The Matt Walsh Show - Discussing Systemic Racism With Heather Mac Donald

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

I sat down with Heather Mac Donald to discuss race relations.   Go to https://expressvpn.com/walshYT and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And we're joined today by Heather McDonald. She's the author of the recent bestseller when race trumps merit, how the pursuit of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty, and threatens lives. Heather, thanks for joining us. It's an honor, Matt. Yeah, thanks for me here. In fact, it's fortunate we're talking today because there's a couple issues that have recently come up that I wanted to ask you about. But first, you know, you've been speaking out against the race hustlers and the anti-racist grifters for a long time, of course.

how do you just from a general perspective, how do you assess the state of that movement, of that scam right now today? I think it's still very strong, Matt, despite the Supreme Court ruling. Now, you and I are both innate pessimists, but I'm sorry, I do not see any cessation of it. Amazingly, the STEM fields, medicine continues to pump out daily statements about medicine and being racist. Somebody just sent me a Case Western Reserve medical school saying we need to change the curriculum of our medical school because of the demographics of our student body.

We need to be teaching humility. We know what that means. I'm quoting them verbatim. I'd never heard that one before. But one can guess that it means whites have to go around apologizing for the alleged racism that leads to disparate outcomes. recently the Oakland District Attorney in Alameda County gave a training to the victim services units about how to not be harmed by white victims. The idea is that if a white crime victim is seeking redress, that somehow that's going to threaten staff of color.

So the war on Western civilization simply because it is deemed too white and too many, the war on standards simply because they have a disparate impact on blacks. I do not see it falling off at all. And I don't see conservatives willing to stand up to the race hustle and articulate what's really going on. So when you see, you mentioned the Supreme Court ruling, but even many of these corporations that it seems anyway from the outside have, some of them have started to deemple, some of the DEI stuff they're pushing pretty heavily for a couple of years. When you see that, you don't see progress. You see, what's happening? Are they just

kind of pivoting because they realize that certain methods aren't working or what? Well, they still have their narcissist young employee workforce that has been brainwashed by K-12 education and put a finishing touch in college that is on the lookout for phantom signs of racism and sexism, those employees are not going to go away. And corporate wives are not going away, which push their husbands to be more woke. So maybe they're going to, you know, we have now Edward Blum who brought the suit against Harvard and University of North Carolina doing lawsuits against various law firms that have blacks only fellowship programs. And he just brought suit against West Point for having racial preferences and admissions. If I were an optimist,

I would say, yes, you know, bring it on. We'll sue people into submission, but that's piecemeal, and it also puts an undue faith in the judiciary. You know, one of the most disturbing moments for me in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that tried to, you know, run an absolute superb jurist out of the country, basically was when you had the students at the Harvard and Yale law schools protesting with signs that said believe survivors. That ethic that a female who claims sexual assault is entitled to automatic belief is the antithesis of due process. Those graduates of Harvard and Yale are being pumped onto the federal judiciary at way disproportionate rates. If they don't change their thinking, and I have no reason to think they will, we can't assume,

redress from the courts in the future. So I just think it's going to take a hell of a lot more honesty than I'm willing to, that I've been able to hear from our leaders. What do you think, so culturally we have, there's sort of race and then there's also, there's also gender ideology. These two things are, there's a lot of overlap there. Of course, they're related. But what do you think is for the left, which is the more potent, vehicle for, you know, cultural domination and for getting their ideology across and indoctrinating people into the ideology? Because gender or race, what do you think is the more kind of potent tool for them? Wow. And I'd also like your response to whether you think things

are improving. I cannot, I cannot put a hierarchy on those. On the one hand, the race hustle is giving an excuse to tear down meritocratic standards across both. the STEM fields across the arts, across theater, across classical music, certainly in the criminal justice system. If people don't understand that disparate impact is driving this perplexing behavior of prosecutors that are declaring entire areas of criminal behavior off limits to prosecution, they have to understand it's all driven by race, because if they prosecute those crimes in a colorblind constitutional fashion, they will have to understand. a disparate impact on black criminals and the left has decided it cares more about black criminals

than black victims so the the race hustle is is allowing us to very quickly self-cancel it is is the the suicide of the west but so is gender ideology gender ideology what are we doing in a gay pride march but celebrating non-procreative sex we are celebrating people who are not choosing their their preferred sexual partners, they are not engaged in procreative sex. And we're, again, it's part of the great replacement theory. We are making sure that the West simply self-cancels. So they both are operating at very profound levels. The one tearing down meritocratic standards, the ability of students to be pushed to accomplish

at their highest level, we're tearing down gifted and talented math education across the country. Somebody just sent me something from the Sequoia School District, which is around Palo Alto and Menlo Park, where they are getting rid of advanced placement courses or advanced accelerated courses

in math, science, and English because of disparate impact. So we're tearing that down, but we're also tearing down the basis of civilization, which is the family. Profiling, surveillance, and data harvesting are a few things not to like about tech giants. But what can you actually do about it when you rely on so many of their products? Well, the good news is it doesn't take

