The Megyn Kelly Show - Bud Light Backlash Grows, Mr. Beast Fallout, and Race Trumping Merit, with Michael Knowles and Heather Mac Donald | Ep. 530

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Michael Knowles, host of The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles Show, to talk about Budweiser CEO's non-apology over the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light campaign backlash, the corporate identity crisis, Bud Light transitioning to a new identity, Donald Trump Jr. defending Budweiser, the LGB vs. TQ in today's society, James O'Keefe's new Dylan Mulvaney video, the left's manipulation of language and whether to use preferred pronouns, a trans professor canceling on Knowles ahead of their debate, fallout for Mr. Beast in wake of co-star's trans transformation, and more. Then Heather Mac Donald, author of "When Race Trumps Merit," joins to discuss colleges claiming it's racism when their student body isn’t diverse enough, self-destructive ideology in some areas of the Black community, Black privilege vs. white privilege, a push to eliminate AP and honors classes in America, the elimination of merit when it comes to healthcare and medicine, getting rid of standards and merit in classical music and the arts, and more.Knowles: https://www.michaeljknowles.comMac Donald: https://store.dailywire.com/products/when-race-trumps-merit-by-heather-mac-donaldFollow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday. I hope you had a better weekend than Budweiser did. Oh my gosh, I'm dying to talk to you about that case. There is so much news to get to today and we have two of our favorites. I love our guests today. Later in the show, I will be joined by the one and only Heather MacDonald, the most fearless commentator in America. I really think she is. And that's a tough lane because people are getting more bold, but none is so bold as Heather MacDonald. This will be her first interview about her absolutely amazing new book,

Everything by Heather is Worth Reading. And that includes her latest offering, which we'll get to. But we begin with another favorite of the MK show, and that is The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show. Michael, welcome back. You are just as bold as Heather MacDonald, but you're a lot younger, so you can't yet have the title of number one. I am happy to play number two to the great Heather MacDonald. It's a great honor in itself. I thought you'd feel that way. Okay. We got to kick it off with Bud Light because after we wrapped the show on Friday, the CEO of Budweiser put out that pathetic, rambling, empty air sandwich of, I can't even call it an apology, an attempt to dissuade people from hating his company and him. It was an utter fail. And then they tried to release an ad to cover up any hard feelings. Let's show the horses again. Look at the pretty

horses. See, we're all about America. So let's, let me just start with his statement for those who missed it, right? I'll give the audience a couple of highlights in case they were living their lives and not paying attention to what the CEO of Anheuser-Busch said. His name is Brendan Whitworth, Whitworth. And he said, as the CEO of a company founded in America's heartland, drink. Okay, we're going to drink every time he tries to appeal to their working class base. Booze it up there with, oh, I was drinking out of that just this morning. Daily Wire left us tears. Okay.

As the CEO of a company founded in America's heartland more than 165 years ago, I am responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew. We're honored to be a part of the fabric of this country. Drink. Anheuser-Busch employees, more than 18,000 people, blah, blah, blah. We have thousands of partners, millions of fans, and a proud history of supporting our communities. Military. Go ahead, sir.

First responders. Go ahead. Sports fans. and hardworking Americans everywhere. We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We're in the business of bringing people together over a beer. Then he goes on for this for good measure my time serving this country here we go okay the fact that he's a veteran that's supposed to appease anybody's objections taught me the importance of accountability and the values upon which america was founded freedom hard work respect for one another what does any of this have to do with their yeah noel's is just in a permanent uh down pour right now down his throat as ceo of anheuser-Busch, I'm focused on building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage. I care deeply about this country, this company, our brands, and our partners.

Blah, blah, blah. I will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation. This is an utter fail. None of this appeases any of us who objected to their bizarre Dylan Mulvaney campaign embrace of wokeness and of a person who spends his life essentially mocking women and womanhood none of it and the closest he comes to an apology is we never intended to be part of a discussion that

divides people well you are you were and you haven't apologized. So Michael, what do we make first of all of the statement? Megan, I don't know what Anheuser-Busch is paying to its crisis communications consultants right now, but I'm happy to take even a fraction of that for better advice than they've gotten, which is shut up. Stop talking. You are only making things worse. And frankly, they could have stopped about a week ago. Do you remember a week ago, Anheuser-Busch came out and they leaked through anonymous sources to the media that the people who were in senior leadership positions, they didn't know anything about this. It was a rogue VP of marketing who engaged in the Mulvaney campaign. Listen, conservatives, Budweiser's really on your side. Okay, we're going to sort this out.

And I never believed a word of that. One, because Budweiser had already made a statement essentially defending the ad campaign. But two, because this is exactly the kind of gobbledygook that crisis communications people always cook up. It allows the company to placate everybody, not totally to satisfy anyone in particular. They say, look, the senior people, the old fuddy duddies, they're on the conservative side. The young whippersnappers who are going to take over the company someday, they're on the progressive side and okay, move along, move along.

Now if they had just left it at that, probably Budweiser could have recovered from this. They lost something like $6 billion in market cap one day. It would have jumped right back up. These things happen, but it's because they keep digging on this losing issue and they refuse to pick a side. On certain political issues, we can meet in the middle. Issues like taxation, you can find the number in the middle. On issues like immigration, you can find the number in the middle. On certain issues, you can't meet in the middle. Transgenderism happens to be one of those issues.

Either women exist and men can't become them, or women don't exist as a real category and anybody can become a woman if he says he's a woman. You have to pick a side. Either women will be allowed to have their own bathrooms or they won't. Either women will be allowed to have their own sports teams or they won't. On this issue, if you stand in the middle of the road, you will be hit by a truck as is happening to Anheuser-Busch right now. By the way, he's all about America and his service to America. And we were founded in America's heartland. This company is owned by the Belgians. This is a Belgian company now. OK, so it may have been found in America.

Just spare me with your American by American. No, this is not an American company. It's HQ is in America. But this is a Belgian company. When you buy Anheuser-Busch products like Bud Light, you're paying money to the Belgians. Not some guy who served his country, I'm sure, honorably who's now sitting in America but working for some Belgians. So spare me on your stupid horses, okay? Do they really believe that Americans were so stupid, were such yokels, that if you throw out a few platitudes about hard work in the military, that we're going to forget everything? Give me a break. Thank you for saying that.

It's so annoying. Screw you and your stupid empty platitudes. I mean, I read this. I'm like, oh, you're a little market-tested buzzwords on what's supposed to stir up our patriotism. Too late, sir. The buzzwords we were looking for are stir up our patriotism. Too late, sir. The buzzwords we were looking for are, I'm sorry, we screwed up. And this woman, whatever her name is, VP of marketing is fired. Her ass is fired because whether she dreamed this up or not, she clearly

approved it. It happened on her watch. Do something to show us you get it. Because by the way, it's not just the ad campaign that has people very angry. That's number one. But her comments on that podcast about how, which is too fratty. This brand is outdated. Talk about not getting your audience base. What do you mean by fratty? Are most of your customers out there drinking beer from condoms like you did when you were

in college, ma'am? Because I've seen the videotape. I never did that. I went to Syracuse University, Albany Law School. Never once. Good luck trying to find a picture of me drinking out of a condom. Didn't happen. All right. So spare me your judgment on your customer base. But that's what she's trying to say, Michael. They're disgusting. They're deplorable. It was another deplorables moment. It was a deplorables moment. And it was a moment of these elite, liberal power players taking their customer base for granted because

they assume that the frat boys are going to keep drinking Bud Light and they assume that construction workers are going to keep drinking Bud Light and they assume that everybody who goes into a bar and just wants a cheap light beer is going to continue to order Bud Light no matter how much we're insulted because, oh, you know, who cares what those people think? And I think they were truly shocked at the degree of organization here by the people who have been insulted. And I think they've been surprised at some of the other beer companies coming out, yingling through some great corporate shade at Bud Light. They posted a picture of yingling beer in front of an American flag with a sunrise and it said, the Yingling has been making beer here for almost 200 years. We support America. We make good beer.

We're independently owned. That was pretty much the whole ad. And I think that Yingling was getting ahead of this because they're afraid that my friend here, Jeremy Boring, is going to start Jeremy's lager pretty soon. 100%. There's obviously, there's a background here of conservatives finally saying, no, you're going to insult regular Americans and tell us to teach our daughters to shave their face, or we're going to start our own razor company. You're going to insult ordinary Americans and try to trans the chocolate bars? Okay, we're going to start our own chocolate company. And it's only a matter of time before the beer industry gets this message too. This person who is on their beer can has made a mockery of womanhood and girlhood for literally the past year and has been celebrated by far lefties all across the country. But to see what's supposed to be a mainstream beer company do it was a bridge too far. That's why they're having the reaction they are. He needs to apologize if he wants to save his company and he won't do it.

