Awakening: A Conversation with Heather MacDonald

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today we have a special episode with Heather McDonald, who has recently written a book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.

And we look forward to hearing from her.

She is one of the leading people in the fight against the destruction of our culture by woke ideology and policy.

And I know that a lot of our Lynch listeners will be very interested in that.

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Welcome back.

Heather McDonald has written extensively on criminal justice reform, immigration, race relations, and cultural issues, especially about academia.

She has published six books, besides the new one, which is

When Race Trumps Merit.

Some of her two other notable ones are War on Cops and the Diversity Delusion, How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.

She received a Master's in English from Clare College, Cambridge, and a law degree from Stanford University.

And before I hand this over to Victor, I noticed, Heather, that you went to high school at Phillips Academy Andover.

And if you guys get a chance or there's some time, I would be interested in hearing how you went from that very proudly left-leaning institution to one of our leading conservative

critics in the modern time.

Are you asking that, Sammy, because you taught there yourself?

I did

for two years.

So I'm very curious, although it may be just the difference in time.

But anyways, Heather, we're excited to have you here.

And I look forward to the discussion of your recent book and the incomparable research you've done on problems plaguing our culture.

So welcome.

And it's all yours, Victor.

Well, good.

This is a great opportunity and privilege to have Heather here for a variety of reasons.

We collaborated on a book on immigration, the immigration solution.

And she bears the name of one of the great patriots, I think, philanthropists of our age, Thomas Smith, who's

associated with her at the Manhattan Institute.

But what's really unique about our guest is on these questions of diversity and police

and what I would call the narrative that nobody dares question,

including people on the right and the conservative movement.

She's really all alone out there in the wilderness.

Maybe her trailblazing advocacy to look at things empirically have brought others along with her, but she

has really endured a lot of unfair criticism given the excellence of her work.

And it's so unique.

It's so ironic that here, you know, I'm at the Hoover Institution.

We've been talking on this podcast about Stanford Law School and what's happened to it.

Of course,

my own mother was on the board of overseers as a state appellate court judge and a graduate of Stanford.

But Heather is a graduate of Stanford University's Law School.

So,

Heather, what prompted this latest investigation of, I guess we'd call it a quality result or the end of Meritau?

Was it the post, George Floyd, or was something you were thinking about all along?

Because it's so timely.

I was just curious about that.

Well, thank you so much, Victor.

This is an extraordinary honor and a privilege to be able to speak with you at length and not just be able to respond in awe at your TV monologues, Victor.

And to your question, I guess that having gone to elite institutions simply gave me inside knowledge of

how these institutions have so corrupted and betrayed their mission, which is to pass on with love and gratitude and joy

the greatest accomplishments of Western civilization.

And this book was inspired, Victor, you're absolutely right, by the mass psychosis that took over

American culture and spread really across the globe

with the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 in Minneapolis, where

you had every mainstream institution in the United States declare itself racist, but more importantly, declare with a sense of absolute self-righteousness

and

unquestionable conviction that the inherent ineradicable character of the United States in general was racism, and that the only way to combat this alleged racism was to tear down every single colorblind, neutral, constitutional standard of behavior and of accomplishment that may have a so-called disparate impact on underrepresented minorities and above all on blacks.

One thing about your book that was very interesting,

you know, 10 years ago, I think people joked and they said, okay,

so we're going to hire by race and we're not going to use any merocratic criteria in the English department.

or we're going to have an assistant provost of sociology or social science.

But, but we would never extend these protocols to brain surgery or air traffic controllers or pilots, because these are the essentials of a sophisticated society and it's built on meritocracy.

But as you point out, that's where we are now.

So it seems to me what you're warning us about, and you chapter and verse with your documentation, you're warning us that this is a new phase that would not just impair higher education that we've all dealt with for years, but the very workings or sustainability of life as we've known it.

Well, this is what is so utterly astonishing, Victor, that people who have devoted their lives to some of the greatest accomplishments of Western civilization, and one of those is the scientific method, empiricism, the conquest of nature through the application of human reason, and the extraordinary extraordinary development of randomized controlled experiments to test hypotheses.

People in science, people in mathematics, people in engineering,

the leaders of academic departments, the leaders of our federal science agencies are all going around declaring that science is racist, that medicine is racist,

that objectivity is racist, that accuracy is racist.

They are betraying what they have worked their lives to accomplish and what hundreds of years of

amateur scientists have accomplished in the name of a lie, in the name of an utter fiction and fraud, which is that our meritocratic institutions today are discriminating against competitively qualified minorities.

Now, I wasn't, I mean, it's appalling,

it's utterly infuriating.

But frankly, let's face it, Victor, you and I are constitutional pessimists.

You know, nobody's going to accuse us of being excessively cheerful about the future.

So was I really surprised?

No, I wasn't.

You and I both knew that the safe harbor conservative line.

uh that oh ha ha ha ha these these

these these narcissistic self self-pitying snowflakes, as they were called.

I always thought that was a ridiculous term for these student crybabies.

It was a dangerous term because it allowed people to think this was just sort of a acute phenomenon.

But the idea that once they got into the real world, the hard realities of the market would strengthen their spine and they'd have to throw aside all of

their solipsism and self-pity.

I always knew that that was a fake hope and that they would bear with them the virus

of narcissistic grievance politics into the real world.

And it was, frankly, an inevitability that the hatred for excellence and the preference for mediocrity that is our race politics today would spread to science, to aviation, to Alzheimer's labs,

to emergency rooms.

It was an inevitability.

Yeah.