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business. Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Walsh YT. Use my link at ExpressVPN.com slash Walsh YT to get three extra months free. That's EXPRSVPN.com slash Walsh YT. But let me turn it back to you. Do you, are you optimistic? And which do you think is of of greater power as a battering ram against civilization, the race hustle or the gender ideology? Well, I'm never optimistic, so that's an easy question. Easy question for me to answer. But I basically agree with you.

I think that I do think that in certain areas, you know, it's a little bit of a whack-a-mole thing. So there are certain areas where they've had to pivot, and the left's very good at this, they rename things, they realize it's something, something is bad, you know, the branding isn't good anymore, so they have to kind of rebrand. And, you know, the pushback against CRT was successful in a lot of ways, but it doesn't mean that that ideology is just going to disappear. And they still, the powers that be in our country still realize that this is a very potent

tool for profit for them and also for control. They're not just going to give it up. They certainly aren't. And between gender and race, it's, I'm not exactly sure. I think it's, I think it is basically impossible to rank the two. So maybe I was asking you an impossible question, which isn't exactly fair. maybe I would say that long term, you know, maybe the race hustle maybe has longer legs in the long term. Right now, the gender seems to be maybe the more potent tool for them at this exact moment.

So maybe that's, if I had to balance the two, maybe that's the way that I would do it. I agree. I agree. And I would just, I would qualify something you said, which is as a tool for profit and control. That's true. And it is certainly true that there are. a lot of race hustlers whose entire jobs depend on the idea that being black is an accomplishment or counterpart that being female is an accomplishment. I know that being female is not an

accomplishment. And I would also say that being gay is not an accomplishment and being black is not an accomplishment. None of those things should qualify anybody for a job. And yet they do again and again and again. And the idea that everything is caused by systemic racism has given birth to a vast consulting scam. But I think that conservatives move a little too quickly to sort of an economic explanation that, oh, this is all about profit or whatever. It is about control, and certainly we've seen that for the COVID hysteria. But it is also, I think, we have to understand, these are true believers. I don't think that they are adopting a set of phony propositions that they agree as such. I think they actually are committed to the idea that

the West is endemically racist and the source of the world's problems, whereas in fact, of course, the opposite is the case. No civilization has provided as much surcease from pain, suffering, premature death, squalor, you know, cold famine than the West. I mean, it's not. It's not, even close. It is not even close. Everything. Just do a little inventory leftists of your apartment or home right now. Do an inventory of every material, every electrical appliance, every labor saving device, your smartphones, water, you've got clean water. You can flip on a switch and get light. You're not overcome with darkness, which was the fate of human beings for millennia. It's all thanks to white overwhelmingly male scientist and tinkers that starting in the early 18th century,

some back in the 17th century with the British society, were fascinated to understand the world, develop the scientific method, and gave us this incredible tapestry of excellence and comfort and beauty that we live with. Well said. I think actually you might have just tapped into one of the, potentially one of the critical differences between going back to the race and gender question because I think I think you're right that the race hustlers, certainly on the lower levels are true believers for the most part. And leftists in general, everything they say about race. I mean, I think they do basically believe it. They're confused enough to believe it. Now, on the other end, the people that are pushing a lot of this trans stuff and the idea that men can be women and women can be men, I think a lot of them don't really believe it, because you can't believe it because it's so incoherent. There's no way that you really believe it, especially if you're an educated person in science, you know that this is not true. So maybe that's one of the differences that the gender stuff is being pushed by people who really are entirely cynical

and they don't believe it. The race stuff is being pushed by true believers, maybe. Well, I get asked this all the time, and I'm sure you do too, which is, well, tell us what the interstate, the psychology or the epistemology of these people are, do they believe it? And again, my instinct is to say that they do, because I can't imagine being that cynical throughout your life, that you are deliberately, like there's a sequence, and maybe it's simply instantaneous, which is, well, I know this is all, as you've said many times, this is an idea that represents It's like a nano of a millisecond of a, of a, like, silia within the millennia of human history,

and all of a sudden it becomes the new default that men can menstruate and females can procreate through penises. This is just astounding. But that they would say that I know it's fake, and yet I'm going to now go and destroy childhood innocence through the premature exposure of children to sexuality. I don't even care if it's heterosexual or trans

or LGBTQ sexuality. Children should be in that zone of innocence. And I know again, I am just repeating one of the most crucial themes that you have been educating your listeners about, which is that you as parents have a duty to preserve your children's innocence and their capacity for imagination as long as possible, because it will provide them a haven from despair and ugliness as adults.