Instead, we're getting the horses ad, which was, oh, I'm sure it was just completely coincidental put out right after his statement. Here it is. Brewed for those who found opportunity in challenge and hope in tomorrow. The horses. Raised by generations. Willing to sip, share, risk, remember. Horses. This is a story bigger than beer.

This is the story of the American spirit. Okay. There was a 9-11 reference, and notice who they showed in there. Two white guys, one with a beard and baseball cap, sitting on a porch in what appeared to be middle America. And in no world does Dylan Mulvaney, dressed as Eloise, then prance out onto their porch with them and have a beer. Those two guys would be like, who the fuck are you? This is a corporate identity crisis about an identity crisis of sexuality. That's what this is really about. What is Bud Light going to be?

No one can be all things to all people. If you are a man, that means that you are not a woman. If you're a woman, that means that you're not a man. If you're the blue collar hard working company, then you're not going to be the fey liberal preposterous company on the coast. You've got to pick. Identities are defined by limits. Bud Light has had a great successful corporate career just being the good old guys, standard American beer. We're staying out of all this crazy politics stuff.

Then they decided to transition. Now they're going to be a woke beer company that addresses the most fringe extremist elements of the radical left. Okay. They're free to do that, I guess, but that means that they're giving up their old identity and they're going to have to pay for that at the liquor stores. You're so right. That's so well put. They're like a trans apple martini, you know, appletini. We know you're still Bud Light, but they're transing themselves to try to get a different customer base. And guess what? That customer base makes up less than 1% of the population. So good luck with that right so like is the new zima megan the new zima which we didn't need a new zima one was plenty um enter donald trump jr uh who has a podcast now this was remarkable and if i may say pretty transparent i'm dying to get your take on i saw matt walsh tweeting about it all weekend.

Donald Trump enters as somewhat of an apologist for Bud Light, and here's why. Listen. Anheuser-Busch totally shit the bed with this Dylan Mulvaney thing. I'm not, though, for destroying an American and iconic company for something like this. When I actually look into it, I'm not going to blame the whole company for the inaction or the stupidity of someone in a marketing campaign that got woke as hell. And we looked into the political giving and lobbying history of Anheuser-Busch. And guess what? They actually support Republicans. In woke corporate America, Anheuser-Busch supports Republicans. Just two things, and I'm going to give it to you. Number one, as I point out, this is not an American company.

It is not an American company. Number two, I'm not going to blame the entire company for the actions of one woke employee. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The CEO runs the company. The CEO is responsible for everything that happens on his watch. And if the CEO were upset about what the marketing department did here, there is zero evidence of that. Someone needs to get fired at a minimum. If you're not going to issue the apologetic groveling email to your fan base, at least fire somebody so they get that you understand they're upset. Go ahead, Michael.

I don't know if Don is trying to play a little good cop to the rest of our bad cop here and try to keep those Republican donations from Bud Light coming on in, especially, obviously, as his father is running for president again. But the timing is really unfortunate here because whenever Don made that statement, at the very least, shortly that statement, at the very least shortly thereafter, or at the very most rather, shortly thereafter, the CEO makes the statement in which he acknowledges and doesn't quite apologize, but recognizes that it's politically divisive.

It's just really, really weak. So I agree with you. Now it's not enough for the VP of marketing to get fired. I think probably the CEO has to get fired at this point. He is now complicit in all of this. And it's a misreading of the moment because while maybe Anheuser-Busch has donated some money to Republicans in recent years, they're doubling down. They are endorsing this radical gender ideology. And so they've forced our hand. And especially this is an issue

that we are winning on with the American people because it's just so manifestly absurd. This is one of the few times that conservatives have actually been able to impose consequences on woke companies for going rogue and appealing to the fringe left. This is not the time to concede. This is not the time to give it up. We need to show that there are consequences for these kinds of actions. When we're on the brink of actually doing that, potentially even leadership change at Anheuser-Busch, now is not the time to do it. Whatever donations

Anheuser-Busch is making to Republicans, it's going to be offset by a slew of donations, either that will come in from companies who are pleased that conservatives are standing up with a spine here, or as of now, if Anheuser-Busch is going to be the pro-Dylan Mulvaney company, I don't think he can bank on a lot of those Republican donations in 2024 or in the future. Oh my God. So there was a report, was it the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee was about to post an ad in solidarity with the Bud Light boycott and then pulled it down once it got revealed by that Donald Trump Jr. was against the boycott and that they made a lot of donations to Republicans. I guess somebody let them know,

hey, this is one of your donors. And they pulled it. And now today, Ted Lieu, one of the most contemptible people in Congress, posted a picture that is like the best advertisement for Coors or Heineken you could ever want or Yingling. Let's go with them. A nice Pennsylvania beer where my husband's from. It's him and three others. We'll put we'll put it up here sitting there with their Bud Light cans directly facing the camera. I mean, it just had like little actors. You know, they wanted to do what you did as a kid, Michael. They wanted to be little actors in front of the camera with their Bud Light cans, except they're mature adult men posing with their Bud Light. It's the worst advertisement for Bud Light literally ever. So here's Matt Walsh's tweet.

Let me ask you if you agree with this. This is from 416. The only corporations we can possibly hope to influence are the ones that donate heavily to Republicans. The others don't give a damn what we say or think. So any Republican pushing for us to leave Anheuser-Busch alone because they donate to Republicans is really telling us to give up the fight against corporate wokeism entirely. Pay attention to those taking this position. Lots of valuable lessons being learned right now. Do you agree with that? I think it's fair enough, although Matt might overstate just how Republican

Anheuser-Busch has been. Big corporations play both sides. In fact, that was one of Donald Trump's campaign lines in 2016 when people would knock him for donating to Democrats. In fact, that was one of Donald Trump's campaign lines in 2016 when people would knock him for donating to Democrats. He said, look, I'm a big business and I play both sides and we grease the wheels wherever we can. And I'm sure that's what Anheuser-Busch has been doing. I think to give Don Jr. the benefit of the doubt, the most charitable read here, beyond just trying to protect some campaign donations for Trump and the Republicans, would be this line that a lot of conservatives in recent years have tried to push forward, which is that we oppose cancel culture and we don't want there to be any politics in the economy

and in business. We want to ignore it and we're not going to play the same game that the left does when the left goes after companies and boycotts them for not being sufficiently woke. I just think that ship has sailed. There is no neutrality here, especially when we're talking about an issue that can't have a moderate position. Either men or men or men can become women. Furthermore, all of the companies are engaging in politics.

Politics just means public life. We're debating really fundamental stuff in the country right now because we can't even agree on what a woman is. We can't agree on what language we speak. We can't agree on what we believe in. We can't agree on borders. We can't agree on anything. And so there's no running away from that.

There's no neutrality. The only way out is through. And if you ever want to restore a sensible country again where we don't need to be litigating gender politics on beer cans, you're going to have to make companies, even companies that have been somewhat friendly, you've got to make them pay the consequences. Because if there's no stick to the companies, then the carrot isn't going to do much good. You know, the thing I think Junior's missing is the second piece of it. I think her name was Alyssa.

I can't remember her last name. It's hard to pronounce. Heiner Scheid. Thank you, Steve Krakauer. He's missing that she had her Hillary deplorables moment about their customer base, too. I guarantee you the Republicans that Anheuser-Busch has donated to are the Mitt Romney types. It's going to be establishment type Republicans. And there's not that there's anything wrong with them,

but that's not Trump's base. You know, Donald Trump Jr. should be thinking about how Donald Trump's base is thinking. The Kid Rocks of the world, right? The Travis Tritts of the world, the John Riches of the world. These are country stars who have thrown out their beer off their Bud Light off their tours. And like those are the ones who get that this company apparently hates them and hates their fan base and hates Donald Trump's fan base. Like there is Donald Trump has enough donations. He got 10 million dollars in the wake of the indictment. Like he doesn't need Anheuser-Busch's Belgian money.