You know, when I think when readers, when they sum up what you've written both in essays in City Journal and elsewhere, op-eds, and the diversity myth in this book, it seems that a subtext, if not an overt, theme, Heather, is when you trace back the origins or the catalyst for these suicidal and nihilistic movements, you come up with the idea that of hypocrisy and careerism.

And by that I mean it seems that there's a lot of very wealthy, affluent people who self-identify as marginalized, the people in the view or people

in Hollywood or in politics, that kind of Obama profile.

And for them, promoting this is sort of a mechanism among an insular society to get a better job, a higher title.

But ultimately, also, there's the hypocrisy of what I'd call the bicoastal white elite,

because I don't think, and I think you argue this a lot, they don't assume that they will ever suffer the consequences of their own ideology.

And by that, I mean when they fly in a Gulfstream, I don't think they use diversity criteria for their Gulfstream pilot, or when they have a brain tumor and they need a meningioma out.

I don't think they say, I'm going to go to the Anderson Center in Texas, but I want to make sure that that brain surgeon team is diverse.

In other words, it's almost as if they're protected by their toxic ideas that they use us as lab rats to experiment on.

I think that's a theme that you've emphasized now and in the past.

Well, there is an enormous amount of hypocrisy.

And, you know, conservatives go around claiming double standards, double standards.

It never seems to work.

Like

they're absolutely impervious to the accusation.

Obviously, the most obvious one is

the green

posturing about the climate change and sustainability.

And they continue year after year to fly in their private jets to Davos.

And we can raise all the alarm that we want about this nauseating hypocrisy.

It doesn't make a damn bit of difference.

They are absolutely shame-proof.

So, yes, in general,

they are, that the white elites are insulated.

On the other hand, there are occasional moments when one can really take enormous pleasure when some of the left-wing elite institutions get some of their own medicine and are accused of being racist.

And that happens regularly, say at the New York Times, with revolts among the

writers against their editors for being racist or being homophobic or transphobic or whatnot.

And I don't know if that insulation is going to continue indefinitely because right now, the rate at which heterosexual white males are being canceled from institutions, are being put at the absolute bottom, are being frankly culled.

We are in a period of white culling.

That is happening so

fast and at such a broad scope that I think it is going to start to hit

even the

children of these white elites who are promoting racial preferences that their kids may not get into their preferred schools much longer.

Yeah.

At Stanford, they just released their class of 2026.

And although whites make up 67 or 70 percent of the general population, they list, according to their own statistics, they only have 22 percent white.

And out of that, given the inordinate amount of women versus men, not inordinate, but asymmetrical, it looks like there's only about

11

percent, maybe 10 percent of the incoming class are white males.

And that's to a not so severe, but that's true of the Ivy League.

And one of the things you're seeing is you've kind of disenfranchised two groups that the traditional Jewish American that was excelled on merit and was quote unquote like Asians overrepresented are now really being turned away at the Ivy League and places like Berkeley or Stanford.

And then you have essentially disenfranchised the entire white working class that might have had a 4.5 with advanced placement and high school GPA or perfect SAT score, but they have no, they're not the children of deans or doctors or donors, or they don't have any

way of a legacy or an athletic.

And they're just simply erased.

That's one thing that came up when I was reading your book.

The other is that when we do this,

there are consequences because when Mark Milley and Austin and most of the joint chiefs started lecturing us on white privilege, white rage, white supremacy,

they just assumed that there were no consequences.

But in Afghanistan and Iraq,

of the people who died there, 75%

were white males in the combat of all people, but they were inordinately overrepresented in combat units, which explains why they died at twice their demographic in the general population.

And yet we never hear that.

But they're short now, 16,000 soldiers.

in the army and maybe 5,000 in the Air Force and in all the services, 40 or 50,000.

And when you look at the data, it's almost preponderantly white males from the middle and lower classes are not joining the military.

That's something that's really scary.

Well, if I can promote one of your works, Victor, the data you just gave on Stanford is from your latest magnificent opus in the new criterion on California that ends up zooming in on the Bay Area and Silicon Valley and Stanford in particular.

So I just want to i want to recommend that to all of your listeners because it just contains amazing history and and data uh

yes i mean to me the question is

who is going to be able to find the language to

be able to enter the political arena and describe what is going on.

And what is going on, as I say, is white culling.

But one feels, you know, when I go on TV, when you go on TV,

to use the word white in any context other than opprobrium,

it's perfectly acceptable for the New York Times to label institutions and individuals white with the intention of canceling those individuals or institutions.

Joe Biden can go around

in his presidential campaign, in his inauguration speech, in his constant harping on the stain that whites put on America's soul from their white supremacy.

It's okay for him to impugn the character of whites.

But if you use white in public discourse, not in that

in that condemnatory fashion, but simply empirically to describe what the actual effect of our policies are, You can feel viscerally that this is very dangerous.

You're not allowed to say it.

And there are many conservative commentators who say, oh, we do not want white identity politics.

We can't go there.

So there's an asymmetry.

Every other group gets its own identity politics,

but European identity politics is not allowed.

And maybe that is absolutely the wise course to take,

and that we can somehow believe that we can pull it all back without naming what is going on.

But I just think that at some point we need to be honest that every time it's a zero-sum game.

And every time an institution

decides to radically lower standards in order to engineer a diverse, so-called diverse outcome,

and bring in underrepresented minorities

whose qualifications are so low that they would be automatically disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians.

And that's going on in medical schools.

It's going on in law schools.

It's going on in business schools.

It's going on in undergraduate admissions.

When they do that, they are by definition denying places to far more qualified whites and Asians.

Now, I'm speaking about averages here, Victor.

I'm speaking about group averages.

I am not speaking about any given individual.

There are many, there are thousands of Blacks and Hispanics who greatly outperform their own group average and outperform individuals from other groups.

