The Atlas Society Asks Heather Mac Donald Transcript

Heather MacDonald is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Diversity Delusion, The War on Cops, and her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.  As the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she joined our CEO, Jennifer Grossman, on August 30, 2023, covering how disparate impact analysis and race-mania are sabotaging the institutions of Western civilization, from the arts to academia to criminal justice. Watch the entire video HERE or check the transcript below. 

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

HM: Heather MacDonald

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JAG: Hello everyone, and welcome to the 167th episode of The Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. My friends call me JAG. I'm the CEO of The Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in a variety ways, including graphic novels and animated videos. Today, we are joined by Heather MacDonald. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you who are watching us on Zoom, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube that you can go ahead, get started, use the comment bar to type in your questions and we're going to try to get to as many of them as we can. Our guest, Heather MacDonald is the Thomas Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and the 2005 recipient of the Bradley Prize. Her work covers a range of topics from higher education and immigration to policing and race relations, with writings that have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is the author of six critically acclaimed books, including The Diversity Delusion, The War on Cops, and her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit. I'm feeling very Vanna White, so I'll put those down. Heather, thank you for joining us.

HM: Jennifer, it is so great to be on The Atlas Society Asks. Thank you so much for having me on.

JAG: Well, it's a great honor for us too. I would love to cover all of your books, but given that we've only got an hour, and I do want to try to devote some of that to audience questions, let's dive right in to your latest, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty and Threatens Lives. I thought this was just really a remarkable book, and as the daughter of a cardiologist and the sister of a gynecologist, I was particularly dismayed by the developments that you covered in your chapter “Medicine's Racial Reckoning.” You write that, “The post-George Floyd racial-reckoning hit the field of medicine like an earthquake.” The basic premise of the push appears to be that if 13% of the population is black, but only 5% or whatever percent of doctors is black, then the reason is racism. Am I getting this right? I know I'm just incredibly oversimplifying it. But if so, what is being proposed to fix this disparity without compromising patient care, not to mention medical research and all of the lifesaving advances that depend on it?

The principle that is now taking down virtually all of Western civilization, which is that if any institution does not contain a proportional representation of blacks, whether it's an underrepresentation of blacks in the case of meritocratic institutions like a medical school or hospital medical staff, or an overrepresentation of blacks in the prison system, then that institution is by definition racist.

HM: Well, I wish you were simplifying, Jennifer, but you're not. You stated it absolutely accurately. This is the principle that is now taking down virtually all of Western civilization, which is that if any institution does not contain a proportional representation of blacks, whether it's an underrepresentation of blacks in the case of meritocratic institutions like a medical school or hospital medical staff, or an overrepresentation of blacks in the prison system, then that institution is by definition racist. The only allowable explanation for that underrepresentation of blacks in meritocratic institutions or overrepresentation of blacks in the criminal justice system is racism. You are not allowed to talk about academic skills gaps and the massive behavioral disparities, criminal commission disparities that lead in a completely constitutional, colorblind fashion to the overrepresentation of blacks in prison. The solutions that are being proposed for this are not to get rid of the academic skills gaps, not to have lower black gaps—

JAG: Have school choice or, you know, address family breakdown—

HM: No, it's to lower standards. It's to lower standards for admissions to meritocratic institutions, whether it's to medical school, to receive a grant in oncology or neurology or in cardiology, or it's to lower standards or eviscerate standards for criminal offending. This is why prosecutors across the country, whether it's George Gascon in Los Angeles, Pamela Price in Oakland, California, Alvin Bragg in New York City, or Kim Fox in Chicago, have declared entire categories of crime off limits. They're simply not prosecuting crime because doing so in a colorblind manner will have a disparate impact on black criminals.

JAG: When it comes to medicine, what does that lowered-standard approach look like? Are we talking about eliminating the MCATs because we just did have that Supreme Court decision? Of course, California had the Proposition that these racial preferences were not supposed to be legal. So, practically, what does it come down to?

HM: Well, what it has come down to at this point, Jennifer, are completely different standards of admission for black medical-student applicants and white- and Asian-student applicants. Black medical-school applicants are admitted with MCAT scores that would be automatically disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians. Once in school with that vast academic skills gap, predictably and inevitably, black medical students fall behind in their classes. Nobody is saying that black students should not go to college or should not go to medical school. What opponents of racial preferences, such as myself, are saying is that they should go to schools on the same basis as their peers, which is for schools to which they're academically qualified. So, if you're qualified to go to a state medical school, that's where you should be admitted. You should not, because you're black, be catapulted into Harvard Medical School because you're not going to be able to catch up.

