TRIGGERnometry - Universities Have Betrayed Their Own Purpose

00:00:00.720 I'm often asked, well, make the case for merit.

00:00:05.520 For me, the essence of university is to pass on a civilizational legacy. That mission, too,

00:00:12.960 has been completely cast aside in the name of oppression studies and its teaching students to

00:00:18.880 hate. It is incredibly clarifying to have heard the chants of entifada, entifada, and glory to

00:00:25.840 our martyrs from students. Don't we want to know that that's their thinking? What would

00:00:30.480 banning that do? They would still be thinking this, and the reason they're thinking it is because

00:00:35.840 that's what they're being taught.

00:00:55.840 Heather, this has been a long time in the making. We've had a chance to meet in person,

00:01:12.960 but this is your first time on the show. So first of all, thank you for coming on. It's a real pleasure

00:01:17.920 to have you on. Secondly, you have been writing for quite some time about the death of merit,

00:01:23.920 particularly on American college campuses. And this issue, dare I say, has been thrust

00:01:29.280 rather into stark contrast in recent weeks and months. How do you feel? And explain to people

00:01:35.200 what we're actually seeing. Well, I'm trying to resist saying I told you so, you know, to the world,

00:01:41.840 because not just I, but a lot of other people have been writing about the degradation of academic

00:01:47.600 life for decades. And it was very hard to get anybody's attention. I don't mind the fact that

00:01:53.280 it was the outcropping of alleged anti-Semitism, which has finally woken up a lot of alumni donors

00:01:59.360 that have been mindlessly pouring billions of dollars into these fraudulent institutions for

00:02:04.960 decades. But it should have been obvious long before this, that universities have betrayed

00:02:12.560 their primary mission, which is to pass on a civilizational legacy with gratitude and with

00:02:18.240 humility and with joy. And instead of taking up a mission of overt politicization based on a highly

00:02:27.360 contestable understanding of reality, which is that everything in our world today can be explained by

00:02:35.840 white racism, uh, and white supremacy. And the, the insane outcropping of fanatical support for the Hamas

00:02:47.680 terror attacks in Israel is a quite logical extension of the university ideology, which sees, sees Western

00:02:57.440 civilization as one long, uh, exercise in domination and oppression. And this, you know, the anti-Semitism

00:03:08.000 that we're seeing now is not the traditional anti-Semitism of say Americans, elite universities.

00:03:15.760 It is something far different from that because Jews were reviled in the past as outsiders. They were seen

00:03:23.600 as a threat to Western civilization. Today, the reason that these rabid students are, are chanting and

00:03:31.280 screaming in favor of terror attacks on Israel is because Jews are seen as the very embodiment of

00:03:38.480 Western civilization, the settler colonialist enterprise par excellence. And therefore Israel and Jews are the

00:03:47.280 current target of university animosity, but the attention will move on, uh, and it will, it will, you know,

00:03:56.000 continue going after straight white males, uh, anything that seems to is the favorite target of the

00:04:04.160 intersectional coalition. And Heather, you use a lot of strong language there, which is not out of

00:04:09.760 character for you, dare I say. I'm only mimicking my, my adversaries. Believe me, uh, this is nothing

00:04:18.080 compared with what they can throw at me and everybody else. No doubt. But, but I want to double

00:04:22.160 click on a lot of it so that someone who's perhaps less initiated in this world than, than the three of

00:04:27.360 us can, can understand where you're coming from. And one of the things you said, which I thought was

00:04:33.200 exactly right, but also very interesting to explore is you call them fraudulent institutions.

00:04:38.720 Colleges being fraudulent. What do you mean by that exactly? Well, they still put themselves

00:04:45.040 forward as bastions of knowledge and free expression, uh, when they are anything, but there is a

00:04:52.880 extraordinary censorship, uh, function being carried on both explicitly and implicitly one that you

00:05:01.920 yourself, Constantine have challenged. Uh, it is simply the case that there are certain views

00:05:08.720 that are not tolerated on campus. And the, there's an informal censorship that goes on constantly that

00:05:16.560 people simply know that there's certain lines they can't cross. You cannot challenge the explanation,

00:05:22.560 for example, that racism explains racial disparities. You are not allowed to talk about the academic skills

00:05:29.760 gap, which in my estimation is a far more powerful explanation for why we do not have 13%, uh, black

00:05:40.000 physicists in our physics departments in, in the United States, 13% being the black share of the US

00:05:46.720 population or 13% computer engineers at Google. Uh, you cannot challenge that. You cannot challenge the

00:05:56.000 idea that racial preferences are an unmitigated good. You cannot point out that they have huge, uh, unintended

00:06:04.560 consequences in setting up the, the beneficiaries of those preferences to fail. So there's, there's anything

00:06:12.240 but a bastion of free expression, but a bastion of free expression. I actually though, hold a more

00:06:17.600 traditional view of universities. I think that free speech advocates and conservatives to a certain

00:06:25.360 extent, or simply classical liberals faced with the very, uh, active and, and pernicious efforts to

00:06:38.720 limit the range of discourse in universities have overemphasized the idea that the very essence of

00:06:46.800 a university is debate. They claim is, you know, you should go to universities and you should feel

00:06:54.480 intellectually unsafe. You know, that this is a understandable reaction to the nauseating, uh,

00:07:01.120 mantra that, well, we need to feel safe and I feel unsafe, which makes me sick to my stomach because

00:07:06.960 it's, it's, it's so self-righteous and narcissistic and, and greatly maudlin and, and, you know,

00:07:12.560 nobody, universities are the safest in a literal sense place in America today. But I think that that

00:07:20.880 is wrong, that the, for me, the essence of university is, is to pass on a civilizational legacy.

00:07:28.320 It is to make the young generation understand what has been bequeathed them by the geniuses of the

00:07:38.040 past. And debate is not really part of that. It's not chemical to it, but a lot of knowledge that is

00:07:45.420 essential in a university doesn't provoke debate. You don't debate the periodic table. You don't debate

00:07:52.920 the spread of civilizations in the, around the Mediterranean at the start of history. You don't

00:07:59.600 debate, uh, you know, how to think about thermodynamic laws of motion. These are things that should be

00:08:09.720 studied, understood, and used to, to expand students' understanding of the world. That mission too

00:08:19.320 has been completely cast aside in the name of, of oppression studies, and it's teaching students to

00:08:26.720 hate. Heather, you say you've been writing about this for a long time. What was, what was the moment

00:08:33.440 that you first went, something's going on here, and I don't know what it is, but I don't like it.

00:08:41.760 Well, I had been an uncritical acolyte of deconstruction in the 1970s when I was in college.

