TRIGGERnometry - Universities Have Betrayed Their Own Purpose - Heather Mac Donald

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Heather Mac Donald is an American political commentator, essayist, attorney, and fellow of the Manhattan Institute. She is author of the best-selling, ‘When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives’ - available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1956007164 Go to http://givesendgo.com/triggerpod  and raise money for anything important to you. Check out Barro’s campaign here: https://www.givesendgo.com/barro SPONSOR: Shopify - sign up for a £1 per month trial at https://www.shopify.co.uk/trigger/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm often asked, well, make the case for merit. For me, the essence of university is to pass on a civilizational legacy. That mission, too, has been completely cast aside in the name of oppression studies and it's teaching students to hate. It is incredibly clarifying to have heard the chants of antifada, antifada, and glory to our martyrs from students. Don't we want to know that that's their thinking? What would banning that do? They would still be thinking this. And the reason they're thinking it is because that's what they're being taught.

Heather, this has been a long time in the making. We've had a chance to meet in person, but this is your first time on the show. So first of all, thank you for coming on. It's a real pleasure to have you on. Secondly, you have been writing for quite some time about the death of merit, particularly on American college campuses. And this issue, dare I say, has been thrust rather into start in recent weeks and months. How do you feel and explain to people what we're actually seeing?

Well, I'm trying to resist saying, I told you so, you know, to the world because not just I, but a lot of other people have been writing about the degradation of academic life for decades, and it was very hard to get anybody's attention. I don't mind the fact that it was the outcropping of alleged anti-Semitism, which has finally woken up a lot of alumni donors that have been mindlessly pouring billions of dollars into these fraudulent institutions for decades, but it should have been obvious long before this that universities have betrayed their primary mission, which is to pass on a civilizational legacy with gratitude and with humility and with joy, and instead of taken up a mission of overt politicization based on a highly contestable,

understanding of reality, which is that everything in our world today can be explained by white racism and white supremacy. And the insane outcropping of fanatical support for the Hamas terror attacks in Israel is a quite logical extension of the university ideology, which sees sees Western civilization as one long exercise in domination and oppression. And this, you know, the anti-Semitism that we're seeing now is not the traditional anti-Semitism of, say, Americans' elite universities. It is something far different from that because Jews were reviled in the past as outsiders. They were seen as a threat to Western civilization.

And today, the reason that these rabid students are chanting and screaming in favor of terror attacks on Israel is because Jews are seen as the very embodiment of Western civilization, the settler colonialist enterprise par excellence. And therefore, Israel and Jews are the current target of university animosity. But the attention will move on. and it will continue going after straight white males, anything that seems to is the favorite target of the intersectional coalition. And Heather, you use a lot of strong language there, which is not out of character for you, dare I say. I'm only mimicking my adversaries.

Believe me, this is nothing compared with what they can throw at me and everybody else. No doubt. But I want to double click on a lot of it so that someone who's perhaps less initiated in this world than the three of us can understand where you're coming from. And one of the things you said, which I thought was exactly right, but also very interesting to explore, is you call them fraudulent institutions, colleges being fraudulent. What do you mean by that exactly? Well, they still put themselves forward as bastions of knowledge and free expression when they are anything but there is a,

extraordinary censorship function being carried on both explicitly and implicitly, one that you yourself, Constantine, have challenged. It is simply the case that there are certain views that are not tolerated on campus. And there's an informal censorship that goes on constantly that people simply know that there's certain lines they can't cross. You cannot challenge the explanation, for example, that racism explains racial disparities. You are not allowed to talk about the academic skills gap, which in my estimation is a far more powerful explanation for why we do not have 13% black physicists in our physics departments

in the United States, 13% being the black share of the U.S. population or 13% computer engineers at Google, you cannot challenge that. You cannot challenge the idea that racial preferences are an unmitigated good. You cannot point out that they have huge unintended consequences in setting up the beneficiaries of those preferences to fail. So there's anything but a bastion of free expression.

I actually, though, hold a more traditional view of universities, I think that free speech advocates and conservatives to a certain extent, or simply classical liberals, faced with the very active and pernicious efforts to limit the range of discourse in universities, have overemphasized the idea that the very essence of a university is debate.

They claim is, you know, you should go to universities and you should feel intellectually unsafe, you know, that this is a understandable reaction to the nauseating mantra that, well, we need to feel safe and I feel unsafe, which makes me sick to my stomach because it's so self-righteous and narcissistic and greatly modeling and, you know, nobody, universities are the safest in a literal sense place in America today. But I think that that is wrong. For me, the essence of a university is to pass on a civilizational legacy. It is to make the young generation understand what has been bequeathed them by the geniuses of the past. And debate is not really part of that. It's not chemical to it. But a lot of knowledge,

that is essential in a university doesn't provoke debate. You don't debate the periodic table. You don't debate the spread of civilizations around the Mediterranean at the start of history. You don't debate how to think about thermodynamic laws of motion. These are things that should be studied, understood, and used to experience. students' understanding of the world. That mission, too, has been completely cast aside in the name of oppression studies and it's teaching students to hate. Heather, you say you've been writing about this for a long time. What was a moment that you first went, something's going on here?

And I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. Well, I had been an uncritical, of deconstruction in the 1970s when I was in college. This is the theory that was most associated with Jacques Derrida, the French, I would say, pseudo philosopher, although there's conservative academics who, by respect, who actually think, oh, no, there was really something very interesting that Dejada was getting at.

