Liberty Series with Heather Mac Donald

oh good evening good evening thank you i'm john mico the executive director of the union league legacy foundation and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to tonight's liberty series uh program the legacy foundation is the non-profit charity of the union league of philadelphia and we of course as you all know live by the values the principles and we use the history of this great institution the union league of philadelphia for citizenship programs for scholarships for tomorrow's future leaders and for lectures like tonight's liberty series program someone asked me tonight one of our speakers asked me tonight how much do you charge for this and i said well we don't charge anything but i will make a pitch so so this is the pitch please support the legacy foundation we need your support to make these programs happen we have programs that reach thousands of thousands not just members but of course all those others that need to understand the greatness of our of our culture uh of our civilization and of course our great constitution so i i please uh ask you to make a gift to the legacy foundation if you already haven't um a few housekeeping items before we start our program first if you would please silence your cell phone or better yet turn it off if anyone does that anymore um the program will last about an hour in total we will have a q a at the end you should all have a card please feel free to fill out a question um kira and becca and other members of our staff will come around towards the end of the discussion uh part of the program to to collect them and we'll get to as many as possible this evening a few upcoming programs and we do take a little bit of a break because on april 6th is good citizen day where nearly 300 high school juniors will be here in this room to learn about what we all care about and learn how to be better citizen leaders but our next program lecture program is on april 12th our library hour age of acrimony with john grinspan uh it should be a great um program and then april 26th the day before the 200th anniversary of ulysses s grant we will have a program with ron white a um a civil war round table and then the next night the union league will be hosting a grant ball uh a u.s grant ball at liberty hill and i don't know if bob cavaliere our 160th chair is here but that's all in in um in partnership with 160th committee in a celebration of the 160 years of the union league of philadelphia and now it's my great pleasure to introduce the chair of the union league legacy foundation my boss the one the only miss joan carter john thank you john so i always start with the first line of the union league bylaws which says that every member shall support the constitution and the free enterprise system but we don't often think about where those ideas come from i mean they didn't just appear in 1776 so ideas like individuals individualism individual liberty logic and reason did they come from the ancient world or the philosophic traditions of the asia or africa tonight we're going to talk about the civilization that made the constitution and the free enterprise possible western civilization and we'll explore the attacks on civilization that threaten the existence of our republic moderating our program is mr joe lacante you may recall that joe was our speaker at the february liberty series program he's an enlightenment scholar a film producer author and the director of the center for american studies at the heritage foundation and our featured speaker tonight is heather mcdonald heather's a thomas smith fellow at the manhattan institute she writes regularly for a very wide variety of publications including the wall street journal and what i really love about her is she takes on topics that many authors will not subjects like mask mandates and revisionist art curators and one of my favorites classical music suicide pact and how math and science have become victims of congress's demand for racial justice she's the author of several books including war on cops and the diversity delusion how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture so please join me in welcoming joe lacante and heather mcdonald [Applause] [Applause] that's your mic here we go thank you welcome everybody uh can you hear me back there in the bleacher seats okay terrific well uh as we get into it here i wanted to say a couple things here that heather mcdonald he's these few public intellectuals who was willing to to defend western civilization without apology without apology yeah that's right uh and western civilization needs defending right now doesn't it because the crisis moment that we're in and it really is a crisis moment it does bring to mind as an historian it brings to mind the 1920s and the 1930s with the rise of new ideologies in the wake of the first world war that have become cynical of the western tradition communism of course fascism nazism eugenics materialism scientism all of these ideologies were a repudiation of the western classical biblical tradition there's a line here from walter lippmann he was a well-known columnist and public intellectual writing in the 1920s 1929 he put it this way the modern man has ceased to believe meaning cease to believe in that great classical western tradition he ceased to believe but he's not ceased to be credulous and the need to believe haunts him it is plain we have succeeded only in substituting trivial illusions for majestic faiths heather mcdonald has been exposing these illusions for many years and i have to say miss mcdonald you are no stranger to controversy if i could just say quickly in 2017 all five of the undergraduate colleges that make up the claremont colleges protested your scheduled speaking appearance and a and signed a petition against you hate to bring up this ancient history but it underscores the problem