The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Heather Mac Donald | Part 2 of 2 | Updates & Clarifications

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

This is the second part unique conversation with journalist and author, Heather Mac Donald. The author of The Diversity Delusion, Heather doesn't mince words. Lawrence and she don't agree on everything as you'll see during the podcast. Nonetheless, these conversations are critical in fostering an open dialogue as we try to come to a deeper understanding of the world around us. You can show your support and access exclusive bonus content at https://www.patreon.com/originspodcast Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, welcome back to the Oritans Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause again. When I gave my introduction to Heather McDonald, I pointed out that we updated our earlier discussion with a new discussion we had this week. And as happens, that new discussion ended up being almost as long as the original one. It was important because we brought up to date a whole variety of things that have happened since we last talk, everything from George Floyd to critical race theory, to what's going on in academia and in the current times regarding censorship. And the discussion was interesting. We continue to disagree on a number of points.

But once again, that's important that we can have that discussion. And the fact that some of the ideas that we're discussed will provoke or offend is something that I'm not going to apologize for. It's the kind of discussion that needs to be had. could decide if they disagree or not, but without having those kind of discussions, we can't really examine our own ideas. So with no further ado, part two of my discussion with Heather McDonald. Hi there. And welcome back, Heather, and thank you for agreeing to talk to me one more time. It's been a long time, but it's been an amazing time in the sense that I just listened to our our original discussion, which is now almost a year and a half old, I think. And it was amazingly

prescient in many ways. In fact, I was dubious. There were things I was dubious about, which I've since now written about, because I've gotten so angry. So I think it's a great time to do a catch-up, and it's nice to see you again, if remotely this time. Well, this is one upside to the COVID insanity that we get to meet again like this. Exactly. So I'm grateful for the opportunity to update. good okay i'm glad thank you now you know in fact one of the things when i was listening that amused me uh immediately was when you talked about your personal history you talked about i guess the the things that had led you to become quote unquote maybe more conservative or or if you want to call it that way and it was your experience that yeah with postmodern

and deconstruction. And what is, is, is, is, is so poetically, so poetic about that is that the new, the new, the new, I mean, it's not you, for you, but the new fad, the new that's captured the world, it seems, or at least the United States has to do with this critical race theory. And, and you, I don't know if you know the book by, by Helen Pluck Rose and James Lindsay, which, cynical theories, I think is called, argue that that, that whole, this whole notion of a if you wish, rises out of sort of the Foucault postmodernist view. So I wanted to ask you about that. Well, yeah, it's the hermeneutics of suspicion, which assumes that one reads,

one analyzes literary texts or culture with the assumption that it is all about hidden power and oppression, as opposed to a professor opening himself up to beauty and to trying to teach students why they should be down on their knees and gratitude before these astounding, sublime works of human imagination. So the dominant attitude within the academy today is this cynical view that there's subtext to be deconstructed. I would say though that, and I can't remember now

whether this came up in our original discussion, that deconstruction is, is sharply different from what came after in the 1980s in that deconstruction was absolutely indifferent to sex and race. It read from a much more abstract perspective of claiming that language always broke down, but the identity politics overlay came after

my involvement with literary theory, and that's the only thing in my intellectual career that I'm grateful for that I was able to experience these texts without having that type of chip on my shoulder to complain that I was reading dead white males, which is about the most nonsensical and adolescent complaint that I can think of. This is an area where I agree with you 100%, and we'll go into that a little bit more. But again, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, because obviously your experience with deconstructionism is much greater than mine.

Mine was from a distance up the hail of Yale from the physics department. But the notion that things are socially constructed, I see that coming in, especially when I hear people critiquing science. Now they're using an identity politics motivation to critique science, but still the notion that somehow there is not an objective reality, that things are still conditioned in this case by the oppressive white supremacy, You pick your oppressor.

You're absolutely right. And I didn't make that connection. There is that sense that everything is a text, the text break down, that reality itself. I mean,

the deconstruction went so far as to say that the human self doesn't exist. It's just an epiphenomenon of language and rhetoric, which is insane. So that is, true. On the other hand, I also push back against the conservative narrative that blames the current moment on the alleged nihilism and relativism of various postmodern structuralist theories. I guess I know

those arguments in one sense they're true. On the other hand, that's not how the left lives. the left lives with utter moral certainty. So there's a whole set of contradictions on the left. I mean, on the one hand, race is a social construct, but if you don't see my race, you're not seeing me, those types of things. But also, they don't live as if truth is a social construct because they damn well know as a incontestable fact that America is white supremacist. Absolutely. It's a, it's a religious, it's so religious in the sense that they know that the absolute truth is known and independent of any evidence. And as someone pointed out to me, the difference between I got that kind of secular religiosity of that absolute moral certainty and the religiosity of more standard religions. The only difference is that at least at least some of the more standard religions allow absolution.

