The Megyn Kelly Show - Cultural Backlash Against Truth, and Pawns in Political Games, with Glenn Loury and Rob Montz | Ep. 325

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Glenn Loury, Brown University economist, and Rob Montz, filmmaker and Good Kid Productions CEO, to talk about the push to find "pawns in a political game" after the horrific Buffalo tragedy, Roland Fryer's history and the story of his rise and alarming and unfair fall, Fryer's research about the true Black experience, cultural backlash against the truth, what Fryer found about how to help improve educational results in Black communities, the truth about police shooting unarmed Black men, the bizarre #MeToo claims against Fryer and when they originated, the extreme punishment against Fryer, the cowardice on college campuses, affirmative action, the cultural push to claim Kanye West is "crazy" instead of engaging with his ideas, the "spiral of silence" when it comes to certain crimes of the wrong narrative, the racial reckoning failing certain minority groups in America, and more.Follow 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. I'm excited about today's program because we are bringing back one of my very favorite guests of all time, and what a day for him to be here. These days, it seems like the cancel culture vultures are coming for anyone and everyone. We have witnessed people being silenced for their politics, alleged misdeeds, even their stance on issues that just don't fit the narrative that some are trying to sell. And today we're going to discuss one such person, a brilliant economist who had his life's work destroyed. We are also keeping tabs on the fallout from

the horrific shooting in Buffalo. Even that attack has turned into an effort to silence certain voices. Those, of course, all on the right. But are there critics telling the truth? More on that in a moment. First, though, I want to welcome Brown University economist Glenn Lowry back to the show. And also joining us today is Rob Montz. Rob's a filmmaker and CEO of Good Kid Productions. And there's a reason we have them both on together. Glenn and Rob, thanks so much for being here. Thanks, Megan. Thank you so much for having me. It's our pleasure. All right. So you guys have taken a deep dive into what happened to Roland Fryer. And I want to get into all of it. We spent a lot of time on the movie and clips and so on and deconstructed because it's horrifying. It's horrifying what was done to this brilliant Glenn says he's the most brilliant economist of his generation. And Glenn is an economist economist and so he understands that. And his life has been ruined because of well-founded research that doesn't go along with the sort of BLM narratives

that the left is pushing and that Harvard, the university where Roland Fryer works as a professor, is pushing. So they've decided to ruin the man's life. That's where we're going to go with Glenn and Rob in a minute. But I want to start with news of the day because there's a lot of it. Glenn, I've been dying to get your take on what happened in Buffalo and the reaction thereafter. you were one of them talking about Buffalo, talking about what's happening in black America and that, you know, the consensus there was not it's the fault of Republicans. It's a lot more complex. And they can see this being split into a question of good and evil by the Democrats and that she excuse me, Ion saying, it's hard for me to be pressured into joining the so-called good side when they're clearly using my color, my race, and that of

fellow Black Americans to divide us for political purposes. What do you make of it? I hadn't heard, Ayaan. We were together at the Old Parkland Conference in Dallas, actually celebrating the career of the great economist Thomas Sowell and the ongoing career of the great jurist Clarence Thomas. The Genesis was a reprise of the 1980 conference called the Fairmont Conference in San Francisco that Tom Sowell had been instrumental in fomenting and which Clarence Thomas attended all those years ago. Now kind of revisiting the question really of what does conservatism have to say to the Black condition, to the challenges confronting the African-American community. Wonderful conference. Buffalo and Ayan's deep point about the politicization. Glenn Greenwald also, I thought, had a very strong piece on this very same theme. I think, gosh, first of all, you have to say what a tragedy and what a horrific crime and et cetera. And I think you have to nod, and more than nod, to the concern

about extremism, of which that particular act is exemplary. But I think Glenn Greenwald gets it right when he says that you don't, if a crazy person does an evil thing and they adopt an ideology, you don't assume that the people, anyone else who holds that ideology is responsible like the shooting of Congressman Scalise or the murder of police officers by people who are animated by Black Lives Matter ideology. You don't. And it would be a mistake, would be irrational, it would be immoral to impute responsibility for that to the people who might have adopted the ideology and promulgated it, which inspired the killer. But I think the politicization of these issues, I think the president of the United States, with respect, taking, you know, what do they call it, the replacement theory, and then Tucker Carlson, I won't go on at length, Megan, I know I'm going

on at length, is supposed to be responsible for this activity. And meanwhile, what they're really doing is telling you, you can't discuss the issue of the security of the country and who comes across the border. So I very much identify with the eye on Hershey Ali's point that I don't want to be a pawn in your game. I don't want the great legacy of struggle of African Americans in this country, of which Roland Frye's triumph is exemplary, to be tarnished by being appropriated, making us pawns on a chessboard of some kind of political thing. So they're going to say it's Trump. They're going to say at the end of the day, there's an election coming. 2024 is coming. There's an election coming.

2022 is coming. They're trying to defeat the expression of a certain revulsion at what the liberals and their intellectual handmakings have wrought by putting this racist label on it. And frankly, my prediction is it's not going to work. They've been touting this great replacement theory as this Republican spun narrative that's made its way into the head of crazies like this shooter in Buffalo. Meanwhile, you know, the actual great replacement theory, quote unquote, that this shooter was reading on and espousing on in his so-called manifesto is this bizarre theory that there's some elite cabal of Jewish people who are trying to eliminate the white race by increasing the black population and the mixed race population. All right. Like lunacy. OK,

that's crazy talk. And that's what the great replacement theory is. What Republicans, including Tucker, talk about on his show and elsewhere is are we ever going to close the southern border? And are Democrats wanting a sieve of a border because they want to increase the ranks of immigrants in the country who they think, rightly or wrongly, are going to vote Democrat? It's not the same thing. And what we've heard over the past four days is they're sisters. They're sister narratives. And there's too much crossover and it's irresponsible and you know it. And in the past few days, a lot of folks, Tucker, Gravy, and a lot of great people who put together like

sort of butted soundbites have put together soundbites of the left. The left pushing demographics are key, you know, that super focused on how demographics are destiny. That's how Joe Scarborough put it and how the demographics of the country are changing and how demographics are destiny. That's how Joe Scarborough put it and how the demographics of the country are changing and how wonderful this is. And talking about immigration in those terms. This is what Tucker said when he came on my show in September. He was like, it's the left that talks about this, which is why I talk about it. And then they look at me and say, well, how dare you talk about this? Well, you put it out there. Here's just a bit of the soundbite Tucker ran the other night on his show.

Blue Wave is African-American. It's white, it's Latino, it's Asian Pacific Islander. It is made up of those who've been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented. In a couple of presidential cycles, you'll be on election night. You'll be announcing that we're calling the 38 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic nominee for president. It's changing. It's gonna become a purple state

and then a blue state because of the demographics. The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them and instead they're moving to be independents or to even vote on the other side an unrelenting stream of immigration non-stop non-stop folks like me who were caucasian of european descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That's not a bad thing. That's a source of our strength.

What do you make of it, Glenn? Well, I shouldn't be laughing because it is a very serious matter. But the irony is just almost unbearable. The irony here is so exquisite. So we are a country where congressional districts are drawn with the intention of assimilating ethnically identified, that is, African-American majorities for the purpose of electing, et cetera. I mean, people are counting by race everywhere you look and everywhere you turn. And moreover, the Democratic Party does indeed count on the demographic weight in order to secure its coalition built around ideas of ethnic and racial difference. So then if somebody calls attention

to the relationship between those things, they're supposed to be the racist. Well, who's really started this? I have made the point on this show repeatedly this week and prior that we, we, there's a massive problem with mental health in America, but it's not, it's not the one the administration is looking at. It's the fact that right now, if you know, you're raising a child who happens to be a sociopath and there are mothers and fathers out there right now who know that they are, there's nothing to do with them. There's no place to put them. They can't be therapized out of being a sociopath. And unless they break the law, you can't get them in the

criminal justice system where the parents don't want them anyway. There's no secure facility where a loving parent would send his or her child. You know what I mean? There's one place that I think Michigan called Nemours, which is as close as we have, but it's still too barbaric for most loving parents to say, I want my kid needs to go there. He's he's torturing animals. He's hurting his little brother and sister. You know, a school shooting is next. And those mothers are out there. I've interviewed them. So nobody will pay attention to this. When we have these massive shootings, you say, oh, there were red flags, red flags all over this kid. Oh, well, you know, what are we going to do? And that's happening again, Glenn. That is happening again. Joe Biden, when he spoke to

this this week, came out and said, there are things we can do. There are things we can do. Number one, we got to get rid of the guns. OK, we need an assault weapons ban. It worked before. OK, that's at best to give Joe Biden the kindest interpretation of the assault weapons ban, mixed results to be as kind to him as possible. I could cite you a slew of studies saying it didn't work at all and that shootings went up. Okay. But anyway, number one, the guns.