As far as I'm concerned, the insight that words are arbitrary and don't actually have any natural connection to their referent is not particularly earth shattering. So I was at a university, when I was in university in the 70s, I was doing what was the sort of the cutting edge theory work at the time. And, and I now regret it. I was, I'm, I'm appalled at my gullibility and my lack of indeed critical thinking. But there was one saving grace to the high theory mania of the 1970s, whether it was perpetuated by Jacques de Rida or Paul DeMann at Yale, where I was Jay Hillis Miller at Yale, identity politics had not hit. So nobody thought to

complain that, say, I was reading John Milton and Jeffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spencer and William Wordsworth and Alexander Pope and Wallace St. Stevens, I never thought to say, my God, where's the female? Where's the black, you know, trans, disabled writer there? All I thought was that I am reading the monuments of English literature, books that have allowed human beings to enter imaginative worlds that would have otherwise been and accessible to them, and that have changed the capacities of the English language. That was a very good thing. Again, bizarre as it seems, there was a time not so long ago when the whole concept of

dead white males was still in the future. So what I started noticing in the 1980s, I had wanted to go into academia, I'd gotten disillusioned about deconstruction and realized that it was a completely fanciful theory of language. So I couldn't go forward, but things got worse because that's when you did have the rising dominance of gender studies, of black studies. And at Stanford in 1986, there was an infamous incident where the Stanford students, ignorant to the last one, completely ignorant about Western civilization. decided that they were going to protest the fact that there was a very modest, very minimal requirement at Stanford to graduate from the undergraduate school to have had some course that would expose you to the basic monuments about Western civilization. So at Stanford, the undergraduates were chanting to get rid of this Western Civ course. And Jesse Jackson, one of our great race hustlers in the United States, came to campus and led students in the chant, hey, ho, ho, Western SIV has got to go.

So that was, you know, that was a pretty clear indication that something was very wrong in the universities. And of course, Stanford capitulated. You know, this is typical. The American academic is utterly spineless. and the university faculties in the United States, but I don't think it's much better in Britain, have completely abdicated their responsibility as intellectual leaders, and they don't have the guts to tell these ignorant students,

here's what you need to learn and study. Before you leave this school, you have four years to fill your empty noggins with as much knowledge as possible. They don't say that. They allow these, students to choose their own courses. And as a result, most students leave college actually knowing less than when they came in.

There's a study that's come out of the United States that shows that. Students of the most elite Ivy Leagues know less about American history after their four years at Yale, Harvard, and MIT than when they came in. I mean, that is utterly heartbreaking. And the thing that I always wonder is, why did no one raise the alarm? Or was the alarm raised by people like yourself and then no one listened to? Why weren't people at the top seeing what was happening and going, we're heading for a very, very dark moment here? I'm sorry, Francis, this is the question. I mean, this is the question that I and others have been asking, what the hell is going on? The trustees have been utterly spineless. They are rubber stamps. are happy to be kept completely in the dark. These are the, you know, external overseers of the universities. At Harvard is called the Harvard Corporation. I don't know what the counterpart would be

in Britain if there is even is then. But they get these complete snow jobs at their trustee meetings. The college administrators come in, tell them only what they want them to know. There's no curiosity. There's no demands to say, well, let's actually read the curriculum. Let's read the syllabi of these courses. Let's see if you are teaching anything that has any remote connection to passing on this civilizational inheritance as the great British philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, has defined education as. The faculty were either increasingly on board with the left-wing politicization of the universities, or, again, they were simply cowards. And we saw this in the 1960s when you had the start of the student uprising and you had black radical groups that had been admitted under racial preferences and were flunking out because of that, not because they shouldn't have gone to college, but they shouldn't have gone to college in an environment where they were not academically matched with their peers. That was the problem, that they were being catapulted by racial preferences into environments which they were not prepared for.

But you had, you know, the Black Panther student counterparts at Cornell and elsewhere occupying administrative offices with machine guns for Christ's sake. And there was virtually no disciplinary action taken against them. This is what spurred the book, the closing of the American mind. Alan Bloom was just so appalled by the cowardice of the faculty and their unwillingness to defend the legacy that is their privilege to curate. I mean, there is really no better job on the planet than being a university professor.

You get to read the greatest books that have ever been written, and all that is asked of you is to tell students to try and convey to them why they should be down on their knees in gratitude before this inheritance. And instead, they're either tight, or actively colluding to bring this legacy down.

Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right.

Kayak, got that right. Heather, and do you think it's down to the fact that, and this is something you alluded to earlier, which is a somewhat, there's been a shift in power dynamics between students and faculty and students and administrators where almost from an outside perspective feels like the adults are being held hostage by the kids. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I traced that to the 1950s when in the United States capitalism had become so fabulously successful in generating wealth that for the first time in the entirety of human history across the globe, adolescence had independent spending power. Not that they'd earned it themselves.

It was conferred upon them by their parents. But there was so much money sloshing around the American economy that adolescents. could go out and buy things on their own, lots of things. And so you had corporations spotting a new market and all of a sudden this was the start of the youth culture. You had music catering to adolescent tastes. You had movies. You had books. Adolescents could have their own cars. And this gave them power. And it started the inversion of our culture now. where youth has the sort of final say in things, and adults are kind of an afterthought.