No, we'll never, we'll never end up, we'll never stop paying. It's an endless bounty for the purging, but not really of guilt, and for the transfer of redistribution. I mean, yeah, the, the blindness to facts is just extraordinary, whether it's policing and crime and the blindness, unwillingness to look at the facts of black crime, which is what drives police today in our data-driven policing environment, blindness to the facts of the academic skills gap, which is the sole reason why there isn't proportional representation in the professions in academia. You sent me recently, Lawrence, in just dismay, one of the latest

religious refusals to look at hard reality, which was the firing of a Georgetown law school clinical professor for speaking, once again, the truth about the effective racial preferences in law school admissions, which is that having admitted blacks with LSAT scores and GPAs, nearly, you know, usually a standard deviation below those of their white peers, not surprisingly, utterly predictably blacks end up at the bottom of their class. She said, a professor said this, thinking this was in confidence to another professor. It wasn't as if she was even going forward and, you know, putting the lives of Georgetown's black students at risk by speaking the truth, but she was fired for speaking the truth. And so you have this bizarre racial preference

theater going on in every selective school across the country in which the professors and deans pretend that the effects of mismatch theory don't exist. It's really quite extraordinary. Yes, you know, I obviously sent it to you, and I thought of you, because we had talked a lot about law schools since part of your background is legal and a lot of the references in certainly the diversity delusion or law schools. And I thought of that example, because you talked about mismatch, and you'd said at the time, there was more research. needed to be done and people were holding on guarding carefully the data so people couldn't really examine mismatch. But what actually even upset me more about that particular case

was not that she drew that conclusion so much. And it wasn't confidence. Was that and she made a point also pointing out that it was, you know, like all stereotypes or like all there's statistics. And it was it was a it was a distribution. And there were some people, you know, blacks and other people who were at the top of the class. But what got to me so much was it, what she was doing was bemoaning. It was saying she hated to have to address this problem. And it was so it wasn't,

it wasn't touting it or or asserting it. It was saying, I really, I really, I hate to have to grade because I worry that this might be the case. And of course, the grading is blind. So it's a,

but, you know, that's what surprised me is that she wasn't drawing a conclusion so much as anticipating her worst fears. and then was fired. And not only was free fired, but the person she was talking to who just nodded their head had to resign as well,

which, which, and we'll get to this, well, it's again something you alluded to and something that really concerns me most is that this is now, it's not just that this is a allegation by, by people who feel victimhood is a, is part of their identity, but it's been bought by,

holy and not just bought but but but but push forward by the by the guard by the heads of institutions by the by the the the people you might think would be the the guardians if you wish against those kind of fringe views and and you know what do you take i mean critical race theory and you know which is i like to think of like string theory which i used to criticize it shouldn't be called a theory, but this notion has become de facto accepted, not just in the, it's in the media and by institution, by academic institutions and government and businesses. All of that's happened in the year and a half since we last spoke. And of course, George Floyd in the trial is about to, I understand they've just gone now, which will date our conversation to the jury to, to, to,

So what do you take of that, that sudden, what seems to me this sudden takeover, it really is remarkable. Well, first of all, I want to make a prediction here, not about this Chauvin verdict, but about where we're going with the academic skills gap and with the crime gap. I think, you know, we've seen the effort to schools saying they're pulling out of the SAT, making it voluntary or not wanting submissions. at all, that's a completely gratuitous act. They don't need to do that. They can simply, you know, every school is committed to these massive racial preferences. They can continue doing what they're already doing, which is race norm. They judge black and Hispanic SAT scores against a different set of standards than they do white and Asian SAT scores. So it's not as if they get the scores coming in and feel like this imperative of, of obviously,

Objectivity and neutrality comes upon them and they're forced to put everybody on the same scale. They don't. For four decades, they've been admitting blacks after having seen their SATs with massively lower scores. Why are they now more and more rejecting even any submission of the SATs? I think it's because they want to put the college board out of existence. because there still are a few remaining objective tests that show us the size of the academic skills gap. I predict the same thing is going to happen with crime.

There are a few departments out there that continue to publish the data. You know, where this goes from here and why every institution has embraced this, if I can also say another thing I was present on, I used to give a speech about two years ago. two and a half years ago, making the point you did, which is that anti-racism is now the national religion, and saying that, you know, as evidence of actual racism gets more and more de minimis, and so you have, you know, the Jesse, what's his name case in Chicago, you know, the fraud about claiming he was beaten up by MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters in an alley way. And, you know, several years ago,

Katie Perry, a singer, had to withdraw a line of women's flats, women's shoes, because a design on the toe of one of them invoked phantom images of blackface, which was completely insane. But there's this sort of ritual cleansing of the hands and attempt at purification

that I think is driven by the fact And again, as you say, this is going on in every single mainstream institution, every corporation, bank, law firm, government office, university, public school system, because America is terrified that the academic skills gap is not going to close. And they are working out a preemptive explanation that is the only allowable explanation for the persistence of that gap, which is white supremacy. and bias. Well, okay, well, there's a lot to unpack there. And we're going to, it's covering, you hit on a number of topics that I want to go go into. But first, by the way, I do want to ask you in this question that I don't know the answer

and you made from your book, but you talked about this systematic effort to, to admit, well, affirmative action effort to admit people with lower SAT scores, say, based on race. Is the same, has the same thing happened based on gender? at all over the years? Oh, in the STEM fields, absolutely. And even less so in undergraduates, because now generally women, females are the majority in undergraduate populations.

But there's exceptions. Cornell University admits undergraduates based on declared majors. And there, in the engineering department at Cornell, females have a three times higher rate chance of being admitted chance of being admitted than males, even though female math SATs are lower than males. But within the STEM fields and Lawrence, I mean, you know this yourself. Yeah.

