In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Richard Hanania to discuss Woke Inc., The Nation of Victims, and why it s important to be open to changing your mind. We talk about how important it is to be able to change your mind, and the value of being open to new ideas and ideas that push you beyond where you were before. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed getting to know each other, and that you take something away from it that you can apply to your own life and career. Thank you so much to Richard for coming on the show, and for being willing to share his thoughts and ideas with the rest of the world. I know that he has a lot more to say, and I think you'll agree that he's one of those rare people who's open to doing the things that we don't do often enough in our discourse, which is changing our mind. I think we can all agree that this is something we should all strive to do more of, especially when it comes to making sure that we're not hemmed in by what we think we should be doing or being told we should do or that we shouldn't be doing. This episode is a must-listen episode, and it's a must listen. I hope that you enjoy it and that it makes you think about what you can do to make sure that you're open to the things you want to do in your life and your career and your life. in order to be a little bit more open to what you think you should do. -Vivek of course, and think about it. Tweet me and let me know what you thought of this episode! :) Timestamps: 1: 2:00 - What do you think of it? 3:30 - What are your favorite part of the episode? 4:20 - What would you like to see me do in the future? 5:15 - What's your favorite moment from the podcast? 6:00 7: What do I think of the podcast 8: What are you looking forward to in the next episode 9:40 - How do you want me to do next? 11: How do I feel about the future of the show? 10:30 13:15 15:20 16:10 - What s your biggest takeaway from this episode?
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:23.000My good friend, Richard Hanania, I've gotten to know you over the last couple of years.
00:00:29.000We had a mutual friend, Chris, who I went to law school with, has been a great friend and ally of mine and vice versa, a fellow basketball fan we were in law school.
00:00:38.000But he told me, he always told me, there's this guy, Richard, you really need to talk to him.
00:00:42.000You know, Chris is not with us on the right, right?
00:00:46.000He's somewhere else on the political spectrum, but independent thinker.
00:00:50.000But he always said, you know, these two guys need to get together.
00:04:21.000And so I started just writing stuff on the Substack, writing stuff for various publications, and it got a lot of attention.
00:04:28.000And I said, wow, this writing for a broad audience, saying what I think and being able to take ideas – As they come, change my mind, not being hemmed in by a topic or a method or whatever.
00:04:39.000This is much better than what I was doing before.
00:04:42.000As far as what drives me in all this, I'm a big fan of human civilization and human progress.
00:04:50.000We both share the immigrant background.
00:04:52.000My parents, they came here as adults from Really, in poverty.
00:04:59.000And, you know, you see the differences between regions in the U.S. and between populations.
00:05:03.000And, you know, if you have a historical perspective, you're like, wow, even people who are poor today are infinitely better off than people who were 500 or 1,000 years ago.
00:05:11.000And the question is, you know, how we got here and sort of how we could maintain what's valuable and how...
00:05:16.000Can we sort of incorporate new technologies and new challenges that come up?
00:05:22.000So I've always found these questions sort of fascinating at a very broad sort of meta level, and I feel lucky to be able to write on the topics that I care about.
00:06:11.000To be honest with you, I look at most of the other Republicans today, even the other presidential candidates, and what I see, or would-bes, and what I see is a sad perversion of that.
00:06:20.000Speak loudly and carry a small stick, which is to say that you become entrenched in a position, speak only to your tribe, speak Puff your chest and say, you know what, if NBC News is mean to me or whatever, I'm not going to talk to them.
00:06:35.000I'm only going to talk to the people who already agree with me and then boast about free speech without actually living it.
00:06:43.000We had a sparring debate with a former Democratic US senator with a host that was, you know, didn't love a lot of what I had to say, but I respected them having me on and I returned that by actually showing up.
00:06:53.000One of the things I love about you, and I try to embody this as best I can too, is courage isn't acting courageous and puffing your chest after actually having prepped with all of your political consultants to then talk to a bunch of people in a home state that are rallying behind you and standing up and cheering.
00:07:08.000It's actually engaging with the ideas that you disagree with and even the people who criticize you.
00:07:48.000I mean, me and you, you know, we're not in the space where we're, you know, losing our lives or, you know, risking our lives on a daily basis or anything like that.
00:07:55.000So, you know, I think the least we can, you know, the least we can do, the least we owe the world is to actually say what we think.
00:08:04.000You know, I discovered when I started writing things that, you know, there's a market for that.
00:08:07.000I mean, maybe it's not always the best strategy, but in a world where sort of everyone is just sort of putting their finger up to the wind, being the one person who doesn't do that, I mean, it gives you a little bit of a… I think Trump 2016 really scrambled people's brains for how politics works.