Number two, messaging on the internet. Okay. So we're going to crack down on the second amendment. We're going to crack down on the first amendment. Mental health. OK, no, not really on the list, because here's what his new spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked about mental health by The Washington Post. Right. This is not Fox News putting this one to her about how this kid had market problems well prior to the shooting, but yet still got a gun. Fair question. How did it happen? One of the things we need to be looking into. She takes umbrage at the fact that mental health is even being interjected into this. Here's a bit of that exchange. He did have a history of mental health issues and was held for an evaluation last year.

So does the White House believe he should have been prevented from owning a gun because of that history? And how does the administration propose doing so in the future so just give me a second because i really want to touch on this it's really important um our nation is facing a mental health crisis so it's important to call that uh one that is worsened by acts of violence like the one we saw in buffalo i want to also underscore that the overwhelming majority of individuals with mental health problems do not commit acts of violence. And so comments that make this about mental health only further stigmatizing mental health issues and detract from the other issues like gun violence, that must be confronted in our society. So just want to make that clear that we are not stigmatizing.

I mean, look, this is this goes back to making sure that, you know, we have gun reform. It's all about the guns, Glenn. She can't even spend a minute on this guy's mental health problems. And let me just tick off a couple of them for you, because I think these have been undercovered. One year before the shooting, this kid said, I want to commit murder suicide. There was a police investigation. They took him to a hospital. He underwent a psych eval, but was released, possibly because he had not made a specific threat against any individual. Not clear, by the way, why he was not red flagged for purposes of getting a gun, which he did thereafter. We do need to look into that. The shooter claimed he had only been joking in his in his remarks. He wore a hazmat to his school for a week.

He wore a full hazmat suit for a week in 2020. And then here's the capper. It always goes down like this. Trust me, as somebody who's interviewed these moms, he beheaded a cat. He once stabbed, forgive me, this is graphic. He once stabbed and beheaded a cat. He repeatedly stabbed it and bashed its head in before grabbing a hatchet and cutting its head off. He took meticulous notes on it. New York Post reporting here. This is from his so-called manifesto recording the time at which blood spilled from its mouth, what knife he used and how many times he slashed its neck until its head came off. He said he felt no empathy or emotion. He told his mother about it. And she said, here's a box, go bury it in the backyard. Talk about your red flags. This guy was a school shooter or a mass shooter waiting to happen. But what we need to focus on, Glenn, is guns. Well, I guess you want to comment. I mean, I'm saddened in a way by the politicization. I mean, obviously, it's about control of the narrative. The narrative could be mental health, because here's a person who needed to be dealt with, who wasn't effectively dealt with, or the narrative could be about white supremacy, or it appeared to be obvious that if you took a gun away from him, he'd find some other tool to carry out the heinous acts that his unstable mind was promulgating, contemplating, I should say. So, you know, this is not about guns. Not really. But is it about white supremacy? I think that's really why the White House press secretary is reluctant to

give any space to a discussion about mental health. And what saddens me is that, I mean, as with so many other things, you know, the dealing with significant public health and public policy issues gets held captive to partisan politics. So that's what I see, Meg. Rob, can I ask you, as somebody who actually actually as a documentary filmmaker, one of the subjects that you've focused on has been Kanye West. And I do not believe the current claim of let's be very careful around the issue of mental health. We don't want to stigmatize mental health because boy, oh boy, were the Democrats singing a different tune when Kanye visited the White House, talked to Trump and seemed to be embracing MAGA type policies. I heard a lot from them about how he was off his rocker and, you know, not well and we shouldn't be listening to him back then.

Yeah, of course. You know, it's remarkable. I just watched the Netflix documentary documentary about kanye like maybe three days ago like i'm six months behind the zeitgeist because i have three small children so forgive me for like a dated reference and the very end of the kanye documentary literally is him watching a tucker carlson monologue about his infamous presidential campaign event in South Carolina. And you could tell from the filmmaker, from the voiceover from the filmmaker, that Kanye West watching and approving of a Tucker Carlson monologue

is definitionally evidence that he's insane. And they have the whole thing. But as you watch it, basically, Tucker makes very similar points to what Glenn and I made in our documentary about Kanye's run for president, where he very cleanly says like, okay, Kanye might have some excessive dragon energy. He might have some biochemical imbalances. But when he talks about freedom is not pornography, and it's not gun violence, and freedom is not abortion, he can still be saying something true. And he could be saying things that are true that most celebrities,

most people in his position would be absolutely petrified to articulate, right? And the documentary that we did about him kind of goes through a bunch of his media appearances, where if you, the kind of what Kanye would call the simulation, sort of the legacy media interpretation or narrative spun around those appearances is that he's mentally unstable and he's crazy and he needs to be medicated and he needs to be institutionalized. But then if you actually watch the specific media appearances, he will occasionally snap into incredibly eloquent insights, and most of his insights like decimate woke orthodoxy. And then when this happens over and over again, you begin to become suspicious that perhaps people are trying to debunk him through this mental health storyline as opposed to letting people see that he's saying these truths that are deeply problematic for them and deeply uncomfortable for them. perfectly, dovetails perfectly with your documentary on Roland Fryer, even though in Roland's case, the attack wasn't mental health. The attack was some some minor alleged me too

type behavior in the form of like a few off color jokes and allegedly a couple of texts where he got a little a little racy. That's it. Like not even accused. Nothing. no touching, no affair, no sexual exploitation, nothing. They used a trumped up Me Too thing to try to take down Roland, because he was doing what Kanye was doing. He's got a heterodox message. But he, like you, Glenn, like all these economists, I love listening to you guys because you're in the world of data. And it's funny because if you let data drive the narrative as opposed to ideology, you can get to real truths. You can get to real action points that could affect change, which you would think that everybody would celebrate. But they didn't in Roland's case because it didn't go along with, quote, the narrative. And that brings me to your to your documentary. OK, so, Glenn, let start with this. For people who have never heard the name Roland Fryer before, who is Roland Fryer? University and a postdoc at the University of Chicago. He's a former junior fellow of the Harvard

Society of Fellows, a professor, the youngest tenured Black professor in the history of Harvard University of Economics at Harvard, and the director of a research lab, Ed Labs, for which he has raised nine figures of cumulative research support to carry off massive social intervention experiments trying to understand how to get kids, poor disadvantaged kids, better educated, and to try to understand what's actually going on on the streets of our cities with respect to violence and interaction between Blacks and the police, amongst many other things. I could go on. He's the winner of the Clark Medal, which is the junior Nobel Prize awarded every year to the best economists under the age of 40, as judged by the American Economics Association and a MacArthur Genius Prize and many other things. of his generation. He is an absolute superstar, stellar, path-breaking. I've been in Toulouse, France and heard graduate students at the Toulouse University Institute for Advanced Studies say,

I've been following Roland Fryer's papers. They want me to tell them what Roland Fryer was doing. I wish I could have done that. So that's who Roland Fryer is, Megan. Okay. So he's a rising star in intellectual circles and economic circles. And he decides to use his talents, as we just discussed, just to find truths, just to uncover truth. In a way, it reminds me a little bit of Michael Schellenberger, who that's kind of what he's doing. Like he takes big topics like climate change or homelessness and just like a moss to the flame will not be drawn away from facts as we can unearth them, irrespective of ideology. And that's what Rowland's like, except with an economics background. So in the film, there's a bit that talks about one of the many things that may have ticked off his superiors at Harvard. And that has to do with looking into the, quote, economics of acting white. Here's a bit. It's soundbite nine. Mounds of existing research seemed to debunk acting white by simply asking top students how

popular they were and finding no social penalty for doing well in school. Asking a 13-year-old boy how popular he is, it's like asking him how much sex he's having. I mean, you're going to get an answer, but it's probably not going to be the right one. Roland comes up with a different way to measure popularity. The students are asked, who are your three best friends? And so you can count how many times somebody gets named as somebody else's three best friends. He has this beautiful algorithm for constructing a popularity index, which he then correlates with the students' grades. And he finds that the curve of popularity rises up until about a B.

Then it starts to tail off. Roland finds that Black kids do lose friends as they excel in school. That there's a cultural ceiling capping classroom performance. A lot of times we don't talk honestly and openly about the things that are hindering Blacks in America. And that's what I'm all about, frankly. And Rob, so in a nutshell, it was that one of the problems for black students and excelling in certain schools is that if you do too well, it's considered acting white, and it's not socially a positive thing. That's what he was testing. And he found that it was true. And you're not allowed to find that in a nutshell.