They need to stand with their base. So I think that was a rare political misstep by Team Trump on where the base is. They don't give a damn about prior donations on something as important like this. For the first time ever, the GOP base that objects to these crazy wokeism things is making some progress, Michael. They're making some progress, right? And it's not time to let up. It's a good case to be made for doubling down on it. And don't forget, one of the arguments for the Trump campaign is the guy is a brash New York billionaire who doesn't give a damn what the established powers say. And so I get that now we're in a different world, that there has been a more

established campaign apparatus. He's obviously been involved with the RNC for a long time. But no, the magic of Trump is, I don't need your Anheuser-Busch money. I'm not going to let you insult my people. I'm not going to let you completely upend our whole culture. No thanks. We're going to do it on our own by sincerely appealing to the hardworking men and women of America who have been forgotten, the people who are called deplorable, irredeemable in the flyover states. We're not going to appeal to them with empty platitudes. We're going to offer them a distinct vision for the country. And the CEO of Anheuser-Busch

has made clear it doesn't want to be part of that new, distinct, normal vision for the country. And okay, see you Budweiser. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Yeah, we got a lot of choices. I'd rather have an apple martini than a Bud Light at this point, although skinny spicy margarita has been my drink of choice of late. The last couple of years, I've really been enjoying it. A little jalapeno in there. It's very tasty. Megan, I've been very lucky because my canned alcohol of preference is White Claw, which is already sufficiently gay that I don't think it has to appeal to transgenderism or any other LGBT. So it will not be going woke, unlike Bud Light.

It's so annoying, by the way, when people defending Bud Light, like, we have to stand up for the LGBTQ, whatever. It's like, could you just stop? Because the LGB community is not under attack. Stop trying to glom on to an issue everybody agrees on. Just stop it right there. It's the TQ that's taking over in bizarre and inappropriate places that we object to. So just stop trying to glom on to a battle that's already been won, that you're not a part of. It's annoying. I love this idea. Like, you know, Dylan Mulvaney walks up and he says, hey, fellas, they're really all attacking us, aren't they? He's like, I don't know, who is us, Dylan?

You're the one dressing up like Audrey Hepburn and threatening the rights and spaces of women and making a mockery of womanhood. Please don't lump us in with the rest of that. Literally, Dylan put out a video that appeared to be tongue in cheek, though one can never tell with this person, talking about how Dylan was concerned that Dylan was late in getting Dylan's period. Dylan's a man. So Dylan doesn't get a period because there's no uterus that just shed its lining once a month, every 28 days. That's how it happens, Dylan. No matter how much you push your Tampax online into other people, you don't need a Tampax because you're a dude. Of course. No, this is quite clear. And I've talked to a number of my friends who identify as gay and lesbian. And they say, Michael, listen, I know that you're not on board with the redefinition of marriage or all, there are all sorts of

culture war issues here. But I think we can agree this is a distinct phenomenon and on this issue, the vast majority of Americans think this is absolutely absurd, especially when it's applied to children, especially when it's constantly forced down our throats in the culture. And that's what Dylan Mulvaney is doing. He is the most prominent voice for cramming this ideology down everywhere in the entire culture. Major, major misstep for Budweiser. Can I ask you quickly about the James O'Keefe video?

James is now on his own. He's separated from Project Veritas, unwillingly from the sound of it. And he did one of his first new videos following Dylan around. I'm not going to lie, made me feel sorry for Dylan. But he also reported that in following Dylan, Dylan went into the women's restroom. Then I felt less sorry for Dylan. But I'd love to get your take. Here's just a snapshot. I don't want to play all 41 seconds to play a little bit so people get the feel. Do you have a comment on the story here of the women being raped by the men claiming to be transgender? James O'Keefe, OMG News. Do you what do you think about the women who are being raped by the men who are transgender?

Do you have a comment about that? women who are being raped by the men who are transgender? Do you have a comment about that? Please don't come in the elevator. What do you think about what is your comment to the women are being raped by men claiming to be transgender, Dylan? OK, so we're here. You get how it goes. What did you think? It's not my tactic. That's that's not my approach in these kinds of debates. But in James's defense, first of all, I love that after that preposterous uprising at Project Veritas, that James O'Keefe is just starting a new organization and he's going back and doing

his work. But furthermore in James's defense, Dylan Mulvaney has chosen to become a public figure. He has chosen to become a political persona in one of the most contentious fights in the country. And so I'm not going to be the one who's chasing people around with the microphone. That is not my style. But that is what happens to politicians. And it's usually the people on the left who are doing that kind of thing. Occasionally some people on the right who are investigative journalists do that as well.

If Dylan Mulvaney did not want the microphones and the cameras in his face asking for his opinion on contentious public issues, then he shouldn't have injected himself into politics. He's happy to take the fame and he's happy to take the money and he's happy to push this absurd ideology on people. Well it is just a fact of public life. When you inject yourself into politics, you're going to be treated like a politician. It's true.

It's true. It's not pleasant, but I mean, I've been there. I've been chased into my home with my children all around town. It's not ideal. It's not something I want to see more of, but Dylan is the person who injected himself into, and I am using him for this person

i'm and i've been wrestling michael um with whether to switch over to biological real real pronouns for trans people for a while i'm gonna have more to say about it soon but i'm i'm as you would say although i didn't really understand the word but you're basically your position on this is fact-based it's anthropological and it's's, what's the word, epistemological. Epistemological. I know. You know, it doesn't rattle off the tongue in a political slogan. You went to Yale.

Explain it. You know, at Yale, they teach you a few things. Increasingly, they're teaching you transgenderism. A few of those other things would be that politics is based on deeper things like anthropology, which is the nature of what it means to be human, epistemology, which is how do we know anything at all, and all sorts of these questions. I really applaud you, Megan, for taking this seriously because most people, if they refer to Dylan Mulvaney as she, they're not making a conscious choice to do it. It's just there's a lot of pressure from the culture.

Dylan Mulvaney is dressing up as Audrey Hepburn and so that's a little bit confusing too. But it's really important because the way that the left wins these kinds of debates is they manipulate language. This is the topic of my book Speechless. They manipulate language so that they can win the debate before the debate ever begins. You see this on illegal immigration. If you're debating whether or not a future American undocumented dreamer has the right to stay in America, well, he obviously does.

He's an American, albeit one without documents. But if you're debating whether a foreign national illegal alien has the right to stay in America, obviously he would not. And especially here, if we refer to men who identify as women, maybe they're the nicest people in the world, I don't know. If we refer to them as she and her, we've conceded the debate before it can begin. We are granting that this person is a woman and she and her certainly have the right to use the women's bathroom and play on the sports teams and take away the private rights and spaces of women.

Let me ask you a follow up on that. Because I read Posey Parker was on the show last week and I read at her suggestion. Pronouns are a hypno, which you can Google and pull up. It's an article that's been banned in a number of places, but you can find it's very interesting. And it talks about how how do you say she can't use the women's restroom? She can't go into the women's prison. She can't swim on the women's swim team. And like, it raises some good questions. How do you, but you know, the argument on the other side is we, we tell lies all the time to people. Do I look fat in this? No. What do you think of my haircut?

Looks great. We tell compassionate lies in polite society all the time, kind of go along with somebody's self-delusion that they don't look fat in those teeny tiny pants, right? To be polite or just to avoid confrontation. So how is this different? People do that, but they really should not. And I'm not arguing that you ought to tell your wife that she looks fat or anything like that, but we can use our language to speak in soft terms without outright lying. This is what euphemisms are for. When you say that there is a woman of a certain age rather than an old hag, you are using nicer language, but you're not lying because the woman is of a certain age. And so I would encourage people to speak in ways that can be perfectly polite and courteous,

but that are not lying. If your wife says, how do I look in these jeans? You could say, you look great. You're my wife. You always look great. And you can get around these things. I would know. If you put that qualifier on the end, I would know. I love spending time with you. There are all ways that are a little bit- You're so smart. No one even looks at your ass. Yeah, exactly. But on this issue, it really does matter because if you live according to lies, you are not going to have a flourishing society. I think what the leftists who are trying to make this argument, what they are insinuating is that lies are comforting, lies will set you free, and that the truth is very cruel. When in fact the opposite is true.

The truth will set you free and lies will always get you. It's worse than that, Michael. They're saying it's not a lie. They're saying I am a woman. I had a woman on the show, a trans woman on the show, I don't know, like a year plus ago. It was shortly after we started, actually.

And it was on the subject of the Connecticut runners, you know, the high school girls who got beaten by these boys who ran as boys a year earlier and then declared themselves girls and ran and crushed. That case is on appeal right now. But this was a trans woman who said, you know, I said, I think I said biological male, now trans woman, you know, born a man, now trans woman. And this person corrected me. You know, that's not, that's not right. What you're saying is false. That's not appropriate. They would actually say the truth is it's like a woman trapped inside of a man's body.