00:08:28.000They said, oh, you know, Republicans believe X, Y, and Z, and this guy is saying, you know, the opposite of that.
00:08:33.000Oh, they're not going to like him, and it was – It was more, I think, a lot of the – they just liked the attitude.
00:08:37.000They liked someone who said stuff who – no matter how the Trump movement and how the presidency turned out, they just liked someone who said stuff who got attacked for it and just stuck to his guns.
00:08:47.000And so, yeah, there's something about courage and just sort of – I think we've gotten away from that.
00:08:52.000I think maybe 100 years ago, maybe you'd read the great books.
00:09:17.000I don't think you're going to say every single thought that pops into your head.
00:09:20.000But look, on the spectrum from complete honesty to just sort of being a sniveling politician and just going with the wind, I think we need more people to just go more towards honesty.
00:09:30.000I think for an individual level and a societal level.
00:09:33.000I'm going to get pretty close to sharing what goes through my head, actually.
00:09:39.000And I reserve the right to – Correct for things that I think are wrong because part of the way you explore your own understanding is to get your ideas on the table, hear the best arguments and response.
00:09:49.000And I just think we have this stultified culture of fear that stops us from doing that.
00:09:56.000You know, you did talk about the mental health crisis too.
00:10:02.000You see it especially among young Americans, right?
00:10:05.000And I think that one of the things that is causing it, I think, is – one of the things I said when we launched the campaign was we have this hunger for purpose and meaning and identity at a moment when patriotism, faith, family, hard work, the things that used to fill that void have disappeared.
00:10:22.000But I think it's like two rivers that collide.
00:11:09.000Yeah, I mean, you know, Jonathan Haidt's, you know, Substack has a lot of good recent stuff on this.
00:11:14.000Yeah, I mean, if you look at the sort of depression, what's happening, you might notice people who are our age or older, even a little bit younger, might not notice it.
00:11:21.000But if you look at what's happening to like, you know, people 12 to 20, they are in bad shape.
00:11:27.000I mean, really, any poll question you want to check, you know, you want to check suicide numbers, you want to check rates of depression.
00:11:32.000The last 10, 15 years have been really bad.
00:11:50.000It's hit people who identify – young people who identify as liberal the most and – And a lot of the stuff they believe, I mean, it's just – they believe the life is as bad as it's ever going to be.
00:12:00.000I mean, their belief about inequality is worse than ever.
00:12:05.000The climate crisis is going to – maybe there's something – there's environmental issues.
00:12:10.000But just the catastrophizing of the media of the last 10, 15 years driven by algorithms, driven by social media, driven by general hysteria in the culture, it has not been good – it's not good for people.
00:12:21.000And I think politicians, political leaders, they have a role to play.
00:12:24.000I mean they can go along with this wave.
00:12:26.000I think that's why you do see a lot of negativity.
00:12:28.000I think that a lot of the negativity on the right and the left is driven by people sort of sensing this in the population and just going along with it.
00:12:50.000So on this topic of courage, let's get into the topic we were going to talk about, which is affirmative action today.
00:13:00.000I think it's a passion of yours and mine to end affirmative action in America for once and for all.
00:13:09.000It's weird, though, Richard, I think that most Republicans, like nearly all Republicans I talked to, and actually a good number of people who aren't Republican either, agree with this policy.
00:13:19.000And yet, I don't think, you can correct me if you have knowledge to the contrary, I don't think there has been, ever, a single Republican candidate for U.S. president that has expressly committed to To ending affirmative action in America, which is weird because it's one of the things a US president can actually play a role in effectuating.
00:13:42.000Certainly no elected president has done it.
00:13:48.000And then let's get into the meat and the history and the debate and the thick of the debate around this too.
00:13:54.000So you're – I mean this is something that I've been thinking and writing a lot about.
00:13:57.000My book Origins of Woke has actually an entire chapter on Republicans and civil rights law and what's actually happened here.
00:14:03.000So first of all, the issue of affirmative action, it's sort of – It's a thing where they will – they're afraid to talk about it in any real detail and when you – and they have actually talked about it but at the most abstract level.
00:14:15.000So like politicians have said like, I'm opposed to quotas.
00:14:19.000Now even democrats, if you go to liberal democrats, they'll say they oppose quotas too.
00:14:22.000If you go to Alina Kagan or something, they'll say quotas are illegal.
00:14:26.000So it's a very – at the very abstract level.
00:15:22.000Lyndon Johnson, by executive order, said that basically anybody who does business with the federal government, federal government contractors, it's not a small segment, it's about 20% of the U.S. workforce covered by companies that fit this description have to effectively adopt these race-based quota systems in order to be able to do business with the federal government.