But I can't imagine that people would be that cynical to say, I don't believe it, but I'm going to pursue these policies anyway. Let me ask you, I think it's very important to equip people with arguments, and that's what I try to do. Of course, you do great job with that in all of your books. Anyone listening right now, we've talked about systemic racism, and that's a big part of the whole race hustle. I think many normal people, when they hear about systemic racism,

intuitively they don't believe it because they can look around a society and see, like, where is this systemic racism? But what you'll hear from the other side is that, well, it's ingrained in the system. There's the vestiges of racism in the past. The system was set up originally by racist people, and so it's still, and you have the disparate impact, as you mentioned. So I know it's a broad question, but how, how? How would you suggest people deal with that and respond to that argument?

Well, I would first start out, and you're right, systemic racism, there used to be the scientific theory of phlogiston, which was this kind of colorless substance that was just assumed to be existing, and it was used as the catch-all explanation for any physical process you couldn't understand, and it had no existence. It was just, it was a placeholder for ignorance, and you had the miasma theory of infection. all these things that were discredited. Systemic racism works the same way. When you don't want to acknowledge the actual causes

of disparate outcomes, which is the academic skills gap, you invoke systemic racism, but you can never actually prove it per se. You can't find it, you can't see it, but it's the fallback explanation. What I would first say is, okay, this idea that we are remaining a discriminative, a racist society, show me any

institution that is not twisting itself into knots to hire and promote as many blacks as possible. How can it be that we're told that universities say, you must allow us to continue with racial preferences because if we don't have them, we will not be able to get our desired critical mass of blacks. And so they are willing to lower their academic standards to an extraordinary degree to admit black students and then the pressure is ubiquitous and constant in every academic hiring search to find the few blacks who have graduated with PhDs in electrical engineering, which ends up being in the STEM fields about 1% at most of PhDs and in STEM fields are granted to blacks and in many

fields there's none. But the pressure is on to hire those few that are out there and they get enormous bidding wars and salaries. Of course, the pressure is also on to hire females in STEM and females get hired ahead of males at rates like at some places three to one. How can it be that these are racist institutions? It's literally a logical contradiction that they are so determined to have blacks in them that they are bending their standards. And yet at the same time, they're discriminating against blacks.

It does not compute. And anybody that is vaguely aware of his workplace, if he's in a law firm, say, an elite law firm, knows that the name of the game is how to black associates are hired out of law school at rates disproportionate to whites. They're hired with lower class ranking. And the pressure is constant from both the American Bar Association, and internally from firms to promote those into blacks into into firm partners.

Now, of course, there are thousands of blacks who are out committing, out competing whites in Asians, thousands. They are getting by on their hard work, on their self-discipline. So I don't want to say that this is a, you know, a problem that has no exceptions. But given the reality of mismatch, when you bring people into an institution that have lower academic skills than their peers, they're going to struggle. And that happens both in academic environments, and it happens in places like law firms. So there's black associates who were hired on the basis of race end up leaving the law firm because they're not keeping up. But nevertheless, you can look at the law firms and say,

all they care about is racial proportionality, and we're both supposed to believe they're racist. Please explain that. And here is what the explanation is, is that people need to hear. And Matt, I mean, I realize that this entire conversation is very difficult for people to observe, to witness, to participate in, because we have very strong race etiquette in this country. Another way of disproving the white supremacy argument,

you know, it is not, as you've said before, it is not the behavior of white supremacists to turn their eyes away from black-on-white violence and to pretend that the problem in this country is white on black violence when 87% of all interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks is committed by blacks, when blacks are 35 times more likely to commit a violent assault against a white than a white is against a black. It's not the behavior of white supremacists to not look at that. But here, I'm sorry, these are uncomfortable facts, but here's the explanation for unconstitutional. ongoing racial disparities in meritocratic fields like STEM or law or corporate high-tech

finance, you know, Silicon Valley engineers. Here's the data. If you look at black 12th graders, 66% of all black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills defined as being able to to do arithmetic or read a graph. 7% of black 12th grade students are proficient in math, and the number who are advanced is too small in a national sample to even show up statistically.