My God, I hear from my friends in electrical engineering and astrophysics, they're having substandard female candidates shoved down their throats all the time. That's, you know, the main diversity game in STEM and big tech is females. because there are so few even remotely qualified black engineers or computer scientists or mathematicians that it's virtually impossible, whereas there are females out there. But as you said before, when you're talking distributions, it is just incontestable that on average males have higher math scores. and both tales of the distribution, as Lawrence Summers was fired for saying, males have the worst math scores and the very best math scores.

That's now apparently unacceptable. And while China, in the sciences at least, continues to be from all of purposes, ruthless and meritocratic, America believes that gender politics is more important than scientific discoveries than a cure for Alzheimer's disease. you have the federal government, including under Trump, but it's going to get worse under Biden, as you've said, awarding research grants to institutions based on their hiring of female and URMs underrepresented minority scientific researchers rather than based on their, the caliber of

their labs. Yeah, I want to go into that in more detail. but the the you're right that at the same time so bureaucratic because when I was chair of department we actually there was a colleague of a very good physicist who happened to black who wanted to come to our university his wife was was had been hired in another department as you often know there one hires trailing spouses in academia and I thought we could we could do that that this was a great opportunity but it turns out he was uh from uh bahamas and therefore he wasn't an he was black but he wasn't african-american and

therefore he wasn't the right kind of minority so they wouldn't do a trailing a trailing spouse, which I just, you know, that kind of silliness that in terms of ticking boxes. Well, you know, I actually, who's to say what's sillier? I mean, I would actually say that that is more honest and maybe more has more integrity. And in fact, several years ago, you may recall Cornell undergraduates complained that non-African Americans were being used for filling the racial quotas. So I'm surprised that your department actually made that distinction because that's one of the arguments that have, that conservatives was used against, say, Harvard in the SFAA suit that they don't care about

economic, you know, lack of privilege. that will take the black son of a Nigerian investment banker over some white sharecropper's son with higher SATs. So that's that's ubiquitous. So I'm surprised at your department. Well, it was. It was the university. But yeah, it's a point. It's a good point, I guess.

But the other thing I wanted to, before we go on was I think it probably standardized testing, apparently law school works. So removing it is maybe a more problematic. I have to say as a as a longstanding academic, doing away with standard testing wouldn't bother me because in physics it has virtually no, very little correlation, especially in graduate school, almost no correlation. I've with further success. And so a lot of departments, for non-identity politics reasons, I've been getting away, doing away with things like the GRE exam,

because it just doesn't. And what happened is that you, you tended to select for people who did the test better, which meant generally in physics. And it was always the case that the high, when you add applications, the Chinese students would always have the highest GREs. But it didn't necessarily correspond to later on when it came to research, which was not as sort of, you know, test oriented, that they, that they excelled as well. So, so sometimes in certain fields, standardized testing is useful in other fields, I'm not. I'm not convinced. I've witnessed that. I mean, obviously astronomy was probably the most widespread jettisoning of the physics GREs.

And I have to say, at this point, I'm so cynical and so despising of the academic diversity racket that I completely discounted that explanation, which is that the GREs are non-predictive. It's very hard for me to believe that somebody outside the field. The problem is, of course, if you get rid of those, what what takes their place. Yeah, and you have, it's hard to do. Generally, it's recommendations. And it's hard to, it's, you know, it's all, actually, it's all kind of arbitrary in a way.

I've always found when I've been on selection committees, even when I was at Yale, I kind of felt like we should do a lottery. It tended to be, the students were all kind of good. And, and, and it wasn't clear who would, who would do better than others. So I was kind of, I was cynical about that. As far as, now I'll get, I'll get more hate letters. As a physicist who was also taught astronomy, I think, The other reason astronomers get rid of the physics g-re is this kind of, well, I won't say physics envy,

but it's the fact is it's not clear that the physics would, anyway, let's not go there. Okay, I see where you're going. Yeah, but, okay, I'm going to be even worse. Is that why there's much more females in astronomy? Okay, well, now we'll really step away from this. No, no, it's interesting. You know, that's what is a fascinating thing, actually, is that one here, well, it's changing, of course, all the time.

it's as dynamic as we're now discussing. But there's a more vocal discussion of gender bias against females in astronomy, which is surprising because as a field, it always has had more women. And in fact, it's really kind of interesting that what you see is the areas, and this was always apparent to me in Europe, it's even greater fraction of females. It's much more representative of the background demographics, and they make much less of a big deal about it. And it's kind of an interesting sort of inverse relationship that you see.

Well, you're still naive. I mean, I guess I am. You're still naive, and if you think it's surprising that the fact that astronomy is more heavily female means that there's more feminist complaints. To me, that is completely logical and follows precisely from what we know about the world. Well, yes, I guess you've, yeah. Well, okay. Well, but what I want to hit on next is pushing for a little further, this incredible adoption by the governing bodies and this and senior scientists and of this of this underlying claimed reality of systemic racism, systemic bias, systemic gender bias without without, without, without evidence.

And I think that's the assumption when there's a, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. de facto assumption is made when there is a inequity in compared to demographics when there's a smaller percentage that the result that the reason has to be gender bias or racism instead of something else is is remarkable and what one sees is and i've seen this happen in a different context is is this kind of virtue signaling the need to be in front the need to be in front of the and i think it's probably the power of social media or or whatever but But instead of just acceding to demands, these groups go beyond. The leadership goes beyond.