And so they come on campus, and they do think of themselves as in the driver's seat, and we have seen there's a whole consumer culture side of the university now that in the United States, I mean, it's truly grotesque. The luxury items, I was at Yale several years ago, and was going around, I ate in the dining rooms, dining halls. Yale's food was always very, very good.

Now, and I'm a foodie, so I should like this, but it revolted even me. At Berkeley College, one of the residential colleges at Yale, they had extra virgin olive oil tasting bars. And these are the same students. These are the same students at Yale. when Nicholas Christakis in 2015 defended his wife who had said that the Yale's undergraduates were adult enough to decide upon their own Halloween costumes without being overseen by Yale's diversity bureaucrats and Nicholas Christakis, who was married to the woman who put this out, Erica, Christakis was the leader of a residential college,

Silman College at Yale. He was then surrounded by a group of mostly black students who screamed and cursed at him. And this gets right to your point, again, about the inversion of authority. These black students screamed at Nicholas Christakis and a revered, highly esteemed psychologist for two hours cursing,

at him saying how unsafe they were at Yale, how oppressed they were, and how he had no right to free speech, telling him to shut the fuck up. I did not. Stay quiet. For all Salem and students. Do you understand that? As your position as a matter, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Tillman.

You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position. as master, do you understand that? No, I don't agree with that. Then what the fuck did, who the fuck hired you? I have a different vision. You should step down. If that is what you think about being of the master, you should step down.

It is not about creating an intellectual speech. It is not. Do you understand that? You're supposed to be our advocate. It was stunning. These students who have the thing that Faust would have sold his soul for, access to knowledge at their fingertips thinking of themselves as oppressed. And what did Yale turn around and do after the scourging of Nicholas Christakis?

It awarded two of the ringleaders its racial justice prize for racial reconciliation. So you had the Yale president, Peter Salavi, who was a complete disaster. He's on his way out, but of course he'll be replaced by somebody even worse, no doubt. Salavis made it as personal mission to eliminate so-called systemic racism at Yale, which is a complete hilarious fiction. I mean, Yale, like every institution in the country, is tying itself into knots to admit hire and promote as many black students and faculty as possible. There is no racism at Yale.

End of story. But this was the extent of kowtowing on the part of a once great educational, educational institution to student Yahoo's. Heather, that being the case, do you think with the antics of the University of Penn, the University of Harvard, and MIT, when talking about speech laws on campus and calling for the genocide of Jews,

do you think we have reached that moment where people have suddenly woken up and gone, what the hell is going on? Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? If targeted at individuals not making public statements. Yes or no? Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?

I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus. But you've heard chance for intifada. I've heard chance, which can be anti-Semitic depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. So those would not be according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules? That would be investigated as harassment, if pervasive and severe. Ms. McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?

If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. I am asking specifically calling for the Jews. genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment? If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment. So the answer is yes. It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. It's a context-dependent decision.

That's your testimony today. Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. That is not bullying or harassment. This is the easiest question to answer, yes, Ms. McGill. So is your testimony that you- will not answer yes. If it is, if the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment, yes. Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?

The speech is not harassment. This is unacceptable, Ms. McGill. I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be harassment.

The answer is yes. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be, depending on the context. What's the context? Targeted as an individual. Targeted at an individual. It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals.

Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism? I will ask you one more time, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct. Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take

action. So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard Code of Conduct, correct? Again, it depends on the context. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board. Well, first of all, I'm going to push back a little bit, Francis. Let's make sure that we're clear. those presidents did not call for the genocide of Jews. And I would think that you guys, as some of the most important free speech advocates on the planet, would join me in saying that those who deplore the universities who deplore the restrictions on free thinking and diversity of opinion there should not take the low road

and use the same double standards that the universities have. used against conservatives to silence anti-Israel speech. The exchange that was seen as very damning to those three college presidents from MIT, Penn, and Harvard was, in my view, slightly demagogic because Congressman Elise Stefonic kept asking them, is calling for the genocide of Jews against your codes of conduct? Well, nobody has called literally for the genocide of Jews on American campus. Even if they had, you know, I still think the answer should have been the same. But she was translating the calls of intifada, which is, you know, let's be generous here,

has possibly a trace of ambiguity to it. You know, one, maybe it's all in bad faith, but I'm willing to accept that it is possible to have a non-genocidal meaning of intifada. So the question itself was a little bit demagogic, but I think the answers were correct, which is that whether hate, so-called hate speech, and again, I think you guys would agree with me that the very term hate speech is a concoction. It is a stratagem to get around the First Amendment. hate speech should not be treated any differently than any other kind of speech.

It is constitutionally protected, at least under the American First Amendment. I know that you guys, sadly, have much more speech restrictive laws there. But the presidents were right that speech should be punishable or banned ahead of the fact only to the extent it turns into conduct or harassment. specifically targeted an individual. So yes, this hearing should have brought down the university presidents, but not because of their answers in that one highly viral exchange. What should have brought them down was their shameless duplicity in alleging that their

universities honored free expression, which is why they would not be punishing the so-called calls for genocide, which again, never happened. But they were right to say they shouldn't punish speech. They were wrong to say that they have in every other situation not punished speech because they have. I mean, we now have the, I hope, well-known case now of Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been facing for the last year the most excruciating a kangaroo court phony process to try and strip her of tenure simply because she has publicly talked about the terrible consequences of racial preferences, the academic mismatch, which I alluded to earlier, and she has opposed mass open borders immigration. She's being thrown out if they can get away