00:08:49.060 This is the theory that was most associated with Jacques Derrida, the French, I would say, pseudo

00:08:54.860 philosopher, although there's conservative academics who, by respect, who actually think,

00:09:00.020 oh no, there was really something very interesting that Derrida was getting at. As far as I'm concerned,

00:09:05.200 the insight that words are arbitrary, uh, and, and don't actually have any natural connection to

00:09:11.880 their referent is not particularly, uh, earth shattering. Um, so I was at, I was at a university,

00:09:19.460 I, when I was in university in the seventies, I was doing what was the sort of the cutting edge

00:09:26.840 theory work at the time. And, and I now regret it. I was, I, I'm, I'm appalled at my gullibility and my

00:09:35.620 lack of, uh, lack of indeed critical thinking, but there was one saving grace to the high theory mania

00:09:44.280 of the 1970s, whether it was perpetuated by Jacques Derrida or Paul DeMond at Yale, where I was,

00:09:51.760 J. Hillis Miller at Yale, identity politics had not hit. So nobody thought to complain that,

00:10:00.560 say, I was reading John Milton and Jeffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spencer and William Wordsworth and

00:10:10.100 Alexander Pope, uh, and Wallace Stevens. I never thought to say, my God, where's the female,

00:10:19.040 where's the black, you know, trans disabled writer there. All I thought was that I am reading

00:10:28.480 the monuments of English literature, books that have allowed human beings to enter imaginative

00:10:37.300 worlds that would have otherwise been inaccessible to them and that have changed the, the capacities

00:10:43.860 of the English language. That was a very good thing. It, again, it, bizarre as it seems, there was a time

00:10:51.720 not so long ago when the whole concept of dead white males was still in the future. So what I started

00:11:00.100 noticing in the 1980s, I had wanted to go into academia. I'd gotten disillusioned about deconstruction

00:11:08.160 and realized that it was a completely fanciful theory of language. So I couldn't go forward,

00:11:15.040 but things got worse because that's when you did have the rising dominance of gender studies of black

00:11:21.220 studies. And at Stanford in 1986, there was a infamous incident where the Stanford students,

00:11:29.100 ignorant to the last one, completely ignorant about Western civilization, decided that they were going

00:11:36.700 to protest the fact that there was a very modest, very minimal requirement at Stanford to graduate from

00:11:45.120 the undergraduate school to have had some course that would expose you to the basic monuments about

00:11:53.840 Western civilization. So at Stanford, the undergraduates were chanting to get rid of this Western civ course.

00:12:01.820 And Jesse Jackson, one of our great race hustlers in the United States, came to campus

00:12:06.440 and led students in the chant, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go. So that was, you know,

00:12:15.940 that was a pretty clear indication that something was very wrong in the universities. And of course,

00:12:22.520 Stanford capitulated. You know, this is typical. The American academic is utterly spineless.

00:12:29.080 And the university faculties in the United States, but I don't think it's much better in Britain,

00:12:34.820 have completely abdicated their responsibility as intellectual leaders. And they don't have the guts

00:12:41.600 to tell these ignorant students, here's what you need to learn and study before you leave this school.

00:12:49.260 You have four years to fill your empty noggins with as much knowledge as possible. They don't say that.

00:12:56.520 They allow these ignorant students to choose their own courses. And as a result, most students leave college

00:13:05.340 actually knowing less than when they came in. There's a study that's come out of the United States

00:13:11.920 that shows that students of the most elite Ivy Leagues know less about American history after their

00:13:17.860 four years at Yale, Harvard and MIT than when they came in.

00:13:23.040 I mean, that is utterly heartbreaking. And the thing that I always wonder is,

00:13:29.520 why did no one raise the alarm? Or was the alarm raised by people like yourself and then no one listened

00:13:34.700 to? Why weren't people at the top seeing what was happening and going, we're heading for a very,

00:13:40.720 very dark moment here?

00:13:43.280 I'm sorry, Frances. This is the question. I mean, this is the question that I and others have been

00:13:48.980 asking. What the hell is going on? The trustees have been utterly spineless. They are rubber stamps.

00:13:55.800 They are happy to be kept completely in the dark. These are the external overseers of the universities.

00:14:03.180 At Harvard, it's called the Harvard Corporation. I don't know what the counterpart would be in Britain

00:14:06.920 if there even is then. But they get these complete snow jobs at their trustee meetings. The college

00:14:15.840 administrators come in, tell them only what they want them to know. There's no curiosity. There's

00:14:20.840 no demands to say, well, let's actually read the curriculum. Let's read the syllabi of these courses.

00:14:27.920 Let's see if you are teaching anything that has any remote connection to passing on

00:14:34.280 this civilizational inheritance as the great British philosopher Michael Oakeshott has defined

00:14:40.840 education as. The faculty were either increasingly on board with the left-wing politicization of the

00:14:50.000 universities, or again, they were simply cowards. And we saw this in the 1960s when you had the start

00:14:56.800 of the student uprising and you had black radical groups that had been admitted under racial preferences

00:15:03.720 and were flunking out because of that, not because they shouldn't have gone to college, but they

00:15:09.320 shouldn't have gone to college in an environment where they were not academically matched with their

00:15:14.840 peers. That was the problem, that they were being catapulted by racial preferences into environments which

00:15:21.560 they were not prepared for. But you had, you know, the Black Panther student counterparts at Cornell and

00:15:31.320 elsewhere, occupying administrators' offices with machine guns, for Christ's sake. And there was

00:15:37.880 virtually no disciplinary action taken against them. This is what spurred the book, The Closing of the

00:15:44.600 American Mind. Alan Bloom was just so appalled by the cowardice of the faculty and their unwillingness

00:15:52.040 to defend the legacy that is their privilege to curate. I mean, there is really no better job

00:16:01.640 on the planet than being a university professor. You get to read the greatest books that have ever been

00:16:10.840 written, and all that is asked of you is to tell students, to try and convey to them why they should be

00:16:18.200 down on their knees in gratitude before this inheritance, and instead they're either tongue-tied

00:16:24.760 or actively colluding to bring this legacy down. Heather, and do you think it's down to the fact

00:16:32.760 that, and this is something you alluded to earlier, which is a somewhat, there's been a shift in power

00:16:38.520 dynamics between students and faculty and students and administrators, where it almost from an outside

00:16:47.080 perspective feels like the adults are being held hostage by the kids. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

00:16:54.760 And I trace that to the 1950s, when in the United States, capitalism had become so fabulously successful

00:17:04.760 in generating wealth, that for the first time in the entirety of human history across the globe,

00:17:11.640 adolescents had independent spending power. Not that they'd earned it themselves, it was

00:17:16.600 conferred upon them by their parents, but there was so much money sloshing around the American economy

00:17:23.000 that adolescents could go out and buy things on their own. Lots of things! And so you had corporations

00:17:31.800 spotting a new market, and all of a sudden, this was the start of the youth culture. You had music catering to

00:17:38.360 adolescent tastes, you had movies, you had books, you know, adolescents could have their own cars,

00:17:48.840 and this gave them power. And it started the inversion of our culture now, where youth has the sort of

00:17:57.400 final say in things, and adults are kind of an afterthought. And so they come on campus, and they do think of

00:18:04.840 themselves as in the driver's seat. And we have seen, there's a whole consumer culture side of the

00:18:11.080 university now, that in the United States, I mean, it's truly grotesque. The luxury items, I was at Yale

00:18:20.840 several years ago, and was going around, I ate in the dining rooms, dining halls. Yale's food was always

00:18:28.840 very, very good. Now, and I'm a foodie, so I should like this, but it revolted even me. At Berkeley College,

00:18:37.480 one of the residential colleges at Yale, they had extra virgin olive oil tasting bars. And these are the

00:18:46.120 same students, these are the same students at Yale. When Nicholas Christakis in 2015 defended his wife,

00:18:58.680 who had said that the Yale undergraduates were adult enough to change, to decide upon their own

00:19:07.240 Halloween costumes, without being overseen by Yale's diversity bureaucrats. And Nicholas Christakis,

00:19:17.080 who was married to the woman who put this out, Erica Christakis, was the leader of a residential college,

00:19:25.480 Silliman College at Yale. He was then surrounded by a group of mostly Black students,

00:19:33.720 who screamed and cursed at him. And this gets right to your point, again, about the inversion of authority.