And the verbiage tends to be way ahead. They want to lead rather than follow. And it's remarkable. And let me talk about one thing that, you know, the American Physical Society, and I wrote about this, and I think you've read my piece about it. But the American Physical Society has. has bought wholeheartedly into the notion that science is racist, something which I have argued, and I still argue, is not for which I, I, and no one I know has ever seen any evidence of.

Universities tend to be quite the opposite. But here, I want to ask, so in the set, one of the things the American Physical Society did was buy into this day of protest, where all research at STEM groups was supposed to stop to because of the horrendous racism that apparent that was supposedly existed that and and that that that concern me but more recently the head of the the president of the american physical society and the american physical society sent out a letter to its membership arguing that trumps and i'm you know i'm no fan of i've no fan of trump but trump's presidential executive order on combating race and sex stereotypes was a direct opposition to the core values in the american physical society now i want to read the order the order um was done to strengthen this American scientific enterprise. It has since been rescinded, by the way, of course, by Biden. But it quoted Martin Luther King saying that in government-supported scientific institutions, people should be judged, quote, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their

character. It argued that materials from places like Argonne National Laboratory that equate, quote, colorblindness and, quote, meritocracy with actions of bias or from Sandia National Laboratories, which stated that an emphasis on rationality over emotionality is a characteristic of white males where inappropriate training materials for government support institutions and it concluded that it should be the policy

the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the federal workforce. Now, when you look at those words, the claim that that's antithetical to the principles of the American Physical Society seems strange to me. It's terrifying. It is, we are, it is just, this is such a betrayal of our precious legacy of the scientific revolution, of rationality of, of, you know, controlled experiments, the scientific method that seeks for truth and evidence, we do not deserve it. We should be, you know, back to going to the bathroom in the woods, descriptive public health, ravaged by, you know,

by actually terrible communicable diseases. It's outrageous that we are absorbing the fruits of the breakthroughs of rational truth-seeking that is the crowning glory of Western civilization and then demeaning it at the same time. It's a stunning. And obviously, if Martin Luther King gave his famous, I have a dream speech today, he would be boycotted as a white supremacist.

because that is now the received wisdom and part of the religious dogma on the part of the left, which is that to say you're colorblind is to be white supremacist. So it turns out that Martin Luther King was hoping to see a day when America would be truly white supremacist. As I said before, Lawrence, my analysis of this. is that it is driven by the terror that the black achievement, you know, we've been speaking about the gender stuff, but I think the gender stuff is an epiphenomenon and is piggybacking onto what is the driving fact of our world today, which is the dysfunction of inner city culture with its large ripple effects throughout two,

many members of the black community, not everybody. I mean, there's plenty, there's thousands, thousands of blacks that embrace bourgeois values of academic striving, self-restraint, deferred gratification, hard work. But you have a culture now that is utterly dysfunctional in the inner city. And it is resulting in this intractable academic skills gap. And I think America's elite whites are terrified that the gap is not going to close and that other explanations than racism will be offered for it, whether it's culture or heredibility. And they are doing this as a preemptive move to make sure that neither of those explanations can gain any traction. Okay, well, that's interesting. I mean, it's one of the areas where I think we diverge a little

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positions that are, I believe strongly in a meritocracy. and the academia has to be a meritocracy, which is itself heretical to say right now, but in many places. But my problem is that these problems, and I think there are real problems of racism in this country, there are real problems of social inequity in this country, but they're not going to be solved

by making someone and assist a full professor who, that's the last place, what you have to do. And you stress, what you focus on is what you perceive as the cultural problems in this year. I think, again, having lived in Cleveland, there are huge problems. I think there, the inequities that have,

the problems have resulted from social inequities, often economic inequities, which may have their basis in racism in the past. But you have places like the inner city of Cleveland where I used to go, where there weren't books in the schools. They didn't have the tax base. certainly agree with you and I think I can I can hold both positions you maybe can't hold both of mine but I agree with you that you know we shouldn't have victimology I would say yes there are

obviously schools that are vastly under endowed I would look at their management but I would also say that you stick an Asian kid and a black kid in the same classroom and I can predict pretty well who's going to end up learning something and that they talk to inner city teachers, the ones that will be willing to speak about their experience. And they will say that they're facing on average, there's always exceptions, but a culture of stigma against acting white, students not paying attention in class, not taking their textbooks home, parents indifferent to whether their kids are studying or not, the truancy rate and one study in California for blacks

is four times higher than that for whites. So at this point, yes, you know, you can talk about school resources, but Lawrence, it's not as if we haven't been trying for 15 years. It's just not the school resources. It's the resources of the community. I mean, I think there's a, you know, again, this is where we differ. There's definitely economic factors.

There's poverty. There's extreme poverty. That leads to, you know, there's a whole confluence of things that impact, that impact on the family environment as well. I might say, for example, that, yes, I would agree with you probably generically and statistically about maybe an Asian kid versus even a white kid, let's, you know, a non-Asian kid. But, but I suspect that if you had an Asian kid who was in an area with Asian gangs, that their approach to school might, be, you know, that we're living in a poverty, in an area surrounded by gangs and poverty, that their cultural approach to school might not be that different than people in an area with the white or black gangs. That's my assumption. I guess I, I tend to think of more of a, yeah, so I don't need to say any more there. Well, but I think that the gangs are a cultural problem. I mean, I don't take those as a background given. I mean, that is precisely part of the problem. And I would also say with regards to poverty, that the biggest driver of poverty in this country of child poverty is the culture of out-of-wedlock childbearing. It's being raised by a single