with it, though now it may be more difficult. So the idea that these schools are bastions of expression, that was virtually test perjury before they made hearing and should have resulted in their firing. Well, Heather, I'm glad you made that point because I've been saying much the same thing. And likewise with protests here in London, where you have people calling for jihad and all sorts of other things, my view is that, look, if you want to make the argument that the purpose of a university is for people to explore crazy ideas, young people are going to have them. We have freedom of speech in the US protected under the First Amendment. You can say all of those things. And I am a big fan of all of those statements and I fully support that. The problem is for the last seven years of

how long it's been, if I asked you where you're from, that was a microaggression and it was offensive. Now you're saying you're being asked a hypothetical question, which is would calling for the murder of Jews be harassment and you're saying, no, we believe in free speech. Well, you don't believe in free speech. You're lying and you're hypocritical. And likewise here in the UK. I mean, you are right. We have more restrictive rules and in fact, calling for jihad is against the law in this country. Maybe it shouldn't be. We can have that argument when you stop arresting people for being transphobic on Twitter because they say a man is a man, right? We can have all of those arguments and we can stick to all those principles. The issue here is the utter and vile

hypocrisy and complete inconsistency that we are seeing. And that is something that has to be defeated, surely. Right, right. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.

Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Again, the answer is not to use the same double standards. And, you know, it's now in kind of this vertiginous, infinite regress where now you have supporters of the campus left accusing the dissident donors who are trying to use this moment to bring the university back to a more sane course. But some of whom sadly have been calling for preemptive bans on anti-Israel speech. So now you have the campus left. there was a trustee at the University of Pennsylvania who snidly after a interim vote of confidence

in the in the Penn president who subsequently was de-fentistrated, but, you know, blaming the dissident donors for double standards. So both sides are now playing it. And I just think the people who are committed to sound university governance and the transmission of knowledge should take the high road. And, you know, the thing is, we want to know what these ideas are. It is incredibly clarifying to have heard the chance of antifada, antifada and glory to our martyrs from students. Don't we want to know that that's their thinking? What would banning that do? They would still be thinking this. And the reason they're thinking it is because that's what they're being taught on college campuses. So you want to get the,

if you want to call it hate, call it hate. You want to get. You want to get. get it out there so you can combat it. And these calls now, I just see the dissident donors and the dissident alumni, they are walking into a trap because they've been going around asking for adding anti-Semitism to the diversity, equity, and inclusion modules. And guess what? The campus bureaucracy is only too happy to comply. It expands the DEI remit. It gives them more power. And of course, what inevitably is added, they say, oh, yeah, well, now got a commission on fighting hate. But guess what? We also have to fight Islamophobia and we have to fight racism because we have to fight all kinds of hate. And so it's just walking into the trap that will

give them more power. Now, the only thing that is good about this, and I'm really looking forward to it, what we are about to see, I think Constantine and Francis, because of this, push for campus anti-Semitism training, I think we may be seeing a crack-up in the academic left. Because let's just imagine what is the anti-Semitism training going to look like? Is it going to say that chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free is anti-Semitism? Is it going to say that Israel, saying that Israel is a settler, colonial, genocidal state is anti-Semitism, you may not say that. Well, for the large part of the campus left, that's not anti-Semitic, that's basic fact. That's simply describing the world.

And so how much longer right now you have the radical left on campuses, although I should take out radical, because they're simply the left. I mean, there's nothing radical. They're closer to the mainstream than one would assume. They're sitting on their hands. They're quiet. kind of putting up with being impugned by the Democratic establishment by Senator Chuck Schumer, who's calling them anti-Semites, they're willing to for now hold their tongues. But at some point, they're not going to put up with it any longer. And the DEI bureaucrats that are being tasked with doing this anti-Semitism training, many of them are very left-wing as well. And they are much more on the pro-Hamas anti-Zionist side. So how they're going to be doing the anti-Semitism.

I don't know. It's going to be a very interesting moment. I'd love to be there. In fact, I'd love to record it. Yeah, I'd love to be there and film it. That would make for amazing content. Millions of views on YouTube guaranteed. But Heather, I suppose what you're really leading to, and this is, of course, the subject of your latest book, when race Trump's merit is the DEI bureaucracy needs to be dismantled. We all know it. We all understand it. It is the route through which all of these terrible ideas are being smuggled in. And it's affecting real world stuff. I don't know if you saw,

I'm sure you would have seen this piece recently written about how complex systems weren't survived the competence crisis. And it's essentially about the fact that if you keep hiring people for reasons other than them being good at their job, you're going to end up in a dark place very quickly. I put it to you now,

there's never been more understanding of the need to do all this than now. Really? I don't know. I mean, I find when I talk about my book, I'm often asked, well, make the case for merit. And I don't know. I think really, is that, are we that far gone that we've just lost understanding that's striving for, we are, that striving for excellence is the, is what drives civilization forward and that things matter. You know, it matters. Here in the United States, we actually now have diversity, uh, criteria. being introduced into the hiring of air traffic controllers.

