The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Heather Mac Donald: When Race Trumps Merit and Reshapes Culture

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Heather Mac Donald is never one to back down from controversy, and that’s exactly what makes our discussions so engaging. She’s sharp, opinionated, and unflinching when it comes to tackling issues many prefer to avoid—whether it’s race, culture, or the idea of meritocracy in modern society. This is the third conversation Heather and I have had for the show. With the release of her new book, When Race Trumps Merit, it felt like the perfect time to bring her back to explore how the focus on race and identity politics is reshaping standards across academia, the arts, and medicine.Of course, Heather and I don’t always see eye to eye. Throughout this episode, you’ll hear us wrestle with some points from very different perspectives. But that’s what makes these conversations so worthwhile. Origins isn’t just about interviews; it’s about true dialogue—exchanges where ideas are challenged, examined, and questioned from all angles.In our discussion, we span a wide range of topics, from Heather’s background in classical literature to the current culture wars affecting our institutions. And while our differences come through, it’s these disagreements that add depth and substance to the conversation. Especially now, when polarization is at an all-time high, having open, respectful dialogues is more important than ever.Whether you find yourself agreeing with Heather or not, I hope this discussion will inspire you to think more critically, challenge assumptions, and look more deeply at the issues shaping our culture today.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi there, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I had the pleasure of recording a discussion once again with journalist and writer Heather McDonald. We did one rather extensive podcast a few years ago, based actually on two long discussions we had at different locations around the world around the time of her book, The Diversity Delusion. And Heather has a new book.

called When Race Trump's Merit. And I wanted to talk to her about it. It's a fascinating book in a variety of ways. I wanted to talk to her about why she wrote it upon following upon the diversity delusion. And of course, it was motivated by the events following the murder of George Floyd. And the prevalence of something that's called disparate impact on institutions around the country and its resulting claim.

of systemic racism. Something I've talked about and I've written about in different contexts in the case of academia and science. And Heather in this book talks about, with many examples, about a wide variety of topics, including the impact on medicine and science, but also in particular, since she's fascinated by the arts with a background in classical literature and a love of music, she talked about how this is impacting on the worlds of art and music as well. And so while we did talk about medicine and some of the severe issues of claiming that somehow the work of doctors is systemically racist when there's no evidence that it is on a case-by-case basis, we didn't talk much about science because I've talked a lot about that in different context.

And we focused on some remarkable and sad tales of what's happening in the music world and the art world. And really ultimately replacing awe and wonder and reverence for the abilities of the human intellect to transcend the daily myopic concerns of our existence and travel to new heights to create beautiful music and beautiful art. and how that's been literally perverted and distorted to surround victimization and hatred, and generally without motivation and without evidence, and how it's demeaning all of us, all of us in our culture. It was a moving and intense discussion, and it won't always be comfortable for people to hear it, but I think it's important that someone like Heather is, willing to talk about topics that aren't politically correct. And whether you agree with her view or not,

I think the examples are quite sobering. So I hope you find this episode at the very least thought provoking and perhaps also fascinating as I did. Now you can watch this episode ad free on our Critical Mass Substack site or you can listen to it there or you can watch it later on on our YouTube channel or listen to it on any podcast listening site. No matter how you watch it or listen to it, I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you'll consider supporting the Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. You can do that by subscribing to our substack site or donating directly on the Origins Project site. Your support helps us bring these programs to you.

Well, thanks again. And with no further ado, Heather McDonald. Well, Heather, it's great to have you back again. We've done two discussions. Two of them were put together into one mammoth podcast, two discussions that took place over the difference of a year or two. And it's great to have you back on the podcast again. Well, I'm a year older, but I hope I'm a year wiser.

So thank you for me back. Good. Well, we all hope that. I'm not sure for any of us it works. But one of the reasons I want to have you back is because of of your most recent book when raised Trump's merit. But I want to, and because I've had you on, we don't have to go into a detailed history of your background,

as we've done before. But just for people who may not have heard, your background is as a classical English lit person. You went to all the right places and you went to Yale for English. And then you had a melon fellowship and went to Cambridge and studied after that. And then I guess deciding that maybe English literature was not a marketable profession, you went to Stanford Law School. Is that the reason you went to law school? Not at all.

Nope. I decided that English was being taken over by a theory of language that I had unfortunately devoted myself to wasting my undergraduate years, the theory of deconstruction or post-structuralism. that seemed at the time at Yale in the 70s, this was when it was at its height. Yale was the center in the United States with Paul de Man and Jacques Delhide would come from France, Jayhilles Miller, and to a credulous and ignorant undergraduate who was nevertheless had been fascinated by language representation. I loved Moby Dick as a high school student. I loved William Faulkner because of him, his pushing the boundaries of expression into sort of new areas. Deconstruction seemed like the hottest thing going, and it was. It had a whole aura of danger around it, of sophistication. There was a cult around the leading figures, and I was too stupid to apply ordinary skepticism. I'm in awe at this point of my contemporaries who had just common sense. And, and, you know, were able to reject some of its central tenets,

like there is no such thing as human beings. All there is is language. There is nothing outside of the text, as Deffi Dave famously said. And when I went to England to pursue further studies in English literature, I was so monomaniically obsessed with deconstruction that I did not leave myself open enough to a much more traditional background in Cambridge. although there was already the, you know, deconstruction had a few representatives there, Colin McCabe and others. And I went back to Yale after that two-year study to start a PhD in comparative literature,

because, again, Yale's Complet Department in the late 70s was the best place to be, if you were going to be the most cutting-edge person in literature. What had happened, though, in Cambridge, I had studied linguistics, a general theory of linguistics under Terrence Moore. And I actually encountered for the first time real language study, kinetics, syntax. I fell in love with J.L. Austens, how to do things with words, speech act theory. John Searle was the representative in Berkeley. This was something that was grounded in reality, in serious thought, not mere wordplay.

and having studied linguistics and seen what real language theory looks like, when I went back to Yale, I had sort of an emotional, intellectual crisis because the professors whom I had revered as an undergraduate, Paul DeMond, Jeffrey Hartman, I heard them repeating the same fantastical nonsensical claims as when I'd left. Nothing had changed. They were a broken record. Demand's reading say of Shelley were absolutely perverse. They were filled with bizarre images, gratuitous images of mutilation, of decapitation. And I heard these people ask, what is going on

and had to leave because I realized that this was a complete fraud. Nevertheless, I still have the theory bike in me. I still was very interested in problems of interpretation. How do you read texts? How do you gain access to an author's intention or a speaker's intention? So I went to law school for the wrong reason. I had no intention of being a lawyer. I was interested in legal hermeneutics, and stupidly, I thought, well, the next step is critical legal studies, which is the legal version of deconstruction. So I went to Stanford because that, along with Harvard in the early 1980s, was the center

of critical legal studies. And I tried to write a law review note applying speech act theory and sort of the whole problem of performative utterances to Article III of the uniform commercial code, which is about promissory notes, a completely insane project. Article 3 is all about practical transactions. It's about how you work with these fantastic instruments of credit. that were developed in, you know, European trading societies in the, in the Renaissance and beyond. And there I was trying to say, you know, is this a illocutionary or locutionary act?

Anyway, so that was a bizarre reason to go to law school. But I kept dipping the toe back in to go to academia because I still believe that there's no greater good than being a professor in ordinary circumstances. I yearned to be back in a real library, Sterling Library at Yale, not the Stanford Law Library, which when I first saw was just shocking to me, just row upon row of case reporters. But what was happening is I was out of graduate school. It got worse and worse. In the 80s, feminism and ethnic studies and black studies and identity politics took over in a way that had been completely absent with deconstruction.

Deconstruction denied the self. And the 80s theory was all. about the triumph and the obsession with the self. And the graduate students were getting stupider. Nobody knew anything. So I had to eventually give up my dream of becoming an academic because I had been disillusioned with the reigning theory. And so there was no way to go home.

But I still regard that as an unbelievable privilege to study the greatest works of man. and to pass them on to ignorant no-nothing students and to try to explain to those students why they should be down on their knees in gratitude before works of sublime expression that they will never otherwise encounter. Well, wonderful. I remember talking about that too, and we'll actually get to some of those divine works in a way or in a different context in the context of this book. Of course, it was a hard time. And as we said last time, I experienced it a little later of being a professor at Yale

and watching deconstructionism in the 80s at Yale. And of course, which became in many ways the precursor of what is now postmodernist views of, you know, critical social justice theory of literally oppression and oppressors and everything having to be viewed in that context. And it was the beginning, it was the beginning of the end in some ways. And I think I told you last time, we used to look down the hill. because science departments are up on science hill and laugh at the craziness, the irrational craziness that was going on and saying it would never happen in science.

And yet, of course, as I've spent a lot of time lately, it's exactly what's happening in science now as you're seeing the same kind of nonsense. But that's a subject for a different, different discussion. Sorry, go on. I just for the record, I think that conservatives are a little sloppy and conflating deconstruction with came afterwards, I think more interesting is to understand the irony of deconstruction morphing into its opposite. It was actually not at all interested in social justice. It was a Mandarin science. It was all about reading how metaphor dissolves into metonymy. It was looking at the

play of tropes. It had no politics. Deh-Dah flirted with it in a very superficial way, but basically if there's no human beings but only text, you're not looking at systems of oppression. What did stay over and eventually mutate is just a very mannered, artificial, hermetic language that is used to exclude people and to pretend that one is engaged in some profound enterprise when it really, especially in the case of Dejty Da, is about wordplay. and obfuscation. Yes, I think I've said this before to someone else, but whenever I hear that kind of obfuscation and that vagueness,

I'm reminded, you see, the difference in you and me is I used to watch TV a lot when I was a kid. And so one of my favorite memories is of the Dick Van Dyke Show, and when Carl Reiner said, what on the surface seems vague is in reality meaningless. And I've always thought of that ever since. And when I hear vagueness, I'm always suspicious. But look, so you became after, and I don't quite know how quickly,

but after law school, you actually did work, and you actually worked for the government for a little while, I noticed and advised environmental protection agency or something like that. But you eventually became what you were labeled as a conservative secular writer. and so you moved into writing. And had you always wanted to write? I mean, you obviously wanted to read and you loved literature. Had you toyed with, you know, writing or the idea of being a journalist early on,

or did that just sort of organically grow? Not at all. And I regret it. I never did any student journalism. I'm in awe of student journalists who actually have to make deadlines, who learn to go out and see the world. No, I was really a univocal, unifocused student. I just loved studying and writing about what I was reading.

