Fearless Thinking In An Age Of Conformity

b good afternoon and welcome to our virtual event fearless thinking in an age of conformity i'm brian anderson the editor of city journal and i'm excited to talk today with heather mcdonald the thomas w smith fellow at the manhattan institute our country is in the midst of a cultural crisis protests over police shootings have led to civil unrest and calls from activists academics and celebrities and journalists to defund police departments social media companies in the mainsteering press are increasingly unwilling to give a fair hearing to arguments that they disagree with in this atmosphere free and fearless thinking is especially valuable heather mcdonald has carried that standard in city journals pages and beyond she's criticized the pernicious argument the key american institutions including the nation's police departments are irredeemably racist her essay in the summer issue of city journal conformity to a lie identified elite academic institutions as a source of this argument in places of stifling intellectual conformity this conformity is not confined to college campuses however as heather recently discovered when a talk she delivered defending law enforcement was pulled from youtube only to be restored under age appropriate content restriction in short heather mcdonald's been doing invaluable work and again we're glad to have the opportunity to talk about it with her today now throughout the conversation please feel free to submit your questions on whatever platform you're watching us on and we'll try to work in as many uh as feasible so heather thanks very much for joining me today thank you so much brian it's an honor to be with you now in your essay which i just mentioned for city journal summer issue you detail the academic response to the death at police hands of george floyd in minneapolis in late may an awful incident that has set off months of urban protests many of which have become extremely violent how has higher education addressed this period of crisis in american history it's approached the crisis with a combination of utterly unhinged rhetoric brian and very dangerous plans college presidents competed to issue the most sweeping indictment they could possibly muster of the american polity and the american people claiming that blacks are everywhere uh and at all times under lethal threat of their lives let me give you a few examples just briefly ted ruger who is the dean of the university of pennsylvania law school immediately announced that we are again reminded that this country's 400 year history of racism continues to produce a clear and present danger to the bodies and lives of black people in every part of the u.s now astute listeners will hear in this uh echoes of tanahisi coats probably the most most read author on an american campus today amherst college president announced that virulent anti-black racism has never not been obvious and yet there are some people who continue to deny it the chancellor of university of california at los angeles eugene block announced that racism permeates every sector of society now it would be a mistake brian to sort of brush this off as mere boilerplate college presidents have enormous authority they they set the intellectual tone for our country and they're supposed to represent our best effort at truth and disinterested knowledge not political partisanship these are highly partisan statements they better damn well have empirical evidence to back up such utterly delegitimating claims about the american polity i have argued that they do not as far as the plans that are rolling out at record rates i'm sent them on a daily basis by various people out in the academic world uh what we're seeing happening now is the rollout of a total revision of the curriculum college after college is declaring that it's very raison d'etre is to function as an anti-racist institution how that overlaps with its mission to preserve and and pass on our cultural inheritance or to generate new knowledge is a mystery to me we have plans to inject issues of racial identity throughout the curriculum the humanities social sciences and the sciences we have more pledges compar built on decades of pledges to hire by quota uh to cast aside meritocratic standards and and hire for professorships uh on the basis of skin color why does this matter brian because uh this stuff doesn't stay put it leaks into the world at large i would argue that the horrible horrible anarchy the riots that we've seen uh over this summer of of tragedy have been inspired in very large part by this sweeping academic indictment of the of the american polity yet wouldn't you assume that america's colleges the campuses are already places of of tolerance uh you know what was the point really of spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on diversity initiatives uh if college administrators are now suggesting that that previous work apparently had no real impact and that universities of all places are still hotbeds of bigotry well first of all it is ludicrous uh i have heard from so many students as i speak on college campuses before they before they walk out or or surround me uh that they are at threat of their lives from circumambient racism and sexism there could not be anything that is further from the truth colleges are the most tolerant institution in human history at least towards society's traditionally marginalized groups will leave aside the the plight of conservative students uh so the idea that there is any need for anti-racism measures absurd uh the point of it is to virtue signal but there is a further uh paradox brian these these college presidents get up and they beat their chest and say i apologize i apologize for my racist institution well they should name some names who are the faculty that are discriminating against black students or against female students because females are just as as uh energetic in adopting the victim mantle uh because it is is confers enormous power and prestige uh but if these college presidents are so convinced that their institutions