That's why it's now called affirming instead of gender reassignment surgery. Now it's gender affirming care. Right. They do this and they keep changing the explanation. The one that you've just described is the most common one, which is that my body has nothing to do with who I really am. And my true identity is immaterial and it's somewhere. They're really referring to their souls, but because we live in modern times, people don't talk in those kinds of terms anymore, but that's what they're talking about. And so you can examine that idea using your intellect and you can say, okay, well what is the relation of the body and the soul? Can your body be opposed to your soul?

There are all sorts of philosophical debates that have raged on this for 2,000 years. The short answer though is they can't be. If you look like a man, you are a man. If you have the natural body of a man, you are a man. They won't do that because the moment you start engaging in that debate, they'll change it and they'll say, well actually trans women, they have the brains of women even though they have the bodies of men. But that's an incomprehensible sentence because your brain is part of your body.

So then you're saying, well part of my body is male, part is female. And then the moment you say, you point that out, they'll move to a different argument. Tomorrow I'm supposed to debate a transgender identifying professor, triple Harvard grad, half a dozen honorary doctorates, very distinguished scholar at the University of my position. My position has been pretty public for a while now. We had had a pre-debate meeting. He seemed to enjoy the meeting and at the end of it reiterated his desire to debate. But I think he thought better of it by the end and I think he realized that I'm not going to shout at him or yell or call him names or anything like that. I'm just going to present an argument as to why transgenderism doesn't make sense and is bad for everybody."

He had no answer to that. Even a distinguished scholar couldn't defend this kind of thing. It seems to me on the matter of being polite and compassionate and nice to people that we owe it to people if we're truly compassionate to tell them the truth about who they are and not to affirm their delusions which are not going to make them happy in the long run. And not only is it going to drive them mad, but it's going to drive the whole society mad as it already has been doing. I know.

I mean, we've talked before about that. There's this disorder that makes you really think you need to have your arm cut off. And no psychiatrist would say, you're right. You do need to get rid of your perfectly healthy left arm. Only the right arm works for you. It's got to go. Otherwise, it's going to eat you alive. You would not be saying, yeah, dude, your left arm's a problem. It should go. You're right. Your feelings are spot on. Out of compassion, out of respect for the genuinely held belief that the left arm is

problematic. You'd be like, I really hope you get the help you so desperately need. Hope you're getting some sort of counseling. Now let's move on. Would you like a sandwich? How about a cup of coffee? And you get off of that very uncomfortable topic because this person needs help. Not the kind that engages in the same delusion. All right, let me pause you there because I am interested in what's going on with this person who you mentioned. The professor's name is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. This is a man who's going as a woman. And Deirdre has canceled on you as near as I can tell, Michael, with a bunch of lies about why McCloskey is so terrified of you. It's actually quite interesting what this person is claiming publicly versus what you say happened behind the scenes.

We will let the audience in on that secret right after this. Every time we have on Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show, he's been canceled someplace. Somebody's calling him a fascist. He's a perfectly nice man. He causes so much trouble. And Deirdre McCloskey is not your fan or is Deirdre because Deirdre now canceled outirdre now, canceled out of this debate, hosted by University of Pittsburgh, which is a public university, event sponsored by Intercollegiate Studies Institute, had agreed to debate you on these issues that we're discussing. Deirdre transitioned from male to trans female in the 1990s and is now 80. I love that you guys were supposed to debate the nature of womanhood.

No woman on the panel okay but okay um now the patriarchy wins again megan that's right has dropped out saying mccloskey had no idea who knolls was when mccloskey agreed and after learning more about you and your beliefs mccloskey decided to withdraw knolls is interested in stirring up hatred and violence uh that toward people who do not fit his extremely conservative Catholic beliefs. I didn't want to give him a platform. It's sad that the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, once a force for liberty, decided to sponsor this man, this fascist, who she called you. So you say McCloskey's acting because they knew full well

who you were and what your beliefs were when they agreed to this debate. McCloskey is acting in a lot of ways. That's true. But Professor McCloskey's excuse as to why he's pulling out of this debate, it's undermined even by his own tweets because weeks and weeks ago, Professor McCloskey went on Twitter and called me a fascist and called me an anti-Jesus Catholic, little Catholic phobia in there as well. It's ironic with the claim that I'm a fascist though because, Megan, as I'm sure you know, fascism is far too modern and progressive an ideology for me. Unlike most people who bandy that word around, I have read the founding documents of fascism, just as I've read the founding documents of communism and all sorts of things. I'll just tell you,

Megan, fascism, it ain't for me. The professor knew all of this going in and had reiterated his belief that it was important to debate me on these issues and to win over the audience in this debate. Then we had a pre-debate phone call just two or three weeks ago in which Professor McCloskey, I won't say he was exactly polite to me, but we discussed how the debate would go. I explained where my stances derived from and why I just don't think that transgenderism depicts a true understanding of human nature. And by the end of the call, he was a bit friendlier and he once again reiterated his belief that

we ought to debate these issues. So obviously he's lying when he says that he discovered that I have no interest in... Just figured it out. ... something like that. Yeah. That's obviously a lie, but it's kind of a perfect lie because I think actually the opposite was true. I think that Professor McCloskey may have gone into this thinking that I was just some

bomb thrower or provocateur who was going to make a big fuss of myself, in which case he could have maybe won the debate by seeming like the adult in the room. But when he realized that I don't hate anybody, I'm not going to call him any nasty names or anything, I'm just going to state my view, which happens to be the view of everyone for all of human history, which is the men and women are different, I think he realized that there was no way for him to win that debate. Especially because there was so much public interest in the debate, a lot of legislators were talking about it, C-SPAN was going to broadcast it.

I think Professor McCloskey concluded that it was better to concede the debate before it began than to lose in front of C-SPAN's cameras. And I had Kelly McGuire, one of my crack producers, go and pull some old sound bites by McCloskey just so we could get a feel for how McCloskey performs publicly and why they would have been so afraid of you. And here is Deirdre on with Dave Rubin in 2016. This is interesting. So it's what, four or seven years ago? Making claims that I think you would have had fun taking on. Here's one example, Sat 10. There's something that's really important for straight people to understand.

No one has regret. A, the number of people who have regret one way or the other, male to female, female to male, is minuscule. And B, if they have regret, they can change back. You say, okay, well, gee, you can't grow a penis. Well, so what? Many perfectly well-functioning men don't have penises from terrible accidents or war injuries. Big deal. It's how you present yourself. It's how you live in the world. That's what determines how society takes you on. Big, so you lose your penis.

Get over it. I'll just speak for myself. That would be a big deal. I think I would have to conclude. And you can see that clip. I had seen other clips of Professor McCloskey debating these issues. He's obviously a troubled guy. He's obviously been extraordinarily deluded on this issue of sex and gender. He can debate reasonably well on all manner of other topics.

He is a pretty distinguished scholar. On this issue, he just says the most preposterous things that are completely indefensible. And so I actually think that one of the proofs of his intelligence is that he withdrew from this debate, because I think he realized at the end that even with all his degrees and fancy scholarly credentials, no one can defend the indefensible. And when one tries to do it, it sounds absurd, as the professor did there on with. Well, look at look at like Kendi. He won't debate Coleman Hughes publicly or he won't debate anybody. Never mind Coleman.

All these sort of advocates for these radical positions when asked to actually stand up to someone smart on the other side, who's well versed in the, and have a smart intellectual exchange on it won't do it. That tells us a lot. So you are going- I should point out, Megan, ISI, after Professor McCloskey pulled out, ISI invited like 10 or 12 leftists, transgender identifying people, prominent spokesmen for the transgender movement. Nobody would do it. So we now do have a debate opponent, which is Brad Palumbo, who is- I like him. Yeah, a nice guy.

He's a little more on the right. He's on the libertarian side of things. He doesn't identify as T, but he does identify with the LGB. So he broadly defends the transgender movement. The debate will be a little different, but it will go on. Professor McCloskey will not have succeeded at shutting it down, and the Democrat legislators in Pennsylvania will not have succeeded at shutting it down. We will have a debate broadly on these issues. It will happen at Pitt tomorrow,

and the libs can whine and cry about it, but we will be hashing out these debates at a public university. I hope you show up drinking a Yingling. Okay, so good luck, and we'll be watching to see what happens. Now, next up, Mr. Beast. I have to ask you about what's happening with his sidekick, Chris. We talked about it on our show on Friday, and more clips are now emerging of this Chris Tyson, who's been the main sidekick to Mr. Beast, the most popular YouTube figure by far, 144 million followers. And his sidekick turns out to be trans. It was this married, masculine, mountain type guy who had the beautiful young wife, has a two-year-old baby, and now suddenly he's a she and looks, I have to say, absurd, but is celebrating his newfound womanhood and still posting publicly.