So it doesn't matter if you're able to handle complex systems mentally and do these incredibly difficult calculations of, you know, the flight incoming vectors of airplanes, you know, that are 6,000 ton killing machines. But what matters is if you're underrepresented minority or female. Everything changed very quickly in 2013, when the Obama administration embarked on a plan to, plan to diversify the ranks of air traffic controllers. Obama's FAA chief at the time announced that

he intended to transform the agency, which includes air traffic control, into a, quote, more diverse workplace. As part of that plan, air traffic controllers no longer needed to take a more demanding cognitive assessment before being hired. Instead, all they needed was a high school diploma and the ability to speak English and apparently to do very basic math that like a third grader could do. all the tests were dumbed down to the point of being absurd and pointless. Now, the result over the past decade has been exactly what you would expect, even if you haven't heard about this. The number of air traffic controllers who are not white men has significantly increased, while the number of white men has decreased, that was the whole idea, according to the FAA,

this is what they tell us. Coincidentally, so have the number of near collisions involving commercial airlines. those have increased significantly. According to a database maintained by NASA, which relies on data self-reported by pilots, the number of near misses has more than doubled over the past 10 years. And just the past year,

there have been more than 300 near misses involving commercial airlines, averaging more than five per week. And just to emphasize that point again, they diversify the FAA, and near misses immediately doubled. Now, correlation, does not prove causation, but it can point towards it. And in this case, there is a giant

glowing sign pointing in that direction. Of course, only a handful of these incidents receive any major media attention, so it's easy to underestimate the scale of the problem, no matter what social media platforms you frequent, you don't really hear a lot about a lot of this. And that's why, in a moment, I'm going to go through some of the near misses that have gotten very little coverage. But I'll start with an incident that did get some attention for the national news media because it helps put the broader problem into some context. So this incident happened in July when air traffic controllers put two aircraft, an Allegiant Air passenger plane and a Gulfstream jet on a collision course shortly after the Allegiant plane had taken off from Fort Lauderdale,

Hollywood International Airport. And here's how that all played out. Watch. The FAA and NTSB are investigating a very close call on the skies over South Florida. an Allegiant Airlines plane and a private jet forced to take evasive action to avoid a collision at 23,000 feet. Here's Tom Costello. Allegiant Air 485 had just taken off from Fort Lauderdale, headed for Lexington, Kentucky when it happened. The pilot forced to make a sudden extreme climb, 600 feet in seconds to avoid another plane, throwing flight attendants to the floor and terrifying passengers, including Jericho Thacker and. her family flying to Kentucky after a Caribbean cruise. It was honestly the scariest thing I've ever been through.

It felt like when you go on the top of a roller coaster and you go straight down from the highest point. The FAA says it happened when controllers put the Allegiant flight and a Gulfstream business jet on intersecting routes both at 23,000 feet. That's when both planes collision avoidance warnings known as TCAS activated, ordering the legion pilot to immediately climb and the Gulfstream pilot to descend. If not for TKFC, these airplanes would have gotten very, very, very close or have potentially collided.

We don't understand that it matters that we are now watering down our medical licensing exams because too many blacks are not doing well on them and that we don't think that there's actual knowledge. But you have, in fact, the discourse in the United States has been so profound. profoundly nihilistic and willing to tear everything down. So there's not anything that is not now being challenged, the idea of excellence, the idea of competence, the idea of rationality. All of these things are being said by a very large portion

of the professional class to merely be covers for white supremacy. And what I find so disturbing is that our gatekeepers go along with it. So you have the editors of Lancet in Britain, of the Scientific American, of science, of the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA here, that have all put out, you know, whole issues dedicated to the issue of race, so-called racism and science. You have the heads of science and math organizations saying that science itself, is racist. That's preposterous. It is not science is a universal language. It's not about scientists.

It's about the scientific method. It's not about whether this or that scientist is black or Asian or Jewish or female or trans. It's about the language that they are speaking, which is that of rationality. And it is about the miracle of the scientific method and the way to test hypotheses through blind, randomized, controlled experiments, one of the great truth-seeking methods developed in human history. And yet, there we are willing to tear down scientific merit. And exactly, the idea that our complex systems are going to survive. I mean, I'm noticing in the United States, just getting through to any customer service agent is increasingly difficult. You get stuck these endless computer voice loops and you can't get out of them. And when you do, you get people

who are completely incompetent. It feels like we are living through a rise in incompetence and mediocrity that is going to really start pulling down our quality of life and eventually will threaten lives. And those are all great points and it will threaten lives. It will also mean a rise in racism because if you get people in positions and they don't merit being there, or they've only been there because of a diversity drive, then people are going to come in and go, do you know what? Do I want the black doctor? Which is an awful thing to think.

Absolutely. I mean, yes, it is perfectly rational if you know the extent of racial preferences and in the United States in medical schools, here's what goes on. We have something known as the MCATs Medical College Admissions, tests. These are objective, colorblind, standardized computer-graded exams to get into medical schools. Black's college seniors, these are the people in their last year of college, applying to medical schools, they are being admitted with MCAT scores so low that they would be automatically

disqualifying if presented by a white or an Asian college senior. And when they, get into medical school, having been catapulted into a school for which they're not competitively qualified. So a black college senior who may be qualified, say, for, and do perfectly well at North, I don't know, New Hampshire Medical University of the University of North Hampshire and would do well there because he would have the same qualifications as his peers. he is inevitably admitted to Harvard, where again, there's over a standard deviation of his academic skills between his academic skills and that of his non-preferred peers. He does very poorly. He's at the bottom of his class. What happens? Do we fail him out? No, we pass him on. We pass him on

again and again and again. Medical schools, hospitals are under enormous pressure to hire black doctors in the last three years, there's been a spate of blacks who've been put to the head of medical schools. Now, again, without racial preferences, you would think, okay, fine, good for that. But we know the combination of knowing both the pressure for diversity and the extent of the academic skills gap, which is huge in this country, huge. The chances are very great that they're only there because of their race and that the black doctor that may have walked through the emergency room doors after you've been brought in after a near fatal car crash is also there because of his race, not his qualifications. I would say the only thing I disagree with your statement,

