Will Cain Country - The Affirmative Action Myth: Does It Hurt More Than It Helps? (ft. Jason Riley)

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Story #1: The two biggest stories today in the world: India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, are on the verge of war and Fiverr's CEO warns that AI is coming for all of our jobs. Will breaks it all down. Story #2: The Author of 'The Affirmative Action Myth,' Jason Riley unpacks the negative impact that Affirmation Action has had on black communities in America. Story #3: The Cowboys have added a potential new star WR and the Utah Hockey Club finally has a new name. Will and 'Tinfoil Pat' determine if these are wins or losses.  Tell Will what you thought about this podcast by emailing [e-mail] Subscribe to The Will Cain Show on YouTube here: Watch The Will Cain Show! Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One, two nuclear powers on the verge of war. The history and understanding what's happening between India and Pakistan. Also, is AI coming for all of our jobs, yours and mine? Two biggest stories today in the world. Two, the affirmative action myth, how it's actually held back Black America with Wall Street Journal columnist and author of a brand new book, Jason Riley. Three, Utah has a new hockey team name and the Cowboys have a brand new wide receiver. It is the Will Cane show streaming live at Fox News.com on the Fox News YouTube channel and the Fox News Facebook page every Monday through Thursday at 12 o'clock Eastern Time. Make sure you subscribe. Set a reminder on YouTube. Jump into the comments on Facebook and become a member of the Willisha.

If you're listening on Terrestrial Radio, head over to Spotify or Apple. Hit subscribe. Leave a comment. If you think it's so deserved, leave a five-star review. And we'll appreciate you as a member of the Willisha. Justin's sitting in for two a days, Dan. Today we've got tin foil pat because tomorrow live in Dallas with a studio audience, we are broadcasting from the KRLD showroom, Odyssey Showroom in Dallas, Texas. We will have as our guest for a live version of this show, which will still stream on YouTube, Facebook, and Fox News.com, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who will be running for U.S. Senate against incumbent John Cornyn.

The Attorney General has been very active, and there's a lot of questions to answer about, for example, Muslim communities popping up in Texas, centered around a mosque, not legally exclusive, but designed for Muslim constituents. Is it the beginning of allowing in, at maximum Sharia law, at minimum no-go zones like the type you see in Paris or in London? We also want to ask him about the new school bill in Texas. Vouchers up to a billion dollars allowing people take $10,000, $11,000 and apply it to their kids' education as they move to charter or private schools. Of course, we'll ask him about his also run for the U.S. Senate.

We also have a country music artist in studio with us, as well as Bonnie Jill Laughlin, friend of the show, because every ticket benefits hounds and heroes. You can get a ticket. Come meet me. come hang out by heading over to k rl d.com buy a ticket watch the show glad hand with me chit-chat let's get to know each other hope to see you there tomorrow for a live event for the will cane show today we have jason riley a wall street journal columnist fox news contributor author of a brand new book the affirmative action myth wherein he argues the policy about a half a century in the making has actually upended

massive growth in the black community. Let's rewind the clock. Let's go back in history. What did it look like before? Sort of the civil rights era, before the welfare state era, what did it look like before the affirmative action era? Was black America on a different

path than the one exists today? The thing that we've all praised affirmative action, what's the real world outcome? Has it helped that with Jason Riley? Meanwhile, the Utah hockey club it is the hockey playoffs has a brand new name we're going to unveil that talk about the finalist did they get the right name did the cowboys get the right brand new receiver all that little

bit later but let's get straight to it with two of the biggest stories in the world today with story number one india has launched operation sendor overnight may 6th 2025 it targeted nine sites in in Pakistan and in Pakistan administered Kashmir. It includes alleged terrorist infrastructure. India stated the strikes were precise and only hit military installations in Pakistan. Pakistan claims civilians 26 dead, which includes women and children. Pakistan in response claims they have now downed five Indian fighter jets and vow to respond. perhaps even more dramatically, and this escalating tension between India and Pakistan.

Let's rewind the clock. Let's talk about this war and why it matters for Americans. It matters because India and Pakistan are nuclear powers, both with a large nuclear arsenal. It also matters because the United States, while remaining somewhat neutral, is more aligned with India than it is. Pakistan. Obviously, through our past, we've had terrorist tensions with Islamabad. But we do maintain an open relationship with Pakistan, but certainly globally, economically, and somewhat militarily in terms of arms sales, more aligned with India. Meanwhile, Pakistan more aligned with China. The history. Kashmir. Dating back to the British, abandoning their empire

in Pakistan and India. The area of Kashmir between Indian Pakistan has been at dispute for decades. There have been skirmishes in 1947, 48, 65, 99. These two companies have had what are small wars or skirmishes for quite some time. They've managed to maintain it without

letting it overflow into nuclear war. But in April 2025, in Kashmir, 26 people were killed, an Indian-administered Kashmir. Pakistan administers half, India administers half of Kashmir. There are calls that this was a Pakistani-backed terrorist organization that killed people in the Indian section of Kashmir. And that's why we saw overnight these strikes into Pakistan. Now, this has, as I mentioned, serious political and global repercussions. What would be the response of China? What would be the response of the United States if this thing metastasizes into something much larger?

Obviously, a nuclear war would be devastating for the region, but also it would mean hell on the U.S. economy. and not to make light of the literally 50 to 125 million people that is estimated to be killed immediately should this thing go into nuclear conflict. But it would, the point, spill over onto our shores. Nuclear fallout would not, according to most experts, if that happened over there. And not to breed fear, but always to play the chess

of looking down the road. There is no real health consequences. Most experts agreed to somebody all the way across the globe in the United States, but economic repercussions would be severe. It is not anticipated that this will bleed over into either a nuclear war or world war. Both China and the United States want to de-escalate the situation. There's too much to lose for both of these countries. Too much invested.