here's what they said they signed a petition heather mcdonald is a fascist a white supremacist a war hawk a transphobe and a queerfold quite a resume but the claremont petition proves your point doesn't it about the moral degradation of much of higher education not all of it but much of it miss mcdonald understands what is now at risk western civilization the foundation of it our ideals our institutions they're at great risk they're being shaken i love what you said in interview a couple of years ago you said this one of the greatest human virtues is gratitude gratitude the purpose of higher education you said is to help students understand why they should be down on their knees in gratitude for the beauty and sublimity of the western tradition no other civilization compares ladies and gentlemen again join me in welcoming heather mcdonald so we've got a few questions for you heather let's start with this it's probably good to just give us a brief description of what you understand to be the western tradition maybe just summarize some of its distinctive qualities that set apart the western tradition from other traditions well thank you so much mr lacante and thank you also miss carter and miss mr miko this is a great honor to be at the union league club union you're still using the word that's probably going to be canceled just like colorblindness but i know that you brave union leaguers will be ready to defend your your title and your your place in philadelphia national history and you bring up the uh ridiculous blockade at claremont mckenna having come out of a jag of speaking engagements at colleges it's an unusual situation for me now to have an audience that's still on its in its seats and is not trying to blockade the place or or walk out in in screaming hysteria so thank you thank you for giving me a hearing i appreciate it as far as what makes western civilization distinctive i'm going to start at a very homely level rather than the large big ideas that of of course are what ultimately is going to animate us here tonight but i've become obsessed recently with materials and i mean literally materials uh in this venerable hall there's they're fairly traditional but when you go back to your house tonight or your apartment check out your kitchen there's just a dizzying array of composite formica various types of steel counters things that we utterly take for granted that some scientists some engineer somewhere has worked at to make human life even more safe from the depredations of nature and this comes out of this extraordinary curiosity that began taking off in the 17th century in britain with the royal society and across the european continent to try to explain and understand nature and you had amateur scientists tinkering whether it's harvey to try and understand the circulation of the blood or the aristocrat lavoisier working on chemistry an insatiable appetite to use our reason to try to get at the secrets of nature and that curiosity spread into many other things it has been one of the signal aspects of western civilization we're now supposed to be constantly apologizing for the age of exploration and certainly uh when the european uh sailors and explorers arrived at new continents they did try to subjugate them you know what the people on those continents would have done the same to us had they had the technology to do so the desire for power is hardly unique but the capacity to understand the world to explore it to to grow the the scope of of human experience has been uniquely western we saw the scientific method develop this extraordinary way of testing causation the the randomized controlled experiment which is one of the great vehicles of understanding comes out of the west and what also comes out of the west is the respect for individual rights the rule of law is uniquely western uh the idea of due process of being able to presume innocence something that terrifyingly the products of our most elite law schools are now canceling the idea of the presumption of innocence every time you hear the mantra believe survivors which was the the thing that they tried to bring brett kavanaugh down with you had the graduates and the students of yale and harvard law schools are future federal judges chanting believe survivors if that mentality gets on the federal bench we can forget uh the rule of law and the possibility of justice before a tribunal our universities are on a mission to tear everything down but the ideas of individual freedom of limited government the thing that the left every idea that the left is now using to turn on our inheritance are uniquely western ideas whether it's tolerance justice individual rights they are fighting the west with western tools and the spirit of critique they have also taken to unjustified lengths but that too is a uniquely western trait of self-examination articulation of fundamental principles and then challenge to those principles these ideas have given the world prosperity that was unthinkable as little as 200 years ago miss mcdonald thank you for that i want to pick up that thought uh for a minute though on the scientific revolution which is terrific that you made that point i mean it brings to mind this line um about the early scientists they really believed that god had written two books the book of nature and the book of scripture and the study of the one would reveal the other and i remember there's a line from john newton of course newton this great you know foundational the foundations of science laid by newton where he said plato is my friend and aristotle is my friend but my greatest friend is truth the desire for truth the pursuit of truth what do you make of that i mean this used to be a western distinctive the the desire to pursue truth wherever it leads well we have become profound skeptics and skepticism too is a trait of the west uh so it is an