Francis, is it's not in the hypothetical. It's not in the future. There have been grounds for doubting the objective qualifications of blacks for 30 years. There was a a law professor at the Yale Medical School named Stephen Carter, who wrote a book in the 1990s called Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. Carter is Black. And he wrote about the psychological discomfort of him as a black man, never knowing whether he was chosen because he was the best person for the job or because he was the best black. And that is a, a, a, a doubt that should hang over any self-aware black person who knows the extent of racial preferences in our society. And it's the same for me. I mean, I don't give a damn. I find gender preferences

completely nauseating. I really don't care if there's a single female on any governing body, any institution, any science research lab. I don't give a damn if they're all male, as long as they're the most qualified, but I know for a fact that I have been put on panels or chosen to do this or write that because I'm a female. I think it's completely ludicrous and irrelevant. You're right. I guess the question is, Heather, I mean, what do we do from here? Where can we go? Is there a way to have this conversation constructively or are we too far down that particular path? Well, in the United States, I think that people have to stop being scared of being called a racist. It doesn't scare me.

We are living in this country a huge race hustle. It is an amazing thing where you have leaders of institutions who would rather cop to the specious charge of institutional racism than explain that the reason that they don't have 13% blacks in their institution, if it's, a meritocratic institution is because of the skills gaps and that there's not enough competitively qualified blacks in the pipeline. They know this, I mean, they've got to know this to be a fact. And yet every piece of institutional verbiage is always, woe is me, we have got to work on our institutional racism and finally become an equitable institution. It's BS. They are equitable institutions, the reality in America is black privilege, not white privilege. If you are a straight white male today, you are at the bottom of the totem pole.

You are not going to get your first choice of medical school, no matter if you've got the medical college admissions test, MCAT scores, at the absolute top. if you have extraordinary recommendations from your molecular biology professor in college, you will not get into your top choice of medical schools, if any. And I've been told many times by parents about this. Their kids get waitlisted. And if you're a white male vying for a job to head a cancer research lab, and you have an extraordinary record of research in oncology,

you will not get chosen because our federal government doles out its research money at this point for cancer, for Alzheimer's research on the basis of race and gender, not on the basis of merit. So we have to stop copying defony racism and capitulating to the race hustle, but we also have to get the facts out. there about just how large the academic skills gap is. I can give them to you right now, but if you want me, I won't because it's an American scale of, I'll just say this. 66% of black 12th graders in the United States, 12th grade is our final year of high school

before college. 66% of black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of what's defined as basic 12th grade math, defined as doing arithmetic or reading a graph, and the number of 12th grade blacks who are advanced in math is too small to show up statistically on a national sample. What that means is you can have diversity or you can have meritocracy in an institution. You cannot have both because the number of qualified blacks in the pipeline is not there. So any institution that is trumpeting the fact that it is devoted to diversity is telling you so-de-voche that it is cast aside meritocracy. So what we have to do is stop apologizing for Western civilization. There's not a single civilization that has not committed the same

sins that the West is now in the dock for having committed at much higher levels of egregiousness, as, you know, Nigel Biggar and his great book on anti-colonialism that came out this year, I think he's in Oxford, Don of religious studies, pointed out that Britain had to occupy Lagos in the 19th century to get it to stop engaging in the slave trade. Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade, and then to abolish slavery, and it then led the world in suppressing both of those, as I said, from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. That was extraordinary.

No other state had done that before. No other states had done that before, certainly not in Africa, certainly not in Asia, nor among the indigenous peoples of North America. That was extraordinary. And we carried on doing that until the end of the empire in the 1960s. And in the 1820s and 30s, the slavery trade department, in the British Horonopas was the largest unit. And in the 1830s or 40s thereabouts,

13% of the total manpower of the Royal Navy was devoted to stopping slave ships leaving West Africa for the Americas, just stopping that, quite apart from stopping slavery elsewhere. Britain used its Navy in the 19th century to blockade the western coast of Africa to try and stop the slave trade. The Africans were going to hoe on continuing this as long as they could get away with. So yes, of course the West has engaged in the horrible travesty of slavery.

It has engaged in conquest. It has engaged in cruelties. The people that it has conquered have been, by and large, even worse. So yeah, Heather, yeah, go ahead. You make a lot of great points there, many of which I agree with actually. The one thing I would maybe want to clarify a little bit, your point about there's no black privilege, it's white privilege, is a little bit.

I think it's not untrue in the context specifically that we're talking about. When it comes to being hired for a job or when it comes to being given a place at college, a straight white man is definitely going to be. advantages compared to a straight white woman, by the way, or a black person or whatever. However, I think your point about the academic gap is what actually many of these people mean when they talk about white privilege. And they're completely wrong to call it white privilege because it's not about being white.