00:19:40.280 These Black students screamed at Nicholas Christakis, a revered, highly esteemed

00:19:46.440 psychologist, for two hours cursing at him, saying how unsafe they were at Yale, how oppressed they were,

00:19:55.320 and how he had no right to free speech, telling him to shut the fuck up.

00:20:00.920 I have a different vision than you.

00:20:15.480 I have a different vision than you.

00:20:21.480 You should step down. If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down.

00:20:34.280 It is not about creating an intellectual state. It is not. Do you understand that? It's about creating a home here.

00:20:41.720 You are not doing that. You're supposed to be an advocate.

00:20:44.600 It was stunning. These students who have the thing that Faust would have sold his soul for,

00:20:55.320 access to knowledge at their fingertips, thinking of themselves as oppressed.

00:21:01.320 And what did Yale turn around and do after the scourging of Nicholas Christakis?

00:21:07.320 It awarded two of the ringleaders its racial justice prize for racial reconciliation.

00:21:14.920 So you had the Yale president, Peter Salovey, who was a complete disaster.

00:21:18.840 He's on his way out, but of course, he'll be replaced by somebody even worse, no doubt.

00:21:24.760 Salovey has made it his personal mission to eliminate so-called systemic racism at Yale,

00:21:30.040 which is a complete hilarious fiction.

00:21:32.760 I mean, Yale, like every institution in the country, is tying itself into knots to admit,

00:21:39.800 hire and promote as many black students and faculty as possible. There is no racism at Yale,

00:21:45.720 end of story. But this was the extent of kowtowing on the part of a once great

00:21:54.280 educational institution to student yahoos.

00:21:57.720 Heather, that being the case, do you think with the antics of the University of Penn,

00:22:08.920 the University of Harvard and MIT, when talking about speech laws on campus and calling for the

00:22:16.040 genocide of Jews, do you think we have reached that moment where people have suddenly woken up and

00:22:21.720 gone, what the hell is going on?

00:22:24.040 Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and

00:22:31.560 harassment? Yes or no?

00:22:32.680 If targeted at individuals, not making public statements.

00:22:36.440 Yes or no? Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?

00:22:42.520 I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.

00:22:46.040 But you've heard chants for intifada?

00:22:47.800 I have heard chants, which can be antisemitic depending on the context,

00:22:53.400 when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.

00:22:55.720 So those would not be according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules?

00:23:00.360 That would be investigated as harassment, if pervasive and severe.

00:23:06.840 Ms. McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

00:23:15.800 If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes.

00:23:23.160 I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?

00:23:30.520 If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.

00:23:35.640 So the answer is yes.

00:23:37.320 It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.

00:23:40.760 It's a context-dependent decision. That's your testimony today.

00:23:44.040 Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context.

00:23:48.040 That is not bullying or harassment.

00:23:50.360 This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms. McGill.

00:23:56.280 So is your testimony that you will not answer yes?

00:23:59.080 If it is, if the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment. Yes.

00:24:06.680 Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide? The speech is not harassment? This is unacceptable, Ms. McGill.

00:24:14.200 I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer.

00:24:19.160 Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment?

00:24:26.760 Yes or no?

00:24:30.520 It can be harassment.

00:24:31.960 The answer is yes. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

00:24:43.080 It can be, depending on the context.

00:24:45.880 What's the context?

00:24:47.800 Targeted as an individual. Targeted at an individual.

00:24:51.560 It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them?

00:24:58.760 Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism?

00:25:04.760 I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?

00:25:14.280 Anti-Semitic rhetoric.

00:25:16.600 And is it anti-Semitic rhetoric?

00:25:18.520 Anti-Semitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct,

00:25:21.880 that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.

00:25:29.720 So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard's code of conduct, correct?

00:25:39.880 Again, it depends on the context.

00:25:42.120 It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign.

00:25:47.400 These are unacceptable answers across the board.

00:25:51.480 Well, first of all, I'm going to push back a little bit, Francis.

00:25:56.200 Let's make sure that we're clear.

00:25:58.680 Those presidents did not call for the genocide of Jews.

00:26:01.640 And I would think that you guys, as some of the most important free speech advocates on the planet,

00:26:09.480 would join me in saying that those who deplore the universities, who deplore the restrictions on free thinking and diversity of opinion there,

00:26:22.600 should not take the low road and use the same double standards that the universities have used against conservatives to silence anti-Israel speech.

00:26:33.560 The exchange that was seen as very damning to those three college presidents from MIT, Penn and Harvard,

00:26:43.720 was, in my view, slightly demagogic because Congressman Elise Stefanik kept asking them,

00:26:52.440 is calling for the genocide of Jews against your codes of conduct?

00:26:58.280 Well, nobody has called for, literally, for the genocide of Jews on American campus.

00:27:03.640 Even if they had, you know, I still think the answer should have been the same.

00:27:08.440 But she was translating the calls of intifada, which is, you know, let's be generous here,

00:27:16.200 has possibly a trace of ambiguity to it.

00:27:20.680 You know, maybe it's all in bad faith, but I'm willing to accept that it is possible to have a non-genocidal meaning of intifada.

00:27:29.800 So the question itself was a little bit demagogic.

00:27:34.040 But I think the answers were correct, which is that whether hate, so-called hate speech,

00:27:43.720 and again, I think you guys would agree with me that the very term hate speech is a concoction.

00:27:50.840 It is a stratagem to get around the First Amendment.

00:27:54.760 Hate speech should not be treated any differently than any other kind of speech.

00:27:58.740 It is constitutionally protected, at least under the American First Amendment.

00:28:04.100 I know that you guys, sadly, have much more speech-restrictive laws there.

00:28:09.220 But the presidents were right that speech should be punishable or banned ahead of the fact,

00:28:17.700 only to the extent it turns into conduct or harassment specifically targeted at an individual.

00:28:26.260 So yes, this hearing should have brought down the university presidents,

00:28:31.780 but not because of their answers in that one highly viral exchange.

00:28:37.700 What should have brought them down was their shameless duplicity

00:28:42.820 in alleging that their universities honored free expression,

00:28:47.060 which is why they would not be punishing the so-called calls for genocide, which again, never happened.

00:28:56.820 But they were right to say they shouldn't punish speech.

00:29:00.500 They were wrong to say that they have in every other situation not punished speech, because they have.

00:29:06.660 I mean, we now have the, I hope, well-known case now of Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania law professor,

00:29:14.020 who has been facing for the last year the most excruciating kangaroo court phony process to try and strip her of tenure,

00:29:24.980 simply because she has publicly talked about the terrible consequences of racial preferences,

00:29:31.780 the academic mismatch, which I alluded to earlier, and she has opposed mass open borders, uh, immigration.

