America's Equity Obsession: An Interview with Heather Mac Donald

Good evening everyone, thank you for joining us to take note of the launch of Trump's merit race, how the pursuit of

equity

sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty and threatens lives. I'm Brian Anderson, I'm the editor of City Journal, and it's my honor to introduce you to the author of the book. Heather McDonald Heather is a Thomas W Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and has written for the magazine almost since its inception, with her byline appearing regularly in the Wall Street Journal and many other major publications. She is also the best-selling author of The War on Police and the Diversity Hoax Just for fun I asked the GTP chat who the most influential City Journal writers are and Heather's name topped the list, so I like that. like IAAI AI yes, over the years, Heather's scrupulous and innovative work has shed light on important trends in American life, her new book offers relentless reporting on perhaps the most dangerous yet, which is the craze for the

equity

that is threatening our scientific, cultural and public institutions.

In this new book, when she competes against Trump's marriage, she details the rise of an ideology of disparate impact. and its potential to cause enormous harm to our society, your book also represents a powerful defense of our civilizational heritage, so we will discuss all that and more tonight, so Heather let me start in the wake of the death of George Floyd in May 2020. Activists intensified their cries for so-called racial equity and proportional representation of races in American institutions and organizations. The press publishes countless stories about minorities under representation in various fields and companies, corporations began to fall on themselves proclaiming their guilt for perpetuating the racial inequality that they now drive.

This change was the concept of disparate impact, which is really at the center of her book, so what is the central idea of ​​disparate impact? Can you briefly trace its origins and how it metastasized in this post-flood period? Thanks Brian and first. everything, let me give you a hate to use the phrase but a trigger warning uh, I'm going to discuss things that are very uncomfortable to talk about. I'm talking about group averages in average abilities, average behavioral agricultural predilections. I am not making any judgment about any individual within any particular racial group, there are thousands of individuals in this or that racial group who outnumber all others.

We cannot make any assumptions about individuals based on their group membership, but the discourse that is tearing down our civilization, that is tearing down meritocratic standards, is itself expressed in grotesque generalities and must be answered with certain observations about the performance of the group, so please look up some truths that are really taboo in our population, the idea of ​​disparity. Impact is the idea that any meritocratic standard in terms of academic abilities that has a negative impact on certain minority groups and especially black people is, by definition, racist unless in the legal context it can be justified by a standard very high of business need, so for example, if you have noticed that over the last few decades of the DEC there has been challenge after challenge to the police entrance exams or the firefighter exams and the accusation is always that these are exams racist for the sole reason that blacks fail them at a higher rate than whites and that is why the Assumption is always good the exam is racist the meritocratic standard is racist to throw away the test and lower the standards until we obtain a standard that does not have a negative and disparate impact what you are never allowed to look at and examine is what the underlying average rates of academic abilities are, the standards are not racist in and of themselves, but we now declare racist any standard that has a disparate impact on blacks per se and we discard.

This initially began in the context of labor contracting, it was a way to expand civil rights laws beyond the requirement that it was necessary to intentionally discriminate an employer had to intentionally say I don't want more qualified blacks, which is per se illegal. and unconstitutional. The disparate impact arose because it was becoming harder to find employers who were intentionally discriminating against competitively qualified minorities, so the new rule was that you could be completely colorblind as an employer, but if you were using an employment criterion that disqualified blacks disproportionately, had to get rid of it and now that idea is gone. judicial opinions are legal codes and are simply the lens through which we judge all of our major institutions, so this ideology, as you document in the book, corrupts The Sciences, um, this is the opening section of the book, It's very alarming and it's happening quickly, so increasingly diversity and equity criteria govern everything from grants and fellowships to government scientific appointments, and even how medicine is properly practiced.

Merit is no longer the primary criterion in many of these situations, so I'm wondering if you could give us an overview of this development and what we stand to lose with the lack of emphasis on Merit in the Sciences, putting both Lunt and Lunt at risk. like by pushing people into medicine who are not competitively qualified and we are also putting scientific research at risk, but here is an example. of how disparate impact analysis works. College seniors applying to medical school take something called mcats, the medical school admissions test, and those have a disparate impact on black students.

