.340And it was just absurd what they're making people do.
00:42:58.280It was basically they have to divide themselves into oppressor and oppressed.
00:43:02.620They've figured out where they are in the racial or sexual disparity scale and oppression scale.
00:43:07.780And then they have to read certain books or follow certain podcasts that are going to help educate them on white supremacy in America, including one that says something like children are not colorblind.
00:43:20.340It's all about how your baby six months out of the womb is already becoming a racist and needs an intervention.
00:43:27.420You need a little Robin DiAngelo for babies, I guess.
00:43:30.040So anyway, but we are little by little seeing signs of hope, I think.
00:43:33.840And one of them yesterday came out of Loudoun County, you know, which has been sort of ground zero on teachers and parents trying to push back against critical race theory.
00:43:42.300We've seen angry clips out of school board meetings, by the way, there they just they just pushed through some approval of transgender or just unisex bathrooms, I guess, allowing that to happen.
00:43:53.900And so, you know, they it's not all going one way.
00:43:57.920But there was a Loudoun County teacher who showed up at a board meeting because she'd been told she wasn't allowed to really say how she felt.
00:44:04.360She says no dissent to the to the CRT training and messaging in the schools is allowed that she was told she's not allowed to even object to it.
00:44:18.300Nobody else is there because given all the troubles there, they they took the covid problems as an excuse to say, oh, no, no one else can come.
00:44:24.380And she shows up in an empty room with the board sitting there.
00:44:28.540Somebody filmed it and said in part as follows.
00:44:33.500I have been a teacher in Loudoun County Public Schools for five years.
00:44:37.700This summer, I have struggled with the idea of returning to school, knowing that I'll be working yet again with a school division that, despite its shiny tech and flashy salary, promotes political ideologies that do not square with who I am as a believer in Christ.
00:44:52.180Within the last year, I was told in one of my so-called equity trainings that white Christian, able bodied females currently have the power in our schools and that, quote, this has to change.
00:46:13.940But at some point, if enough people stand up, we are going to unmask this ideology.
00:46:20.120What really has to happen, Megan, though, right now, the only allowable explanation for socioeconomic disparities is bias.
00:46:29.780That is what's driving everything today in our culture.
00:46:33.520That's why everything is coming down is because, as you say, there is not 13 percent, 12 percent black representation at Sullivan and Cromwell Law Firm,
00:46:45.020at at Gibson Dunn Crutcher Law Firm, at Google, at Microsoft,
00:46:49.520because the average black 12th grader reads at the level of the average white 8th grader.
00:46:56.320The vast majority of of black 8th graders do not have even partial mastery of math and reading skills, a gap that does not close.
00:47:08.300There's a standard deviation of accomplishment on virtually every type of colorblind, standardized, objective test.
00:47:17.760And and and but we're not allowed to talk about those gaps.
00:47:22.580We're not allowed to talk about the crime gap.
00:47:24.620Instead, any disparity, as you say, is chalked up to racism.
00:47:29.740And as as long as that is the only explanation in the public sphere, the left wins, the left will continue destroying meritocratic standards,
00:47:39.920which you brought up earlier, that every standard is coming down because they all have a disparate impact.
00:47:45.780That's not because the standards are racist.
00:47:49.520It's because there are different skills levels that need to be eradicated before we can expect proportional representation.
00:48:02.420What drives it? Because I've heard I mean, I've heard I heard a great debate between Glenn Lowry and I think it was Breonna Joy Gray.
00:48:09.580And she was accusing him of being too focused on black culture, saying, you know, it's not a bootstrap situation.
00:48:17.160And she was saying it's it's poverty driven by large part.
00:48:21.180You know, she was saying, yes, there are definitely some racist structures, but she's not really a BLM type person.
00:48:26.420She's not like a woke activist, Breonna.
00:48:29.380And she was saying, if you look at sort of the poverty situation in America and how most black kids are raised and they don't have full bellies when they go to school and that's distracting and so on and so forth.
00:48:38.780But I mean, she to me, I was like, OK, she's persuading me that this is a real factor.
00:48:43.440And how do we solve that? I don't know, Heather. I haven't studied it.
00:48:45.780But what what do you say is causing that disparity?
00:48:50.480Chinese immigrant children come to this school.
00:48:54.020You know, there's a book by Ying Ma of I forget what it's called now.