But then we right after that, in the documentary, we go into Roland's biography. And there's ways in which Glenn, after what he just said, still underplays the magic and the magnificence of Roland's career, that he wasn't just like born in Daytona Beach, Florida. He was born and immediately abandoned by his mother. Okay. He doesn't meet her until he's in his early twenties. And he's raised by an alcoholic and what I've called an employment challenged father who actually goes to jail when Roland is graduating from high school.

Roland himself kind of fell into small time crime at high school, but then he, on an athletic scholarship, goes to the University of Texas. And while he's there, he kind of accidentally walks into an economics class and then instantly falls in love with these, the equations of it and the data sets, because so much of his life up to that point

had been defined by chaos, incomprehensible chaos. And for him, economics offered the promise of understanding and snapping into focus a world that had been violent chaos up until that point. And we go into his biography in part to show that for him, something like Acting White or some of the other bombshell studies that he released are not primarily about mindless provocation. And they're not even about partisanship. I mean, there's things that he found that definitely don't fit a neat conservative narrative about the world, right? He's only interested in truth because he cares about all the kids that he left behind in Daytona Beach.

It's like truth is absolutely essential into giving them an opportunity. And sometimes truth is uncomfortable. And sometimes truth doesn't fit in the partisan narratives. But it's not about provocation for provocation's sake. It's not about pleasing Republicans. It's not about pleasing white people, right? It's about digging up truth. And those truths can underlie policy changes that can produce more Roland Friars.

That's the whole point of it. And that's that's the reason why he launches any of his economic investigations. Mm hmm. And so that was so beautiful. Yeah, go ahead. Go for it. No, no, I'm sorry. It's your show. But I just I mean, this thing that Rob just said is so beautiful because that's exactly right. And that's, again, the irony, because Harvard counts as the guy who's looking for truth. Harvard's supposed to be very tossed. It's supposed to be about truth. It's in the very brand. And this idea that a young Black man coming along against struggles will have some insights that cut against the grain of the liberal narrative about the Black victimology condition, this is a very deep point. And the fact that the point of it all at the end of the day is to help the kids, which if you don't face the truth, and this is not going

to just be true about acting white, this is going to be true about gun violence. This is going to be true about the educational achievement gap. This is going to be true about the seven and 10 born to an unmarried woman. This is going to be true about the abortion rate. This is going to be true about a lot of stuff. The truth will set you free. Couldn't have said it better, Rob. Absolutely right. And to me, it's also the case in the Buffalo shooter. Like let's, yes, he was radicalized over the last 12 months. Yes, he had very racist views at the time he walked into that grocery store. But as far as I have read, that wasn't this kid prior to 12 months ago. This is a sociopath.

People who torture animals are sociopaths. And we've seen that pattern in virtually everybody who's committed a mass shooting. So I'm not excusing it. I'm just saying, let's deal with the real problem that led him to be attracted to these ideologies and to want to kill long before he ever started reading the racist teachings of mass shooters overseas. Let's deal with the with what created the desire to kill on a mass level as opposed to just jumping to his reason du jour. I mean, that's he this guy was a ticking time bomb well before he started

reading about the great replacement theory. And we won't go there. Unlike Roland Fryer, who will go to all the uncomfortable places and has been just absolutely. I mean, I know one of his research assistants said he's been it was a murder what they did to him. It was a professional murder. We're going to get to that. Let me stand you by a squeeze in a quick break and much, much more as we dive into the disturbing story of what happened to Roland Fryer. And then what can we do about it? How can we help this guy? Let's talk about episode number two. So he's at Harvard and he's gotten away with the acting white study and conclusions. But then he goes back and pokes the bear again. And he starts taking a look at education more in depth. And he goes and is he part of establishing Harlem Children's Zone or

he just worked with them, Rob? He just worked with them? Yeah, he just worked with them. I mean, to what we talked about before, he's looking for to unbury specific truths that can be used to uplift people. And everything about education in particular that he's been told works to boost Black achievement, like smaller class sizes or more credentials for teachers or spending more per pupils. All that stuff has been definitively proven to be absolutely irrelevant. And then he stumbles on the Harlem Children's Zone, which has these incredible academic games for poor Black kids in New York City. And he goes in there to basically figure out what is their magical formula that can then be replicated and injected into other school systems. All right, here's a little bit from the documentary on that. This is Soundbite 10.

The truth that matters most to Roland is how to fix schools for all the other young Rolands in the world. It wasn't until I got involved in education I heard about the cardiac test. You'd walk around a school and they would say, we have a new program after school program. I would say, oh that's great. Does it work? And they would say, yeah.

And I said, well how do you know it works? You could feel it in your heart. Maybe. Maybe. 2011, screen reads. Harlem. Roland's work brings him here, to the Harlem Children's Zone. It's a revolution, taking in poor black kids and within three years getting them to catch

up to and even exceed their white peers at richer schools. You know, we really got to think about this gap here because there's like a white black gap going on. I'm not sure why you guys can't actually achieve. He starts piecing together a five-part formula for the zone's success. And he finds that a central piece is aggressive human capital management. Economists speak for the practice of firing tons of teachers. He asked the teachers, what do you think you need to educate these kids? And we got answers like, well, all we need is smarter kids.

I said, all you need is a new job. The Zone's formula is simply operationalized common sense. Revolutionizing schools won't require a revolution. They needed extra time. If you're behind, you either got to spend more time or ask the white kids to please take Thursday and Friday off. Small tutoring groups, they used data to drive instruction. They had high expectations. They took no excuses for failure.

The highlight of Roland's youth were summers spent with his grandmother, a Florida grade school teacher. And she notices what he notices about this formula. I talk to my grandmother about every other day. She lives in Daytona Beach, Florida, very close to here. And I've told her the five things. We're family now. I'll just tell you what she told me. She said, baby, they pay you for that shit. I know. I know it's obvious. But if it's so obvious, why are we not doing it? Why are we not doing it? High expectations, not the soft bigotry of low expectations.

So, Key, Glenn, you've talked about this many times. Well, I mean, first, let's just take notice of the achievement that is represented in Rob's short synopsis of Roland's work on education. I mean, this is one of the biggest questions of our time. How to make schools more effective. He actually runs a massive experiment in the city of Houston after the Harlem Children's Zone research to confirm what was described there as a basic outline or template for more effective education for minority students. This is a magnificent intellectual achievement. And so and what happened in Houston, Rob, was incredible. This is basically reads on. This is from the piece talking about after being handed control of the 20th lowest performing public schools in Houston, Professor Fryer fired half the teachers and almost all of the principals. Yay. Within two years, he had significantly boosted math scores and college matriculation.

I read this and said, why didn't his work then get expanded to every single struggling community, especially in predominantly black areas in the country? Why didn't everybody say, oh, my God, they're on to something? Fire the bad teachers, set the expectations higher, give the kids more time, you know, use data and all that. What happened after Houston, Rob? Well, yeah, it's only a mystery if you assume most of the people in the space actually want to fix the problem. It's not a mystery if you don't assume that. Yeah. I mean, and it's, um, the other thing that, that Glenn talks about it, one of those,

the essential pieces of that formula is basically being institutionally allergic to condescending to these kids. Right. As, as Roland says in that, in that piece that you read, like bad schools, failing schools, taking kids from bad circumstances and just say, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you've had it so bad. We shouldn't expect very much from you. And a place like the Harlem Children's Zone takes those exact same kids and says, that's too bad. Now let's teach you the Pythagorean theorem. Right. The idea is that even under those circumstances, you can still excel, right? You can still excel. And that's one of the essential elements of it. That cuts directly against some of the more famous Black intellectuals in America right now, like Ibram X. Kendi, which say that if a standardized test is proving or showing achievement gaps, that means the test is

necessarily white supremacist and institutionally racist and needs to be scrapped, right? It means you ought to not just lower, but you need to dissolve the standards if you fall upon an achievement gap. And I think, yeah, I mean, you're asking why is it that it wasn't replicated? This is something I was thinking about during the break. OK, because it's just to zoom back for a second. So in the opening segment with Glenn, I've been fortunate enough to work with Glenn that I know some of his like some some of the verbal tics that he uses sometimes. And when he was talking about Joe Biden, the first thing that he said is he said, with all due respect, right? And when Glenn Lowry says, with all due respect,

he's about to like incinerate whoever he's about to talk about, right? He is. He's about to basically be the most eloquent person in the English speaking world and just destroy him, right? When I interviewed him, when I interviewed Glenn, and we were talking about Roland and how out of place he was, I did ask Glenn to sort of describe what the black establishment at Harvard University is like.

