Meritocracy Isn’t Racist. Lowering Standards Is. - Heather Mac Donald

Heather McDonald, welcome to Dad Saves America. Thank you so much, John. It's an honor to be with you. So I've been excited to have you on for a while, but post-election, I feel like we might be living in your moment. I would never claim that, but I'm still curious as to what the hell happened. I don't want to be too optimistic, but it's in my nature to be pessimistic. I've lost four steak bet dinners on the outcome of the election.

I actually find myself thinking if we could hold on to the White House for 12 years, we really could correct the country and return it to merit, excellence, and get rid of the hatred for white males. Right off the bat, you're getting right to it. So this is why, so why I say this is this, you know, in this right of center universe, there's a lot of voices from sort of.

cosmopolitan libertarian types to uh fairly hardcore in the culture war voices and in that domain you are the most i think rigorous and Hard to beat of the culture warriors. You have taken on the hard issues around DEI and diversity around the whole discourse about policing and the cops and. And you have done so unflinchingly. And I think one way to look at what happened this November is a surprising number of Americans, a more diverse...

number of Americans than one would have expected, more or less said, hmm, I think I might be more with you. Or at least I'm not with them. Yeah. So, is that how you see things and what... Am I making any sense? Sure. I would love to believe that. I think we have to take the polls at face value when they said the economy was the big deal in inflation.

one wants to believe that one's favorite issues are also those of the voters. And I would say if there was a backlash against these larger cultural forces, it would be... We refuse to tear down civilization. We refuse to accept the proposition that standards of behavior, that standards of excellence are by definition racist, which is what the left tells us, if they have...

a disparate impact on blacks. I have to say that I see a lot of our world up to now having been distorted by what is at present a unjustified guilt about current racism. That's why we're tearing down law enforcement, because we don't want to have a disparate impact on black criminals. That's why we're tearing down medical college standards, licensing standards, because we don't have a disparate impact on blacks. We were racist.

We were white supremacists. We are not that country today. And I've been waiting for some kind of backlash against the unfair. tearing down of our civilizational standards. And maybe that's partly what we're seeing now. So my goal for our conversation is to, in some sense, offer an entry point into your thinking for people who haven't come across you.

And also to explore where we might disagree, because I tend to be I'm more libertarian minded. So there's certain things where maybe I disagree a little bit, kind of, sort of, but mostly not, actually. But. your most recent book on merit and race. Just lay out your thesis for that so people can get an on-ramp onto the work you've done and the arguments you're making for merit and against.

this I guess you'd say affirmative action style of approach to helping people and helping people of color helping people who have been historically at least their forebears, if not themselves. who have been oppressed. Right. So what's your argument? Well, helping people of color, you don't do so by tearing down standards. You don't do so by having double standards and saying we don't expect the so-called marginalized groups, but above all...

blacks to live up to the same standards as white and Asians. We'll have a set of double admission standards. We'll have a set of double hiring, double promotion standards. That's not the way you help people. It's condescending. And it means that you are for sure going to stunt people's ability to live up to their highest potential. The book uses as a sort of core concept.

an idea that arose in the law called disparate impact. And this grew out of a Supreme Court case in the 1970s that looked at the fact that traditionally America's anti-discrimination law says... You, employer, may not intentionally discriminate against blacks. You can't say, I'm not going to hire people because I don't like the color of their skin. That intentional discrimination violates now.

belatedly, finally at long last, what were and should be our founding ideals of equal treatment for all. So we had the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. We said... It's about time we're going to start treating people equally. By the 70s, most of that overt discrimination... had disappeared. Employers were really living up to their obligations under the law. And yet, you didn't yet have workplaces that were proportionally black and white.

You know, blacks are 13 percent of the population. And so the expectation was if you were a Google tech lab, if you were doing artificial intelligence, you should have 13 percent. black nanotechnologists or AI researchers. That wasn't happening. And so the courts said, well, we want to kind of expand the scope of the civil rights laws, and we're going to get rid of intention. as something that is legally impermissible. Now, if an employer has a perfectly colorblind, neutral standard...

that he never intended to use to discriminate, but it has a disparate impact on blacks. So, for instance, if this was a power company, Griggs Power Company... it said it wanted its employees to be able to read to a certain level in order to be able to read power manuals and you know how to how to work in like a utility plant that neutral

Basic standard meant that more blacks were being disqualified for employment. They weren't meeting the standard. And so the court said, if you have a neutral standard, but it negatively affects blacks... We're going to call that discrimination, even though that's not your intent. So now we have this idea that a standard that is not intended to discriminate...

It can be colorblind, objective, but it means that you're disqualifying more blacks. That's bad. And we've taken that concept and we've gone around to every meritocratic institution. Again, to law schools, to medical schools, if the LSATs, the law school admissions tests, if blacks do more poorly at those, we're going to throw those out.

If blacks do more poorly at the medical college admissions tests, we're going to throw those out. At medical licensing, we're going to throw those out because they have a disparate impact on blacks. This is a concept. that destroys excellence, it destroys achievement. We see it in the arts, where expectations of a certain proficiency... for instruments. If that has a disparate impact, we're going to throw that out. We're throwing out literature and we're seeing it in the law too.

I'm sorry. In criminal law. Right. That's why we're getting rid of prosecution. That's why we're getting rid of incarceration, because those laws also have a disparate impact on black criminals. One example of... This change that I've heard about is, I think it is in the symphony, the way that there was blind rehearsal or tryouts.

That in order to take away racial or identity preference in the decision making, you would have the people try out and you just hear their music and you'd not see them. You wouldn't know anything about them. And so that seems like definitionally the like, all right, perfect. It's literally like a blind test on the basis of the output alone. And as I understand it, this mentality you're talking about.

has led to the reverse. So now we're going to actively make sure that we put your race and your identity at the foreground of our decision making. How would that not just... Well, I guess... Ibram X. Kendi says that we need to have active discrimination to counter past discrimination. Right. That's his anti-racism model. We need to actually actively say less of you, more of you. Right.

Because that happened in the past and that kind of forever like we're always going to be doing that right is that is that a fair? articulation of the other side's perspective? Yes. George Floyd race riots resulted in mass psychosis across the country. Every elite institution declared itself racist. You had art museums saying, We are racist. 5,000 years of Western civilization is racist. Our new mission...

per the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is anti-racism. You had restaurants saying we're racist. You had law firms saying we're racist. You had the Mathematical Association saying math is racist. And it was all this idea that a standard that has a disparate impact is racist. And Anthony Tomasini, who was the lead classical music critic of the New York Times, he called for what's...

called de-blinding orchestral auditions. They were blind, you wouldn't know the identity. He said, I can't stand, and Alex Ross of The New Yorker, their lead music critic, this breaks my heart.

These people, these classical music critics who are presiding over a dying tradition that they should know contain some of the most... profound expressions of human eros sorrow longing joy that's ever been created they should be selling this art And here was Tomasini, here was Alex Ross, here was the BBC Music Magazine, after the George Floyd, during the summer of 2020, the summer of mass psychosis, saying...

I can't stand going to a concert hall and listening to white male composers and having whites in the audience. This is giving young people an excuse. to avoid this beauty. So Tomasini said, de-blind orchestral auditions so that we can make sure that we can racially engineer the composition of orchestras. Conductors are not discriminating. Nobody is discriminating. Even if you didn't have blind auditions, all that a conductor cares about is he doesn't want the first horn.

in a Strauss tone poem to blow his solo. He's looking for excellence. He was looking for perfection. If it was an all black orchestra and they were the best, that's what he would choose. The idea that. conductors or music managers are discriminating against the most qualified classical musicians is absurd here's how absurd it gets john again you would think how can a blind

audition where you don't know the identity, how can that be racist? Here's what else is racist under a disparate impact standard. Speeding cameras. It turns out speeding cameras are racist. If they tell us, which they do, that blacks speed at higher rates, they're racist cameras. The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, waged a war against a technology called shot spotter. And I don't know whether our libertarian, non-libertarian differences will show up here. We'll see. Shot spotter.

is an audio technology that picks up the sound of shootings, of drive-by shootings, which is important because it turns out in the inner city, which is where almost all drive-by shootings occur, at an absolutely barbaric rate, 80% are never called in for various reasons. And so ShotSpotter picks it up and alerts the police and at the very least allows...

first responders to get there quickly where they may never get there at all without this technology. Well, ShotSpotter tells us... again, that most shootings are occurring in a very small portion of Chicago on the south and west sides and sort of known hotspot corners in overwhelmingly in black neighborhoods. So it turns out that this audio sensor is racist.

because it tells us a message we don't want to know. So Brandon Johnson said, I want to get rid of ShotSpotter, except for the DNC. ShotSpotter said, okay, you don't like us, we're out of here. They were going to pull out in February. of 2024 brandon johnson said not so fast Leave in September, but stick around for the convention. And sadly, ShotSpotter agreed with this annoying and incredibly insulting conditions. But that's where we've gotten to, is that a camera, a computer...

A non-sentient being is racist. So I want to explore some term setting. There is a tiny part of me that feels like... Shot spotter sounds like the surveillance state. I knew it. I know it. Good. Excellent disagreement. I don't know about this. I don't know about the robots or the drones going to just start becoming Judge Dredd. But.

We'll set that aside for now. I'm going to come back. I want to parse this a little bit between the race and equity things. They're deeply connected. And the police issues, which are the two areas where you've spent so much of your time. Yeah. But first I want to...

I want to pose a question, which is, is this all overblown? Make the case that this sort of woke... DEI, disparate impact, explicit racism as the replacement for colorblindness ideology. Make the case that this is broad based and happening in places beyond. Columbia University's campus and a couple of whack jobs at Disney. How much of a problem has this actually been in the broad institutions of America for real?

Make your argument for that. Well, broad institutions of America, I would say in every professional school, your viewers, if they have white male sons and they've applied for graduate school. I would bet a very large proportion of those white males if they're not in some LGBTQ category have not gotten into their first choice or second choice or third choice for medical school or law school because they are the bottom of the totem pole. There is no more reviled creature.

in an academic environment today than a straight white male. And that occurs as well in the professions, in law firms, black. law school graduates are catapulted way ahead of their GPA ranking into associate positions. way ahead of their white and Asian colleagues. The press hires on the basis of race publishing. Good luck publishing a book if you're a white male, non-LGBTQ.

author uh the media we've seen that government yeah the oscars is a good example in the media space which is they've now made explicit race quotas for your crew like if there aren't If there isn't sufficient diversity in the people behind the camera, you're not qualified to get an Oscar now. Right. As of like, I think this year. Right. It's unbelievable.

Broadway after, again, during the George Floyd race, there was this movement called I See You, White American Theater, that had the most hilariously hysterical, hyperbolic manifesto. basically blaming theater for having the gall to ever mount a play written by a white male. And they've just, this group- Aren't most of them? No, I mean, seriously, aren't like most of the historical-

So after George Floyd, like every new play on Broadway that year was by a black author. So, and you have, I wrote about in the book, the amazing Institute at Juilliard, which. is one of the premier arts conservatories in the country. for classical music, but also for theater and dance. And the black students there just had this incredibly self-involved narcissistic meltdown. when they were asked to listen to a Zoom reenactment of the African slave trade in order to increase the empathy.

of all students towards what blacks went through and and and out of out of that centuries-long experience of sorrow and oppression came black music and black theater But the black Juilliard students said, how dare you subject us to this? And they had a complete meltdown. And they, too, demanded we should. Wait, what were they melting down about? This was black.