00:48:57.460Chinese girl in the ghetto or something who came to Oakland.
00:49:25.620The idea of poverty, I'm in conversation now with a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District who is not too happy about the race, white privilege training that they've been having to take online.
00:49:40.520The grading rubrics, which don't allow you to assign F's or penalize somebody for not turning in any homework or doing any tests.
00:49:50.980And she points out that the schools that she's taught in, the Title I schools that are the poor population, are awash in resources.
00:50:00.640Whereas there's a charter school in Studio City that has a lot of Hollywood kids there that has no money at all.
00:50:26.400I guess I'm not a policy wonk by instinct.
00:50:28.820I'm not sure that there's a lot of policy that we can do.
00:50:32.700You know, the policy wonks like to tweak tax credits.
00:50:35.600And we now have this absurd idea of the government paying families for having children with whether or not they're working or not, which is just returning us to the destructive regime of free welfare for all.
00:50:51.920I think what has to happen is really a cultural shift.
00:50:54.960So I guess I would use every bully pulpit I could to say that children need, on average, mothers and fathers, that males are not toxic.
00:51:04.280I would stop the demonizing of males in our culture.
00:51:07.560We have been taken over by the feminist ideology that says that strong women can do it all.
00:51:11.940We regard fathers as sort of optional appendages to a family.
00:51:17.400And, you know, the APA, the American Psychology Association, I referred, you know, previously to its work on the big five personality traits and neuroticism.
00:51:28.620I can guarantee you if they were doing that same study today, they would not come up with that observation, which is true, because now it has gone as left as anything else.
00:51:37.500And several years ago, it had a whole new sort of diagnostic sickness, which was maleness.
00:51:45.300You know, the traits of self-reliance and competition are toxic and pathological.
00:51:53.560I mean, we really are disappearing males from this culture.
00:51:57.200And male-creating institutions have all been taken over.
00:52:01.360The idea of putting females in combat units is suicidal, if you care about defense, because you're going to introduce arrows into those combat units.
00:52:10.480The only reason we're doing that is in order to qualify more females to be four-star generals.
00:52:15.360It has nothing to do with war readiness.
00:52:18.300You know, the Boy Scouts have gone under.
00:52:20.860So the traditional institutions that recognize the male virtues of chivalry and risk-taking, exploration, empire building, are being decimated.
00:52:37.400And I don't think that bodes well for civilization.
00:52:42.280Being female is not an accomplishment.
00:52:44.140It's not even particularly interesting.
00:52:45.720And the same goes for every other type of identity characteristic.
00:52:50.860But right now, we have our science bureaucracies that are rife with this meritocracy-destroying identity politics, where we say it's more important that your lab be diverse than that it be the first to develop a final cure for cancer.
00:53:06.180China, meanwhile, is ruthlessly meritocratic.
00:53:08.780It does not look at all at sex or at ethnicity.
00:53:23.240They are going to speed ahead in science and technology unless we can get them somehow infected with the identity politics gene, which will stop their progress as well.
00:53:35.860It's like to suggest that we don't have the opportunity, women, to get involved in STEM-related careers now or university educations is totally absurd.
00:53:45.020We have more opportunity than any place on earth.
00:53:47.740But, you know, Abigail Schreier was pointing out in her book, her beautiful book, Irreversible Damage, and on this show, too, that here's the truth.
00:54:05.560What I object to the fact that now that the opportunity is there, so is the shame on little girls who are like, no, I'm not into that.
00:54:14.340I don't want to do the science and technology.
00:54:16.320I want to go read the English literature.
00:54:17.720Or I want a job that involves people and being around, you know, whatever, using my communication skills, reading and talk, what have you, the opera, let's say.
00:54:28.040And instead, we look at young girls, the messaging is you're less than unless you're going to be tomorrow's scientist.
00:54:34.280And the other point she was making, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, Heather, was one of the reasons why, and this is eye-opening for me, too, because I used to lament the fact that there are so few female CEOs at the Fortune 500 and 100 level.
00:54:46.380And she offered a different way of looking at it.
00:54:50.560And as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, that's true.
00:54:54.400And it was, in a lot of cases, women, they're too smart for that.
00:55:00.360But they have prioritized their family, their well-being, their friendships, their need to see their friends and the people around them.
00:55:08.180They are not going to be, they're built differently, and they're not going to be okay with 18-hour days, six days a week, for years and years and years.