No one is looking to this to be a trigger. But as tensions continue to rise between the United States and China, on economic fronts and in the tariff war every little trigger should be taken seriously the quote unquote experts should not be just taken as all bold all caps science

this is a hotbed and when you're dealing with nuclear weapons and nuclear war and a decade's almost century old conflict who is to say cooler heads always prevail it's a story that is getting a bit of coverage today in the mainstream media but it's worthy of much more as we

watch and ask, hey, how did this start? Where does this go? And how could it impact America? Also today, one of the biggest stories, not receiving much attention. Is it the CEO of Fiverr, big technology company? Name is Micah Kaufman. An email has been revealed that he shared with his staff. In this email, Kaufman suggests that everyone's job is at risk, not just coders, not just those that do repetitive tasks, but everyone's job is at risk when it comes to artificial intelligence. Here's what he wrote specifically. So here's the unpleasant truth. AI is coming for your job. Heck, it's coming from my job too. This is a wake-up call. It doesn't matter you're a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep,

salesperson or finance person, AI is coming for you. You must understand that once was considered easy tasks will no longer exist. What was considered a hard task will be new easy, will be the new easy, and what was considered impossible will be the new hard. Do you not become exceptional talent at what you do or master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not talking about your job at Fiverr. I'm talking about your ability to stay in your profession, in your industry. Scary stuff coming from a technology executive talking about not just your current job,

but your industry, your profession is at risk. I went and I asked, what professions are the most at risk? Well, according to AI, it reads like this. Here are the most at-risk jobs. Cachiers, 73% of experts agree, cashiers could be a thing of the past under AI. Factory and manufacturing work, 60% suggest that could be gone. Truck drivers and transportation and logistics jobs, 62% say that could be gone. Data entry clerks and processors, customer service reps, retail salespeople, journalists, 60% suggest could be gone. Software engineers and developers half think could be gone. Bookkeepers and accountants, financial analysts, telemarketers.

all could be gone. Many studies predict that by the year 2030, 30% of U.S. work could be automated with hundreds of millions of jobs affected globally. Pretty scary stuff. Now, it creates new jobs, as does every bit of creative destruction when it comes to technology. We can't say what those jobs necessarily will be, and we can't say what will be the replacement rate. If you eliminate hundreds of million jobs and you only replace it with tens of millions of jobs, what happens to, say, 70 million now out of work? What is the future?

And if it doesn't just include, I mean, if it's every level of profession, what are you left to do? Well, as a country, I think there's a lot that we've left to do. And I think, I truly believe we have some of the right people thinking about how America exists. in an economy that could be vastly different within five years. Five years is a blink of an eye. We're five years away from 2030. We're in the midst of this revolution of AI. I mean, think about how long, it takes four years to go to college.

I don't know how long it takes you to retrain yourself into something you don't yet know needs to exist. But five years is beyond most of our all financial planning, family planning. I mean, we plan beyond five years. And if the world's going to revolutionize and take away profound. professions and industries, what can we do? Well, all we can do is hope we have the right leaders to center as much of this revolution right here at home in America. And that brings me to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent under President Donald Trump. While the economic

message, I think, with tariffs and deregulation and taxes has been somewhat chaotic, a little incoherent, hard to make sense of, Bessent has consistently given us the bigger picture. Scott Bessent wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago, and he has consistently laid out how everything being fought for by the Trump administration is an interlocking step. None of it stands on its own. It all works together to try to. Yes, bring home manufacturing.

Yes, reorder the global economy when it comes to trade and tariffs. But build a future for Americans. He lays it out in three steps. First step. Renegotiating global trade. Tariffs are an effective tool for balancing international economy. They reduce trade barriers in other countries, opening more markets to American producers, while also bringing back thousands of manufacturing jobs.

So the first step is part of this tariff plan. It's doubtful, I think. This is my opinion. And everyone's trying to figure it out. From Wall Street to Democrats who want to fight politically. Are tariffs a tool to replace the income tax here permanently? Or are they a trade chip on the table to get the United States better deals globally? Here, Bessent seems to thread that needle saying we want to bring manufacturing jobs back to America, yes.

He does say raise taxes that it offset the income tax and begin to re-center much of the global industry right here at home in America. Second step, making the 2017 tax cuts and jobs acts permanent and adopting the president's new tax priorities. No tax on tips, overtime, and Social Security. They're currently debating that within Congress. Mr. Trump's tax reforms will improve the quality of life for Americans harmed by reckless trade policies. They want to put more money into the hands of Americans. So they want to bring, through regulation and taxes, more jobs back to America,

then free up more money for Americans to invest how they so see fit. And then third, deregulating the economy. America must build again, not only homes and factories, but also semiconductors, power plants, artificial intelligence data centers, and other technologies of the future, reawakening our industrial capacity is key to raising employment and wages among the working and middle class and the only way to compete with China for technological and military supremacy. He has said, we can't live in an economy that is real estate, finance, and Wall Street centered. And the rest of America in a consumer-based economy that buys cheap goods made overseas from Walmart,

We might have raised standard of living when it comes to cheap goods, but we'll have a drop, as we've seen, in real wages. So what can we truly afford when it comes to the big necessities of life? Healthcare, homes, raising a family. They want to find a way to bring an economy back that works for middle class and working class Americans. Their answer to that is bring as much industry and companies an investment back home to America. once it's back home, deregulate it, let it fly, let it build, and do it fast. If we're five years away from many jobs, if by 2030, 30% of jobs are gone, according to AI, and I don't know if that's hyperventilating and real, but if it is, we've got to get on it and we've got to get on it fast.