This was historically black music that they were melting down about listening to? This was a three-day workshop that Juilliard had brought in, run by a black theater professional at NYU. That was going to be an immersion in black art, in above all musical theater, spirituals, jazz. On the opening day, this black theater professional, Michael McElroy, had the students watch by Zoom, because we were all socially distanced at that point.

a reenactment of the African slave trade whose dialogue came out of the TV series and book Roots by Alex Haley, a black author. During this reenactment, the black students were all texting each other about how this was just too oppressive and how dare they appropriate our history. It's impossible to understand. Do not ask me to explain this, John. It can't be explained. No, no. But the Juilliard capitulated. And so these students went on a rampage.

They had their manifesto saying it is racist to ask us to learn the general American dialect. It is racist to ask us to ever go outside of our racial identity. But of course, the rule is its usual double standard. Blacks can play white roles, but whites can't play black roles. And so they claimed that they were oppressed by having to just be in an environment where, as you say, Sorry, it's a European tradition. We were Caucasian demographically. That's a reality. There were no blacks.

on the European continent for a very long time. And when they arrived, there were very few in numbers. You can't expect that culture to have a whole tradition from the start of black art, just as we don't expect China. in its Chinese classical opera tradition to have African writers. China's not going around apologizing for its classical opera because it doesn't have blacks. India's not going around apologizing for its classical epics because they were written by Indians and not by Africans.

The West is the only civilization engaged in this pathetically ungrounded self-flagellation. You don't pull punches. I'm sick of it. I'm sorry. Because it is perverse. This is the question that I've been pondering for months. What is with the West that is uniquely... Self-counseling at this point. I want to come back to that question because it's actually a profound question. And you point it out in truth because we are America is a uniquely.

culturally diverse society relative to all the human existence and most of the planet so and everyone i've i've traveled more than most americans which is not hard because we don't travel that much abroad as a as a people We're obviously the least racist country on planet Earth. And it's like literally obvious and it manifests...

my former guest, his name is escaping me, Wilfred Riley, had brought up a survey about perceptions around things like interracial marriage and all kinds of other things that would indicate the level of kind of racial prejudice. Right. And America was like top of the charts for tolerance of all the things that you would think suggest we're pretty good on race. And we beat ourselves up the worst.

But isn't that also because we had a uniquely horrible chattel slavery? And it is you said, OK, the Civil Rights Act in 1960 in the 1960s and and the changes. And then by 1980 it's done? To play devil's advocate. That sounds crazy. You're telling me in 15 years we solved racism and we should move on? That doesn't sound reasonable or fair after hundreds of years of oppression and segregation and redlining and Jim Crow and a culture that says...

Blacks are second-class citizens or not even human in its worst form. You can't tell me 20 years and we solved that problem. Isn't this just maybe an overcorrection but still a... reasonable and necessary rebalancing that's going to get it wrong at the margins, going to overplay its hand a little bit, but still fundamentally the right thing to do? Well, first of all, answer your question about. by 1980s is enough change. But remind me to return to your claim that we had a uniquely barbaric...

system of chattel slavery. But it's a very valid question as to whether from 64 to 1980, you could have a transformation of the culture. one would be right to be suspicious. Nevertheless, I would say when you're looking at a very specific issue like a literacy... minimal literacy test that applies to everybody for employment or going to high school. I mean, I guess you could say, of course, we know that literacy tests were used to exclude blacks and poll tests, but...

At some point, I would say when the standards themselves are so colorblind and they have no idea who is taking that exam, at some point you have to say, regardless of what the ambience may be, And we're not going to tear down those standards and have double standards because we don't think blacks can make them. But I would agree that... It would have been impossible to predict the degree of sea change in Americans' identity. And I went on an audible listening tour for a year or two of...

catch up to a lot of black literature. You know, Frederick Douglass, Native Son, Claude Brown, Man Child in the Promised Land. And it is truly sickening. the degree of gratuitous nastiness that characterized American whites for a long time. I am perfectly sympathetic to Malcolm X calling the white man a devil, given... the long history of what would seem to be a white supremacist identity, because whites would go out of their way to simply put blacks down.

when it was not even necessary in just the most heartbreaking ways. is so painful to see pictures in the 1940s of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington dressed to the nines, living up to bourgeois norms of self-presentation and still being told to go to a different hotel or a different restaurant. The cruelty was just unfathomable. So you can understand people who say the... truly oppressive aspects of our culture when it comes to race.

aren't that long ago. For someone my age, it can be like, my parents were being called these things. I'm not saying me, but I'm just to play the role of somebody today who might be in their 20s, let's say, at Columbia. So you understand where they're coming from. Of course. And, you know, I think racism was pervasive, but the South in particular, I mean.

Who are these people? What was going on in the 50s and 60s? They're the savages with the beating up children so they can't come into a schoolhouse. I was alive then. I was a child, but I was not aware of it. And I think there was a backlash, obviously, in the North, but one would have felt like... Who are these Americans? This is absolutely barbaric. But I would ask people to simply empirically observe our reality today. We're supposed to believe in white privilege.

I'll believe in white privilege when I hear about a black high school senior who puts his race down as white applying to college because he thinks that will give him an advantage. If there is such a student, he's completely deluded. He has no idea about the world. Because today, it's being black which will catapult you into... graduate school, into law school, into medical school, into business school ahead of what your qualifications would suggest. And that's true getting employed as well.

getting an opera role, getting hired in Hollywood. Being black is the key. Being white is the disadvantage today. So it would have been unfathomable to... imagine this degree of sea change, but I would say it has occurred. And I would also say to your point about Americans being the least racist.

We are so ready to be post-racial. Americans now, they're just kind of like nice. They're just nice people. They just want to get along. And there's been one love fest after another from white Republicans towards black. Republican politicians. These so-called MAGA Republicans, they don't give a damn about somebody's race. They care about his values. So they love Alan Keyes. They love Alan West. They love Ben Carson. They love Colin Powell. Most recently, they've loved some of the crazy.

out there. But again, it's quite... Some of the crazies. Who are the craziest? Name some names on these crazies. Well, we've had recently, I mean, I sort of love the guy, the lieutenant governor that was running for governorship in, was it... Virginia or West Virginia that was very, very conservative theologically. And then there was the football player Burgess Owens.

I've heard of him. He was a good speaker. But anyway, he spoke to White House. They loved him. But let me return, if I may, to your original claim about uniquely horrific chattel slavery system. Pin it for just a sec. Okay. Because I'll come back to it for you. I won't forget. One argument. I want to do, because we broadly agree, so I want to do my best to represent the other side and play devil's advocate here. One other argument for essentially this equity...

disproportionate sort of like tilting the scales in the other direction would be go something like this as I understand it. It's almost like a foreign aid. It's like you have a culture that has not been on the ladder of success multi-generationally the way white Americans have. hasn't been able to pass down homes, accrue intergenerational wealth. And so, sure, we could go to colorblind governance and I don't know your name.

I don't know your race. I have a pure sort of metrics merit system whenever it's physically possible. But it's just going to be too slow. To catch up, to build literally the cultural and financial capital in black families and family lines. To get to a place where you do get to earn it. So, you know, we could say, hey... It cuts to the question of how much merit is accrued to the individual and how much do we have to account for the fact that...

I do have certain privileges. I don't care about the white part. But I had two parents who raised me and loved me. And they did send me to school. And so I do have a bunch of privileges. Now, and that set me up. for accruing the benefits sort of like compounding interest. And you have to start the compounding process and we have some catch up to do. So this is maybe temporary, but isn't that what do you how do you respond to that kind of argument for all of these efforts?

as ham-fisted and flat-footed and often ridiculous as they might seem. Well, I love your analogy to foreign aid. I stuck in a bomb by putting it in there, by the way, but keep going. We've just been through the COP29, the latest climate change grift where we're supposed to, the demand is that we transfer another trillion of dollars.

into the global south now because of climate change. It's unbelievable. It will go down the same sinkhole of corruption and mismanagement as before. And because governments are not... willing to cough up the trillions they're saying well now we've got to figure out a way to get it from private sector but anyway so foreign aid is a good example of something that

we're supposed to say, well, it's well-intentioned, I guess it is, that has had absolutely zero effect, by and large, on development in the third world. Several... responses, this claim of you can't expect people that have been held back for generations and centuries. This was Lyndon Johnson. You take the chains off. They're not going to be ready to compete. So we have to have.

What was called affirmative action, I prefer the term racial preferences because affirmative action still has the ambiguity that all is meant is do more outreach, you know, just make sure that you're casting a wide net. No, that's never what it's meant. It is meant... a system of double standards that we don't expect whites to meet the standard, blacks rather than meet the standards. We're going to admit them with much lower skills.

But that was back in 64, 65. It's a long time later now. So is that when, as Sandra Day O'Connor said in upholding in one of the early... preposterous, just incoherent Supreme Court decisions upholding racial preferences and admissions. She said, well, in 25 years, we're not going to need this. Nothing has changed. The skills gap is not closed. I would say as a philosophical matter, you simply are not helping people by saying we don't expect you to meet standards.

We have people from the entire global south that are flooding into the United States because they think this is where they have the most opportunities. These are people of color. This has always been, by the way, not to interrupt, but... This has always been the biggest own on the we're such a racist country is. Why would people of color flooding in to hell? It doesn't make.

any sense it can't it's like an instant game over to the argument empirically like people go to places where their life will be better not worse right It's shameless. The ACLU is shameless. In the morning, their line is oppression, oppression, oppression. This is systemically, endemically racist, this country for people of color. The afternoon line is.

Open borders. You may not have any kind of immigration controls. Every person of color the world over has an absolute entitlement to come into what in the morning it was saying is is lethally racist. You know, so. It's amazing that they get away with that utterly contradictory, inherently illogical stand. But my final response, John, is it turns out that... double standards hurt their alleged beneficiaries. This is the whole theory known as mismatch that was...

developed by this wonderful law professor at UCLA who's a progressive. He's all in favor of public housing and housing assistance. Richard Sander, he's done very... rigorous empirical work, it turns out that if you admit people into institutions for which they're not competitively qualified, they struggle to keep up. And let's take it out of the race. arena, which is so difficult for Americans. It makes us so uncomfortable to talk about skills gaps and put it into gender terms, sex terms.

If MIT decides it wants more females in its class because of gender equity, and it admits me, and I have a 650 on my math SAT on an 800-point scale. And my peers, who have been admitted not based on their gonads, but based on their mathematical capacities, and they're averaging, the average SAT score in math at MIT is 800.