It's about the socioeconomic circumstances from which you come. And the sad truth of America is that a lot of black people in America grow up in terrible circumstances, go to a terrible school, get a terrible education, and that is why that gap exists. The fact that people then try to correct that by putting this person in a position to fail at an elite college shouldn't happen and it's wrong. But I think we ought to also include that piece in the conversation as well. Wouldn't you agree? Well, absolutely good points, Constantine.

However, I would disagree with one of your premises, which is that when people talk about white privilege. They are alluding to implicitly the skills gap. No, they're not. You're giving them way too much credit. They will actually deny that the skills gap exists. It is completely offstage. All of our journalistic writing here about the challenge to racial preferences, otherwise known as affirmative action in colleges, is exclusively couched in terms of colleges are excluding black. acts, if there's not proportional representation in the student body, it's somewhere, somewhere there is some inequity and exclusion going on. So that aspect of it, of the actual empirical gaps is really, really off stage. That having been said, let me address your other points,

though, about why those exist. And yes, there is clearly different levels of privilege and opportunity. There's no question. But I would say this, that the focus right now, I think, has to be more on personal responsibility, what parents can do for their children. You know, I've twice now in the last couple weeks have been interrogated by a European when I'm talking about the battle between race and merit, who's asked me, well, what about poverty in the United States? You know, there was a Hungarian of all people recently and then, and then in Norwegian. Well, you're very unequal in the United States. You've got this poverty problem. Well, our poverty problem in the United States is overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy, of out-of-wedlock births. Right. Our poverty population consists of single

mothers. And if the only thing you care about, if you're sort of a lefty and the only thing you care about is the economic capacity of a family unit, if you think that's the most important thing, how much money or welfare benefits they have, you should care about out of wedlock childbirths because children born to single parents are at least five times more likely to be poor than children born to married parents. But there's a lot more involved in that, in having two married parents. It's an entire culture that values the stability of marriage that holds young men responsible for the children that they create, that they procreate, and that holds expectations to young black males that you will be responsible and you better develop the bourgeois habits

to make yourself a marriageable mate. All these things are incredibly important. Parents could do a hell of a lot more to make sure that their kids actually. take their textbooks home from school to study, that they're studying for exams. If you compare the amount of time that Asian students in the United States spend on homework, to the amount of time that black students spend on homework, it's a ratio of like five to six to one. And the idea that, oh, we stiff inner city schools in per capita government funding, that's not true either, Constantine, because of various anti-executive. poverty programs, our inner city schools are funded on a per capita basis at a much higher rate

than many suburban schools. Now, am I going to deny that there are like these palatial prep schools in the United States, you know, the Andover's and the Exeter's that maybe like your agents, I don't know, but I think ours are probably even more cushy and legerient because we never had that whole tradition of like Eaton boys beating each other since. and the sadism of that. But yes. Yeah, you missed out. I really did.

It was very strong. It's delightfully homoerotic. It built character, though. We have to say that. You guys did survive the blitz in a way that probably Americans, I can't even imagine would have. But I don't, you know, there are differences. But I think that to continue harping on external explanations is not going to do much,

Because we as a society in the United States have been trying for six decades. We have spent trillions of dollars to close the achievement gap. It is the basic goal of all of our social policy. At this point, the change has to come from within a pathological inner city culture that tells young black children that if they put out effort in their schooling, they will be acting white. There's not a hell of a lot that you can do. you can spend another $3 million on that grammar school.

But as long as the kids are getting the message from their peers and from the population at large that it is a sellout to study for exams and to pay attention to their teacher, those three to $6 million of extra taxpayer redistributed money is not going to make a damn bit of difference. Right. Oh, look, I think you make some good points. And by the way, at no point did I say anything about money or this being a money issue. I think what I mean is the socio-economic circumstances, it's partly, yes, of course, about the wealth of the parents and so on.

But what I meant primarily was the environment in which you grew up is extremely influential on what ends up being the course of your life. I know for myself, if I didn't grow up with two parents, if I didn't grow up with two academic parents who pushed me to pursue certain things. even the fact that genetically I probably am quite academically predisposed to being successful would have would have curtailed my opportunities in life quite a lot and it just seems to me like the attempts to fix this of the college level are misguided precisely because we're attempting to address completely the wrong problem the by the time somebody from a minority background

gets to college those privileges or lack thereof have already set the course of the life in a very powerful way. And the things we then do probably just make things worse rather than better. But moving on very briefly, because we've only got a few minutes left, this all seems to be coming from this idea that you talk about in your latest book, and Thomas Sol talks about in his brilliant latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, which is something you've been trying to fight as an idea out there in the culture for a very long time, which is that discrimination is always in everywhere the cause of disqualification. In other words, if there is a disparity, it means that there's been discrimination.

And that, to put it very, very mildly, isn't quite true, is it? Right. If I can just nevertheless backtrack a little bit. You know, socioeconomic, it's not money, it's socioeconomic differences. Well, so then, but if you're then defining them as family structure, again, that I agree with you, but that is not something that we can solve by transfer payments or a hell of a lot social policy except to valorize. Heather, no one disagrees with that.

I am all for personal responsibility. Men shouldn't be walking away from their children. People need to have children and stay together. Look, we're all completely agreed on this stuff. Okay, but that culture can be changed. That's the point. The change has to come from within.