mother. And that is the privilege. Now, we hear about white privilege. The real privilege today is whether you're growing up with two married parents. A kid with two married parents that have, say, $20,000 in household income annually is going to do a lot better than a child of a single mother with $40,000 in government assistance benefits. So I just think at this point, we have spent so much time blaming society and trying to compensate with redistribution programs, and we have not spend enough time focusing on things that people can do for themselves. Yeah, I understand. And I think, I mean, and I accept certainly, I mean, in both cases, I think we both, while we disagree, I think there's a lot we overlap with. It's a question of, again, a distribution,

whether we agree at the center. And so, you know, I think I understand what you're saying. I'd rather here not focus on that. I think we have different approaches to societal problems. what we certainly agree on is approaches to non-problems, to non-existent problems, and how that is negatively impacting so many areas of society. And obviously for me, because I've been at academic, the impact on academia has been remarkable. What do you make of, let me just bring up some of the other things that amaze me, this retraction, the fact that now journals are retracting papers that are not demonstrably wrong,

but that don't have conclusions that people like. That's the worst. That's the worst thing. I mean, there may be crummy papers, but if they've been, you know, I know a lot of, you know, in physics, I would read papers in journals. I'd say, well, this is not very good. But, but I wouldn't say, you know, that we don't, if we retracted all the papers that were crazy in physics, there would be, there would be none.

But, I mean, for example, more related to your first book, something I wrote about in which you're quite aware of, is that is this Michigan State psychology professors who published an article in, I think, the proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. And there were double problems with that. First of all, the vice president for research, who happens to be a physicist that I knew well, helped fund that. And as part of the day of protest, was associated with the American Physical Society, had the day of protest. Some of the people took time out to then say, well,

we use our day of protest to try and remove this vice president for research for funding this clearly racist research. What was the racist research? The research suggested, and I can't comment on how it's quality, but the research, it certainly was reasonable enough to be accepted by the proceeding as a National Academy of Sciences,

suggested that there might not be this correlation between police violence and race. And by at least exploring that heretical question, not only was he removed, but what was remarkable is the authors ultimately were pressured into retracting the article. What's your comment on that? Well, the reason they retracted it is that I cited it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed at the start, of the Floyd riots. And so it was my association with it and publicizing it that led to this retraction. It is utterly appalling. It is, again, a violation of the procedures of academic truth-seeking that have given the world prosperity that have lifted billions out of squalor and premature

or death, which is the belief in the marketplace of ideas. And that if you think something is wrong, you don't suppress it, you provide better arguments and better data. So again, it all comes back to, I'm sorry, I'm going to be broken record. It is all driven by the black behavior gap and the skills gap. Anything that shows that disparate outcomes in this case

in policing and incarceration are driven, are driven by black crime, not by racism, is not allowed. Joseph Josadio, the lead researcher on that paper from Michigan State University, they found that when you take crime rates, violent crime rates, into account that police officers, white officers were no more likely to shoot black civilians,

and race simply disappeared. That seconded a paper they'd done in 20, 2018 that showed that when you take violent crime rates into account, the odds ratios for blacks and whites of being fatally shot by the police reversed completely, and that whites were actually three times more likely to be fatally shot by the police. You know, one doesn't have to do fancy regression analyses to come to those conclusions. You can just put side by side the percentages of blacks who were shot by the police fatal each year with the percentage of blacks who commit violent crimes

like homicide, robbery, aggravated assault, and rape, and see that the percentage of blacks involved in those crimes that make one more, the most susceptible to having elevated uses of force, including lethal force, used against you, are much, much higher than the percentage of blacks who were actually shot. So, you know, this is just amazing. This is why I say, get a hold of and download the data you can now from the NYPD, from the LAPD.

I don't think the Chicago Police Department publishes it anymore, that show that that is why police stops and arrests are higher in black neighborhoods, because very soon it is going to be gone. And there will be no way to counter, even though the countering of that narrative doesn't make any damn bit of difference. to at least put facts out there that show that policing is not racist. It is simply going where people are being most murdered by drive-by shootings. Okay. Well, as I say, those statistics I find fascinating. I haven't studied, anything that I haven't studied, I kind of remain agnostic about in the sense that it seems like, it seems plausible to me, and it certainly seems rational.

I, and you've done more looking at the data than I have, but it's certainly worth, the point is, if that data exists, it's worth discussing and it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be taboo from talking about it, regardless of your interpretation of it, to even, but what worries me is that even ask the question, even ask the question is forbidden. And that's the, that's for me, the ultimate slap in the face as an academic. If you can't ask questions, then the hope of a rational society and any progress of scholarship goes out the window. Well, there's whole areas of research that are now taboo. It used to be that in the early 2000s, end of the 1990s, it was still kind of possible, though very risky professionally, to study traffic behavior by race. And,

And the few studies that were done showed that black speed at twice the rate of whites. That is a very significant fact to know when you're doing your usual racial profiling traffic stop studies. Now nobody can study that. If you did, you'd be out of a career as a criminologist or a social scientist. But, okay, that's there. But I also want to point out that, you know, I know that, I mean, you're making the key point, which you've made, that it's, that it's this concern about possible racial disparities that is causing this censorship. But it also, but the same kind of thing is happening in gender.