are are places of racism where students need allies if you're black or female you need an ally to survive why haven't they changed their admissions policies why haven't they gotten rid of these professors and why don't they issue a warning to black students or to female students that you're entering a a scene of of utterly lethal uh bigotry and of course the reason they don't because they know that is a lie and this is all part of this very bizarre charade that the country's elites are involved in in which elite whites uh flagellate themselves for phantom racism this is unprecedented in in human history to have this degree of self-hatred uh we're learning that the anti-racism ideology isn't just limited to the humanities you mentioned it's it's extending into other academic areas as well this this mindset is entering the sciences in in your experience oh absolutely uh thanks to the national government uh here's what trump should do you know he's reamed out the the the uh anti-whiteness training he should ream out more importantly all the federal tax dollars that are pouring into science departments to fight intersectionality and engineering the engineering school at the university of california san diego uh this summer announced that it was going to become uh an anti-racist organization well what anti-racism has to do with uh developing new nanotechnologies or or understanding uh some of the engineering challenges of of vaccines and viruses is another mystery uh but science harvard science uh dean recently announced that he would be upping the number of black scientists hired none of this has anything to do with our ability to solve the medical problems that face us and yet the national science foundation the national institutes of health are funding diversity and intersectionality uh initiatives in in alzheimer's research on the theory that the only good science is diverse science so and you also have campuses throughout the university of california that won't even look at a scientist who's applying for a job if his statement announcing his commitment to diversity is not sufficiently effusive that scientist won't get through the first cut i'm not sure that albert einstein would get hired today at the university of california and many other colleges because he oddly for a scientist was absolutely obsessed with his pursuit of truth uh and was not going to distract himself uh from a with a sort of pseudo specious politics but there's very few places today where he would get hired without having to jump through at least a whole set of diversity hoops you spend a lot of time on campuses giving talks sometimes controversially so uh what's your what's your feel for how this this kind of blanket ideology in a way is is affecting students how are students responding to these claims that the universities are hotbeds of bigotry and racism well i would i would identify two polls uh brian the ones who are the true believers who have gone out now to colonize the hr departments of corporations to colonize their very interstices google the big tech companies are one big college campus writ large in silicon valley and those who are demanding and protesting with the absolute encouragement of of college administrators and many faculty collect proclaiming their victimhood but then there are the students who are cynical about this and who uh don't necessarily buy into it but they are terrified there is an enormous amount of self censorship happening on the part of both students and on the part of faculty uh they it's the opposite of if if you believe that the purpose of higher education is free willing freewheeling discourse and debate of ideas an idea that i am not fully committed to i think the real purpose is transmission of knowledge and and debate of opinion is is part of that but but in some cases tangential but but if if you see universities as primarily about the free exchange of ideas then they are a travesty they are a complete failure in that because uh students are so terrified i mean one thing i noted with extreme alarm over this last year was that several of the nominees to the federal bench that had been put forward by the trump administration either saw their nominations sidelined entirely derailed entirely or had a very very hard time getting through because of undergraduate writing in conservative student newspapers a a nominee for the ninth circuit court of appeals in the western states ryan bounds as a stanford undergraduate had written some sardonic essays about stanford's obsession with identity politics and multiculturalism well his nomination was torpedoed thanks unfortunately i'm sad to say uh to by by tim scott senator tim scott with the assist from marco rubio uh and then another nominee naomi rao barely squeaked on because as a yale undergraduate she had written some undergraduate essays in their conservative yale's conservative student paper uh disputing the idea that there's an epidemic of campus rape well those were essays written in the 1990s by undergraduates who which had the effect of of torpedoing judicial nominations any undergraduate today thinking of challenging campus orthodoxies who is aware of the current climate of hostility and suppression would be frankly reckless to speak out against this because given social media you know to get the 99 the the early student newspaper things you had to dig through the archives today everything's on the web i fear for the future of of conservative uh anti-dogmatic student newspapers of which i have benefited enormously my uh shout down blockade a year or two ago at claremont mckenna college in southern california the only decent coverage of that was from the claremont independent a conservative student newspaper but as i say those voices are going to be very few on the ground in the future well maybe that leads into this question you know this is not the first period of left-wing activism on campus there was there was an earlier period in the 60s into the 70s really that was very pronounced had political uh influence in the country i wonder how these periods compare in your view they compare because the the campus radicals in the 1960s did not have a phalanx of thousands of diversity bureaucrats cheering them on of college presidents cow towing before them bending the knee just weeping in in in shame at their own racial sins you now have an utter uh codependency between these left-wing college bureaucrats and these self-involved narcissistic students who put on little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlitz and vice chancellors of equity and inclusion that amplify this that give it institutional credibility in a way that the sixties protests never had uh and and as i say the transmission belt into the world at large is much much faster uh these i think are more consequential simply because they have been so institutionalized and there is virtually no voice on campus that is pushing back against them the 60s there were not enough voices the faculty we learned back then were largely supine were largely cowards and were willing to have uh administration offices in many most cases taken over with machine guns but still there were some people who fought back today that that virtually never happens we have a related question from an audience member uh craig lazera if you were counseling a high school senior he asks looking for a traditional non-woke education are there any colleges you could recommend hillsdale he says comes to mind but are there other institutions that are resisting these trends you're describing unfortunately they're very few uh and obviously the first that ever always comes to mind is hillsdale there are some i assume some catholic colleges out there i would ordinarily have recommended the st john's colleges which are dedicated to a great books tradition and yet i have heard a rumor and i have not confirmed this myself that they have become woke in their education if that's not true i apologize to those campuses but i would do due diligence before sending your child there i think what we need uh you know i i have been very reluctant to pull the plug on academia because i there's nothing i believe in with greater conviction and passion than the the privilege of studying the great works and of passing our legacy on to students of trying to educate them to understand why they should be down on their knees in gratitude for the sublimity and beauty and humor and irony that is the western tradition but after this summer uh i've i've decided it is utterly unredeemable you know we've heard you mentioned brian in the beginning the uh defund the police movement forget that that is utterly reckless and will result in in thousands more black lives being taken what we have to do is defund academia do not give them another cent uh i and the problem is that parents i've i heard i spoke to a a parent several months ago this is before the troubles but uh and urging her not to give any more money to harvard and she said i'm sorry i have to until my child gets in uh that is a very hard thing to break because the the parents that are desperate for the status and credentials that these colleges can uh convey uh are are very reluctant to to pull the plug on alumni donations but it has to happen we have to have creative thinking backed up with with a large philanthropy to create alternative institutions i would like to see a revival of the 18th century tradition of the private tutor who would take the the sons and daughters of british aristocracy on the grand tour on the continent uh to rome to the to vienna uh and and and uh one that was filled with learning but there is absolutely no reason to keep these institutions going anymore they do not deserve it well that's a good article idea actually um let's see here's here's another audience question and it gets back to some of the comments he made earlier uh the audience member says there's been a spate of college style struggle sessions in non-university settings from the retraction of tom cotton's op-ed at the new york times to the google employees protesting their company's collaboration with the defense department uh do you think university activism risks infecting other institutions i think you've started to answer that and if so uh which institutions are at the highest risk do you think of being infected it's not a risk it's a reality it has happened uh of course google that protest was fueled by college graduates we have also got to stop the idea that social uplift programs uh should be measured by the rate of college going no no no no we have got to decouple this but every institution the the uh new york times the press it's all college graduates uh these are people who have bearing with them the virus a virus that is far more dangerous in the long term than the coronavirus ever could be it is the virus of racial hatred and division based on no facts whatsoever uh the press has been taken over government is taken over uh big banks are taking over you've we've seen this summer every corporation in the country putting out almost indistinguishable statements about america's endemic racism as if college presidents were were dictating to them uh when when google fired the computer engineer james damore in august of 2017 or 2018 excuse me for having written a very moderate 10-page fact-based memo suggesting that it was not discrimination against highly qualified female engineers that was responsible for the fact that google did not have 50 50 male to female engineering uh and and james damore said it may have something to do with the average career predilections of males and females average he was talking about distributions he was not talking about the females at google he was talking about the females not at google and mentioning the fact that females on average again i'm not talking about your daughters who will be the next nobel prize in physics i know but but on average females gravitate towards hands-on relational work males towards abstract ideas-based work google fired him for that memo because it said it made females feel unsafe at work google's ceo pichai mimicked verbatim the pathetic language of academic victimhood in explaining why he had to fire google damore but on one of the google chat boards somebody posted anonymously the statement we have to nip this diversity bud thing in the bud which it's too late but we have to try and at least its march uh because right now our what google calls its human resources department which is its typical googly uh precious name of people analytics people analytics is now just an outpost of women's studies and black studies and that is true uh in every major corporation uh that relates to a question asked by pablo who's in our audience is there any truth to the claims that diverse organizations actually make more money have greater revenue or is that a correlation without necessary causation i am so skeptical uh i have not looked myself at those studies but i i simply cannot believe it because at this point uh given the academic skills gaps that are vast between whites and asians on the one hand and so-called underrepresented minorities that that is blacks and hispanics on the other and exist as well to a lesser extent between males and females any institution that is affirmatively engineering diversity is doing so by setting aside its color and sex blind meritocratic standards there is it is provable that when you set those standards aside and substitute something else you are going to get a less qualified workforce uh and and we've also had counter evidence of research that's come out that says that this anti-white training produces more dissension and more of course it does i mean of course it does uh you're you're brow beating people with a false premise that they are all bearers of of uh lethal anti-black bias when in fact this country is so ready to be post-racial in my experience you go across the country the vast majority of whites are well-meaning they just want to get along we want to move beyond this but we're being brow beaten bludgeoned into this racial consciousness so i'm skeptical of those those arguments that say diverse things diverse organizations do better uh and we've also seen i believe that the the social impact funds uh that probably also take into account now the gender and race ratios on in corporations they don't outperform others uh and and we do have evidence as well that all the diversity training backfires so no a corporation should look exclusively at at merit it is for other institutions to try to close the academic skills gap by the time you get to employment it's simply too late here's an audience question from elita cass given what corporations like google are doing to employees who speak out as you just described can anything be done from a public policy standpoint to restore equitable treatment for employees across the you know the ideological spectrum boy that's a tough question uh i know that a friend of mine is suing her school who fired her she taught at the french lycee in in los angeles it fired her for having in a completely unrelated speech not on school time said that we should be grateful for western civilization i kid you not that was the firing offense she's suing the school under california a california statute that says that employers cannot discriminate on the basis of political viewpoint the problem i have the the fear i have is that we're creating a precedent uh and one that you always have to worry what happens if that president gets in the hands of the left so if a corporation uh you know does not want to engage in politics and uh could it be sued by say a biden administration for not having affirmative outreach for certain leftist points of view or certain diversity hires so i'm not sure the i the idea of employment at will uh that employers should be able to fire for most reasons is also a zone of freedom so one has to be very careful in how you uh restrict that and and make sure that you're not setting a precedent that in the wrong hands could have the exact unintended consequences that that we want to avoid i i i so i wish i don't i don't have an answer to that frankly and the easy answer would be public shaming but as the world becomes more and more infused with college graduates there is no more shame we're in a race against time we're in a race against changing demography uh and you know things are at a very critical urgent state right now and we have not much time remaining to try and preserve the principles of western civilization which are both fair a commitment to fairness to impartiality to due process and also to uh a legacy of literature and art and beauty that is almost unmatched i wonder um and this is obviously speculative question uh how much the pandemic has has uh had an effect on all of these developments from the unrest to um you know the way the universities are thinking about uh their their financial flows because you have a lot of students uh who are not going back to campus and who are still being asked to pay full tuition i i just wonder if that could change some of the mindset here one hopes and as far as leaving aside the question of the right please don't call it unrest right call it riots call it looting call it anarchy unrest is like what i have every night with restless leg syndrome uh so let's be honest um but addressing the colleges first it's hilarious because the colleges are the ones that are promoting this therapeutic culture of of unsafety and wellness initiatives and what i call the college woke spa with its massages and essential oils and petting dogs and and aromatherapy i kid you not uh marina i wrote about this for the city journal uh and and so they're cr they've created these hysterical students so on the one hand if they followed that wellness ethic they would all be shutting down but they are also at the same time greedy capitalist bastards that are desperate for tuition dollars and they have an entire industry of enrollments managers both in-house and and and and contracted out to try and get as many warm bodies in freshman year seats as they can just to get those deposits in their accounts so that they can pay for more 400 000 diversity chancellors uh so they're they're in a very paradoxical situation of wanting the bodies in and yet you know being responsible for the safetyism ideology that is destroying our economy right now uh and one would hope that that parents would say enough of this i'm not giving you tuition but again i'm speaking just anecdotally i i met a woman this this summer who has a daughter who was admitted to pitzer college one of the claremont claremont colleges uh and they're all offline but she's still paying the 60 or 70 dollar tuition simply because she's not willing to give up that spot uh because pitzer is uh credentializing so we'll see i think there will be a shake shake out at the lower reaches one hopes because we could we should cut the college student body population by 90 percent college should be something for the academic elites it is not a program to learn how to market to do marketing or sports management colleges have to get back towards a high demand high intellectual demand uh set of requirements so one would hope that it is going to have massive shakedowns shake out but i don't know these are protein institutions they have managed to keep tuition climbing way above the rates of inflation and thanks to student loans trump should be doing far more to cut off the tap there people should if you pay out of pocket that would bring some rationality to this taxpayers should not be underwriting these grotesquely obscenely inflated tuitions cut it off uh as for the the riots that we've seen i've that is a very frequent explanation that well these poor people they've been all quarantined and and uh and cut off from social interaction so of course they have to go and loot i'm not buying it i do not buy any justification for anarchy there's plenty of people who have been put into their stupid unrealistic unnecessary coronavirus shutdowns who are not looting looting is always a crime of opportunity uh and it is a result i would argue far more of the ideology that we're talking about today brian which is the ideology that america is endemically racist that gives justification we have seen the op-eds pouring out of the pages of the new york times the books in favor in defense of looting this is an ideological phenomenon not an economic one for sure we know the economy has nothing to do with crime the most safe period in american history the lowest crime was during the great depression the economic recession of 2008 crime continued to drop nobody's out there taking pickup trucks and and bashing into gucci and ferragamo because they cannot eat with their 600 uh a week uh unemployment check that's not what's going on here what's going on here is hatred and opportunism um here's another an anonymous audience question this person says i teach writing at a large canadian university and a small catholic college do you have suggestions for how not to give in to the pressure to teach diversity delusional materials all i can say is if you have the if you have the institutional capacity to be brave do so say that you are choosing works that by your uh lights are the most eloquent they are the finest examples of the english language that you can find and that you believe that all students are capable of absorbing all great literature and uh that the the idea that the the race or sex of an author is of relevance to what that author produces is extraordinarily narrowing i mean there's there i don't think there's ever been a dumber idea out there than cultural appropriation that we are now drawing boundaries on the human imagination it is ludicrous i recently read one of the most insightful explorations of female sexual competition uh that i've come across written by a male in 1947 uh britain the the slaves of solitude patrick hamilton it's astounding but if i believe cultural appropriation uh ideology as a male he should not be writing about uh female psychology uh this is absurd the only thing that matters is the greatness of the works we're reading i'm grateful that i went to college before multiculturalism hit uh so i got to read chaucer spencer milton william wordsworth alexander pope without ever thinking to complain that they had the wrong gonads and the wrong melanin sadly today students are taught that that is the first thing they should look at upon opening a book is whether that book conforms to their own narrow narrowly defined uh limiting uh gender and and sex identity uh ron asks could the new generation of college graduates and faculty hurt america in its competition with china in the future are they too preoccupied with diversity and critical race theory to participate in what are useful endeavors according to this iran in our audience absolutely we are putting our competitive edge at risk absolutely hundreds of millions of your taxpayer dollars are funding university mathematics departments physics departments chemistry departments biology departments to study intersectionality microaggressions heteronormativity in math and engineering ludicrous scientists just want to do their work they are not discriminating china is going full speed ahead obviously china has its problems it has its political problems there is undoubtedly patronage there in its science labs but they are free of this scourge of diversity i have said before the best thing trump could do if he wanted to level the playing field with china would be to dump a few cargo loads of gender theorists onto beijing research labs because as long as we are spending as any money promoting a diversity agenda in science we are not doing basic science and we are inevitably uh with that taking our eye off the ball it will hinder our competitive edge and we already know uh that that our science department's graduate studies can't be filled with american students because our math teaching is so watered down now thanks in very large part to diversity concerns uh the we have teachers of mathematics that are regularly they've been doing this for decades putting out curricula looking at multicultural math and ethnocentric math and whatnot uh so we're already behind i mean we are pathetic in our international competition scores on the the paisa exams and others uh