00:55:18.200You know, every time your listeners and viewers, Megan, see another one of these damn strong girls can do it all programs that are being funded by the government or by the private sector, by the Ford Foundation, you know, girls who code, you know, science for females, they should be appalled.
00:55:39.020It is a miracle that any boys are even trying anymore because they are a disappeared population.
00:55:46.080The idea that philanthropic and government efforts still need to focus on females as if they're in a press class, as you say, is ludicrous.
00:55:56.880When it comes to just sheer college completion, females dominate.
00:56:01.460They're the dominant population in colleges today.
00:56:04.380Now, at the outer edges of math cluelessness and math brilliance, males predominate.
00:56:13.840They're the, they've got the worst math skills and they've got the best math skills.
00:56:17.660At the highest ranges of the math SAT, the male to female ratio is about 2.5 to 1.
00:56:26.240And so, as Larry Summers acknowledged, and this got him fired from Harvard presidency, there's a different, the curves are different in the distribution of math skills.
00:56:36.460So, we do not need to focus more on encouraging females.
00:56:41.700What we need to do is stop telling males that they are toxic.
00:56:45.160I noticed, however, Megan, that when you were offering a set of alternative pathways for females to the, you know, either being the CEO or being the high, the first engineer at Google,
00:56:58.320and you were saying rightly, study English literature as I did, as I still view as the, as the highest calling one could have,
00:57:06.320or, you know, be an opera singer or, or, or, or be in the arts world.
00:57:12.600You know, that too should be valorized as a, one of the most important things that you could do.
00:57:18.140I feel extraordinarily privileged that I had a stay-at-home mother who knew the British children's literature classics, who read to me Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh and, and, you know, Alice in Wonderland and, and E. Nesbitt that filled my imagination with, with fairies and nature and irony and wit that these great children's books had.
00:57:43.580Being a mother is a calling as much as anything else, but in the career world, you're absolutely right.
00:57:50.940I've gone around, Megan, collecting what I call natural experiments to test the theory that it is gatekeepers, that it is misogynist gatekeepers who are excluding females from various institutions.
00:58:05.040And, and, and my hypothesis is that that is a bunch of crock.
00:58:09.560And here's the best refutation of the gatekeeper, the misogynist gatekeeper hypothesis, Wikipedia.
00:58:17.160Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that anybody can contribute to.
00:58:56.740Nobody's going to complain about them.
00:58:58.140The fact of the matter is, is that males are more interested in public affairs and in data and in their insane, like competitive baseball score, you know, statistics, which I just can't even follow.
00:59:14.560But, but that, that, you know, and it's the same with letters to the editor, to the newspaper.
00:59:20.300Nobody's preventing females from sending in letters to the editor, but they run at least two to one male to female.
00:59:36.100It's just that the disparity cannot be chalked up universally to sexism and a patriarchy, that some women are more masculine in their approach to life and in their makeup, and some women aren't.
00:59:50.640And we're treating them all like they're these disadvantaged little violets who will never advance in life or be happy in life unless they do what the STEM technology says they must and can do.
01:00:02.460I will tell you, Heather, I thought I've come, I've come a long ways on this because I was raised in a mostly Democratic family.
01:00:11.680We were Catholic, so we certainly had some more traditional values.
01:00:15.060But, you know, politically, I would say my family voted Democrat because our belief was that the Republicans were for the rich and we weren't.
01:02:27.740You made three little lives and they need you and you don't get a do over.
01:02:32.180And once you cry at their high school graduation, you know, your tears of lament won't do anything for them, for you.
01:02:39.400You know, it's not worth it doing, breaking another news story on the A block of Fox News to miss yet another recital or a moment to tuck them in at night.
01:02:49.200All of it, you know, so I, I feel like my journey on this has been, I won't say complete, it's ongoing, but it's been eye opening.
01:02:57.080Well, that is so fantastic to hear, Megan, and I really hope that everyone is listening to you.
01:03:04.880And I think they are because the feminist movement is, is engaged in a bunch of complete contradictions.
01:03:13.260It is illogical, it is, it is unbiological, it is against human nature.
01:03:19.620The idea that somehow making partner by working, you know, billing those 2,200 hours a year, staying up until 2 a.m., pouring over discovery documents and correcting them for typos is, is more important than, as you say, raising those three unique lives.