I could generate, you know, 20 pages on 12 lines from Wordsworth's Prelude. I loved close reading. I loved to engage with text, but no, and I was not particularly political. So moving, I started writing, and initially, I was so mad at deconstruction because I'd wasted so much time on it. I realized I'd been at Yale taking traditional literature courses and not struggling with La Mithology Blanche, one of Derrida's essays in Sterling Library Stacks.

So I wanted to write the definitive deconstruction of definitive refutal of reputation of deconstruction, which I never did. But I started writing on the postmodernism and the rise of multiculturalism, small literary journals and then was eventually asked in the 90s when I was in New York City to start doing reporting. My first reported piece was about a crack-addicted schizophrenic named Larry Hogue who was terrorizing a particular neighborhood on the Upper West Side because he couldn't be permanently committed. He picked up in the hospital would be somewhat treated with

psychotic drugs and put back on the streets and decompressed. It was a harbinger of the insanity that has brought New York down again. And so that was a completely new experience for me. I had never, ever gone out and interviewed people. And I figured that, and again, I did not come out of a conservative background. I had read no conservative theory. I'd really read no political theory. So I figured I know nothing And my only value added is to go out and be willing to do the footwork and get out into environments and not just pontificate from an armchair So I started doing that and it turned out that it was the

1990s when New York City was in the vanguard of the urban governance revolution And I'm sad to say that when one now invokes the name of of Rudolph Giuliani, you have to apologize for it because the man has destroyed his legacy. But in the 1990s, he was an absolute miracle of insight about civil society, the need for public order. And so I started writing about his crime policing revolution, his welfare revolution, his education revolutions. And so that brought me into the journalistic fold. But as I say, out of complete ignorance.

and but a curiosity. I mean, the thing that's great about being a reporter is you get to learn about all sorts of new things. Yeah, I know. I think that's a wonderful thing. You get to learn about new things. And I have to say, I'm less than all of student journalists, except you're right. They learn about deadlines. But I tend to find, think that the journalists that I admire most in some ways or other came to it from some other background.

Oh, interesting. And anyway, but you eventually and you, you know, you wrote a variety of books. And in the last book we discussed was your book, The Diversity Delusion, which was published in 2018, a wonderful book, a really wonderful book. And we spent a lot of time on it. So my first question in some sense, having written the Diversity Delusion, when I first looked at this, I thought, okay, you know, what's different? why return in some way to that subject? So what led you to decide to write this book? And I'm pretty sure I know,

and probably has something to do with what happened in 2020, but why don't you tell me? Yeah, I mean, the George Floyd race riots produced a collective psychotic breakdown on the part of America's elite institutions and their leaders, where every single mainstream institution declared itself guilty of systemic racism

on the basis of this episode in Minneapolis in May 2020. And I witnessed, it wasn't just academia, it was law firms, it was business, it was journalism, it was the arts, science, all turning on their civilizational legacy based on completely specious grounds of claiming that our current society, our current systems of knowledge, our current, the scientific method, are all profoundly biased.

And the things that I loved, the things that I would still devote my life to if the context was right, were being torn down by the guardians, people who should be making the case for these traditions. And so I wrote the book out of a combination of sorrow and fury that, we were really at risk of losing the civilizational legacy. And of course, as you well know, Lawrence and have been so articulate and influential, it's no more and more preposterous than with the pursuit of science. But it's every place else as well. It's every place.

Yes. Well, it's, it was enlightening to me in a number of ways. I'm always enlightened by your work when I read you up by the way. And and but and I will say and I want to want to, we'll talk a little bit about science and medicine, but but we have, but not only have we talked a little bit about that, but as you know,

obviously I've written and talked a lot about it. I want to focus for the most part later on with music and the arts and because much of that was new to me and like everything else, unbelievable. One could not believe it would be real if it wasn't actually happening. But at the very beginning of the book, you use a term which I hadn't really heard, but really encompasses much of the problem. And it's the term disparate impact. So why don't we start there?

Why don't you describe that term what it means and why it's fallacious in some ways, or at least why the implications of disparate impact are often fallacious? So go ahead. Well, the technical explanation is it's a term that came out of the law. And it was a way to expand the concept of civil rights, expand the concept of racism to an absolute absurd telos. The civil rights laws that were passed in the 1960s belatedly to our shame, you know, with absolute necessity, banned intentional discrimination. And so if you were going to sue an employer for discriminating against blacks, you would have to show that he set up a selection system that deliberately was intended to keep blacks out. And that's what the law prohibited. You may not discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color and a few other so-called immutable traits.

But in the 70s, it was decided, well, it's getting harder and harder to find the traditional types of overt, explicit, intentional discrimination to get rid of. And the civil rights industry was kind of looking around for something else to take on. And so the concept came about in a case called Duke's Power, Duke v. Griggs Power, I think. that said if an employer puts in place a selection process for screening applicants, and he has no intention, race does not come into it. He simply wants to get the best applicants. So let's say it's a reading exam. And the reading exam is because he wants to have people working in a power plan

who are able to read the instruction manual of operating massive turbine, If that neutral colorblind exam has a negative effect on black applicants, if black applicants fail it at a higher rate, it said that that exam has a disparate impact on blacks. Then that's a racist exam. And it can be thrown out on racism grounds, even though, the employer himself was not a racist, and the test is immaculately colorblind. So the idea that any standard, and this applies in both meritocratic contexts of, say, a medical school admissions test or a medical licensing exam, where you're trying to measure merits, you're trying to measure excellence, you're trying to measure competence to do a job. if that exam, which was crafted not with the purpose of excluding blacks, but simply to find out who can actually save somebody who's been hit by a car

and he's about to die in that ER, do you have the medical skills to save him, if blacks fail the medical licensing exam at higher rates than whites and Asians, that exam has a disparate impact on blacks, and the exam is racist and must be modified. So disparate impact implies, applies in meritocratic context, and it also applies in behavioral context. If your viewers, Lawrence, are in the United States, and they've been watching with perplexity

what's been going on in the criminal justice system for the last four or five years, where you see prosecutors, these so-called progressive prosecutors deciding not to prosecute entire categories of crime, however necessary prosecuting those crimes are for maintaining civil order, for maintaining a sense of a safe society, whether it's turnstile jumping in the subways, theft, looting, resisting arrest, trespass, disorderly conduct.

If in using those laws to prosecute crime with no racist intention, You're simply trying to put criminals in jail. If more blacks fall afoul of those laws, the laws have a disparate impact, and therefore we're not going to enforce them. And so progressive prosecutors and judges have been saying, we're not going to enforce the law because we don't want to put more black criminals in prison. The result of that, this massive decriminalization, this massive de-incarceration, has been an incredible crime.

spike following the George Floyd race riots, police officers are demoralized, and parts of American cities have become, once again, they're sliding back to the anarchy and the swallor and disorder that we saw in the early 1990s. Okay, great. And we'll come back to that. That's, you know, criminal justice and criminal reporting are one of your bailiwicks, which you've been working on. And in fact, the end of the book deals with that subject directly. So we'll get there and it'll be a nice way to sort of, you know, bring some circular completeness to this discussion, because we will end up on a discussion of criminal justice, but we'll take a long and winding road to get there. But this notion, this disparate impact notion, which, as you say, may have begun with a test or

or employee selection process, it's really quite fascinating because it's what, it's, it's, it is remarkable because it's led to the notion that if ever the, the, outcomes of any hiring process. Yep. Not even hiring, but school selection or anything else, does not reflect the background demographics of society. Right. Exactly.

Then it is a racist or sexist or, you know, any otherist. And it's, from a scientific perspective, it is the opposite of doing science because it is assuming the answer before you ask the question. So the evidence is that there's a disparate impact, fine, that the hiring does not reflect in one way or another background demographics. But the next question that any reasonable researcher would do, or science would say, well, what could be the factors? Instead of assuming the answer and requiring that to be the answer,

you might ask, are there many factors? For example, you know, if they're very far fewer people, say, let's just change it. Say women chosen in physics, you might ask, well, how many applicants were there? I mean, if they're far fewer applicants, then it's hard to reproduce the fact that women are 51% of the population if they're 5% of the applicants, for example. But, you know, so many factors, I mean, and we could go on to a whole program. we're not going to. But it does, but you're absolutely right. And I think the, I think the fact is after, and you point out, with the catalyzing factor was George Floyd, but it became this, the derogre that systems, science, medicine, government were systemically racist if they did not reflect

the background demographics. And that, and that produced a whole bunch of impacts, which we want to discuss. So really the heart of much of what we're going to talk about today, and that's why you introduced at the beginning of the book, is this notion of disparate impact and education, science, music, arts, and then eventually in the law. And I want to go through these in a variety ways. I'm going to, I should tell you to Vance, I'll, we'll do quick, we'll do short shrift to science because I've talked about a lot. But the first chapter you discuss about this is the bias fallacy. And the fallacy that really, if things don't reflect background demographics, there must be some systemic bias. And you cover a few topics that I thought I'd give you a chance

to talk about a little bit. You talk about an education, the SAT and the LSATs, and then we'll go to medicine for a little bit before we eventually move to culture and the arts. So want to talk about SATs and LSATs and the effort to sort of remove those? Well, let me just, down on what you've been saying, Lawrence, and state, as long as racism remains the only allowable explanation for racial disparities, the left wins. It is all coming down. If there's any racial disparities you say, you are only allowed to assume that that is because of a racist standard and that somebody is excluding qualified, competitively qualified blacks. And so So this is an, I want to send out an alarm.

This is the instinct of our elites. It's the instinct of the press. All they need to do to do a front page New York Times story is fine. Any institutional law firm that does not have 13% lacks within it, whether it's law firm partners or computer scientists at Google or Apple, if there's not 13% representation, by definition, the answer is the explanation is racism, and the response is tear down the standards. My purpose in this book was precisely to provide the alternative explanations,

and this is something that is very difficult to talk about. Americans are very well-meaning. We were racist. We were white supremacists. We were gratuitously nasty to blacks. We violated our founding ideals every day of this country's history. For hundreds of years, although, of course, there were people who were sickened by both slavery and to jury segregation and were extraordinarily eloquent in fighting it. But for far too long, Americans were indifferent to that.

That is not a reality today. And Americans are so well-meaning now that they turn away from these facts. It makes them very uncomfortable. and in some settings I offer trigger warnings to say I'm going to talk about things that you would rather not hear about. The idea that whites are somehow white supremacists when they refuse to look head on at the breakdown in the black community is ludicrous. But the skills gaps as measured by colorblind objective tests are massive. And that is what explains the lack of 13% black oncologists in cutting edge labs or 13% black black black recipients of neurology grants from the National Institutes of Health. When you have these gaps,

for instance, one of the tests that is used to try to measure American students' progress is called the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's given every four years, I think. And on that test, 66 percent of black 12 graders do not possess even partial mastery of the most basic 12th grade math skills defined as being able to do arithmetic or read a linear graph. 66% do not even have partial mastery of those skills. They're so-called below basic. The number of blacks who are advanced in math nationally is too small to show up statistically in a national sample.