So there I am brought into this peer group of really math whizzes. I mean, they're above 800. Like the ranking is so improvised. They're way at the curve. What's going to happen to me my first year?

in freshman calculus you're gonna get flushed out i mean i'm gonna i'm gonna flunk out now am i gonna flunk out no because the diversity bureaucracy at mit is gonna run up to me and says well you're feeling out of place you're struggling the reason is misogyny you're in a culture and and and it's gonna latch on to me

to be one of its victims that it can now leverage for more diversity hiring because I need more people to run interface between me and this unsafe environment. But I am going to really struggle if I can, and I'll likely change. I'll likely change my major aspirations from engineering to maybe gender studies. This is what happens to blacks. It's the one group that is really systematically...

subjected to the handicap of being catapulted into an academic environment for which they're not competitively qualified. People who oppose racial preferences are not saying blacks shouldn't go to college. By no means, what we're saying is blacks should go to college under the same conditions as everybody else. If your profile fits you for Boston College. then go to Boston College with peers that share your academic skills because the teaching will be pitched to that level.

but to catapult you instead of going to Boston College, to MIT or Harvard, just because Harvard's president. And MIT's president wants to look over its student body and feel the warm glow of noblesse oblige in righteousness because it has a suitably diverse... That's cruelty. to those alleged beneficiaries of racial preferences. So the real argument, as far as I'm concerned, is that those double standards hurt their alleged beneficiaries.

What is your definition at the most abstract level of two words that you've used that I think are important? Merit and excellence. How would you define those two words? So we're talking about the same thing. I think we know it when we see it. I would say that there are professions that... over the centuries understand what are the skills necessary to be on the cutting edge of cancer research, what people in science, they know. what a scientific mind at its best can understand.

I think, you know, we're far too susceptible. We've all been kind of deconstructed and brought into postmodernism. So our instinct is to be skeptical and problematized, as they say in academia. what these standards are. If we didn't have a racial skills gap, and let me just throw in here what I'm talking about and why it is...

Ludicrous to expect is the left tells us to expect that absent racism, you would have proportional representation in meritocratic institutions that are interested in skills. Here's the reality. And again, this is very difficult to talk about. It violates racial etiquette. And most Americans are allegedly white supremacists, white Americans.

turn their eyes away because it makes them very uncomfortable. We don't want to talk about these things. But given that the discourse is going around talking about racism, racism, and racism, we have to fight back with the facts that...

undercut the argument that only racism explains ongoing racial disparities. Here's the facts. According to this nationwide test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 66% of black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of 12th grade math skills, defined as doing arithmetic. or reading a graph, 66% of black 12th graders possess no mastery of those very reasons. No mastery. No, they don't have even partial mastery.

Below basic, the way the rankings work, and it's getting, I hope, not too complicated. No, no, please. Basic, the way the NAEP defines basic level is partial mastery. 66% of black 12th graders are below basic. So they don't possess even partial mastery of arithmetic. How does that... Because our schools, in my view, suck universally for everyone. How does that compare to white students? White students are about.

30, 28, 30% below basic. It's really bad. Okay, so the schools are failing. The schools are failing white kids. And parents are failing. I mean, it's the schools and it's the parents. There's a lot to it. But just to... put these basic numbers in perspective so if you've got a population just as is 13 of the population so you got 13 versus um uh you know 87 right

Did I do that math right? For everybody else. For everybody else. Whites are about 62%. But the Asians and all the white adjacents all lump in together. So... You're talking about right there at just proficient math proficiency. You're not going to have... You can't. You're not going to have the 13% ratio of 60% of the 13%. They're not there. They're relative to a third. They're not even there. I mean, if you're talking about Google or you're talking about getting into engineering school...

You're not going to be basic. You're going to be advanced. The number of blacks nationwide in a nationwide sample in the NAP that are advanced in math, which is at the bare minimum what you're going to need. in order to be in really demanding professions, it doesn't even show up on a statistical sample. It's too small. And the number who are even just proficient is...

About 6%. So are you just saying black people are stupid and we need to deal with that? Is that what you're saying? I'm saying we need a massive change of culture, of family culture. If we all acted like Asians... we'd be a lot better off. I'm told all the time, you can see it. The Asian parents are sending the message to their children from the time they're sentient. I expect you to succeed. I expect you to study. I'm gonna monitor your homework. I'm gonna monitor your school attendance.

Blacks have a truancy rate in California, four times that of whites. You can't study, you know, learn if you're not in school. Now, I agree. I mean, the schools, because of progressive education and the lowering of standards there, are... absolutely substandard. But even so, I'm sorry, if you put an Asian student and a black student, on average, there's...

I'm talking about averages here. I'm not talking about individuals. There are thousands of blacks who are whooping Asians' asses, okay? But we're talking about group averages. An Asian student is going to do a lot better. in any academic environment because of the family culture. One example, you brought up MIT. So we've had now the striking down of racial preferences in college admissions by the Supreme Court. Right.

And it's in the news recently. And it was positioned hyperbolically on MSNBC, of course, as like, oh, see, we're going to hell in a handbasket. And their example was MIT admissions year over year since the change. And what happened was all the groups went down as percentages, including whites and Asians went up. Yeah. That's what happened. It was like, oh.

And I know the case, I think if I remember this correctly, was actually an argument that Asian Americans were being actively discriminated against at Harvard. Am I remembering that correctly? So you have this weird... intersectional warfare of we're going to talk about black and white but we're going to kind of ignore these other groups like asians and like those super successful nigerians that were really uncomfortable for us to talk about that beat out

white americans on average and everything um why are those like again instantly argument busting groups of people not they continue to be treated Like not part of the conversation. I mean, you know, among the people who are so active about this, why can you how how do you think it is that the anti-racism crowd.

can live in that cognitive dissonance where it's like we live in a white supremacist country, except for the Asians and the Indians. Some of whom, you know, have radically different cultures. And so like, if we're bigoted, aren't we also bigoted against? Asians and Indians? I don't get it. How are they justifying that? There's any amount of rationalizing the real. They'll come up with any explanation to justify it so you had for a while.

you know, a decade ago that, yeah, they're white adjacent and somehow they're... It's like the number of contradictions within left-wing ideologies is unbelievable because occasionally, you know, the Asian students on campus, the status today on campus is to be a person of color. And Asians, by and large, are still trending pretty left wing because that's how you get elite status in our culture. The elites are still overwhelmingly democratic. So that's where the power lies.

And so there'd be a lot of Asian students who could say, please, sir, can we be a person of color too? Can we be a student of color? And the administrators were like, no, no, no, you may not be a student of color because here's the secret. Student of color is a euphemism for underperforming students. And so Asians are just like, by definition, not students of color.

Jews fit into the same category. Right, absolutely. And here's what the Asians do. The needle gets more and more, the eye of the needle gets narrower and narrower for them. Because admissions is always zero sum. This is something that the proponents always denied with a straight face all the way up to the Supreme Court that, well, just because we've got set asides for black students.

Doesn't mean that anybody else is thereby handicapped. No, excuse me. Every time you set aside a place for a female who's less qualified. That's one less seat for a qualified male. Same with race. If you set aside seats for blacks, that takes out the finite core for non-blacks. So it is always zero sum. But the Asians...

Rather than complain, except the few that were willing to come forward and serve as plaintiffs in these recent lawsuits, they basically say, you set the bar even higher, we'll meet it. That's the proper response. We'll meet your damn standards and we'll beat you at it. And that is the message that is not being sent to blacks. The message being sent to blacks is you demand that standards be lowered on your behalf. And that's a tragedy. These black civil rights leaders.

are not exhorting blacks to study more. And I'm sorry, the reality is I've been in a lot of inner city classrooms. I've observed that classroom behavior. It's not exactly... obedient or respectful or dedicated to learning. It is chaotic. And then we make excuses that if... Black students are disciplined more for insubordination. That's because the teachers are racist. Are you kidding me? This is the most left-wing profession in the country. Ed school is one two-year-long marination in...

white privilege theory and intersectionality. These are not racist school administrators. The black kids are acting up more because of the chaos of their home environments. So the idea that somehow, you know, the... The the problem is, again, the racism, the Asians belie it. And so the solution is. Well, and immigrant black Americans. So one thing I had our first episode.

of this show a couple years ago was with an educational entrepreneur disruptor named Mike Yates. And I don't even remember if this part of the conversation was on camera or not, but he has come. a long way, he's become much more of a classical liberal from being more of like a kind of anti-racist type of thinker. And he said one of the things he encountered in school was this question of what does it mean to be black?

And it was between first generation immigrants from Africa and black American students whose family lineage has been here for a long time, maybe even going back to slavery. And there was a lot of tension because, again, like the Nigerians and the, you know, the Ghanans and the people who'd come from Africa had more like the kind of typical.

immigrant to America, zeal, and they didn't have the baggage of the culture that has emerged here. Right. And they outperformed. And they didn't want to be grouped in. with the race discourse in the same way. And so it was like this really interesting window into an internal dialogue, internal dialogue, that he said,

was really starting to change the way he thought about race in the country because it's like, well, it's like, gosh, my buddy from Nigeria is darker than me. And so if race is all about looks and skin color. Why is he doing great? Yeah. Why is his family still together? Well, you ask, you know, why is this still going on? It's because it's a race hustle now. And that's how you have power. You get automatic power if you're a black.

so-called advocate by claiming racism because whites are still guilty enough and they're well-meaning enough at this point that they're going to confer a whole lot of benefits on you. And it's a great gig. You specialize in being black. Nobody can compete with you on that. It's just like specializing in being female. Well, here's the news. Being female is not an accomplishment. I don't deserve any special privileges. Because I'm female.

There's no, it's of utter no interest to me. And being gay is not an accomplishment either. But under identity politics, those are qualifications in their own right. And I'm just sick of it. I don't think...

that any institution that is based on knowledge and the accomplishment of knowledge should admit me. simply because of my gonads. And if I don't have competitive qualifications, I shouldn't be there. And I am under no delusion that I have been the so-called beneficiary of gender preferences forever. I have never been excluded from anything because of my sex. To believe that as a female today is to be completely deluded again. Because...

You look at Fox News, for example, it has about a 50-50 male-to-female ratio of on-air talent. That is completely artificially engineered. i think the ratio of attractive blondes is a little out of step with the population as a whole though and fox yes define attractive we know just saying there's a difference there's a different selection criteria going on

Absolutely. Well, at Fox, thanks to Roger Ailes. But I go around collecting natural experiments to test this theory of gender bias. And they're... And the theory of gender bias is the racist or the sexist gatekeepers. That if you have an institution that is not 50-50, it's because they're sexist gatekeepers. Viacom or Hollywood or whatever. So let's find institutions with no gatekeepers and see how the gender ratios pan out.

There's several of them, but one of the most interesting is Wikipedia. Wikipedia, it's blind. Anybody can edit. There's no gatekeeping. You just enter at will, and nobody knows who you are. It's anonymous. Also... There's no history of Wikipedia. You know, people, the excuse for lack of 50-50 parody among chess grandmasters, even though, again, it's meritocratic now, is, well, there was a history of discrimination and females are so oppressed by that history.

so they can't go forward. Wikipedia is very new. It's not as if there's a history of long-term discrimination against female editors at Wikipedia. Well, to the absolute chagrin of the lefties who run Wikipedia... It's like 90% male. Without any gatekeepers, nobody is keeping the females out. It turns out... Where did you get that data from? How do you know that? From Wikipedia. This was like a huge scandal several years ago.