That's get these deals done. And I think we'll see that play out over the next six to 12 months here at home when it comes to the tariff deals on the Trump administration. Get this investment back home. We've already seen that. Massive, foreign and domestic investment here at home and the United States. Get these factories, whatever they may be. I don't think anyone truly believes that we're all going to be screwing screws into iPhones or making Nike's. But whatever is next, whatever that replacement job is next, that AI is threatening,

make sure it's here at home in America. But because we don't know, deregulate. Deregulate everything. Build oil refineries. Build nuclear power plants. build raw materials, rare earth minerals, processing capacity, of which China currently owns 90%. Deregulate telecommunications. Deregulate everything so that we can be at the forefront of building whatever is next. And hopefully, accompanied with that, our jobs for middle class

Americans. Purpose. But in the meantime as well, give people their money back, lower taxes. And then they spurn investment. They make choices. We have to be fast. We got to be moving. We got to figure out what's next and we got to get on it. We got to succeed and fail. Trial and error. Otherwise, we decay. Oh, yeah, we're fat from eating McDonald's. Oh, yeah, we've got cheap TVs from Walmart. But we can't really afford what history has proven to be the foundational elements of happiness family purpose

meaning we've already seen middle america hollowed out a loss of those things loss of purpose loss of jobs destruction of family loss of meaning drug and fentany

crisis across and we have to arrest this development because I'm going to tell you something it doesn't stop in Springfield Ohio it doesn't stop in San Angelo, Texas, it moves. It's not geographic. It's everywhere that decay, the cancer, the hollow out of America, move fast. In order to afford this all, there will have to be spending cuts.

There will have to be cuts to our money spent by the federal government. And that'll be the big debate in Congress and politically. As those cuts are made, we'll have a choice to make. Do we hang on to the entitled past, or do we fast? innovate and move freely into the future. Two big stories today that impact the future of Americans. Let's look at the affirmative action myth. Did it in fact help or hold back Black America?

We're going to break that down with the author of a brand new book and a columnist of Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley, next on The Will Cain Show. This is Jason Chaffetz from the Jason in the House podcast. Join me every Monday to dive deeper into the latest political headlines and chat with remarkable guests. Listen and follow now at Fox Newspodcast.com. Or wherever you download podcasts. It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes.

We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at thequiz.com. Then come back here to see how you did. you for taking the quiz. Affirmative action was introduced. It was sold to us as a way to fix racial injustice. After decades of being held behind by racist government policies, now the government would

embrace a race-based policy to give a leg up, an advantage to black America. But according to my next guest, it may now be causing more damage and the problems it was meant to solve. Jason Riley says black Americans were making a sense. historic progress before reformative action. But today, those exact racial preferences hold back, stigmatize, and handicap black America. It is the Will Cain Show streaming live at Fox News.com on the Fox News YouTube channel on the Fox News Facebook page. Hit subscribe at Apple or on Spotify. Jason Riley is a Fox News contributor, a Wall Street Journal columnist and the author of this

brand new book, The Affirmative Action Myth. Jason's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on, Will. Glad to be here. Talk to me about the myth. What myth are you attacking? Are you tackling in this book? Well, the impetus for the book was the 2023 Supreme Court decision and Students for Fair Admissions, the Harvard that outlawed race-based college admissions, said they were unconstitutional. And there was a lot of chatter around that decision. I mean, it was not unexpected. People said the makeup of this court suggested that those policies were going to go away. But what struck me was all the doom saying, coming particularly out of the left and elites on the left who argued that if these policies

go away, they will devastate black America, particularly the black middle class, that these policies had in fact created the black middle class and that without them there would be no more upward mobility. College campuses would be whitewashed and on and on. And I said, wait a minute, that is not what history shows here. History shows that there was a significant black middle class before these policies came into effect, particularly in the 1970s. And in fact, in the era of affirmative action, that middle class has grown more slowly than it was growing in the pre-affirmative action era. And so I tried to make my case that these policies are not necessary to upward mobility,

that blacks were upwardly mobile well before these policies came into effect. And that's the story I'm trying to tell. let's talk a little bit about that history jason of the black middle class before affirmative action i think we would also have to say before the modern american welfare state the war on poverty under linden baines johnson and a few other potential contributing factors to the decline of the black american middle class starting as you pointed out in the 1970s or late 1960s i lived in new york for 15 years jason and new york's an interesting petri dish to see changes over time. I lived on the Upper West Side. I spent a ton of my time in Harlem.

My sons went to, one of my sons went to school in Harlem. They both played soccer in Harlem. So my social life took me to Harlem a lot. And for example, neighborhoods like Hamilton Heights. Hamilton Heights is a famous neighborhood in upper Manhattan that was historically a black middle class neighborhood, beautiful brownstones, townhomes, big, nice area. Today, Hamilton Heights, while it has that history, has either been gentrified or it's rough. It's one of the two, you know. It doesn't represent the historical tie to the black middle class today. Now, I'm just bringing up Hamilton Heights as a little illustration, right, of what the black middle class looked like before the mid-1900s. Sure, sure. You're absolutely right. Black life looked a lot

different in the first half in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. And what's remarkable about that is that there was discrimination at the time. There was much, much more racism, legal racism at the time. You could put a sign in your window that said, we don't hire black people. Yet the black labor participation rate was higher than the white labor participation rate. And you saw, again, blacks climbing out of poverty into the middle class. You saw them increasing their years of education, both in absolute terms and relative to whites. You saw them entering skilled professions

between 1940 and 1970. The number of people entering, the rate at which blacks were entering the middle class professions, was tremendous. I mean, the number of middle class blacks between the 1940s and the 1970s, something like went up by a factor of five. I mean, affirmative action has never replicated those gains.