Well, let me let just for, just for completeness purposes, of course, one statistic is useful, but it's much, but it's pretty, we should ask, since I think most people are abysmal in math, what, do you know the percentage of whites that, that, that, that, that, I mean, you know, so it could be, is it also 66% whites are abysmal in math or not? No, I'd have to refresh my member on the numbers, but I think it's 20% at most. And Asians, of course, it's much lower. Uh, the people who are proficient and advanced in math, uh, are almost exclusively, whites and Asians. And you're right that

even saying this, you risk, don't just risk, but generally would be called racist for saying it. Even if we're not assuming any what the reason for this is, you're not, it's a statistic and it has

many reasons, including the fact that our inner cities do an awful job of education and their large black populations in the inner cities I taught in Cleveland where I saw that. So one's not making a moral judgment or a value judgment. But of course, it's because Americans are well-meaning on the whole, talking about any disparities and arguing that there are problems, there are deeper problems that need to be solved does immediately allow one to be at least categorized as a racist,

as I'm sure you have been over and over. Right. Yeah. And, I mean, if you want, again, comparisons, there's another test that is given. It's sort of the alternative given in the Midwest to the SAT, called the ACT, and it finds that 3% of black 12th graders are ready for a STEM degree, STEM major, ready being defined as having 75% chance or so of getting at least a B-minus in a STEM major. and the number of whites who are STEM ready, according to the ACT, is five times as high. Still pretty low, of course. It's low. Yeah, I mean, if you look at China, we're being left behind at the same time that we're dismantling our gifted and talented programs for our math whizzes, because those two have a disparate impact.

They're not 13% black students, and we've decided that we would rather not put everything, we throw everything we've got at our math talent and hold those students back, you know, in the fantastical hope that somehow if we keep the advanced students lagging, that black students will catch up and they never do. China, meanwhile, you know, is just whooping our ass when it comes to the Math Olympiad and other tests

because it says it doesn't give a damn about identity politics. It is just saying we're going to find our best talent, and throw everything we've got at them. Yeah, okay. And this reichens back to our earlier discussions, the diversity delusion. I'm going to turn on my fan because just watching you in the heat of where you are is making me warm.

So I'm just going to turn it on. Hold on it. Well, I actually do have air conditioning on, which makes me very nervous because I'm always worried that I'm going to be the straw that broke the camel's back and take the grid down. A fan is I live in a rational place where it's generally like nice and cool. Okay. look let I want to so yeah well let's move on towards quickly towards medicine and then I want to

and a little bit of science then I want to move to arts because there I I've just been amazed to see the examples you give but in medicine is of some concern and by the way I will say that this having recently written in the context of an article and I think and a book we're editing I'm editing in Canada, something called CanMed was a recommendation for teaching of medical students. And the conclusion of the report basically was that when it comes to the education medical students, encouraging and making the basis of their education and anti-racism was much more important than medical expertise. That was the statement of the board that produces doctors. And I think most patients would probably prefer their doctors to have medical expertise.

And that fact resonated when I was reading your chapters. But you want to talk about how this is impacted on people and individuals, both performance evaluations in medicine and maybe the JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association podcast example you talk about in the book. Yeah, again, like it just cannot be stated enough, Lawrence. This is insane. It is insane. Anti-racism fighting phantom racism is now the credo of every elite institution.

And we are putting our civilizational progress at risk. It is ludicrous to say that doctors should be trained in this pseudoscience of anti-racism. Let's just be honest. complete BS. There's nothing there. Microaggressions, heteronormitivity, white privilege, blah, blah, blah. These are empty verbiage, just, you know, to go back to deconstruction, that allow a cadre of charlatans to make a very, very good living because whites are so damn guilty and so incapable of defending the Western civilization that has allowed the world over to triumph over its ordinary state of penury, squalor, suffering, disease, early premature mortality,

Western science, Western ideals is the sole reason for that. And we are not willing to defend it. And medicine is just extraordinary. that you have, this is a theme that I talk about, which is so hard to imagine. It's the people leading these institutions who should know better who are the biggest problem. It's the leaders of medical schools who are saying. Leaders of all institutions are the biggest problem that seem to me. And we'll see that when we talk about it later on, leaders of museums, leaders of art galleries,

leaders of federal agency, scientific agencies, presidents of universities. you're right they're they're they're they're much more interested in in virtue signaling than than in in in in the realities of the world but but there's a reason for it because they can be they can suffer and and that's why I want to present you know some of the examples you give and I don't know if you remember all these are they're fresh in my mind because I've read your book recently I know having written books that I have a hard time remembering what I've written six months earlier but but there was a just one example that I that I found striking was this journal, this, what happened to people who'd done a podcast for the Journal of the American

Medical Association. Right. So why don't you talk about that example? Yeah. So their internet editor for the JAMA, which used to be a very prestigious medical journal, I'm not going to deny, of course, they still publish cutting edge science, but they like every other journal Lancet in Britain, Scientific American, they are totally left wing. They are completely committed to the idea that every Western institution, including science and medicine, are defined by racism. That is their raison d'être

is to engage in white supremacy. So there was a guy at Livingston, who was an editor for them on podcasts and internet stuff, and he brought on a professor, I think maybe from NYU to talk about anti-racism training in medical schools. And Livingston was interviewing,

and said, well, explain to me this concept of systemic racism and his interviewee tried to do so. And Livingston said, you know, I was raised in a Jewish household. We were profoundly committed to civil rights. I look around the profession. I don't see systemic, I don't see racist. I don't think doctors are racist. I think, yes, I will, of course, acknowledge how could what not that there are disparate outcomes in help.

Blacks do have much higher rates of diabetes of heart attack. But I don't think that's because of racism. I think there's environmental. Racism in the medical profession at least anyway. Right. It's not because of doctor racism. You know, doctors are trying to provide

the best care possible regardless of skin color. And so he sent around a tweet advertising this podcast that, you know, a question is systemic racism, a problem in the medical profession? And he adabrated that his answer was going to be no, but this was a discussion.

Well, he became an absolute pariah. One medical association after another came after him for the temerity of questioning the only allowable explanation for ongoing racial disparities, which is racism. And his boss is at JAMA apologized for putting something out there that questioned the

problem of systemic racism among the medical profession and the top editor over this guy Livingston himself had to resign the outcry was that great Livingston was a medical school professor

at UCLA apparently when he went back to his campus he was subjected to a you know a Stalinist type guilt session with everybody screaming at him for being so racist. So he was effectively disappeared. And that's the fate of everybody in academia who questions that any racial outcome could be due to anything other than racism. So it's just one of the many cancellation stories.

You know, there was a guy at Midwestern University, maybe St. Louis, I'm not sure. leading cardiologists who wrote an article in a cardiology journal saying that racial preferences in medical admissions were not serving their purpose because black students admitted with much, much lower MCAT scores, this is the medical college admissions test, were predictably and inevitably falling behind in their classes because they were thrown cruelly into an academic environment for which they were not competitively qualified. Nobody is saying black shouldn't go to medical school, they're saying, do not send them under unique conditions of unfairness, which is making them compete against people with a standard deviation higher of medical qualifications.

So this guy who was led fellowships, he too, the cardiology profession went after him. They took him off the fellowship program that he led. He was the subject of an absolute Twitter storm, accusing him of racism. He had no backing from anybody, either in his colleagues, you know, nationally or within his own college. It is, you're absolutely going up against a buzzsaw of hatred and mendacity if you question the disparate impact could see. And I was recently speaking at a conference talking about science versus dogma, a conference

of ex-Muslims, as it turns out. But, and I tried to say that, you know, how you distinguish science from dogma. And one of the ways is that science asks questions and nothing is sacred and everything is subject to question. And that's what science and progressive science, but that's what education more generally should all be about. So whenever you find anyone simply asking the question, not making a claim, but remove or asking the question, you have to ask, is this, as this digressed or moved into or sunk it into dogma? And that's a real problem. And you're right. So this example struck me because all he did was ask.

He said, you know, I'm not clear to me that doctors are racist. You know, there may be other causes. Right. And what you point out was that his boss, who was the editor-in-chief, Howard Bouchner, did typically what happens then. Immediately apologized, immediately did a Stalin-esque kind of apology. Oh, we shouldn't be doing this trying to get out ahead of the game. But of course, like always happens in these kind of things, it didn't last long. for him. And he was out in short order as well. And, and of course, let's also note the inevitable

conclusion to these events, which is promising an entire additional superfluous raft of diversity initiatives. Okay, so guess who's replacing him? Black, female, very intersectional, who promises, of course, that she is going to change the standards of medical journal publishing. she is going to look at the race of authors and their colleagues, and she is going to make sure that what gets published is published not on the basis of is this pushing the scientific discourse forward, but is it going to allow us to claim that we have better diversity metrics than we did before, again, something that is utterly inimical to scientific progress?

Absolutely. Okay, well, and by the way, I always like to find reasons to disagree with you, so a little bit, since I agree with so much. One thing I will say, because once again, we've done this before, my background is from the left, probably, having grown up in Canada, when you say this is the victory of the left,

or it's not, I don't say it is that. I think it is, it's the demise of everyone. It's the harm of everyone. There's no victory here if you get in the way of reason and sense and an open debate. And so it may be that this, particular line of of of of of dogma comes from the less but there's no victory if it wins it we all suffer including in ultimately everyone including the left suffers from it and so that's well just i'll

say that yeah i think you're looking for i i love disagreement myself and i'm happy to disagree but i think that's a a specious source of disagreement i would certainly not disagree with that it's obvious that the entire, everybody is piggybacking. It's completely hypocritical because these people that are willing to tear down the standards of Western civilization would not for an instant go without air conditioning, refrigeration, clean water, clean milk, air conditioning, their dam server farms, the mass of consumption of electricity to do their smartphones. So, of course, they will suffer as well.