And if you object to what you've seen or your children seeing it, you're a transphobe. Mr. Beast, who tries to stay political, apolitical, tweeted out on April 13th. Yeah, this is getting absurd. Chris isn't my nightmare. He's my effing friend and things are fine. All this transphobia is starting to piss me off. So, okay, this is getting dicey for him. He's been studious in avoiding this kind of thing, but it's been forced on him by his friend who transitioned and is now owning it on camera.

Just for some context here, here's a bit of his transformation sot 7 why did i paint my nails because my pp big that's why we kept flapping is that not pretty cool who would have thought oh snap uh he's like hey guys welcome to my vlog we do a monkey things. You know what to do. Roger that. Rubber suits going dark. Hey, nice shirt.

Thanks dude. Nice shirt. Thanks. He's got the headband on. Shoes. Oh, he's different. This man's out there saying his, his two-old baby absolutely supports him, has no problem. Like, okay, the child has no idea what is happening.

You're inflicting damage by the day. You have no idea. But Mr. Beast, taking a stance for his friend, what do you make of it? Who would have imagined that a widely admired person in popular culture with the name Mr. Beast. Might have a few things that are a little off about him, but in his defense, he's in an impossible position here. And this guy, Chris, has put him in that impossible position. And the silver lining to this awful storm cloud, especially for his family, is it really clarifies the problems of the transgender movement and all of these leftist movements for that matter, which is this guy, Chris, has decided because he has some disordered type of desire,

he's going to shirk all of his other commitments and obligations, and he's just going to pursue his sexual desires. But that's not how we used to think about our identities and politics and the family too. We used to think of it from the position of obligation. This man has an obligation to his wife. He took a vow and said he would be a husband to his wife. Part of being a husband means you don't become a wife yourself. This man has an obligation to his child. When you become a father, you take on responsibility and you have a responsibility to be daddy.

By being daddy, that means that you can't become a bizarre caricature of mommy. You have to fulfill your obligations. It raises this question, why did this guy in his late 20s one day just wake up and decide after getting married, after having a kid, after being a dude for his whole life, one day he just decided that he's a woman. And what I strongly suspect is that one of the drivers of this is something that no one wants to talk about with the transgender explosion, and that is pornography. My friend Ali Stuckey pointed this out not long ago that Chris had had all sorts of strange posts about really bizarre types of pornography, even pornography involving depictions of children.

And I don't bring that up to suggest that he's a pedophile. I'm not making that claim. People can draw their own conclusions. The only reason I bring it up is to show that the man is fluent in the language of pornography. And so he obviously has a relationship with pornography. And one of the undiscussed stories here, you can read it on Feminist Current, a really good article on that feminist website, is that there are genres of pornography that encourage men to identify as transgender. When I brought this up on the show, many people started writing into me saying that they've

encountered this kind of thing. It's obviously dangerous. It's obviously disordered. And people need to start paying attention to it. Yeah. Well, we talked about this as well on Friday and it's dark, this particular kind of anime, you know, it's chicken and the egg. What attracted him to it in the first place or did he try it out and it drove him in a direction he wouldn't go. But once you get married and in particular have children, my position is it's utterly selfish and inhumane to go through with this. Utterly selfish and inhumane.

And to pretend your child's fine with it, it's not going to cause any damage, is a lie. It's a lie. I know that. Michael Knowles, always a pleasure. Can't wait to see how it goes tomorrow. At least you have a very smart, fun, respectful sparring partner, or so we think. We will find out when we watch it live on C-SPAN. Me and Abby. Thank you, Megan. Great to be with you as always.

All right. Good luck. See you soon. And remember, folks, you can find The Megan Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel, 1-11, every weekday at noon east, and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. Go there now, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly to check out all of our fun clips. Joining me now is the absolutely fearless and brilliant bestselling author, Heather McDonald. Heather is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributor and editor at City Journal. And she joins us now for her first interview about her new book, When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. Heather, so good to see you again.

It's wonderful to be with you, Megan. Thank you so much for having me. Such a timely book, and you have brought the receipts, as they say. Can we kick it off with what's happening now with racial equity, the Supreme Court, and university admissions? Because there's a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court right now that we think is going to eliminate race as an acceptable criterion for college admissions. Right now, it's okay to use it as one of many,

but it looks like the Supreme Court's about to overturn that in a pair of cases that have already been argued and will probably get a decision in June. I noted in the book, you talked of course about what, and you mentioned this in your last book too, what happened in California when they got rid of affirmative action by voter initiative in 1996 for their University of California schools. And the University of California, having been through this experiment, and I've read you, I've read Glenn Lowry on this, successfully, you would argue, successfully got rid of race as a criteria for admission, now turns around and says to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of

those who want race-based admissions. It's been a disaster here. It's been a disaster. We haven't been able to get enough diverse students. And the way they positioned it, Heather, I'd wanted to read this to you, was, yes, we're racially diverse in our schools, but not sufficiently racially diverse, since you said we couldn't have affirmative action. Black, this is from their amicus brief, Black Native Americans and Latinx students are not sufficiently represented at most competitive universities of California. And they widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation. That's their argument. They want to bring it back in California. They want to prevent the ban across the country. What say you to this whole thing?

They will try everything they can to ignore and violate the law if, in fact, the Supreme Court declares that you may no longer discriminate against the most qualified student applicants on the basis of their race. They will use holistic admissions. They've been setting, they've been preparing for this moment, Megan, by saying you may not even submit SAT scores. And they will use holistic admissions. They'll ask students to write essays that discuss their degree of oppression. They'll be able to figure out the race of applicants. And it will only continue the charade. The reason that we do not have proportional representation in universities or any other

meritocratic institution, Megan, is not racism. Standards are not racist. The problem is a vast academic skills gap. And the elites in this country are terrified that that skills gap is never going to close, and they make it taboo to discuss it. And so these universities are in this bizarre position of claiming that they are somehow racist institutions, that if they don't have 13% Black student body at UC Berkeley or at Harvard or at Yale, it's because they are discriminating. Well, if that's the case, tell us who's the discriminators are and get rid of them. But the reason is not discrimination. It's the fact that, for instance, 66% of Black 12th graders do not possess even

partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills defined as being able to do arithmetic or recognize a linear function on a graph. That's the problem. And instead, America is tearing down every meritocratic institution on the phony charge of racism. It comes to math. They don't have their basic math skills. And I know your book says 50% of 12th grade black students aren't proficient in reading either. The other side will say that too. America's race is past. Well, okay. That's a different discussion, but let's not tear down standards. Let's make sure that those kids can succeed. Now, I would argue that at some point the culture in those communities has to change. There are vast behavioral differences as well with regards to our students taking their textbooks home to study. Are they staying home at night to do their homework?

Are they out on the streets running with gangs? Are they involved in drugs? The Black truancy rate in California is four times that of white students in California. On average, Black students spend less than a third at doing homework than Asian students. All of these very obvious, noticeable behavioral differences in how students approach schools and how their parents regard academic achievement make a difference. To deny that is to deny just common sense. There's a very terrible, destructive, self-destructive ideology in Black communities that says that academic effort is acting white. So if you're a Black student who is studying, who is paying attention

in class, you will be demeaned as somehow, you know, betraying your race. How we expect to have equal academic outcomes when an ideology as perversely self-destructive as that is dominant, is beyond me. And it's, again, it is a violation to a certain extent of racial etiquette to talk about these skills gaps and behavior gaps, Megan. We are very uncomfortable doing so. Whites turn their eyes away in discomfort to look at things head on. And I agree that racial etiquette ordinarily should pertain. But when we have our elites and Black activists going around lodging on a daily, if not hourly basis, sweeping accusations of white supremacy, if every institution that it does not have a proportional representation of Blacks is per se today deemed by the New York Times or CNN or Harvard or Berkeley per se racist, the time for racial etiquette and pussyfooting around these underlying problems is over. These activists will just keep going back. I mean, if they have to go back to 1619

to say, no, the racism preceded every problem you just listed, that's what they will do. As I was reading part of the book, here's one section that you have on it. And you're not the first person to come up with this. It's not Heather MacDonald. There have been full studies on this. If you get the straight A's, it's called acting white. There was one out of, I think it's Columbus, Ohio. That was, um, the, the most well-respected and you write behavioral differences also undercut the expectation of proportional representation. In other words, 13% black people in the, in the community. Therefore we have to have 13%, uh, everywhere, you know, in all these admissions, one third, you write of all black males have a felony conviction, the prevalence of out of wedlock births in the black community, over 70% of all black births

out of wedlock means that a high percentage of black females are burdened with solo child rearing responsibilities and on it goes. And you are right, man, you're not allowed to talk about that. And if you do, I'll go back. I'll go back one more generation to blame it all on the founders. Well, you know what? I've been on a reading project to refresh myself on Black civil rights history, on America's history, and I am absolutely heartbroken and appalled by how ugly America's past was. So in one sense, there's one aspect of the 1619 Project that I agree with. America clearly was white supremacist. It was an apartheid country. And Americans until, you know, fairly recently treated Blacks just with gratuitous and heartbreaking cruelty and contempt. But we have to be able to look at the facts today. That is not our reality today.