And people don't know this history. And one of the reasons they don't know the history is because it's not in the interest of black leaders today, whether you're talking about black politicians or civil rights activists, to tell this story. Instead, they want to credit whatever progress. What's that? They want to credit whatever progress they've achieved through, to their social programs that have been implemented since the 1960. I'm sorry, I knew where you're going.

Yeah. But how was that happening, Jason? I think anybody listening is like, wow, okay, so labor force participation, climbing out of poverty, educational attainment was going up from 40 to 70, but it was obviously in a very racist environment, as you mentioned. So how was that happening? Well, a few things were going on. One was the great migration out of the south.

And it was not only a migration from south to north, It was a migration from rural areas, which tend to be poor, to wealthier areas in the cities, urban areas. And so blacks were leaving the south in large numbers and leaving rural areas in large numbers. And simply moving from Alabama to Ohio, doing a job in Cleveland is going to pay a lot more than doing that same job in Mobile Alabama. So simply physically moving was one way that we saw upward mobility. The other thing you had back then, and I think that this was also a very big factor that doesn't get enough attention, is you had much more stable black families, which are conducive to upward mobility as well. You had higher marriage rates among blacks in the early decades of the 20th century than you did among whites. In fact, as recently as the early 60s, two out of three black children were being raised in a home with a mother and a father.

Today, three and four are not, or something close to that. And in some of our inner cities, it's upwards of 80%. That has been a tremendous factor in stunting upward mobility among blacks. What you saw when I was talking about those numbers of blacks entering the middle class professions, what you saw in the 1940s and 50s and 60s were black, white incomes converging. Blacks were not only making more in absolute terms, they were gaining on white. you saw what we call today a reduction in income inequality taking place that starts to stall in the late 60s and one of the reasons it starts to stall because in the late 60s you begin to see this proliferation of single parent homes and of course single parent homes are going to be making less money than dual parent homes and so right there that breakdown of the family had economic consequences in terms of blacks catching up to whites and so the breakdown of the black family has been a tremendous factor. And one of the problems you mentioned that war on poverty and Lyndon Johnson's

great society, they exacerbated the breakdown of that black family because they subsidized antisocial behavior. They subsidized the types of habits and attitudes and practices that are not conducive to upward mobility. So you saw less labor participation rates. You saw more school dropout rates and so forth. And of course, that all leads to lower incomes. for blacks. And so affirmative action could not make up for those things. And that's what we lost and when we lost the black nuclear family. I want to get back to the affirmative action element in a minute, which is more about education. But the breakdown of the family, so as you described the gains made from 40 to 70, the physical movement from south and north or rural to urban,

I think it can almost be as an argument used against you in that, well, that's a one-time gain for the black population. In other words, once that, that is completed, once that migration has completed, you need to see the ability to continue to gain in real wages and labor force participation. It's a singular one-time boom because you're going from extreme poverty to employment in urban centers. But the family element is going the opposite direction. It's cutting the other way. And I've always been curious, like, what happened? Like, you gave us the stats. What happened in the 60s? Now, the left kind of dominates the narrative on this, and they say it's due to the war on drugs, the imprisonment of the black male that broke up families,

destroyed families. You're pointing to the great society. And the word you used was subsidizing antisocial behaviors. I think what speaks to me is incentive. You know, people work according to incentive. So it put a lot of incentives in to what? To take, what, welfare checks? Explain to me how the 60.

and public policy destroyed the black family? Well, if you pay people not to work, you're going to get more people not working. If the government is going to give people so much money, more money than they can earn in the workforce, they are going to make the rational choice to not enter the workforce. We saw a bit of this under COVID. When people stayed home or refused to go back to their jobs, because we were subsidizing them staying home. They were getting more money.

then their former employer was going to give them if they went back to work. But this isn't something new. This is an ongoing issue with the size of the current welfare state that we have. And there can be a tipping point where basically the government is providing so much money to individuals who are unemployed

that they have no incentive to go find work. And that is what we saw to a great extent under Lyndon Johnson's policies, this great expansion of the welfare state, putting in place disincentives to work. It also, when I say it's subsidized antisocial behavior, it also told single women, if you have more children, we will give you more money.

And if we catch the father of that child living with you, we will cut you off, which gave an incentive for the father to be absent. He'd be costing his children's mother, as well as his children money if he stuck around. And so that's what I mean by perverse incentives that were put in place. But the earlier point you made about the migration being a one-time game doesn't quite compute because what blacks were also doing, and by the way, even with the great migration, most blacks lived in the South.

Today, most blacks still live in the South. So it's not like the South emptied out of blacks, but blacks were also increasing their years of education. and traditionally in America, when you increase education, you increase your earnings. So these are not one-offs. So increasing years of education was a huge, huge deal. But one point to make about affirmative action here is that the benefits have mostly flowed to those blacks who were already better off. And that's why some of the most vehement opponents of getting rid of race preferences are upper-class blacks. After the decision came down against Harvard, But everyone from Barack Obama on down

when it came to black elites denounced this decision. But it's that class of blacks that have benefited the most from affirmative action, even though it's been sold in the name of helping the black poor. And just to give you a quick statistic on that, if you look at the earnings of the highest earning blacks, which be in the top 20% bracket, their share of income between the late 60s

and the early 90s, the first 25 years of affirmative, action. Their share of income went up at about the same rate as whites in the top 20%. But blacks in the lower 20% of earnings saw their share of income decline at more than double the rate of whites in the bottom 20% over the first 25 years of affirmative action. So those benefits, whatever benefits affirmative action was providing, it was providing them to blacks were already better off. And that is why you see this sort of class distinction and who cares about racial preferences going away and who and who doesn't because they haven't really benefited from them. More of the Will Cain Show right after this.