From within. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so, yes, I would say that that this is, our culture today, we're forced to, like, perform do performative lies. You know, we have a little lies about, well, the biggest threat to the United States is Trump's white supremacist MAGA people that are, you know, or the, it's white supremacists who are beating up elderly frail Asians in San Francisco and New York when the videos show us a quite different reality that we're not allowed to talk about. We see the reality of who's doing the looting and the and the

shoplifting and the gratuitous knockout game attacks, but we're not allowed to talk about that. So we live those lies. We live the lies that there is, you know, one can change one's sex and gender by theod and that there is not a biological rule of sex built into every single cell of our body. We live that lie as well. But the biggest lie I would say that any disparity in our institutions is by definition the result of racism. That is a lie. It is, in the case of meritocratic institutions,

the reason for disparities is because, as I said before, the academic skills gap, the other issue that needs to be talked about in the United States today, since the George Floyd race riots of June 2020, we have been unwinding our criminal justice system at just an astounding rate, and you have prosecutors deciding not to bring cases. They're declaring entire categories of crime off limits to prosecution, whether it's petty theft, shoplifting, looting, resisting arrest, which is catastrophic, trespass, disorderly conduct. All of these things are now declared, we're not going to criminalize them.

Police are being told not to make pedestrian stops, even if they seem highly suspicious behavior, all because those activities, however constitutional, however colorblind, however essential to maintaining public order, do have a disparate impact on black criminals. But because our prison population, here we have a case not of the underrepresentation of blacks, but the overrepresentation of blacks. As I said, blacks are 13% of the national population in the U.S., but they make up a third of our prison population. The only allowable explanation for that in mainstream discourse,

whether it's the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and certainly on every single American campus, the only allowable explanation is criminal justice racism, mass incarceration, we have racist cops, we have racist judges, we have racist juries, we have a racist drug enforcement system. That is, again, all wrong. The reason for the over-representation of blacks in prison is highly elevated rates of criminal offending. And I don't want to sound race-obsessed here. Let me also add Constantine and Francis. that I have spent years going into inner city communities, going to police community meetings, trying to give voice to the thousands of good law-abiding, decent, hardworking residents of those

communities who I hear exclusively say, we want more police. Why don't you get the kids who are hanging out by the hundreds on the corners fighting? why can't you arrest them for truancy or loitering? I smell marijuana in my hallway. Why can't you do something about it? There is a drug set going on on the corner that I see out my window. I'm terrified to go down into my building lobby because it's being colonized by trespassing youth,

hanging out, smoking weed, and selling drugs. These are the people who never get heard by the mainstream media. They deserve protection. They deserve the police. And when you pull back on law enforcement in the name of fighting phony racism in the name of avoiding disparate impact, it is the millions of law-abiding blacks who are hurt the most. Since the George Floyd race riots, there have been dozens of black children, nine-month-old children, one-year-old children, five-year-olds, six-year-olds, nine-year-olds, gunned down fatally in their beds, in their living rooms, on their front porches, jumping on

trampolines, at barbecues, at birthday parties, riding in their parents' cars. These black kids have been fatally gunned down by these barbaric drive-by shootings, or if they haven't been killed, they've been rendered brain dead. We have never been asked by the Black Lives Matter activist to say their names, not once. There has not been a single Black Lives Matter rally on their behalf. Why? Because they have been killed or maimed exclusively by black gangbangers. They have not been killed by whites. They have not been killed by the police. And because they've been killed by blacks, the media and the activist doesn't give a damn about their lives. And as long as we go, continue, and our president, Joe Biden, has this phony meme that he barred from Barack Obama,

which says that black parents are right to fear that their children will be killed by a cop or a white supremacist every time they step outside. That is 100% false. Yes, it is much more dangerous to be black in the United States than to be white. And the reason is, is because you're so much more likely to be killed by a black criminal. Blacks between the ages of 10 and 24 die of gun homicide at 24 times the rate of whites in that same age cohort. That is a civil rights problem. Since George Floyd, black juveniles are shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles, who's shooting them again, not the police, not whites, but other blacks. Black juveniles commit gun homicide at 100 times the rate of white juveniles.

That's the problem. And it is one, obviously, in Britain that you're also not allowed to talk about. You've had your metropolitan police putting out these specious reports about their own racism simply because their officers were going where crime was happening and trying to stop it. You cannot fight crime without being disproportionately in minority neighborhoods because, sadly, that's where the victimization is occurring. Heather McDonnell, it's been a fantastic interview. Thank you so much.

We always finish our conversations with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think we should be talking about how much beauty there is in our civilizational legacy that none of us deserve Mozart, none of us deserve the St. Matthew Passion. None of us deserve Schubert's song cycles or Tiepolo or John Singer-Sargent.

And it's not just, I say this to my fellow, I guess I'm called a conservative, my fellow conservatives. Yes, free markets are great. We absolutely need to be able to continue creating prosperity. But the point of civilization is not just economic exchanges as vital as that is. And maybe it's the scenic one known for everything else. But let's also remember that you should not die before reading, if you die before reading certain books,

whether it's Middle March or War and Peace or Anna Karenina, or reading pastoral poetry, you will have died a poor life. And so it's time to get cracking and start exposing yourselves to some of the great monuments of civilization. Heather, beautiful message and stick around with us as we ask Heather your questions, whether you're a local supporter or support us elsewhere. Hang around and we'll be answering those right now. Please ask Heather what suggestions she has for adults who need and want to be self-educated

because their college experience was old DIE crap, critiquing the authors of the past for the various prejudices and similar postmodern nonsense. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task. unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel,

Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer.