From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot Com. This is the
Powerline Show with your host Steve Hayward. If anyone ever asked me to name
the ten best journalists in America today, spots numbers one through five on my
list are the same person, Heather McDonald. Heather is always must reading when
she appears frequently in City Journal and other outlets, writing about a wide range
of current social problems. She's always fearless and uncompromising and telling the truth in
reporting uncomfortable facts and challenging the conventional wisdom. She caught early the forces leading
to the defund the police movement in her book almost ten years ago, The
War on Cops. She also caught early the perversities of the diversity, equity
and inclusion industrial complex you might call it, that is now rampaging through American
universities and other institutions. And now she's out with a brand new book,
When Race Trump's Merit, How the pursuit of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty,
and threatens lives. As I mentioned the Heather at the beginning of our
conversation here, I'm sometimes scared to pick up her newest books because they're so
prescient about the bad news and things that are coming our way. Let's turn
to that conversation right after these brief messages from our sponsors. Well, Hi,
Heather, how are you? You have done it again with your new
book. And I have to say that I'm kind of scared to get your
new books. And here's why. I remember when you wrote the War on
Cops here almost ten years ago, and then things got immediately worse. You
know, within a few years we had defund the police and total disarray of
policing in the America right now. Then you followed it up with the diversity
delusion, and immediately that whole business ratted it up to a whole new level
of insanity. And now you're out with when Race Trump's Merit, And like
I say, I'm almost afraid to open it because I'm afraid things are going
to get worse. But I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but
not entirely. Heather. You have once again brought your ferocity and diligent journalistic
skills to exposing something that is really quite depressing. But let's start to say,
well, I can I can? I have to choose between either being
pressent or being totally ineffective, and I don't know which one. You know,
Well, well we'll come to all that. I mean, there's a
great value always in telling the truth, but without effect, well it could
be worse. Let's just say, let's imagine it would have been worse if
I hadn't if I hadn't spoken out. So that's that's some solace. Maybe.
Well, I think there's always great value and have when some having someone
organized the truth for all the people out there who suspect in their bones and
then their instincts that something's wrong. So that's why it's a useful public service,
even if the powers that be resist listening to what and acting on it.
But we're gonna come to that at the end about what remedies should be
thought about. So where are we here? I mean, I guess I
should ask you hard to do. But you know, when race Trump's merit
I guess I'll put this way. I've been picking up for several years now,
the elite opinion turning on meritocracy. Whole stream of books, you know,
titles like you've probably seen some the meritocracy trap, the meritocracy myth,
the tyranny of meritocracy. That was the late Lonnie Winier's book about all this,
and it was pretty clear that the subtext was the problem of racial groups,
especially blacks, falling behind, and we need to dismantle meritocracy, a
creation originally of liberalism, if we're going to remedy this. So that's sort
of my own opening bid, and go ahead and give me a couple of
your opening bids. Yes, it's absolutely it's all about race. You can
have diversity or you can have meritocracy. You cannot have both. And the
only reason that we're turning on meritocracy in this country is because meritocratic standards have
a disparate impact on blacks. They Blacks do poorer at tests of academic skills,
not because those tests are racist, they are not, they're objective,
they're color blind, they're constitutional. But because blacks academic skills are much lower,
and you know that's a separate issue, then that one should deal with
that, But one should not deal with that by tearing down maritocratic standards.
But if these standards did not have a disparate impact on blacks, we would
not be tearing them down. We'd be perfectly happy to live with a meritocratic
society, and we would be content that people, some people succeed at certain
areas of life more than others through dint of effort and innate talent. When
I look around at our world today, Stephen, I see the myth of
racism and the problem of ongoing racial disparities as driving almost everything that I find
troubling. Yeah, so now you pick up on I guess what an Aristotelian
would call the proximate cause, or in modern terms, the tipping point of
this, which was the formalized doctrine of disparate impact, going back to the
famous Duke Power case of what the nineteen seventies, and so now, I
mean the popular version of this now, which you know well, is Abrahm
Kendy saying that any disparity between the races is proof of race caused by racism,
and is proof of racism. But that disparate impact doctrine has really settled
in like a squatter, right, and it's driving everything exactly. It's no
longer a legal doctrine. It's simply a cultural construct. All you need to
do now to take down any individual or any institution is to label that institution
or that individual white. I mean, you can see the New York Times
doing this. It's a very handy journalistic tool. You just slap white in
front of an official's name and oh my god, he's evil, or you
say to it that an institution is majority white, and that raises a very
deep cloud of suspicion and disparate impact. As you say, began as a
court case. It was a way of expanding the reach of civil rights statutes.