extraordinarily broad tradition uh but the the efforts to critique forms of government you have the socratic dialogues of a constant back and forth of holding received wisdom up to analysis can we figure out a principle that can explain a variety of different uh phenomena whether it's in the law or in in science uh and so the pursuit of truth has been an animating function but the skepticism towards truth is also western and i have to admit i am a product of a 1970s college education that was uh sadly far too immersed in ridiculous french theories coming out of paris that were profoundly uh postmodern and believe that truth is really just a function of power or is inevitably partial there's a part of me i will confess to be honest that is persuaded by that up to a point i do think the process of interpretation is endless i'm not sure that it is within human uh capacity to reach a single agreed upon truth all i i can see empirically that disagreement is is is a an aspect of human existence that has always been with us nevertheless for all of my academic relativism when i'm writing about the black lives matter movement and the lies that are being told about the police and i am trying to put forward data that show that there's no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police i absolutely believe that i'm in pursuit and actually in possession of the truth so i can have two different well you're no wilting wall flower we can say that let me pick up this theme of gratitude if we could though uh that you raised so beautifully in that in that interview can we get to the root of the reasons that gratitude for our civilization it seems that it's become such a rare commodity not just in higher education but in the larger culture gratitude how do we can we get to the root causes of this do you think well here's another aspect of the way that the west is so universal and so broad in its accomplishments that it can be self-canceling i would i date a lot of our current problems to the extraordinary success of free market capitalism which is also a product of what western principles the idea of free trade overseen by property rights uh the amazing understanding that a respect for property is the foundation of a stable civilized society and we went so far in combining the courage the imagination of these empire builders these these capitalist kings and i'm not going to use the phrase robber barons uh because they were not robbing they were by and large creating wealth but the extraordinary power of capitalism created something in the 1950s that had never before been seen in human history adolescence with spending power we were so rich as a society that parents could hand their teenage children credit cards or checks or whatever they were using at the time and corporations spotted a new market and they started developing a youth culture to cater to this new source of market demand and when you have corporations treating adolescents who know nothing who are ignorant who are self-righteous puffed up with their own desire for power and grandiosity when you have them treated respectfully by record companies and entertainment companies trying to sever them off you know they can drive now and they've got their whole youth culture that's we started elevating youth to a position of power you wouldn't know it by looking at our political class today you look at our political class and biden and nancy pelosi you think this is the most confucian society that's ever been we venerate age but in fact the culture is still driven by this obsession with youth youth are not grateful they are they take everything for granted they believe they're the first to ever feel injustice uh and and they have no sense of perspective and of course increasingly due to the failure of will and the failure to pass on solid substantive knowledge they are ignorant and so i think that this lack of gratitude and sense of remaking the world that you saw in the 1960s with the college rebels and and no understanding of the work of centuries that it took to develop the idea of a limited constitutional government here in philadelphia the in further advance of a written constitution ideas of the separation and balance of powers ignorant of all of that and i think that that that youth orientation of profound narcissism uh and and belief that you can start the world anew and the world should rotate around your own petty grievances that is now mutated into the poison and uh just patheticness of identity politics is a product of ultimately of that youth culture yes let me pick up that point that maybe combine the two the youth culture but also the private property point that you make because it seems to me and i want you to unpack this maybe a little bit more the idea that private property that our own possessions our intellectual property the fruit of our creative energies and gifts that this should be a natural right an inalienable right that's very john locke right life liberty and property the founders picked up on that's a western idea isn't it i mean that is a distinctively western idea do you wanna maybe just unpack that a little bit more yeah well you know the alternative is collectivism it's tribalism uh most societies have been tribal we were tribal too you know we've we've we've had tribes coming through europe uh and uh you know that sense of blind obedience to a group uh is is really you can say almost the the natural human condition uh and it was you saw pushing back against that with the greeks in in fifth century athens and and the development of again individual reason coming out and individuals having the capacity to question uh their current arrangements to ask questions of justice uh and and that that too is is very unusual the protection of property and the sense that what you work at and have have improved that that you have a right to possess that and to