But the averages are the things that are driving our discourse, that are driving our policies, and we are shrinking.

opportunities at every single moment for, as you say, the high achieving white working class across the board for Asians and for Jews.

And one can only hope that we figure out a way

to start speaking the truth because we are asking for civilization cancellation and mediocrity by deciding that we would rather have diversity than meritocracy.

That's a very good point because I think people realize are beginning to realize that the stuff of civilization takes a long time to achieve, but you can really unwind it as we saw since George Floyd very quickly.

I once in 2006,

I was asked to speak on the Roman mosaics in Libya.

It just opened under the Qaddafi regime when it was sort of liberalizing.

I had two government minders, and when they picked me up at the airport, we ran into a pothole and we had to get out of the car, a little Russian car, and lift it out.

And I said to them, How can you be an oil exporter with all of the ingredients of asphalt in your roads are terrible?

And the guy turned around and said, Mr.

Hansen, we hire our first cousin here.

And what he was trying to say is on a tribal system, we're not merucratic.

And that's what's really scary about it.

And, you know, you said that everybody is afraid.

And that really struck home, too.

I was listening right before Tucker Carlson was relieved.

And when he got onto that topic, I would read what people wrote about him the next day, and they'd say,

he's an advocate of the great replacement theory, but what he was really doing was echoing or repeating or reiterating what, oh, a John Judas or Roy Texera or a James Carrawell had been writing for 10 years or 15 years.

They had books with the title

The New Democratic Majority or

Demography is Destiny.

And it was almost a triumphant welcoming of an open border.

And when Tucker said they are trying to change the demographic for political reasons, they called him a nationalist, white nationalist that believed in the great replacement theory.

And when all he was doing was summing up the triumphalism of the left.

But apparently, they felt that they were exempt from anybody identifying.

them for what they were really doing.

And that's what's really scary.

I don't know how to,

you, you had a really good point where it stops, because when you look at the polls do you support admissions by race hiring by race the majority says no do you support uh reparations no but when

these

questions that have no popular support are institutionalized in foundations in academia and k through 12 and entertainment and the media in silicon valley wall street the left's control of the institutions is so powerful that even popular opposition to

these identity politics measures doesn't seem to work.

It's almost as if we're waiting for some kind of natural leader who's fearless and just says, I'm not going to do this anymore.

I don't care what you say.

You're the racist.

I'm not.

And you can say anything you want about me.

But we don't seem to have a political leader who's got the stature or confidence to do that yet.

No, I totally agree.

Well, I mean, I have to say, and I'm not in any business of political endorsements or whatnot, but I have to say I'm impressed with DeSantis.

He does do that.

You're absolutely right.

He does do that.

He's the closest, I think.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel chagrined that I had been writing on these topics for

decades, and it didn't occur to me the very simple legislative steps that he's taken.

It all seems so obvious in retrospect, and he's...

He's setting a model.

So, yes,

that is exactly what it's going to take, Victor, is somebody with stature to get up and say, you cannot scare me by calling me a racist.

I'm giving you the facts.

I am not a racist.

This is not, at this point, a racist country.

It was a racist country.

It was a white supremacist country.

It was an apartheid state.

It violated in a completely heart-wrenching, nauseating manner its founding ideals.

One can admit that.

and say that is not our country today.

Today, the reality is black privilege, not white privilege.

You cannot find an institution, mainstream institution in this country that is not tying itself into knots to hire and promote as many blacks as possible.

I'll believe in white privilege when somebody tells me about a high school senior who's applying to college, who puts down his race as white when in fact he's black.

That will never happen because the reality is black privilege, and everybody knows it.

So, So, you know, I think the other thing that needs to be understood though, I think that Americans are sleepwalking through all of this is how vast the academic skills gaps are.

So that even though you have every single institution, whether it's an Alzheimer's research lab or a big tech company or a law firm that is

doing everything it can to hire and promote as many blacks as possible.

Here's why we still have not not achieved proportional representation across the board in our meritocratic institutions.

It's the academic skills gap.

And in my experience, Victor, people are clueless as to just how vast it is.

And let me just throw some numbers out.

I know it's always hard to absorb numbers orally, but here they are anyway.

Black 12th graders, 66%

of all black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of basic 12th grade math skills defined as being able to do arithmetic or read a graph.

Eight percent of black 12th graders are proficient in basic 12th grade math skills, and the number who are advanced in math is too small to show up statistically.

Now, those

that

huge academic skills gap means that it is preposterous to look at an engineering department at Caltech or MIT

or the University of California, Irvine, and say it doesn't have 13% Black engineers, therefore it's a racist department.

Therefore, we know as a prima fascia matter that it is discriminating against qualified black engineers.

No, they are not in the pipeline.

And so when an institution tells you that we are opting for diversity,

you know that it is canceling meritocracy and it is hiring not on the basis of academic accomplishment, but on the trivialities of race and in many instances, sex as well.

And so it's going to take a leader, I think,

to not just speak in generalities about colorblindness.

But I think somebody's going to have to bite the bullet and actually say what our real problem is, which is a inner city

culture that is pathological, that defines academic effort and academic achievement as acting white.

And that culture is resulting in the perpetuation of the vast academic skills gaps that make any expectation of racial proportionality across the board completely fanciful.

And we're going to get right back.

The book that we're discussing is When Race Trumps Merit with Heather McDonald, and it's already

way up on the Amazon ratings.

I urge you all to go out and buy it.

You've read The War Against Cops, you've read her earlier work.

So I think this is her masterpiece.

They're all good books, but this is really the most, it's really timely.

Not that The War on Cops wasn't also eerily timely, timely, but this is especially so.