But I just mean that they triumph and then. of their crusade giants. But in the end, actually, I wasn't talking about just suffering physically. I think I meant also in areas where one might be more sympathetic to issues that one would think could come from the left

and one can list a whole bunch of them. If once, whenever you depart from reality, you lose credibility. And so I think the left suffers specifically because by pushing narratives that are just, unrealistic, the important areas where they could, where they have, in my opinion, a positive impact on society lose out because once you've lost, it's like the boy that cries wolf, once you've

lost credibility by making ridiculous claims, then the claims that aren't ridiculous aren't listened to either. I think that, you know, it's famous, left shoots itself in the foot over and over again, I think. But anyway, that's, that'd be there, okay. I wish they were losing credibility. I don't think they are. I think they control the institutions. Well, okay, yeah. Anyway, we won't have that discussion here. I was going to talk about drug trials, but I think, I think, well, do you want to talk about the problems of drug trials at all as well? I don't want to dwell on medicine too much, but but the fact the way the kind of anti-racism or at least the disparate outcome

dialogue has changed the way drug trials are done in a way that will hurt lots of people, including blacks. Well, you know, an oncologist said to me, he was talking with a fellow oncologist, and she said she'd lost a grant to study a form of cancer that was particularly egregious of white males, and her drug trial didn't have enough blacks enrolled, and she was trying to do so,

but she couldn't find them to enroll because they didn't meet the specifications. And so the grant was snatched away from her, by the NIH, not because she was not doing good science, but simply because the mania for racial representation, proportional representation, goes even into the constitution of the test and benchmark population for new drugs. And you can go to a meeting of pharmaceutical companies,

and they will lament that half of their time now is spent trying to figure out ways to engineer diverse study populations, including if they're in the Midwest, if they're out in Nebraska, where there is not 13% blacks, because this is judged on a national basis, they're just not there, but they are spending all their time trying to come up

with racially proportional study populations instead of talking about how this particular drug works in a cellular pathway within the cell. And so it's another just way that the West, uniquely the West, no other cult, no other civilization, goes around with this degree of guilt, even though they have plenty of grounds to do so more than the West does, uniquely the West is deciding to end. its future progress. Okay, well, and you say that, I mean, the last chapter book is about the end of civilization in that regard, but let's not, let's, let's, we'll build up to that. You know, then you next talk about science, and you do relate to a case that's very near

and dear to me because I've written about it and spent a lot of time with John Cormondy, but I was going to spend some time talking about it, what happened, but I've written about it, what happened to him for merely trying to improve the statistical ability to determine possible likely success outcomes for junior faculty was so ridiculous that it's worth reading about in your book or as I say, I've written about it and in our forthcoming book or the war in science that's discussed a lot. But I want to move to culture and the arts because that, you know, that's as far as I can tell, your personal passion and then criminal justice, which professionally is something you've focused on. And so we'll head there. I knew it was your

first love when I walked the first time we recorded a podcast with you when your small apartment in New York was dominated by a large piano and and I knew that what clearly there were priorities here. Yes. And the piano was the priority. But what is going on in in in in music and art and museums is what I want to spend the bulk of the rest of the time talking about because you talk about a great length. As I say, it's clearly a passion of yours. And it is. It is. remarkable and one of the first victims is classical music and western music the claim that somehow western music and classical music is racist and we can you know we can unpack that a lot but why don't want to i just start there and let you let you let you go well again this was part

of the great mass psychosis collective nervous breakdown after george floyd when every single classical music organization whether it's orchestras opera companies music conservative and most egregiously the classical music press put out these these nauseatingly bathos-filled mea-culpas about how they preside over a racist tradition a racist institution the head of the american symphony association said it sickens him to look out at these white audiences and white donors uh and and this is a paramount example of what we talked about before, which is the betrayal of the gatekeepers, these are people who, more than anybody else, should understand the preciousness of this tradition, the utter

exquisite beauties, the sublimity, the pathos, the eros, the longing, the tragedy to be found in classical music and who should be selling it to the world. This is a tradition that is under enormous threat. It has very little purchase now in popular culture. There's little music education in the schools. It's becoming ever more of an elite art form. And so if you were within that institution, especially as a classical music reporter, critic, you should be selling this to the world and saying, if you do not hear the St. Matthew Passion before you die, if you do not understand the exquisite languor, if you've never been exposed to the languor of Chopin nocturns or the barker roll, you will have died a poorer person. Instead, they, the Class of Music Press out atrociously,

Alex Ross of the New Yorker, Anthony Tomasini, the former lead critic at the New York Times, BBC magazine. They all jumped on the George Floyd bandwagon and said, oh my God, this tradition is so racist, is the only reason anybody listens to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is because he was a white male. The BBC had an editorial that was just outrageous, offensive, just criminal saying that, oh, the only reason is that the classic music is just one look-alike white face, a white male face after another. Number one, they don't look alike.

These are really, you know, there's no comparison between J.S. Bach and Chopin or, barely oh, sorry. But of course, all you see is white maleness. Speaking of what you can see. Yeah. So they are teaching young people to hate. They're giving young people another excuse to turn away from this tradition. And you had right after George Floyd in summer of 2020, opera companies would put out, you know, statements of apology and groveling and self-refering.

and self-flagellation about how their institutions are racist. Now, this is completely preposterous. You know, again, let me, I just want to keep stressing, Lawrence, we are the only civilization that is doing this. Chinese opera is not African drum language, you know, Europe and drummers.

They're not doing this. European music, the Western art tradition, was a European tradition. Europe was demographically white. That is just the facts. Yeah. We were not diverse. So it is by definition, by historical inevitability, going to be a white tradition in the same way that Chinese classical music, Chinese opera is Chinese.

It is not, doesn't have Africans black. Or maybe to make it clear that jazz is a black tradition in the U.S. I mean, generally, you know, and the early jazz musicians were primarily black, right? I mean, that's a fact. Yeah, I wouldn't say primarily. Yeah, that was definitely primarily. It grew out of black roots. We had a lot of white jazz musicians as well,

and certainly the big bands. Of course. But yeah. But my only point, my only point is, it is preposterous for Europeans to apologize for the fact that their tradition is white because that's what it was. And that is not a reason to reject this music.

And if this was some sort of white supremacist tradition, please explain to me why millions of Chinese students at this very moment are spending 10 hours a day practicing Rock Mononoff and Beethoven's Hammerclavier in the hope of having a career making Western classical music. There's a fantastic Chinese pianist, Long Long, who was very worried when he was going to his first competition in Europe. and he said to his father, how can I compete? This is their music. And his father said, it is your music.

This is a universal tradition. It's, you know, the idea that it's somehow a white supremacist tradition is completely, it's a total non-sequitur. Well, in fact, yeah, my one could see that.

My daughter was a, that played the violin from a very young age and at many of the, you know, if you went to say the Aspen. Oh, wow. You'd see the Aspen.

you'd see the Aspen Institute or you'd see the you'd see the Aspen Music Festival and it mostly Asian kids playing at you know, and you could do it's just obvious but but you put but let's go back because you point out that it's not just this this this apology and this claim I wish we'll get to that that that classic music is racist and I want to quote some things you point out that that that following in the last years even the the the people who were defining in some some sense of culture, the reviewers, the music reviewers who should know better are making statement which is, which is remarkable. For example, you talked about Anthony Tomasini and you mentioned here and, you know, one of the, I remember when I lose in Cleveland, I had many friends who were in the

Cleveland Orchestra and was aware of the politics of selection and everything, but one of the big developments, which seemed at the time a huge development was blind auditions behind a screen. That suddenly was going to remove gender, race, and everything else, just the quality of the music. And so it seemed to be a major breakthrough. And then you point out that Anthony Tompicini urged that orchestra auditions no longer take place behind a screen in order to address the appalling racial imbalance in orchestral ranks. Explain the logic of that to me because I don't understand it. Well, it's the same rejection of colorblindness that we see in every other institution where, oh, I thought we were supposed to be colorblind.

And now if being colorblind has a disparate impact, then you're supposed to take race into account in order to minimize the number of whites and Asians in an institution and maximize the number of blacks regardless of qualifications. The idea that any classical music organization is discriminating against competitively qualified blacks is ludicrous. A conductor wants one thing and one thing only. An orchestra that is not going to flub the Tristan and his old a prelude or Parsimval prelude or they exposed horn solos in a Strauss-tone poem. He doesn't care about race. He's a fanatical perfectionist. And there was racist, there was discrimination in classical music in the 40s and 50s. I write about this fantastic black conductor, composer, violinist, John McLaughlin Williams,

whose father graduated from Howard University with the degree in music, piano performance. And he experienced racism in the Coast Guard and also in the music profession. And it destroyed his father. he became an alcoholic. So it was real. McLaughlin Williams is a rational person, and he is able to distinguish the past from the present, something we do not seem able to do.

And he can look around. He can look around and thank you. We'll actually get to him because, yeah, you talk about people who are willing to speak up, which is so rare, and for obvious reasons, because of the dangers of speaking up. And he comes across as a rational and courageous man, So let's save it for a second.

No, but my only point, my only point is it is not the case that today blacks are being excluded. It simply is not. We've got a history of recent black performers, Andre Watts, Kathleen Battle. If you have the chops, you're going to be chosen. But the idea that we need to get rid of a colorblind way, it's completely perverse, that somehow we're supposed to believe that colorblindness will be racially biased against blacks. just as we're supposed to believe that speeding cameras are racist. If speeding cameras show that black speed at higher rates,

it's racist technology or if shot-spotter technology shows that most drive-by shootings are occurring in black neighborhoods, it's a racist technology. This is a contradiction in terms, but that's the same thing with a blind audition. If blacks aren't getting chosen, it must be because somehow the screen is racist. So this is just one of these desperate efforts

to not look at the fact that the application pool, that the pipeline is different. There's not as many blacks coming into conservatories. They're not getting the training in the home to the same extent. But if they're not in orchestras proportionally, it is not because of racism. I think that's why it's not because of racism in the orchestras. I mean, I think the point here,

and it's more socioeconomic than racial, is I think to stress this, Yes, there may be fewer blacks auditioning for orchestras. But that stems, as you say, maybe from cultural conditions. And if we're interested in trying to encourage diversity, we have to look at a far deeper level to early education. There are other issues that need to be addressed. You don't address it.

You don't address concerns about inequities in society by solving them at the very tip, at the very apex of achievement, that's not where you solve them. You solve them by going deep and looking at the root causes. And I think that's the tragedy here, I think, to some extent. That's the tragedy. The standards are not the problem. You are not solving this by tearing down the standards.

The problem is there's too few people meeting the standards. Keep the standards and work on why there's too few people meeting the standards. but that is our instinct now, again, the disparate in fact, you tear down the standards. And right now, if you're a black, if you're a black performer, if you're a black composer, you have it made. The concert programs are being rejiggered completely.

We'll get there. I want to you talk about that. And, I mean, you know, the statements you're making, which sound ad hominem to somebody stand are obviously, they're not because the text of your, the substance of the book describes case after case where these instances are happening.