When it came to step one of the medical school licensing exam (this is an exam that comes at the end of the second year of medical school that tests students basic knowledge of science, processes of anatomy, physiology, drug interactions and blacks were getting very poor grades on that step one of the licensing exam to become a doctor, let's just remember what this is all about), the board that administers the exam said, “Okay, well, we'll throw out the scores.”

HM: So what happens is the black medical students having been admitted with vastly lower academic skills fall behind in their classes, and they are now disproportionately at the bottom of the scale. When it came to step one of the medical school licensing exam (this is an exam that comes at the end of the second year of medical school that tests students basic knowledge of science, processes of anatomy, physiology, drug interactions and blacks were getting very poor grades on that step one of the licensing exam to become a doctor, let's just remember what this is all about), the board that administers the exam said, “Okay, well, we'll throw out the scores” <laugh>.

JAG: Is that done or is that a proposal?

HM: It's done, it happened in January of 2021. Now it's just a pass/fail. So, you have no idea who's at the top of this class and who barely squeaked through to pass the exam. The hospital residencies that are choosing residents have no idea who are the students that are barely hanging on in selecting who gets into the highly competitive residencies like orthopedic surgery. The pressure is on throughout. I mean, we are now changing standards for medical honors societies. This pressure will be on to change the standards for step two of the licensing exam. And hospitals are under enormous pressure. Medical school faculties are under enormous pressure to hire black doctors to be there regardless of their qualifications. The science-granting agencies of the federal government, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation are now giving out scientific grants, not on the basis of whether this is the most accomplished neurologist who has the best hope of curing Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, they're giving out medical grants on the basis of race.

JAG: You devote five chapters to how disparate impact analysis is also sweeping the arts from symphonies to operas, to ballet, to theater, to classical music. From the way that you write about classical music with such feeling and sophistication, I have to assume that it's a particular passion of yours.

HM: It is the most important thing in my life. I grew up playing the piano. My father played much better than I did. He was able to play Chopin’s The Scared Sea, the things that he played, Music Minus One, the Schumann piano concerto, or something I would never in a billion years have been able to play. But I was very lucky he took us to the LA Philharmonic matinee concerts on Sunday when it was still at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. And since then, there's nothing that gives me more profound insight into human experience than classical music. Not that I don't adore the American songbook and jazz, and I had my stint in the sixties with acid rock and counter-cultural music. But I keep coming back again and again to classical music.

JAG: Favorite composer?

Mozart's DaPonte operas are, for me, the highest experience of sublimity and joy and pathos. Although the St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach comes in very close, the Schubert Song Cycle.

HM: Oh, it's whatever I'm listening to at the time, really. This is what's so astounding about classical music that it contains just more riches than one can ever hope to consume in one's lifetime. I get very depressed that we perform the same limited number of great canonical works over and over again, ignoring the vast universe of classical music. But I mean, if you put a gun to my head, I may have to say that Mozart's DaPonte operas are, for me, the highest experience of sublimity and joy and pathos. Although the St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach comes in very close, the Schubert Song Cycle. So, don't get me started, solo piano music is about the most painful expression of sorrow and longing that I know. So, it's all too wonderful.

JAG: You were describing how as a child, you were exposed to this, your father was playing the piano on a very high level, your home was infused with classical music. One of the takeaways, teeing off what we were talking about before, is that you just can't go to the end and say, “Oh, there aren't enough blacks in the symphony,” --  you have to go back to the beginning and ask, are we actually creating the supply of candidates? You talk about the cultural aspects of valuing academic achievement, but also just exposure to music. Whether that comes in the family or whether that comes in school music instruction. You talk about how that's being cut back. So, if this disparate impact analysis is the driver, then what are, again, some of the recommendations and also even some of the things that have already been implemented to make orchestral composition more representative of blacks?  Areblind auditions going by the wayside, or the requirement to read musical scores. What's going on?