Black MCAT scores are at rock bottom and that's why several medical schools are now deciding that for black students they will forgo mcats altogether, that's the developing trend for decades. have had two separate standards for admission, so blacks are admitted with MCAT scores that would automatically disqualify them if taken by a white or Asian student a black student with slightly below average MCATs and GPAs are nine times more likely to be admitted to a medical school than a white student or an Asian student again, these would be scores that would be disqualifying; otherwise the medical school licensure exam was passed as failed rather than graded because again the licensure exam has a disparate impact on black medical students is used to select students for some of the residencies.

Most competitive schools during medical school have decided that we would rather get rid of grades and the actual medical licensing body would rather get rid of grades and destroy our ability to rank students and then give a completely colorblind neutral test that doesn't. has racial biases, its goal, computer grading, which has a disparate impact on blacks, preferences never end, the pressure is enormous on schools to promote the hiring of doctors based on race promote doctors based on race to put them into burden of medical research and pressure is also coming from national funding agencies, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation are now making race a more important qualification for receiving medical scholarships than an actual scientific qualification if you want to get a grant for your Alzheimer's research lab or your neurology, a larger neurology lab, you need to show how your work impacts and improves diversity and how your own lab is working to change the demographics of your uh. of its research core now, frankly, I don't care who discovers the neurological pathways responsible for Alzheimer's if that lab is all Chinese if it's all female if it's all black if it's all white I don't care all that matters is Are these the more qualified scientists, but in the United States and only in the United States we have made the decision that diversity is more important than meritocracy, while China pays no attention to identity politics and runs at full speed trying to launch everything what you have for your most talented mathematically and scientifically inclined students without saying that we have to reduce their capacity to make sure that all groups finish at the same rate at the end of the line, so that's science the next major.

Part of the book is about something very close to you, which is culture and the arts, so it describes the distortion and defamation of Western high culture by activists who now see it primarily as camouflage for a regime of discrimination and racial domination. I think what's most striking in reading your book is that this part of the book is the complicity of leading institutions and artists in this kind of ongoing attack on our Western cultural heritage and this I also think I would say has accelerated since the assassination. of George Floyd, so maybe I know that you could document a little bit of what's been going on there like you do in the book, yeah, yeah, running an opera company or an orchestra or your maximum hole in the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or James Rondo, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, you should kneel in gratitude every day for your privileged existence to curate artistic traditions that are among the most Sublime in world history and that allow human beings to escape their self petty, narrow and pathetically ignorant and expand into forms of Consciousness and understanding that are far greater than any of us could hope to experience, whether the orestaya of Escalus, one of the great tragic trilogies of classical Athens, read chills at his insight into the human thirst for revenge. and the transcendence of finally achieving a rule of law and a hope for justice or whether it be the pastoral poetry of the Renaissance or the Langer and Eros of Brahms's late piano music or Chopin's nocturnes or the tragic catharsis we get from the box of San Mateo passion, these are works that none of us really deserve and it turns out that the heads of our classical music organizations, our literature departments, our art museums don't really deserve them because they go around telling the public about it and the most criminal thing is telling the young people. that people hate these traditions on the pathetic grounds that they came out of Europe and therefore by definition were inevitably created by Caucasian people, that's the European tradition, get over it, it's the past, we can't change it, Europe wasn't 13 black, probably still It is not expected that the Canon of classical composers is 13 black and if it is not, it is per se racist, it is absurd.

Now, of course, there are fantastic black composers, but they came up much later in our tradition, but now you have Alex Ross, one of the country's leading classical music critics who writes for the New Yorker, apologizes for being white and a priest. a tradition that is he, as he says, blindingly white, he is a, he apologizes to the white audience, he apologizes to the white donors, the other most important classical music critic in the country. In the country, Anthony Tomassini of the New York Times has asked that auditions for orchestral editions take color into account so that musicians can be hired based on race.