I mean, there was just a New York Times op-ed, but it was a piece I knew about already about an article, which looked to me like a silly article, but it was an article in nature, and there are a lot of silly articles in nature. And the researchers were female. They looked statistically, and they said, on the whole, women who have, females who have women, female mentors don't do as well as female students who have male mentors. Now, my presumption not having worried about in detail is, well, I think there's probably, the rationale is, in my mind, quite simple. Historically, in STEM disciplines,

historically, STEM disciplines have been more or less male and historically, the most senior researchers have been male and you tend to do better if you work with most senior researcher. So it's not surprising that that people who work with male researchers historically have, have done better. Now, there may be arguments, there may be other reasons too. And that means that it's not particularly an interesting article. But it's an article and that statistics are there. And as far as I know, the authors have still not argued that they made any mistake in their But instead, 7,000 people demanded scientists, and I, you know, I don't know what their demographics were, demanded it be retracted and it was retracted. And because the conclusion, which may not have been very interesting, nevertheless, what the argument that was given was it doesn't send a good message to young female students.

And therefore, we can't allow it. we can enter instead of saying look i think it's uninteresting and there are any peripheral reasons why that may be the case uh it's no we better not even admit that bit of evidence for fear that it will that it will that it will uh that it will go against the argument that that you know that young women should work with with with senior women that they need female mentors to succeed well you know the analogy to religion can get overworked but but it is true i mean this is just, we're in a world where we see heretics. We want to crush heresy. We do not allow any dissent from the catechism of revealed truth, which is that the world is biased towards white

males and that females and blacks and Hispanics are oppressed, that they are unable to reach their full potential because of the oppression of white males. And any facts to the contrary, must be ruthlessly erased. And what's so nauseating is that these are the people who go around under the mantle of science, whether it's wearing masks outdoors when there's virtually zero chance of transmission of coronavirus in wind-swept outdoor spaces,

and yet there they are virtue signaling with their damn masks on, or, you know, going, exceeding to every absolutely arbitrary numerical limit on shutdowns and whatnot. And yet there they are destroying the scientific enterprise. I don't know where this ends. We are moving into a period of real censorship, whether it's privately imposed with the exceeding of government. It will probably end up being government imposed as well. And as you said earlier, we, We are cutting off the means by which society advances, which is advanced the airing of ideas,

the contesting of ideas, open debate. One doesn't know what to do. Yeah, well, I want to get there. You know, I want to lead there. But in fact, last thing I'd like to talk about is what can we do if there's anything. But in fact, of course, I'm always happy that you throw in these things which are going to, you know, push my buttons. But I mean, and I happen to be in general.

My attitude is maths in general work and therefore it's no big deal to, you know, if they work in general, you know, instead of making a series of exceptions, you know, wear them and and, and it helps the problem. But anyway, let's not talk about mass. It's wonderful that people who can disagree about so many things could agree about other things, but or be concerned about the same things. Indeed, talking about censorship, there was an article by a chemist in Canada, an eminent chemist who wrote about merit and his concern.

concerns, in fact, about affirmative action and promotion that never in spite of the need, you know, the desire to have diversity, marriage should be the key determiner. And that and there was not quite not only was that person basically castigated by the provosties university, but that article was removed too. But but more so, the examples of censorship that I find most concerning both societally and and and now in the media are the two. I mean, one, you're in, I think in California right now, but the San Francisco desire to cancel, you know, to censor history, censor Abraham Lincoln in principle because, you know, while he might have might have been good in one area, he would have come to Native Americans, he wasn't. But also this horrendous example of the science writer for the New York Times who was taking a group of kids to Peru. And one of the kids talked about how a friend had used that the N-word,

which no one can say because it's like saying Yahweh in the Jewish religion and he basically advised again, you know, talked about the problems but he used the word and therefore independent of any context and the fact that he was trying to advise people

in a rational good way about why they shouldn't use that word necessarily. He was removed. And you know, I wrote a piece called the turning the profane into the sacred. I mean, we're, if we sense, language. If words become so, and we've seen this with trigger, and we may have talked about this last trigger warnings, trigger, you know, safe zones in schools in universities, where

words are so dangerous that merely saying them will destroy someone's whole academic career. And in this case, we'll destroy, you know, society that the media cannot use those words. That's a great concern because, because once you start censoring language at such an extreme level, that regardless of context, words can't be used, well, then we really are religious, don't you think? Yeah. And there's two things that play here. There's the nauseating conceit of fragility that is, here I agree with you, this is sort of originates with the female ethos of safetyism and, and, you. you know, the crying about, I'm unsafe, I'm unsafe that has been picked up by blacks, obviously,

and that led to the firing of another New York Times, the editorial editor of the opinion page for running a Tom Cotton op-ed on a federal response to the rights. So we're, that merely having published that op-ed, which was a perfectly defensible mainstream position, somehow put the physical safety of the Times as Black. employees at risk. I mean, that that, that, that idea that one is literally at risk of one's lives is just so childish and slump and grossed and narcissistic. So there's that at play. You know, something that was brought up to me by actually, I, I was on a debate at the Oxford Union recently on on whether everyone is religious. And I actually took the side of saying

everyone is religious. And I talked about secular religion and argued that the Oxford students were being that way. But one of the people, young woman who was happened to end up being on the same side. I'd point out something quite interesting to me, which I'd never realized before. She was talking about the religion of safetyism. And she pointed out that the remarkable thing is, and I didn't know about these studies, that students feel far less safe now because of this fixation on safetyism than they did when there wasn't, which is kind of an interesting, an interesting result. I just throw up at the very premise of the question. It sickens me that this even has to be asked, like, why are we even asking students if you feel safe? Are you kidding me? On a literal

basis, there's no safer place than American University. On a psychological basis, the idea that they're psychologically at risk is just preposterous. I cannot stand the entire ethic. But so to your examples of the firing of the time science writer and the toppling of America's history. The other aspect with the N-word repeated controversies that come up is this grotesque ignorance about some basic distinctions in language use and linguistics. One of the most important is the distinction between use and mention. When any white person today says the N word. He is invariably doing it as a mention of the word, not as a use of the word. He is mentioning it, quoting it in a context of somebody else's use. He is not directing it at any given person.