Well, if if someone like Roland can't fit in there, what are these people like? What is it that they care about? What kind of ideology do they have? Forgive me for interrupting you, Rob, but just to tell our audience, Glenn was formerly at Harvard. He was the youngest black economics professor ever tenured at Harvard, then comes along Roland. And I think he was the youngest black tenured professor ever at any place at Harvard at the age of 30. So you have a history at Harvard, though you're at Brown University now. Go ahead, Rob. And I will say on camera, when Glenn was about to discuss some of the members of the black establishment, he also said with all due respect, right? He said he proceeded to do to them what he just did to Joe Biden. And I mean, I don't, Glenn can discuss as much as he'd like what he thinks the predilections are and the ideological commitments are of the black establishment at Harvard. But that gets back to your question, which is, okay, we have what Roland called the vaccine for education

at the Harlem Children's Zone. We've found the five-part formula. And just like you would basically take and replicate the COVID vaccine, right, or any vaccine, and then you spread it all across the country, we're going to take this vaccine and inject it in other failing school systems. And that's exactly what he did in Houston. And it worked. I mean, it took a while. I mean, it worked. Why is it that after that success, you wouldn't continue to spread the vaccine? That's the exact same question as, well, what is it that the people that are the Black establishment at Harvard care about? And it unfortunately is not actually about concrete improvements in the lives of poor Black people. It's not. It's not.

Well, it's about politics, if I may. Yeah. At the end of the day, that's what this is about. I mean, come on, let's just face it. Charter school debate? I mean, Thomas Sowell has this wonderful book about charter schools. Charter school debate. I mean, Thomas Sowell has this wonderful book about charter schools. Charter school debate. This is about the National Economics Association, National, I'm sorry, National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. This is about control. This is about, you know, who do the kids belong to?

Do the kids belong to the union or does the union work for the kids? I mean, that's ultimately what this is about. And Roland is caught in, just like on the police research stuff, which I soon will talk about, he's caught in this political jigsaw, just like on the debate about acting white, where the real issue is, is culture a factor in accounting for inequality? And to the extent that it is, it shifts the burden of responsibility in some sense about what to do in the face of the problem of persisting inequality. This is about power at the end of the day. And that's what we're taking up next, the police work he did. But before I get to that, you mentioned this is about politics and power. And there was an extraordinary

soundbite on television with respect to the Buffalo situation and how it's being used to sort of smear the entire Republican Party. Donnie Deutsch, who's over on MSNBC. I mean, it's rare when they say the quiet part out loud, but here's an extraordinary instance of somebody doing it and explaining why they keep saying at every turn, great replacement theory, great replacement theory, and trying to saddle this very racist theory that I was talking about that inspired these overseas shooters, not the immigration concerns that the left and the right have had in this country for the past 40 years. Why they keep saying it and why they have to keep keep doing that tactic. Here he is. Listen to this. We don't have the economy on our side as Democrats, So you have to scare the bejesus out of people.

The way to scare it is say, you know, this replacement theory, this is not just coming from some dark corner of the web. This is the Republican platform. Make them own it. And Democrats run from this fistfight. I know in the previous segment, Eugene Daniels, he talked about the president not wanting to call out names. Call out Tucker Carlson. Call out the politicians and make this, make them own it. Glenn, it's right there. We have to scare. We have to scare people. They're going to lose.

November's coming. It's time to scare the populace. It's the same thing. Yes, it is. And again, I think it goes to politics and the fact that I'm sorry, can I say this on your show, Megan? I mean, the Biden administration is failing across the board. The party is expecting a disaster in November and well-deserved. That Supreme Court leak, something tells me, I don't know this for a fact, but how does Bill Maher put it, but I know it's true. That Supreme Court leak has something to do with this. They're grasping for straws. And white supremacy, you reap what you sow. They've been playing the race card forever. I'm not excusing, obviously, I'm not excusing anything. But do you think that you can make race the centerpiece of the discussion of the heart and soul of the country and not cause

some white people to defend whiteness. Again, I'm not defending them. I'm saying it's all a piece. We are reaping what we have sown. Oh, that's fascinating. I've heard you warn about that many times on your blogging heads TV with your talks with John McWhorter about how this is a dangerous game they're playing. And we don't want to go down this road. And we don't start comparing crime stats and doing like it doesn't end in a good place for anybody. And yet they continue to do it and they continue to exploit tragedies for political purposes. That seems clear. All right, back to Roland. So this, I think, was his cardinal sin, right? As controversial as the earlier work was, even though it was so fascinating and great intentioned and great results, was the study on police. Police involved shootings and whether we have evidence

that black men are being killed at a disproportionate rate by racist cops than white men. Rob, do you want to describe what happened there? Yeah, him and his research team go down to Houston, and they go through 1000s of handwritten police incident reports. And they basically put them in this big data set and analyze them and are trying to answer this question at the basically red hot center of American politics, which are, are is their racial bias in police shootings. And other questions too. And they run it through and they find that in fact, there was not. That actually black suspects in Houston were slightly less likely to be shot than white suspects. That makes the New York Times. And as we recount in the documentary, though, Rowland had been directly confronted during the early stages of the paper and told by other

powerful, high profile academics not to publish the results, not to do it. Okay. And he does a bit of that. We have a bit of that. This is soundbite. He doesn't care. He just does it anyway, right? Let me get to that because we've got a bit of that. And have a bit of that. This is soundbite. He doesn't care. He just does it anyway, right? Let me get to that because we've got a bit of that. And that's soundbite 13. And then I'll get back to you. I remember Roland walking in and saying, what do the numbers look like?

And I said, I just don't want to say it out loud. And he said, what do you mean you don't want to say it out loud? I gave this paper early on. Three professors took me to the side. I said, hey, it's just so different, bro. It's so different. You don't want to publish it. You put that away from them. I said, well, you just guaranteed I'm going to put it in no matter what. He couldn't find bias in lethal use of force. In fact, he found that it was less likely that force would be used against a suspect when

the suspect was Black. The resulting media firestorm props credible death threats, and Rowland is temporarily assigned around-the-clock police protection. I think the truth helps us. Right? False narratives do not. I find it frustrating. I find it insulting that people would change the truth because they think they're trying

to help us. They're just trying to help themselves. The truth is enough. I'm just following the data wherever it leads. What are you doing? But the truth shall not set you free, Rob. It didn't in Roland's case. I mean, shortly after that, his career is basically ended by a shady sexual harassment trial. It's like, it doesn't take, you have to be Sherlock Holmes to be a little bit suspect. You're like, wait, okay, like, we're not going to ask any questions about this. We're just going to like, like the New York Times, the day that his punishment comes down, essentially ending his career, we can get into it. It basically paints Rowland as an unrepentant sexual predator and mentions in their piece, oh, by the way, he's the guy who authored that, that study that didn't find racial bias in police shootings that you hate, as if the two things are related, but like, oh, it's not the Clark medal winner. It's not like the greatest economic mind of his generation at Harvard University professor. It's we're pairing this sexual predator with that study that you despise that demolishes your worldview. And that's the narrative that gets set in stone and basically goes unquestioned until the doc that Glenn and I made comes out. It's like, it's a little suspect. It's a little suspect what's going on. Yeah, it is. So Glenn, the role of the New York Times here should be underscored because there were a number of pieces written by a team of investigative reporters who I can't name before the final dispensation of Rowland's situation at Harvard that were in effect,

like expose and it's the Harvard Crimson also has to be mentioned uh in this context and to some extent i think the administration at harvard were responding to public pressures to not be lenient given that they knew the kind of pieces that would be written uh if uh they were not uh very strict with roland so you know that that whole media left-wing cabal world needs to be invoked here. But, you know, the finding of no evidence of racial bias in the lethal use of force by police in Houston was a bombshell. It was a blockbuster finding. It came right at a time at the height of this Black Lives Matter stuff. And it was pushing in the opposite direction against the Benjamin Crump narrative that it's open season on Black people.

And so it just underscores how important it is to pursue the truth because cities could be put on fire in this country for getting this one wrong. I mean, again, the capital T, capital N, the narrative was more important. So he had to be silenced. And that's where we pick up the story right after this quick break. Glenn and Rob are staying with us. Aren't they great? Isn't this a great discussion? And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. That's youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly if you'd

like to watch the show. If you prefer to just listen on your own time while you're doing your makeup, doing your errands, what have you, you can subscribe and listen and download to our audio podcast on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. And there you will find our full archives with more than 320 shows, including the first time Glenn was on with us. It was En Fuego, episode 25. We're talking about Rob's documentary, which you can find at whocanceldroland.com.