00:29:39.300 She's being thrown out if they can get away with it, though now it may be more difficult.

00:29:45.220 So the idea that these schools are bastions of expression, that, that was virtually test perjury

00:29:51.460 before the hearing and should have resulted in their, in their firing.

00:29:55.780 Well, Heather, I'm glad you made that point because I've been saying much the same thing.

00:29:59.380 And likewise with protests here in London, where you have people calling for jihad and,

00:30:05.380 and, and all sorts of other things. My view is that, look, if you want to make the argument that

00:30:10.500 the purpose of university is for people to explore crazy ideas, young people are going to have them.

00:30:16.180 We have freedom of speech in the US protected under the First Amendment.

00:30:19.780 You can say also all of those things. And I am a big fan of all of those statements.

00:30:24.500 And I fully support that. The problem is for the last seven years or however long it's been,

00:30:28.980 if I asked you where you're from, that was a microaggression and it was offensive.

00:30:33.460 Now you're saying you're being asked a hypothetical question, which is would calling for the murder

00:30:38.020 of Jews be harassment? And you're saying, no, we believe in free speech. Well, you don't believe

00:30:42.740 in free speech. You're lying and you're hypocritical. And likewise here in the UK, I mean, you are right.

00:30:47.940 We have more restrictive rules. And in fact, calling for jihad is against the law in this country.

00:30:54.020 Maybe it shouldn't be. And we can have that argument when you stop arresting people for

00:30:58.100 being transphobic on Twitter because they say a man is a man, right? We can have all of those

00:31:02.820 arguments and we can stick to all those principles. The issue here is the utter and vile hypocrisy and

00:31:08.900 complete inconsistency that we are seeing. And that is something that has to be defeated, surely.

00:31:15.300 Right. Right. But again, the answer is not to use the same double standards. And, you know,

00:31:21.140 it's now it's in kind of this vertiginous infinite regress where now you have supporters of the campus

00:31:28.020 left accusing the dissident donors who are trying to, you know, use this moment to bring the university

00:31:40.260 back to a more sane course, but some of whom sadly have been calling for preemptive bans on anti-Israel speech.

00:31:49.220 So now you have the campus left. There was a trustee at the University of Pennsylvania who snidely after a, uh,

00:31:57.540 interim vote of confidence in the, in the pen president who subsequently was

00:32:01.780 defenestrated, um, but, you know, blaming the dissident donors for double standards.

00:32:07.940 So both sides are now playing it. And I just think the, the people who are committed to,

00:32:14.980 to sound university governance and the transmission of knowledge should take the high road. And,

00:32:20.020 and, you know, the thing is we want to know what these ideas are. It is, it is incredibly clarifying

00:32:28.340 to have heard the chans of entifada, entifada and glory to our martyrs from students. Don't we want to

00:32:34.260 know that that's their thinking? What would banning that do? They would still be thinking this. And the

00:32:40.420 reason they're thinking it is because that's what they're being taught on college campuses. So the,

00:32:46.740 you want to get the, if you want to call it, Hey, call it, Hey, you want to get it out there

00:32:52.660 so you can combat it, you know, and, and these calls now, I just see the, the dissident donors and

00:32:59.060 the dissident alumni, they are walking into a trap because they've been going around asking for

00:33:07.060 adding antisemitism to the diversity, equity and inclusion modules. And guess what? The campus

00:33:14.660 bureaucracy is only too happy to comply. It expands the DEI remit. It gives them more power. And of course,

00:33:23.060 what inevitably is added, they say, Oh yeah, we'll now got a commission on fighting hate, but guess

00:33:30.100 what? We also have to fight Islamophobia and we have to fight racism because we have to fight all

00:33:34.020 kinds of hate. And so it's just, it's just walking into the trap that will give them more power. Now,

00:33:40.660 the only thing that is good about this, and I'm really looking forward to it, what we are about to see,

00:33:48.340 I think, Constantine and Francis, because of this push for campus antisemitism training,

00:33:56.260 I think we may be seeing a crack up in the academic left, because let's just imagine what

00:34:04.340 is the antisemitism training going to look like? Is it going to say that chanting from the river to the

00:34:12.260 sea, Palestinian must, Palestine must be free is antisemitism. Is it going to say that

00:34:18.020 Israel saying that Israel is a settler colonialist genocidal state is antisemitism? You may not say

00:34:25.620 that. Well, for the large part of the campus left, that's not antisemitic. That's basic fact.

00:34:32.740 That's simply describing the world. And so how much longer right now you have the radical left on

00:34:40.580 campuses, although I should take out radical because they're simply the left. I mean, there's nothing

00:34:44.660 radical. They're closer to the mainstream than one would assume. They're sitting on their hands.

00:34:50.900 They're quietly kind of putting up with being impugned by the democratic establishment, by Senator

00:34:56.660 Chuck Schumer, who's calling them antisemites. They're willing to, for now, hold their tongues,

00:35:02.660 but at some point, they're not going to put up with it any longer. And the DEI bureaucrats that are

00:35:08.260 being tasked with doing this antisemitism training, many of them are very left-wing as well,

00:35:14.260 and they are much more on the pro-Hamas, anti-Zionist side. So how they're going to be

00:35:20.500 doing the antisemitism training, I don't know. It's going to be a very interesting moment.

00:35:27.780 I'd love to be there. In fact, I'd love to record it.

00:35:30.500 Yeah, I'd love to be there and film it. That would make for amazing content. Millions of

00:35:34.580 views on YouTube, guaranteed. But Heather, I suppose what you're really leading to,

00:35:38.820 and this is of course the subject of your latest book, When Race Trumps Merit, is the DEI bureaucracy

00:35:44.500 needs to be dismantled. We all know it. We all understand it. It is the route through which all of

00:35:49.620 these terrible ideas are being smuggled in, and it's affecting real-world stuff. I don't know if you

00:35:55.780 saw, I'm sure you would have seen this piece recently written about how complex systems won't

00:36:00.820 survive the competence crisis. It's essentially about the fact that if you keep hiring people

00:36:08.500 for reasons other than them being good at their job, you're going to end up in a dark place very

00:36:13.380 quickly. I put it to you now, there's never been more understanding of the need to do all this than

00:36:18.500 now. Really? I don't know. I mean, I find when I talk about my book, I'm often asked,

00:36:24.580 we'll make the case for merit. I think really, are we that far gone that we've just lost

00:36:33.060 understanding that striving for excellence is what drives civilization forward and that things

00:36:42.500 matter? It matters. Here in the United States, we actually now have diversity criteria being

00:36:50.020 introduced into the hiring of air traffic controllers. So it doesn't matter if you're able to

00:36:56.260 handle complex systems mentally and do these incredibly difficult calculations of the flight

00:37:02.900 incoming vectors of airplanes that are 6,000 ton killing machines. But what matters is if you're

00:37:12.500 underrepresented minority or female. Everything changed very quickly in 2013 when the Obama administration

00:37:18.340 embarked on a plan to diversify the ranks of air traffic controllers. Obama's FAA chief at the time

00:37:24.820 announced that he intended to transform the agency, which includes air traffic control,

00:37:29.380 into a quote, more diverse workplace. As part of that plan, air traffic controllers no longer needed

00:37:35.060 to take a more demanding cognitive assessment before being hired. Instead, all they needed was a high

00:37:39.860 school diploma and the ability to speak English and apparently to do very basic math that like a

00:37:44.980 third grader could do. All the tests were dumbed down to the point of being absurd and pointless.