He is merely saying, you know, as James Baldwin said, you know, ends are this way or I am an end. he's not directing it. Whereas when rap people start, there was a Twitter study done that blacks used to directing it at each other, the N-word something like six million times a month on Twitter. But that doesn't slay them. That is not lethal to them. But if a white person mentions it in a quotation context,

bracketed, not as a put-down, but as merely an object of observation and discussion, that somehow we are to believe that that puts the safety at risk. And so words have taken on, as you suggest, we're returning to a magical property where the word itself is kind of, has magical powers to kill the thing that it refers to. We are not progress. in our understanding of human communication, we are regressing to a very primitive state. There's a, you know, I think in the piece I wrote on this, I referred to, I don't know if you've heard the song by Tim Minchin, but I think it's a perfect, when you want to put it in a less emotional context, Tim mentions Australian, and he does a song about prejudice, and he talks about

a word that you're not allowed to use, which has two Gs, an E and R, an I, and an N. And, and, and, And then halfway through the song, and he's, by the way, has red hair, the song turns into only a ginger is allowed to say ginger. Because in Australia, in a lot of places, redhead, people make fun of redheads. And of course, it happens to have the same numbers, same letters in it. But his point was, yeah, no one who isn't redhead should be allowed to use the word ginger. And when you put it in that non-emotional context, I think it illustrates the, the fact that we just take this word, which in our case, for those of us who live in the States, Ginger doesn't have any emotional context. And we suddenly endow it with magical properties that

it didn't have before. And anything like that, I guess as a scientist, I've spoken out against religion and myth and superstition my whole career because it's such an anathema, because science is based on saying these things aren't magical. There isn't magic. you know, let's look at the data behind it. And that's why for me, this whole controversy is the same. I view it as an attack on science and rationality. And that's why I guess I'm so concerned. I'm happy that people will discuss it like you at a time when it's very difficult to discuss.

I want to spend much longer because we've gone on a while. But I do want to. Let me just say something. You know what part of what's going on here is just a power play. It is just the inebriating exercise. of power. That, you know, by treating the, by pretending that the N-word has lethal, destructive power over blacks, blacks exercise power over everybody else.

And this is true for feminists as well. Rape, the word rape, which is, you know, it's, again, which can't be used or can be so disconcerting in a class if you use the word rape, for example. But you see these Yahooos that are sitting there slaying every, aspect of Western civilization simply because they can. They are tearing everything down because they have the power to do so. And power is a source of erotic charge. It's something that human beings strive for. And it also gives them authority. You know, you have now all the black activists that being black now is an accomplishment, you know, all these diversity bureaucrats that you mentioned before,

that is what they their their skill is being black that is their claim to fame that's true in academics you know i'm here because i'm black uh and and that happens with females as well and frankly i don't regard being female as an accomplishment it's not even particularly interesting but it is something that is unique i mean only blacks can be black so that is something that they well, nobody can take away from them and there's no competition out there. So this power to destroy careers based on perceived racial slights or sex slights is really an amazing thing and it is something that has to be fought because it is it is tearing everything down around us. You know, that's a perfect segue to the last thing I wanted to really talk about,

which is this issue of power. When we talk about, and what I want to get to is who gave them the power and what can we do? Because that's the real problem. There was a great article, in fact, I forget in what magazine about someone arguing, hey, you know, you gave, you college administrators,

you, this and that, you gave people the power. But I would argue that, in fact, that the root of the problem is, you know, academics are a timid lot, and I would argue cowardly in general, but but they're particularly afraid because their whole livelihood depends upon those above them. And what I don't know if I told you this, I think I may have written you this. When I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal called the ideological corruption of science

about this very, about a number of these very issues, I got a lot of letters back, a lot of letters from faculty around the country. And happily, you know, I didn't get much hate mail. I got some hate mail. But many, many of them, of course, agreed with the, with my premise, but what was shocking to me was that four individuals in particular wrote to me under pseudonyms because they were afraid that their superiors would see the email and they would be fired. This is academia. And so the question is who gave, who gave people this power? I mean,

the social media endow's power, but only if you allow that, that Twitter mob to, who have an impact. And once, and so we allow the Twitter mob to have an impact by, by firing people immediately like that woman in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, I'm not, in the power and what can we do to try and to try and to try and turn the situation around. Oh, well, it just be like.

I mean, I worry. I, I've told people. I, I, my own, I'm not optimistic. I think it'll get. worse before it'll get better. It'll eventually get better when it becomes so ridiculous. My suspicion is it'll get better when it either becomes so ridiculous or enough people realize that they're under threat, that they begin to question that the premise. But that, you know, those are my arguments and I really meant to ask for yours. So, so let me ask you.