00:15:42.000And every president since Lyndon Johnson Including every Republican president from Nixon to Reagan to Bush 1 to Bush 2 to Trump could have taken a pen and crossed it out, and they didn't.
00:15:59.000And I think the reason is fear of political backlash, but it's weird to me.
00:16:03.000I mean, some of them have said as much.
00:16:04.000The policy advisors, I've pressed them on this as to why not.
00:16:07.000They said we don't want to die on that political hill.
00:16:09.000But it's weird because they've died on so many other political hills from controversial failed wars to all kinds of other things.
00:16:41.000And if I'm making a mistake, I'm still going to keep doing it.
00:16:43.000But I at least would like to know what it is because I can't even figure it out what exactly is stopping a Republican Party from doing what its base wants to do and even what most of these people in private will agree with me on.
00:16:53.000So I mean the history here is even more interesting than that.
00:16:56.000So not only – I mean did Nixon not get rid of this executive order.
00:17:14.000So Nixon had a plan that he's going to split the white construction workers who are excluding black people, the labor unions from the Democratic Party.
00:17:23.000So it was actually – and then the Democrats actually revolted in Congress.
00:17:27.000And the Democrats and Republicans were going to actually overrule this by legislation.
00:17:31.000And Nixon talked the Republicans into not doing it – and he specifically told us, look, this is going to split labor and the civil rights group.
00:17:38.000It was almost like too clever by half.
00:17:40.000And so he just went after the construction industry.
00:17:42.000His labor department under him – apparently, it doesn't appear he knew this, but the labor department extended it from construction to all federal contractors.
00:17:51.000There's no record that Nixon even knew.
00:18:07.000And the history of this is just so fascinating because it started out as a way to split the labor unions, the construction workers, against the civil rights people.
00:18:19.000Basically, the labor unions were this closed space where it would be father to son or whatever.
00:18:23.000And then Nixon came in and basically said, you're going to have to have basically racial quotas because you've been excluding black people for too long.
00:18:53.000Goals and timetables means quotas, so I'm just going to keep saying quotas, but I'm going to keep saying quotas because I think it's intentional to call it out for what it is, but I got you.
00:19:00.000Yeah, if someone Googles the Nixon support quotas, you'll find all these quotations.
00:19:04.000I am against quotas, and everyone else will say it's a lie.
00:19:10.000So then that's how he could – he talked the Republicans into this divide and conquer strategy on the left.
00:19:15.000Then his labor department expanded it from – this was just construction, government-funded construction contracts.
00:19:21.000They expanded it to all federal contractors and from the historical record – All it says is you must take affirmative action to make sure you do not discriminate race, gender, sexual orientation.
00:19:36.000So that doesn't actually say quotas or timetables or anything.
00:19:39.000It could be read as just a non-discrimination, very basic thing.
00:20:17.000And then the expansion, it seemed like there were real ideologues who believed in affirmative action, who wanted to expand it, and Nixon wasn't even paying attention at that point.
00:20:24.000This was almost coming up to Watergate, so he was busy with other things and doing that.
00:20:28.000Yeah, but each side was sort of using the other.
00:20:30.000So Nixon thought he was being cute, and they were just like, great, let's just make this useful idiot who's distracted by this other stuff upon to permanently enshrine race-based quotas in America.
00:20:40.000And do you think that – was there any split in the civil rights movement advocates about this possibility or will most just be like, yeah, absolutely, let's take it and run?
00:20:51.000It depends on when in the history you look.
00:20:54.000So before the Civil Rights Act, and, you know, who knows how much of this is politics, how much of this is genuine belief, but when the Civil Rights Act was, you know, was being debated inside, everyone said, you know, nothing like affirmative action.
00:21:35.000So 1971 was the case that said an IQ test, even if there's no intention to discriminate, it could be discriminatory if one group does better than the other.
00:21:45.000The EEOC thought it would lose that case.
00:21:47.000It said that the statutory history of this is so clear that we're probably going to lose, and then we're going to have to decide what to do.
00:21:55.000And they actually won at the Supreme Court, believe it or not.
00:21:58.000People were sort of sleepwalking into this stuff.
00:22:00.000People weren't really paying much attention.
00:22:02.000So just to understand, the EEOC was on the side.
00:22:06.000It was sort of the plaintiff in this case.
00:22:09.000Pressing the idea that because there were disparate outcomes based on IQ tests or intelligence tests of some kind that were used, aptitude tests, that that could itself be evidence of actual discrimination and therefore be a civil rights violation.
00:23:28.000You could still overcome that presumption, but you know how expensive and uncertain that is.
00:23:32.000That's just going to naturally lead to quotas and other kind of affirmative steps to make sure that you have some kind of racial balancing.
00:23:40.000I mean, I don't know how deeply you want to get at this, but the 19 – Deeply is the answer.