There was a very significant proposal in the summer of George Floyd mass psychosis that gripped the country from the New York Times’ lead classical music critic at the time, Anthony Thomasine, saying that orchestra audition should be de-blinded. That means, rather than having the identity of the person auditioning for that second violin seat concealed behind a screen, the screen should be removed so that the people choosing the performers for the empty seat in an orchestra can choose on the basis of race.

HM: There was a very significant proposal in the summer of George Floyd mass psychosis that gripped the country from the New York Times’ lead classical music critic at the time, Anthony Thommasini, saying that orchestra audition should be de-blinded. That means, rather than having the identity of the person auditioning for that second violin seat concealed behind a screen, the screen should be removed so that the people choosing the performers for the empty seat in an orchestra can choose on the basis of race. One orchestra is moving in that direction. Whether this catches on, I don't know. But the pressure, again, it's on, it's on, it's on. What the musical institutions have done—you know, they were all in absolute, and remain in, dire financial straits—during the absurd pandemic shutdowns, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, was telling his orchestra musicians, his chorus you're going to have to basically not be paid for a year because if we put out any salary we'd go under, there will be no more Metropolitan Opera. At the same time, Peter Gelb found the money to hire the first ever Chief Diversity Officer for the New York Metropolitan Opera to fight against systemic racism. This was a woman who came out of the Harvard Law School. She has no opera background, no musical background. She'll be paid in the high-six figures, $400k whatever, because coming from Harvard Law School as an administrator there, she would've had a very, very high salary. Orchestras are hiring these people that are completely useless.

Here's what they should be doing. If you want to create the pipeline, recreate musical education. One of the privileges I had in writing this book was talking to some black, orchestral musicians and conductors. One guy, John McLaughlin Williams, who I just adore, he's made a career out of conducting and recording really, really obscure early-20th century American composers. I have to say, Jennifer, I do know a lot of music. <laugh>. I had heard of none of these people, you know, whether it's Nicholas Flag, Celo, Hadley, these are people that have completely disappeared. He records them. He's black. These are white composers, and he recorded them, like in the early 1990s with the Ukrainian National Symphony. He was raised by parents that had both gone to Howard University. They had classical music in the home and they taught him that all music is good. You have as much right to access Bach as you do William Grant Still or Joplin, all of it is available to you. I talked to Joseph Striplin, a black violinist who grew up in Detroit in the 1940s. He said, “I grew up in a classic single-mother home,” but he went to a great Detroit public school, Cass Technical, that had like three different orchestras. So, he was learning to play the violin, and he heard the people in the violin section of his school orchestra who were getting private lessons. He said, “Whoa, they're really good. I better practice a lot harder.” But he said that we grew up in a world where classical music was in the culture. Now it's completely vacant. It is an alien idiom. It is, in fact, sadly repellent to many people: these classical music organizations, rather than nattering on about their specious, phony, nonexistent racism because it does not exist, (Jennifer, there is no classical music organization today that is discriminating against blacks. The opposite is true), what they should be doing is saying, “We're going into the schools. We are going to make our music available to create an audience and create people who want to become classical music organizations, part of an organization. Instead, all they're doing is the same preposterous virtue-signaling that we saw out of college presidents, that we saw out of heads of banks, out of heads of corporations.

JAG: The scientific, and then yes, also the complete silence and cowardice when cancel culture comes for teachers and people who try to actually do their job and do the right thing. One more question on music because it is a passion of yours and mine. Beethoven appears to have been singled out for particular scrutiny, with one critic saying that his Ninth Symphony is no more a masterpiece than Esperanza Spalding's “12 Little Spells,” which I guess is a jazz composition about body parts. I'm not sure how familiar you are with Ayn Rand's work, or The Fountainhead in particular, in which critics conspire actually to promote a play titled No Skin Off Your Nose, even though they actually know that it's terrible. Is there a similar sort of Ellsworth Toohey-esque dynamic going on here to assault artistic excellence and beauty?

There's a definite hatred for greatness and sublimity. There's hatred for a Western civilization deemed too white and too male.

HM: Yes, I think there's a definite hatred for greatness and sublimity. There's hatred for a Western civilization deemed too white and too male. This quote that you gave is not from a critic. He's actually an academic. He's a musicologist at Hunter College that is now celebrated and heralded across the music profession. Alex Ross has lauded this guy. He's got this most insane theory about a music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, and the musicologist, Philip Ewell, has whiteness on his brain. The guy is absolutely obsessed. For him to make that statement about Beethoven, it's absurd. I'm sorry. I know we're all supposed to be sort of relativistic about musical taste, and I'm not allowed to say that there is more depth and sorrow and human experience in the Bach cantatas than there is in gangster rap. I'm not allowed to say that, but I'm sorry, there are.