And I want to pick out some. But you do point out, I mean, it's not just Anthony Tomasini. It's another New York Times critic called for reforming operas culture by placing anti-racism front and center, Washington Post critic, alleged systemic racism runs like rot through the structures of the classical musical world, as if without explanation. And finally, a statement, which I found amazing, a call for orchestras, opera, companies, and conservatories to, quote,

examine the supremacist logic embedded in traditional Western art and music repertoire. So somehow there's supremacist logic embedded in Mozart or Brahms or Bach or or you pick your composer. Now, you talk about this situation in opera, and also you also talk about someone, one of you, it sounded like you're making a joke that Beethoven was racist, but it's not a joke. In fact, it's a claim. And you talk about someone named Philip Ewell, I think. And you want to, you want to describe what's happening there? Well, he's a classic academic now who has gone to town on race obsession, narcissism, solipsism, that is making claims that are patently wrong on their face, and this gets him advanced up the ladder and gives him more and more fame. He, after George Floyd, was coming up with all the ways that classical music talks about whiteness. So any term of art within the classical music vocabulary, he thinks, is all about whiteness. You know, so it's tempo or crescendo or excellence or the canon or, you know, an opera.

All of this is terms for whiteness. So this is a man who is obsessed. He's megalomaniacal. And at one point, and he has this amazing claim that, well, I'm not going to say that Beethoven was a particularly good composer. To be able to say that he was great means that I know that every other composer in the world was not as good. No, it doesn't. You don't have to be able to say somebody is great. To be able to say this is a really good meal doesn't mean that you've eaten every other meal available on the planet at that day.

There is objective grounds to say Beethoven is great. Well, so he's been going around for a long time with the typical race hucksterism. but he also turned his attention on a particular Austrian music theorist named Heinrich Schenker was working in the 20th century. And Schenker is now known today for what is called Schenkerian analysis, which is a particular way of analyzing music, harmony structurally, to understand how keys change, how melodies change, motives change.

And there's a whole school of people. that believed that Schenker had very profound insights in how classical music has its power, where its emotional power derives from. And Schenker has a series of ideas of hierarchy that some keys are more important than others in certain pieces. They, you know, involve shifts between one level and another. and so I have to say this because it's so preposterous, but it has nothing to do with race.

Shanker was not thinking about the problem of blacks for a moment when he was writing this theory. But Ewell takes it up and says, well, because Shanker talks about hierarchies of notes, this is really all about racial hierarchy and about whiteness, that anybody who's doing Shankarian analysis is about for furthering white supremacy. If your viewers are not following Lawrence, they're wrong, they're not wrong. They're right not to be able to follow it.

It's completely illogical. So this speech, he gave a speech about this that got acclaim. Alex Ross of the New Yorker said it was illuminating, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And there was a professor down at University of North Texas, Philip Jackson, who runs the Shanker Music Society and a journal of Shankarian Studies.

And he thought this Ewell's analysis was to say the least provocative. And so he put together a symposium on it and on Shankarian analysis. Is it racist or not? And he put out a call to the profession, including to Ewell, to submit articles. And he got 20 or so at least.

And there were maybe five that were supportive of Philippians. Ewell, and the rest said there's not much historical basis for this. This does not make sense. And Jackson himself wrote an article that I think made the mistake of making this personal and sort of lodging an anti-Semitism claim against Ewell because he'd also been celebrating anti-Semitic rap music. But the profession turned on Philip Jackson, that he dared to write, to edit a symposium that questioned the brilliance of Philip Ewell meant that he was himself a racist. He was taken off the Center for Shankarion Studies.

He was removed from editing the journal. And he too became a pariah. All of his music colleagues turned on him. He's now suing the University of North Texas, claiming a massive First Amendment violation, which it is. he's had some decent interlocutory rulings on his behalf. But meanwhile, Philip Ewell, you know, continues to rise from one imperial height to another on the basis of completely specious, I don't even want to call it scholarship. It is simply regurgitating tired nostrums that came out of academic theory that have no connection

to reality. Okay, well, let's continue in that theme then. you know, next thing you talk about scapegoats and the rise of mediocrity, you talk about something that happened in the Manhattan School of Music. And is the first name, Dona or is it Donna? Donna Vaughn. Donna Vaughn. You want to explain there too?

I found these are cases when I read, I wrote the notes down to myself because I was shocked and surprised. Let me put it that way. Well, Donna Vaughn was a long time opera, director of the opera program at the Manhattan School of Music. Manhattan School of Music is one of three main conservatories in New York City, the predominant one, of course, being Juilliard, and then there's Manus. and Manette School of Music is up in far north Harlem in Washington Heights, I think. And she read a very good opera program. I went to a production she did of Americadante opera I do a figaro that was fantastic,

just incredibly funny and sophisticated and stylish. And she was so devoted to diversity that she created a doer, scholarship at her alma mater in the South because she wanted to see more blacks in classical music. And she had mentored blacks throughout her career. And she was during the COVID lockdown, she was doing a Zoom presentation on musical theater. And somebody anonymously went on and said, how dare you have produced a operetta. Operettas are sort of light operas, they're comic, their effervescent champagne-like confections. And she had produced one at the school,

the land of laughter, Daslandes-Lachens, that had Asian characters in them that could be, today we would say, oh, these are stark Asian tropes, you know, how bad now? How can you even put them on the stake? So this question that came out of the blue was apropos of nothing she was described. So she cut the guy off and said, this isn't relevant, and went on with her presentation.

She was teaching high school students. Well, this provoked the fact that she, and she addressed this. This had been a previous, you know, usual phony student crusade when they actually produced the opera. This produced a huge backlash against her. There was the usual student petition saying it is oppressive. Black students are oppressed by being at Manhattan School of School of. music is if Donna Vaughn is even in a remote proximity, she got character references a assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, Howard Watkins, who's black and gay, wrote an letter

saying, she has been so supportive of my career. She was also accused of preposterously of popophobia, as if you can get away with that in the arts world. You know, she's been supportive of my marriage and my career. She was essential to me. There was a black student that I spoke to for the article and said she was completely colorblind. It had nothing to do. She had high expectations. She pushed us to be the greatest possible musicians we could. Too bad, too late. No way could Donna Vaughn survive. So she was booted out simply for keeping her lecture on topic. And of course, she was replaced by a black male Tazwell, who has made race a pretty big part of the Manhattan School of Music curriculum at this point. Well, okay, there were more examples, but we have so much to do.

I want to move on because the next subject is so amusing or interesting or, I don't know, or sad, depending on how you look at it. There's a chapter you have called Making Beethoven Woke. and it has to do with Fidelio, I guess. And you want to explain the situation there? Well, Fidelio is Beethoven's only opera. It was an enlightenment-inspired. Beethoven was a passionate believer in liberty and freedom. He was a big supporter of Bonaparte,

Napoleon revealed himself as a would-be conqueror and an emperor but Beethoven was absolutely a creature of the enlightenment and the belief of equality and he is one opera sadly just one

is about a political prisoner who has been thrown in a cell by a tyrannical Spanish grandee and abuser without any due process of course

he's down in length languishing in the dungeon and his wife wants to save him and so she goes undercover as a male to try and get herself into the prison to free her husband and

it's got some beautiful music in it. There's a quartet in the first act. Miel is so Wundubah to me this is a wonderful that is just haunting. It just is unbearable in its complexity and beauty and and melding

of voices. And it's got a prisoner's chorus where the prisoners have been kept in the dark and they come out into the light in the courtyard. And they sing a hymn to light and freedom. It's so beautiful.

Anyway, this is an opera about the Hewing Spirit. But it's decided that it was not sufficiently wope. So there's an opera. There's an opera company that goes around doing woke revisions of classical operas called the Heartbeat Opera,

and the Metropolitan Museum commissioned them to do a woke version of Fidelio. The only reason that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was bringing in a production of Fidelio, which is not really within its ambit, is because the Met Museum itself, after George Floyd declared itself an anti-racist institution. So this production of Fidelio kept the music. It's an opera in German, and the dialogue when it's not sung is spoke in German. The production at least kept the integrity of the arias sung in German, but it completely revamped everything else.

It completely changed the dialogue, and it made Fidelio about. about a Black Lives Matter activist who was writing a PhD in, you know, the racism of the 13th Amendment. It was under attack from the government. And so he had been thrown in a southern jail because of his color. And his wife, in this case, goes into the prison as a female. And, of course, this production introduces a homoerotic element where the, the male guard in the original who falls in love with the wife who's travesting as male. In this case, it's a female guard, so you've got a lesbian attraction going on there.

And the whole thing was turned into a political manifesto that had very little to do. do with some overlap. I mean, you could find general similarities in the theme, but it was an absurd way to try and prove your racial bona fides. If you want to do an article or an opera about Black Lives Matter activists, write your own damn opera. Do not pretend that that is what Beethoven had in mind. these works from the past are precious vessels that allow us to lose ourselves in previous sensibilities. The sensibility of the enlightenment with the moving into the romantic period, which is where Beethoven is positioned between classicism and romanticism

and his use of Schiller's poetry, the Oat to Joy in the Ninth Symphony. These are works that would never be created now. The language is different. The rhetoric is higher. we should value the opportunity to find out what human beings that went before us thought, how they felt, and not dragoon works from the past to speak to us endlessly about our own pathetic, trivial, political obsessions. So, fine, I'm not, I'm not at all opposed to an article about white supremacy destroying,

to an opera about white supremacy destroying Black Matters, Lives Matter activists, just write an opera about it. But do not change the integrity of Beethoven's text and what he was trying to get at with that opera. Okay, well, look, okay, that's great. Now, but let's take it even more to the more present. Speaking about people writing operas that are in modern times and writing about them, even those seem to have problems. And you then spend a significant amount of time talking about the experience of an opera called Nixon in China and what happened there. So why don't we proceed to that? Nixon and China was created by some of the most left-wing people in the arts world today.

Peter Sellers, who I went to high school with at Andover, he was an Enfantelie Idler. He's a director. He was fantastic back then. He would put on these incredible puppet productions. He would read Winnie the Pooh in the Drama Lab. He ran the classical music radio station. this was clearly somebody was very much up there in the IQ scale and in the talent scale. So he was the director. John Adams wrote the opera, wrote the music. John Adams is also very, very progressive. And the librettist was Al, I can't remember Alice.

Anyway, another complete progressive. And I'm not against progressives in classical music. I'm not, you know, if they're dominating the first. and there's not discrimination, so be it. So Nixon and China was about the Nixon's famous entente of arriving in China to try and have a breakdown of the Cold War. And it's an interesting opera. I think it's probably the best of Adam's operas.