00:23:44.000The statutory history is so interesting because – When they were debating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Illinois had its own version of the EEOC, and they went after Motorola precisely on this basis.
00:23:56.000Some black guy didn't do well on a test.
00:23:58.000The Illinois version of EEOC came and said, okay, this is evidence that the test is discriminatory.
00:24:05.000So this is a state-level, like, equal opportunity thing, says disparate outcomes case in Illinois.
00:24:41.000And so there was a big New York – the New York Times at the time – And what did they say?
00:24:43.000Like literally you can have facially non-discriminatory tests.
00:24:47.000As long as they were not designed or used to discriminate.
00:24:51.000Now, the courts can – you've been to law school.
00:24:54.000You know how courts can play with that.
00:24:57.000They weren't designed or used to discriminate.
00:24:58.000But the legislative history was specifically – Well, I think that's socially fraught territory if you get into the point of saying that something could be facially discriminatory ex-ante.
00:25:08.000If it's just an aptitude test, to know that that would be facially discriminatory ex-ante is very dangerous – I mean, you see where I'm going with that?
00:25:19.000And this principle is not limited to tests.
00:25:21.000Gail Harriot, professor at UCSD, has basically said everything is disparate impact.
00:25:30.000Look, if you have a thing saying show up on time, you know, the odds that every race is going to show up on time, you know, at the exact same rate.
00:25:36.000It's what I call scope three disparate Disparate impact.
00:25:38.000So basically, she says, disparate impact.
00:25:40.000Look, it bans everything because literally everything has a disparate impact and then gives the government basically unlimited discretion at what it goes after.
00:25:48.000So now it's like, you know, under Obama administration, EEOC was saying, oh, it's a criminal background check, right?
00:25:55.000They started saying you do criminal background check.
00:25:57.000Look, all races don't have equal odds of having a A crime, you know, having been convicted of a crime, so therefore that's discriminatory.
00:26:04.000So just about anything they want to do, now they can do.
00:26:07.000This disparate impact principle is sort of the, you know, I call it the skeleton key of the left.
00:26:14.000You know, when it was like COVID, it was like, oh, you want to get rid of your mask mandate?
00:26:43.000So what do you think actually, I mean, what you just said, you know, cuts in the other direction.
00:26:48.000Statutorily, you would say the Civil Rights Act with the Tower Amendment argue against the idea of disparate impact being a basis for a violation.
00:26:57.000So just delineate, put some meat on the bone here as to, well, why is that still nonetheless the prevailing norm today?
00:27:34.000But my question is, in light of what you said about the Tower Amendment, how did we get from there where the framers of the Civil Rights Acts so expressly wanted to be clear that so-called disparate impact would not be – A basis for civil rights violation.
00:27:51.000To me, that's the statute itself to get to a regime where now if you apply a test, say an aptitude test or criminal background check that results in disparate results on the basis of race, today to infer that that's a civil rights violation, how did we get from A to B? I know Griggs was part of it, but that's one case.
00:28:10.000Yeah, there was – so there was – yeah, so the affirmative action in contract is also sort of a disparate impact principle.
00:28:17.000It's like all you do is you look at your employees and you say, if you don't have this number of people in this job, then you set the goal or timetable.
00:28:22.000So it's the same – it's actually like the same sort of principle.
00:28:26.000And how we got here, I mean, it was really neglect.
00:28:31.000I mean, like – I think that Republicans for a lot of years didn't want to think too hard about this stuff.
00:28:36.000And so the liberals and the Supreme Court said, okay, we agree with you.
00:31:34.000I mean, if you're on the left and you're arguing for these race-based quota systems and Trump's your number one on most things, but even he turns a blind eye and says he's cool with these race-based quota systems, that's a problem.
00:31:46.000And, you know, I was actually listening to a podcast where the head of the part of the Labor Department that's in charge of these affirmative action programs, he was on a Federalist Society podcast and he was – He was bragging about how they actually expanded it during the Trump administration.
00:32:00.000They brought intersectionality into it.
00:32:02.000They would say, oh, you look at blacks and you look at women, look at black women.
00:32:08.000I talked to some people, actually, who were in the Trump White House, and I showed them this podcast of the guy in the Labor Department bragging about this.
00:32:16.000Who was in the Labor Department bragging about it?
00:32:17.000Oh, the head of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, OFCCP, which is the part of the Labor Department that runs the affirmative action.
00:32:55.000I mean, and, you know, yeah, the guy was – I mean, I talked to somebody close to the – you know, who was in the Trump White House and he said – he was shocked.
00:33:15.000And like the conservative movement – So what's the nexus of – so is this guy sitting in the CCP office of the labor department or CCP whatever alphabet soup ungrammatical amalgam of random letters that end with CCP? Yeah.