So they actually reported this. Yeah. And... The Wikimedia Foundation. It turns out that females do not have that same drive for facts. for thoroughness. Even the female entries like Manalo Blahnik stiletto heels are very thin compared to what you would expect. There's other natural experiments. Anybody can write a letter to the editor of a newspaper. There's no gatekeepers. Nobody's saying who's, you know, you can just send it in.

That's about two to one females. Who subscribes to the New Republic, to the Atlantic, to public journals? No gatekeepers. You can subscribe. It also skews heavily male. Because males, on average, and I'm not saying there's not lots of exceptions, then your daughter and your granddaughter are going to be the most accomplished physicists.

public figures in the world. But on average, males are more externally oriented. So when you look at Fox and you see the 50-50, that is engineered because that does not reflect the actual pool of... Who is most interested in public affairs? And I'm always amazed at, like, there's still like conservative magazines that are... Thank God holding out against this. Like National Review, you can look at the capable contents or national fairs. It's all male contributors.

And you can't, they would love to have more females. So anyway, this time. There are these sort of generic things, like rules of thumb in terms of phrase.

this world of psychology uh as it pertains to gender right that women on average are more interested in people men were interested in things men on average are more interested in abstractions and spatial relations, which is where the STEM and political and ideological stuff comes in, which is probably also where the philosophy and the history of some of that kind of...

On average. Yeah. But those averages, I think, is it James Damore who had done a paper on this and sort of showed that the averages, when you get to the extremes, end up mattering a lot. Right? the sort of bell curve at the tail where you get the truly radically brilliant crazies, if the average is off, you're going to have a really disproportionate number of truly exceptional people.

And it isn't proportional. There's some dynamic there about it. Are you familiar with some of that? Yeah, yeah. This is what got Larry Summers pushed out of Harvard. It turns out that... At the tails ends of the distribution curve, males predominate among math dummies. There's a lot more males than females who are completely clueless. They never have been able to add two and two.

And at the far end of the math genius level, males outnumber females according to a very inadequate measure when the SATs used to measure in 50. point increments and they got rid of that because of the usual racial we don't like the what it tells us about the racial distribution but at the at the top 50 which is again hardly the tail end males outnumbered females like

2.5 to 1 so so again the only allowable explanations of exact parallel for race the only allowable explanation for the fact that the Google engineering department is overwhelmingly male is discrimination against all of these qualified females that are equally good at doing the most abstract.

physics and engineering as males, but they're just being kept out because Google would rather have a subpar collection of engineers than allow females to come in. The quality of the Google search results suggests that that is... We should... deed a problem something's a problem well i don't know females females would make it much worse we should get we'll return to james demore in an instant and his his big problem was talking about neuroticism um but so

This is like a scandal. So Larry Summers was at a conference. This is the former president of Harvard who was Clinton's treasury secretary. Yeah. Big economist. He said, this is a conference supposed to be asking difficult questions. I think, is Larry on the Asperger spectrum? If he isn't, he's Asperger's adjacent. Because I've met him and it's like, hmm.

He could be. He speaks his mind. He's not going to. He's not going to. Yeah. I interviewed him a few times for the Hamas hysteria on campus. But anyway, so he said, well, maybe, you know, there may be other reasons such as. personal preference males and females have different interests in you know being in a computer lab at 2 a.m eating cold crusts of pizza because they're so involved in coding and you know there may maybe there's something

in the distribution of high-end skills. So Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT, she famously afterwards read, she had to run out because she was about to throw up because hearing that there may be... or hearing somebody say that there may be differences in the innate.

averages of math skills was so traumatic to her that she could not be in the same room. She's a biology professor? She's a biology professor at MIT. So anyway, the Harvard faculty rose up in absolute... revolt against Larry Summers for daring to... even suggest that anything other than sexism explains the lack of 50-50 proportionality. Summers, to his immense discredit, apologized. He brought in a whole raft of new gender-based programs, but it was too...

little too late, even though I don't, so he ran it up. James Damore, the hapless, naive little lamb. I was at a conference with him once, and you couldn't meet a more sort of ingenuous... person who was an engineer at google and google was involved in the identical discussion of right woe is me we're so sexist somehow

you know you have these institutions that are willing to blame themselves for racism and sexism rather than admit the obvious which is there's a pipeline problem so google is saying somehow we've got all these sexist engineers and please raise your hand if you're one of them, they never asked that, that are keeping out all these qualified females. So Demore wrote this five, 10 page memo saying, well, maybe there's other explanations and Google's supposed to be this wonderful.

we're open to all ideas we've got our little employee chats and stuff as long as they so long as they're communism adjacent We can make money, which is not communist, but the rest of the ideology can be turbo communism. Yeah. Somebody there once reached out to me, an engineer said, we've got this books program. I'd like to.

invite you, would you be willing to come up to Menlo Park or wherever they are? And I said, sure. And I didn't hear from him and I didn't hear from him. And then he finally decided. For professional reasons, I'm not going to advance your name. You know, that would have been like the end of his career. But anyway, so Damore proposed. Was he wearing a Maoist dunce cap when sending you the email?

I've struggle sessioned myself so that others won't have to. Yes, right. And sure, he disappeared himself after that. So he's buried so deep at this point. But anyway, Demore said... He actually didn't stress the skills so much. He said, there's different inclinations. And he said, Females are on average score higher on neuroticism. Well, that's one of the what's called the big five. Yeah. Which are these psychological traits that have been known or.

identified maybe their constructs by psychology for decades. And neuroticism means a higher propensity for worry, for self-doubt awareness. It makes sense as if you're a... maternal creature that needs to protect babies, that you would be super vigilant. Right. Right. So females, they're neurotic. So this got Demore booted out. Because the females, they're supposed to be so brave and such strong women, but if they read a memo that talks about a...

psychological trait, they've just fall to pieces because actually they're really like Victorian neurasthenics that need their fainting couch all the time. So again, another weird double standard that females are so strong and yet they can't stand to hear. And so you talk about, you know, the female traits. It's the females that are driving the academy left. Poll after poll shows when it comes to...

Do you support academic freedom and the ability to pursue truth no matter where it ends up versus do you believe in speech codes and protecting safety? It's a huge split. The males are for the pursuit of truth. open discourse, and it's the females who believe in suppressing speech in the name of safety, which is one of the most nauseating concepts. We got it, you know, ad nauseum during COVID.

Be safe. I hated that. That was like the worst mantra in human history. Yes, safetyism. Safetyism. As a kind of like accidental backed into modus operandi for our society has been.

incredibly destructive yeah i want to plant a flag for something i want to come back to which is that you are a you're data driven you're fact-based you're punchy as hell you don't pull punches so i want to i want to come back to the question of like fighting a war in the culture or fighting a war of discourse in the culture and the trials and tribulations of that in a world where the counter-reaction to this wokeism

has some pretty dirty underbellies, some of which we've seen in some of the comments sections of some of our videos where it's like, oh, no, that's a little fascism adjacent to. So I want to I want to come back to that because I think it's challenging for us.

But first, I promised we would talk about, is America uniquely racist in its history? I've been wondering about that. And is our history of the slave trade uniquely worthy of... of uh lashing ourselves and recontextualizing our history as being born in 1619 instead of 1776 and so um

Make the case that that's not true, that people on average are told American slavery, uniquely horrible. Uniquely. We are a slavocracy. What's the counterargument to that? There's not a single society or civilization in human history, in all of human history, that hasn't practiced slavery. It seems like it's an innate instinct that human beings have. If they have the capacity to enslave others, they will. Africans were enslaving each other. Chinese were enslaving each other.

It was in Greece. It was in Rome. It has been the norm throughout history across the globe. The only civilization that tried to end slavery. was the west we are the only civilization that has provided the language the concepts to end it it the abolitionist movement began in britain with echoes in North America. It was Britain that ended the transatlantic slave trade. They dedicated in the 19th century, in the 1800s. 13% of their naval resources were dedicated to simply...

blockading the coast of West Africa to try and end the slave trade because the Africans were so gung-ho on keeping up the transatlantic slave trade. You had Dahomey... members, pre-Nigeria, actively going out and getting their fellow Africans to bring them to the slave markets. This was completely a mutual... transactional transaction. Britain occupied Lagos in 1861 to try and decouple it from the slave trade. The Arabs

There's still slavery going on now, you know, in a lot of Arab countries. One fact I heard pointed out is that the Arab nations had enslaved more people than North America and maybe even all of the Americas.

And that the question was, well, why aren't there that many black people today in Arab countries? And the argument I heard made, I'm curious if you've heard this, is they enslaved people like crazy and then... mutilated them like like turned them into eunuchs and and made sure they wouldn't breed basically it's like the most barbaric story i was like is that true like that is i guess

Like, where are all the black people? I haven't heard that. I mean, there's an argument that's made, because it's a huge slavery literature that actually... American slaves, they live very well compared to those in the Caribbean. It is true that if you look at like one, I just was reading, a historian was looking at one slave port.

of exit in Africa, only 1% of the slaves that came out of that port went to North America. They went... to latin america to the caribbean to other places we were not the main consumers of slaves but in any case uh aren't american states like vermont some of the first Units of government to abolish slavery as well?

well isn't that my understanding but like but i mean in the early like as far as like who were the first five oh yes but a lot of people there was a backsliding some of them abolished it initially and then opened it up more and there was

You know, there was some slavery going on in the northern colonies. I understand that the Quakers, who were strong abolitionists, actually had some slave... stuff even while they were claiming to be strong abolitionists so there's yeah it's i guess the messy history on several fronts there yeah but you know i'm gonna

i'll i'll be willing to pay reparations when i see africa saying we're going to pay reparations too again this is not unique uh this sounds i don't even know whether to bring it up because it it can easily be dismissed but American slaves actually measured just at pure, and I am not ignoring the psychological abuse and cruelty, heinous cruelty of this, but...