Roland Fryer, we are speaking of, Harvard University professor. Glenn says the economist of his generation who has been treated terribly by Harvard University for pursuing facts and not narratives. So he publishes this this piece. And before we move on from the study that he did on police shootings. Just want to fill that out. What he found is that police were more likely to engage in nonviolent force on black suspects, tasering, handcuffing, other physical submissions than they were on white suspects, even when the suspect was described as compliant by the officer himself. So as you point out earlier, he's not narrative driven.

It's not like, oh, I'm going to exonerate all the cops with this study. No, he said, when it comes to short of something fatal, they're worse on black suspects than they were, than they are in white suspects, even those that they are describing as compliant. No one had a problem with that piece of Roland's study. Fine. Yes. That's what we believe too. And then when he got to the part about, but when it comes to fatalities, black suspects are less likely to be shot by police than white suspects. They couldn't tolerate that. That was totally that, that crossed a line they shouldn't have crossed. And by the way, then he added something that's

been really important in our national debate. And that is, uh, findings about the so-called Ferguson effect, finding that, uh, his team examined data from about a dozen cities stretching back decades and found that if a police department is subjected to a federal pattern or practice investigation, that was the Obama DOJ's favorite tool, in the wake of a viral police killing, officers tended to withdraw from the community. And he concluded that many of these investigations would then see after them, you would see a market increase in both homicide and total crime. We're living that as a nation right now. We're living that as a nation. That's why it's so irresponsible for the media to take a tape like the George Floyd tape, as awful as it was, and just put it on loop over and over and over with the narrative that all cops are racist, that they're all terrible.

So he's trying to say this. And by the way, the FBI has just now come out with a study showing the vast majority of people killed since we had defund the police and all this stuff in the wake of George Floyd are black and brown people. No one at Harvard is going to address that either. The people who have been trying to take down Roland will not address that fact, that it's black and brown people who have mostly been killed in the wake of these narratives, but they want credit for being the ones who care about the black community. So in the midst of all this, enter the accusations. The Me Too movement comes for Roland Fryer. And as somebody who is literally probably interviewed more Me Too accusers than anyone on Earth, never mind the US, I got to say, I read these, I was like, eh, eh.

You read the Harvard Crimson, you think Roland Fryer is Harvey Weinstein. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say that it's, I'll leave it up to the audience after they've seen the specific accusations to determine what they think the severity is. I think it's a lot of off-color jokes. And frankly, one of the things that added to the profundity of Rowland's economic research and the reason he maintained the bravery and the imagination to keep asking these extremely important questions is that he refused to sort of conform to the script of what it meant to be a black intellectual at Harvard University, which I mean, I mean, which oftentimes basically just means like being a white person with woke opinions and acting in a very specific

like upper middle class Martha's Vineyard way. And so, I mean, we go into it, some of the people that are his enemies at Harvard University, they also have black skin like Roland does, but they have extremely privileged upper middle class backgrounds. They go to Exeter, they go to fancy universities while Roland had been going to public universities. But all of which is to say, Roland, once he got to Harvard, continued to be the kid born into a low-income neighborhood in Daytona Beach, Florida. He didn't modify his speech, he didn't modify his rhythms. So a lot of like the things that ended up getting categorized as sexual harassment, I think are him just being like an authentic lower middle-class black guy

at Harvard university. Plus they're ridiculous, Rob. I mean, honestly, like the ones that you outlined in the piece, I'll just give the audience a flavor. He made some arguably inappropriate jokes in the office, like saying an elderly university administrator, quote, hadn't been laid since black people were slaves. I mean, OK, fine. Who's offended by that? Yeah, I mean, Harvard, you like you theoretically like undomesticated or you like raw blackness. But in practice, actually, I guess a lot of people are offended by it. I mean, I mean, like who? Like what? In front of Glenn. But like, I think he would agree with this as an assessment. The elderly administrator was like, I got laid just this morning. Roland Fryer doesn't know

what he's talking about. Then he quipped that he learned his negotiating skills while, quote, trying to get laid in high school. Okay, I'm waiting for the offense to set in. No one got touched. There was no sexual congress among anybody. No one was propositions. And I think the real, the killer is that even if you buy the assessments of the Title IX investigator at Harvard, which is that these were inappropriate, this was an abuse of power asymmetries in Roland's lab. The Title IX investigators themselves, after handing down that conviction, recommend training. That's what they recommend. Harvard's own investigators recommend training, and somehow that gets transmuted into career termination. That's

a little suspect. That's a little strange. And we kind of go into the back end mechanics that that are somehow able to transform sexual harassment training to we're going to we're going to go nuclear on your career. Yeah, that's right. So there was a second, I should say, the first woman who came forward against him was I think there's only two. But there's one woman saying I was his assistant and he made these inappropriate comments. And the documentary has a clip from Roland's researcher and co-author on some of these studies, an Indian woman who doesn't go on cam in terms of her face, but you can hear her voice and who spent a ton of time with this accuser and knew her very well. And here's a bit of her take on this woman's allegations, plus how those allegations, something like 38 number when they were first filed, actually panned out by the Harvard investigation team that was charged with looking into them. Listen. It was one of my closest friends. She'd left on a very sour note.

She wanted just plain old revenge. She goes and she logs 38 specific claims of sexual harassment. Instantly, investigators shave off six of those. And then after the investigation, they shave off another 26. All but six of them were rejected. Many of those on the ground that they were not only false, but they were deliberately false fabrications. In other words, they were lies. And then another woman comes forward and says, years ago, I was his assistant and we had some inappropriate texts with one another suggesting, I don't know, was this the one who said he talked about how he was going to need a new bed if he ever got married or got a girl?

It's like, keep going. At the time, Roland was single. There's an immense amount of pressure on him as this highly touted black economist at Harvard University. And this woman is a biracial ballet dancer with a 780 on her math SAT. You can kind of see what was happening there. The flirtation is mostly unidirectional. It's him being flirtatious with her. But as we go into in that piece, she files, she never files a formal complaint, but she does complain to some administrators about this. They tell Roland to cut it out.

He immediately cuts it out. And she continues to work with him from several more months after that. Right. So this was like an old, settled, semi-claim of sexual harassment that everybody had been under the impression was over and done and settled. And the Harvard investigators go back into it and resurrect it as part of making this case of Roland as a unrepentant sexual predator, right? There's a lot of just very gangster stuff that goes down right now. And again, Title IX, as a mechanism of resolving sexual harassment claims on college campuses, is notoriously opaque and prone to ideological abuse. It's basically a monarchy, and they just get to make up the rules as they go along. And all of the protections that are normally afforded a defendant in a criminal trial are not provided on campus for most Title IX investigations.

To the contrary, the system is entirely rigged for the accuser. The whole trick in these Title IX proceedings on college campuses is don't get involved in one. If you're the man being accused, you're dead. I mean, upon the accusation, it's over for you. There are very few that wind up with, and he's exonerated, and the evidence wasn't there. You have no right to discovery. You have no right to cross-examine the witness who's accusing you. You have no right to counsel in the hearing room. Those who are actually trying your fate are all victims' rights advocates, and you have no place to object.

And once they inevitably find you guilty, there's very limited rights of appeal outside of that body, nevermind in the federal district court. So the whole trick is don't get sucked in, which they knew, which they knew when they came for him, Glenn. And then after this Title IX board says, you should do some training. Even these folks who probably wanted to get rolling said, yeah, training. The higher ups at the university, the dean of the faculty and the chair, I think, of the African-American Studies Department, they came and said, oh, no, it's going to be far, far worse. So what happened to Roland? I think in Larry Bobo's case, it was his role as dean of social sciences and Claudine Gay's dean of the faculty. And yes, they were among the people who finally decided about the

disposition of Rowland's case. The punishment administered was the closing of his lab and the shuttering of all the ongoing projects, along with a two-year suspension without pay and a humiliating, intrusive regime of control or oversight of his teaching when he returns from, as he has done, from the two-year suspension. So that was the punishment. I mean, I think the question here, Megan, if I may, is why did Harvard not protect their valuable superstar asset from the administration of an injustice, which any of us can see. I mean, we can see in retrospect, and they could have seen at the time what an injustice allowing this Title IX machine to roll over Roland Fryer would be. And they did not intervene to prevent

this from happening. Now, I think we don't know that they were explicitly motivated by a distaste for his research findings, but I think it's beyond question that this would not have happened if they valued Row Roland for what he was actually bringing to the university. And again, the irony is just He's raised over $100 million to support his research. There's $30 million sitting in accounts to which he has no access, which have not been returned to the donors for projects as yet incomplete that were ongoing when they shut down his lab. Oh, man. I know you wrote on your substack, Glenn, these folks at Harvard, those at Harvard responsible for this state of affairs should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

Indeed. I think it's gone the other way. It's a self-affirming system there where they're all patting themselves on the back. They feel no shame whatsoever. I think the question of Roland's career should not be just decided that it's been destroyed. I think it's up to us whether or not Roland's career has been destroyed, and by us, I mean all of us. I think he still has a tremendous lot to contribute. He may choose to stay at Harvard. He may choose to do something else with his life. He's running companies and

doing all kinds of amazing things in terms of the genius, creative, social analyst and activist in his way that he is starting companies and working on hard problems. I'm not going to say more about that. That's for him to reveal to the world. But yes, they should be ashamed of themselves. So there's not any question about that. Well, that was one of my questions is my note in the margin of your sub stack piece reads Harvard is not the place for him to state the obvious. Why not just leave Harvard? I know they can't fire him because some people may be wondering why didn't they just fire him?