00:37:51.620 Now, the result over the past decade has been exactly what you would expect, even if you haven't

00:37:56.420 heard about this. The number of air traffic controllers who are not white men has significantly increased,

00:38:03.540 while the number of white men has decreased. That was the whole idea, according to the FAA.

00:38:07.700 This is what they tell us. Coincidentally, so have the number of near collisions involving commercial

00:38:13.620 airlines. Those have increased significantly. According to a database maintained by NASA,

00:38:19.780 which relies on data self-reported by pilots, the number of near misses has more than doubled

00:38:24.500 over the past 10 years. In just the past year, there have been more than 300 near misses involving

00:38:30.500 commercial airlines, averaging more than five per week. And just to emphasize that point again,

00:38:35.860 they diversify the FAA and near misses immediately doubled. Now, correlation does not prove causation,

00:38:45.540 but it can point towards it. And in this case, there is a giant glowing sign pointing in that

00:38:51.380 direction. Of course, only a handful of these incidents receive any major media attention,

00:38:55.940 so it's easy to underestimate the scale of the problem. No matter what social media platforms you

00:39:00.900 frequent, you don't really hear a lot about a lot of this. And that's why, in a moment,

00:39:04.980 I'm going to go through some of the near misses that have gotten very little coverage. But I'll

00:39:08.340 start with an incident that did get some attention from the national news media because it helps put

00:39:11.940 the broader problem into some context. So this incident happened in July when air traffic controllers

00:39:17.620 put two aircraft, an Allegiant air passenger plane and a Gulfstream jet on a collision course shortly

00:39:22.660 after the Allegiant plane had taken off from Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood International Airport.

00:39:28.260 And here's how that all played out. Watch. The FAA and NTSB are investigating a very close call

00:39:35.140 on the skies over South Florida, an Allegiant Airlines plane and a private jet forced to take

00:39:41.300 evasive action to avoid a collision at 23,000 feet. Here's Tom Costello.

00:39:46.900 Allegiant Air 485 had just taken off from Fort Lauderdale, headed for Lexington, Kentucky. When

00:39:53.780 it happened, the pilot forced to make a sudden extreme climb 600 feet in seconds to avoid another

00:40:00.900 plane, throwing flight attendants to the floor and terrifying passengers, including Jerrica Thacker

00:40:06.900 and her family flying to Kentucky after a Caribbean cruise. It was honestly the scariest thing I've ever

00:40:13.300 been through. It felt like when you go on the top of a roller coaster and you go straight down from

00:40:17.780 the highest point. The FAA says it happened when controllers put the Allegiant flight and a Gulfstream

00:40:23.460 business jet on intersecting routes both at 23,000 feet. Climb, climb. That's when both planes collision

00:40:31.380 avoidance warnings known as TCAS activated, ordering the Allegiant pilot to immediately climb

00:40:37.300 and the Gulfstream pilot to descend. If not for TCAS, these airplanes would have gotten very,

00:40:42.100 very, very, very close or have potentially collided. We don't understand that it matters

00:40:47.540 that we are now watering down our medical licensing exams because too many Blacks are not doing well on

00:40:54.820 them and that we don't think that there's actual knowledge. But, you know, you have, in fact,

00:41:01.700 the discourse in the United States has been so profoundly nihilistic and willing to tear everything down.

00:41:12.580 So there's not anything that is not now being challenged. The idea of excellence, the idea of

00:41:18.340 competence, the idea of rationality, all of these things are being said by a very large portion of the

00:41:27.300 the professional class to merely be covers for white supremacy. And what I find so disturbing

00:41:36.500 is that our gatekeepers go along with it. So you have the editors of Lancet in Britain,

00:41:43.620 of the Scientific American, of Science, of the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA here,

00:41:49.620 that have all put out, you know, whole issues dedicated to the issue of race, so-called racism

00:41:56.100 and science. You have the the heads of science and math organizations saying that science itself

00:42:03.060 is racist. That's preposterous. It is not. Science is a universal language. It's not about scientists.

00:42:11.540 It's about the scientific method. It's not about whether this or that scientist is black or Asian

00:42:18.180 or Jewish or female or trans. It's about the language that they are speaking, which is that

00:42:24.980 of rationality. And it is about the miracle of the scientific method and the way to test hypotheses

00:42:33.540 through blind, randomized, controlled experiments, one of the great truth-seeking methods developed in

00:42:40.740 human history. And yet, there we are, willing to tear down scientific merit. And exactly, the idea

00:42:49.940 that our complex systems are going to survive. I mean, I'm noticing in the United States, just getting

00:42:56.580 through to any customer service agent is increasingly difficult. You get stuck in these endless

00:43:02.820 computer voice loops, and you can't get out of them. And when you do, you get people who are

00:43:09.700 completely incompetent. It feels like we are living through a rise in incompetence and mediocrity that

00:43:17.620 is going to really start pulling down our quality of life and eventually will threaten lives.

00:43:24.740 And those are all great points, and it will threaten lives. It will also mean a rise in racism,

00:43:31.220 because if you get people in positions and they don't merit being there, or they've only been

00:43:37.140 there because of a diversity drive, then people are going to come in and go, do you know what,

00:43:41.620 do I want the black doctor? Which is an awful thing to think.

00:43:44.660 Absolutely. I mean, yes. It is perfectly rational if you know the extent of racial preferences. And in the

00:43:53.940 United States, in medical schools, here's what goes on. We have something known as the MCATs,

00:43:59.860 Medical College Admissions Test. These are objective, color-blind, standardized, computer-graded

00:44:05.300 exams to get into medical schools. Blacks, college seniors, these are the people in their last year of

00:44:15.140 college, applying to medical schools, they are being admitted with MCAT scores so low that they

00:44:23.140 would be automatically disqualifying if presented by a white or an Asian college senior. And when they

00:44:31.220 get into medical school, having been catapulted into a school for which they're not competitively

00:44:39.380 qualified, so a black college senior who may be qualified, say, for and do perfectly well

00:44:45.940 at North, I don't know, New Hampshire Medical University, Medical University of the University of

00:44:53.140 North Hampshire, and would do well there because he would have the same qualifications as his peers.

00:44:58.740 He is inevitably admitted to Harvard, where again, there's over a standard deviation

00:45:05.220 of his academic skills between his academic skills and that of his non-preferred peers.