JAG: You can say it here, <laugh>.

HM: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. There are Objectivists here. Yes. To dismiss Beethoven and to say you can't compare him to Esmeralda Spalding, who is a lightweight, is absurd. It is literally absurd. And yet that is going on. Now, there is a lot of programming of black composers. I reviewed a concert at the New York Philharmonic that was on explicitly black-liberation themes. I went, I'll be honest, Jennifer, with a predisposition, assuming that I would pan the concert, but I actually enjoyed it. There was a wonderful Symphony No. 2 by William Grant Still that had in its second movement something that sounds like it's right out of one of the great American classic songbook tunes. And there was another oratorio by Hailstork that was very good. But there's also some mediocrities that are getting programmed, both contemporary and in the past. The two that drive me the most insane are Joseph Bologne, an 18th century French composer in the court of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. I just have written a devastating review, I have to say, of the completely specious movie about him that came out early this year. Then Florence Price, she was a black composer of the 1930s. Her music is so banal, it is so repetitive, and students are being taught that there is no difference between her or Joseph Bologne and Schubert or Stravinsky or Rachmaninoff, I'm sorry. One of the roles of artists and the people who run artistic organizations is connoisseurship. They cannot be relativists. They have to say no. There are actual differences in achievement and in merit and in excellence. Now, if you're going to do that, and what you're talking about is white achievers and creators, that is racist according to the dominant narrative.

JAG: Before moving on from the arts, you covered how the diversity agenda is affecting philanthropy and volunteering in the arts. There was one example that you shared that I found particularly heart-wrenching, and that was the Chicago Art Institute's abolishing of its docent program because it was deemed too white. Can you share with our viewers a little bit about what happened?

HM: Well, I'm going to speak very frankly here, Jennifer. We are living through a period of white-calling. I'm sorry, that's it. Whites just take it. I mean, it is just amazing the suicidal quality of Western civilization. Every single day we hear about “white supremacy”, which is not true. “We were a white-supremacist country.” I have no problem admitting that we were an apartheid country. We treated blacks appallingly, cruelly, gratuitously, truly nastily up until very recently. But the opposite is the case. Now, the reality is black privilege not white privilege and whites are being removed. This is what racial preference is all about. Finally, the Supreme Court acknowledged that racial preferences are always a zero-sum game. There's no way for it not to be a zero-sum game for every quarterly qualified racial preference, so-called beneficiary that you're nominating and elevating, you're keeping out more objectively qualified white and Asian applicants. So what's going on? What went on at the Art Institute of Chicago, which is one of the greatest museums in the world, and I often tell people, if you visit, go to the little corridor of French 18th-century Ancienne Régime, pastel portraits by de La Tour, by Chardin. They're just amazing, and yet, the Art Institute of Chicago, under its completely foolish idiot head, James Rondeau, canceled its entire docent program of almost a hundred volunteer educators who spent years getting what was in essence in MA education, studying diversity up the gazoo so they could bring Chicago school children into the Art Institute and teach them about art. So what's their problem? They were white, female in this case, that wasn't intersectional enough. It didn't save them from getting axed. So, Rondeau axed the entire docent program. They were getting free labor, labor of love, and replaced them. He said he replaced them with six paid, part-time “volunteers” chosen on the basis of racial equity. We know what that means. And, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento has also bragged about getting rid of its white docents, not entirely, but lowering the number. Basically this is just a metaphor synecdoche for what's going on across our institutions. And white people are so well-meaning and so passive before all of this. They just sort of turn their eyes away.

JAG: I think that's true. But I think that what's also happening is that when you continue to accuse people of white supremacy where none exists, first of all, there's sort of a hyperinflation of all of these terms. When you, like during the Tea Party movement, would accuse people, who were protesting against higher taxes and socialized medicine, that they're racist. You drive people underground. Yes, I think that they can come back in a more radicalized form, and you actually might end up with a renaissance or resurgence of white supremacy or white nationalism or what have you, because it's just gone so overboard.