It's got a fantastic aria that Nixon sings called News is a mystery where it, Nixon is meditating on the fact that at the moment when he is having this meeting with Mao, that the world knows that at the moment. It's traveling around the world. It's a wonderful aria. And he's got Pat Nixon. So this was a team of creators who created it for the Houston Opera in the 1980s. And it's cast back then and in most productions since then,

were white singers. James Magdalena, who's worked with Peter Sellers for many of his handle productions, was Nixon, the singer who was Mao and Chu Nlai. They were white. And it's been that way for most of the productions under the direction of Peter Sellers,

who is, at this point, I'm sorry, he's really a caricature. He does preposterously tendentious political works in L.A. and elsewhere. But the Scottish opera, after George Floyd, put on a production of Nixon and China, that won an award. It was viewed by the critics as a fantastic production, and it was celebrating afterwards the fact that it won the Sky Arts Award and some obscure growth that nobody's heard of before in Britain called Beats,

that it's an acronym for East Asians, I don't know what, British East Asians in theater, but it's mostly an opera organization, complained that the production of the Scottish opera was engaged in yellow washing because it dared to cast some whites singing Chinese people.

Now, a black baritone was singing Nixon, so you're allowed to, you can sing a white role if you're black, but the rule now is, is you cannot sing a black role if you're white, and apparently you can now not sing a Asian role if you're white. And so Beetz went on this campaign saying that this was a racist production because they had dared to employ the genius of imagination and creativity

and say, we're going to get the best singers, and they have the capacity as actors and artists do to embody a individual who is very different from them. And so Scottish opera under this Twitter storm, and you had a Labor, UK, a Labor Party member who also leapt on this and said this is a racist production, they had to give up their arts award,

apologize, apologize, apologize, you know, put the usual flagellation on their website. We will never make this mistake again. But the irony is that the productions had been predominantly white under the original, under the revivals that Adams and Sellers did at the Metropolitan Opera.

Nobody thought about it. And now the rule is, it's this asymmetrical rule. It only works in one direction. And of course, Beetz got no credit, or rather the Scottish opera got no credit for putting a black singing Nixon. And this now has become a ubiquitous thing.

And I talked to the leader of Beets And I said, well, so who can sing a Chinese singer? Is it okay if a Japanese singer sings Mao or Zhu Enlai? Can it, Indonesian, these are groups that historically have not been exactly friends with China. Yeah. Can somebody from Thailand? Oh, yes, that's okay. So Asians are all fungible.

You know, you think you see what you see them all. It's a ridiculous classification. It's, you one could say, it's racist to try and break all these cultures. But that's now the role. And it is becoming very hard. Casting decisions become very difficult at this point. Yeah, okay. Well, okay, that's just such a self-parody that I had to have you talk about it.

Let's end our discussion with classic music, going to one of the hearts of classic music, the Juilliard. And what's happened there after 2020, in terms of its pedagogy and the way, the way it's changed at Juilliard. So take it away. You know, Juilliard, people are, as I say, Chinese students, tens, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are now practicing 12 hours a day to try and get into Juilliard.

It's a stored institution. It has been involved in black theater. It is involved in American theater, training musicians. It's the pinnacle. It is not a racist institution. It is not. It is not discriminating against anybody. But after George Floyd, they had to do their anti-racism stuff.

And so they brought in a whole bunch of black programming, and they brought in a black teacher from New York University to give a three-day Zoom presentation called Roots to Rep about the black musical tradition in the United States. And he wanted to start with a historical exploration of what the reality of slavery was. like and how spirituals grow out of that and the civil rights struggle that came out of this profoundly tragic sadistic institution. And so he put on a recreation of a slave auction in Africa, the dialogue of

which was from Alex Haley's roots and had been shown on television in the 1970s. And, and students were watching this on Zoom and as this was going on there was a group of black and this was in the theater department of Juilliard there was a group of black students who were furiously emailing each other about how racist it was of a black

music professor from NYU to culturally appropriate their history of races of slavery and and forced them to watch a historical recreation of slavery. And this was, according to these black theater students, having to listen to a dialogue from the slave trade was more than they could bear. They were traumatized by this.

And so they started another of these petitions and campaigns that accused Juilliard. And afterwards, after the seminar, some of the white students and a few black students said this was incredibly moving. This was a very powerful, dramatic recreation of a very, very awful period of American history. But the black students said, we cannot survive looking at this and how dare you force us to watch. And also, McElroy had given trigger warnings. They said, this is going to have slavery issues. You don't have to watch this. But they'd

stayed on. So they turned him into a pariah. He was gotten rid of. And Damien Wetzel, who's a former ballet dancer and the very left-wing host of director of Juilliard, he apologized. He said, we never should have done this. This was so insensitive. And the students emboldened by the apology, the provost apologize, emboldened by the sacking of McElroyd. And again, McGillroy was going to go from here to black musical theater, Scott Joplin, the riches of black tradition. McGillroy is not a racist. The black students then felt they had victory in their sales. The wind was in their sales. And so they went on a tirade against everything essential to dramatic art. They said, you shall not force us to endure the oppression of doing white theater. We cannot, our fragile psyches

cannot survive white theater. You cannot ask us to learn the standard American dialect. That is oppressive. You have to color cast. You have to have much more diversity on your faculty. Again, nobody is discriminating at Juilliard against black theater professors. It ain't happening. arts world is fanatically progressive. But these students basically ran the show and got rid of the very idea of emotional freedom. Everything now is color-coded. You know, if you're going to be... It's also, it's also this myth, which I think they're buying into, which is that language is violence, that that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, intellects cannot hear words they don't want to hear.

Or words based on experience that they never had themselves, after all, the experience of slavery, which was horrific, was not something that they had ever experienced any more directly than any of the white students, I think, which is a key point. But it may be horrific, but as I often, I was just saying the other day, too, at a lecture, but I said all the time,

purpose of education is to make us uncomfortable. I know you think it's more than that, and it is more than that. But if you're not uncomfortable at some level, you're not pushing yourself and, you know, you're not expanding your horizons. Well, you're an actor. Your whole purpose is to be able to embody tragedy.

You know, Aristotle's theory of catharsis, the Greek tragedies are terrifying. They exhume catholic forces in the human psyche that we would prefer not to look at, the passion for vengeance, for killing, for fratricide, patricide, the, the theories that pursue us. These are terrifying works. And an actor is supposed to be able to put himself into other identities

and to channel human experience to a wider audience so that we can feel things that we would not otherwise ever feel. And for an actor to put boundaries around his imaginary experience and say there's certain things I cannot do. So, you know, if you have, your parents were alcoholic, you can't do Eugene O'Neill's plays, it's reposterous.

It's putting us all into little corrals, identity-based corrals, which narrows human experience. The whole purpose of art is to be universal and to transcend your pathetic self, which is time-bound, experience-bound, and allow you to see far beyond your own horizons. And for an actor to say, you can't ask me to do something that, you know,

I don't like that historical fact. It's the antithesis of what acting is. And yet, Juilliard, typically, again, the leaders cave in. They sell out their profession rather than defending it. It's the fact that art, music, literature, and science, at their best, cause us to see ourselves in a new way by expanding our understanding of ourselves and forcing ourselves often to see ourselves differently. And the fact that it stifles all of them when you cannot allow yourself to even be exposed

to anything different than what you feel comfortable with. I mean, it's really, it's, so okay, that's, that's music. Let's go to art. Lawrence, if I can just add, what happens? happened to Juilliard is nothing compared to what happened to the theater world at large after George Floyd. There was this movement called We See You, White American Theater. And you have people in the profession that are leaving in droves now because the tyranny of race is so great. The plays are being selected for Broadway based on their racial themes, the identity of their

actors. I think there's probably no field that has been more turned upside down and has been force to completely betray its, it's, um, it's, it's, it's ideals and reason for being than theater. And it's just, it's a real pogrom out there for the theater world. And in one sense, it's hard to feel too sorry for them because in many other ways, uh, you know, they've sort of are the source of some of these, these ideas to begin with. But anyway, I just want to add that. So, no, that's right. And that resonates back to long ago, we had a podcast with a good friend of mine, uh, or Trevor Nunn. I don't know if you know who you know. Yeah. Yeah. And Trevor is what, you know, was at the end of that bemoaning similar things and a wonderful, one of the few,

the only person I think is directed every, every play of Shakespeare's, among other things. Wow. Directed the World Shakespeare Company at the same time as having created cats and other musicals. And it's a, anyway, good. So I recommend you listen to that because Trevor is remarkable. So it's an old podcast we did. Um, now let's go from music. music to art because the next thing I really hit home for me because I because of it's indirect but when I was chairman of the board of sponsors the Boltony Atomic Scientists we did some events associated with the Art Institute of Chicago. Oh wow.

And to hear what happened at the, you know, the art institute is just such a such a fantastic place for art and for the education of art. And the inspiring young people to, again, expand their boundaries beyond the local streets that they may live in. That's what's so wonderful about it. And the first story you give is one where they basically ended a program to educate young people, the demise of the docent. So why don't you talk about that? Yeah. I mean, this is when we're playing around with titles and whatnot, one of the issues was white calling.

I mean, it is basically what's going on. Let's be honest, it's white culling in every single institution. And, yeah, the Art Institute of Chicago was fantastic. I go to, every time I go, there's this one small corridor of 18th century Roccoe pastels by Chardin and Martin Quentin Latour. I've got one of them on my smartphone of a violinist. They're absolutely gorgeous. It's got the Fragon Art. It's an amazing Van Dyke collection.

It's just fantastic. And so there's been a tradition in art museums from the 20th century called docents. These are volunteers who give tours to students and other people, but focus on student education of art museums. And the Art Institute of Chicago was one of the first to come up with a volunteer program of docents in the 1950s. There had been a financial crisis, and female women had been. involved in the fundraising to try and bring the institute out of its financial difficulties.

And so they created an organization with that that had further life. And so they got involved in education and developed a very, very rigorous program of training for the docents. It's basically like getting a master's of fine arts. You have to write a dissertation, do research, original research, you know, know about the collection, learn about pedagogy that had diversity in it from its start. You know, how do you present this collection to a diverse group of students? But the problem was after the George Floyd again,

somebody noticed that the docents were basically white females from the suburbs that had spent, you know, years of their lives training for this, committed overwhelmingly to a public school population in Chicago that were black kids that were coming in to try and figure out a way to bridge this collection with their lives. And so the head of the Chicago Art Institute, James Rondeau, who's a total buffoon, I spent many hours trying to transcribe a speech he gave at a museum in Iowa, and the miss speaking, the ons and a sentences that go nowhere,

it's just remarkable. But it was decided that having white docents was simply a racist thing that the museum could no longer tolerate as bad was the white names, not. exclusively white around the entablature of the museum of, you know, Phidias and Velazquez and Van Dyck and Michelangelo and Da Vinci, the fact that these were the white, the artists that the founders of the Art Museum, which was intended as a democratic institution to bring art to the masses, that that reflected their view of Western art, and it was a perfectly legitimate view. That too was oppressive. And so the docent program was ended. They were, the docents were given their marching orders.