00:33:32.000He's calling up then people in corporate America to say you might be in violation if you're doing business with the federal government, if you're not meeting these goals and timetables.
00:33:40.000Yeah, I don't know if he's calling up.
00:33:41.000He's sending them letters saying, you know, we're going to do more, you know, spot checks.
00:33:45.000You know, enforcement is sort of sporadic.
00:33:47.000So they're, you know, they're increasing enforcement.
00:33:51.000They're, you know, expanding the search of what they're looking for.
00:33:55.000Yeah, there was no sense that this is, you know, there was no sense of like, This might be contrary – from listening to this guy, there was no sense this might be contrary to Trump's message or what most Republicans believe or whatever.
00:34:08.000And look, conservative media dropped the ball here.
00:34:10.000I mean like – when conservative media is concerned about things, I mean Republican politicians tend to listen.
00:34:16.000And I think this is why this is changing.
00:34:18.000I mean I saw just recently in Texas – Greg Abbott just sent a memo to all state agents that said, no more DEI hiring.
00:34:50.000I mean, it's easy like if something you have to pass a law for, that's the most difficult thing.
00:34:55.000So how much of the affirmative action we see in America is created either directly or I would say the combination of this executive order, its implementation, break down for me the pie chart of what you think the sources of affirmative action in America are.
00:35:19.000So, you know, I think that it's hard to say because we've had 60 years of government regulation and then you've created a whole new culture and you've created whole new industries.
00:35:28.000The human resources industry takes off in the 1960s out of affirmative action offices.
00:35:33.000I mean, they just need to keep up with what Washington wants and what they're doing.
00:35:38.000I mean, the universities – I hope we get to talk about the universities because they actually – the Nixon administration, and I don't want to even blame Nixon personally for this, but basically one of the government agencies, the precursor to education and health and human services, goes to universities and says, we want data on the race and gender of your makeup.
00:35:55.000Columbia University comes back and says, that is against our principles.
00:36:05.000This is Title VI. Because that's why I love Hillsdale College because they don't take the federal funding so they still don't do this stuff.
00:36:10.000This is Title VI. This is not private employment.
00:36:12.000This is a different part of the Civil Rights Act.
00:36:30.000This is around 1970, 71. Not that long ago, the universities are standing up for merit and for colorblindness.
00:36:37.000And the federal government is saying no.
00:36:40.000And, you know, the Columbia University, eventually the president writes like an open letter and says, they want us to become a race-conscious institution.
00:37:02.000The universe is- Oh my God, this makes me- So if you want any evidence- This makes me livid.
00:37:06.000We see the universities and we say, you know, oh my goodness, these people are ideologically crazy.
00:37:11.000And to know the history that the Ivy League schools were standing up for merit at a time and the federal government just not that long ago was saying, no, you have to be another way.
00:37:18.000I mean, that shows you sort of the power of government.
00:37:20.000I mean, today, look- I mean, it's why I'm running for president.
00:37:36.000It started with the federal government, but it started via executive order perpetrated through the entire culture and cultural fabric of our country to create this race-based artifice.
00:37:47.000I mean I intend to do more than this, but if you do just one thing in your first four years in office to get rid of this de facto racism, that itself is a boon for the country.
00:38:00.000I'm just – I'm disappointed that not only Trump, all the way dating back to Nixon, either couldn't get it done or made it worse.
00:38:41.000I mean, when I wrote my Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law, when I wrote the piece sort of – my first sort of idea connecting law to wokeness, people were surprised.
00:38:50.000And, you know, I'd gone to law school with Chris Nicholson.
00:38:52.000We were both interns at Center for Individual Rights, so I knew a little bit about the legal background.
00:38:57.000And I wrote this, and then everyone was surprised.
00:39:15.000If Chris Ruffo had said, repeal affirmative action that night, I mean, Trump might have done that instead, but it's what he happens to see.
00:40:04.000It's been – there's been education polarization.
00:40:07.000Even 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, Republicans won college-educated whites in 2012. I mean, that sort of seems like 100 years ago.
00:40:15.000But 2012, I mean, Republicans won college-educated whites.
00:40:19.000Now, it's like 60-40 to the Democrats.
00:40:22.000And of course, college-educated of other races are even more democratic.
00:40:26.000And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's been a sort of a brain drain from the movement and they're just, you know, even when there's like low hanging fruit of things that they can do and things they could change that's consistent with their principles and would be good politics, they tend not to pick it up.
00:40:59.000They take the form of this merger of state power, corporate power, sort of cultural hegemony.
00:41:05.000permeating different institutions even outside of government that it probably takes a leader in the White House who has a first personal understanding, bone deep conviction and constitutional commitment to actually get it done rather than just doing what conservative media tells them to do, frankly, on a given day. bone deep conviction and constitutional commitment to actually get it And so that's part of the premise for my candidacy.
00:41:26.000But I just think that, you know, it's my expectation, actually, Richard, that everything you're saying is true about why they're not on the issue, maybe more ignorance than fear.
00:41:37.000Pretty soon, we're going to see a trend that's already started to happen in the last couple of weeks where the other candidates in this race are just taking my ideas.
00:41:46.000I think that's a good thing for the country if we open the Overton window.
00:41:49.000It could either be the Overton window of fear or the Overton window of ignorance.
00:41:53.000But either way, to actually take on sacred cows of affirmative action, climate religion, using the military to decimate cartels, basic stuff that – Certainly nearly all Republicans, but even most Americans actually end up supporting.
00:42:10.000But I want to get to the bottom of how difficult it would be to execute.
00:42:15.000I mean, for me, I think the simplest thing to do...
00:42:18.000I'm not saying it's the only thing to do, but the simplest thing to do would just be to rescind Executive Order 11246. I mean, it seems like a good day one item.
00:42:42.000rescind and replace yeah yeah so there was a little bit of this in the trump administration where they would uh you know princeton at one point i kind of like that actually a lot because if you just rescind it you mean the federal government's no longer requiring it but yeah i mean there's place it you actually are codifying the civil rights acts and you can use actually the what do you call that the uh you can use the tower amendment as your statutory basis for that executive order yeah which is to say that actually because executive orders technically have to have a statutory basis yeah great yeah well even well that's another
00:43:09.000that's a whole kind of words the statutory basis of it but um Yeah, like Title VI, for example.
00:43:22.000And so, like, you know, this is used to push for woke stuff.
00:43:26.000But, like, you know, technically just using the letter of the law, it should be pushed to use – look, if you – and this is what the Supreme Court, you know, hopefully is going to rule in – In the Harvard case, the problem is now, the universities are getting rid of the SATs.
00:43:45.000I mean, there'll at least be market pressure.
00:43:47.000I mean, look, if they sort of want to toss out their reputation and start taking a worse applicant pool just to practice affirmative action, they'll suffer the consequences of that at the very least.
00:44:47.000I mean, we- I don't think this- where I'm going with this is a Supreme Court ruling, if it's narrowly construed to just being in the area of college admissions, that's a step forward.
00:45:20.000And it took a while to get – the entire culture has been shaped.
00:45:23.000So if you do everything – you get in and you do everything you want in an administration, it's not going to like we're going to go back to the culture of colorblindness and meritocracy overnight.
00:45:32.000Hopefully, the idea is 10, 20, 30 years later, right?
00:45:36.000Next time there's austerity, they cut the HR department, they realize they cut all the DEI bureaucrats, new businesses brought up, they don't have the government on their neck, and then we have a different culture.
00:45:45.000Nobody even at that point connects it to the policy that you implemented in 2025, right?
00:46:19.000I mean, I think you cannot fight the culture war without taking the managerial bureaucracy on that actually created those cultural conditions because it's a lot more sizzly to go after critical race theory or gender ideology or whatever as a one-off playing whack-a-mole.
00:46:38.000It trends better on Twitter and I think it makes for a better news cycle for a politician.
00:46:43.000But the harder work, but more important work is dismantling the bureaucratic machine that created this in the first place.
00:46:54.000That's actually what I find – I mean, I'm interested in both, but that's what I find far more interesting than the content of the culture war itself.
00:47:58.000They just called it affirmative action compliance.
00:48:00.000It was basically, we're just complying with the government and then eventually became, you know, the diversity- You're talking about in the federal bureaucracy or in corporate America?
00:48:24.000So it was like sort of a self-looking ice cream cone where the government would say – have these things and these people would come in and they'd be in the bureaucracy and it's sort of this mess that's been created with federal law at its root.
00:48:37.000But yes, I mean the goal is you – there's things in the federal government you can attack directly.
00:48:42.000The OFCCP, I don't think there's anything – Good that they do.
00:48:47.000Maybe they can, you know, go after, like, explicit, like, whites-only signs if you find that among contractors, right?
00:49:01.000I, in my lifetime, have not seen a whites-only sign other than, like, maybe at some, like, sort of stultified tennis club where they're referring to, like, the clothes you wear.
00:49:10.000Yeah, well, I mean, that's part of it.
00:49:16.000People said, okay, we don't – and look, the markets, you know, people want to make money and, like, people are just – you know, like, my idea that, like, markets are fair isn't that, like, Capitalists are angels.
00:49:26.000It's like they're selfish enough that they want to make money, right?