trade with uh under the rule of law and and make contracts uh that that really was a western yes a western development and when you see the negation of it as you suggest would say with the whole communist vision the whole communist vision is to eliminate private property and somehow you'll solve the problem of human nature everyone will get along and off we go to shangri-la and we see what happens with the negation of the concept of private property it just leads to human misery but young people don't necessarily grasp that do they often you know uh the the universal book on freshman reading lists these days in colleges is inevitably abraham candy or robin d'angelo white fragility i i'm going to be very honest with you i have begun my reading in the totalitarian literature very late in life and i i don't know how one lives with that history it is it is almost unbearable to know what human beings have been capable of uh when given unlimited power the cruelty the gratuitous sadism i don't know how one can go on we should and so the book that should be read by every freshman coming to college is gulag archipelago but they are we are ignorant we are it is out of sight out of mind you do you college students dare to complain about white supremacy in current day america this is against every empirical fact but let us never forget what human beings are capable of when the rule of law breaks down and when rulers are given unlimited power it's not just power property that's at stake it is the very capacity to have a private life yes uh that orwell one of 1984 one of the great president books understood you you you destroy the private realm yes which again is something that was very important in in western's ideals so private property just stands in the way of the entire totalitarian project doesn't it in so many ways right you have written about the lack of courage uh in defending our civilizational inheritance it's incredible this lack of civilizational confidence that we seem to have the self-loathing you've written about the lack of courage and you know this is happening in the west it seems to me and to many others at the precise moment when say uh the ukrainians they are displaying a kind of moral courage it seems to many of us the likes of which you know we haven't seen in our lifetimes so this idea of courage civilizational courage and confidence i mean when a president zelinski says i don't need a ride i need bullets as an american i feel a little bit kind of ashamed almost of being an american and wondering if we have the same kind of courage and fortitude to defend our rights and our freedoms talk about this lack of civilizational courage and is there maybe a moment being created with this crisis in in europe right now to get us to think to step back and think about what we have and what could be lost well let me give you a little uh glimpse inside my upper east side apartment building where i live [Laughter] healthy 30 year old men are still double masked in the elevator [Laughter] worse in my neighborhood in yorkville they're still wearing masks outdoors and they're still wearing masks in central park surrounded by trillions of atoms of fresh air which make it a literal impossibility to encounter enough viral dose to become infected these are the people who purport to be defending science that know nothing about infectious disease the cdc's own guidelines for contact tracing say we're not interested in you unless you've been in close proximity with somebody in a confined space for 15 minutes and yet in my neighborhood people are still wearing masks in central park so am i very confident that we have the courage that it would take to take up arms to defend ourselves i'm sadly not confident and what i see happening i mean what the covid experience at least in the west and i will i could you know raise an example against myself which is china but my diagnosis for it in the west is the with the rise of safetyism and this insane inability to rationally measure costs and benefits and to calculate risks one type of risks against another type of risk the covered nightmare that we are not out of yet has been the greatest failure of policy making in u.s history nothing compares to see our leaders jettisoning throwing courageous small businessmen overboard because they have no understanding of the heroism it takes to build a small business they have no understanding that every worker is essential they have no understanding that government stimulus spending is not an adequate substitute for private economic activity and their mandates that came pouring forth that were utterly arbitrary i mean these these rules about people being chased in public parks in in santa monica mountains in la the the the the hiking trails being cut off nobody could walk they couldn't walk on the beaches again they should have been saying get outdoors get exercise get your 300 pound weight off of you because we already knew everything that was to be known about covid was known in march 2020 with the with the data out of italy we already knew the average age of decidence 80 average comorbidities three obesity high risk factor and instead we were told stay indoors bake banana bread [Laughter] order in food don't go outside everything literally scientifically exactly counter-indicated and there you had governor cuomo with his nauseating daily conferences in which he would regale the public with stories of his italian american grandmother and bonding with his daughters for the first time making these arbitrary distinctions about color code zones and what degree of covered cases would lead to shutdown these were numbers being pulled out of the hat and we went along with it this is what is so worrisome oddly there's been more protests in europe but more odd still is australia can you explain that one we all thought it was like the beacon of liberty and libertarianism they've gone absolutely nuts but i would say that our problem in the west is the safetyism [Music] excuse me to half the audience but a great problem is a female ethos which is anti-rational not a great understanding of the market i'm sure i'm not speaking to the women here i'm speaking to the women that are running the university of pennsylvania that are running [Laughter] yale law school that we're running harvard law school that are taking academia further down the route of irrationality uh and and so this feminized ethos is going to be very hard to fight obviously ukraine it's it's hilarious to see the media on the one hand you know wanting to accentuate the war on the other hand they've been surprisingly silent about the fact that ukraine has been evacuating women and children wait a minute i thought we're not allowed to do that isn't this a recognition that men and women are different but they've gotten away with that so far we'll see how much longer that lasts i hope that uh this creates some kind of deeper understanding of the west i'm not so certain we were speaking earlier i'm not certain zielenski is necessarily the best exemplar of individual rights limited government freedom of the press he's good and he's he's a great it's a great uh advertisement for the second amendment uh and and why civilian militias are a good idea uh but i think the change is gonna have to come within ourselves and i think it's going to entail taking on uh the biggest problem of our age i i see a lot of our problems today driven by something that most people don't want to talk about and we can either do so or not tonight it's your discretion joe which is the issue of of race you know in america yeah well this is a question that's occurred to me as we're talking here and i appreciate your comments there about governor cuomo as an italian american i guess i'll stop baking zucchini bread now thank you for that i guess i'll do that but i wonder if there's a connection between this lack of civilizational confidence not knowing uh what our achievements have been and how we got them i wonder if there's a connection about that i think you've implied that there is and the fear the absolute fear in the age of covet i mean maybe just unpack that a little bit more because i don't think anybody would have guessed that we we would have done the things that we've done to ourselves with this covet business i remember my grandmother restituta aiello this she was a young girl when the first influenza uh virus broke out uh in the first world war and um they were carrying bodies out of the buildings she said in brooklyn they were just carrying the bodies out of the everybody was afraid but they got on with it 50 million people died in the in at least in influenza we've lost and it's tragic what we've lost we've lost about 5 million or so right with with this covet but 50 million 10 times the number and people got on with life as best they could how do we explain the fear is there connection to this lack of understanding of the west and what we've done what we've achieved just throwing it out there well i think it again i think it really is a feminized ethos and if i can say so i was not surprised if i could make a plug for an article that was really um uh pretty present right before covet i would i wrote an article that in city journal called the therapeutic campus and it focused on something at yale university called the good life center which is basically i called it the college woke spa it was it was really quite appalling uh it was a in silliman college and you could go and and and rake sand you could be in a sandbox and there were therapy there was you know massage therapy and and and and scented candles and uh a bookcase that consisted of self-help manuals and a rewritten winnie the pooh because the original winnie the pooh you see was presumably too uh i don't know patriarchal and the language was too good you know a.a milne is one of the great ironists if if you haven't started your children or grandchildren on winnie the pooh please do so it's not too late but because the british children's literature is one way to inoculate your children against the awfulness of young adult dysfunctional literature immerse their ears in the greatness of good literature so yale had this good life center which was utterly feminized ethos of therapy college students up to that point had been declaring themselves emotionally traumatized there was this so-called epidemic of mental trauma and mental illness at harvard at yale give me a break you guys are the most privileged individuals in human history you are not vulnerable you are not at risk and yet colleges had been cultivating this sense of fragility you know and we've we've also heard that in this the uh i think it's all fake when students demand speech codes because they claim that reading ovid makes them feel unsafe or that hearing arguments about free speech or about the police make them feel unsafe i don't believe it you know there's there's people who sort of say okay i'll give you the benefit of doubt you really do feel unsafe but this is the jonathan hate argument confront your feelings of unsafety head on and learn to control them i think they're just making an argument as an excuse to give themselves more power so so the covet safety ism did not come out of nowhere it came out of a an accelerating trend of narcissistic risk aversion to the point that we now i've got with with covert the idea was zero covet are you kidding me i mean this that's it's an absurd idea but i remember governor cuomo at the start of his his his you know auditioning for his oscar award said if if these shutdowns save just one life it will have been worth it well that's a ridiculous standard no public policy has ever adopted a save one life standard with with that we would say nobody can drive on the highway more than five miles an hour we allow people to go at 60 65 knowing that we will have an average of 40 000 highway deaths a year we accept that as the risk of other conveniences yes you know it brings to mind uh another moment in the west where there was a complete lack of civilizational confidence and it's the 1930s the and young people the oxford union society voted in 1933 this is after the first world war all that trauma they didn't want to get into another war no matter what was going on in germany they don't want another war so the oxford union society all these young people they vote this house will under no circumstances fight for king and country 1933 when we know what happens but then you get a leader this is where leadership really matters doesn't it because then you get a leader like winston churchill and you have this moment in 1940 with the evacuation of dunkirk a complete military disaster you have to evacuate hundreds of thousands of british and french troops from france into great britain leave behind all that military equipment i don't know what we would do now that if that similar scenario happened now but what churchill did a couple of days after the evacuation of dunkirk he tells his cabinet draw up plans for a cross-channel invasion four years before it happens before normandy happens d-day is drawing up plans for a cross-channel invasion that's a spirit of confidence civilizational confidence that they had but the leadership was key maybe want to speak to that absolutely i mean rhetoric matters we are still stirred by an order who can appeal to our highest nature and best instincts it is quite extraordinary that the you know the greeks understood this rhetoric can be terrifying it could be a source of evil and it can also be a source of good and as far as churchill being able to move the the british to incredible acts of heroism you know we're in this bizarre moment now the trans moment where a subpopulation of i don't know what 0.003 is now the almost obsessive focus of attention uh to try and deny the difference between males and females and we have a concerted crusade to emasculate males i'm going to be speak very honestly to discredit traditional male virtues of chivalry and heroism entrepreneurship risk taking setting out across the atlantic that you've never crossed before in a rickety boat conquest yes conquest something that every civilization has wanted to do uh and and we're trying to demonize those the american psychiatric society says that masculinity is toxic and and we have now you know the the growing uh uh reign of females but what and and and the effort at younger and younger ages to indoctrinate young people into these utterly uh counterfactual unscientific ideas that sex and gender are mere constructs and and boys are being marginalized every every every encouraging public message that's ever sent by an elite institution today is directed exclusively at females the you go girl ethic you know girls who code boys get nothing it's amazing and yet they're still they still rule silicon valley you know why because they have that entrepreneurial urge so what gives me hope is that with every generation every new child who's born still has his genetic inheritance and there's still the possibility of reclaiming our biological gifts that say that females have skills and strengths and males have skills and strengths and there is only so far deliberate culture can do to wipe those out terrific point terrific point thank you for that yes [Applause] we just got some questions from the from the audience here thanks to john miko the man behind the curtain uh but i want to before we get to i want to ask one quick question one last question here then we'll get to the q a um western civilization has gone through periods of real darkness but also periods of renewal right do you have any thoughts about a pathway toward at least a partial renewal of our civilizational confidence any thoughts about that any either from examples from history or things you see going on right now that give you some hope in that regard well i i know what what needs to happen i'm not sure it will happen uh and again i'm going to allude back to something i said just in passing it is my sense observing on a daily basis with heartbreak with utter uh sense of of pathos and rage and sorrow one institution of civilization after another coming down whether it's as as ms carter mentioned classical music or art museums or science stem fields or or theater it's all being taken down in the name of racial justice and avoiding disparate impact because it turns out there's not a single meritocratic academic standard or behavioral standard that does not have a disparate impact now on a racial basis and right now the left is allowing the only explanation that is allowed into the public arena for ongoing racial disparities is racism it's the only the only you can only say the reason that google does not have 13 percent black engineers is because they're discriminating against black phds you're not allowed to say but there are no there are almost no black phd's in the hiring pool coming out with engineering and physics degrees you're not allowed to say that so as long as racism is the only allowable explanation for ongoing racial disparities the left wins we are going to have to find the courage to say that there are without making any comment about individuals and the capacity of individuals to succeed and transcend right now there are cultural reasons that we don't have proportional representation in every single institution and that culture has to be taken on uh and we need to be courageous in being called racist and say i don't care when you demonize the cops guess who pays with their lives law abiding black residents of high crime neighborhoods when you demonize law enforcement and say we're not going to force criminal justice laws