Separation of families, all of it. Sometimes. That may be exaggerated, but they did do better than a lot of white indentured servants. I've been listening on Audible to a fantastic book by Gordon Wood called The... the radicalism of the American Revolution. Yeah, I interviewed Gordon about this and he told me some of it. Of the white indentured servants, he said there's very little difference, that he sort of, captivity, slavery.

lack of power was absolutely endemic there was a slight you know difference obviously you it's better not to be a slave but still hierarchy and And unequal power was absolutely endemic in pre-revolutionary America. So two wrongs don't make a right. Why is that an argument against the 1619 crowd? just why does that matter that we okay we are horrible but so is all of humanity why is that an argument well first of all

Is the 1619 Project right in its history as an empirical matter? And I think the weight of historians is that their claim that the whole purpose of founding... the American Republic was to preserve the slave trade, that that just, it doesn't bear up. So I would say truth matters. But then the larger question is, is this the... Is this the best strategy if you want to close those racial gaps, which everybody does? And again, the gaps are behavioral.

and academic those are the ones that matter is the best strategy to go around still playing the victim card and demanding that standards be lowered on your behalf as blacks rather than saying we'll meet your damn standards and we'll

better will best you at them and i would say that the best strategy is the latter and to give up playing the victim card and you mentioned asians you know uh There's pushback. You know, they're the ones that have been trying to defend the... various exam schools across the country. Here's another disparate impact. In New York City, there's the famous school called Stuyvesant, which has been one of the biggest...

generators of talent and success. Anybody can go there to public school, but it's got an exam to get into it. And it has been under attack for decades because of disparate impact, because the exam, which has nothing to do with race, it is not culturally biased, it measures math skills and reading skills. And it, blacks do very, very poorly on it so that based on this computer graded, again, purely objective, no racist computers, the percentage of blacks admitted.

is very small. And Asians, Stuyvesant that has no affirmative action is like 70% Asian. And so we're getting rid of that. Now, the Chinese Americans are the most... They're the ones that have been fighting the preferences to an extent. And if it ever comes down to how much longer are they going to go along with...

being excluded from what their natural number should be in institutions because of white guilt. At some point, if they say, we're not putting up with this any longer, you're really going to see changes. I interviewed the strictest headmistress in London. Her name is Catherine Burblesing. She runs a school that's akin to a charter in London called Michaela. It is overwhelmingly...

black and brown kids from Arab countries and from Africa who are immigrants, often first generation. It is truly, there's a beautiful documentary about it called Strictest Headmistress. And it is a perfect case study of why behavior and high standards matter. She holds these kids to impeccably high standards. She, the whole thing holds, it is strict. And this film. lays out a couple things number one the kids they are the underprivileged of their society

Except for the fact that they have parents who cared to put them in this school that they knew would set them up for success. So that is great privilege. Right. It is the highest performing school in... I think in London, if not in the entire United Kingdom, by grades, some of these kids, English is not their first language. And they just say, no, you got to get here. You got to be the top.

Anything shy of the top is a failure. And when you fail, we're not going to sugarcoat it. But we are going to say we believe you can get here. It works. It works. It's like if you want natural experiments, it's like the perfect natural experiment for... When you tell someone, I believe you can reach the stars, it isn't disempowering, it's the opposite. It doesn't mean they can always reach the stars, but it works.

What parent would say to his child, I want you to go through life claiming to be a victim and demanding that standards be lower on your behalf because I don't think you can meet them. So get, you know, make sure that you're... Victim hustle is well polished because that's the success. And, you know, don't bother working hard because everything's, you know.

arranged against you. That's not a recipe for science. You know, we had comparable schools here in the United States, charter schools, that went under a category, conservatives used to write about this. in maybe the 2000s called No Excuses Schools. And one of the premier chains of this was something called KIPP, which is an acronym, K-I-P-P, knowledge, power, I'm not sure what it stood for. Started by two...

Jewish guys, I think from Texas. It's featured in the documentary Waiting for Superman, Kip, very, very prominently. And they viewed themselves as civil rights, part of the civil rights tradition. you know going back to the 60s and and the no excuses schools set up absolutely um incredibly detailed rules for behavior, you know, how you walk in a corridor, the parents sign contracts. I will monitor homework. I will monitor attendance. I will work with my child. And the kids are...

The libertarian, you may not like this, but every minute of their day is scripted because of the assumption that... It's not a government school, so I got no problem. Okay, that's all right. Good, good, good. You like order as long as it's not top-down. Good, I'm with you on that. So the assumptions that they need to be brought into the bourgeois values of... self-control, deferred gratification, and looking at future orientation, things were going well. George Floyd hit.

I've heard about this firsthand accounts of internal changes that are heartbreaking. And the motto used to be something like, work hard, be good or something. And the founder of... Kip decided that was a racist motto, that to say work hard is racist. So this is the mentality we have. On the left, it is so condescending, and it is so counterproductive. These are educated people. Are they just a bunch of pants-p***ing cowards?

I mean that honestly. I know. It's a question. And because it's like, surely he knows that saying working hard is a racist claim. I know. Is racist. Right? Am I crazy? You... The world is crazy. I mean, remember the Smithsonian belatedly in the summer of George Floyd hysteria, they published a chart that's been going around for like decades among corporate diversity trainers and stuff about all the...

attributes of whiteness. This is like, it shows up. Oh, I've seen this graph. It is the most. Objectivity. Repugnant thing you've ever seen in your life. It is like, did David Duke write this? Exactly. So if you care about accuracy, if you care about promptness, if you're objective, if you're rational, if you care about family, that's to be white. So if you're going to be like...

a radical black with black identity, you're going to be against all of those things. So it is a mystery. Don't I have- Punctuality is white supremacy. Right. But that's been around for a long time, you know, and the diversity hustle has been a long- around a lot longer the people knew in the 90s you would have these corporate diversity trends there's a new a new scam where people decided i'm going to train for diversity

And that's one of the tenets, is that expecting punctuality is just anti-diversity. I want to interrogate a couple moments in history as you understand them, because... When you look at where we are and you look at the statements you've made, which are summaries of the facts about averages for black performance academically.

in behavior as it pertains to crime, percentage of violent crimes committed as a share of population, all of those things. If you go into the time machine, as I understand it, Back to 1955, let's say. I believe that black families, which are currently at illegitimacy rates. father absentee rates north of 75% today. We're actually below Italian American immigrants in the 1950s that the black family, the black culture.

The things that I think you and I believe are the bedrock of being set up to succeed in school and become the next Thomas Sowell. We're there. Am I? Is that a fair picture? That there was, because I think you could hear everything you're saying and derive that what you're actually saying below the surface is that there is something inherent in black people.

that make them incapable of the kind of success that whites and Asians have? Well, first of all, I don't go there. I don't think it's necessary. main goal right now is to get the culture to stop destroying standards in the name of avoiding disparate impact, because I think that is civilizational suicide. And so... One doesn't, in theory, need to answer the question why in order to say colorblind standards are not racist. But...

The cultural differences right now with inner city culture are so vast. It's so obvious that there is so much to be done there as far as... no longer valorizing or glamorizing violence, celebrating fatherhood and cutting back on... welfare payments that pay people for self-destructive behavior, that that matters. The culture has changed much for the worse. And we used to be able to talk about that. You know, Tipper Gore in the 90s brought the country's attention to rap music, which is just...

gangster rap. I mean, these sets of values that you hear in this, we turn away. You know, we talk about like nice... college professors as being misogynist. You want misogyny or homophobia? Listen to gangster rap. But we couldn't take it. We turned our eyes away because it was too uncomfortable. um and yes there was much just to jump in on that for a minute um and i'm not the hugest rap fan even though i've made weirdly nerdy rap videos about economics and the like

You could say similar things about rock music and about other pop cultures always had a transgressive energy to it. The sick, you know, I think some of there is a legitimacy to. the culture that you're talking about there. But I think sometimes the like piling on, on rap music sounds like pearl clutching from, you know,

soccer moms or something that aren't really connected to things. So I want to just put that out there that there's a lot of diversity inside of hip hop. Not all of it's a bunch of nonsense. I'm talking about... Celebrating cop killers. And you're absolutely right. You know, the Jimmy Deans, the sort of, there is this. She was just 17, if you know what I mean. That's in the Beatles. So there's all kinds of stuff in music that can be like, oh, that's not great.

Well, that does come out of, to a large extent, the celebration of adolescence that grew out of the 50s with our fabulous wealth for the first time that allowed adolescence to be an actual market. And so you had... adolescent setting the the tone for culture, which is a disaster. Adolescents have no taste. They have no knowledge. And when you give, when they have their parents' credit card to spend because we're so damn wealthy because capitalism works so well.

that we've just got this excess resources sloshing around, it's not really going to lead to the most intelligent and uplifting culture. So that is, I agree, there's a... Get off my lawn with your rap music and your rock and roll, you kids. Well, we need more of that as far as I'm concerned.

I wish adults would grow up and, like, move beyond their damn 60s rock groups, which I grew up with them, but I don't listen to the Rolling Stones anymore. It's a little bit gruesome to see these rockers, you know, 80s with no hair. But anyway. I derailed us a little bit. But I'm not going to completely normalize rap, gangster rap. I think it's a window into a world. And I'm not suggesting censorship or anything.

Part of why I kind of jump in there, because Tipper, that was, you know, we now are seen as to to white person like being pro. I don't know. Well, I don't think of soccer moms these days as pro clutching. They're sort of part of the problem. but anyway. I think it's interesting, as we sit here, free speech is now a right-wing issue. If you go back to the late 90s, the right wing wasn't great on speech and expression as it comes to things like video games and music. So I just...

I think it's important to kind of understand some of that context. No, I forgot that if regulation was- They were regulatory forces, I think, to some extent. But even so, there is this- Cultural transformation that takes place. You were saying you were a little, you don't go there as much. Is that right? Well, the causes, I just, I think it's all, it's very contested. I think culture.

just plays a huge role, and that's what we should focus on. I will say, to be perfectly honest, though, W.E.B. Du Bois in the turn of the 20th century... was himself complaining about Philadelphia and what he saw was very high rates of out-of-wedlock child-rearing and juvenile delinquency compared to the culture at large.

There's been problems for a long time and what the causes are. I just don't think we need to go there. I think the focus has to be on how do we get out of this. Now, I understand that... The human beings always want to ask the why. How can you... You don't have to solve it. You can solve the problem, I think, without knowing the why. By maintaining... high standards and and and not being susceptible to the race hustle any longer so the the moment we're in

Right now, the election of Trump, his overperformance with black men, especially Latino men, but also writ large. I was surprised. to see, I think, as we currently sit here, that even the gap between men and women in terms of the Trump vote wasn't as wide as people were thinking. We heard a lot about the diverging of the sexes on politics. This seems like a moment where the kind of conversation you and I are having can actually be heard by more people without pearl clutching and woke.

You know, silence is violence and speech is violence and you're a fascist, which is something that's been thrown your way many, many, many, many times on college campuses. Are you worried about... reaction over reaction reactionary cultural forces that um are ugly on the right as it pertains to this we have we've been especially like

The COVID-George Floyd combo was like about as toxic a cultural stew as one could imagine. So you're locking people down. You're absolutely demolishing their lives and their psychology and their families. And then you're subjecting the culture to this crazy hypocrisy on the basis of something that was tragic but rare, not emblematic of systemic this or that.

To anywhere near the extent that we were all told it is. And a lot of people are just like, I'm done. And when you get into that space, it's not a rational space. Or it can be an irrational space, a space that starts to calcify. How do you think about that? As someone who uses strong language and someone who comes at these issues with a lot of force and isn't afraid to make the arguments about what's happening on average, how do you think about...

discourse on the right and where it might start to go too far in pockets? Or do you not care about that? Well, I think that the actual anti-Semites and the actual racist... are very small in number compared to the anti-white racists that dominate our institutions everywhere. And so I think that the... Obama and Biden administrations, their justice departments, and FBI's

We're always warning against, you know, we're going to have these outbreaks of white supremacist violence. It never happened. I mean, January 6th was really an abysmal event, embarrassment. It was not some uprising of, you know, Neanderthal white supremacists. It was people that were...