They originally the sixty four sixty five Civil Rights Acts only penalized intentional discrimination.
So an employer who was intentionally saying I don't want to hire qualified blacks
as police officers or as tech workers, and had a test for employment,
he would run a foul of civil rights statutes and would be guilty of discrimination.
But by the seventies there was less and less of that type of discrimination
going on, and so to keep the whole civil rights enterprise going, you
now had the idea that an employer could be completely color blind, non discriminatory,
have no racial animus. But if his criteria for employment negatively impacted blacks,
if he had a test, say for a firefighter, that said,
well, we want you to be able to read chemical instructions for using your
firefighting chemicals. And blacks failed that reading test at a higher rate than whites,
even though the test was color blind and was not intended to discriminate.
You'd have to throw off the test, which is absurd. And we've seen
this go on for decades. We've had decades now of lawsuits against firefighting exams,
police exams on the simple ground that blacks don't do as well. So
we throw out the tests, we open the floodgates, we bring in less
qualified individuals. That has a huge negative effect. But now, and and
so you had the disparate impact. This was the Supreme Court case, as
you say, affirming this idea. It's spread into federal regulations, it's spread
into statutes. But now it's simply the way we observe the world. And
so all it takes is to say that, well, blacks do less well
on the Medical College Admissions test. You don't have to bring a lawsuit.
You just say, well, if they do less well on the MCATs,
they have the MCATs have a disparate impact on blacks. Let's get rid of
the MCATs. Yeah, yeah, I mean it now reverses the presumption.
I mean it used to be the burden of proof is on the government to
prove that you'd intentionally discriminate it. Now I mean, this is unfolded.
It's not the central focus of your book. But the way this works now
is as if there's a statistical difference between the composition of your workforce and the
local demographics of the community, you just presume to be discriminating, and now
you have to prove your innocence. You have to prove a negative right.
And it's gotten very perverse. But now it's spread, and this is the
interesting part of your book, is it's spread into the cultural world. And
here I want to connect was most interesting about the way head McDonald is looking
at this problem and the way other people have a lot of people talked about
woke capitalism they call it, and big business gave billions of dollars to Black
Lives Matter, and they're bending over backwards for diversity and so forth. The
heart of your book is the effect this is having on culture, on the
arts. And I have a couple of theories on this, one the general
and then one specific to you. My general one is that the theoretical problem
here beyond disparate impact, or at the heart of it is runaway egalitarianism,
equal opportunity. Equality is not sufficient. We have to have equity, which
means equal results. But the other thing is and here because I know that
if we actually lived in a non insane world, Heather McDonald, you would
be a literary critic or a cultural critic, and we'd beat you alongside Lionel
Trilling and Northward Fry. And the reason I say that is is that one
part of radical ideology I've always thought, and I think you can actually find
this and obscure writings of Marx if you go far enough, is the idea
that society can be organized without tragic outcomes. In fact, Marxism actually contemplates
here and there that death itself could be conquered in the Marxist utopia, and
an awful lot of literature i've heard you talk about it, especially the Greek
classics, are all about the fact that human life is essentially tragic. Of
course, treating tragedy is an individual thing. Once you start treating people as
members of groups, then the whole element of a tragic sense of life that
ends with all of us dying disappears and it's completely warping our sensibilities. Now
that's a whole mouthful, but I know that you're equal to it because of
your fine tune sensibilities about culture. Well, weird a question, Heather,
I said, I want to try some questions you don't usually get. But
anyway, No, I think it's a great question, and I'm trying to
think if I agree with it, because I would say that the left's narrative
about American history, I mean, maybe it points to some kind of utopian
end, but I would say it is in one sense far darker and far
more tragic than the traditional American history because it is all about oppression. I've
actually been on a big reading project of black history, sixteen nineteen project.
Then for fun, I decided to go to Howard Zinn's People History of America,
which I never read before, which is quite bracing. I enjoyed it
far far more than the sixteen nineteen project because it wasn't so damn narcissistic.
I mean, at some point there's there's some things I agree with the sixteen
nineteen project, and that I do think that the American traditional conservative American narrative
is a bit of a whitewash. I am struggling at this point, and
I have not resolved this of how to how to integrate America's very very long,
gratuitous cruelty and nastiness to blacks with the story we tell about ourselves.
And I don't know whether every statement we make about American history needs a footnote
to say, but see blacks, you know, as a counterexample. So
so, but the sixteen nineteen project kind of freed me a little bit of
my torment because it became so narcissistic. You know, it is not the
case that everything is about black oppression. That's what the sixteen ninety project.
Howard sin was much more interesting, much more interesting. I liked the you
know, the primary sources and history from the bottom up. And he's obviously
an outright communist. He hates every aspect of success, of capitalism, of
economic exchange, of freedom of private property. But it's sort of it's much
more honest. And Marx's categories are more interesting than identity ones. But in
any case, I would say that the left narrative of constant oppression is pretty
dark as well. And so you know, you can do things by group,
and that doesn't mean you don't have a tragic sense of life. And
I also I've never quite understood the conservatives trying to discredit the idea of progress,
because certainly we do believe in progress, at least of the technological,
scientific, and material sort. So um, so that that distinction is not
quite clear. But but as far as like the arts necessarily breeding a tragic
understanding of life, um, yes, I guess that's not necessarily. What
I get from the arts. What I get from literature and from music is
insight into human feeling and experience and history, human types, human struggles that
I would never have access to on my own. And whether the bottom line
of all of that is tragic or simply revelatory, I'm not quite sure.
But there's certainly a lot of joy and sublimity in the arts, but but
also a lot of humor and irony and wit yea, So so I'm I'm
not sure about that. Which way what leads us to a tragic understanding of
humanity? And what is a defiance of that? So why do you think
that progressives reject a tragic view of life? Maybe it's just that we are
tragic right now, or we are maybe you're maybe you would differ between tragedy
and oppression, that that may be different. I don't know, yeah,
I mean, I didn't want to cross you up with a big roundhouse a
crazy question. I don't think it through two. I mean, I guess
what I think is that if you are oriented towards suffering situations. I think
of Kenneth Minogue's famous definition and liberal mind of the Liberals are oriented towards suffering
situations, and they want to alleviate suffering, and they get carried away with
the idea that progress and political power and redistribution can relieve all suffering situations.
And at some point there, you know, I think there's much to be
said for the reform liberal tradition. Confidence is not one of them. That's
an all the long story. Um, let's let's press on a little bit
a tangent of this. Though. I agree with you about Zin by the
way, that that the categorical and wholesale rejection of him by conservatives was a
mistake. By the way, someone else who thinks that is Bill McClay,
the historian. Really yeah. I had a long talk of Bill about that,
and he says, yeah, there's there's more to. I mean,
you can think you think Zinn's conclusion and orientation is defective, which I think
it is, and he makes some factual mistakes, but it's readable. There's
a reason that thing caught on the way it did. It's very readable,
engaging history. And but let me let me sharp at I know you're familiar
with the passage from du Boys where he says, what I read Shakespeare and
I winced not. Yeah, I'm not sure you know a modern day du
Boys can say that today because we're now categorically rejecting that great tradition. That
that was the larger context of that question. I was asking you, Well,
he says Shakespeare wins is not you know he doesn't Boys. Yeah.
Yeah, it's that these great authors aureally as an Aristotle and Shakespeare and Dumat
and Balzac do not WinCE at him, that he is able to enter the
pantheon of human thinking without the color line, without prejudice, and so it's
a it's a mutual engagement. But but he you know, he does not
feel rejected by these greats. But yes, absolutely, I mean that Dubois
quote which brings tears to my eyes every time because it's spoken from a world
that was still keeping people like Duboys out, even as tragically. It's like,
you know, something Shakespearean with the cross paths, whether Romeo and Juliet
or a Tello, these ironic moments where the messenger has not seen. You
know, you look at the pictures of the nineteen forties and fifties and you
see La Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong dressed to
the nines, you know, with hats on and suits and abiding by bourgeois
values at a time when America was not letting them in by and large,
you know, the individuals, yes, but but still the bulk of society
was still involved in gratuitous putdowns. Now it's the opposite, it is the
it is the opposite. We have to be able to say that. I
can say both. I can say we were white supremacists. And now the
reality is black privilege today, it is not white privilege. So now we're
here with open arms when every single institution is bending itself into knots, twisting
itself into knots to hire and promote as many blacks as possible, And then
you have this oppositional culture in the black community. That means that they're not
prepared to take advantage of those opportunities on equal terms. They only get in
through lowered standards. So it's it's a terrible you know, ships crossing in
the night. So but in any case that that quote breaks my heart,
it brings tears to my eyes, and yet it is not described our understanding
of the Classics for decades. Now. This is what just infuriates me about
the Academy, that these literature professors, art history professors, music professors,
who all we ask of them is that every fall they say to students,
here is greatness. Here is where you will learn things that you would otherwise
never know in your narrow, petty lives. You will you will be able
to bask in language of exquisite richness, profundity, precision, clarity you would
never otherwise get it. Come and take my classes instead, they're saying,
we need trigger warnings. You know, the professors are agreeing to trigger warnings.
These are works which are toxic. If you're of the wrong race and
sex, you should read only through the lens of anger and resentment. And
so nobody really the appetite for the Classics and the rhetoric around them is all
about anti racism and anti misogyny, and it is an absolute betrayal and we
should fire every single humanities professor who is not willing to sign a statement that
says I believe in my tradition. It is a tradition of beauty, accomplishment,
and greatness. And I will do everything I can to teach students why
they should be down on their knees in gratitude before these works. Yeah,
let me try. It's not exactly a parallel to the voice. But you're
write in your book about Lynn Manuel Miranda Groveling after he received criticism for his
movie In the Heights about the Hispanic neighborhood in New York because he didn't have
the right shades of color of the Hispanic cast. And I'm you know you
mentioned in Passing of Course that he littlemo brand of Course burst on the scene
with Hamilton, where he cast mostly black actors playing the founding fathers, And
I know it did attract some criticism at the time when it came out,
But I'm wondering, now, let's see what you think, would he could
he make Hamilton today? And would he make it today? I'm actually thinking
that that play now could not be done. Why because it seems to me
it's still an okay category of blacks playing whites. What what what's the next
step between after black's playing whites not doing whites at all? You mean we
shouldn't even have any representation of the Founding Fathers. Yeah, I'm not so
service that. I mean the way I interpreted it was at the time was
this is showing that why some conservatives like to play this is showing that the
teaching and intention of the Founding uh was intended to be universal, accessible to
anyone, right the way Lincoln thought about it later on. Right, and
and now if you think about the lens of the sixteen nineteen project, which
is you a moment ago or more generally talked about, you know, anger
and resentment or now the coin of the realm, you wouldn't want a black
cast reflecting favorably on Hamilton or any of the other Founders, Right, I
mean, that's that's what I'm thinking about that. I say, yes,
okay, that I agree with. I was taking it because because what what
tripped Lynn went Miranda up with the in the Heights was the exquisite boundaries and
barbed wire that are being put around works based on skin color and ethnicity.
I mean, it's just it's the absolute crushing of human imagination and the ability
to to for an actor to put himself into a radically different time and character.
So, but yes, on from that extent. Now, I've never
seen Hamilton's so I you know, I'm I'm from Afar, and I know
I have a few friends that couldn't stand it because of the rap music,
and I suspect I probably would have been in that camp. But in any
case, but but to the extent that it is actually a celebration of the
Founding, I think you're absolutely right. You know, it would it would
have to be rewritten as the Founding with slavery, you know, it would
be sixteen nineteen as the Founding and h something that we never got rid of.
Yeah. Actually I think it's you know, you can now watch it
streaming somewhere. I think it's pretty good. I didn't think the it's not
conventional rap. It's actually Rick give me away. It's it's much more conventionally
musical than when you think of the term rap, but sort of a blend.
Anyway, we're thinking and I think one thing you mentioned an Togo humanities
professors who came into all this don't stand up for their disciplines for whatever reasons.
You know, I've seen a lot of surveys I think you've probably seen
them too, that show that well, I'll put it this way, very
bluntly, part of the problem here is white liberals. I see all these
surveys that's showing that black opinion. However, you want to test the questions
is this isn't the right category, but is not as far to the left
as white liberals are. In other words, the problem is Marin County and
you know Westchester, and then in fact, if you went by I think
maybe even majority of what blacks think, they would be skeptical of a lot
of what's happening. Do you pick up any of that? I know you
go to a lot of community meetings and stuff and get out and do shoe
leather reporting. Well, I've certainly heard that argument made for years now,
and to be perfectly honesty, I think it's somewhat of a safe harbor for
conservatives and that and I will say, I mean I have made a point
in my police reporting of going out into inner city meeting, community police meetings
and giving voice to exactly the people you're talking about, the good, law
abiding, hard working inner city residents who are terrified of the kids hanging out
by the hundreds on the corner fighting and the kids colonizing their lobbies, selling
weed and trespassing, and they want more officers. And there are some polls
that, like, there was a Quinnipiac poll in New York City that showed
that a slightly higher percentage of black voters in New York City than white voters
wanted the police to enforce so called quality of life or broken windows, public
order of fans. So I know that argument that having been said, I
think I think it's somewhat of again a whitewash to think that there is not
a huge black support for victim politics. And we just had the election of
Brandon Johnson in Chicago in a runoff election against Paul Vallas, both Democrats,
both very liberal Democrats, but Paul Vallas, the white run runner up,
was more pro law enforcement than Brandon Johnson, the black candidate, who had
before been explicitly defund the police, which I think is somewhat of a irrelevant
category because we've had de facto defunding. You don't have to be explicitly for
defunding to not have an incredibly pernicious effect on policing if you pursue the narrative
that policing is racist. And Brandon Johnson certainly pursued that narrative. But the
greatest votes for Brandon Johnson came in the highest crime areas of the city,
which are overwhelmingly black. And so it is a real, real puzzle.
And one can say that it is not for me to speculate why this is,
but one can just look empirically and note that it is possible to be
the most victimized by uncontrolled crime, which can only as far as we know
from decades of comparing police response with social service response and greater government funding and
more welfare and social workers up the gazoo, the only thing that works is
police absent reconstruction of the black family. The police were but these communities would
rather put up with crime than vote for somebody who is pro law enforcement,
because that means giving up on the narrative that the police are somehow racist.
So, yes, white liberals are the problem, but it's it's not as
if they're imposing an ideology that is strongly resisted by the black community. Yeah,
yeah, I mean I did notice that too, and was disturbed by
that those results, although I did also notice that it was a close election
and Johnson did very well on the Upper east side of Chicago, which,
in other words, the closer you got to Northwestern University, the better he
did. We know who lives up there, and I don't know. The
voting behavior and sort of ethnic loyalties and voting is something that puzzles a lot
of people in a lot of domains. And if I were you, if
I were you, you could now, you know, raise against me the
fact that all groups, by differing majorities, don't want racial preferences. So
that's another example on your behalf right. But but I would just say the
black activists and the black faculty in universities are just as bad as the white
faculty and the students. The black students are wielding the power that they have
by being black as much as they possibly can. Yeah, so, oh
sorry, No, go ahead, Well, okay, I'll start drawing toward
a conclusion and summarize for listeners that they want to read the central chapters of
your book, where you go through. I mean, I think we're all
familiar with stories reading in the media of cultural institutions caving into, you know,
sort of absurd levels of racial consciousness, you know, dismissing the dosince
of the Art Institute of Chicago, and but you have cataloged so many of
them, it makes me realize that this is much more. In other words,
those things we occasionally read about or not isolated examples, is sweeping the
entire or cultural artistic artistic landscape. Is that? I think that's not an
overstatement to put it that way. No, it's absolutely not an overstatement.
There's not a single there's not a single arts institution that is not under relentless
constant pressure to program on the basis of race, to hire, on the
basis of race, to fund raise, on the basis of race to put.
It makes its board of trustees racially proportionate, and many people are getting
out. I mean, there's theater directors, heads of theater organizations are quitting
right and left because the pressure coming from their funding organizations and their own staff
is so overwhelming and it makes their job absolutely impossible. It's not what they
went into theater for, which was to expand human possibilities of the imagination,
and now they're being told to shrink it through the realities of race. And
it's happening. I mean, the museum world is just utterly disgusting. I
mean, there's some shows I write about the metropolit Museum of Art that has
mounted a show that is the cancelation of all art in order to make the
argument that an abolitionist sculpture, a work clearly intended to protest against slavery,
is, in fact, according to the Metropol Museum, a pro slavery,
white supremacist work. In order to make this completely counterfactual argument, requires the
met to lie about every aspect of art history. To claim that an artist
not naming his model is racist. Artists when that model is black, when
racist. When artists have not named models forever. It requires the Metropolitan Museum
of Art to claim that portraying the nude is racist when the model is black.
When the nude, the white nude, has been the basis of Western
art for five thousand years, when there are hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of portrayed white nudes out there in states of undressed, far more
revealing than in this one statue that the MET is trying to deconstruct. I
mean, this is an art museum so dedicated to anti racism that it means
tearing up and imposing a completely counterfactual narrative on its own collections. Yeah.
Yeah, that's the term I use for this is this is utter nihilism on
top of everything else. All Right, one more big question and then a
very short question and I'll let you go, Heather. The big question is
your last chapter is called Saving Meritocracy, Saving a Civilization, and you know
you quote someone early in the chapter saying it could take fifty to one hundred
years things Actually he didn't say this, but my translation is things almost happy
to get worse where they can get better. And then you have a few
suggestions that maybe we need some forceful political interventions. But what can be So
I'll just restate the question, what can be done to turn us around?
What should be done to try and turn us around? Well, yes,
and it's you're not putting words into his mouth. He absolutely said that.
This is an oncologist talking about why nobody can speak out in his own profession
and why he's not willing to speak out against the lies that that medicine is
racist because they're all terrified of losing their jobs. So he said it's going
to take fifty two hundred years. The entire medical system is going to have
to collapse and be rebuilt because nobody right now is willing to stand up and
defend it. So we'll all have to, you know, give up on
Alzheimer's cures or cancer cure as while we're trying to make our labs happy and
diverse. It's it's an absolute betrayal of what scientific method has been, which
is about the scientific method, not about scientists. It's not about the race
and identity of scientists, believe me, in any case. So it's coming
down. Everything is coming down. I mean, people have their heads in
their sands. Everything is coming down. If we allow racism to be the
only allowable explanation for racial disparities. As long as Kendy has the final word,
and any racial disparity is the result of racism, and you can't say
anything else, the left winds, it is all coming down. My book
provides the alternative explanations, which is massive academic skills gaps, massive crime gaps.
So where do we start? Even though we were saying that now disparate
impact has leaped out of the legal sphere into the culture at large. Nevertheless,
one should of course start a president, presumably Republican, but if he's
a Democrat. Good, you know, welcome to the fold. Guy.
Get rid of every disparate impact regulation in the federal government executive branch that you
can rewrite the regulations, take disperate impact out, take it out of the
federal agencies. Right now, the federal science agencies make race and sex more
important criteria in federal science granting than they do scientific merit. Get rid of
that. I mean, the hundreds of millions of dollars that are coming out
of the NIH, the National Science Foundation, the CDC, the Department of
Energy, all around intersectionality and diversity is sickening. That can all come out
with the stroke of a pen. He should pressure Congress get rewrite statutes,
take disperate impact out. But then when that ends, when the policy changes,
you've done them all. It's still going to take courage, and it's
gonna take something for individuals within institutions to stand up and say I'm not racist,
my colleagues are not racist, my institution is not racist. How you
overcome the fear gap of people that are worried about losing their jobs is very
tough. I came up with just some proposal of, you know, maybe
a central organization that whenever anybody was willing to sort of be cannon fodder and
stand up and speak the truth, this organization, in theory, would leap
to his defense with the data that would explain why, you know, the
Google engineering department is not thirteen percent black, or why a medical school student
body is not yet thirteen percent black. But but they're getting there by getting
rid of all meritocratic standards. And so what I find missing in our current
discourse are people that are willing to broach breach Rachel etiquette and actually give the
facts about and that it makes Americans very, very uncomfortable. We are so
far from being white supremacists that we're willing to put up with these fictions that
white are the threat to blacks, not other blacks, and that whites are
the threat to Asians, not blacks. We say all these things in the
face of video to the contrary, and we're so much not white supremacist that,
you know, if I get up and tell the facts about crime,
white conservatives will come up and say, well, you know, that makes
me feel very uncomfortable. You really don't You shouldn't talk about those facts.