He's tenured. So they can't. So they basically just clip his wings. Um, so why, why not leave? Why not go to someplace that's a little bit more open-minded? I know there's not that many to choose from. Well, I left Harvard in 1991 and moved to Boston University, but that's my story. That's not Roland's story. And I think he's not going to let them have that satisfaction. I mean, he may well, after he becomes a billionaire, decide to retire at the age of 52 and do something else with his life. But he's not going to just run with his tail between his legs.

Not only that, but he's got this black mark on him now such that other institutions, if you know, these people are cowards. They're spineless. A Princeton or a Yale or a Stanford to make Roland the XYZ professor something and to let him bring his $100 million raising effort in his visionary genius level of research to their institution. To do it, they would have to stand out and take the slings and arrows that would surely come their way as a result of the taint that's been put on him by this process. The taint is significant.

In September of 2021, the Crimson, that's their on-campus newspaper, editorial board, wrote an absolutely scathing piece about him. I mean, I read this and I was like, is he really like a Weinstein type? What the hell did he do? My God. Then you look at the actual allegations and they're utterly contrary to the language. The piece starts by saying Fryer was suspended for his quote, abhorrent treatment of his female employees. The joke about how somebody

hadn't had sex since, you know, 100 plus years ago. They note that he was accused of creating a hostile environment and engaging in years of unwelcome sexual conduct. He never touched anybody. He wasn't accused of touching anybody. He wasn't accused of conditioning anybody's career advancement on any sexual favors, etc. That's not in the piece there. They write, this sends the message that Harvard is a university that permits a culture of sexual harassment. They go on. This is allowing a faculty member who it has found violated university sexual harassment policies to educate its undergraduates. This undermines the university's Title IX policy, ultimately sending a message of hypocrisy to the students. Women in the economics department now

must decide whether or not they wish to take a class from a professor who allegedly objectified and sexualized his female employees, period. I mean, then they go on. Here's the final. To our dismay, Fryer will be teaching this fall. Harvard should notify students in Fryer's course of the findings of their investigation against him. He should not be allowed to interact with students alone in office hours or other spaces. You have to out him on all these allegations to everybody, and then he can't be alone with students. And then they go on to say the following. We do not make this ask lightly. The loss of Fryer as a trusted educator and mentor at Harvard is a heavy one. and then he can't be alone with students. And then they go on to say the following. We don't ask, we don't, we do not make this ask lightly.

The loss of Friar as a trusted educator and mentor at Harvard is a heavy one. Friar's actions of sexual harassment have turned what was once a source of hope into a collective disappointment, distributed and carried amongst all of the students who once looked up to him. Students of color especially

have been stripped of a role model. Friar could have been an excellent advisor to students eager to tackle the economics of inequality, an immensely important area of research. But students have been denied this opportunity and the world is worse off because of it. Glenn, that's kind of an admission right there. The administration must stand against this. They won't, but they ought to. These kids running these newspapers are going to do what they're going to do. They're 22 years old. You know they're going to do what they're going to do. And they're going off on a Title IX thing, Harvey Weinstein and all that. It's obvious hyperbole and it doesn't fit the facts. editor of the Harvard Crimson, from the president of the university, objecting to the character assassination, the McCarthyism that was being perpetrated against this stellar contributor to what the university is supposed to be about.

The cowardly character of academic leadership is at the root of the problem in the universities today. We reached out to the two people featured in the documentary, Claudine Gay. She's professor of government and of African-American studies at Harvard, also serves as the Dean of Social Science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and to Lawrence D. Bobo. He's Dean of Social Science, who you mentioned a minute ago, Glenn, and also chair of the department of african and african-american studies we didn't hear back from her we got this from bobo's office unfortunately like this due to a very very tight schedule dean bobo will not be able to speak with you he thanks you for the invitation very very tight they said to me that's what his people said to me too he's a busy guy what can i say i? One might say ultra tight, ultra, ultra. Can I say though, you just saying the word Bobo

triggered me though, Megan. So I have to just say something. Okay. A, that's that, like that, again, that editorial is only surprising if you think that the primary thing that Harvard undergraduates are being taught is how to pursue veritas, right? If you believe the pamphlet truth, it's not surprising if you think what they're being trained to do is to perform victimhood. And if that's what they're being trained to do, that's like a plus work right there. Right. And again, this is about deep, deep ideological corruption of the institutions of higher, of higher learning. I need to tell you guys that, right. But can I, I just want to say on a somewhat hopeful note, because again, I'm like Glenn and I'm like you in the sense that I find myself using these words that I would have been

sort of horrified about when I'm talking about like the cabal or like, you know, the woke cathedral or the progressive establishment or legacy media. And it sounds conspiratorial, but then there's no other way to describe what is the state of affairs in 2022. But at least for me, that's very sad and bad Roland's case is in the New York Times, in which they dutifully serve as handmaidens of the Harvard establishment and just repeat this narrative that Roland is an unrepentant sexual predator, and that's how the narrative gets established, that's not great. But it also means that there's a gigantic story that's just sitting there that's been entirely ignored by legacy media.

And that's basically what we we tried to do. And it's not just that, though. It's we can make stuff that gets ignored. But like, I mean, Glenn, like we can also make it better than the legacy media institutions or or a large legacy like Harvard University, which is, and again, not to mince words, but I've watched more Larry Bobo lectures than his graduate students, okay? I've read more of his papers than his wife, okay? And this is me putting it kindly. He, like a lot of the establishment, white and black at Harvard University, is a pampered mediocrity, straight up. He's a pampered mediocrity. And they couldn't even make something,

they couldn't even make a powerful counter-narrative piece to this Roland documentary, even if they tried. They couldn't do it even if they tried, because they've gotten rich and wealthy and have a lot of status and have been put to the very highest realms of these institutions. And they got there. They're well above their actual intellectual merits, frankly. And again, I don't just mean this about Bobo. I mean, it's about a lot of people that are at Harvard University, and they couldn't even

make something this good if they tried. And I think that should at least serve as a point of optimism if you have our critique of where media is in America in 2022. Go ahead. That was deep. That was going for the jugular here in the war for the future of our country, which is largely about control of the narrative about these large issues that we're talking about. And I'm glad to have Rob Montz on my side of the line in that one, because he's right. I mean, pampered mediocrities, oh my God, can I say that? I cannot say that. You all did not hear me. Because, you know, but look at the corruption. And I do not mean this in reference to the the individuals in question here, but affirmative action undermines

everything. It undermines everything. I'm sorry to go off script here a little bit. This is not the solution to the racial inequality problem, creating sinecures and boosting people and inflating and puffing them up when they're not actually getting it done on the ground. Rob rendered his view about Professor Bobo's videos. I do not dispute it. Neither do I endorse it. I'll let it just sit there. I'll let it just sit there. I'm not saying he's an affirmative action professor. You didn't hear me say that either. What I'm saying, though, is that the deep story here is that Rowland's excellence is absolutely impeccable, and it's independent of the color of his skin. Exactly.