HM: It's absolutely the case. To be perfectly honest, Jennifer, it would be a logical conclusion. I don't see why every other group gets identity politics, but not whites. There's no rational basis for excluding them.

A police officer is 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer.

JAG: I think a much better model is individualism and merit and objectivity. Our philosophy is Objectivism, so the relative standards and the relative judgements have got to go. All right,  Part Three of When Race Trumps Merit, in your book, you cover how disparate impact analysis has its most concrete impact on the criminal justice system where every disparity in arrest or incarceration rates is now attributed to racism. In the chapter on double standards, you mentioned that despite all of the attention to officers killing unarmed blacks, this was eye-opening to me, a police officer is 400 times as likely to be killed by a black suspect as an unarmed black is to be killed by a police officer. Talk a little bit more about this double standard, and what are the implications if society looks away when law enforcement is attacked?

If you look at the entire universe of interracial violence between blacks and whites, and whites and blacks, blacks commit 87% of all interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks.

HM: Well, we've seen it, 2020 was the largest single increase in homicide in this nation's history, 29%. That's an astounding one year leap. That's all because of the George Floyd-demonization of the police. The police backed off of policing. You know, they were being shot at with laser guns and cop cars destroyed, precincts burned down to the ground, the object of constant vicious attacks and insult and rhetorical attacks as well. President Biden, when he was running for president the first time around and throughout his presidency, continues to say that black parents are right to fear that their children will be killed by a cop every time they step outside. That's completely wrong. Yes, as the Kansas City Mayor said recently, “Existing—while black—is dangerous in this country.” What the Kansas City Mayor meant was, “Oh, because white people are gunning black people down all the time.” No, apart from this tragic recent shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, which is horrible and sickening. But that is, sorry, it's not the way black people are dying. Black juveniles in the post-George Floyd era are being shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. One hundred times, Jennifer. Who's shooting them? Other blacks—other blacks. They're not being killed by whites. If they were being killed by whites, we would've heard about every single one of those shootings, and they're not being shot by the cops. You know, we hear about white supremacy. Here's another statistic we all hear: hate crimes against blacks by whites. If you look at the entire universe of interracial violence between blacks and whites, and whites and blacks, blacks commit 87% of all interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks. A black is 35 times more likely to commit an act of violence against a white person, as a white person is to commit an act of violence against a black person.

We've all seen the videos of the flash mobs on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, people getting beaten up. We've seen the videos of these frail, elderly Asian people in the Bay Area and other places in California getting beaten up. We all pretend we're not seeing it. It's all black people. It's not white. Yet, when there was the one spa shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, by a tormented, Christian young man who felt he could not control his sexual urges and he'd been using prostitutes, he shot some of the prostitutes that he'd been using in Atlanta, and this was immediately turned into an anti-Asian hate crime. It was not about race. He was on his way to Florida Porn Studios to shoot them up down there. Those were not Asians, but the only anti-Asian crimes we were talking about at the time was this one committed by a white guy. So, everything we're saying about our criminal justice system today is completely the opposite. The police are actually the government agency that most cares about black lives. The Black Lives Matter activists don't give a damn. There are dozens of black children that are being gunned down every year, toddlers in their beds, on their front porches, in their parents' cars. They're being shot through the head, shot through the lungs, shot through the pancreas by black thugs committing drive-by shootings. We have never been urged to say their names because the black activists don't give a damn about black victims, except in the exceedingly rare instance when a cop or a white person shoots a black.

JAG: So, let's mix it up. As previously mentioned, we're not going to be able to talk about all of your books, but, and I wish I really had more time to cover The War on Cops, one of my main takeaways is that at the end of the day, the biggest casualties, as you were saying, are the inner-city blacks who bear the brunt of violent crime when proactive policing is curtailed. I did notice that the book attracted some criticism in libertarian circles, including the Cato Institute. Among other things, they take issue with your calling Black Lives Matter a fraud. I don't know if they might be willing to reconsider that criticism. And you’re characterizing the New York Times as serving up anti-police propaganda. I think the most substantive criticism appears to be your defense of stop-and-frisk. Have you seen that criticism? Any defense or thoughts on it?

Who's committing the drive-by shootings in New York? Though blacks are 22% of the population, they commit up to three quarters of all drive-by shootings in New York. If you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings, you account for about a hundred percent of all drive-by shootings. That is true in every big American city.