01:03:39.620Is, is for feminists, basically, to adopt male values, you know, it's to accept the male version of the world, which is highly competitive, which is status obsessed.
01:03:51.360And it's, it's the values which gave us civilization because they led to exploration and, and conquest, which is often a very good thing.
01:03:59.120But, you know, what, and yet at the same time, you have feminists claiming that females are different and better from males.
01:04:10.260You know, if we all, if we all had female politicians, we wouldn't make war anymore.
01:04:16.540Maybe so, maybe not, but, but they, you know, insist that females are better.
01:04:21.300And yet, when it comes to recognizing specifically female values, like empathy and the ability to raise children, they, they refuse to acknowledge those.
01:04:32.680But, as you say, there are individual differences.
01:04:35.860There are plenty of fathers that are far more nurturing than mothers.
01:04:39.880There are mothers who are martinet, you know, draconian, disciplined freaks.
01:04:45.200And, and it's to the father that the child comes running for solace, you know, when the mother said, you idiot, you know, you screwed up on your homework again.
01:04:54.120But, on average, again, both of us, I'm not talking about anybody's daughter.
01:04:58.820I'm not saying your daughter is not going to be the next Nobel Prize winner in physics.
01:05:02.500I'm talking about averages and distributions.
01:05:05.080On average, females, mothers have a different connection to their children.
01:05:10.340And to pretend that connection doesn't exist and that child doesn't need it because you want to make partner or, or be in the C-suite, it's your choice, certainly.
01:05:23.840But, but don't claim that that is sort of a, a neutral choice that isn't, in fact, all about politics and about trying to prove something.
01:05:35.480I, I'm amazed, as you said earlier, Megan, the idea that we're discriminated against is ludicrous.
01:05:41.520I have never, in my life, been discriminated against because I'm female.
01:05:50.260I know, to the contrary, just as the reality of our world today is black privilege, not white privilege, the reality of our world today is female privilege, not white, not male privilege.
01:06:09.980No, what I'm saying is I've been put on panels.
01:06:12.660I've been chosen to speak because I'm a female, because they want that female.
01:06:18.060It's not because of my qualifications.
01:06:20.020My qualifications are not particularly impressive, but I actually had a producer from Fox invite me onto one of their Fox Nation things that was on like interest rates or something,
01:06:30.640which I do not know anything beyond what I barely surmise in the newspaper, and this female producer actually admitted to me.
01:06:41.200I said, it's because I'm a female, and she admitted.
01:06:46.540You know, we have now this phenomenon in science, a stigma against mantles.
01:06:52.480A mantel is a predominantly male scientific panel, and no less than the head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, who has been going around for the last year beating his chest about how science is so systemically racist.
01:07:05.920He also thinks it's systemically misogynist, and he has declared that he will not attend any scientific conference.
01:07:12.340I don't care if it's got the most cutting-edge researchers on COVID or Alzheimer's or autism if the researchers are predominantly male.
01:07:23.160And so you know that if there's a conference under the auspices of the NIH and it's 50% female, you have no idea whether those are the most qualified scientists.
01:07:32.980You only know that they're there because of their gonads and their sex, and that is the reality in our world today.
01:07:43.200We've talked about it with other guests, too, on Affirmative Action, right?
01:07:45.560It's like a lot of Black scholars resent it because they get tarred with this, you-check-the-box sort of judgment that may or may not be fair at all, and even kids who did check the box get it, and you're sort of up against it right from the start, right?
01:08:00.600That you're seen as sort of maybe not equal, not as good as, that you're less than, you didn't belong there.
01:08:06.020It raises all sorts of issues that are ongoing for those kids when they actually get into the schools.
01:08:26.980But without using the label Me Too, right, because that brings up so much, I maintain that the heart of that movement, you know, that in a way I was a part of, was good.
01:08:39.920You know, putting a stop or at least empowering women to feel like they had a safe way of objecting to their bosses, pawing them physically.
01:08:47.680I mean, committing crimes, really, in exchange for professional advancement or just the maintenance of one's job, was a good thing.
01:08:56.680It had been going on for a long time, and it needed an avenue out for women that was meaningful, as opposed to just you've got to suck it up and let them grab your boob if you want to get that, if you want to keep your job.
01:09:07.160And that's why it's a case-by-case situation, right?
01:09:09.980You've got to look at each one and say, I don't believe her.