Okay? That's the real threat. It's not an Afro-American studies department. It's the, gosh darn, Harvard economics department. It's venerable. It's foundational. He raises nine figures to do research. Nobody does that. Nobody else does that. Nobody's a MacArthur genius. Nobody's a John Bates Clark medal. The excellence is just pouring off of him. that black people would be judged by the content of their character, of which Roland, now with standards, this thing that they're trying to tattoo on him is exemplary. He's a threat. And whenever you're a threat, especially one who's saying things that align with the other side, ideologically or politically, you need to be destroyed. And they're doing their level best. But Roland's going to have the last word. Thanks to you guys. Thanks to this documentary. Thanks to our listeners and viewers and more and more people who get the real truth about him and understand that it's important to stand up and support his mission and whatever he forms next,

we're all going to support. He's got way more support out there than he even knows at this point because he's still tied to them and limited in what he can say and do. But as soon as he clips that tether or manages to, you know, step away in some way, he'll feel it acutely. You know, I think most people just going about their lives are worried about inflation. They're worried about all this, but they're not thinking about Roland Frye. They don't even know the story, which is why the documentary was so important. And even I, I've covered Roland Frye. I've said it is studies in full, the good, the bad, the blah, blah, all of it. And didn't have a full appreciation for what was happening to him until I saw this piece. So it's an important piece and it's very easily accessed. Stand by. Glenn and Rob are staying with us. We've got one more block to go, a lot more to cover, including some of the news of the day and the disbanding of the disinformation board. Did you hear? Showtune tyrant is gone. She's gone. So you mentioned affirmative action.

And we had a couple of things coming down the legal pike on that front. A case going up to the U.S. Supreme Court, questioning whether it's still, to condense it, still has a role at the university level. Can you discriminate against Asians and a role at the university level can you discriminate against asians and their admission uh at the university level in favor of other kinds of diversity admissions supreme court going to take a look at that i know rob you wrote a whole you did a whole other documentary on like facebook saying we need more diversity hires we need more diversity hires doing self-flagellating over its diversity number. It's all about like the quota, right? It's the quota that they look at,

the raw numbers of certain people of color, et cetera, as opposed to how are they doing? How do they fare once they're here? Do they ascend to positions of power? Do they have a positive experience once they've entered Harvard University or Facebook, et cetera? So Glenn, what do you make of where that's going

in academia? What would you like to see? Well, the court's going to decide evidently in the fall. I should acknowledge that I signed on to a friend of the court brief with some other economists supporting the Students for Fair Admission side of that case. And, you know, there's going to be a decision. What would I hope to see? I would hope to see that the court would decide that what

happened to the Asians at Harvard and what's going on at the University of North Carolina is unconstitutional or inconsistent with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I think the affirmative action in 1980 was one thing. Affirmative action in 2022 and on into the indefinite future, I think it's poison for the future of race relations, poison for the pursuit of racial equality, genuine racial equality in the country, which can only be founded, in my view, on equality of performance and of merit. And that it points, this is a band-aid. This is a accommodation of the disparity in the development of intellectual performance amongst different groups in the country by trying to legislate or mandate equality of achievement. what's happened to the Asians at Harvard, again, this is to be decided by the court, is abominable. The appropriation of a personality rating as a cover so that, you know, they say the Asian students have high scores, but they're narrow, they're nerdy, they all want to do science

and they're not interesting and they're not going to be leaders. I mean, you can say that about any other group of people. I mean, what I say to the affirmative action proponents who talk about this diversity thing, show me a black student with high scores, but a bad personality or who is not admitted. Or show me an Asian student with low scores scores but an amazing personality who is admitted, and then I'll believe the argument that it's a personality rating difference that accounts for the disparity. They're just playing with us. They have a tacit quota, an implicit desire for diversity, and they're rigging the numbers in order to get it to the detriment of merit. And it doesn't end there. I mean, this is being built into our culture. It's creeping into the corporate world. It dominates the thinking in the political realm amongst progressives, and it's poison. Quotas are unlawful, by the way. That's why they have to disguise it. Yeah, I know. There was a

headline not long ago about the NFL requiring, isn't a racial thing as a gender thing, but requiring like all of these assistant coaches to be female. OK, so do they know that most of the women don't play football in football in high school? And I mean, we don't have the Pee Wee program for a lot of girls. So it's not exactly like a pipeline sending. It's like, could you give us a break? You know, and I know Victor Davis Hanson's always making the point, like, if we want perfect equity when it comes to gender, when it comes to race in major sports, let's do the NBA next. See how that goes. Right. They don't want perfect equity. They don't want perfect parity. They just want to sort of look like they care about diversity as long as it aligns with their worldview.

And honestly, the same thing on these mass shootings. You know, they ignored the press, ignored Waukesha. They didn't care when a black man mowed down the dancing grannies and the children who were white. That didn't fit the narrative. They didn't care about the subway shooter who was black and had written a lot of anti-white things because that didn't fit the narrative. But the Buffalo shooting, different story. They've ignored the the it was a Taiwanese guy who shot up Asians or vice versa. Just the same just after Buffalo. This happened just a

couple of days ago. Didn't make the press five Hispanic guys down in Texas shoot out at another facility. Didn't make the news like it does. It has to align with the narrative or doesn't count. And I love. Yeah, go ahead, Glenn. No, I was going to echo Rob Monson saying this is an opportunity because everybody can see what's going on. And I really fear the consequences of the unraveling of this kind of spiral of silence that we're embedded in, where everybody can see what's going on. Everybody knows that guy in Waukesha who drove that SUV into dancing Granny Christmas Parade was a racist mass murderer. Everybody knows that. No one will say it. Of course not, because, you know, it doesn't fit the narrative, as you say. And I don't think that kind of suppression.

Everybody knows that the real threat to Black life in this country is vicious, violent criminals who are preying on other Black people in the cities of the country. The cops, you know, Heather McDonald has made this point over and over and over again. Everybody knows it. The thing is not going to hold together here. It's going to unravel and heaven help us if it unravels in in an ugly way which is quite possible well and you know i mean you can do this tit for tat on a lot of stories but the same weekend that uh the the 10 people were killed in buffalo uh and three others shot 33 people were killed in chicago 33 people were shot in in chicago uh 33 people were shot five fatally

in weekend violence across chicago just just yesterday it was in the news that uh chicago had to close millennium park like the uh where everybody goes and listens to the music because a kid got shot 16 year old got shot i mean the violence is pouring out there into john cass has been writing great stuff about this, into the mainstream sort of Chicago roads, neighborhoods and so on. It's not confined to like the areas, you know, are full of gangs and so on. No, now you can be at Millennium Park and have to worry about getting shot. You can be on Road, not Rodeo Drive, Mag Mile, they call it, Magnificent Mile and have to worry. They can be having a post-dinner drink in the loop and have to worry about it.

The media will never talk about it. They won't touch it. And everybody knows, excuse me, Megan, that it's young black kids who haven't been parented and who are indisciplined, who are pouring out in large numbers, some of it social media coordinated. And I mean, the racial dimension of this and, you know, I don't take any pleasure in calling attention to it. I just want to point out that everybody can see it. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what you've been doing for a long time and just saying, look, these are the stats and it doesn't behoove anybody to start doing this. Like, let's divide by race. Let's let's focus on the one. And there's no question this guy was motivated by race when he actually did the thing in Buffalo. As I said,

it's not that we need to ignore that aspect of it, but some more time needs to be spent on what happened prior to that and how he got radicalized in the first place. Rob, I was going to ask you about your other documentary, because when you talk about what Facebook did with again, I think this is basically quotas, what they were what they were doing in themselves reminds me what I went through in New York City. The first time Glenn was on the program with Coleman Hughes, I revealed to them why we left our schools in New York and how racist they had gotten there. And I had read to them a thing that was circulated at our boys school that read in part in every classroom where white children learn there is a future killer cop. And it was shocking. And Glenn was he did his Glenn thing on it. He did not say with all due respect. He just did it. And it was wonderful. But it reminded me what we went through in our New York City schools where every single all the schools started flagellating themselves after George Floyd.

The headmaster or whatever you call him now at my daughter's school was like, our school is racist. I'm racist. We've had hundreds of years of racism. And I'm sorry. I'm like, what'd you do? What? What'd you do?