As impossible as it would have been to predict 50 years ago, we are a different country and racism is not the problem. Here's the reality, Megan, black privilege. It's not white privilege, it's black privilege. If there is a single black student who is applying to a selective school and is putting his race down as white because he thinks that being white will gain him advantage to getting

into Yale or Amherst or Scripps, I'll pay $10,000 to anybody who can find that. The reality is being Black today in any mainstream institution confers an enormous advantage. There is not a single law firm, a single bank, a single tech lab in Silicon Valley, a single science lab that is not twisting itself into knots to try to find, hire, and promote as many remotely qualified Blacks as possible. White heterosexual males, it's over for them. They are at the bottom of the heap. So as bad as our country's past was, but I can also say this, it sickens me, but it was worse every place else. Every other empire and civilization in the rest of the world

practice slavery. Africans enslaved each other. They continue to engage in genocide. There is brutality everywhere. The other has been treated with absolute cruelty in every other civilization. So the United States, while certainly not perfect, and we certainly betrayed our founding ideals, was no worse than any place else. And in fact, it was a lot better. And today, the very ideals that the left is using in its various phony, completely ungrounded anti-racism crusades are ideals that were created exclusively by the West. Tolerance, equality, equality under the law, due process of law, all of these are Western ideals. You can go to Africa today and to the extent that those ideals exist they have been imports so i made two white um i think heterosexual

males they're little but so far that's how it seems to be going i made two and uh in addition to a girl and i understand they're going to make them pay for sins of not even their fathers but this country they're going to make them pay for what happened during the David Duke generation that was alive and well during the 1950s and flourishing, nevermind what happened before that. And I get that their position is, so what? So what? The black children of America suffered enough, and now the white children are going to have to suffer. But of course, it seems rather unfair that my non-racist, absolutely loving, thoughtful boys are going to have to pay for somebody else's sins. But what say you, Heather, to that argument that it was the black kids who had to suffer unfairly and unjustly for so long, and now the white kids are going to have to suffer? Too bad. Well, that's a very clear way of putting it. I've never heard it put exactly that, but that is absolutely the motivation here, which is a hatred and vengeance and retribution. back on Blacks. And again, none of us were enslaving. None of us have responsibility for

the ugliness of the Southern racists who were beating up Black kids that just wanted to go to school. It's horrifying, but I'm sorry, we do not have inheritance of acquired characteristics. None of us are those people today. And again, the reality of white behavior today is whites yearn to be post-racial. They do not give a damn. What they look for in people of all races is, do you share my values? Do you share my bourgeois values, my belief in patriotism, in hard work, self-discipline, deferred gratification? That's what people and white Republican voters have had one love affair after another with black politicians, whether it's Allen West, Allen Keyes, you know, Trump's health secretary. It just goes on and on and on. We are not systemically racist. But if you want to help

blacks, at some point, we can acknowledge that there was decades of mistreatment of keeping them down, of preventing them from reading. That was all true. But today, there's nothing that the outside world can do to make them competitively qualified. You have to do the reading yourself. The only person who can put knowledge of arithmetics in your head is yourself. There's no amount of compensatory transfers or trying to pull white people down that is going to make you able to read better. The effort has to come from within that home. And right now, whites have to stop apologizing, Megan. It is all coming down. I see it on a daily basis. There's not a single meritocratic institution,

above all in the sciences and medicine, that is not in the crosshairs. Any institution that is not proportionally Black is now vulnerable. It is all in self-immolation. And we have to be able to present an alternative explanation for racial disparities. That alternative explanation, which is in my book, I give data, page after page of data that explain why we're not proportionally representative, whether it's academic skills or whether it comes to crime commission. Those one third that you talked about of all black males that have a felony conviction, those that those convictions are not the result of racist police. They are a result of actual criminal offending and the dead black bodies speak for themselves.

We'll address that and we'll come back. And I want to talk about what's happening with the elimination of advanced placement and honors classes in the high school level. And then what's happening in medicine. We had a doctor on the show on Friday, a black woman, extremely accomplished, who was saying what's happening in the medical field is scaring her. And what Heather found would back that up. We'll do all of that right after this. So, Heather, you lay out how at the high school level now in certain states like California and others, there is a push to eliminate advanced placement or honors classes because they don't think those are fair to minority groups because they're underrepresented there, too. They want to see absolute proportionality that 13 percent of the population. And if you have a greater Latino or black population in your city, then it should be reflected in the number in the honors classes as well. Well, this is all the idea of disparate

impact that any neutral colorblind standard that is not racially based, if it has a negative disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics, you don't need to ask any further questions. You just throw it out. It's per se racist. And so these objective standardized tests that allow admissions to gifted and talented students of all races. You know, the whole purpose of the SAT when it was first created after World War II was to knock down the traditional elitism of Yale and Harvard that only accepted students from elite and New England prep schools like Andover and Exeter and said, no, let's have a colorblind, background blind, legacy blind, wealth blind test that will allow students of all backgrounds to show their academic accomplishments. Then so they brought in this test and all of a

sudden, whoa, you saw these students from the Midwest that had never showed up at Harvard before. So these tests, again, they allow above all, whether it's Stuyvesant High School in New York City and the elite exam school, elite only academically, Lowell High School in San Francisco. They're predominantly Asian. So much for white privilege. If it's white privilege, why are the Asians whooping everybody else's ass, including Jews, whites, and every other group? These tests are colorblind. Nobody knows their identity. But because of those academic skills gaps, because Blacks and Hispanics are way, way behind in reading and math from almost the start of their schooling, they're not passing these neutral, colorblind, anonymous tests at the same rates. So we've decided that we would rather not cultivate

our top math talent than have classrooms that are not proportionally diverse. And this is suicide, Megan. It is civilizational suicide. While we're canceling our advanced math courses, here's what China is doing. It is finding its top math talent and it is throwing everything it's got at them. It's putting them into math Olympiads. It's putting them into the most demanding calculus classes without any concern about the trivialities of identity.

If the class is all female, fine. If the class is all male, who gives a damn? And China is ahead in every international test of math and sciences. It's leading in many, many critical technologies that are key to military preparedness for cyber warfare. It leads in a whole bunch of artificial intelligence nanotechnologies because it is not held back by this absurd disparate impact diversity conceit. Meanwhile, we're saying that instead of learning math, students should learn about their own white privilege. This is a waste of time. It is civilizational suicide. Yeah, it's worse than a waste of time. This is just a quote from the book. Early drafts of the new California math guidelines under the proposed curriculum, mathematically gifted students would not accelerate into advanced classes until the 11th grade

in order to create more exclusive, meaning racially proportional math classrooms in middle school and early high school. And you go on to point out as of 2018, China ranked number one in the international tests of K through 12 math, science and reading known as the PISA, the U S 25th. We ranked 25th. All right. So, but let me turn the page to medicine because that's deeply concerning. I mean, you can't, if there's any place in which merit should rule the day, it's medicine, firefighting, and the flying of airplanes, just to name a few, but those, this should not be touched by anything other than merit. I don't want, whatever. I wouldn't mind

seeing a big burly female firefighter who looked strong, but I don't need to see some little life ballerina wearing a fireman's hat to feel like I matter. The U.S. medical licensing exam is a prime offender of this, all these problems you write. At the end of their second year of medical school, students take the step one of these, basically they're on the way toward, they're called USMLEs. Now I know about this, Heather, because in another life, before there was Doug, there was Dan, my ex-husband, with whom I have a very friendly

relationship still. And Dan, I was with him during medical school, internship, residency, fellowship. I always joke that I'm the worst gold digger of all time because I helped put him through all those things and then we divorced, right? He started making his money. Okay. Anyway, it's fine. I'm sure that's the case.

He's saying, what do I do? What do I get? It landed in a good place for both of us, romantically and professionally. So he took those step ones. You take it after second year and they're nerve wracking. They're hard and they're hard for a reason. They're trying to ferret out those who are going to make it in medicine and those who aren't. And then there are more steps after that.