01:09:14.500But that's why I was happy to see Andrew Cuomo go down this week.
01:09:18.620I thought he should have gone down over the nursing home scandal, but no one seemed to want to pay any attention to that because they just wanted to run cover for him.
01:09:26.140And when the women started coming forward, I was glad to see it because I wanted him to go down.
01:09:32.200My closest friend is Janice Dean, who's been sort of leading the way.
01:09:37.020But I also read their accounts, and I thought, this guy should not be sitting in the governor's mansion.
01:09:41.300You don't grab your assistant's breast and her bottom and shove your tongue down her throat and grab the belly of a state trooper who's protecting it, all the stuff he allegedly did, and keep that post.
01:09:54.060But I'd love to know what your thoughts are as somebody who's been skeptical of the movement.
01:09:58.260Yes, and I respect your viewpoint enormously, Megan.
01:10:02.580I've mostly been a solo worker, so I've not been in that type of office environment and have not experienced that kind of behavior.
01:10:10.560And I would never purport to question your experience with that kind of oppression.
01:10:17.160But I will say, you know, I'm glad, too, that Cuomo has had his downfall just listening to his—I put myself through the torture of listening to his COVID conferences at the start of the pandemic in March and April, and they were simply unbearable.
01:10:36.460The man is such a narcissist, and he was so wallowing in this unjustly granted celebrity and whatnot, and obviously thinks that every word out of his mouth is brilliant.
01:10:49.380And we were subjected to little tales of his Italian grandma that got recycled multiple times and his children, and, oh, it was unbearable.
01:10:57.500Nevertheless, I will say I do differ with you on Me Too and politics, I'll have to say, which is that I think that human life is in different domains.
01:11:11.400I think there's the domain of eros, male-female relations, and then there's the public realm of politics, of leadership, and I don't think that one is relevant to the other.
01:11:23.680Let me put another thought experiment to you.
01:11:26.580If it turned out that, you know, some of our greatest founding fathers—I'm just pulling a name out of the hat, James Madison.
01:11:33.740And again, believe me, this is a hypothetical.
01:11:38.180I'm just positing a thought experiment.
01:11:41.560What if it turned out that James Madison was a skirt chaser and, you know, he pawed his wife's maid?
01:11:49.700Would we think that it would have been better for the country that he be ejected from a leadership position in drafting the Federalist Papers, in drafting the Constitution,
01:12:03.500in creating the most unique at that time architecture for public life, for government life, because when it came to the private realm of eros, he acted like an entitled male and, you know, gave in to his sexual lust?
01:12:22.340I don't think that's a fair trade-off.
01:12:51.560I just—I'm sick of the, you know, the idea that females are a particular category that should have, you know, hate crimes around them or be treated specially.
01:13:03.220So, yeah, if he's a serial criminal, then he's not a good person to be involved in the creation of a government.
01:13:11.800But short of that, short of somebody going around and criminally raping people, and I would stick really much to a traditional definition of rape.
01:13:21.980I think a lot of—I certainly do not think that what's going on on campuses fits that definition.
01:13:28.500And I recommend that chapter of your book, The Diversity Delusion to People, because it does call out—I mean, we can be honest about crimes and power dynamics without classifying everything as a sexual assault.
01:13:40.040I mean, we can, you know, and it's like, look, women are now—they classify so much on college campuses as an assault.
01:13:48.100It can be—it can literally be a man just touching your arm when you don't want him to.
01:13:53.420And it's ruinous for the men who get accused, and especially with no due process, thanks to Obama.
01:13:59.080And now, once again, Biden's trying to be—bring it back.
01:14:07.480I mean, like, JFK cheating on his wife, that's not really something I have much interest in.
01:14:11.920You know, even Bill Clinton cheating on his wife, I don't know if I have much interest in it.
01:14:15.440I mean, it's salacious, so I'm interested as a human, but I don't know that I would have wanted him bounced out of office had I been one of the—a senator at the time.
01:14:23.740Um, but I think when it—when it shows a pattern of abuse, and certainly when job advancement is conditioned on submission, that's such an abuse of power that he's got to go.
01:14:38.860Yeah, I—I—and I'm not sure that this is a real distinction.
01:14:43.260I'm making it in my mind, and it may—it may be completely collapsed, but I would say there's a difference between employment relations and then political accomplishment.