No, she couldn't get specific. And that's kind of the Facebook thing that you looked into. Tell us. Well, that one is more about they won't admit that it's a pipeline problem and they have to just consistently like plow millions of dollars into well-polished TV campaigns to promise to do better and to promise to boost diversity. And what you just said also, when Glenn was talking, it got me thinking about the fact of how awkward though, and comically tragic, this kind of colossus though of progressive right think, how tragic and comical it gets when they are confronted with the problematic reality of Asian excellence, that it keeps changing how they deal with it. Right now, we're working on a documentary about some changes that are happening to Thomas

Jefferson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, which you guys might have heard of because it consistently gets ranked as the best high school in America. It's very much like a Stuyvesant in that it used to have a very clean admissions protocol, which was just like a single test and a couple other academic credentials determined whether or not you got to have entry into basically the best high school in America. But it's been awkward because the children of poor Korean and Vietnamese and Chinese families in Northern Virginia have been dominating the test. And as of two years ago, it was like 70% of Thomas Jefferson High School is Asian, right? But then flash forward to the summer of 2020, America's racial reckoning, and the principal of Thomas Jefferson High School sends a missive, very much like what you were talking about, Megan, a missive to all the parents of Thomas Jefferson High School about how they need to do better, about how they failed to

be diverse, about how all the latent white supremacy in the school. And in this documentary we have, the person who is reading this letter is one of the parents at Thomas Jefferson High School. She immigrated from China in the 80s, and literally she and her family have escaped the Cultural Revolution. That's the person who's being lectured to about their privilege, is being lectured to about their unfair position in the intersectional pyramid. And it's just obscene. It's ridiculous, right? And most of them are lower middle class, working class. And it's just that the only thing they spend their money on is test prep. That's the only thing they spend their money and time on. And they have a culture that values academic excellence. And that's what accounts for their astonishing success at a place like Thomas Jefferson High School.

And you get to watch like the weird warped doublespeak of the establishment when they're trying to explain that as also an outgrowth of white supremacy. I mean, it's it's it's it's crazy making. You see it sometimes when you look at the Indian American community. You know, these are people who are brown people who they don't count either. They have a culture that values hard work and merit and and just, you know, challenge within the school districts. And yet they're not sort of I have a lot of Indian friends who are like, where do I fit? Do I get to go to the diversity group? Like, am I wanted there? Because I don't feel like I am and yet um you know i i've

suffered certain acts of discrimination just like most people of color at some point in their life um and also we've talked about this before i think glenn but immigrants in this country who are black people black people who are not american born a lot of whom have the same very strong work ethic and will eschew some of these narratives about the black experience in America. They sort of get lobbed off from the narrative by the by BLM Central to, you know, like, well, you don't understand because you're not descended from slaves, which a lot of black Americans are not descended from slaves either. It was like you're not descended from slaves, so you can't understand the true black experience

and you can't speak to American racism. Yeah, well, what this reveals actually is that we're in the 21st century and this is a great dynamic, moving target country. This country is evolving and the world is evolving. The world is getting small. You know, you can work with people across great oceans and whatnot. And the billions who are coming online with modernization that's going on in China and India are going to change the course of the history of humankind in the 21st century. And we Americans and we Black Americans, we Americans because, you know, the reaction against the disproportionate representation of excellent test takers at a place like Thomas Jefferson by dumbing it down and leveling it down, getting rid of the test and whatnot, will hinder us as a people, American people, from getting in.

And we black Americans have a lot of state because nobody is standing still. You know, they're moving forward. It's like Roland says, I think at some point in Rob's documentary that you've got to ask the white kids to take Thursday and Friday off if you want the black kids to catch up. And nobody's taking Thursday and Friday off. And these Asian kids are certainly not taking Thursday and Friday off. So if we don't get our heads around what really is the issue here, which is the development of the capacities of our people to effectively perform in modern society. We're cruising for another summer of 2020 just down line. The demagogues are going to have a field day. And if I may, without running on too long, we need leadership. We need Barack Obama to come out of hiding and lead a movement to empower African Americans and others to grasp the opportunities of the 21st century, not to repeat the tired, shopworn, you know, chivalrous and fairy tales about white supremacy is holding Black people down, about America has a knee on the neck of Black people. It's the road to disaster for America and for blacks.

But let me let me ask you, because I also understand if I were black and living in Buffalo and anywhere near this community, I can understand how I'd feel scared and I'd feel angry and I'd feel worried for my kids. And I and outside of Buffalo, too, because the narrative is really I mean, there's no question that there are crazy people in the country and there are white supremacists in the country, not to the numbers that the Biden administration would have us believe, but they're clearly out there. And with race becoming so such a centralized topic of discussion, as you pointed out late earlier, it's dangerous. So I I wouldn't know what to say to that person who's worried because it's really the Democrats who continue to make race the focus of everything. You know, you cannot avoid it these days. And then you see a story like that where this guy has clearly racist thoughts and writings.

And what what would you say? I mean, to black Americans now worried, worried about their safety. Well, I'm glad you asked me because, you know, I said earlier who started it and it may seem insensitive to the families who lost loved ones and so forth. And it may seem that I was unconscious, unaware of that there is a real threat of violence, of racially motivated violence against Black people in this country. I understand that that's the case. I don't mean to minimize that at all. I mean, what would you say? You'd say, oh, my God, I'm so sorry for your loss. I mean, you would try to comfort people as Obama comforted in that amazing speech that he gave in South Carolina after the terrible racist crime that was presented there. No, you don't want to get into tit for tat. You don't want to get

into, you know, counting off violent acts perpetrated by Black people as if that somehow balanced the scales. You want to try to stay in touch with reality without losing, you know, touch with your humanity and human empathy. These things are, at one and the same time, emotional and requires to draw together and mourn, but they're also political in the various ways. I mean, we're going to have to decide what the narrative is going to be going forward. And it's a delicate balancing act to be able to maintain a sense of sympathy and support for people who suffered loss, while at the same time not being plowed under by the ideologues

who want to make the narrative miss out on the fullness of the picture. In circumstances like these, you want to look at facts. You want to look at numbers. Like, let's get an actual handle on the numbers, the size of the sort of white supremacy in America, these groups that are devoted to it and spread the word about it. I would like to do something like that. But the truth is, Glenn, I don't really know who to trust on something like that. And in part, it's, I don't really know who to trust on something like that. And in part, it's because of things like what happened to Roland Fryer. You know, we've seen time and time again that people who write these studies take a thick

Lisa Lippman over at Brown University, who wrote a study, did a study on the trans craze sweeping young girls and then was forced, you know, thanks to the wokesters to have it reviewed again. And it's it withstood the scrutiny. But my point is, I don't know who to trust, because if you're a professor at a university doing this kind of research, you can't really write the truth and survive. So it has to be modified or has to be double peer reviewed later or, you know, what have you. So it's a little disconcerting because facts are tough to get on these subjects i think the question is if in response to what happened in buffalo how do we minimize going forward the chance that it happens again and ask ourselves a question of whether or not invading against white supremacy and the threat that it poses or

examining the delivery of mental health services to people who need them would be the most effective way to minimize the possibility of a recurrence of this event going forward. I think I can see the answer to that question. We need the disinformation board, Glenn. That's what you're basically, no. We need the show tune tyrant. Chris Ruppo came up with that.

I have to say it's brilliant show tune type because this woman, you know, she's resigned. That's over. I think we're all in agreement, especially I know, Rob, you did another documentary on freedom of speech, how important it is on college campuses, etc. That's not where we were going with the disinformation board, though. It does remain unclear whether it's entirely disbanded or just on pause. Your thoughts on that one, Rob? Well, yeah, I mean, I'm glad that caricature of tyranny is broken down. But I do want to say, and talking to Glenn is part of what informs us about me, is that a big part of the reason I've done so many investigations into higher ed is because I still have what maybe is a naive, romantic vision of what these institutions ought to be. And it's extremely unique and valuable purpose. And one of those purposes, obviously, is the generation of new truths. But again, right now, I'm just going to be parroting Glenn's lines in another documentary

we did about free speech at Brown University. Part of that process, though, of digging up new truths requires a open forum of a variety of different ideas bumping up against each other. And I do worry, as much as I love Substack, as much as I love the Megyn Kelly podcast, as much as I love these other kind of upstart media institutions that are forming outside of the corporate establishment is that a lot of them tend to not have that feature that's ideal in higher ed, which is a heterodox, open market of ideas. And you really do, in order to get smarter, you don't just want to consume people that already agree with you. And the university at its best, takes very smart people from all across the political spectrum, makes them clash with each other, and will hold them accountable if they

try to use rhetorical techniques, other than using evidence and arguments, like you can do plenty of tribal ad hominem attacks on Twitter. But if you come to a university properly functioning, you can't get away with that. You're not supposed to get away with that. It's either you mount a good argument and you present some good evidence of your own or you lose or you lose. And that's an extremely important system to have in place. And it's difficult to really accurately replicate outside of the university. Well, hope springs eternal. We've got University of Austin and that's about it right now.

We'll check back in with further updates. Glenn Lowry, such a pleasure as always. Rob Mons, congrats to you. Everybody's got to go check out the Roland Fryer film at whocanceldroland.com. You requested, we responded. Tomorrow, Dinesh D'Souza. He's behind the documentary. Everyone's talking about 2000 Mules.

Don't miss it. See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.