And I didn't know this, but you write in the book, since January of 2022, and I was with Dan back in 1997, I'm talking about, step one has been changed to pass-fail. Pass-fail. Okay, that's new. And then you take on the claim that blacks are being excluded from medicine because of exams like this, that they're being excluded from medical training and from the medical field, and that's why they're underrepresented in medicine. You have the numbers. You write, from 2013 to 2016,

only 8% of white college seniors with below average undergraduate GPAs and below average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school. Less than 6% of Asians who had those same problems in their qualifications were offered a seat in medical school. Over 56% of black college seniors with below average undergraduate GPAs and below average MCATs were admitted. 31% of Hispanic students.

That is unbelievable. So 8% of whites, 6% of Asians, 56% of Blacks college seniors with below average grades and MCATs get admitted to med school. What does that tell us? Thanks to the medical schools, all these schools are saying, if you take away racial preferences, we will be terribly undiverse. So basically they're saying, and it's true, the facts bear this out, that virtually every minority student today in a selective school

has been catapulted outside of his actual academic skill range into a school for which he is not academically prepared, and he is falling behind because of that. You have no confidence that that doctor is the most qualified. Now, he may well be or she may well be the doctor that you spoke to last week, Megan. But unfortunately, thanks to racial preferences, the so-called beneficiaries of those preferences never know, am I the best candidate or am I the best black or female candidate? You and I have been the subject of sex preferences all our lives, Megan, that cast doubt on our actual accomplishments,

if there are any. And in your case, yes, in mine, who knows? But it's humiliating and it undercuts any sense of legitimate accomplishment. And so the fact is, again, I hate to keep hammering this home, Megan, the problem is not the standards. The problem is not the U.S. medical licensing exam grading system. It's not racist. Objective grades, objective standards are not racist. The problem is

the skills gaps. And we won't talk about them. And instead, we're tearing everything down. And so now these residencies that use step one of the US medical licensing exam to select students for the most competitive residencies in neurology, radiology, oncology, they don't know who they're getting. A pass fail system is extremely crude. But the only reason we went to pass-fail, there was nobody saying the actual grades were in any way inaccurate in assessing actual medical competence. The only problem with the grades was that they had a disparate impact. And that is all you need to know today in order to get rid of an objective and valid standard. One of the problems with this system is there are plenty of black people who would pass these tests as is. You know, it's not the numbers that these woksters want, but there are.

There are black people who work hard, who find a way, who happen to be born into privilege, whatever it is, who would pass these more easily than you or I would. But now they're going to have to be judged by this same, oh, did you get in thanks to the 56% thing? That would be incredibly aggravating. I think about the kids who go to school with my kids who are incredibly bright, some of the smartest kids in the class. And now they're going to be judged by this, right? This sort of hand up to people who may not deserve it. And then that's I mean, this is a problem in general with affirmative action. Is it just everybody gets tarred with the question mark when they might not deserve the question mark? Well, in the 1990s, a Yale law professor, Stephen Carter, wrote a book called Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, and he said it haunted him. Anytime he got asked to speak or got an award, he didn't know,

am I the best person for that panel or for that award, or am I the best black that they could find? And that is the problem. So yes, it is a pall that hangs over any so-called victim class. You never know in college admissions in the 1990s. And it quoted some Black students that said, well, we don't need to study particularly hard because we know we'll get in anyway. And students know this. High school students all compare SATs, and they can see precisely the preferences that you spoke of, Megan, with regards to medical schools, that an Asian has one-ninth the chance of getting admitted with a certain score level as Blacks. These high school seniors all know that their Black peers with SATs that are standard deviation below their own are getting admitted to the IVs, and they've been rejected by every school they've been applied to. And then we're turned around and we have to all play this

charade to say, oh, preferences don't exist. We are forced to live a whole set of absolutely logical contradictions and impossibilities. On the one hand, the universities in the affirmative action case that you spoke about in the beginning, Megan, say without preferences, we cannot survive as a diverse institution. In other words, we would have virtually no Black students without racial preferences. But if anybody within that institution says, well, there's a good chance that this or that person was here because of preferences, then that person is a racist and must be cast out. And we see that happening now to Wax at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who has said she has

actually spoken about the result of racial preferences, which is that the mismatch theory, which is that students admitted to an institution which they're not competitive academically, they end up at the bottom of their class. This happens at every single law school. The black law students end up at the bottom of their class because they have been propelled into institutions for which they're not competitively qualified. If they went to a law school where they were competitively qualified, instead of going to Harvard Law School, they went to Boston College Law School, they would do perfectly well. Right. But instead, flounder, and they're told by the bureaucracy to think that they're the victims of racism, which is another lie. Well, and the truth is, if you would take a step away from,

you know, the obsession with race, right, the wokesters and the people who are pushing all this, for one second, they would see it. Like I, I did not get into Harvard and I would venture to say, if I had gone to Harvard, I really would have flailed. I didn't do very well in high school. I lost my dad. It was a tumultuous time. And I did not have the basis of knowledge or learning for a successful career there. I went to Syracuse. I did very well. And based on those scores, I got into Albany law school, which it was a fantastic law school, but it was good enough. And I on those scores, I got into Albany Law School, which was a fantastic law school. It was good enough. And I wound up thriving in the legal profession, which landed me here. Everything worked as it should in my case. And so it's not about black or white or women or men.

It's about what are your qualifications? We're talking about certain professions that like the abandonment of merit could potentially prove in this that profession in particular absolutely dangerous completely not only are we putting individual lives at risk but we also now are determining our scientific research priorities based on race not scientific needs so the nih which is the basic funder of biomedical research, is now deciding to move funding from pure science. So trying to figure out what are the cellular pathways of cancers or trying to figure out what's going on neurologically with Alzheimer's. This is basic science research that is extremely complicated at this point involves a whole set of different scientific fields, physics, sometimes even engineering. They're moving money from that basic research that will be what frees us from our lingering susceptibilities to crippling, debilitating disease into research on racism in medical areas, health disparities, which is, okay, it's a valid topic,

although it is one that is vastly exaggerated. I mean, I would say actually it is not a valid topic. The problem with health disparities in race is not doctor racism. It's again, it's behavior, things that people can change, weight, susceptibility to disease. But now we're going to give more funding to studying phantom racism in doctors than doing pure science, just because more black MDs do that type of research and less pure science. This is insane. We have the NIH doling out Alzheimer's awards based on the diversity of a research lab. Insane. It should only be based on the scientific competence of that lab. And instead you have researchers, principal investigators in incredibly important

fields that are spending more time trying to justify their work on diversity grounds or coming up with reasons why they can't have proportional representation in clinical drug trials than they are explaining cell signaling in nematodes to talk about their cancer research. It's crazy. You write in the book about how the NIH leadership of cancer labs in particular say that your cancer labs should match the national or local demographics, whichever has a higher percentage of minorities. And you point out about Johns Hopkins, where I was for a year when I was married to Dan and he was doing his residency there, sorry, his fellowship there. Baltimore, which is where Johns Hopkins is, is over 60% Black.

And you say, should Johns Hopkins Cancer Center have 60% Black physician administrators, which is what the NIH is saying? How? That would be a totally disproportionate number to any facility in the United States. Good luck finding it, right? So you definitely have to lower standards in order to reach that. Is that what the NIH wants? Yes, absolutely. And especially when like 10% of Black students actually have any basic skills in reading. But we are- In Baltimore. In Baltimore, yeah. We are determined not to see any racial skills gaps. We're turning it away. And instead, we're determined to blame American society, mainstream institutions for racism. So anything is vulnerable. Classical music is vulnerable. Art museums is vulnerable. Oh, we've got to talk about that. We've got to talk about that. Because there's a reason you

talk about getting rid of beauty. And you've done so much great writing on this. I remember we talked about some of this last time you were there. But it's not just medicine. I mean, those are important fields, medicine and so on. But it's also the arts that are under attack. And what's happening in particular when it comes to opera and big orchestras that you see, if you go to see the symphony to get into the symphony, to get try out for that kind of an orchestra, you have to go behind a closed door, like behind a screen. So they don't, they intentionally are, are trying to pick only the very, very best musicians no longer, because that somehow where you actually literally didn't know the person's race is racist. That's racist too. It never ends. After George Floyd, every single classical music organization put out these puling, nauseating statements, beating their chest, saying, woe is me. We're so racist. We are in a racist tradition. Our audiences are too white. Our composers we play are too white. We will never forget. Our mission today is anti-racism. No, it's not. Your mission is making, is presenting a tradition of unparalleled sublimity in as perfect a manner as you can, in as expressive a manner as you can without regard to identity.