01:14:55.600And my point is really mixing—I think it is a—it's a narcissistic gesture on the part of feminists to say that the—what I think is sort of more the personal realm of—of—of sexual ambiguity between males and females,
01:15:11.960of the—of the constant sort of probing, seeing what—what is their reciprocal interest, even if there's not reciprocal interest.
01:15:18.600I mean, look at—I know that the just obnoxious self-involvement of—of males who, like, can be the most unattractive people in the world, and they keep pushing.
01:15:32.980You know, you—you really think this isn't going to get you anywhere you're attracted?
01:15:36.780But—but to take that realm and to take down male politicians, because, as I say, the ability to negotiate, the ability to maybe be a great diplomat, to be over, you know, dealing with Cold War politics, to understand leverage, to be able to figure out solutions, compromises among warring parties, that is a different skill.
01:16:01.180And it's a male skill. It's also a female skill. I'm not saying it's exclusively male, but traditionally it has been predominantly male.
01:16:09.260I—I just think that the fact that somebody, when he's back in the office, is eyeing somebody's butt, is just not relevant to his ability to lead this country out of perhaps, you know, tortuous geopolitical situation or domestic situation.
01:16:28.320But how can they leave him—let's say we accept the allegations of all these women against Cuomo.
01:16:33.260This is interesting to me. I like this discussion.
01:16:35.620Let's say we accept—because he's both, right?
01:16:37.880He's a politician who's doing things in the political world, but then back, the women he allegedly harassed, many of them, are employees, right?
01:16:46.620So the number one, accuser number one, was his executive assistant, you know, a young woman who says he grabbed her breast underneath her blouse, grabbed her behind, among other things.
01:16:58.700And it's not like he can't do his job as governor, having done those things, but you can't—he has two hats.
01:17:07.000And as somebody who's at the top of the government and the staff in the government, how could we knowingly leave him there to keep doing that to woman after woman when we know how difficult it makes the—it is for the women, what spot it puts them in, you know, that it's not legal.
01:17:24.720It's not lawful for him to do it. So you can't just say, oh, well, he's really good at the, you know, the other stuff, and we're going to ignore this other lane.
01:17:32.860No, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's very, very complicated.
01:17:35.280And so were they to bring an employment complaint, you know, that may be the counterpart to impeachment.
01:17:42.220I don't know. So I'm sort of dealing with just sort of the abstract categories here.
01:17:46.720You're getting rightly so into the complexities of trying to deal with the situation as it is.
01:17:53.340I'm just stating as a general principle, I don't think that we should say that somebody's political career should be decimated because he doesn't always keep his hands for himself.
01:18:10.020And you've also posited, which is absolutely right to do so, saying let's assume arguendo that all of these allegations are absolutely accurate.
01:18:19.040We know darn well that that is a risky assumption to make, but I'm changing the slant here.
01:18:26.460But, you know, at one point, I think it's undisputed that one female says to him, you know, during one of these encounters, well, you'll get us in trouble.
01:18:35.320To me, that kind of line sounds like somebody who's complicit.
01:18:39.900And, you know, he claims that there was flirtatiousness on the other side.
01:18:50.760And females know very well how to play their sexual attractiveness for advancement and for favors or favoritism on the part of males.
01:19:04.660So I just I'm not I'm not 100 percent convinced that it is as cut and dried.
01:19:10.320And and, you know, I think we should be very, very wary, given what we've seen with the campus rape allegations and and Kavanaugh and whatnot.
01:19:18.100But but you're you're perfectly within your rights to say, let's posit that they're all correct.
01:19:25.300And and but I would also then insist that and I'm not accusing you of not doing this, that let's imagine that Cuomo was a politician who understood the beauty of commerce,
01:19:40.100who understood the grandeur of individual enterprise and entrepreneurship, who was not willing to subject the struggling small restaurants in in New York City and state to completely arbitrary shutdown orders,
01:19:57.840who was willing to speak about opportunity and the fact that students and of personal responsibility,
01:20:07.740you know, would we still say that he should go because he was too handsy?
01:20:46.220There's something weird with him sniffing the hair, making the weird comments about the young girls.
01:20:50.080I'm telling you, if I were in a room with Biden, I would let him meet my daughter, but I would not necessarily leave her alone in the room.
01:20:55.560It's not like I just think he's a little creepy.
01:20:58.940Well, let's be a little bit more taller.