because they have a disparate impact on blacks it's that elderly woman in the south bronx who stood up at a police community meeting that i attended an out of the blue apropos of nothing in particular said how lovely when we see the police they are my friends it's people like her who suffer so we cannot allow ourselves to be bludgeoned into silence uh by the phony charge of racism as long as though that that that that racism remains the predominant diagnosis of of american civilization today right now things are going to stay very bad i'm afraid well it's back to this issue of courage isn't it having having the courage as public leaders to do it okay let's take a question here from the audience please discuss the impact of social media facebook twitter etc on on our cultural confidence in western civilization the impact of social media on that it's a big question you're talking to somebody who doesn't do facebook i still don't understand how it works i don't run my own twitter account so i you know in this i can only parrot what what i've i have read it obviously is a accelerator of herd instinct and it you know and and people that back down because the twitter mob is on them you know i've i have a twitter account that's run by the manhattan i think they they uh censor it on my behalf so i don't see what comes at me negatively i don't understand frankly why people that are the victims of a twitter mob don't just wait it out a day or two because we know the mob is fickle it'll go on to a victim the next time in in a few days or hours wait it out stick to your guns do not allow yourself to be uh to be cowed into silence or to changing what you know to be the truth uh because of some unseen uh twitter force uh and again i'm i can only repeat what you guys i'm sure have already heard the social media instagram comparing oneself to others is uh females seem particularly susceptible to that group pressure to portray oneself as having a perfect life uh that's not a good thing i would say you know females decouple no parent should be giving his child a smartphone ever maybe i don't know what the proper i do not know what the age would be when a child deserves a smartphone but as long as possible do not do it because just as capitalism weaned children off of their parents in the 1950s the internet is another huge source of of acid corroding parental authority so keep it up keep them away from it as long as you can give them books the the aesthetic pleasure of a book wow with illustrations again i go back to the great children's illustrations eve e shepherd these are things of utter beauty and and preciousness that we should not allow to be put into the memory whole as wow as uh or will said give them books because uh you know books is the way we kind of pass on the tradition if i could quote from aristotle just happen to have aristotle's politics here with his friends um there's a wonderful lineup maybe you can respond to this um miss mcdonald but of all the things which i have mentioned that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government a good education to support your government and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected he's complaining about the state of affairs in ancient greece uh and it'll be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution that's part of what books do for us isn't it they train us in that right hugely important right i mean just read a book read the constitution read the federalist society you know the other problem of social media is the short attention spans uh and people are not reading novels there was i i wasn't a part of the common core uh fight uh so i i only know it from the outside but as i understand it it it decreased even further the role of literature in english classes and it was all about non-fiction because we have to teach critical thinking one of the most overrated concepts in education here's how you learn to do critical thinking you do not do critical thinking you learn the periodic table you learn to conjugate german verbs you learn the spread of civilization in the ancient mediterranean you do not teach critical thinking because when you give these products of ed schools the capacity to teach critical thinking you know what that translates as we're going to be anti-capitalist oh we're going to read advertisements and we're going to find out the subliminal messages of you know general motors or something uh education should be about immersing yourself in long thought in novels in extended argument and the ability of literature to take us into worlds that we would otherwise never encounter in our petty constricted narrow lives beautifully said beautifully said how about that [Applause] [Music] and that's what the western canon does that it helps disturb the immoral imagination to form the moral imagination here's a question in the audience well what is the elite university's endgame if they tear down society won't they destroy themselves good point good i wouldn't give them the credit of being that far sighted and rational in their thinking i think at this point they're operating out of hatred if you can't create something you can tear it down what does mock do it destroys that is mob power that's what these students are doing they cannot create what is being there is hatred for a civilization deemed too white and too male and they cannot replace it they cannot continue it but they can tear it down the statues are coming down i have predicted that we are not going to have a white house for much longer we are going to have to rename it we are going to have to washington dc will not survive much longer it will have to be renamed uh don't don't assume that the lincoln memorial will will survive do not assume nothing things that were unthinkable several years ago have now become thinkable so the universities uh sadly though can bank on the