They said, clear out your lockers. You're too white. You could, we'll give you as a compensation prize two years of annual membership free. But we don't want you anymore. And this is a museum. Every museum is struggling for revenue. And it said instead we're going to have six paid, educators, as opposed to a hundred of these volunteer docents, and they're going to be chosen on

race grounds, and they brought in the usual diversity head to run this thing. So the art museum was walking away from a hundred people who were willing to donate their time in favor of six that were going to be chosen on their anti-racist credentials and had to be paid, simply because it was scandalous that they were white. And other museums have done the same thing. The Crocker Museum in Sacramento brags about the fact that its docents, that the white percentage is dropping. So basically, whenever an institution gets rid of whites,

that is something to be celebrated. Well, yeah, the shame, you know, white-black side, what saddens me is the poor kids in Chicago. you can't service as many young children with six paid or not paid employees versus 100. And so the end result is once again, because of this dogma, you impoverish everyone. And you particularly hurt the population you're trying to help, which is a population of kids who probably don't have one way or another because of socioeconomic or whatever or cultural backgrounds don't have access to that art. this may change the life of some young person who goes there. And by having fewer, by not having adults and so you don't have those tours and you cause some young person not have the opportunity

to potentially have their life changed. It's tragic in my mind. And not only are you denying them that opportunity, you are filling them with a creed of hatred and resentment and phony victimology that will also impede their future. progress. Every time the elite institutions validate this notion that to be black in America

today is to be on the receiving end of a non-stop series of racist actions and behaviors and feelings, that is not something that is going to motivate people to succeed necessarily. You are filling them with a reason to hate

their environment and it's a poison and it's also duplicitous because is simply not the case. Yeah, you wonderfully said. It's tragic because it exactly that. It fills them with hate, a sense of victimization, and instead of an appreciation and an awe and wonder for the beauty that they're having the opportunity to see.

And that's for me, I mean, you know, I've talked about religion and other times. And, you know, and for me, that's why I have been involved for much of my life. I hate seeing instead of awe and wonder at the universe, I get upset. when people restrict it to concern and rules about fantasies instead of allowing people the opportunity to experience the universe for what it is. And that's true for science as well as art. Well, it's not just the Art Institute of Chicago. There's several chapters in your book where you talk about the Met

and basically both apologizing for art and then canceling it, ultimately. The first one involves something that started with, a bunch of Dutch masterpieces and then moved on to a exhibition on the African origins civilization. Give us a brief summary of what happened there at the Met. Well, the Met, after George Floyd declared itself that its purpose now is to be an anti-racist institution, which meant turning on the 5,000 years of Western civilization, that it is its privilege to curate. It's got one of the great collections of the world, but it decided that anti-racism was now what it's all about. And so it now stages exhibitions, not always, but many of them, whose purpose is to deconstruct,

to unmask the racist subtexts of Western art. And they've now, in their Dutch master's collection, make the Dutch still life, which is one of the great genres of Western art, of exquisite beauty, those still lives are simply about colonialism. They have nothing to do with colonialism, but the wall labels teach you to see the absences. You know, there's nothing about slavery in these still lives of translucent grapes and lemons and, and pewter and silver and cut glass and the bounty of the

game hunting it's not about race sorry guys it's not it's not all about race but according to the Met it is so if there's nothing about colonialism in those paintings that makes them all the more about colonialism because his deconstruction taught us

and absence is actually a presence so you go around and you're reading about you know well, it's really the slave trade is behind all of this. And so they're applying this deconstructive acid to their Western art collection. At the same time, they mounted a show called the African Origins of Civilization based on a completely fraudulent,

afrocentric historian named Jop, Jake Jop, who was, I think, Ginnah, and I'm not sure, Senegalese, maybe. And his theory is that Africa is the source, subsinger in Africa is the source of all Western art, architecture, mathematics, science, Egyptian, the Egyptian, it's all just those were black.

You know, the Egyptians were black. It's the black Athena thesis. We had with Martin Bernal that was also exposed as a complete fraud by Mary Lefke, in the 90s. And so the Met has basically fargone its role as scholarship, as a scholar, as a

curator, and as a connoisseur in favor of phony history. So it mounted a show that's purporting to show that sub-Saharan tribal art is really the basis for Egyptian art and everything that came after it. And it embraces

just phony genealogies of what Western traditions were from it. Greek and Roman art and architecture is not based on Africa, and it's not even based that much on Egyptian art. Even if we were the sake of argument, you could see that Egyptian art was black, which it wasn't. But the thing that is most striking for me, Lawrence, was that the Western instinct now is to turn on its own tradition for colonialism and genocide and ethnic wet cleansing and whatnot.

Well, so the show had various African artifacts in its sub-Saharan African artifacts, and there was not a word said about tribal warfare. You know, there was a bronze celebrating a Nigerian de homeate sheep, and not a word said in the waltics about the fact that he, you know, would inevitably have been enslaving his tribal. enemies and engaging in as much genocide as he could technologically. The only thing lacking was the technology to do it, but if he could, he could have

would have wiped all of his enemies out. And the instinct of the Met now is to approach non-Western traditions with immaculate respect and view the artist's intentions as sacrosanct. We're not going to deconstruct it. We're not going to show the hidden subtext of oppression. No, we're going to treat these African works as works of formal beauty. And we're not going to show them as works of oppression and colonialism. And some of the comparisons, Holland Carter, which is, he's a New York.

Well, I was hoping we get to Holland Carter because, as you point out, It's probably the most shameless double standard. I'm incredible. So he, go on. The Met has paired a wooden African carving of a man and a woman with an Egyptian stone carving of a man and woman. The Egyptian one is much more realistic.

It's, you know, curve, you get a sense already as what we're going to see of the Greeks, of trying to convey how flesh looks under fabric. African wooden carving is much more geometric, highly stylized, highly abstract. But Cotter claims that the African work is much more egalitarian and feminist because the men and the woman are basically sort of similarly proportioned, whereas in the Egyptian one, there's a difference in scale and size between the two. and he's claiming that we all should learn from African tribal rituals. There's a huge glorification of these African power objects,

which are rank superstition. There's like just a sort of a ball that is made up of spit and leaves and detritus and garbage that you then pound nails into, if you want to have a spell over your enemy, apply your saliva to it. And Carter is saying that these very rough-hune objects of rank superstition are at the same level of craft and art and beauty as Egyptian carvings of the infamous, not even the famous, blue taracotta hypotumous. And he says, well, we should all learn from African social justice.

you know the concept of justice particularly you point out the dichotomy because i guess there was a met exhibition called fictions of emancipation about this one piece of art and and and and that and that caught her when he reviewed the uh african origin civilization show which then which anticipated this, you say. He criticized the ancient Egyptian sculpture of man and woman for getting the man dominant with a head taller than the woman. But then when it came to the forever free exhibit where it's a man and a woman, again, he doesn't mention the woman at all in some sense in order not to point out that she's much smaller than her male panel. Yeah, this was a statue by a black female sculptor,

Native Indian and African Edmonia Lewis that was in this Fictions of Emancipation Show that as this gargantuan male emancipated slave and next to him like lower than his knee is like a female of a very sort of ambiguous race and you don't really know she's a daughter's wife. She's a tiny little thing.

And, and, uh, Carter's review of the Fictions of Emancipation goes nuts about how wonderful the Edmonial Lewis sculpture is without again using his same scale, but this show that you just brought up Lawrence,

the Fictions of Emancipation, when I wrote that chapter, I felt like Milton, which is a preposterous comparison. I'm not in all claiming that Milton, but in the beginning of the books of Paradise Lost,

he would write invocations to the muses saying, please give me the power to describe, to go down into hell and describe Satan or to go up to heaven and be able to convey what the Garden of Eden was like before the fall. Please, may I have the rhetorical resources to do this? And when I looked at this Fictions of Mancipation Show, I thought, I can't do it.

there's no way I have the language to convey how much of a travesty this show is. This was, it's the worst I've seen. In all that we've talked about, I have not seen anything that is a bigger scandal than this show that represents more of a betrayal of the tradition that is the Metropolitan's Museums, one obligation to fulfill than this show. It was built around a bust by the great 19th century French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Capot, who was, I think, second only to Bernini in being able to show what flesh upon flesh looks like, the pressure of a hand on a thigh.

and in 1873 Capo who was involved in the renewal of Paris some of the did the sculptures for the opera he was involved in the great baron houseman reclamation and expansion of Paris into the city of life that we know it today

he did a sculpture in 1873 that the English title is Why Born and Slave and it's a bus of a African woman with a rope around her upper chest, looking over her shoulder with an incredibly haunting expression of outrage, disbelief and poignancy that is clearly intended and has always been understood as a work of abolitionist art to try.

try to convey still the horrors of slavery and to show the humanity of this female slave. And the detail, the psychological acuity which Carpo has as employed to convey this woman is extraordinary. And this is like science. We've actually got a randomized controlled experiment here Lawrence because we can see the pre-George Floyd Metropolitan Opera and the post-George Floyd Metropolitan Museum of Arisoumi Not Opera because in 2014 the Met mounted a large very important retrospective of Kaukoult and it and it treated him with the respect he deserved as one of the great French sculptures second only if that did de Ga. and it had a terracotta version of Why Born and Slaid in it,

and the Met rightly said this is a very haunting portrait of slavery that captures the humanity of this woman. So in 2019, the Metropolitan Museum bought a marble version of this, one of the originals, and with the intention, this was already pre-George Floyd, to do a revisionist exhibit around this work to show that in fact it was a racist work come George Floyd race rights

the Metropolitan Museum goes into overdrive and decides okay we've got to get a black curator for this show but goes forward with it and now the carpo bust is now the symbol of racism and is not a weapon against racism and the thesis of this show involves turning on its head virtually every aspect of Western art tradition,

whether it's the use of the nude, the use of models, the art market, working with sketches, creating all of these in this ridiculous show, and the title gives it away, the fictions of emancipation. It's that emancipation never happened. It's a fiction. And the thesis is that every time a white, artist creates a work of abolitionist art. In fact, his goal is to show that black's natural condition is to be enslaved. This is a complete non-sequitur. It's based on nothing historical. It's based on no

art historical knowledge. It is based on ideology. And the entire show is based on the premise that every time white artists such as Josiah Wedgwood, one of the great abolitionist, crusaders from Britain who did a famous cameo of a profile of a black man with his arms raised in shackles called Am I Not a Man and a Brother? This image was replicated across the world as an abolitionist, anti-slavery icon. It was worn on jewelry. It was put on, you know, play settings. It was essential. The Met said that Wedgwood is a racist. His point was to show that blacks can only be enslaved. It's a completely nonsensical exhibit.