as far as our our science and math and reading capacities so but it if you think things can can never get worse you're wrong they can always get worse and they will get worse now you um recently had your own experience with this cultural conformity you've been describing on campus and in its spillovers to the broader culture and in a speech you gave this summer uh you made the argument that the u.s u.s law enforcement isn't engaged in systematic uh violence against african americans the video was deemed by youtube as uh insensitive initially and uh i wonder if you could just tell that story a little bit and what what happened yes this was a speech at the center of the american experiment in minneapolis and i used uh federal data which is the gold standard in criminology uh for for the truth about policing and crime to show that we are not living through an epidemic of racially biased uh shootings of black men to the contrary uh when you take violent crime rates into account uh whites are overshot the the bias would seem to be in the opposite direction i talked about the vast support for proactive policing among the thousands of law-abiding residents of inner city neighborhoods who beg for more police protection so as soon as i finished this live stream speech youtube wiped it off the web entirely the center of the american experiment appealed uh and youtube grudgingly put it back on but slapped an age restriction on meaning that your child your 12-year-old boy cannot watch my speech in the privacy of his bedroom uh but he can watch uh naked women spooning with naked men uh or or buxom naked women frolicking in las vegas hotel pools or he can watch content about how to become an anti-fall warrior all of these videos are available on youtube without an age restriction i went on tucker carlson to talk about this and as soon as that segment ended uh youtube slapped another warning saying this was offensive content on the speech so uh we are definitely in an ideological war here uh the speech is available i recommend people to watch it it's a fairly comprehensive uh treatment i think of as as comprehensive as i could make it of the uh lies and and facts to rebut them about policing that is causing so much damage and so much loss of life in the country at this point uh but but uh this i'm just one small part of the vast web of censorship that's going on now by big tech well what what uh in your view should we be doing about that is there a policy answer there or is it really a matter of creating new tech institutions doesn't seem to be an easy response yeah i've you know more about this than i do brian as a as somebody who's been following webb uh law for a long time i don't know you know we've got whether we regulate these as as monopolies and require free speech again though i i run up against my usual hesitation of steadying a precedent uh you know that if if the left for instance if the left says well in order to create uh open environment we have to censor hate speech that's it's it's a preposterous argument but they've made it before so i don't know and and creating alternative venues we we've got some that are in the works you know that are operating now parlay or parlor as some people call it but but getting enough critical mass to to lure people away from the big tech platforms is very challenging so i don't know and one would like to believe that simply sunshine and transparency is enough it's not you know prager you i've my prageru videos have been demonetized and age restricted i know that some of of manhattan institute's videos have been age restricted which seems to be now the one of the tools of choice by youtube uh we can talk about it all we want and and we're like little gnats flying around a big ox and it doesn't seem to work so i don't know uh uh you know we have these hearings this summer and the mainstream media was incensed that any republican legislators dared to talk about uh big tech censorship as opposed to the anti-trust issues so i i don't know i i don't know uh but we need a solution fast because i fear i mean i i've got a forthcoming piece in city journal saying that i i think the next step in censorship is that data will no longer be available i think we are going to lose access to data on the academic skills gap uh i think that's why there's a a war against sats they want to put the college board out of existence so that we cannot have an alternative explanation for why there is not 13 black engineers at google we cannot talk about the math skills gap and i think we are going to also lose access to crime data uh so we we need to move fast to make sure that humanity has the trove of knowledge and facts that it's necessary to move forward uh here is another audience question this is from carl anderson it overlaps with some of what you've you've already responded to a big picture what do you think will happen in the long term as consequences of this is obsession with identity politics and censorship of free speech plays out you know where where is the culmination uh uh heading well i'll tell you one logical squaring of the circle for the identity politics and this is uncomfortable to say but white identity politics you know we've we've we're living through a period right now of uh everybody talk about white supremacy we are really playing with fire here americans are naive about tribalism they think they can play with tribal hatreds and it'll be fine well we've seen it is not fine we are seeing the fires already we are seeing uh the shooting and the looting things are getting very bad we should not be turning our eyes away from this moment it should really be the anarchy that we've seen should be the only thing people are talking about it is not something happening in a few places it is not something that will remain uh limited uh so we think we're not gonna turn into an african civil war i'm not sure about that these things we are playing with hatreds that the founders understood that you you you scratch away the veneer of civilization and you have some very base instincts and when we are delegitimating the