But that's been sort of it. There was the Charlottesville march. I mean, that was like a small group of yahoos in Charlottesville. Yeah, so it's a complete fiction that that's the threat in the... in the country today you know we always hear before the election the idea was that there'll be white riots if

Trump lost. And I thought that's very, very unlikely. If there's going to be rioting, just look at the history. It's going to be the left. You know, they've done it before. They'll do it again. So I don't worry about the... the sort of Hitler sympathizers out there, because I just think they're trivial. They have no impact on the culture. They're in the corners of the internet, and it's just...

They're not a threat. The Nick Fuentes types, the young, the sort of young incel men who are women haters, all that. There's these pockets that are like, oh, oh no. But I do think... I asked myself, I'm sorry, as a logical matter, how do you say that every other group gets its own identity politics and whites don't? You know, why should we be the... ones who have everybody circling their wagons and deciding, you know, we're the enemy and they get to...

to use their identities as weapons and as means of advancement. And whites are the only group that says, well, we don't have an identity. As a purely logical matter. I don't think that's sustainable. It's held up to now. Whites are willing to give every other group advantages and to say your identity deserves...

official government recognition and benefits. And God forbid we culturally appropriate, although we don't mind. If we're serious about being anti-cultural appropriation, we should tell... the whole rest of the world sorry give us back our vaccines give us back our hot showers and clean milk and clean water and airplanes and the air netting automobiles elevators and and electricity i mean i'm i'm just amazed that i could

flip the switch, get, get lights on at night. This is an absolute miracle that we are never sufficiently grateful for, but you guys are all culturally appropriating us. Sorry. So, so, but. I know this is a debate within the right. Most of the conventional establishment conservative opinion takes the high ground and says there shall be no white identity politics.

I frankly have been driven enough into a corner that I am willing to contemplate at least Western civilization identity politics. I am willing to say... that there is a civilization that's under threat right now that... I'm going to say it is uniquely powerful in its set of concepts and in its accomplishments. The scientific revolution that came out of London.

with the Royal Society, the passion to tinker, to understand reality, to work out mathematical explanations for how the world works. And yes, the... the urge to explore. I'm reading a book now that is a chronicle, a set of letters that a geologist, a young geologist wrote from California. He was brought out.

by Whitney to do a geological survey because they wanted to map the mineral resources in California to be able to better know where the silver mines are. And they've got quick silver mines. I'm a Californian. I had no idea that there used to be... mercury mines in California, but it is an amazing thing what these guys put up with in their passion to understand. and map the geology of California. They would just walk for

50 miles a day through chaparral up the mountains into 130 degree temperatures, not complaining, running out of water. Their mules are the only things that get them over these crevices. That passion to explore, to circumnavigate the globe, no other civilization showed that. And I can tell you that... Any other civilization that had our technology would have done the exact same amount of colonizing as we did, because that is a universal human impulse.

We did do it, but every other civilization, not just slavery, but, you know. I mean, Genghis Khan, for crying out loud. If they had the resources of genocide, they would have done it. But the West gave the world maps of navigation that nobody else came up with. So I am willing to be a Western civilization chauvinist, and I'm not apologetic for that.

It's funny that you would frame it that way because in the immediate aftermath of 10-7...

And I'm not, I'm 100% Italian Catholic. I don't really have technically like a dog in the fight in the Israeli-Palestinian thing other than I have a bunch of Jewish friends that I love. And, um, and... philosophically and argumentatively I have opinions but the full-blown revolt against the all the premises of Western civilization that sort of came to a peak with the protests across the whole Western world in the immediate aftermath of the...

this demonic attack on 10-7 by Hamas, by the official formal government of another region. If that's anything other than an act of war, then... I don't know what you're supposed to, how you're supposed to concoct the notion of what war is. It shook me to my core. It was like, we really are under as a concept. And when I say we, I mean the West, Western civilization. This is what decolonization looks like was their slogan. And it meant we're going to kill you all. Land back. All of these slogans.

struck me maybe for the first time in my adult life as being something that we can't just sit on the sidelines and be like, well, free speech and isn't that lovely? but as a kind of fifth column in our society, trying to destroy it from within. And I've guessed on all the time, I tend to be a rational optimist, broadly, but...

This feels like a fifth column that wants to destroy the society and leave barbarism and return to tribal war of all against all in its wake. Let's go back to being like the Cherokees who were just... beheading people. Let's in Australia, you know what we're going to do as our political answer to trying to further expand?

universal rule of law and equality under the law, we're going to do dances like the Maori who beheaded people and traded in the heads of the people they conquered. And I'm going to... I'll go on for a little bit longer. But the worst part about that is, okay, if you want to play the old ways game, here's how the old ways game looks. We go to war. Whoever wins takes it all. Yep. So guess what we won?

Sorry. No land back. You lost. You lost. Those are the old ways rules. It's not Marshall Plan. That's not the old ways rule. It's not, oh, you invade us in 1967. We take the Sinai and West Bank. and all of this, and we give it back for some reason. That's not the old ways rule. I'll bracket my rant, but I'm with you. We're better. The West is better. The West...

invented a philosophy, a culture, warts and all, that's better. It's why it won. It's why we invented just about everything. So I agree. There's so much there. The left fights in the name of concepts that are uniquely Western. Tolerance, equality, limited government. These are all Western concepts, and yet the left wants to tear the West down. It's just completely perverse. It's what I think about all the time. Why is the West uniquely self-canceling? That includes its immigration policies.

don't understand it. I've also become, I listen to German public TV on my podcast. And so I get maximal. coverage of climate conferences and EU and UN stuff. And I have had the exact same response to you of... Whatever happened to the old nation state and its lack of apology, now, like, when did... nations become such wimps where like the West, all it is, is just giving money out all the time.

To no end, it doesn't do anything, but it's a complete abdication of what the sort of self-respecting nations used to do, which is say, we have power. You're right. We want...

The reason you guys got conquered is because, like, you didn't have the wheel. Africa never developed writing. Sub-Saharan Africa, in millennia, it never... developed writing it had no architecture if you wanted to survive how about you develop some technology what is with these nations when did it become the norm for at least a certain group of nations to be so completely unselfassertive and just view themselves as ATMs for the rest of the world. It is very perverse. Is it guilt?

What do you think it is? Yes, it is guilt, but why are we uniquely guilty? Why isn't China guilty? Why isn't Africa guilty? Why isn't India guilty? Because they all have equal sense. So I ask myself, does it come from the Western critic? impulse that we see in classical Greece with Socrates. questioning concepts that were self-critical, that we use our reason to question authority. And we went along for millennia and sort of did well, although, you know, history is one long attack on authority.

So I think conservatives are kind of all a bunch of phonies because we pretend to be conservatives and Burkeans, not you. I'm pretty, but you know, we believe in, well, but we believe in. tradition and authority, except we don't, because we've gone along with every radical change that has brought us to this world. But the West is uniquely self-critical, and maybe at some point... that just becomes an instinct that is so great that it tears itself down like did this begin with getting rid of

absolute monarchies and established churches. Was that the beginning of the end? Was it the French Revolution? I don't know, but it is really perverse. Now, the Contra perspective on this. would be something like this and there's plenty of truth in it. You two sound like a bunch of Cassandras. The world has never been better than it is right now. We are a more moral people than we've ever been as a planet.

There are fewer people as a share of the planet's population dying of violence. There are more women who are literate. There are more babies surviving into adulthood. We live materially wonderful lives. Most of what we're dealing with... to the extent there are problems, are just the excesses of wealth, that we just have this abundance disease. We basically have societal diabetes. Well I think that's true. I think that's absolutely true. I mean obesity is literally...

I'm astounded when I go to my disgusting third world supermarket, Key Foods, right next to me. It's hell. When I come back from California, I feel like I have entered hell in going to Key Foods. It is completely chaotic. We've had supermarkets for 100 years. They can't figure out cart management. They all build up. There's nobody to help you bag anything. It's the filthy open boxes everywhere.

It's unbelievable, but it is wall-to-wall packaged food. It is the most bizarre thing. This is absolutely unique in human history where food scarcity, food starvation, famine was the norm. We are so successful. that human beings are surrounded by food all the time granted it's awful food i believe in primary ingredients and cooking for god's sakes a primal uh archaic tradition but but

You can eat all the time, and it turns out most human beings don't have the well-worth all to not eat if you put food in front of them. It is astounding. It is in many respects the best of all possible worlds, but that should be all the more reason not to then turn on the concepts that gave us this prosperity, whether it's political concepts of... equal representation due process you know just because a male is accused of it doesn't mean you believe survivors

you have the presumption of innocence and you have to prove the case with cross-examination. Some of the greatest truth-finding mechanisms developed in human history is the Anglo-American jurisprudence. You don't tear that down. You don't say that science is racist and do Navajo learning circles. You know, you don't repatriate archeology. because somehow this is preventing Native American, the archaeological remains which are being used to understand human history.

because somehow Native Americans are being held back because there's a skull in the Natural History Museum, and you don't pretend that we have things... I'm sorry, there is nothing to learn as far as solving biological problems from... Native American so-called science. It was superstition. We were superstitious. I mean, again, reading Gordon Wood and Albion Seed, it took a very long time for...

The West to overcome fallacious means of thinking of just association is causation. But so let's keep our let's keep our affluence rather than. trying to mimic third world backwaters. I'm only laughing because it's like, you're one of a kind. Okay. Thank God. One of the things that I think can justifiably push back on your glorious tirade is, and mine.

is that we continue to live in a world of enormous complexity and the solutions to problems come from unlikely places. And so I think we do have a unique and slightly weird... problem that I don't hear talked about, I think, quite enough. And that is in a world where we're all globally connected. Yes, great ideas can travel fast, but culture can travel maybe even faster.

And bad culture and a kind of monoculture can take root. The university being the perfect example of basically brain-destroying monoculture. It's like, oh, you hate... You hate miles and miles of soybeans grown by Monsanto. Well, you have the intellectual equivalent of that at Harvard. The preservation of distinct... cultures, complete with their superstitions, complete with their oddities and their anachronisms strikes me as something that may have a value that we don't fully understand.

How do you think about that? How do you think about diversity for its own sake in the name of a kind of cultural biodiversity? Yeah. I read an absolutely... lightning bolt type book this summer, translations of essays by a French philosopher, Renaud Camus, No Relationship to Albert. that's been translated as the enemy of the disaster. Camus was the one who first came up with the concept or term the Great Replacement.

Now, he never meant that as a conspiracy theory. It wasn't that there was some cabal of Davos types that are trying to erase the West, but he just noticed. the radical demographic change in France with Muslims coming into a culture that is very, very different. He has an extraordinary set of explanations. He says it's the second career of Adolf Hitler that Hitler has made the West... completely leery of any concept associated with his crimes, such as nations, peoples, races.

a national identity, and we've gone totally in the opposite direction. He has other explanations of the replacement of the haute bourgeoisie by the petty bourgeoisie. passion for egalitarianism as opposed to elite culture. But he's also, in many respects, a classic European intellectual in that he's very suspicious of American capitalism. And he also makes an argument for cultural diversity, that one of the reasons he doesn't like The Great Replacement is the world is homogenizing.