Hey, I'm Trey Gowdy host of the Trey Gowdy podcast. I hope you will join me every Tuesday and Thursday as we navigate life together and hopefully find ourselves a little bit better on the other side. Listen and follow now at Fox News Podcast.com. Listen to the all-new Brett Bear podcast featuring Common Ground, in-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, along with all your Brett Bear favorites, like his all-star panel and much more available now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your

podcasts welcome back to the will cane show all right let's talk about the pros and cons of affirmative action for just a moment um it's uh i can't remember the story we were doing the other day jason it was actually i think the story was about women in the workplace we were talking about this and the idea of the pros and the cons of giving someone an advantage and the reputational harm that has on that person once they're in the environment. The stigma of it. You know, this is some Clarence Thomas has talked about this, right? It casts a shadow of doubt over every black high achiever.

Hey, are you meritoriously at the same level of everyone else that had to get here? Or did you get an exception? Did you get a pass in some way? That's one obvious con, which I think the left dismisses is racist, but it's actually, again, human rational. It doesn't matter if it's black, women, or anybody else, everybody's going to look at, hey, if there's a policy that gives this person preference, I'm going to wonder if their true meritorious, you know, resume got them here in the same way I had to. It's interesting that the left does want to dismiss the stigma portion of this debate, but it's a selective dismissal. I'll give you a quick example that I'm sure your audience will be familiar with. I remember a few years back when Elizabeth Warren was called out for claiming to have Native American heritage and using that to advance her professional career.

And I remember an interview she did with the Boston Globe where she said, you know, I got here on my own. Don't tell me I got any of it. She grew indignant that someone would suspect her of not being qualified to have the accomplishments that she's had in her life, being a Harvard professor in total and any self-respecting person would of course no one wants to be the token on campus or the token in the workplace yet elizabeth warn will turn around in support affirmative action if you say to her what about the stigma how it taints the accomplishments of blacks she'll wave that away so it's a very selective use of stigma on the eyes of love but it's it's very true and the supreme court got into this in their majority opinion in the harvard case where they talked about how or affirmative action reinforces negative stereotypes. So if you're at a selective school and you it's full of black kids or the black kids who are there are mostly black kids who have been let in with lower standards and you see them pooling at the bottom of the class, you see them dropping out at higher rates, you see them switching to easier majors and then you leave school.

What is your impression of the capabilities of black people that you've gotten from school? So, yes, this is a problem in that it does taint the accomplishments of blacks, and it's one of the reasons I'm a big opponent of these policies. And that leads you to your mismatch theory, right? Yeah. Meaning what you just said, that dropout rate or that, and that what reinforces in the negative stereotype, is inherently part of the mismatch theory. Yes, absolutely. What we know from a large body of research is that one of the most important things in where a student. goes to school and is successful there is whether their academic credentials match those of other

people at the same institution. Where there's a gap, you're going to see that student struggle. And so it doesn't matter if it's a gap in race. It doesn't matter if the gap is coming from the child of alumni or a donor. It doesn't matter if the gap is an athlete, a star athlete. there's a gap that student one. If Harvard gave people, hold on real quick, left, left, that's interesting. You brought up legacies. You see left handed redheads pooling at the bottom of the class, dropping out at higher rates. That's just the way it works. Right. You need to go to school to be successful. You need to go to school with people that somewhat matched your academic credentials because that is going to determine the pace at which the material is taught in class. Professors teach to the middle. So you're behind credentials. We've seen this also play out, to your point, with legacies and with athletes.

So an athlete that gets into a better school, not on his academic credentials. Right. It depends on the size. So an athlete, if he goes to a school that's a hard academic school and he got there on an athletic scholarship and he has trouble academically, then what we've seen is, what you described earlier, potential washout rate, failure rate, and so forth. And the same thing with legacies. I got in because my daddy and my granddaddy did, but I'm really not good enough to be here. Then he struggles to stay in school. And the real problem here, or the real tragedy, I should say, is that if you look at a school like a Duke or University of North Carolina,

these very selective schools that take black students who haven't met the average score of the average person at that school, their test scores don't match that. that child typically, that student, that young person, has test scores that are well above the national average. They're just not as high as the average student at Duke. So they've set this kid up to fail. This kid could be hitting it out of the park at North Carolina State or at Michigan State. But instead, they've been funneled into the University of Michigan or the University of North Carolina or Duke for window dressing purposes so that these schools can show a catalog that, you know, is racially balanced. And these schools care less about the actual outcomes after that student is admitted.

I mean, I don't care what the freshman class looks like so much as what the graduating class looks like. And they are setting up kids to fail and never make it to graduation, kids that would be hitting it out of the park at a less selective institution. So affirmative action doesn't do any favors for the intended beneficiaries. And that's one of the points I try and stress in the book. So I want to make sure, I want to revisit this for a second. because I can just hear my own thoughts and probably everybody listening, like, well, we all believe in rigor and a strenuous environment and sort of, you know, the whole maximum, Jason, like, if you're the, what is it? If you surround yourself with four idiots, if you're the smartest person, then you become the fifth idiot. If you surround yourself with five geniuses and you're the dumbest, then you become eventually the fifth genius, right? In other words, surround yourself with high achievers is sort of what's in and put yourself into a rigorous environment. But I guess, so the balance is,

is, okay, in a school environment, if you take an underqualified kid, either based upon racial preferences, legacy admissions, athlete, whatever, red-headed left-handers, like you said, the risk is that he quits, and you're seeing it play out in the data, that he washes out, he fails out, he doesn't rise to the standard, he doesn't achieve to the level of everybody else, the risk is he quits, and he's in a worse position. And if he had gone to a more matched institution, you use the example of NC State, he'll actually continue to strive, maybe middle the pack, maybe top of the pack, wherever he ends up, and he ends up graduating from that institution and is a better place in his life than struggling at the higher institution?