I'm not optimistic either. Although in the last couple of weeks, the, the mainstream media suppression of valid stories and valid viewpoints has become so shameless that I actually had a little moment of hope where I thought this can't go on. People are going to push back against it. I don't know. And, you know, I certainly am not happy about academic cowardice. I don't know how I would react in that position, though. I'm outside the academy and in journalism. And the fear of peer pressure, the fear of losing your job. It's very hard. Oh, it's understandable.

I don't condemn it. It's totally understandable. And we see it in two forms. We see it in people who are, I think it's manifest, in people who are afraid to speak out, which is understandable. But the other where it's manifest

is exactly reminds me of the communist scare in the 50s. The other way of dealing with it is to be extreme in your virtue signaling. deflect potential concern about yourself by pointing out that all the communists or all the other races

so going above board to signal that you are virtuous and therefore deflect possible criticism and of course that happens in some members of the academy but where it really happens I think is where we're seeing it in the leaders we're seeing it on our not just political leaders but our scientific leaders

You've seen Francis Collins who not only talked about when you, in our last talk, you talked to me about his talking about manals, which I'd never heard of. But then you've seen him recently apologized for the National Institutes of Health being racist, which without any evidence whatsoever. And so I don't know how as long as the leaders, our academic leaders, our government leaders, media leaders, feel the necessity to virtue signal. I think that fear is going to persist. So I don't know how we address that. And again, I come back down to the ultimate fear is the fear of the academic skills gap. That's the ultimate fear. But, you know, I also wonder, I would think that scientists would care about the integrity of their labs

and that they would want the most qualified scientists there. and they don't want dead wood that has been brought in for diversity purposes. It's a mystery to me. You say, you know, maybe it'll change when people feel like their own jobs are at stake or their children. There's a clear, there's one clear eye, sorry to interrupt. I try to do less than I used to, but listeners, but there's one clear reason that, and you brought up, but I've seen it loud too, is that if you're worried about your funding, In some sense, you have to now because there's two things.

A, a number of funding agencies are requiring you to demonstrate diversity. And this is what kills me. Young faculty who are making grants in science for scientific issues with string theory, let's say, have to in their proposal demonstrate issue, how they're going to attract diversity. It reminds me of how they were supposed to talk about how they were going to attack public ignorance about science. most of them are capable, have no skill set in either. The fact that they have to do it in order to continue to do what they really want to do, whether it's playing live service or simply requiring a change in the content or content of the group they work with,

I think there's a reason. So that's the reason. If they want to continue to do what they want to do, they have to obey these rules. So it's a matter of compromising a little or giving up entirely. Well, it's a decadent society. We've got prosperity. We have been benefiting from the accomplishments and the beauties of the scientific method for centuries now. And we want to sacrifice all that to politics. But again, unless we can speak honestly and take actions that will close the skills gap, this isn't going away. Americans, white Americans are utterly terrified that it's not going to close. And that is what keeps this thing going. We want to change the topic to white supremacy.

And we deserve to go down. You know, China has a ton of problems, and I may be romanticizing it. And for all I know, it's scientific process, whether, you know, it's not corrupted by diversity. but it may be deeply corrupt by political connections. I don't know. But if it continues or if it does reward accomplishment and not the trivialities of race and sex, it will eventually pull out ahead.

And if it does, we deserve it. This is, it is a childish society that we got now that is driven by hatred, for a civilization deemed as two white and male. And that is an act of resentment. It's the attitude of losers who believe that they cannot compete on their own. And it's a tragedy.

I just finished a piece that's gonna come out in the City Journal summer issue on the Black Lives Matter attack on classical music, the thing that is the most profound, profound aspect of my life that's closest to my heart. And it is an utter tragedy and a travesty that this tradition is now being subjected to the poison of identity politics. There is nothing in our world that is standing. And you speak about the leaders and the gatekeepers. That is the problem. It is the betrayal of the guardians, museum directors who have been given the

privilege of curating Western civilization that are now apologizing for, you know, the racism of Italian fresco painting ludicrously rather than being down on their knees and preserving this extraordinary inheritance. Well, well said. Let me just echo it in my own words, too, I guess, that for me, once again, I come up this as a scientist who has fought myth and superstition, but the whole point of science, and to me, the whole point of scholarship is that nothing is sacred. And that when we, when we, when we censor ourselves, censor our questions, censor others, because of concerns about, about what's sacred and what can be asked, then the most, then the basis of the enlightenment is gone. And for me,

that's the biggest tragedy, the fact that we have come, we can come so far and we can go so much further in the future by continuing to ask questions without concern about where the answers will lead us. And we need to do that as scholars and as a society and as individuals. We need to continue to question. And I guess for me, my hope lies in the hope that we can convince people to question that eventually the thing. that occur will become so ridiculous that people will question them. In physics, there's a lot of pedagogy says the only way you learn is to confront your own misconceptions. And you do that when something is so ridiculous that eventually say, hold on. And I know that that, that, that people will be upset by some of the things that have been said here.

But at least they shouldn't be upset by having the discussion. And I hope that that will be that. And I will fight forever for the right to have that discussion. discussion. So thank you very much for having it with me right now. Yes, let's be anti-fragile and don't stay safe. Okay, thanks. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. You can continue the discussion with us on social media and gain access to exclusive bonus content by supporting us through Patreon. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos

by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsprojectfoundation.org