That makes the expectation of equal outcomes absent racism simply impossible. It cannot be done. The fact of the matter is you can have diversity or you can have meritocracy. You cannot have both in light of current academic skills gaps. And any institution that loudly proclaims that it is behind diversity. And diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are its prime values, is telling you Soto Voce that it is lowering standards and is cast aside meritocracy.

On meritocracies, the last question I want to ask you on that topic, because you're talking about merit, the need to assess people based on merit. The equity pushers will say that we can't assess everybody. We can't assess everyone equally based on merit because we're not all starting from the same place. This is Camille Harris's line, and she didn't come up with it, obviously. But the difference between equality and equity is, you know, equality is the assumption that we're all starting from the same place.

And so you just treat everyone the same and let people. be free and that's equality. But the problem was we can't do that because some people are starting the race farther up the track. And so equity is to put everyone at the same starting point, which means boosting some people ahead of time so that then we can have from there an equal race. How do you respond to that absurd claim? Well, if the disparity is diminished over time and you gave people reference, you know, you admitted black students to selective colleges with 200-point difference in SATs, a standard deviation, and by the end of the four years or six years, they had caught up,

you know, that may, that would be something that we should definitely consider because it would show that, well, you can close the disparities this late in life, but it doesn't happen. In fact, the opposite is the case. You are putting a handicap on students. It is that racial preferences are incredibly cruel and sadistic. They are the most cruel policy of these damn college presidents and administrators because they are putting a unique burden on black students to be catapulted in academic environments for which they're not qualified and in which they will predictably struggle and fall behind. This is not about race.

It's simply about academic mismatch. And let me put it in the context of some of some of the fact that. context of sex. Let's say MIT wants more females in its undergraduate class, and that's not a hypothesis. Of course, it does. Every school that's a tech school is obsessed with gender, and so it has gender sex preferences, and it admits me with SATs on my math score of 600 on an 800-point scale, whereas my peers are all admitted basically with 800s. my male peers because they've been admitted based on merit and I've been admitted based on my sex. Well, what's going to happen in my freshman year? I'm going to struggle because the teaching is

understandably and legitimately pitched at the average skill of my classmates, which is very high. And I'm likely to say, I can't keep up, I'm dropping out of the STEM field, I'm going to major in MIT's Gender Studies Department, and of course, the diversity bureaucrats will be ready at hand to tell me that I'm the victim of misogyny and rape culture, and that's why I'm not keeping up. The same thing happens with black students. They are catapulted with much greater academic skills gaps into schools for which they're not competitively qualified. If they had been admitted to schools with the same skills as their peers, let's say instead of getting into MIT, they went to Boston College or Austin University, or instead of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, went to a university, a North Carolina state school that was less prestigious, they would do just fine. And that's what everybody else does. You know, it's not the end of the world to not go to an elite Ivy League

school. Believe it or not, college presidents, you bunch of elitist snarling curs, it is possible to get a decent education and to become a leader at a second and third tier school. So the idea that because maybe we don't start ahead, we have to at the end of the process, lower our standards, A, it doesn't work, and B, here's what's happening when we lower standards. We are now lowering standards for the medical school licensing exam, part one, because blacks don't do well enough on it. So we've gone from a graded, it's called step one of the U.S. medical licensing exam. It used to be graded as of 2021 January.

It went to pass-fail basis so we would cover up the ongoing skills gap. Black medical students were doing the worst in their classes. They were not landing their preferred residencies. So we've decided we'll just get rid of those standards. The pressure is on throughout medical school to change standards for medical licensing. The curriculum is being changed. The Honor Society credentials are being changed. There's less and less time being devoted to clinical practice and understanding how to save a body that's been crushed in a car accident

and more time students are spending learning about systemic racism in medical school. So if you care about whether you're going to get the best qualified doctor walking through that ER, or whether you've got the best qualified oncologist trying to finally solve the mystery of cancer or the best qualified neurologist trying to save human beings from the scourge of Alzheimer's disease, it ain't happening. The federal government is giving grants for science research based on race, not based on skill. We are slowing down our progress.

Meanwhile, China is barreling ahead at mock speed with its math education, with its science education. It is finding its most talented students throwing everything it's got at them and saying, go whoop America's ass, and it is happening.

Yeah. And I would also note that you said, really, you don't have to go to Ivy League school at all. You can survive. Actually, you can go to no school. You can go to no college at all and still survive as I've discovered. Well, there's a lot more we can say about this, of course, and you say a lot more in your book, Win Race Trump's Merit, and that can be picked up anywhere you get books, including Amazon. Heather MacDonald, thanks. Thanks again. Really appreciate it. I appreciate it, Matt. Thank you so much.