Absolutely. And we have, we have, we have, not only do we have academic studies that show this, we have real world experiences that show this. Because, you know, before the Supreme Court decision on Harvard, several states had done. already banned race preferences in college admissions. Big, diverse states, California, Florida, Texas, Arizona. So we know what happened in those states. So after California banned racial preferences back in the mid-1990s, you saw decline in black enrollment

at the top schools in the system, Berkeley and UCLA. But in the overall University of California system, black enrollment went up. So did Hispanic enrollment. So did GPAs. And most importantly, so did graduation rates. So a system, affirmative action that had been put in place to increase the ranks of the black middle class

in practice left you with fewer doctors, fewer lawyers, fewer physicists than you would have had in the absence of the policy. And this illustrates the mismatch. Those kids that were mismatched at Burk were better matched with UC Santa Cruz where they went on to earn their degree and earn them in more difficult disciplines and graduate with higher GPAs. So yes, that is what happens and that is the kind of, now the studies we have,

because I like the illustration used earlier about surrounding yourself with smarter people. Unfortunately, the academic studies we have don't support that the lowest performer in the group will catch up. And so I'll give you a quick example. there was a study done of law school students who were admitted to Howard University, the historically black school in D.C., which does not use affirmative action, and George Mason University, a higher-ranked law school that does use it. Black students from Howard passed the bar on their first try at much higher rates than black students who had been admitted under affirmative action at George Mason University.

So did those kids at George Mason University, the black kids who were admitted under affirmative action, get a better education than the kids who went to Harvard, where they met the same standards of their fellow students. So again, we have real world experiences and we have academic studies that show the harm that affirmative action is done. All right. Lastly, I want to talk to you about culture, because what we talked about happening in the 60s and then with the advent of affirmative action in the 70s, Jason, was the beginning of the decline of the family for one element that we were talking about. But we're now, what, 50 years removed from the beginning of those policies.

And so a lot of things that were incentivized back then, while they remain with incentives, over a 50-year period, you can ingrain some of that into culture. And you talk about culture in this book. And you talk a lot more about, like, respectability politics, and it's about culture instead of racism. Yes, very much so. Pull up your pants, finish school, take care of your children. But it's become taboo to say those things. You get your head handed to you when you say those things.

The focus has to be kept on white racism as the all-purpose explanation for inequality, racial inequality in our society. And then that has been drilled in to people, particularly lower-income blacks, by politicians and by activists. And it's a very, very dangerous thing. And mainly because it is untrue. Imagine if Martin Luther King or Thurgood Marshall or those civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks had had that attitude that, you know, oh, people are racist, guess we'll just throw up our hands and wait for white people to get their act together. No, these people have the attitude that blacks must perform, blacks must lift themselves up, notwithstanding what whites are doing. We cannot let that stop us.

And yet today, you go to your black elites, your Ebram, Kendi's, your Tanahisi, Coe, is, you're Nicole Hannah Jones's with their 1619 project. It's the exact opposite. Don't ask anything of black people until we have vanquished white racism from America. And so long as I see a Confederate flag out there somewhere, so long as someone's out there using the N-word, you can't talk, I can't talk to you about black behavior. That's irrelevant.

And that's the attitude that is ingrained in a sort of subculture of blacks. It's very, very, very damaging. I think we need to do what we can to move away from it. How damaging, Jason, do you think popular culture is? You know, it was a story the other day. It was a free speech-based story. It was like, will the Trump administration do something to outlaw narco-coritos? That's songs in Mexico that celebrate and sort of deify drug cartels and drug cartel leaders.

And look, that's a free speech argument that's waiting to be had. However, I do think there is. is real impact on popular culture on how people see themselves in the wider society. And, you know, whether or not it's, whether not it's music or, and not even just music, you wrote about this, acting white, so many different things that disincentivize or discourage, or I don't, if I'm trying to think, if I had somebody disagreed with me, Jason, they'd say no, trying to encourage a different form of success. Well, I'll tell you this, if Trump did push for outlawing gangster rap, I think there'd be a lot of black moms and dads out there who would cheer him on in doing that.

I certainly know that my parents tried to shield me from that subculture. And I find it unfortunate that some of the most popular hip-hop acts out there, these guys have become millionaires and even billionaires, trafficking in the worst stereotypes about black people. Trafficking and misogyny and violence and glorifying. And materialism and glorifying it. And living it out. Look at where Sean Combs is right now. They weren't just rapping about it.

So, yes, this has been hugely damaging. But again, it is something that our cultural elites look to and say, you know what? Jason is the sellout. He's the one acting white. You know, Snoop Dog is the authentic black person. You know, what this really, where this really came to head. By the way, Jason, do you think Malcolm X? The thing is, interestingly, I think black leaders who were the proto-pro-nationalist black leaders from the 60s would actually agree with you.

Like, what would Malcolm X think of, like, you know, Snoop Dog? We know. We know he said it. Mark, Mr. King, Thurgoer Marshall, those guys were. were very much into respectability politics. They believe that it mattered how blacks carried themselves. They said, yes, there's racism out there, but we can't blame all of our problems on racism.

We have to address some of these issues within our community in terms of our behavior, our conduct, our attitudes, and habits. We need to be in a position to take advantage of these civil rights we're fighting for once we have them. And so, yes, they would very much agree with me, I think. And I think I cite some of their work to that effect in the book, that the attitudes in the black leadership have changed dramatically on this front

over the past 50 years and for the worse. Yeah. Really fascinating stuff. The Central Tent is talking about affirmative action, the myth of affirmative action in Jason's new book, which I encourage you to check out. The Affirmative Action Myth, Jason Rowley, Fox News contributor, and Wall Street Journal columnist. It's out now, Jason. It is out now and available on Amazon and in bookstores.