Yes. And he's as much in favor of Muslim culture, but in Muslim communities. And he thinks that the loss, and that he says replacism is the... mechanism of modernity that everything can be replaced. Again, this is the European intellectual talking about the American commodification of everything. And there's no more sort of unique identities. That's very French. Very French. Hates Taylorism.

But nevertheless, he makes that argument. I would say I'm going to do your libertarian side now, which is that nobody is forcing. these cultures to have faced themselves in the name of Western blue jeans and Big Macs. It's the market. And it's true, you know, although it's always amazing to see, like, clothing. India still has its own clothes. You look at Pakistan as well, even places in

In South America, it's quite lovely. They still have fantastic textiles, so that's good to see. But yes, there is clearly a global... capitalist culture of American consumer products. One can rue that, but you know, you're going to be the first to say, what's the solution? People are voting with their feet. The question with all of these things as it pertains to culture is always...

Well, who's going to be the minister of culture that doesn't suck? I'm pretty sure they're going to suck. Yeah, exactly. And France, you know, they've had their rules against American cinema. I'm becoming a little more sympathetic. I remember conservatives used to mock Quebec and the whole province of Montreal and Quebec. in the 90s for having rules about you must use France and French and you can't have English signage and stuff. That's ridiculous. I'm more sympathetic to that now.

because of sort of replacement theories that why shouldn't you try to hold on to a cultural identity? But, you know, I'm amazed when I see Starbucks in Vienna. when they've got this tradition of cafe culture, you're really going to buy Starbucks? But it sells, so. I am, I've spent. Oh, can I just interject? Go ahead. I just want to assent to your.

the importance, the catastrophic importance that you place on the reaction in the West to October 7th. You're absolutely right. This should have been the defining moment where we see... with utter clarity what we have become. And to me, the big question of the election was, whether the Jews, are they going to continue voting for Democrats?

when they should have learned by now that your intersectional allies hate you. You know, every protest on a college campus was the intersectional coalition of gays. Blacks, Muslims, lesbians, you name it, females. all hating on Jews. Are the Jews going to finally say, we're walking away from the Democratic Party? And an article I just read said, no, they continue to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. So with that kind of...

Well, not the religious Jews. Not the Orthodox. But the cultural ones who should care. It's just bizarre. There was the moment where you had the alumni revolts at Harvard and Penn, and they started out with these ridiculous... demands for more diversity training, for it to be anti-Semitism training, that so misunderstood what was going on. Because as you say, this was not primarily an outbreak of anti-Semitism. It was an outbreak of anti-Westernism. And that...

is in the curriculum. It's in every aspect of academia, and you cannot extirpate that without wholesale change and doing a little... Anti-Semitism trainings about maybe you shouldn't use from the river to the sea, it's not going to cut it. This shows what we have become. And we've forgotten it. I mean, just as we've walked away from the COVID hysteria and we're not holding people accountable, you know, there should have been a total...

political accounting for that. And we've forgotten the safetyism, except it's obviously everywhere. We've kind of walked away from... the October 7th. We still have campus protests now in the new school year, but they're not getting the same attention. And we're so nice as Americans, we just kind of move on.

We are in a time that I think... I'm trying to grapple with this because it's very easy to make emotionally gratifying arguments. And what I mean for... for being boisterous and punchy and cut right to it. And one of them I heard made by J.D. Vance when he was interviewed on the New York Times podcast. He did this long-form interview with this New York Times reporter. She asked him,

You know, you said Donald Trump was like America's Hitler and now you're his running mate. Like, how do you how do you square that circle? And his his story that he told. And I think it is. I'll just call it a story. Maybe he believes it. I think it's compelling even if he doesn't. And that is, in 2016, I thought his rhetoric was unbecoming of our institutions.

And that it was too bombastic. It was too inflammatory. And I want more statesmen. I'm paraphrasing here, but I want a statesman. I want good leadership that is smart. is coherent, has an ideology of Americanism that I can understand. Not just some New York guy that's throwing bombs and wants to punch. And then I realized that that's not the country we have anymore. That our institutions are way more broken and corrupt, way more shot through with psychosis and craziness than I thought.

And so maybe we do need the New York guy with the brash voice and the crazy talk sound to get in there with a sledgehammer and do a down-to-the-studs remodel. Because this at the margin sort of George W. Bush. compassionate, conservative, you know, I'm sort of only, I'm at the 49 yard line. We're debating the 49 yard lines. That used to be this phrase you'd hear in politics in the before times. That that's not, that we don't live in that world.

That's a delusion. I don't know if that's true or not. And I don't know if I like it because I'm just like a Philly slash Jersey guy that kind of likes this. or if it is true and there's something about the calcification of our institutions the the like over the threshold of self defeat that Radical Marxism in all of the universities and bleeding into the K through 12, the deep state, the stuff we got exposed to, like the COVID, the COVID then.

George Floyd protests, then Biden, Hunter Biden laptop, then Twitter files, then if you're protesting. Drag queen story hour. You're a domestic terrorist, according to Merrick Garland. How many of these things do I have to get thrown at me before I'm just like, I'm voting for that. Bye. I'm all in, baby. That's what it feels like. And I'm just laying it all out there, partly because I'm scared of that, too. Like, I don't know that that's a productive posture.

It's a smash things posture. And the smash things revolutions tend to involve a lot of guillotines in history. And we end up with Jacobin crazies. So maybe that doesn't make any sense of what I just said. But how do you understand... the vibe of our discourse and where we head. How do we, do we head towards productive improvement when the vibe is like... Bright red, bright blue.

Yeah, I mean, this gets into the very difficult question of Trump. And I would say one can have a smash culture without Trump as the figurehead. I think I was... Very surprised that DeSantis did so poorly because he's somebody that also gets far probably better than Trump does. Just how. dangerous the left-wing assault on merit and colorblindness is. And he was pretty aggressive. But it didn't take off.

I would be completely in favor of continuing to be unrestrained in one's criticism and refuse to... compromised, refused to do the little usual disclaimers of I do not say anymore, well, of course racism is still a problem, because it's not. It's like the Nick Fuentes you talk about. Those people are out there. They have no power. The institutional... norm is now black privilege, not white privilege. So I'm not going to do those disclaimers just to be hands across the water.

This is sort of like the election denialism question. It's like, well, let me get a bunch of people in MAGA hats being upset about the election. Isn't the same thing as all of the institutions doing Russiagate for four years, including the intelligence community and and the Justice Department. Like it's not those aren't the same thing. Yeah. How dare they say that we're the threat to free speech when you have Biden.

Pressuring comes to this whole miss. I mean, how do they get away with misinformation and disinformation concepts? It's incredible. They have no self-awareness. You guys are mimicking George Ardwell like You don't care? This is so obvious. Disinformation is so clearly a term that is totally self-involved. It's what you call things you disagree with. Who has the power to declare misinformation? You don't get that.

power. It's the marketplace of ideas. Go read your damn JS mill. That is the absolute essential thing. It's the marketplace of ideas. If you're so confident in your truth, let it be. You don't suppress it. Anyway, I find this amazing. And they claim that it's the right that threatens free speech. But generally, I would say that I'm still not... I'm not a happy Trump voter because this is the one time I feel female identified because I'm not usually at all. But when I hear males say, oh, his...

His nicknames are so funny. Little Marco. I find them uniformly repellent and juvenile. And I think, again, I'm going to generalize here. I think it's more of a male thing to think. Well, his behavior as it pertains to women in general. is not good oh that doesn't bother me one bit Just bug me one bit. All right. So sleeping around, having sex with stars is no problem. Little Marco is the problem? Yes, absolutely. That's public behavior. Okay. Little Marco is how your leaders...

what their language is in the political realm. I... distinguish the political realm from the private realm of Eros, all bets are off. Okay. All bets are off. But that is not my company with JFK and LBJ and a whole bunch of them. So I guess that's fair enough. And who cares? Like, what if it turns out that James Madison had been a skirt chaser? Would we say now, oh, Me Too should have taken him out, that that was more important, that he was, you know, maybe going after his maid?

And it's a complete female narcissism to think that somebody's behavior in the private realm of Eros should trump their capacity as a public leader and political thinker. So anyway, what I object to... Trump is his lack of political male virtues of magnanimity, graciousness, and frankly, his rhetoric. I mean, you may think that there's no difference.

I do believe I'm fact-based. His rhetoric gets pretty Manichaean and hyperbolic. I think he was becoming increasingly hyperbolic. I'm for total closed borders at this point, but he was frankly exaggerating. the extent of criminality in the immigrant population. My objection is cultural. So I think that we can have... other strong leaders who are not cowed by the claim of being a racist that are not necessarily Trump.

And I hope they come forward. And I hope J.D. Vance, I know, I'm really hoping that Vance can maybe restrain Trump's worst impulses. I'm not looking forward to the tweets again so that Vance gets eight years at it.

The immigration issue is very interesting and complicated and also seems different here in the U.S. than in Europe, where you referenced the French. There does seem to be a... And almost this is going to be hyperbolic and maybe it's not fair. There's an almost proto crusades thing going on in Europe. It seems like we're just going to let you take over. Right. Just come on in and take over. It's ironic. We've abandoned the church. You can have it all. Yeah. Like I'm just.

I'm like holding onto the table for dear life as an Italian Catholic that the Vatican doesn't somehow, something bad happened to the Vatican, even physically. Yeah. It's the anti-crusades. I mean, it's the crusades in reverse. They're reconquesting. It's unbelievable.

The ironies are incredible. But I think, wouldn't you agree that it might be a net positive if we shipped every gender studies graduate in exchange for two Mexican-Americans? Wouldn't that be a good trade? I mean, can't we? There's all kinds of immigration innovation we could. come up with together, surely, right? Get a bunch of hardworking Catholics in, send a bunch of blue hairs out.

There's no formulation of an immigration policy that you would be on board with? Can't we have like a middle ground between that? I don't know. I guess it depends on the... I just think we're importing third world culture. I don't think is it inevitable that the corruption, it's all going to titrate out.

And they're not going to bring that here. I mean, you're seeing in some of the small Southern California cities, a lot of corruption that are heavily Hispanic. So I would choose as an immigration policy, high skills. and people that are going to assimilate, you know, there's still not much. Well, the English language learning is not great in a lot of the Southern California.

Hispanic communities. What about Texas? We do great. We got all kinds of Mexicans. My son went to a school that was 88% Mexican. It's great. We're probably farthest apart from each other on integration. Probably so, right. Although I will say... you can't escape, no matter where you stand, if you're like Alex and Rasta, Brian Kaplan type, or if you're completely on the other side. The political reality is that when...

immigration gets too voluminous, there's a political reaction that you can't escape. That seems to be... almost natural law like the chinese exclusion act the 1924 constraints it seems like there's a certain limit that gets touched that's where it just happens people just like i can't accept this

For some reason. Yeah. I mean, as you say, America is a special case and it's harder to argue for the thousand year tradition as Camus does of the French people. And the only a nation of immigrants is I mean, I mean. Yeah, as you know, I'm sure that there's a pushback in some circles about that, that there was, in fact, a core ethnic and cultural identity that was Anglo-American.

mass immigration was quite late and that there is a cultural heritage coming from Europe. So whether the... the mestizo Indians that are coming in to be electric bike delivery workers are going to feel a continuity and an affinity with... The tradition of European civilization, I'm just not sure. But by now, you know, we have our mainstream institutions betraying that anyway. But ideally...