institutions of law and order you see the new york times and the washington post inevitably put law order in scare quotes the claiming that it is merely some racist dog whistle it is not law and order respect for police officers we the the things that happen to police officers on a daily basis is an attack on all of us they go after police officers because that they are the symbols of civilization so that if this continues uh american prosperity is over because you need stability you need stability of expectations the double whammy of the riots and the coronavirus lockdowns have dealt a blow to america unlike anything we've ever seen we've lived through five five uh months of unprecedented government malfeasance between the riots and the coronavirus lockdowns i don't know if we recover as far as free speech i don't know if we lose it we lose the ability to self-correct right now the only allowable explanation for racial disparities is white racism and so what we're doing on that explanation is to retool all our institutions to have even deeper and more inflexible hiring quotas based on skin color without regard to merit and qualifications we are putting the caliber of our institutions at risk by and and we're also putting the qualifications of those many qualified uh competitive blacks under the the false stigma the unjustified stigma that they too are hired under racial preferences so that is very bad uh if it turns out that this only allowable explanation for racial disparities which is white racism is wrong but we do not have the ability to talk about alternative explanations which are cultural problems behavioral decisions individual decisions like dropping out of school getting involved in gangs having children out of wedlock not having an academic culture the the pernicious the pernicious culture that that academic effort is so somehow acting white an idea that was put out no less than by the smithsonian's institution uh museum of african american history this summer uh if if it turns out that those other explanations are right but we cannot voice them then we have no ability to self-correct and this this vortex of racial hatred and resentment will only worsen uh another question and this um comes from kyle wilkins uh he wonders if the courts could be receptive to fighting back in some of these areas whether on free speech or on on some of the the more pernicious uh examples you've described of of excessive pursuit of diversity norms well i first was wondering whether he's going to ask whether the courts are susceptible and i would say yes i'm terrified by the future of our jurisprudence if we have sex and gender and race quotas for uh nominations to the federal bench this is very bad the courts have been very good on the uh travesty that is has been the campus rape tribunals uh which fortunately the department of education under donald trump and education secretary devos uh got rid of of the very destructive dear colleague letter that was put out by the obama administration that basically gutted due process on campus and i think the vast majority of challenges that have been brought by students who were convicted of campus rape through completely inadequate legal procedures on campus the vast majority of courts have been open to those challenges uh as far as free speech uh yes i would say so far they probably have a pretty good record on um on free speech if one could figure out ways to bring it again what i worry about is the academy we saw during the confirmation hearings for supreme court justice brett kavanaugh that devolved into this frenzy of feminists uh self self pity and caterwauling the believe survivors movement uh had its strongest proponents on elite law schools let's let's think about what belief survivors means it means that you do not have a presumption of innocence for the accused it means that any female who accuses a male of rape or sexual assault is automatically entitled to belief to credence well you had the the student body of the harvard and yale law schools walking out demanding that their classes be cancelled under the banner of belief survivors a disproportionate number of harvard and yale law school graduates are going to be put on the federal bench if they go on the bench still embracing the believe survivors mantra due process and fairness is over and it is going to it is already spread from uh the area of sex and race into as i write about in the upcoming city journal into race uh we have a a a advocate telling the wall street journal this summer that if a black person tells you an employee tells you that he has been the subject of racism on work he's believe him he's automatically entitled to belief you're not allowed to say well maybe there were other reasons why you weren't promoted you're not allowed to say that believe survivors now applies in the racial realm as well uh so again be very very scared about what is coming out of our universities well heather i think we're unfortunately uh reaching the end of our time for today um thanks very much for joining me thank you and uh for providing such a um a withering and excellent discussion of these extremely important issues um so so thanks again thank you and thanks uh for everyone for watching uh today and for your many thoughtful questions uh if you'd like to hear more about such conversations uh or interested in supporting our mission i'd encourage you to subscribe to the manhattan institute's newsletters or consider making a donation there are links for doing so in the comments window on your screen so thanks again uh for for watching everyone and thanks again heather for your your excellent discussion such an honor thank you brian you

Channel: Manhattan Institute

Views: 22,590

Keywords: censorship, social media, campus protests, police shootings, media culture, colleges, higher education, social unrest, social media companies, police reform, anti-racism, racist, Black Lives Matter, heather mac donald, manhattan institute, think tank

Id: BZVUlNJBvFg

Length: 54min 13sec (3253 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020