00:45:10.420 He does very poorly. He's at the bottom of his class. What happens? Do we fail him out? No,

00:45:17.540 we pass him on. We pass him on again and again and again. Medical schools, hospitals are under enormous

00:45:26.740 pressure to hire black doctors. In the last three years, there's been a spate of blacks who've been

00:45:32.900 put to the head of medical schools. Now, again, without racial preferences, you would think, okay,

00:45:40.420 fine, good for that. But we know the combination of knowing both the pressure for diversity and the

00:45:48.340 extent of the academic skills gap, which is huge in this country, huge. The chances are very great

00:45:56.740 that they're only there because of their race and that the black doctor that may have walked through

00:46:01.460 the emergency room doors after you've been brought in after a near fatal car crash is also there because

00:46:08.100 of his race, not his qualifications. I would say the only thing I disagree with your statement,

00:46:12.980 Francis, is it's not in the hypothetical. It's not in the future. There have been grounds for doubting

00:46:22.180 the objective qualifications of blacks for 30 years. There was a law professor at the Yale Medical

00:46:29.220 School named Stephen Carter who wrote a book in the 1990s called Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby.

00:46:36.180 Carter is black. And he wrote about the psychological discomfort of him as a black man, never knowing

00:46:46.260 whether he was chosen because he was the best person for the job or because he was the best black.

00:46:53.940 And that is a doubt that should hang over any self-aware black person who knows the extent of racial

00:47:04.820 preferences in our society. And it's the same for me. I mean, I don't give a damn. I find gender

00:47:10.900 preferences completely nauseating. I really don't care if there's a single female on any governing body,

00:47:20.340 any institution, any science research lab. I don't give a damn if they're all male, as long as they're the

00:47:26.020 most qualified. But I know for a fact that I have been put on panels or chosen to do this or write that

00:47:33.540 because I'm a female. I think it's completely ludicrous and irrelevant.

00:47:40.500 You're right. I guess the question is, Heather, I mean, what do we do from here? Where can we go?

00:47:48.180 Is there a way to have this conversation constructively or are we too far down that particular path?

00:47:55.620 Well, in the United States, I think that people have to stop being scared of being called a racist.

00:48:03.380 It doesn't scare me. We are living in this country, a huge race hustle. It is an amazing thing where you

00:48:10.900 have leaders of institutions who would rather cop to the specious charge of institutional racism than explain

00:48:21.060 that the reason that they don't have 13 percent blacks in their institution, if it's a meritocratic

00:48:26.580 institution, is because of the skills gaps and that there's not enough competitively qualified blacks in

00:48:32.580 the pipeline. They know this. I mean, they've got to know this to be a fact. And yet every piece of

00:48:39.140 of institutional verbiage is always, woe is me, we have got to work on our institutional racism and

00:48:49.940 finally become an equitable institution. It's BS. They are equitable institutions. The reality in America

00:48:58.500 is black privilege, not white privilege. If you are a straight white male today,

00:49:06.500 you are at the bottom of the totem pole. You are not going to get your first choice of medical school,

00:49:13.060 no matter if you've got the medical college admissions test MCAT scores at the absolute top.

00:49:19.700 If you have extraordinary recommendations from your molecular biology professor in college,

00:49:26.820 you will not get into your top choice of medical schools, if any. And I've been told

00:49:32.980 many times by parents about this. Their kids get waitlisted. And if you're a white male

00:49:40.420 vying for a job to head a cancer research lab and you have an extraordinary record of research in

00:49:49.620 oncology, you will not get chosen because our federal government doles out its research money at this point

00:49:57.380 for cancer, for Alzheimer's research on the basis of race and gender, not on the basis of merit.

00:50:03.940 So we have to stop copying to phony racism and capitulating to the race hustle.

00:50:11.940 But we also have to get the facts out there about just how large the academic skills gap is. I can

00:50:18.900 give them to you right now, but I, you know, I, if you want me, I won't because it's a, you know,

00:50:23.460 it's an American scale of, of, um, I'll just say this 66% of black 12th graders in the United States.

00:50:30.660 12th grade is our final year of high school before college. 66% of black 12th graders do not possess

00:50:37.060 even partial mastery of what's defined as basic 12th grade math defined as doing arithmetic

00:50:44.500 or reading a graph. And the number of 12th grade blacks who are advanced in math is too small to

00:50:52.740 show up statistically on a national sample. What that means is you can have diversity or you can

00:50:58.340 have meritocracy in an institution. You cannot have both because they're the number of qualified blacks

00:51:06.820 in the pipeline is not there. So any institution that is trumpeting the fact that it is devoted to

00:51:13.380 diversity is telling you so to voce that it is cast aside meritocracy. So what we have to do is stop

00:51:21.700 apologizing for Western civilization. There's not a single civilization that has not committed the same

00:51:31.140 sins that the West has is now under in the dock for having committed at much higher levels of

00:51:38.100 egregiousness as, uh, you know, Nigel, Nigel Biggar and his great book on anti on colonialism that came

00:51:45.860 out this year. I think he's an Oxford Don of religious studies pointed out, uh, that Britain had to occupy

00:51:54.420 Lagos in the 19th century to get it to stop engaging in the slave trade. Britain was among the first states

00:52:04.180 in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery. And it then led

00:52:11.140 the world in suppressing both of those, as I said, from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. That was

00:52:17.220 extraordinary. No other state had done that before. Uh, no other states had done that before, certainly

00:52:22.580 not in Africa, certainly not in Asia, nor in among the indigenous peoples of North America. That was

00:52:28.740 extraordinary. And, and we carried on doing that for until the end of the empire in the 1960s. And

00:52:35.460 in the 1820s and 30s, the slave trade department in the British foreign office was the largest unit.

00:52:42.500 Um, and in the 1830s or the 40s, thereabouts, 13% of the total manpower of the Royal Navy was devoted

00:52:50.820 to, um, um, into, in, to stopping, uh, slave ships leaving West Africa for the Americas. Uh, just

00:53:01.780 stopping that quite apart from stopping slavery elsewhere. Britain used its Navy in the 19th century

00:53:08.500 to blockade the Western coast of Africa to try and stop the slave trade. The Africans were

00:53:15.380 gung ho on continuing this as long as they could get away with. So yes, of course, the West has,

00:53:24.020 has engaged in the horrible travesty of slavery. It has engaged in conquest. It has engaged in

00:53:32.820 cruelties. The people that it has conquered have been by and large, even worse.

00:53:39.860 So yeah. Yeah, go ahead. You make a lot of great points there. Uh, many of which I agree with.

00:53:46.260 Actually, the one thing I would maybe want to clarify a little bit, your point about there's no

00:53:51.460 black privilege, it's white privilege is a little bit. I think it's not untrue in the context

00:53:57.700 specifically that we're talking about when it comes to being hired for a job or when it comes to

00:54:04.420 being given a place at college, uh, a straight white man is definitely going to be disadvantaged as

00:54:09.220 compared to a straight white woman, by the way, or, or a black person or whatever.

00:54:13.700 However, I think your point about the academic gap is what actually many of these people mean when

00:54:21.460 they talk about white privilege and it's, and they're completely wrong to call it white privilege

00:54:25.860 because it's not about being white. It's about the socioeconomic circumstances from which you come.

00:54:30.980 And the sad truth of America is that a lot of black people in America grow up in terrible

00:54:36.740 circumstances, go to a terrible school, get a terrible education. And that is why that gap

00:54:42.420 exists. The fact that people then try to correct that by putting this person in a position to fail

00:54:47.380 at a, at an elite college is, is it shouldn't happen and it's wrong. But I think we ought to also

00:54:52.900 include that piece in the conversation as well. Wouldn't you agree?