HM: Well, the Cato Institute adopts the usual specious benchmark for analyzing criminal police activity. And this is the benchmark used by the mainstream media and every anti-cop activist, which is to compare police data to population data. So let's look at New York City. Blacks are about 22% of the population, and they make up about 53% of all police pedestrian stops. So yes, there's a disparity there. Blacks are stopped at least twice the rate of the representation of the population. So Al Sharpton and Cato say, “Okay, the police are racist.” But the police are not developing their deployment tactics and deciding where to go after drive-by shootings based on population ratios. They go where crime is happening and where people are being victimized. Here's the relevant statistic for determining whether that stop rate is racially disproportionate. Who's committing the drive-by shootings in New York? Though blacks are 22% of the population, they commit up to three quarters of all drive-by shootings in New York. If you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings, you account for about a hundred percent of all drive-by shootings. That is true in every big American city.

JAG: Yes. In fairness, I do think that Cato did acknowledge that there are these really dramatic disparities. Their push seemed to be more on the constitutional aspect. Whether this was someone who was suspicious or was this a pretext of someone acting suspiciously?

HM: Well, I'm not going to justify unconstitutional stops, but the technique is constitutional as Cato well knows, and I'm not saying it claimed otherwise, but it is a constitutional power that police have to stop somebody custodially so that you're not free to leave based on reasonable suspicion that there's suspicious crime behavior in the works. So, one can debate empirically whether there were too many stops and whether they were being done unconstitutionally. I would say that the police expert who the plaintiffs funded by massive pro-bono efforts against the NYPD by the most elite law firms in the city, Paul Weiss and Covington & Burling against the overstaffed, overmatched police attorney, Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia, his statistical techniques were lousy. It was absurd. He was not using the right type of data. But what we see, what happens when the police back off of proactive policing is criminals get emboldened and crime goes up. We saw that after the Michael Brown shooting, in August of 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. I called it the Ferguson Effect. You had the largest two-year increase in homicide in the nation's history, and then you had the George Floyd or the Minneapolis Effect, which was even worse. It is incredibly humiliating, scary, uncomfortable to be stopped when you are innocent of a crime. That is no question, that is the case. But it is sadly a crime tax that blacks face. As long as the crime rate is so exponentially higher in the black population, there is a greater chance statistically that a law-abiding black guy is going to be stopped at some point in his life because he matches the suspect’s description. The solution to that is not to say to the police back off of proactive stops, it's to say we've got to get this crime rate down.

JAG: Right? I think you also pointed out that one of the barriers to that is a cultural factor that there is an unwillingness to work with the police and to give them information that would help them solve these crimes and get people off the streets. Okay. We are overloaded with questions. I'm not going to say overloaded, because we love our questions. It makes my job easier. So, we'll try to get to as many of them as we can. Maybe we'll keep it more rapid fire. MyModernGalt on Instagram was first to the gate, and he wants to know your thoughts on the recent ruling in the Harvard admission scandal. Do you think the schools are just going to fund workarounds?

HM: Yes, I do. <laugh>, I absolutely do. And in the process, they're renaming all their diversity-and-inclusion, sinecure non-entities to something that doesn't so immediately suggest that this is race. You know, I'm a pessimist and a skeptic at heart, so take that into account. But obviously, the Roberts majority opinion did leave open a very large loophole. Excuse me. Schools are already doing so-called “holistic admissions,” which is to say, we're going to read your essay and you're going to tell us about how oppressed you are as a black person and black student in America. We're not going to say that's why we're admitting you, but that is why we're admitting you. That's going to go even more aggressively in the future. So, it's going to be a very interesting thing. I haven't really been able to game-theory it out because the schools don't want to leave any tracks. To the extent that they still use academic test scores like the SATs, and if a plaintiff can get his hands on those and still show these massive gaps in the scores that are being used to admit blacks versus whites and Asians, that will suggest ongoing racial preferences. But if the schools get rid of them entirely, and some systems have—the University of California has actually banned the submission of SATs—they won't have any ability to rank their students, which they want to do. They may claim that these test scores don't measure anything, but they use them to have a degree of precision out to 0.001%. So it puts the schools up to a very difficult choice, which I've personally really relished and will enjoy watching how they twist in the wind to try to figure this thing out.