fanatical obsession of parents to credentialize their children and the fanatical obsession of alumni to get their children and grandchildren into those universities credentialize them so even conservatives who know better are still donating to their alma mater for one reason only they want to get their kids in they have got to stop that give to institutions that can rebuild our civil society whether it's vocational education the boy scouts who have been defunded by corporations for the trivial reason that the gay lobby in in in corporations decided that their crusade was more important than the heroic work that the boy scouts were doing in inner cities that i have observed firsthand of these young boys tying knots in church basements in bedford stuyvesant in bronzeville saluting the flag it's a thing of beauty that breaks your heart inner city scouting was doing extraordinary things it's now been decimated and defunding because corporations have pulled out but there are institutions that will rebuild society that these alumni whether it's of an ivy league of a state school do not give them another damn scent i would say to all of you if any of you are giving to your college alma mater you're part of the problem not the solution and you can see me afterwards and we'll talk it out mr mcdonald um i don't know that we've ever really seen the kind of self-loathing for civilization for american culture and western culture we sort to some degree you could argue in the 60s but this is different this feels different to me i'm just about old enough to remember some of that from the late 60s and 70s but this feels different to me do you feel the same way and how do we explain it yes absolutely there's nothing there's nothing like it to me you know when i've been on college campuses and i've seen the campus mob direct it myself when i see the video of nicholas christakis at yale surrounded for two hours by screaming hyenas cursing at him using the foulest language uh saying you are disgusting playing the race card against him one thinks of the chinese cultural revolution as the only possible precedent but that was different it was by and large the masses turning on the elites and so you had the intellectuals being driven out uh their their learning being disparaged and and uh you know the natural aristocracy being torn down what is so unprecedented in this current moment is the elites turning on themselves turning on its own civilization so yes i don't think there's a precedent for this uh and and young people being told that there is nothing in your heritage to be proud of you stand for white supremacy for colonialism for oppression when in fact there is not a single civilization that has not and many in many cases is not still engaged in genocide in ruthless misogyny go try holding a gay pride march in uganda and see how far you get the university today is the most tolerant environment in human history towards society's traditionally marginalized groups and yet it pretends to be a an epicenter of racism and and and discrimination and these college presidents are living an absolute lie they they have to know that every faculty search is one concerted effort to hire find and promote as many underrepresented minorities and females as possible any of these college presidents are turning on their own college and saying oh woe is me we're so racist whether it's christopher ice gruber at yale or peter sal peter ice group excuse me at princeton peter salovey at yale uh ruger at u penn law school they're all living a lie so how you raise children that are told there is nothing to be proud of and what that results in in a decade or so i don't know but it is a it is a scary experiment that we better cut off at the pass before we actually see it it's a final result yes yes yes and jumping off that point i think the last question um it does seem that this negation this desire to negate our culture our civilization and the desire to judge the past judgment in an almost it almost has a kind of cult-like quality to it you want to just talk about that and and maybe how do we shake people loose from a cult i mean this is this is a challenging moment warren isn't it wow that's a tough one uh yeah i i mean reality therapy i guess taking them send them to send them to cuba [Laughter] send them to venezuela reality checks yes let them see what a non-western culture really looks like that does not respect individual rights that does not respect private property don't have these school year abroads where these americans you know they go and they insulate themselves they don't even bother trying to speak the foreign language when they're in florence you know they want to just hang out with their fellow americans that's a waste of time send them to the third world yeah let them see what a true tribal society is like you know on this point uh back in the 90s when i was working to think tank in washington dc we had an intern i can't remember his name now tall thin young man well-spoken he came from somalia a failed state and here he is in america and he sees he sees this amazing prosperous country he's surrounded by young people who like him who accept him and every day he would come into the office and he'd say america what a country what a country thank you thank you so much thank you so much heather heather and joe thank you so much for a wonderful program ladies and gentlemen heather mcdonald thank you for being here this evening everyone we'll see you on april 12th for our library age of acrimony thank you have a wonderful evening oh i'm sorry our high school students our high school students please come up front for a picture with our speaker thank you you

Channel: The Union League Legacy Foundation

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Id: Uti2WNV2HD8

Length: 62min 50sec (3770 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022