00:54:55.380 Well, absolutely. Good points, Constantine. Um, however, uh,

00:55:02.820 I would, I would disagree with one of your premises, which is that when people talk about

00:55:09.380 white privilege, they are alluding to implicitly the skills gap. No, they're not. You're, you're

00:55:16.020 giving them way too much credit. They, they're, they will actually deny that the skills gap exists.

00:55:22.100 Uh, it is completely off stage. All of our journalistic writing here about the challenge

00:55:28.260 to racial preferences, otherwise known as affirmative action in colleges is exclusively

00:55:34.180 couched in terms of colleges are excluding blacks. If there's, if there's not proportional representation

00:55:41.780 in the student body, it's somewhere, somewhere, uh, there is some inequity and exclusion going on.

00:55:48.100 So that aspect of it, of the actual empirical gaps is, is really, really off stage that having been

00:55:59.940 said, let me address your other points though, about why those exist. And yes, there is clearly

00:56:10.500 different levels of privilege and opportunity. There's no question, but I would say this,

00:56:16.980 that the focus right now, I think has to be more on personal responsibility, what parents can do

00:56:25.940 for their children. You know, I, I've, I've twice now in the last couple of weeks have been

00:56:30.660 interrogated by a European when I'm talking about the battle between race and merit, who's asked me, well,

00:56:37.700 what about poverty in the United States? You know, there was a Hungarian of all people recently. And then,

00:56:43.700 and then in Norwegian, well, you're very unequal in the United States. You've got this poverty problem.

00:56:48.980 Well, our poverty problem in the United States is overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy of out

00:56:55.380 of wedlock births.

00:56:56.420 Right.

00:56:57.140 Our poverty population consists of single mothers. And if the only thing you care about, if you're sort of a lefty,

00:57:04.020 and the only thing you care about is the economic capacity of, of a family unit. If you think that's the

00:57:11.140 most important thing, how much money or welfare benefits they have, you should care about out of

00:57:16.100 wedlock childbirths because children born to single parents are at least five times more likely to be

00:57:22.100 poor than children born to married parents. But there's a lot more involved in that, in having two

00:57:28.500 married parents. It's an entire culture that values the stability of marriage that holds young men responsible

00:57:35.860 for the children that they create, that they procreate, and that holds expectations to young

00:57:43.300 black males that you will be responsible and you better develop the bourgeois habits to make yourself

00:57:48.340 a marriageable mate. All these things are incredibly important. Parents could do a hell of a lot more

00:57:56.900 to make sure that their kids actually take their textbooks home from school to study, that they're

00:58:02.660 studying for exams. If you compare the amount of time that Asian students in the United States spend

00:58:08.820 on homework to the amount of time that black students spend on homework, it's a ratio of like

00:58:14.340 five to six to one. And the idea that, oh, we stiff inner city schools in per capita government funding,

00:58:24.340 that's not true either, Constantine. Because of various anti-poverty programs,

00:58:30.420 our inner city schools are funded on a per capita basis at a much higher rate than many suburban

00:58:36.820 schools. Now, am I going to deny that there are like these, these palatial prep schools in the

00:58:44.420 United States, you know, the Andovers and the Exeters that may be like your Eatons? I don't know, but I

00:58:50.180 think ours are probably even more cushy and lejuriant because we never had that whole tradition of like

00:58:56.660 Eaton boys beating each other senseless and the sadism of that. But, yes.

00:59:02.420 Yeah, you missed out.

00:59:03.220 I really did. It's delightfully homoerotic.

00:59:10.020 It builds character though, we have to say that. You know, you guys did survive the blitz in a way that

00:59:14.740 probably Americans I can't even imagine would have. But I don't, you know, there are differences,

00:59:20.820 but I think that to continue harping on external explanations is not going to do much because

00:59:29.540 we as a society in the United States have been trying for six decades. We have spent trillions

00:59:34.820 of dollars to close the achievement gap. It is the basic goal of all of our social policy. At this

00:59:42.340 point, the change has to come from within a pathological inner city culture that tells

00:59:49.140 young black children that if they put out effort in their schooling, they will be acting white.

00:59:56.020 There's not a hell of a lot that you can do. You can spend another three million on that

01:00:02.740 grammar school, but as long as the kids are getting the message from their peers and from the population at

01:00:10.020 large, that it is a sellout to study for exams and to pay attention to their teacher, those three to

01:00:19.220 six million dollars of extra taxpayer redistributed money is not going to make a damn bit of difference.

01:00:24.980 Right. Oh, look, I think you make some good points. And by the way, at no point did I say

01:00:29.700 anything about money or this being a money issue. I think what I mean is the socioeconomic

01:00:35.940 circumstances. It's partly, yes, of course, about the wealth of the parents and so on.

01:00:40.660 But what I meant primarily was the environment in which you grew up is extremely influential

01:00:45.460 on what ends up being the course of your life. I know for myself, if I didn't grow up with two

01:00:52.500 parents, if I didn't grow up with two academic parents who pushed me to pursue certain things,

01:00:57.940 even the fact that genetically I probably am quite academically predisposed to being successful,

01:01:03.220 would have would have curtailed my opportunities in life quite a lot. And it just seems to me like

01:01:08.500 the attempts to fix this at the college level are misguided precisely because we're attempting to

01:01:14.100 address completely the wrong problem. By the time somebody from a minority background gets to college,

01:01:22.340 those privileges or lack thereof have already set the course of their life in a very powerful way.

01:01:27.380 And the things we then do probably just make things worse rather than better. But moving on,

01:01:33.460 very briefly, because we've only got a few minutes left, this all seems to be coming from this idea

01:01:38.740 that you talk about in your latest book and Thomas Sowell talks about in his brilliant latest book,

01:01:44.420 Social Justice Fallacies, which is something you've been trying to fight as an idea out there in the

01:01:50.180 culture for a very long time, which is that discrimination is always and everywhere the cause

01:01:55.860 of disparities. In other words, if there is a disparity, it means that there's been discrimination.

01:02:00.100 And that, to put it very, very mildly, isn't quite true, is it?

01:02:05.620 Right. If I can just, nevertheless, backtrack a little bit.

01:02:08.820 You know, socioeconomic, it's not money, it's socioeconomic differences.

01:02:13.940 Well, so then, but, but if you're then defining them as family structure, again, that I agree with you,

01:02:20.660 but that is not something that we can solve by transfer payments or a hell of a lot of social

01:02:26.580 policy, except to valorize.

01:02:28.580 No one disagrees with that. I am all for personal responsibility. Men shouldn't be walking away

01:02:34.260 from their children. People need to have children and stay together. Look, we're all completely

01:02:40.180 agreed on this stuff.

01:02:40.980 Okay. And, and, but that culture can be changed. That's, that's the point. It has to,

01:02:44.420 the change has to come from within.

01:02:45.780 From within.

01:02:46.100 Yeah.

01:02:46.340 Yeah.

01:02:46.820 Yeah, absolutely.

01:02:47.540 Yeah. So, so yes, I would say that, that this is our, our culture today, we're forced to like

01:02:53.460 perform, do performative lies. You know, we have little lies about, well, the biggest threat to

01:02:58.180 the United States is, is Trump's white supremacist MAGA people that are, you know, or the, it's white

01:03:03.620 supremacists who are beating up elderly, frail Asians in, in San Francisco and, and New York when the

01:03:09.460 videos show us a quite different reality that we're not allowed to talk about.