And we'll be right back.

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We're back with Heather McDonald and discussing whether Race Trump's merit.

You know, I think Sallust once said, and Libby said it too, that you reach an impasse when the medicine is considered worse than the disease.

And when you talk about the inner city, I think everybody understands that single-parent households, the absence of a father, and

these exorbitant crime rates.

and the inability to recreate a family unit in the inner city or in other immigrant communities, some of them, means that it's way too late at the college level to inculcate the necessary skills to be competitive.

But we all know that there could be a solution.

There could be an Al Sharpton or there could be an AOC or somebody like this lecturing about the need for a stable family or charter schools or homeschooling or academies that stressed, you know,

mandatory Latin or English or history so that at a very early age, people who were not as affluent as others or didn't have the same cultural opportunities would still be competitive.

But when you mention that, they either say that's cultural appropriation or you're enforcing white values.

And every time I've been in that situation, you know, and I taught 21 years at Cal State trying to create

classics program.

We sent 50 people over 21 years to the Ivy League law school or PhD programs, but they were mostly Hispanic, Black, Southeast Asian, and poor whites from the Oklahoma diaspora.

But it was enormously hard because people on the left in all of the departments would say, you're trying to brainwash people, you're robbing them of their cultural identity, you're culturally appropriating your values for theirs.

Sometimes their parents would come in and talk to me and say, my son is acting white, or he

doesn't need to do this.

And after 21 years, I was kind of exhausted and be tired.

But the point I'm getting is that we all are aware of the solution is not hard.

It would work.

And we can see it with Asian immigrant families that have already adopted it.

But to

implement it,

even though we would know that it would radically change the lives for the better of millions of people, seems that we're incapable or impotent.

We just can't do it because I guess...

It's to suggest that one methodology is better than another and we can't do that, which gets back to one of the themes of your book, this radical equality of result.

And it's when a society or civilization is in an impasse, when it knows what it has to do, but it knows it can't do it for self-imposed limitations, then it starts to just implode or decline.

Well,

what you say, I completely agree with, except for your use of we,

which I think is too broad, that we know what needs to be done.

Nobody says everybody has to be, you know, a Google engineer.

All we're asking is don't go out and be committing drive-by shootings at 2 p.m.

in the afternoon, spraying bullets across the sidewalk, killing young Black children with a bullet to the head.

That's what's going on that America turns its eyes away from.

We are terrified about the ongoing inner city breakdown.

We don't want to talk about it.

We're scared it's never going to go away.

And so we continue coming up with this alternative explanation for over-representation of blacks in prison and underrepresentation of blacks in meritocratic institutions, which is this ubiquitous systemic racism, which is basically our modern version of phlogiston.

It's a complete,

it's a, it's a.

What do you think?

I mean, Shelby Steele, whom you know, and I know and greatly admire, when he talked about white guilt, it's the guilt.

perhaps that they don't want to come out and speak the truth as they see the truth or is it is it just fear of careerism careerism?

We saw what happened to Professor Katz at Princeton.

He condemned a takeover of the dean's office, and he used the word, it was a terrorist act, and they destroyed his career, although he's doing very well now in an alternate career.

But is it the fear that if you speak out and speak the truth, they're going to come after you?

Or do people have a self-limited idea?

Well, I feel so guilty, I'm well off, and these people are not, these people, these marginalized, whatever they they create or they construct.

Is it just their guilt that they allow themselves to be deluded and they're afraid to say things they know that would help people?

It's just astonishing that we've talked and we all know, I mean, we're not unique.

I think you're right in the criticism of we, but there's people who know the answer that are in a position.

to affect great change, but they won't do it.

And I don't know if that's their short-term careerism or they're just racked with guilt.

I noticed in the Oakland, I don't know if you saw that, Heather.

Yesterday, there was a city council meeting in Oakland,

and they defunded the police.

They decriminalized felonies.

They're having a revolving door.

And there were, it was 500 people.

And the majority were white women who were very left-wing.

And they all got up and started yelling.

And they said, I have been robbed.

This person has been raped.

This person has been assaulted.

We have an epidemic of crime of young teenagers.

What are you going to do about it?

And I was surprised that, and they were addressing these complaints to the city council that had voted to defund the police and et cetera.

But I guess what I'm saying is if things get bad enough and it starts to affect the people who implemented these toxic notions, then you're kind of a race between time, aren't you?

Can you, at the last 11th hour, can you affect the change quick enough before the society collapses?

Yeah, I mean, I've always felt that we're going to ignore crime until white children start getting shot in drive-by shootings.

You know, right now, once if white conservatives stop caring about black lives, it's over.

You know, black, there's just no hope for black crime victims because white conservatives, whether it's Fox News or New York Post, were the only ones talking about it.

You know, and when you do, you're accused of being a racist and using a racist dog whistle.

The idea that the left cares about black lives mattering is a hilarious fraud.

They don't give a damn about black lives.

Every single day, dozens of blacks are killed in homicide.

That is more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, even though Blacks are 13% of the population.

Dozens every single day.

Do we say their names?

Do we know who they are?

No, we don't, because they're killed by other Blacks, not by the police, not by whites.

They're killed by other blacks, and therefore they are not of any use to the white racism narrative.

So, and that includes the dozens of black children who have been gunned down in their beds, in their front yards, porches, jumping on trampolines at barbecues in their parents' car.

We don't say any of those children's names who have been killed in drive-by shootings because they're killed by other blacks.

So, you know, it's good to hear about the Oakland revolt, and I hope it continues.

I would say, up to now,

there's not been much movement on the

let's stop demonizing the police front.

And

I don't think the midterms were particularly positive in that regard.