00:49:40.000Because markets are selfish, because people are self-interested, right?
00:49:43.000And I think Americans are good people too, but basically it's the market forces.
00:49:47.000Actually, the immigrant thing actually brought up a point that I think sometimes gets forgotten in this.
00:49:51.000And so the irony is that affirmative action, as I understand it, ends up helping The kids of black immigrants who came to this country in the last 50 years far more than it does the descendants of slaves.
00:50:05.000So even if this is about dismantling systemic discrimination, we stupidly make it about your skin color than we do actually about what the original justification of affirmative action was even supposed to be, right?
00:50:17.000I mean the way they – Kids who come from West Africa or whose parents or grandparents came from West Africa, they're the ones who then claimed the victimhood mantle when in fact it had nothing to do with them.
00:50:25.000The way we classify race, I mean, it's strange.
00:50:30.000One of the things I show in my book is these words Hispanic and Latino, they were very rarely used in the English language before the government made them a category.
00:50:39.000So you look at Mexican-American or Cuban or Puerto Rican-American, those go down since the 1970s, and Hispanic and Latino go up.
00:50:47.000So I have a chart that shows this right in.
00:50:48.000It's like an amalgam of like multiple different cultures that have nothing to do with each other.
00:50:52.000So the government said you're a people and then they said – like La Raza was getting all of its money basically from the federal government at the beginning.
00:50:59.000They were getting grants from these various programs saying we're La Raza, we're the race.
00:51:02.000It started out as a Mexican group and then they basically said, okay, we're all Hispanics.
00:51:07.000The Asian Pacific Islander thing, I mean it's bizarre.
00:51:11.000I mean it's the fact that there was some lobbying at some point from a – there was – Different groups tried to get included, right?
00:51:20.000So like Indians came, they wanted small business loans.
00:51:22.000Now, Asians get discriminated against in affirmative action in colleges.
00:51:25.000But for small business loans, all the law says is you have to be a minority group.
00:51:28.000So most of the minority small business loans, they go to Asians usually.
00:52:00.000You know, we can play our betting odds, exactly what they'll say, but assume that there's at least some limited basis for overturning affirmative action in college admissions, but it'll give us a blueprint for what applies outside of college admissions as well.
00:52:12.000How much easier is that going to make my job in doing the things that I've said I want to do as U.S. president?
00:52:20.000So the Supreme Court decision, there's a lot to be said about that.
00:52:24.000One thing that I hope they do, and I may write about this, is that a lot of the colleges, they're saying that we're going to try to get a diverse student body, but we're going to do other things to get diverse instead of directly considering race to the application process.
00:52:40.000According to the plain text of the Civil Rights Act, to rejig your admission system to get a certain number of black and Hispanic students, I think the Supreme Court decision should be broad enough to say, no, that's not allowed either.
00:52:54.000If you said, we want to rig the system just to have whites instead of blacks, but after you said we can't discriminate, people would see that clearly.
00:53:00.000So a broader Supreme Court decision...
00:53:03.000That's something along the lines of, you know, all consideration of race means all consideration of race.
00:53:07.000You can't rejig the system and still get government federal funding.
00:53:22.000There was talk in the Trump administration, and they never got around to this, but getting rid of disparate impacts, a standard for Title VI as a general matter, you could do that through executive orders or at least through the executive agencies.
00:53:33.000There's talk of Bill Barr's DOJ doing it near the end and just sending out that sort of directive to the rest of the government, not directive or guidance or whatever.
00:53:44.000I mean, like, you know, legislation, I mean, if you want to be really ambitious, dust off the Civil Rights Act of 1995 or whatever, 1994, whatever year it was, you know, get rid of the – there's a professor at George Mason named Dave Bernstein who talked about the separation of race and state.
00:54:04.000It should be just as unthinkable to – it's unthinkable right now to say – for a government agency to say we have too few Catholics or too many Jews or whatever.
00:54:12.000It should be just as unthinkable to say we need more Hispanics or more Asians or whatever it happens to be.
00:54:18.000And I think this – I think it creates a cultural tailwind to get this job done.
00:54:22.000It's not going to – the Supreme Court ruling is not going to get the whole job done.
00:54:25.000And, you know, a lot of people say, oh, if you start attacking this stuff, you know, the liberals are going to mobilize, they're going to do – it's like you don't know that because public opinion is not on their side.
00:54:34.000And when public – when they feel the wind of public opinion at their side, then they could feel that – they could feel like they can get aggressive.
00:54:40.000When it's going against them, they have to hem and they have to haw.
00:54:48.000I mean, if you explain to – even if you look at the polling, how California – I mean, I think 55% or 60% voted against affirmative action.