Yeah, well, I'm sorry. I am not going to obey that etiquette
any longer. It's too late. The hour is late, Steve. Because
the left dominates the discourse with phony facts, it can hold those phony facts
can only be rebutted with actual truth, and we have to start telling the
truth. Yeah, all right. Exit question A short one, I think,
which is what's next for you? You know, I began somewhat tongue
and cheap, but only partially so that I'm always scared of what you're gonna
take up next, because you're ahead of the curve on really disastrous trends.
And I know you're working on promoting this book that's just brand new, but
you have something on the drawing board. Is there a chance that Heather McDonald
might take up for example, the gender war is currently going on. There's
also a high quotation of insanity. Well, you know, I think about
that a lot. Actually, I sort of feel like there's already being taken
up. But I do have certain views and hypotheses about what's going on.
I think it has not really been observed that part of this absolute insanity,
I mean it is. It is truly the craziest thing that human beings have
ever done and thought about and claimed, I think, in all of our
history. And I'm not a fan of a lot of myths, you know.
I'm a radical secularist, a radical materialist, radical and peerless empiricist.
Uh So, a lot of sort of spiritual metaphysical claims I find as idiotic
as much of the left. But this one takes the cake. But it
does certainly fall in the long human history of of of a discomfort with mind
body dualism, and revulsion towards the flesh. You know. So I see
these these these just insane self castrators in part in the long tradition of of
flagelence of our shirts, people trying to scourge the flesh. You know.
It's a it's a yeah, exactly. It's a discomfort with the body,
with carnality, with sexuality. And we saw it, you know, with
anorexia, with cutting, and now we have cutting off one's genitals, uh
or are trying to you know, de sex oneself. It's a it's absolutely
bizarre, and it is also this has been observed. I think is that
if you can get the public to go along with the idea that males can
get pregnant, you have people utterly under your control. I mean, there's
there's no aspect of truth in the world that you cannot simply rewrite to suit
your will. Um And and it's also just a deep, deep hatred of
everything traditional and bourgeois. It also grows out of just a profound hatred for
the biological, heterosexual, two parent family. And so you know, this
began with feminism, grew with gay rights. You know, I think that
truth to be a trojan horse. Frankly that were I mean, I just
wonder why at this point, what are we celebrating with gay pride marchese.
You know, as I say, being female is not an accomplishment. I
don't. I don't go around saying female I deserve, you know, plaudits
for that, and being gay is not an accomplishment. But I think it
was ultimately about more attack on bourgeois normalcy as opposed to wanting to expand the
reach of bourgeois normalcy. So well, Heather, whatever you take up next,
we'll look forward to it with some fear and trepidation, but always eagerness
for how well you do it. Thanks very much, Heather, and good
luck. Thank you so much, Steve. It's great talking with you.
Don't go away. We've got a PostScript for you right after these messages.
All right, a couple of last things before we go. We barely scratch
the surface with Heather in that conversation, so by all means, get her
book book mark, also her appearances at City Journal and the other outlets where
she appears frequently. She's amazingly prolific. We'll be back this weekend as usual
with all three of the regular bartenders at the three Whiskey Happy Hour. And
also, since we're trying to step up our game and attracting advertising support so
we can expand the podcast, I guess this is the point where I need
to encourage people to go on iTunes or whatever podcast platform they use, give
us a five star rating, etc. Etc. That helps us attract more
of an audience. It also helps us get new guests. I suppose,
in any event, don't forget to milk the soft power dividend and let's go
Brandon, Bye bye, everybody. Ricochet joined the conversation