I think that the status quo, I'm glad you agree because a lot of people were trying to spend them very positively.

To get back to your earlier point about what drives this, is it fear?

Is it guilt?

Shelby Steele is, you know, his, it was paradigmatic, his description of the codependency between guilty white liberals whose moral worth comes from acknowledging phony, non-existent racism, and then the blacks who are playing on that guilt and are doing the race hustle.

But I think there's another element as well, which is that

I think elites are terrified that the

crime gap and the academic skills gap are never going to close, that after trillions of dollars of redistribution, there's been very little progress made.

And

at this point, you can't even talk about culture.

You know, there was a moment in the 1990s during the federal welfare reform and Wisconsin welfare reform and New York, where you could sort of talk about Black pathological inner city culture.

And the whole point of welfare reform was: well, we're going to impose work requirements and hope that somehow that has a

roundabout way of

reincentivizing family formation.

It didn't work, but you could sort of talk about multi-generational poverty.

The amazing thing about our current period, Victor, is even that's off the table.

Nobody is talking about inner city culture.

Back then, you had Orlando Patterson, you had Elijah Anderson, Black sociologist, talking, talking about street culture versus decent culture in the inner city.

You can't now talk about it.

We're all supposed to pretend that

the vast majority of Blacks are being raised in two-parent homes.

They've got

1,400s on their SATs, and the reason that they're not being admitted to MIT is because MIT is somehow discriminating, which is hilarious.

It's ridiculous.

And so nobody wants to look at that.

And we would, I think what the elites are doing is proleptically establishing racism as the only ever allowable explanation for racial disparities because they are terrified of culture and they are really terrified of any kind of heritability argument.

Do you think historically,

and this is just a theory of mine, that we were making progress in assimilation, integration, intermarriage to becoming, we're coming to a point, and I think you were hinting on it about these great black sociologists and the Tom students or followers of Tom Sowell and Shelby Steele.

But it seems to me that there was a divisive, a dividing point with the Obama administration, that at that point,

Obama took an old word diversity that had been a marginal academic word.

He mainstreamed it.

And by that, I mean the old binary between blacks and whites and that historical problem problem of racism, slavery was now transmogrified into anybody who wasn't white.

You could be an Argentine Orthodox, you could be a computer programmer from India, but if you could claim you were not white, you were now part of not a 12%, but 30%.

And

they start at that point,

that group, which was so large, but even if it was ill-defined, started to lodge complaints in the sense of a binary.

We are the victims, you're the victimizer.

We are the oppressed, you're the oppressors.

And you saw Obama when he would say things such as: you know, when my grandmother, who was a bank executive and really worked hard for him to go to prep school, when she walks down, when she sees a black man, she clicks the door and he kind of threw her under the bus.

Or he said, Trayvon Martin is the child, would look like the black son I never had.

Or Michelle, you know, downright mean country and always raised the bar, never been

that

seemed to mainstream the racial essentialism that we're going to push this in a way that we haven't pushed before.

We're giving up on the content of our character rather than the color of our skin, and we're going to lodge an existential complaint about white people.

And that's when I really think the word white became a collective in a way that I'd never heard it before.

I'd always, you know, that seems simplistic, but it seems like the Obamas,

who I think they have a lot to account for because they were really divisive people.

Well, you know,

I'd be very interested in getting more information from you on that, Victor.

That

I don't know if that's sort of a conservative

founding myth that things were getting that much better and that we were closing gaps in in the 90s.

I was thinking, like, in favor of what you're saying, that it was the case that Clinton had the sort of sister soldier moment when he was able to speak about Black dysfunction.

On the other hand, the whole driving while Black conceit that was really big in the late 1990s.

That was another...

Another phony argument about the police, which is that if the police have higher rates of traffic stops of black drivers, it must be because of racism.

One is not allowed to look at driving behavior.

Do blacks speed more?

Do they run red lights more?

The answer is yes, when that was still allowed to be studied.

Now it's of course taboo, but when it was allowed to be studied, yes.

It turns out that the rate of speeding is extremely high.

And the type of driving that you see in inner-city neighborhoods is utterly terrifying.

So I'm not so sure that we were making great, great progress in race relations in the 90s that Obama walked into and sort of all blew up.

I think that the race hustle has been going on for a very long time, and it's something that I just refuse to cave into any longer.

I can't take it anymore.

I saw that.

I went back and looked at the 92 and 96 speeches at the Democratic Convention, and

they would be considered right-wing now by the Democrats.

So they were all talking about closing the border, legal only immigration.

And these were given by Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, protecting union wages.

And

they did speak about race, but

it was deliberately

non-Jesse Jackson.

In other words, Jesse Jackson was not mainstream into the Democratic Party at that point.

I mean, there were other black leaders that were considered not as radical.

But when Obama came in, I mean, he had a picture with Farrakhan.

They didn't release it while he was there, but he was...

He brought in Al Sharpton,

who was far more radical.

And Al Sharpton had been a marginal person.

I mean, Crown Heights and Freddie's Market and all of Tawana Brawley, he was just persona non grata, I thought.

And all of a sudden, he was at the White House every week and mainstream and really launched this new pseudo-career as a black statesman.

And just, I think anybody in the 90s who would have

been told that would have been completely, what, Al Sharpton?

That's what, and I do think that they, I don't think that things were that great.

I don't mean that, but I do think that they got a lot worse after the Obamas were there.

You know, and you were speaking before about, you know, will it take an individual to break through the lie, the absolute,

the oppression of fiction that we're all supposed to live these various fictions now.