01:21:01.260I mean, that's another sort of feminist trait.
01:21:03.940And I'm not saying it's yours, but a little brittle.
01:21:06.580We're brittle towards human frailty and the variety of human experience.
01:21:12.420I guess it's creepy, but there are different ways.
01:21:16.220There's spectrums of people that are are more physical with others.
01:21:19.760And these are politicians that feel like if it's me, that's one thing I can handle myself and always have.
01:21:27.040If it's my 10 year old daughter, it's a different story.
01:21:29.880She when she gets old enough, she she'll learn.
01:21:43.040I hate when women and men, but really it's a woman thing for the large part, resort to playing the victim, you know, and that's and even in even though I have been sexually harassed, I don't use that term victim.
01:21:56.980I was the target of a guy who was behaving inappropriately.
01:22:00.580And, you know, I got I got through it like most women do and wasn't prepared to make a federal case about it ever, you know, came up many years later because the question was then asked, does he ever do this?
01:22:10.980And I was in the position of having to say, well, you know, if we're if we're really putting this to the test, I do have information on it.
01:22:18.440But that's not to say I want my daughter to be put in the position where she has to handle it.
01:22:22.960And I certainly think when you're dealing with a boss, you shouldn't have to deal with this bullshit.
01:22:26.060And I would tell my sons, if you're in a position of power, you got to you got to check that.
01:22:37.320Don't you don't don't fish off the company pier because it's totally fraught.
01:22:41.360And there are power differentials that especially in today's day and age can get you in trouble.
01:22:45.120So, you know, you could find yourself a nice girl at the bar or a church or at, you know, the mixers.
01:22:50.760But whatever, I sound like I'm 200, but not not at the office unless it's somebody who's equal to you.
01:22:59.020Well, I'm going to suggest something, Megan, that I hope you won't mind.
01:23:03.000But as long as you're still talking about shoring up strong young women, you're giving ground far too much to the left.
01:23:11.680I would say you should cancel that as a as a life project entirely and recognize the fact that it is not females who are struggling, gender dysphoria notwithstanding and the herd instinct of changing.
01:23:41.980And I will agree with you in the case to males.
01:23:45.700You know, I I'm frankly not all that sympathetic to the males that get caught up on campuses with these ridiculous me to sexual assault campus rape charges because they're on notice.
01:24:01.640You know, they're on notice that they get drunk and their their partner gets drunk and they get in bed.
01:24:09.340They are very likely to be charged with rape, even though they did not tie the girl down and pour drinks down her throat.
01:24:16.700She got herself drunk and she was involved in the prelude to intercourse.
01:24:25.920And so when they get when the hammer falls on them, they were perfectly forewarned and they have allowed themselves to be carried away by their hormones.
01:25:21.940Don't be a ho like keep it in your pants, like fall into a loving relationship, something that's meaningful before you take that that big step.
01:25:30.400And that's probably the best way of protecting yourself, because someone who loves you is not going to basically turn around and accuse you of rape unless she is insane.
01:25:39.760And ideally, you won't fall in love with an insane person if you've taken the time to figure out who this person is.
01:25:45.280That's the best prophylactic against finding yourself in that kind of situation.
01:25:49.540Now, I can't believe that we are at an hour and a half, Heather, and I haven't asked you one damn question about the cops, something I've been so fired up about, something you've been amused to me on.
01:26:24.780Let's do a part two on law enforcement, crime rates, incarceration, criminal justice and people like Lori Lightfoot in Chicago and what she has to answer for for what's happening there.
01:26:38.520Sadly, I feel we could put this off for another year.
01:26:41.040And unless Biden changes his rhetoric and his policies out of the Justice Department, nothing will have gotten better and we will have plenty of material to talk about.
01:26:49.420But hopefully we'll do that before the next year is out.
01:27:12.320He wrote the big, big bestseller, The Souls of Yellow Folk.
01:27:16.280But he also more recently was interviewed by Andrew Sullivan and appeared in Andrew's column that, you know, I love.
01:27:23.420What happened to you and he coined that phrase, the successor ideology.
01:27:28.560And he's another sort of cultural commentator.
01:27:30.860He's also got his own sub stack who's been able to put into perspective what's happening in our country.
01:27:35.360Really smart dude and has a way of capturing what's happening on the left right now that I have felt very is very helpful, is personally meaningful.