00:54:54.000So once it becomes partisan, maybe they coalesce.
00:54:58.000But there's a chance to split this, especially with the Asian population, especially even with Hispanics when you see the kind of – there's no indication that they particularly like racial preferences even though in some cases – I mean, California Prop 6C, look at that vote.
00:56:27.000But I think it is starting to create this new wave of anti-Black racism that stems from resentment, that stems from a feeling that things aren't working like they're supposed to meritocratically because they're not.
00:56:47.000But even to the Black person who would have otherwise earned his post exclusively based on merit, If I had to pick, I think the system is most unfair to that person, more so than to me, or to you, or to anybody else.
00:57:04.000Because for us it was just that we didn't get a position.
00:57:08.000More difficult reality is you got the position but you weren't treated with the respect that you should have been because someone still condescended on you.
00:57:16.000And it's fueling this new kind of anti-black racism that it's almost no one's fault, not the person who feels the attitude, not the person who – certainly not the person who experiences the attitude.
00:57:26.000It's the fault of a system that created it and I think that's just the sad part in all of this.
00:57:30.000I don't think we talk about that enough actually.
00:57:32.000Yeah, I mean, you know, who knows how conscious this is, you know, this kind of resentment.
00:57:37.000But yeah, I mean, a lot of these, you know, a lot of these sort of studies programs, African American studies, Chicago studies, they weren't, they didn't, you know, their origins wasn't like that of other academic, you know, fields where somebody had an intellectual interest and they were contributing something new to humanity, like, you know, psychology or whatever.
00:57:53.000It was more like, you know, some students occupied, you know, government or college buildings like at Cornell and Berkeley, and they demanded an African-American studies program.
00:58:02.000A lot of the time, it was like the stuff that they, because they were affirmative action, they got it to the university for affirmative action in the first place, they had to build a whole grievance department, like a study of grievance to explain their failure.
00:58:14.000There was a big, you know, scandal at, I think it was UNC, where like they were putting all the black athletes, you know, because they got double, you know, they were athletes, so they came in with less...
00:58:23.000You know, with worse academic records.
00:58:26.000But they were just putting them in the African American Studies program because, like, I guess they were just – that was just what you do with people who, you know, can't cut it in other fields.
00:58:34.000Yeah, and it sort of creates these new made-up fields and it creates this culture of condescension, right?
00:59:24.000It's not the fault of the black person, the Hispanic person, the white person who's on the receiving end of that difficult kind of statement.
00:59:33.000It's just the fault of a system that created those attitudes, but you're not allowed to say it in public, but it doesn't change the fact that people actually think it.
00:59:42.000He said he was an expert in cameras or something when he was in the military, and he says people would, even the most racist guys from the South would come up to him because they said, oh, the black guy learned this.
01:00:05.000I mean, people can see that you're – people, when they talk about law admissions or they talk about admissions to graduate school or universities, they know the bar is being lowered and they know what that means and they have experience.
01:00:15.000They know who the smartest people in their classes are.
01:00:17.000They know who got in and who maybe can't keep up with the work.
01:00:21.000And you're not allowed to talk about it.
01:00:22.000You're not allowed to, you know, make a political issue out of it.
01:00:26.000This kind of like sort of, you know, submersion of like what's really going on and the sort of dishonesty it teaches.
01:00:33.000It's not healthy for our culture, and that's why it's important to address.
01:00:36.000And I think it is one of these issues.
01:00:48.000I might have criticized George Bush for a lot of things, but not for this.
01:00:49.000I mean, I've criticized George Bush for a lot of things, but not for this.
01:00:51.000He's called it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
01:00:51.000He's called it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
01:00:53.000Chief Justice John Roberts famously said, right, the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, right?
01:00:53.000Chief Justice John Roberts famously said, right, the best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, right?
01:01:03.000And so say what you will about John Roberts, say what you will about George Bush.
01:01:04.000And so say what you will about John Roberts.
01:01:34.000And I think that that will hopefully be the beginning of a, at long last, the beginning of an e pluribus unum reuniting of the country, a revival of the country around this idea of merit.
01:01:48.000And I think we could do that, put the merit back in America, I joke around sometimes.
01:01:53.000I think that's actually one of the missing ingredients in our national revival.
01:01:56.000And I think that what you're doing, I mean, I think is part of it because people don't, I think, know how to talk about it in a way that's positive.
01:02:17.000We're going to care about doing great things.
01:02:18.000Then you get the motivation to overcome that political resistance.
01:02:21.000So, you know, we're going to do it in a positive way and not because we're just sugarcoating it with some positive veneer.
01:02:27.000No, the essence of merit, the essence of excellence is itself a positive and galvanizing message accessible to anyone, no matter their skin color.