And so,

and I agree with you,

and it's very depressing if you're right about Obama that our history could have gone in either direction and that by the just sheer fate of electing this one particular man, he drove us in a particular direction that we weren't destined to go on as opposed to

I sort of feel that structurally we were moving in the direction that we've ended up in already that the academia was every year pumping out more and more narcissistic poison into the society at large that just reached a critical mass but you may well be right that had we had a different president at that moment, we wouldn't have ended up with our George Floyd mass psychosis.

And that's one of the puzzles, obviously, of history and counterfactuals.

But

whatever the reason, whether we were destined or it was Obama who took us there, the fact of the matter is, is that right now,

we're in an emergency situation.

I mean, we are the fact that we're unwinding gifted and talented programs across the country, that we are saying, you know, we are not going to allow our most gifted math students to advance.

We're going to hold them back.

We're not going to give them advanced algebra or calculus because that would result in not

racially proportionate classrooms.

All of this is just civilizational suicide.

It is civilizational suicide for the National Science Foundation, for the National Institutes of Health, to say, we don't care if you're the most qualified oncologist.

You know, we're not going to give you a grant if you're not of the proper race or sex.

Somebody, an oncologist, and go ahead.

I think it's happening at geometric rate.

I was looking at the statistics at your alma mater, Stanford Law School, and the breakdown came in admissions, it seems to me, right

either the year before or during the George Floyd.

And the point I'm making is they had they were rated number two.

I don't know how those ratings are actually

compiled of law schools, but

97% of Stanford graduates passed the California bar on the first try.

This latest cohort,

14%

flunked the bar.

And it's Stanford graduates, 14% flunked the bar.

And of course,

thematic with your book, the point wasn't that they were not getting the necessary instruction because of weak faculty and a watered-down curriculum and their own extracurricular activities that were non-academic while at law school, but more importantly, that the

bar, which has already been watered down in California, was unfair.

And so

that was something that I think is also thematic in your book.

When you talk about people being unprepared and promoted, it's the entire process or protocol by which we evaluate talent has been blown up.

It's almost as if we say,

well, why do inner city people walk out of,

I don't know, they walk out of Walgreens with allergies and they say, the champions of this galaxy, they say, well, white people created laws and because they don't steal allergy pills, it's against the law.

And so why should we follow it?

And that critical legal theory that has been really,

it's what I'm trying to struggle for is that this seems to be a 367 days a week assault on the the very structure of a society.

I think that's what's really fascinating about your book.

It's the whole edifice that makes things work.

And if they were to get their way, I don't think anybody would want to come in the United States.

We wouldn't have seven million entrants that have come under the Obama administration, I mean, the Biden administration's open borders, because this whole society would be

completely identical to places that we know exist in Latin America and South America that don't have meritocracies, but have these tribal considerations or old boy networks or corruption that allows people to be promoted and in positions of influence that they didn't earn.

That's what's really scary, because you're talking about a kind of a neutron bomb that's been let off inside the United States.

It's a profoundly nihilistic view that denies the very

truth and reality of accomplishment and excellence.

So that if there's any standard or expectation that has a disparate impact on Blacks, our response is not, okay,

there's a problem here.

Let's qualify more Blacks.

Instead, we say, that was a racist standard.

That was a phony standard that merely was put into place in order to perpetuate white supremacy.

We'll tear down the standard.

I am sick of it, Victor.

I am sick of it.

How about instead of demanding tear down down the standards on our behalf, Black leaders say we will meet your standards and we'll better your standards.

We'll beat everybody else at this game.

But instead, right now, if any academic standard or behavioral standard, and if any of your listeners still are puzzling over why we're not enforcing the law across the country, why are these left-wing prosecutors declaring, okay, shoplifting,

turnstile jumping, trespass, petty assault, drug possession, resisting arrest,

disorderly conduct.

We're not interested in these.

You can do these with impunity.

Why is this going on?

Why are police chiefs telling their police officers, do not stop or arrest for these various crimes?

Why is this going on?

It's all because of the same reason, disparate impact.

Because when you enforce the law in a colorblind, neutral, constitutional manner, you will have a disparate impact on Black criminals, not because the law is racist, but because the crime rates are so high in the Black community and their victims are Black

predominantly, but also whites.

And we're all supposed to pretend that the reason it's dangerous allegedly to exist while Black in this country is because whites are killing Blacks.

Are you kidding me?

That is not the case.

The vast majority of interracial violence between Blacks and whites and whites and blacks is committed by blacks against whites.

87%

of all interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks is committed by blacks against whites.

Blacks are 35 times more likely to commit

a violent assault against a white than a white is against a black.

And yet, here's Biden telling us that white supremacy is the problem.

But the reason we're not enforcing those laws is because it has a disparate impact.

And,

you know,

we've got to get, we've got to say that the disparate impact concept has to be cast aside.

It is tearing everything down.

We're going to have, when we come back, I'm going to ask Heather some questions about the consequences of being an advocate for

meritocracy.

We'll be right back after this short break.

And we're back with with Heather McDonald.

Heather, so you've been out there in a solitary figure.

And I'd just like maybe our listeners could understand what that entails.

So you were at Claremont and you gave a lecture.

What happened?

What happens to you if I said,

Heather, I want you to speak at Stanford Law School?

These are great ideas.

They're against the grain.

This is exactly.

What would happen if you spoke at Yale or Stanford or things like that right now?

What does that entail for someone in your position?

Well, I don't know if I'm as controversial as Kyle Duncan, the Fifth Circuit judge who spoke at Stanford and caused an absolute psychotic breakdown on the part of the students there by his very presence.

Because, you know, these are lawyers, budding lawyers who are supposed to be able to handle different ideas.

No, that's not the case actually at Stanford Law School.

You know, I haven't been to a law school in a while, but I can tell you in the past,

if I go to a campus and have one of two messages, I can say, we're not living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men.