I do not, as you say, you do not need to see some female walking through the door or a female firefighter in order to feel validated. I don't need to hear a female composer in order to feel that I have reached some further understanding of the movement of the human soul. If I am listening to Bach or Mozart or Chopin or Lake Brom's piano music, I am experiencing feelings that I otherwise would never have had access to. And I could not care less whether I'm listening to a male or a female composer. The same goes with the race of composers. There are some fantastic Black composers. They're not the ones that are being promoted now. There's some real mediocrities

that are out there. But music is not about race. And yet you have the leaders of our classical music organizations, whether it's the director of the Metropolitan Opera. They're all, they faced an incredible budget catastrophe during COVID because they closed down, they lost their audiences, they had no money coming in. discriminate against any group or any sex all these organizations that were in near bankruptcy hired way overpriced diversity consultants have no musical background their only expertise is that they're black and they come in at you know a hundred thousand two hundred five hundred thousand dollars a year plus staff to go around saying well you don't have enough black musicians in your orchestras we don't know who's auditioning when they're black conductors only want the best musicians they don't give it their perfectionists their tyrants their their taskmasters but the thing they're not is discriminators against talent

all they care is i do i want a horn player that won't flub the solo in a Richard Strauss tone poem. And if it's that's a Nigerian, please come and be in my orchestra because I want the best talent. Right. But again, they would say, well, chicken and the egg. We haven't fostered the arts for whole communities in the United States. We haven't lit the fire of love for music in a lot of these inner cities. And therefore they don't fall in love with the cello. They don't fall in love with the violin. And they're never going to have this opportunity until maybe we help them get into college and then something happens and they fall in love with it. And then maybe they're behind. And so they need a leg up because of the past historical discrimination. And we'll give them that leg up and maybe they won't be the soloist.

But what's wrong with giving them a pathway into the larger orchestra when they've never historically had it? And there are bad reasons for that. Well, actually, they did have it. There was actually there was definitely heartbreaking discrimination against black musicians. On the other hand, there were very many that were promoted, that were given conducting ships, Pulitzer Prizes, fellowships. And in fact, the orchestra profession since the 1960s has been bending over backwards

with one inner city fellowship program after another. To say that the contemporary, the mid 20th century orchestra was not concerned with trying to provide educational opportunities is completely wrong. They send musicians into schools and again, they give fellowships and they try and cultivate talent. But the fault is not that we somehow excluded inner city students from music education. We've cut music education back completely. And I talk about some black violinists who did get exposed through their public schools back in the 1940s and 1950s in Detroit of all places. There were orchestras

in schools, two or three sometimes, a black violinist, Joseph Striplin, who now leads a community orchestra in Virginia. He grew up, he said, with a traditional inner city single mother, but he got it in his schools. And he had students, fellow students that had private lessons, and he listened to them. He said, wow, they really play the violin. I better start studying more. So the solution is, yes, better education across the board. It would be great if classical music wasn't so completely alien now in our culture, but the solution is not to lower standards at the end of the line. And Asian students are absolutely, again, whooping everybody's ass.

Orchestras are way, way disproportionate Asian because of the home environment that the parents, these tiger moms are saying, not only are you going to study calculus in the ninth grade, but you're going to play both the violin and the piano. And China, you know, they've got 300 million students studying piano today. It's fantastic. If China ever decides that, oh, actually, Harvard is not paying any attention to the fact that I'm showing up with three instruments, I still am discriminated against. Maybe there's no point in my learning instruments if it's not being driven by actual love of music, then classical music's over. Amy Chua's book, The Battle H battle hymn of the tiger mother is just so amazing and she she walks you through all of that and it she's totally self-deprecating

and delightful in it but she does she talks about how one of my favorite lines is she says if a western she distinguishes between the sort of chinese mom the tiger mom and the western she's like if a western child comes home uh with a b plus in math the western mother might say okay nice try honey you know maybe you'll get them next time with an A let's go out and have fun. If, if a Chinese child ever came home with a B in math, which would never happen, she says the parent would be getting the practice tests. All fun of any kind. If it had been allowed to the first time would be canceled.

There'd certainly be no, they're not allowed to do drama. They're not allowed to do, you can't get an A in anything other than gym or can't get a B in anything other than gym or theater, both of which they'd prefer to disallow. I mean, she just goes through it. It's hilarious, but it explains the great, great grades. It's a culture. It's a culture that prizes things like classical music and the values that come from that kind of repetitive practice, not to mention studying.

It's not something I want for myself, for my kids, but that's probably that, you know, that's why I went to Syracuse. Can we talk about the docents? This is one of my favorite stories of the entire year, the docents in Chicago. It's unbelievable. The Art Institute of Chicago, it turns out that they were too white. They were great. They were free. They loved what they were doing. It was a bunch of old ladies who had devoted their lives for free to helping people go around the museum and understand love of art. Fired. Too white. Hashtag museum too white. And thus it remains

to this day. White culling is the order of the day. It's museums, it's virology, it's vaccine distribution, it's orchestras. There was an orchestra in England that fired half of its musicians because they were too white. Let's be honest. Again, this is no longer the time for racial etiquette, Megan. It is white culling. Every institution is trying to get a proportion of whites down chicago had one of the most vibrant volunteer traditions in the 1950s the art institute of chicago which is an unparalleled collection i recommend that everybody go well they still can before all of the wall labels have been turned into anti-colonialism anti-racism anti-white uh harangs uh they've got an amazing collection of 18th century pastel portraits that I visit every time I'm there.

In the 1950s, Chicago, the Art Institute was in financial trouble, and women got together and fundraised for them and did such a good job that the Institute decided to incorporate women into a women's board. And they thought, okay, what should we do next? Well, how about we start education? At the time, it was assumed that especially for educating children about art, you should have paid, official, credentialized museum MFAs. And they said, no, we're going to be volunteers, but we're going to put ourselves through a program that is as rigorous as getting a master's of fine arts. And we're going to do it for free. And starting in the 60s and 70s, of course, they became very concerned about diversity and they would do their own trainings about reaching out to diversity audiences. But they

brought thousands of Chicago public school kids into the museum to expose them to the beauty of art, to try to acclimate their eyes to seeing the vast dramatic evolution of style, which is one of the great dramas in human history of how you get from Chartres Cathedral to the Renaissance, to Brunelleschi to to Beaux-Arts and and then to modernism how do you get from Giotto to John Singer Sargent these are incredibly

dramatic changes in human expression but in comes the a former contemporary art curator, James Rondeau, who is a total idiot. And I say that with factual basis. And you can read his remarks in the book. He sounds like he's a 12-year-old valley girl. He and his new director of the Women's Board, herself a diversity hire, decided the docents were too white. And so they completely terminated their docent program. They said, OK, clean out your lockers and for a consolation prize, we'll give you two years of free Chicago Art Institute membership. And so now they've got at best six paid educators who are not going to be able to educate,

bring in the students that they did, and they will be chosen on anti-racism equity grounds, not on whether they know a damn thing about art. Oh my Lord. All right. So in the time we have left, is there any cause for hope? I realized the world exploded after George Floyd. There was a seismic shift in the ground underneath our feet when it came to all this race essentialism. But here we are almost three years later. Are we getting over this? Is this so baked in? There is no getting over it. Where are we? Well, I do take hope from governors like Ron DeSantis and some of these legislators that are pushing back. I would just add, you know, the third part of the book

is to talk about criminal law enforcement. There again, if you're confused as to why prosecutors are not prosecuting, why judges are not sentencing, why police chiefs are saying, do not enforce the law, including against resisting arrest, everything there too is explained by disparate impact. We've decided we would rather not enforce the law than put more black criminals in prison, even if that means that thousands more black lives are taken, including dozens and dozens of black children who are gunned down in barbaric shootings in their backyards, in their beds, in their living rooms. All of this is because of disparate impact. It explains everything in our world. Nevertheless, there is some pushback now. It is absolutely appropriate for governors

to say in elementary school, you're not going to get the damn trans ideology. Children should have innocence. It's not about being anti-trans, whatever that means. It's about not forcing kids to rub their noses in premature knowledge of sexuality. It is perfectly appropriate to say, as a public university, we are not going to fund these totally unnecessary diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies because, again, Reagan, colleges are not racist. They are the most left-wing organizations in human history towards society's traditionally marginalized groups. They are all, every single one, are discriminating in favor of Blacks, not against Blacks. Offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion are founded on a lie.

They are staffed by people who have no competence. So we should continue fighting back. So that does give me hope. Heather MacDonald, the book is When Race Trumps Merit. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. you