The show said, because we don't know the name of Carpo's model for Yboarded enslaved, that just shows that Carpo is trying to erase the black identity. We don't know the names of 99% of white models of white artists. That's not a thing in art. They are anonymous models. but just because Carpo did not name his black model for this son, that's racist. He ignores him because the woman in the Carpo has one black breast showing, that's racist. Ignoring the fact that the history of Western art read civilization by Ken Clark,

the nude is at the center of Western art in far more erotic settings. than why born and slave. The Met is destroying its own knowledge. It's destroying art history in order to promote this preposterous claim that every time a white artist tries to argue against slavery, the thesis that he's really saying is that the natural condition of blacks is slavery. Well, I'm glad I got you touch on a topic that you didn't feel emotional about. And no, it's remarkable.

And, you know, I was going to go back to Yale and Vincent Scully, who I knew. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, but I think I'm going to skip it, although, you know, basically, you know, that's erasing art history in school, which is unfortunate. But I think I'll stay away from universities for a moment. I want to move next and potentially close to the end because we may do short shrift to just law and order. But I'm so intrigued by the discussion of culture. I want to end on a somewhat upbeat note in a sense, which is a chapter on bold abstainers,

that I think it's a really important lesson that you have here. There are a number of examples where you show individuals and groups that speak out against this nonsense and still survive because that's important because I think it's easy to feel hopeless. It's easy to feel that it's so terrifying that you can't speak out. And it's nice to see examples of people who spout rationality and stand up principle and still survive. So there's three. There's this John McLaughlin Williams. We talk about there's a Tulsa Opera and then the Long Beach Opera. If you could talk about those three, because I think it's really significant that they stood up for their integrity.

Yeah, well, McLaughlin Williams, I just have enormous respect for. I mean, he is the quintessential artist that does not give a damn about the trivialities of race and identity. He was raised in a musical family. Both his parents were panis. This was the man I mentioned whose father was a victim of racism and it destroyed his career and this really is psychological stability.

But so McLaughlin Williams grew up with music in the house and he was fascinated by a musical dictionary and he would read it and he said, well there's all these composers we never heard about like what's their music? I want to hear their music. And he studied as violinist

But he got restless and he wanted to be a conductor, partly because he wanted to be able to bring less known works to light, which is the crusade that I'm on. I think we're playing the musical canon to death, and I only listen to music the year works I don't know. And so McWilliams went from being a first violinist in a regional orchestra, went back to school to learn conducting. and he had an amazing recording career on Knoxos

under their American label that came up in the in the 1990s recording these obscure neo-romantic composers like Hadley and Rosello that are never, ever, ever programmed with a Ukrainian orchestra. He went to Ukraine to conduct these and record them. So black guy doing these

these somewhat long-winded to be honest, symphonies. So this is a man who cares about art. And he was asked to do a

retrospective of another lesser-known composer that he'd already recorded and he was going to this is going to be a master sort of a central recording. And the family of the composer got wind of the fact that John McLaughlin, William's, had written a Facebook post supportive of some things that Trump was doing. And it was not

particularly little, but it had nothing to do with his conducting career or his musical career. It was just him expressing himself that there's something that Trump said that I agree with. And the, the representative of the family said, sorry, we can't work with you. It's just a travesty that you have anything positive to say about Trump. And you'd actually, it was bad enough when you said something positive about George W. Bush. And McWilliams, McLaughlin Williams wrote a just incredibly a passionate, eloquent letter back to the, to the representative say, I have never, ever brought politics into my music and art making. It has no relevance to me whatsoever. I don't care what your identity is.

I don't care what your political affiliation is. I only want to know, can you make music with me? And it didn't work. But he's gone on to have his own career, but he's completely uninhibited about when he does express himself politically to do so with honesty. He says, you know, in regards to like, let's get rid of the blind auditions, why don't we just get rid of auditions, period, and send in headshots, you know,

well, you're black, okay, you're hired. I don't even care what your music is. So he's extraordinarily critical of the identity turn in classical music and thinks it's just going to be the downfall of classical music. He, so he's sort of an individual figure that has had the courage to speak out. but there's institutions as well Tulsa Opera is run by a very progressive composer Tobias Picker who's written the first opera about transgenderism

and you know he's left wing let's just say I don't care he is left wing and so they weren't going to Tulsa Opera was going to put on a concert to commemorate the I guess it would have been the

hundredth anniversary of the Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa in 1921, where there was a basically race riot program and whites rampaged in the black business section of Tulsa. And so Picker commissioned a bunch of works from black composers for black performers for this 100-year celebration of Tulsa Massacre. And And then he was going to also perform works by no longer living composers, black composers. And one of the composers that he reached out to is a man named Daniel Bernard Romaine, who is another of these race hustlers that has made his career, you know, making his whole issue about how racist the world is that he works in and how the victim is a black person. So he wrote a short piece, and he was paired up with Denise Graves,

who was one of the great black Metsos from her heyday. It was in the 1980s. She was one of the great Carmans at the Metropolitan Opera. And for any composer, she's retired now, basically, but she still sings, but she's no longer, it's no longer of the height of her career. For a composer to be allowed to write a work for Denise Graves to sing is really a coup. It's like it doesn't get better than that.

So, Remain wrote a piece about how racist America was that ended with the phrase, God bless America, God damn America. And Denise Graves said, I don't think I can sing that last line. It doesn't accord with my values. Do you think we could work on it and change it a little bit? Something that singers had done throughout the history of opera,

you know, Mozart, Verdi, they all went nuts about these then, you know, the divas singers that were demanding that everything be written for their, rewritten for their voice and brought in their own operas. Arias to stick into operas that had nothing to do with the plot. So it's

hardly an unusual request to say, can we work on this a little bit? Well, Romaine decided that he was the victim of racism because Tobias Picker, the head of Tulsa Opera was white. So a lot of the fact the person making this request,

can we rewrite the last line a little bit, to be more in a court, was black, and said, this is what happens when whites run arts institutions. They oppress people like me. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to rewrite this. You know, the only reason is because I'm black and you're oppressing me.

So Tobias Ficker and, and working with him was the same Howard Watkins that I mentioned earlier that was the student of Donovan who had been so supportive and he said are you to remain are you kidding me like I'm black everybody that's in this concert is black

the singers the composers this is not an issue of race this is an artist who wants something that she can feel she's maintaining her her integrity to sing and and and

and remain would have nothing to do with it so they parted ways And the concert proceeded. I listened to it. It had some wonderful music, Adolfo's Hail Stork, some gorgeous stuff. And surprisingly, very little of it was heavily political. A lot of it was love works, but fantastic music, some of which we'd never heard before. Romaine went on to produce this in video that you could see.

And it's a ridiculous music video. He got one of the black sopranos that surrounded it, Janay Bridges, who's also playing the race card to the hilt in the post-George Floyd world. And somebody said to me, part of the reasons these graves didn't want to sing it, maybe not the content of the lyrics, but it's just such lousy music. It's sort of new age noodling.

It's incredibly primitive harmonies, and there's no melody to speak of. So it's a pretty trivial work that Remain was got so hot under the collar about, but Tulsa operas, of course, survived and Pickers going on to do his transgender opera and whatnot. And they basically said, sorry, we're not, we're not, we're not going to cave into this hustle. And Long Beach Opera was itself the target of a hustle. It had, you know, hired all of these diverse, black arts consultants that had nothing really to do. They were just hired because they were black.

and two of them decided that they weren't getting enough work. And so they went on a rampage and claimed they were the victims of racism. Even though the Long Beach Opera is very left wing, it does a lot of, you know, I think they may have done Central Park Five opera. And the director said, diversity is our watchword. It's all we think about. But these two black people said, oh, I'm the victim of racism. And so they got the LA Times wrote a sympathetic articles about them.

But the Long Beach Opera just held its ground and said, okay, you think you're in a racist organization, bye. You know, find yourself some other work, which of course they did. They all, and Daniel Beard-Romain gets still, gets one commission after another. He's put on arts commissions and panels and you name it. So they have sadly never really suffered from these types of hustles. but Laundry-Jabros has stood up and lived to tell the tale. Yeah, they, you know, they stood up and said, no, we didn't. We're not racist.

And there we are. And I think, you know, that's the lesson. I think that we have to, I think you put it well. We don't want to, we don't want to breed hate. We want to breed wonder. And, you know, it's been, that's why I do what I do in my science. And I think, and I know that's why you're passionate about music and art as well. And I think, and the last, the last,

the last paragraph of your book, which I can't, a short two sentences that I'll read, Western civilization contains too much beauty and grandeur, too much achievement and too much innovation from advances in the sciences to the blessings of Republican self-government to be lost without a fight. It will be lost, however, if disparate impact continues to be our measure of injustice. And once again, if we take, if we know the answer before we even ask the questions, which is what I've always argued is my problem with religion. If we allow that to be the dogma of the claims that systemic racism must be the source of every problem without questioning it, then we're not, then we're doing a disservice to everyone. And it is a threat, as you say,

to our civilization, because for me and you, I think, the, the, the, the, the, questioning that is at the heart of science, that says a heart of music, that's at the heart of literature and art is what keeps the world going. And if we stop questioning, and if we stop questioning because we're afraid what people will say about our questions, then we go back to the dark age. And I applaud you for speaking out in spite of the fact that it's still is being correct to do so. But I will defend rationality. and integrity as far as I can. And I thank you for the book and for speaking out and for educating me and I hope our listeners

about especially in music and art, areas where I, where I wasn't aware of issues that are going on. Thanks. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Lawrence. Absolutely. Do not apologize. Do not cop to phony racism and stand up for what you believe in and for the greatness

of Western civilization. We cannot. It's too important. and to let it fall under these faulty charges of racism. So thank you for what you do as well. Thanks, great. Well, it's a pleasure. We'll see.

We'll talk to you again, but it's always a pleasure. And I'm glad I'm not where you are, where it's much hotter than where I am. Thanks. Yeah, I guess I'm grateful for air conditioning, even though I hate using it and I worry about taking down the electrical grid, but it's something that we're also should be very grateful for. So sadly, I have to use it. Thank you.

Hi, it's Lawrence again. as the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society in the 21st century.

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