Or if I say,

you college students are not oppressed.

In fact,

Not only are you not oppressed, you are

probably the most privileged human beings in history because you have at your fingertips the thing that Faust sold his soul for, which was knowledge.

The students will freak out.

There is nothing that makes a college student angrier than to be told that he is not oppressed, because his oppression is his basis of dignity and self-worth.

And there is nothing that is less acceptable to college students than to tell them that, no, the police are not racist.

So when I spoke at Claremont McKenna College, which is a small liberal arts institution in Southern California outside of Los Angeles,

300 students blockaded the auditorium in which I was supposed to speak in order to prevent anybody from entering the auditorium to hear me or engage with me.

So I spoke to an empty auditorium until the police decided it was no longer safe to have me there because all these students were pounding on the plate glass windows outside the auditorium.

And other places, there's been walkouts and

protests, you know, students that file in, take seats up.

And then nobody was ever disciplined for that, right?

At Claremont, I think there was some minor, a little bit of minor discipline.

So

when you have a proposal with a great book like this, when race trumps merit, and

you have an agent, and

would Alfred Knopp or Random House will say, my god, this is a sensational book, it's going to recalibrate the whole that's not going to happen, right?

Because of ideology and

that's true as well too.

I know it is in my case that conservative authors,

it's very hard to publish as it used to be.

You could publish, you could go to any publisher.

And by the same token, do you think the New York Times or the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement will write a sober and judicious fair review of your book?

No, we're up against clearly

an ideologically monolithic culture, elite culture,

that is confident in its superiority, in its unique possession of the truth.

I always object to the conservative line that the left is relativistic.

It's not.

It's absolutely morally dogmatic.

They're convinced they have the truth.

The problem there is not nihilism.

It's the failure to understand the extraordinary achievement and beauty of the idea of the marketplace of ideas, another Western concept foreign to the rest of the world

that we in the West are now deciding we don't want to live with either.

So, yes, I, you know, what one at this point

one looks on in a state of

uncomprehending uncomprehending uh

sort of passivity of i don't know at what point do you stop what does look to be this movement into sort of totalitarian culture how do you pull the emergency rip cord i don't know stop it you think some of people it's kind of like a monastery of the mind by that i mean

they don't go to target or they've never turned on the oscars or the emmys or the grammys or the tonys or they don't watch the nba i was just looking at the nba figures

29 million people watched the finals 30 years ago.

And now they're bragging they have one-tenth of

that audience, maybe 4 million at the most, a little bit more than that, 12, 15%.

And they call that success.

So there must be a lot of people who

feel they can't speak out, but they just passively drop out.

They just not, they don't, they've never turned on network news.

They don't know what, they don't listen to NPR.

They don't go listen to any of these events that used to be iconic, like getting the family around and watching Oscar night.

But that's not going to change, is it, if people just sort of drop out and don't participate in the popular culture?

It has some value, but it seems that we have to be a lot more proactive.

Do you agree with things like the Bud Target Disney pushback and boycott that the conservatives for the first time in my life are starting to say, well, I don't approve of what the left does, but at this 11th hour, I've got to do something similar.

Do you know anybody who doesn't approve of that?

I'm like asking myself, on what possible ground could I not approve of it?

It's great, and I just hope it lasts.

I think there's been obviously consumer boycotts in the past or efforts at them, and they tend to fizzle out.

So we'll see.

But, you know, I'm...

I do feel like

the people, the public still has two powers that they haven't figured out how to take away yet.

One is the market, the power of the purse.

The other still is the vote.

I do not believe that we're in a situation now where people's votes are being systemically changed.

I'm sorry, I don't.

But I also am enough of a pessimist, and again, I know I'm speaking to a fellow pessimist, to think that that will not last, that they will figure out a way to force us to subsidize

woke products, you know, so that if Hollywood insists on making these remakes of,

you know, cartoon classics that I, I frankly have no investment in, like, you know, superhero movies, I've it's not my thing.

But if they are remaking them to be the promotion of woke values, as my understanding, a lot of them bomb in the box office, and that's very satisfying.

They do, they do.

I had a publisher telling, I had a publisher tell me, I won't mention any, it's not my publisher, but I had a person say that they had to publish X number of books that were on woke topics, mostly black this and black that.

And they knew that they would have zero market and they were going to lose a lot of money.

And they had turned down a number of manuscripts.

I'm the chairman of the board of Encounter Press.

Roger Kimball's a wonderful editor.

The Bradley Foundation helped it participate in that.

And you wouldn't believe that the number of authors now that are as last recourse are going to encounter.

And they have been said, they've been told, we're not going to publish you anymore at Macmillan or Random House or Alfred Knop or Simon ⁇ Schuster.

We're just not going to do it.

We would prefer to lose money publishing titles that will protect our jobs.

I guess

they're not market reality books, but

it's

a lot of people.

These people,

I guess I'm getting at.

this woke movement is not attuned to the market, which means I counted up the money that Disney had lost either through subscriptions or attendance or stock devaluation and added it to targets, loss of sales and stock, and added it to Budweiser.

It's about $60 billion.

That seems to be,

we've never seen a magnitude so quickly.

So

I'm glad you think that's a good idea.

I do too, but

we.

No, but Victor,

my point is this: that right now, for for now, it does seem like these woke companies do have to choose profit over virtue signaling.

But my belief is that that will be no longer the required trade-off.

That there will be figure out a way, even though, you know, they right now they can't get those adolescent boys to show up to the intersectional lesbian trans

action hero movie, but they will figure out a way somehow to get into our bank accounts and get us to buy it anyway.

Well, you know how that's, we know what the way will be.