01:03:13.300 Um, we, we see the reality of who's doing the looting and the, and the, and the shoplifting and

01:03:19.060 the, and the gratuitous knockout game attacks, but we're not allowed to talk about that.

01:03:25.060 So we live those lies. We live the lies that there is, uh, you know, one can change one's

01:03:31.700 sex and gender by fiat and that there is not a, a biological rule of, of sex built into every

01:03:39.780 single cell of our body. We live that lie as well.

01:03:42.900 But the biggest lie, I would say that any disparity in our institutions is by definition,

01:03:48.260 the result of racism. That is a lie. It is in the case of meritocratic, uh, institutions.

01:03:55.620 The reason for disparities is because, as I said before, the academic skills gap, the other issue

01:04:01.140 that needs to be talked about in the United States today, since the George Floyd race riots of June,

01:04:07.460 2020, uh, we have been unwinding our criminal justice system at just an astounding rate.

01:04:13.940 And you have prosecutors deciding not to bring cases. They're, they're declaring entire categories

01:04:20.980 of crime off limits to prosecution, whether it's petty theft, uh, shoplifting, looting,

01:04:28.660 resisting arrest, which is catastrophic, trespass, disorderly conduct. All of these things are now declared,

01:04:36.260 we're not going to criminalize them. Police are being told not to make pedestrian stops,

01:04:41.620 even if they see highly suspicious behavior, all because those activities, however constitutional,

01:04:48.980 however colorblind, however essential to maintaining public order do have a disparate

01:04:54.180 impact on black criminals. But because our prison population here, we have a case, not of the

01:05:00.500 under-representation of blacks, but the over-representation of blacks. As I said, blacks are 13% of the national

01:05:07.540 population in the U.S., but they make up a third of our prison population. The only allowable

01:05:13.620 explanation for that in mainstream discourse, whether it's the New York Times, the Washington Post,

01:05:18.580 CNN, and certainly on every single American campus, the only allowable explanation is criminal

01:05:24.820 justice, racism, mass incarceration. Uh, we have racist cops, we have racist judges, we have racist juries,

01:05:32.260 we have racist, uh, drug enforcement system. That is again, all wrong. The reason for the

01:05:38.580 over-representation of blacks in prison is, is highly elevated rates of criminal offending. And I don't

01:05:44.340 want to sound race obsessed here. Let me also add, Constantine and Francis, that I have spent years

01:05:51.300 going into inner city communities, going to police community meetings, trying to give voice to the

01:05:57.300 thousands of good law-abiding, decent, hard-working residents of those communities who I hear exclusively

01:06:06.580 say, we want more police. Why don't you get the kids who are hanging out by the hundreds on the

01:06:13.700 corners fighting? Why can't you arrest them for truancy or loitering? I smell marijuana in my hallway.

01:06:22.100 Why can't you do something about it? There is a drug set going on on the corner that I see

01:06:26.980 out my window. I'm terrified to go down into my building lobby because it's being colonized by

01:06:32.900 trespassing youth, hanging out, smoking weed and selling drugs. These are the people who never get

01:06:40.420 heard by the mainstream media. They deserve protection. They deserve the police. And when you

01:06:47.060 pull back on law enforcement in the name of fighting phony racism, in the name of avoiding disparate impact,

01:06:54.420 it is the millions of law-abiding blacks who are hurt the most. Since the George Floyd race riots,

01:07:01.380 there have been dozens of black children, nine-month-old children, one-year-old children,

01:07:08.580 five-year-olds, six-year-olds, nine-year-olds gunned down fatally in their beds, in their living rooms,

01:07:16.660 on their front porches, jumping on trampolines, at barbecues, at birthday parties, riding in their

01:07:24.500 parents' cars. These black kids have been fatally gunned down by these barbaric drive-by shootings,

01:07:31.940 or if they haven't been killed, they've been rendered brain dead. We have never been asked by the Black

01:07:39.620 Lives Matter activists to say their names. Not once. There has not been a single Black Lives Matter

01:07:47.780 rally on their behalf. Why? Because they have been killed or maimed exclusively by black gang bangers.

01:07:56.740 They have not been killed by whites. They have not been killed by the police. And because they've been

01:08:02.900 killed by blacks, the media and the activists doesn't give a damn about their lives. And as long

01:08:10.340 as we continue, and our President Joe Biden has this phony meme that he borrowed from Barack Obama,

01:08:18.660 which says that black parents are right to fear that their children will be killed by a cop

01:08:23.940 or a white supremacist every time they step outside, that is 100% false.

01:08:30.020 Yes, it is much more dangerous to be black in the United States than to be white. And the reason is,

01:08:38.100 is because you're so much more likely to be killed by a black criminal. Blacks between the ages of 10

01:08:44.180 and 24 die of gun homicide at 24 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. That is a civil

01:08:52.020 rights problem. Since George Floyd, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles.

01:09:00.900 Who's shooting them again? Not the police, not whites, but other blacks. Black juveniles commit

01:09:07.300 gun homicide at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. That's the problem. And it is one obviously in

01:09:14.660 Britain that you're also not allowed to talk about. You've had your metropolitan police

01:09:20.580 putting out these specious reports about their own racism simply because their officers were going

01:09:27.300 where crime was happening and trying to stop it. You cannot fight crime without being disproportionately

01:09:34.020 in minority neighborhoods, because sadly, that's where the victimization is occurring.

01:09:38.660 Heather MacDonald, it's been a fantastic interview. Thank you so much. We always finish

01:09:44.660 our conversations with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about

01:09:48.900 as a society that we really should be? I think we should be talking about how much beauty there is

01:09:58.900 in our civilizational legacy. None of us deserve Mozart. None of us deserve the St. Matthew Passion.

01:10:06.740 None of us deserve Schubert song cycles or Tiepolo or John Singer Sargent. And it's not just,

01:10:13.380 I say this to my fellow, I guess I'm called a conservative, my fellow conservatives. Yes,

01:10:19.460 free markets are great. We absolutely need to be able to continue creating prosperity,

01:10:27.140 but the point of civilization is not just economic exchanges as vital as that is. And maybe it's the

01:10:34.180 sine qua non for everything else. But let's also remember that you should not die before reading,

01:10:42.580 if you die before reading certain books, whether it's Middlemarch or War and Peace or Anna Karenina,

01:10:48.740 or reading pastoral poetry, you will have died a poor life. And so it's time to get cracking and

01:10:54.820 start exposing yourselves to some of the great monuments of civilization.

01:10:59.380 Heather, beautiful message. And stick around with us as we ask Heather your questions, whether

01:11:05.300 you're a local supporter or support us elsewhere. Hang around and we'll be answering those right now.

01:11:12.260 Please ask Heather what suggestions she has for adults who need and want to be self-educated

01:11:18.180 because their college experience was all DIE crap, critiquing the authors of the past

01:11:23.380 for the various prejudices and similar postmodern nonsense.

TRIGGERnometry - March 10, 2024

Universities Have Betrayed Their Own Purpose - Heather Mac Donald

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