Okay, awesome, and an awesome conversation. I'm glad to have you on. Thank you so much. I could go on for another half hour, but Jason has a heart out, so I'll let him go here. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. Thank you. Take care of well. All right. Take care. There you goes. Jason Riley, the affirmative action myth. All right, the Utah Hockey Club has a new name. Do we like it? And the Dallas Cowboys have a new wide receiver. Do we like him next on the Will Kane Show? It is time to take the quiz. It's five questions in less than five minutes. We ask people on the streets of New York City to play along. Let's see how you do. Take the quiz every day at thequiz.com. Then come back here to see how you did.

Thank you for taking the quiz. Fox News Audio presents Unsolved with James Patterson. Every crime tells the story. But some stories are left unfinished. Somebody knows. Real cases, real people. Listen and follow now at Fox Truecrime.com. George Pickens and the Utah Mammoth.

It is the Will Kane show streaming live at Fox News.com. On the Fox News YouTube channel and the Fox News Facebook page, hit subscribe at Apple or on Spotify. I want to bring in tinfoil Pat if we can. Justin's filling in today for two days, Dan. And we technologically hope everything. works out. But I bring you in tinfoil because this is probably your expertise. We're going to try to limit airtime to the scintillating nature of your commentary. But this is your

expertise. Uniforms. This is what you tweet about, think about, mascots, names, seems to dominate 70% of your thought when you're not devoted to some kind of conspiracy theory. The Utah hockey club has chosen a name after quite some time of debate, they narrowed it down to maintaining the Utah Hockey Club, going with the Utah outlaws tied to the frontier spirit of the American West. There was a lot of really cool outlaws that did call Utah home. And the Utah Mammett, a nod, the Ice Age Giants that once roamed the region 10,000 years ago.

But, for example, there's a 1980s. 88 discovery of a mammoth skeleton in Huntington Canyon. They could not go with the Yeti, which was our favorite here on the Wilcane show, because a Yeti Coolers. That was a trademark office rejection because of the popularity of the Yeti Coolers. They didn't negotiate anything to work it out. So Utah has selected the mammoth. What do you think, tinfoil?

I think that Utah just hates pluralized sports names. I mean, we now have the Jazz, the Mammoth. No S is at the end of their names for these teams. And they could have changed the Jazz name, so I don't know why they didn't do it. But overall, I like it. I think Mammoth is a strong name. Yeah, Jazz moved from New Orleans to Utah and kept it.

And that's a little awkward. It is. And I don't think anybody would begrudge the Utah Jazz becoming something else. I like Utah Mammoth. I'm good with it. I'm in on it. Tenful and I talked about this this morning. In concept, there for a while, I liked Utah Hockey Club.

I liked Washington football team. I know it's generic, but sometimes generic is counterculture cool. And I liked it at first. I also am a soccer fan. And we talked through this this morning. I like names like Manchester United, Manchester City, F.C. Dallas in that environment. And when I see a team like, say, the Chicago fire, it sounds a little juvenile by comparison. And I like that soccer teams use the badge or a crest with words on it, right?

And it seems distinguished in that environment for a sport that's been around for hundreds of years and clubs that have been around for a hundred years. It seems traditional, and it makes something like the Denver Broncos sound silly or any soccer team that embraces that sort of movement. And by the ways, a lot of those European soccer clubs do have nicknames. They just, you know, they're called that, but they don't really use it in their branding,

like citizens or toffees or, you know, there's a whole host of them. So it's kind of distinguished, but I think it has to work in its own environment. And football and hockey are caricature sports in a way. They embrace big logos, big symbiology, big mascots. And Washington football team ends up sounding generic in a world of Giants, Eagles, and Cowboys. And Utah Hockey Club sounds generic in a world of maple leaves and senator. and stars and Panthers. I get it.

In the end, I get, even though my instinct is to think it's distinguished to be the Utah Hockey Club, I can see how it comes off generic in that particular sport. 100%. I mean, when it comes to like hockey and hockey jerseys, you want that big crest logo. You need something kind of around it. And a lot of teams recently have tried to mimic like the Rangers and the Rangers vertical stripes or the rangers vertical horizontal lettering horizontal

diagonal no no diagonal diagonal diagonal diagonal diagonal diagonal diagonal it doesn't work it's like a one one time thing just like the panthers tried to mimic the the canadian stripe on the on the jersey it doesn't work it's like one time thing most hockey teams you have to have that logo in the middle and i think with the mammoth their new jerseys they have that they still have diagonal striping on the away jersey doesn't look is good, but, you know, it is, it's like you got to, you got to kind of stick to what

your sport is when it comes to these. And baseball, we talk about it's, baseball is an alliterative sport. It's the word. It says Texas on the front of the Rangers jersey, right? And the hat is a T. And I think that's right for that sport. And it's, it's more akin to soccer in that way. It's older.

It's more literal back in the days when they didn't have graphic designers to make some, like, amazing logo. And I like it. It harkens back to history in baseball and in soccer. And it looks silly sometimes. I'd say the Astros have pulled it off. I do like the Astros logo on their hats and they've pulled it off. But in football, I don't want to see bingles written across the helmet. I want to see the tiger stripes. I think it looks awesome. So I'm with you. I think baseball, soccer, be literal, old, and traditional, and you don't need fancy mascots and monikers and logos. But hockey and football, you do. And now, I think you could make this mammoth logo pretty goofy, pretty quick.

So they're going to have to be careful. You know, I don't want to see some cartoon mammoth stampeding at me. It's okay. It's already out. It is? The new logo? I haven't seen it. It's okay.

I don't have to look at it again. I'd only saw them brief. But I mean, you're 100% right. I mean, the worst football helmets, you know, a lot of people put, and this obviously I have a bias, but I also hate this style, like the script gaiters across the helmet, people put that helmet in like the top 10. I think it's absurd because it's just words on a football helmet. It's like football helmets should have, should be playing, like Notre Dame's gold.