Currently, they often start at various levels behind the screen so that auditioners do not know the identity of the performers and as with all things in our disparate impact obsessed world today, we have now decided that the mechanisms that are inherently Colorblind people are themselves racist and so this applies to the hearing screen, it applies to red light cameras, a red light camera doesn't know who is driving. uh the car, but if the red light cameras show us that in certain neighborhoods black people are running red lights or speeding, then the camera is racist and will be scrapped, that's happening all over the country, so now there are museums that put labels on the walls that teach their viewers to see the great baroque masterpieces of the Dutch golden age, these still lifes of translucent grapes and lemons and silver that shines in the light, to see those still lifes as colonialists because at the same time they were painted, Holland and the Netherlands had colonial territories and that is why we have this massive guilt that is being promulgated by people whose only obligation in life is to share this beauty and tell young people to come to my museum, listen to this music if you die without listening to these works.

You will have lived a poorer life than you might have otherwise, but now it's all being filtered through the entirely expansive lens of racial inequity. you started talking about the issue of law and order, which was also discussed in the book that is published.policy question that you describe and have described and written about in the past, the disconnect between what residents of minority neighborhoods have said in the past they want in law enforcement and the relentless anti-policing rhetoric of many legislators and activists, and found that uh, blacks and other minorities in the past have appreciated visible proactive policing anyway;

In fact, they have asked the police to take stricter measures in their communities. I remember I used to go to community meetings in the Bronx and other places where that would be what was discussed. I wonder if that disconnect continues to hold up in the post-George Floyd era. Do you know more generally what influence disparate impact analysis has had on public safety? Well, the disparate impact analysis on public safety has been disastrous, absolutely disastrous. The narrative is that they are color blind. Constitutional law enforcement that has a disparate impact on black criminals is per se racist, uh, and we have the doubled-down falsehood that black parents are right to fear their children will be killed by a police officer or a white person every time I left out that Joe Biden talked about this during the present of his presidential campaign he said it before the day before his inauguration he said in his inaugural speech he said it constantly it is a constant theme that is a falsehood uh blacks have a rate tragically highest death rate from homicide with firearms.

Blacks between the ages of 10 and 24 die from homicides at a rate 25 times higher than whites between the ages of 10 and 24. That's a civil rights issue that you would think that civil rights activists I would care if they didn't talk about it because if they talked about it honestly and looked at the real data, what we know about the victims of the witnesses of fit and non-fatal shootings and from witnesses to fatal shootings is that black The death rate from gun homicides is caused almost exclusively by black criminals. All police shootings of black men could be eliminated today.

All shootings by whites against black men could be eliminated. It would have virtually no effect on the black death rate from gun homicides. We are blaming the police, we are blaming the criminal authorities. Everything you see that may have been disconcerting you in the post-George Floyd era. Why don't these prosecutors prosecute for criminal trespass? prosecute because it's basically telling the police that you know it's open season for you and we, as prosecutors, don't care, we are decriminalizing resisting arrest, why don't you do it? Prosecuting gun possession, drug possession, prostitution, disorderly conduct, loitering, it's all driven by disparate impact is all you need to know to understand our world today the reason Kim Fox in Chicago, Alvin Bragg in New York, George Gascón, Soros's worst prosecutor in the entire country, has decided to put entire categories of crimes out of the reach of his district attorneys because their application has a disparate impact, not because that application is racist but because the crime rate among blacks it is much higher.

I've spent a lot of time in high-crime neighborhoods talking to residents there. I go to police community meetings and talk to good, law-abiding people who deserve the same Freedom from Fear as the residents of Park Avenue and what I have heard over and over again is that we want more police officers. I smell marijuana in my hallway, why can't they do something about it? smoking marijuana in the club I see outside the window why can't they arrest those people? Why do they allow hundreds of kids to hang out on the corner fighting against what happened to the truancy laws? effects of depoliticization and disparate impact Crusade are never hurt, it is a very strange thing if you were a civil rights activist and we are going to do a kind of Rawlsian experiment of imagining before knowing the real reality of the things you could Let's imagine an activist of civil rights siding with black victims instead of black criminals; something we might even have expected because black victims are those whose lives are being destroyed, but all our civil rights activists have sided with black criminals, they say. who would rather not put more criminals in prison where they can't continue taking advantage of old black women who are afraid to go into the lobby of their building to get their mail, when when kids come in illegally smoking marijuana and selling drugs, they would rather allow those good people honest and law-abiding people have to figure things out for themselves, then make arrests and increase the racial disparities we have in prison and that to me is a very perverse decision; right now it seems to me like they are the only people who care about black lives are the police and white conservatives because the only people we talked about crime before the 2022 election were basically media conservative media, but were accused of making racist dog whistles.

If you talk about black victims, you are a racist, it is a very curious thing. I can tell you that if black and white conservatives stop paying attention to crime, no one will pay attention to it. The New York Times sure doesn't give a damn about black victims, the only black victims they care about. it's about those who are killed by a police officer and they are very small in 2021 there were six unarmed black people killed by police officers shot dead by police officers a police officer was 400 times more likely to be killed by a black man than a unarmed black man being killed by a police officer, but those are facts that are not allowed in public discourse.

Racial preferences in academic hiring and admissions. Another theme of his book clearly diminishes opportunities for disadvantaged or disadvantaged groups, so policies designed to boost the prospects of black and to some extent Hispanic applicants often disadvantage whites and Asians who have higher scores. or often better credentials, competing for the same positions, you know, adherence to disparate impact dismisses this kind of racial rebalancing act as necessary to improve the life chances of disadvantaged minorities. uh, but you would have to say that this is tremendously unfair to the new disadvantaged, we could call them, and a sure way to perpetuate and increase racial tensions over time, so that would be a question, do you know what the reaction will be to the perpetuation ? of these policies and then looking at the policies themselves, how racial preference policies impact their intended beneficiaries, it's not always a positive thing, right, Asians are becoming radicalized on this because they're the ones who are the most screwed, the standards for entering if you are Asian into selective schools is increasing because the numbers of those allowed to be admitted to reserve places for beneficiaries of racial preference are becoming smaller and smaller, so they have to know the schools that they're trying to say well the SATs are racist if they haven't, if they've banned them entirely, they're calculating Asian scores to a decimal of 0.001, you know you have to touch, not just, it's probably not enough to touch the violin in the piano monologue, you'd probably better add the bassoon, you'd probably also better be really good at baseball and, you know, get the math Olympiad, so there's starting to be a reaction, we see this especially in the high school level, where there are several examining schools that are, uh. trying to create environments for people who are more academically motivated, like Stuyvesant City in a private school in New York City that has a computer-graded colorblind objective test for entry, I think it's 70 Asians and there's decades of pressure to say let them fall apart. testing began admitting by race, there hasn't been any adjustment yet, but other places have gotten rid of their tests.

Lowell High School in San Francisco was also predominantly Asian and they opted for a lottery system instead of the exam, not surprisingly. The first year after the lottery was instituted, D and F rates increased by 300 percent. Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia also got rid of its neutral and completely objective colorblind admissions test because they want to engineer greater racial proportionality. Asians are beginning to radicalize. On this, the equity argument against racial preferences has been a favorite of conservatives for years, that this is reverse discrimination, it's not fair to people who haven't done anything, you know, Asians aren't responsible for slavery. and, frankly, none of us today are either. unless you believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and we all somehow now carry the genes of um and and and the responsibility of slave owners and let me also leave a aside here our racial history is appalling it's disgusting we were a white supremacist. country we were in a divided country whites treated blacks with unbearable cruelty, contempt, gratuitous evil until very recently, today we are not that country, we are not as incredible as one would have expected, even in the 1960s it does not exist a single conventional institution today. that's not going to the trouble of hiring and promoting as many black applicants as possible, if that.

I would like to know any black student applying to college today who is going to classify his race as white because he thinks it will help him. say otherwise, if your white heterosexual male child can get away with labeling his race as black, he might as well do it, the argument has traditionally been made against racial preferences that it is unfair to whites and Asians, and I get it, but as far as I'm concerned, and that's what the equal protection jurisprudence and the case before the Supreme Court that is challenging Harvard's preferences and the University of North Carolina's preferences will probably use the same old and tired jurisprudence of equal protection of strict scrutiny and that's it all has so many fictions that it makes me want to vomit.

I hope and it is very unlikely that they actually override racial preferences on pragmatic grounds, which is something known as mismatch, which is that the preferences do no favors to their beneficiaries and Let me take it out of the racial context and put it in the sexual context if the MIT admitted me with six hundred on my Math SATs and I'm not going to tell you what they actually were and I'm not sure I remember them, but I sort of do and I got a 600 on my Math SATs on an 800 point scale and all my Peers who were not so-called preference recipients scored eight hundred on their Math SATs.

I'm going to fail my freshman calculus class and I'm going to have a hard time if I get a harsh camp in my entire class and of course the diversity bureaucracy at mit will tell me, well, you're a victim of misogyny, you're in an anti-feminine environment, while the reality is that it is not. in an environment for which I am not competitively qualified, there is no shame in going to a second-tier school. Boston College and Boston University provide a perfectly good useful education. If I had been admitted rather than pushed above my ability at the time to a school for which I was competitively qualified where I shared the grades of my peers, I would do just fine. good.

The same thing happens with blacks, it does not help them to carry the almost sole burden of having to compete in environments for which they are not competitive. graded and the results speak for themselves law schools employ vast racial preferences this is what happens at the end of the first year of law school first year law degrees are colorblind they are anonymous professors they don't know who writes the blue books 51 percent of black law students at the end of their first year of law school finish in the bottom 10 percent of their class; two-thirds of black law students at the end of their first year of law school finish in the bottom 20 percent of their class; the gaps never close this is not a good way to reduce racial stereotypes, but it is also not a good way to increase the number of black lawyers because the number of blacks who fail the exam six times in a row and never pass is six times higher than that of whites because black students have been disadvantaged by being in law schools where they are not competitively qualified, of course blacks should become lawyers and go to law school, they should go under the same conditions as everyone else and we don't We have this burden of the preemption catapult that makes it harder to compete, so I hope someone has filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court and Clarence Thomas orJohn Roberts say this is what I want the public to understand about this. preference regime that we have been living with since Bakke in 1978, which has not only destroyed meritocratic standards but has been a real handicap for the people who seek to benefit from it, those who speak honestly and stand up to this regime, this disparate impact regime risk losing their livelihood and social position at least in some cases, which is why his book includes

interview

s with several employees of prestigious scientific and cultural institutions.

They vehemently oppose racial preferences. They see what you have described happening but are not willing to express it. their feelings publicly and you can understand that because of the fear of consequences, so I wonder if you know if the opposition within these institutions defends merit. Does someone who does this become a martyr? Is it your only option or are there other ways to do it? fight this, yes, upon finishing this book I asked an oncologist that he had been directed by them. They have natural cancer institutes that give something called Outstanding Investigator Awards and these are awards that the federal government gives to the most advanced cancer researchers. that they are doing high-risk science, in other words, it has a high risk of total failure, it may be based on a theory that is so far-fetched that it will never produce any results, but if it produces results, wow, this is This has the possibility of absolutely break the paradigm and these research awards are very lucrative.

They exempt oncology researchers. Basically, they can take six years off from teaching to focus solely on this fight, and I spoke to an oncologist who lives to cure. cancer, that's all he wants in his life and he had been notified by the director or deputy director of the national cancer institutes. He says awards for outstanding researchers haven't been going so well lately. They are not diverse enough. Please expand the criteria for nominations. send us more diverse candidates so we can give more diverse awards not a word about meritocracy this wasn't about the scientific qualifications you've been sending us are inadequate we want a higher level of scientists no that's not what the game was about it was about lower their standards so we can show diverse faces when we have our guardian class and I said: when are you going to face this?

This is disgusting and he said: we need our jobs, we want our jobs if you stand up we will be crushed those who have done it now are complete pariahs the whole system is going to take 50 years it is going to have to completely collapse and be rebuilt from scratch and I feel sorry for him , I would say that people in my position who are not canceling institutions and thanks to the Manhattan Institute for not canceling me we will still see, uh, when Twitter starts appearing in the fall, you know, coming in and what C-SPAN has to say about this, no I know, but those of us who are more isolated have an absolute obligation to provide the facts. that explains the disparate impact I'm not going to be intimidated by the silence it's too late it's too late everything is collapsing uh People like us have to talk Me in the book you know what I am I'll give you an honest description here Of what they find writers and speakers, you're always supposed to have a positive solution, although I'm a pessimist and I don't necessarily feel very optimistic, but the audience wants to believe that there is hope and that there is something that everyone can get behind.

So I'm scratching my head and what can I do with the solution? Because, frankly, it seems like a really tough nut to crack, so I came up with the idea of ​​an institution that would be separate from any particular institution, like someone's medical school or someone's tech startup that would be ready to go in. in action. Whenever there is a surprisingly brave scientist like Norman Wang and the electrophysiologists at the University of Pittsburgh who run a laboratory have had all kinds of students he mentored, the best in their field, he dared to write an article in a scientific journal that It says racial preferences in medicine are not working, we have tried them, they are not working, we are lowering our standards, we are not helping advanced medicine, we are not helping students, it was completely canceled. they removed him from his position they stripped him of his research capacity he is not allowed to have any contact with the students this is what happens people destroy themselves by telling the truth and so I thought that maybe if we could have an organization that would have them under its reach The data on academic skills that Gap made available it made available on crime, so when the police are vilified and now we have a complete recruitment and retention crisis, there is barely a police department in a major city that be close to the number of officers you need to fight crime, even if prosecutors were willing to bring a case against a thief or thief, but they don't have the officers to make those arrests because there has been a post-George Floyd flight. of the profession, so if we could have an organization that would provide the data to back this up, that is one hope, otherwise all I can say is courage, I refuse to apologize, I refuse to back down because in this point I think there is a good argument to make. for racial etiquette and, as I say, they are uncomfortable things to talk about, no one wants to hear about it, but the time for racial etiquette is over because as long as racism remains the only permissible explanation for racial disparities in a college of medicine in an Alzheimer's laboratory in a classical music orchestra in a bank in your corporation in a newspaper as long as racial disparities remain the only permissible explanation, everything is collapsing and we have to be able to defend ourselves with the real explanation of what these are tragic disparities that we can all agree on.

They must be solved and we all have different explanations or solutions to solve them, but they must be solved in the core of the family at the earliest ages of childhood to socialize children and get rid of the white anti-performance ethic that penalizes many black students who They are doing their homework, they are taking their textbooks home, they think they can meet the standards, they want to learn and if their peers criticize them for acting white, that is something very difficult to overcome and it has to change, but but 22 years later I say the solution to this is to get rid of medical or engineering or chemistry competency standards and have double admissions standards, that's not how we fix it and we have to start explaining why our institutions are not in the present tense. racially proportional we can expect them to be more honest the only way they will be is with more honest speech and it is paternalistic it is condescending to lower standards instead of saying we know everyone can meet those standards thank you.

I think we'd like to open it up to the floor and hold the microphone for about 15 minutes for questions, so we'll start here at the front with the gentleman at the end, just hold the microphone, please, Mark. professor Castorino at Rutgers University and before me, what is Trump's name has to appear there? When does Trump's name have to appear there? Oh, I'm sorry, I think we thought about that, but probably the only brown person in the audience, but I want to say something about where Merit Trump's race I'm Indian and my country was ruled for 200 years by the White Gang on the other side of the sea ​​in 1947 we gained our independence as a people and as a nation we refused to look back but decided to move forward today fear of my countrymen who went to the same universities I went to about three of the largest companies in the world Microsoft Google and IBM two others Indians became governors of two southern states of this country and another Indian is now Prime Minister of Great Britain the fastest Now my advice to Harvard University and the New York Times stop this narrative about race, okay, no help the people you're trying to help get the message of the Indians who made it or Merit is not based on race thank you yes yes they have.

They have a heart problem with the presumption of white privilege when Asians are yelling at everyone, you know, but of course, you know, we know we know all the rhetorical spins about that, well, they're white adjacent and no, they. No, they're not, you know, they are, it's an academic endeavor, it's a family culture, if you can't learn, if you're not in school, the black truancy rate is very high, no one can, in this moment, learn to read. the student has to do it himself and racializing this does not help, the effort has to come from within and if the effort is made, we are an open society, we are waiting with open arms, okay, let's go to the back of the room, like this that uh, I'll go to the left uh, back there, I can see your hand.

Heather I enjoyed your talk. I generally agree with your thesis, but it sounded like you were assuming that there is necessarily a problem with our institutions not being racially proportional. and that's not at all obvious to me, it seems inevitable to me that there are racial disparities, even significant ones, in some institutions and not in others, and that could simply be a reflection of different cultural norms and preferences of different ethnic and cultural groups. In our society, yes, that is true. I guess I have to focus on the accusation that racial disparities in institutions are per se a sign of racism somewhere, you know it's very difficult, this is at this point, systemic racism is like a flagistan, it's that vaporous.

What we just have to believe is out there and no one can really point out where it is exactly, but I guess instead of just saying, well, we're going to have disparities, let's get over it. I feel like my commitment right now is to explain. those disparities and then it's a slightly different argument in a sense, we're making the same argument that in light of the gaps in academic skills and the behavioral gaps in crime yes, of course, we're going to have a racial disproportionality So the assumption that there would be equal results is only valid if the cultures at this time were different, but I can tell you that Asian culture, tiger mother culture, puts everything else to shame and if you juxtapose that with tiger culture, downtown, the behavioral disparities are so Cool, I'm surprised that apparently my good friends on the left actually believe that the best explanation for the lack of disparities is racism and not what is quite empirically demonstrable about how cultures differ originally.

A woman in the yes, yes, thank you, just wait. the microphone, please, thank you. I agree and everyone agrees that the election of these mayors and woke gas affects minority communities even more than white communities in major cities, but how do you explain Johnson winning in Chicago when you know he doesn't , both were? the candidates were Democrats one was Law and Order one was criminal coward how do you explain that yes he is um and he actually got the biggest vote in the highest criminal districts in areas? I guess I mean, I'm really bragging here and I do this with great trepidation, but you've asked me, but it's just that at some point it's not my place to speak out about black voting behavior, but it seems like there's a conflict, you know?

I've made it my mission to give a voice to the people the New York Times refuses to listen to and who are truly desperate for more police protection. I think they do. I won't do it again. It is presumptuous of me to formulate a hypothesis, but I will offer a hypothesis that there is a The conflict, within the blacks, there is a tradition and, as you say, they are both Democrats, but there is something perhaps seductive in the narrative of racism along that many voters are not ready to resign yet and Brandon Johnson was selling the argument that the police are racists, it is also perhaps attractive that, oh, more services are the solution.

I'm skeptical that maybe that attracted people, but that's what it is. I would say that the conservative safe harbor argument, which I can sometimes be guilty of perpetuating, is to say clearly, well, the polls show that you know if you do it. Quinnipiac polls routinely show that if you ask blacks if you want more broken windows, quality of life, enforcement, they will say yes at higher rates than whites, and yet they will also vote anti-police. candidate, that's true too, these are all very difficult things and it's difficult for white people to talk about it. There are some great black leaders out there and I hope they get more attention and more followers because the race that is Hustle is seductive, it's a narcotic.

It's been working, but it has to stop now and, frankly, I'm going to racialize this and again, excuse me for violating racial etiquette. I know these are extremely raw issues, but I'm fed up. I've seen it too. There's a lot going onwith the things I love, we can't let the racial hustle and bustle plague us any longer, we have to believe in equal opportunity standards, we can't keep maligning colorblind meritocratic standards, this gentleman here with the tie, just wait for the microphone please many microns coming thank you for an excellent talk thank you before I ask my question I am a retired associate professor of medicine and oncology what you talked about impacted me during the coveted epidemic the initial data was that it is happening further. in African Americans and Caucasians, anyone who has done any clinical research would automatically look at the subgroup analysis, compare rich whites to rich blacks and poor whites to poor blacks, they would have quickly realized that it is due to wealth in the one where the poor are. their apartments and we probably would have saved many lives by doing the subgroup analysis that for some reason was not done.

In fact, I wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal even though they published other letters of mine, they didn't publish them, so with this one we seem kind of nonsense. I think we lost lives while dealing with my question. However, what do we do about it? You know, these people like Professor Wang in Pittsburgh, when they get fired, there should be a fund to get good lawyers. sue the institutions and once these people are harmed and not with fines, they may back off when their pockets are taken, they may start listening until they get hurt, they are not going to listen to anyone and that is probably the cheapest way to do it, getting them.

Good legal representation to find out why they were fired and as far as I know no one has. So can you answer if anyone has done that or is thinking about it? Yes, there are some lawsuits going on. Timothy Jackson at the University of North Texas has been expelled. He worked because he ran a musicology journal created around an Austrian music theorist named Schenker who has been very influential in the United States. There's a black musicologist at Hunter College here in New York City, part of the CUNY system who has the most absolutely crazy theory that because Shanker talks about hierarchies in tonal value and it's by doing some kind of hierarchical analysis of music that is about race, in some ways all classical music is racist, anything that has any kind of hierarchy if they are like fields of physical forces, that is racist, this Yule is absolutely crazy, but it is loved in the profession of musicology, of course, everyone loved him.

Alex Ross of The New Yorker, so Jackson published a symposium in the Journal of Shankarian Studies that had critics actually people are a little cautious critical of Philip Buell's strange theory of hierarchies and musical analysis being racist and he it was they canceled his show they canceled his newspaper they got him off the police he's suing uh so there are lawsuits going on there's a guy in Florida who's suing so yeah it's a really good idea. He would do it. It would actually complicate your observation about Covid. I would say that one of the worst consequences of racial hysteria in medicine is to say that there are racial disparities in health outcomes.

They are themselves also the result of racism and again you are not allowed to talk about the behavior, so you will have realized that it is no longer allowed to say that obesity is bad. For health, we are all supposed to be fat positives and celebrating obesity in this way, it's really cool and it has a racial angle, which is why Scientific American has published all these medical journals that devote entire issues to the topic. the idea of ​​racism and medicine and they published a study that said that to talk about it we should try to reduce black obesity rates, that that is racist and therefore the only allowable explanation for racial disparities in outcomes of health is that doctors are racist.

Talking about exercise, better medication compliance, maybe people need help if you're in a poor neighborhood, get help getting to your doctor's appointment, but I can tell you that you can talk to the doctors at the center. the city who work in large university medical centers and will tell you about the differences in people who show up for postnatal visits, prenatal visits and care, there are racial differences there but you can't talk about that, it's just medical racism and that means that we are not going to save black lives because we are not allowed to talk about the behavioral components of racial disparities and I would say that obesity is probably the main reason for the black-white disparities that we saw in death rates from Covid. uh ask the last question here because we're running out of time and this is a personal question.

Heather, you know her in this book and throughout your career at City Journal and elsewhere you've written about some pretty disturbing trends in American life, so you mentioned you're a pessimist I wonder what motivates you to keep going uh sadness and anger My heart breaks daily to see the things I love torn down with so much ignorance uh and and there are not only the things I love but so many people love and I can't take it anymore and I'm furious at the ignorance that is allowed to dominate our culture and our civilization . I am the most privileged person in the world to have had an education in the liberal arts, humanities, to be able to have read English literature before I came in, before anyone thought to teach me that I should feel oppressed for reading dead white men, I was never It did not occur to me nor to my companions to reject reading John Milton or Alexander.

Pope or William Wordsworth or Edmund Spencer or Strawser because they were white men, all I knew was that I couldn't understand Milton's syntax in Paradise Lost and that was what was wrong with me, not his dead white masculinity, so I had to work very hard for it, but I am glad I did and Milton's vision of paradise in paradise lost is one of the most essentially charged acts of linguistic beauty and achievement of the absolute richness of the fecundity of the world he describes. I am very privileged to have that. I had to read those books and it breaks my heart that the generations that came after me have been given excuses for their own ignorance and all they care about is chasing these fictions of their own victimhood and supposed fragility.

It's disgusting, I can't. I can't stand it and we all have to stop being silently beaten by everyone, whether it's the fiction of fragility and security, the fiction of racial oppression, we have to start fighting back and fight for our civilization. Well, on that note, I want to thank you, Heather.