People who come in would be those that say, okay, I want to embrace, you know, the culture of George Eliot and Dickens and Trollope and Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Andrew Marvel. and Beethoven and Mozart and Chopin. So I understand things move, evolve, evolve. I love Latin American music. I love the folk music. So I don't know. I still think I would prefer to take in people with higher levels of education and with an...

a stated interest in the Western legacy. As we start to wrap up, I want to stay on this subject for a little bit. It's connected to our broader conversation. And this is where we're going to, I think, maybe have more difference, but I'm an open-minded person on this. I'm not doctrinaire.

one aspect of the immigration story that for, and this is like, maybe this is my own personal identity politics. I bring it up. My, my, my heritage. Did you see the movie Cabrini by any chance? No. So it's the story we actually interviewed. I interviewed Eustace Wolfington, the executive producer, and I loved it. It's a story of this Catholic nun, Sister Francesca Cabrini, who comes to the States at the turn of the last century.

And is, you know, comes to New York City and starts to build orphanages and hospitals and the ultimate embodiment of entrepreneurial civil society for Italian-American immigrants who at that time were the largest immigrant group. coming to the state. I think there's 5 million almost entirely southern Italians that come to America. And I heard this from my own great-grandparents, that when we came...

A, there's a lot of merit tests that Sicilians weren't going to pass. Like, if you try to put in place some kind of IQ or anything, it's like, no, we're a bunch of band... It's like, they called us banditos. Like, there's a lot of, um, simpatico. as an Italian American with the current Mexican, but broader Latin American. They called us Latins.

I looked at my great grandfather's naturalization paperwork and it's like dark. Like we were like not white people until relatively recently as a people. So like even the notion of whiteness. My back stiffens with that term because it's like, A, as someone with Roman genetics, I will stand by the Western civilizational structures and go to the wall for them.

But the whiteness thing. Well, I don't know. Romans are, that's not, that's a different thing. That's like some Nordic Anglo stuff. I'm not, I don't feel like I'm going to go. You know, all in on that. I don't like that. I don't think that that's representative of what Western civilization is. I think that's adopting a construct of the wacky race collectivist left. I think people on the right need to just not go there. What about Caucasian? Because there are...

Contrary to what the left says, that race is a social construct, at the same time they say, if you don't see my race, you're not seeing me. So I don't know how we'd scare that one. But there are actually genetically marked... racial groups, and Caucasians are one of that. So you're a Caucasian. You know, it's a group that has come down. from Northern Europe. But anyway, I... The reason why I'm bringing all this up is to say that the... We have...

brought in lots of people who didn't fit with the prior people and we became awesome Americans. I don't see any reason why that can't continue to be true. I think there's a completely reasonable conversation about rate and about the way. Certainly. I have no love for the Democrats on any of this. They're just liars. They claim they care and they've done nothing to change the rules of the system. DACA was just illegal. It's just like extra legal.

presidential nonsense that's not statute. But I hope we can have something more sophisticated about when it comes to immigration than just... build that wall and send them all home. I don't know that that is in keeping with what this country has done in its history. What's your response to that concern? I guess I would say that... I would agree with you that it's about numbers and I think mass migration of low-skilled immigrants that are not necessarily literate even in their home languages.

is not a way to increase the average capacities of the United States. And I know Texans love Texas. There are parts of Los Angeles where I grew up. that just look terrible now. There's litter everywhere. It looks like a third world country. Isn't that just like California?

We didn't get a chance to talk so much about the destruction of the police. We'll save that for our next conversation. But how much of that, is that really that it's Latin Americans coming to California? Or is it just California lefty whack job governance that doesn't want to... do anything about basic public crimes. Well, I'm not speaking about crimes so much as just the text. Well, litter and all of that is part of it. Well, but the people are littering. So, you know.

That's a cultural value. Like there's the mountains of California now. There's... recreational areas, little springs and whatnot that are just completely litter filled. And Tucker Carlson got in a... big trouble at one point by saying it's Hispanic immigrants, but it's true. Those are the ones that are leaving the trash there. So there are cultural norms that can be overcome, you know, in with a...

better assimilation. But as Mark Krikorian would argue, the problem maybe is not the immigrants, it's us, that we no longer believe in assimilation and saying these are values that you will conform to. So I'm just not in favor of more poor, low-skilled Hispanic immigrants that are not necessarily passing on. the social capital that I think I'd rather see in our country. But I understand the immigrant history here. Italians, you know, they...

They're very much part of the West, obviously. The Sicilians, you may say, you know, a little less. But even so, I mean, my God, look at the opera houses down there in Palermo. The Mexicans that we're getting are the mestizos. You know, it's not really this, it's not the Spanish, Hispanic roots there. It's a different people. So I would just say... Let's select on the basis of skills, language capacity, and likelihood of assimilating. The invasion that you see at the border, I think, is not...

is not going to necessarily improve our country. So one way to connect the dots from our earlier part of the conversation is... We should have merit-based entrance into the U.S. just as the universities should have merit-based entrance. Right. Absolutely. Which they don't. And, you know, we always talk about Canada. There are other countries that do screen, but even Canada now is saying...

It's too many. You know, we've got, this is not working out. So I just, I do think that cultures have a right to say they don't want to change it. That's sort of an issue. Can a culture say, I like it the way I am? We like being the way we are. We don't want to change. Or should immigration policy ultimately be determined by people living outside the country? Because that's sort of the way it is now. When you have de facto open borders, we can set our immigration.

policy and it doesn't really matter. It's whoever wants to come in. And I acknowledge that it's an open question. To me, it seems... You may argue it's self-defeating and you're trying to cut yourself off and you won't thrive as a culture. Nevertheless, it seems to me the right of a culture if Hungary wants to say, we like our Hungarian culture. And we don't want to take in immigrants. That's their right. There's something about America when you talk about culture.

that is fundamentally different than Europe. Because from the get-go, we're multicultural. And we are very big. I mean, we're the size of all of continental Europe, right? Like, roughly. within continental europe you've got this discomfort between the groups you know you've got

very distinct blood and soil nations that have truly a fairly homogenous culture. You go to, it's funny, the left loves to lionize Scandinavian countries. You want to see overt racism. Spend some time in the Scandinavian countries. But they're monocultures, by and large. You know, immigration is starting to impact that in ways that they're pushing back on. America isn't like Europe, though. I mean, it might be like Europe writ large, but we...

What is American culture? Like, how would you even define what American culture is? Well, I think there was a core, and I would also say we were multicultural. Yeah, we had Germans in the beginning. and French, but it was individuals that are coming in. You know, Albion Seed, the famous book that got so much attention, he talks about the four different folkways, but they're all from different parts of England and Scotland. The core really was an...

Anglo tradition with some around the edges of the Germans, as I say. And we had places that spoke, you know, German was the official language. So, you know, that's on your side of the question. I would say that throughout the 19th century, there was a pretty defined... american culture now you can also come at that from other words yeah what about blacks and i that's a question that i found myself asking myself all the time well even to that end what is culture in the i mean if there's one area

There aren't more than one. There's obviously black American contributors to lots of parts of American life. But some of the things that we typically think of as culture, especially music, African-Americans have had like... They are the, they are American pop culture. Like they literally, they, they, they, you know, jazz, rock and roll, hip hop. These are, these are American culture. I mean, we can not like.

gangster rap, but hip hop is an American cultural export. Yes, I would say it is a culture. I wouldn't say it's the culture. I would put in... the American Songbook and Jews' contribution as equal jazz. I think the American Songbook is our main contribution to world culture. But yes, you're right. Still, you know, I do think that there was a core identity there that expected assimilation. On your behalf, I would recommend H.L. Mencken's autobiography of growing up in Baltimore.

called Happy Days. He's an extraordinary writer. Oh, yeah, I love H.O. Manning. But he describes, you know, his school principal that would go around... flattering one ethnic group after another. So one day he'd be the Polish American, the next day he'd be the Scandinavian American. And so very much to your point about the multicultural, multinational nature of America. This was in the late 19th century.

Mencken was a little bit ironic towards this. But I think it's a question of numbers and source. And I do think European... stream in is different from the global self? I think the area where our shared values can come together on this question is this. There is an Americanism that I think is baked into the vision of the founders. That...

We should, and it is the sort of distillation, as I think of it, I think of it, maybe I'm just super romantic, but our founding principles, our founding documents, the things that make us special as a unit of governance. are worthy of defense, of celebration, of inculcation, of assimilation. And if you're going to be an American, you better love being an American. And being an American is a set of ideas.

that ain't communism it isn't divide and conquer identity politics it is all men are created equal endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights and i think if we could i think one of the things that creates this immigration tension Maybe for you, and I'll let you respond to this before I ask my typical last question of the show, is... Do you find yourself reacting against some of this in part because we are no longer a country doing that?

We're not saying, come on in. We're not doing the Statue of Liberty poem, but saying, you're going to be an American, and you're going to salute the flag, and you're going to know the civics of our country, and you're going to... make it your secular creed. Is that part of what makes it more uncomfortable for you as we look at this immigration situation? Yeah. As I said, just to repeat, you know, Mark Krikorian says the problem is us.

not the immigrants, is that we are not asking for assimilation. We are not testing commitment to the American creed. So that is definitely a problem. You know, if we had a sense that people were coming because of those ideas and not just, you know, you're going to... Obviously, wanting to better yourself and have a better job, that's also very American. Getting a handout or an Obamathon or an apartment here in Manhattan is not the American way. Right, right.

So, yeah, I mean, that's certainly a middle ground. I just, I do think that migration from the global south is the issue of the 21st century. And I think... If it is allowed to go unchecked with a total transfer, I think that's going to be a problem. And I think, again, how about you fix the problems in your own country?

I think it's a reasonable position. Heather McDonald, I ask this of every guest. We call the show Dad Saves America because I think that is a role that we as men play that is powerful and important and heroic. And so... When you think about your work and what you do in your life, how do you see your role in the American story? I never thought about that, and I don't think I have one. I just, I, um, I...

My role, I guess, is somebody who's no longer going to be cowed by being called a racist. And I believe in, even though I really am a postmodernist from my training. So part of me doesn't believe in truth. Yet, of course, I'm also going to say, you know, I know these facts and they sure look like the truth to me. Although as an abstract philosophical matter, I can say, well, you know, it's all standpoint theory and whatnot.

But I do think that there are facts that rebut the narratives that are tearing everything down. And I guess I think of myself as somebody who loves... greatness and beauty and sublimity. I love the classical music tradition. I love literature. And I want to fight for those things. And I hope I can convince other people.

that if they die before hearing Chopin or Brahms solo piano music or some of the great Mozart operas or reading Middlemarch, that they have... lived a poor life and that there are things there that are worth defending Heather McDonald thank you for being on Dad Saves America I will be having you back as soon as I can I think I look forward to it thank you so much great conversation John you

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