They should have, you know, I like the Florida State. Spear, obviously, or, you know, Dallas's Star or, you know, Eagle Wings on the side of the helmet, something that stands out, the Bengals helmet. But, you know, scripts in football are absurd. I'm looking at the Utah Mammoth logo. It's okay, like you said. It's okay. It's a little bit, and maybe this is retro now, but it's a little bit 1990s style New England Patriots, Denver Broncos, look in logo where I would go with the old Patriots and the old Broncos logos. Those were

awesome with Pat Patriot. And the old Buccaneers is a little bit Buccaneers-ish as well where I like whatever they called the guy. What was the Pirate? Yeah. With the Bucks. Bucco.

Bucco Bruce. Pat Patriot. Bucco Bruce. Yeah. Those were solid. Okay. This is actually real quick. This actually harkens to the Minnesota Wild logo. because you can see the head kind of mimics the mountain range, whereas the wilds was kind of like a wild landscape.

So I see what they did. It's too modern and minimalist, but it's not bad. Anyway. Meanwhile, the Dallas Cowboys have promised four weeks that even though they didn't draft a wide receiver, and they definitely need one, to be their wide receiver number two, to C.D. Lamb,

that they're works on a big trade. It appears that trade has been pulled off. The Cowboys have traded for Pittsburgh Steelers' wide receiver George Pickens. They gave up a third round pick and a fifth round pick in consecutive years, and they got back a sixth round pick from the Steelers. Now, I'm torn. George Pickens is a diva. He has a history of it.

He wants the ball. He complains. He's said to be not that. that hard of a worker if he's not being targeted. On the other hand, he's incredibly talented. People say he could be great in a different system with a real quarterback, and the Steelers haven't had a great quarterback for a while. But the Cowboys seem to, my gut is they always seem to overpay.

Like when they traded for Amari Cooper, and that was a win of a trade, I remember my take on ESPN was, why did you give up a first round pick? Nobody gives up first round picks for veteran wide receivers. And they just crave up a fourth round pick for Jonathan Mingo. I'm like, everybody here's like, why would that cost you a fourth round pick? Look at other, look at other wide receivers who've been traded, and it doesn't cost that much. And I'll give you examples. Debo Samuel traded from the 49ers to the commander's fifth round pick.

Now, he made a lot more money, and he needed a new contract, both. But they've essentially got him for one year, I think, the commanders, and he makes $20 million. They get up a fifth round pick. DeAndre Hopkins went from the Titans to the chiefs for. a fifth round pick. And let's be honest, Hopkins was, oh, not great. All right with the Chiefs. Devante Adams went for the Raiders to the Jets for a third round pick. But Devante Adams is a lot better than, for example, Jonathan Mingo, although he didn't do a ton with the Jets when he was traded. Johan Dotson went from the commanders to the Eagles for a third round pick and two-sevenths. A fifth

came back. So what I'm getting at is I look at the market and I look at the cost. A third round pick for George Pickens is not bad. The Cowboys only have him on one year of contract. They have to figure out if they're going to pay him. And that bothers me giving up a third round pick for essentially one year if you don't pay him to stay. But the Texans gave the bills a second round pick for Stefan Diggs. They did get a fourth and fifth back.

So I don't know how that balances out. But this deal is pretty Jerry Judy, by the way, that's a good one. That's one that's worked out. The Browns traded for Jerry Judy from the Broncos. And they did that for a fifth and sixth round pick. So I think it's expensive what the Cowboys spent on George Pickens. They certainly didn't get a deal. But I'm not sure they were completely robbed either.

It's within the bandwidth. Good receivers should be in that third to fifth round range. Judy was a better deal, clearly. But when I look at all these other comps, I see the face you're making already. He's in the high range of the comp, trading for George Pickens. He is. So one of the things that stands out to me, when we're talking about all these other receivers, is Judy was young still, okay?

But Judy was still a crapshoot because he didn't do anything in Denver. Pickens, though, he still put up 900 yards. He's young and talent. People know his talent level. And so, like, but he's still only 24. And all these other receivers, they're in their 30s at least. So, I mean, like, it's actually the only one to, you know, like, Dotson and Metcalf, you know, Dodson was a third, Metcalf was a second.

And it's like, you know, other than that, I think it's a pretty good value for a guy who's so young, you know. Judy is the one that blows it out. You're like, how did the Browns get him for a fifth and a six? And he wasn't doing much in Denver. That's the answer to why. But the talent was still there. And maybe that will be the deal with Pickens. Like he was doing pretty well in Pittsburgh, but it was dysfunctional.

Hopefully that's not all on his personality, because that'll be a problem. But if it's not that, then it is a decent deal for a young wide receiver. Unfortunately, one you have to pay a year from now. But not bad. Makes the Cowboys offense look pretty good. They're loaded on the offensive line. You got C.D. Lamb and George Pickens now as your top two wide receivers. You got a healthy Dak Prescott.

The question is, can they run the ball with the rookie Jaden Blue from. Texas or somebody behind that good offensive line. I'll have questions about their defense. They're really banged up in the secondary and at cornerback. But I don't think this is going to make the Cowboys necessarily a Super Bowl contender because you've got the Eagles and commanders in your division. But it makes me much more optimistic about where the Cowboys sit today. So the verdict is it's always easy to trade a future draft pick until next year you're

sitting there without a third and then it hurts. but pretty good trade for the Cowboys to get George Pickens from the Pittsburgh Steelers. We like the Mammoth. We pretty much like George Pickens for the Dallas Cowboys. All right, that's going to do it for us today. Hope to see you tomorrow in Dallas,

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