It'll be the Soviet system of state-run, no choice.

Here's a state-approved film, and you're going to go watch it.

Right.

The other thing I'm worried about, I am a little bit worried about voting, and I agree with you about not the mechanics on Election Day, but when, under the guise of COVID, in about 10 states, 70% of people had voted on Election Day.

And due to the change in voting laws in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, all nominally legal, but they did sue to overturn the will of the legislature in those states.

And the result was that only 30% voted on Election Day, and yet the rate of err went from about 4%

down to 0.3 or 0.4 by a magnitude of 10.

So they were flooded with early ballots and mail-in ballots, and yet 70% of the electorate, but whether they collated with the register's list of voters or they had one name only or a wrong address or no signature, those were allowed to be cured or were accepted in a way that that had not been true pre-COVID.

Or when you have Mark Zuckerberg put $419 million

into pre-selected

precincts to basically absorb the work of the registrars by

hiring his own workers and putting Dropbox.

There's ways of manipulating, I think, the way people vote without breaking the law nominally.

But maybe I'm paranoid.

But I think

I keep going back to that Molly Ball Time essay of February

2021 when she used the word woman of the left, said, this is a cabal, this is a conspiracy, here's how we pulled it off, ha ha ha.

And she was talking about everything from Google searches to turning off and turning on encouragement of demonstrations and

getting

titans of Silicon Valley to give money to particular precincts.

It's pretty scary.

And I think they're going to do that more and more and more.

I don't think they have to change the law or actually cheat on election day.

But just the sheer magnitude of money at the disposal of the left is so overwhelming.

Well, let's notice, Victor, that what the left uses inevitably, to bring it back to the larger discussion, in fighting laws to try to tighten up the voting process, what they inevitably use is race.

And they claim that Republicans who are trying to limit

early voting or

registering on the day of and mail-in ballots and whatnot, drop boxes, that that's all motivated by racism and that it's an attempt to to curtail, you know, go back to Jim Crow and whatnot.

Preposterous, absolutely preposterous, but that is

the go-to argument

on the part of the left today to oppose anything that stands in the way of their greater power is to charge racism.

And that's why I say.

Americans have to start getting ready to say, you can't scare me by calling me a racist.

I think that's

that's the most important thing.

You can say anything about me and it has no effect whatsoever.

You know, it's kind of like nuclear proliferation.

When one country goes nuclear, then for deterrence, everybody else.

And when you look at Rwanda or Yugoslavia, when these societies descend into tribalism, every particular group then refashions their own.

tribalism, which is really pre-civilizational for their own protection.

That's what's kind of scary.

I was in, I live in a community that's about 90% Hispanic.

And in the morning, people from all the rural areas go to Walmart.

And if I go in there and I see a rare white person, I don't know them.

They don't know me, but they'll say hello in a way they never did before.

You know what I mean?

It's almost like, hi, how are you?

And I said, do I know you?

No, no, I don't know you.

I don't know who you are.

But it's...

almost as if certain people who feel vulnerable are saying, you know what?

If this group, this group, this group says that their superficial appearance is essential rather than incidental, and I don't, then I'm going to be victimized or vulnerable.

So I'm going to do it.

And

that's really scary because you get into a Hobbesian war of everybody against everybody.

And I don't.

Well, but it's already there.

It is.

They have any idea what they're creating?

We're already there.

Yeah,

as I say, like I am less scared by the prospect of white identity politics my fellow conservatives, just because we're already there.

We're already there.

And so at this point, like, I don't give a damn.

Whatever it takes to stop the destruction of our civilization, if it entails making European,

the people who are the inheritors of European civilization, obviously it's a global civilization and anybody can participate in it.

But if they're going to talk in terms of skin color, then there's going to come a point when the targets of that talk are going to as well.

And it's only a matter of logic and sort of turnaround as fair play.

And you were being very cautious earlier in our conversation, Victor, about the great replacement theory and sort of hedging on it.

But to me,

Biden himself at one point

celebrated.

No, he didn't.

He says it.

He celebrated

the fact that whites are down.

In 2019,

he told people as a candidate to come across the border illegally.

I was fact-checked by that.

And when I wrote that, and I sent to the fact-checker, and then they agreed.

He said in 2019, come across.

And there was a deliberate effort to...

There has to be some reason, either it's cheap labor or it's future constituents or present constituents, given the laxity with amnesty and things.

Anyway, it's,

I think everybody that's listening is just wondering

when they look at things in history in the past, when these societies descend into tribalism, it never ends well.

And yet there's a way to stop it before it does.

And I think you're right that the way to stop it is for every person according to their station to stand up and say,

not only does that.

not affect me when you call me those names, because either you're doing it out of hypocrisy or careers and whatever,

But I'm going to speak out on when I see it happen to other people as well.

And I think maybe your message is getting out because I saw that the GoFundMe for Mr.

Penny in New York.

Did you see that?

It was almost way over $2 million almost immediately.

And people had had enough.

Anyway, we have to stop.

And I want to really thank Heather McDonald for coming on to discuss her new book, When Race Trumps Merit.

She's undoubtedly the bravest intellectual, conservative, or liberal on the national scene, but she's also one of the most astute, dispassionate, dispassionate in her arguments and scholarly.

And I urge everybody, everybody to go onto Amazon right now and click on Heather McDonald's race, When Race Trumps Merit, and not just support the book, but be enlightened by it.

And it's been a great pleasure, Heather, coming on.

I hope you'll do it again.

Victor, this has been truly a wonderful experience, and we're both in California, so I hope to see you actually in person and not just through the magic of Zoom.

I hope so too.

Thank you so much.

And this is Victor Hansen signing off.