JAG: All right. Jackie Ada on Twitter asks: “What's the purpose behind race-based admissions? It cannot be to promote minorities because Asian Americans are also discriminated against.”

There's a term in the academic world and beyond “underrepresented minorities” that is, URM. So, Asians are now seen as white adjacent, but they're not underrepresented. They're overrepresented.

HM: Well, it's because they are worried that there's not enough blacks. There's a term in the academic world and beyond “underrepresented minorities” that is, URM. So, Asians are now seen as white adjacent, but they're not underrepresented. They're overrepresented. Here's what it means. Here's a little translation key. What “students of color” means is underperforming students, and all these Asians that want to be part of the elite, they put up their hands, say, “Please circle; we be a student of color,” and the administrator says, “No, no, no. You are not a student of color because you are whooping everybody's ass on campus.” So the purpose is not to get in any old minority, it's to get in blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics. And the elites are terrified that the academic skills gap is never going to close. They're preemptively putting out the only allowable explanation for the academic skills or for lack of racial proportionality, which is “racism” because they're terrified of a cultural explanation, and they're sure as hell terrified of a heritability explanation.

JAG: Well, they're working pretty hard to make sure that the skills gap doesn't close by trying to thwart all attempts of offering school choice and competition in education at every turn. Okay, Ms. Warren asks, “On the next book, When Gender Trumps Merit, have you considered this disparity?” We're probably not going to get to this [holds up The Diversity Delusion], but actually you talk about it a lot here.

The more that the universities become feminized, the more they trend left, the more they hate objectivity, free discourse, scholarly discovery, no matter where it takes them.

HM: Yes. White females are an absolute scourge. One of the reasons the university is just going downhill so much is this domination. It's feminized. Poll after poll shows that females are the ones that are pushing for the restrictions on free speech. They're the ones who think it's more important to take into account alleged harm, psychological harm from harmful words or something, that it makes you want to throw up. There's the idea that these students are actually at risk from hearing about a different non-orthodox explanation for racial disparity, say, that is completely specious. Any adult that goes along with it is just enabling self-regarded narcissism and whininess. But the more that the universities become feminized, the more they trend left, the more they hate objectivity, free discourse, scholarly discovery, no matter where it takes them. So yes, females, white females in particular, are a total scourge and there are obviously exceptions, but the few remaining—

JAG: Hopefully present company, the two of us.

HM: Yes, absolutely. I will include you and we'll hope that I get nominated too, Jennifer. Yes. But, economics is still male dominated, so it's still a little more rational philosophically. The feminists are all complaining that philosophy is too male dominated, so, you can sort of predict which way a discipline is going by looking at the demographic shift.

JAG: Well, if they wanted philosophy to be a little less male dominated, maybe they'll give Ayn Rand a second look. I'm not going to hold my breath. But your answer on gender actually is going to inspire me to jump back into one of the questions that I had for you. Greg Lukianoff, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, and previous guest on this show, he and Jonathan Haidt, advanced the idea that overprotective parenting has contributed to this very fragile culture on campus where students prioritize safety over free speech. I thought that the argument was pretty compelling, but you take issue with it saying that campus intolerance is not, at root, a psychological phenomenon, but an ideological one.

HM: Well, first of all, I respect Jonathan Haidt very much, and Greg Lukianoff, but it doesn't comport with the facts. Despite my recent diatribe against white females, let's be honest: blacks on campuses are pretty damn expert as well in leveraging the harm card and playing-the-victim card. Let's be honest, Jennifer, they are not subject to overparenting, we wish they had more parenting. So, that is not their problem. As far as white students go, white males have the same parents as white females, but the call for shutdown of free speech is overwhelmingly coming from the white females, not the white males.

JAG: But the white males and the white females are both subject to this same indoctrination. So, why is it not affecting the guys or affecting the girls more?

It's an ideology that is based on hatred, as I said before, of a civilization deemed too white and too male.

HM: Well, exactly, but that's my point. It's not the parenting, it's the ideology that is celebrating victimhood. If it was just a function of having been or being overparented, you would expect white males on campus to be as vocal in calling for excluding speech they don't like, but they're not. They have the same parents as their sisters, if it's their sisters that are engaged in this. So, I see this as more: it's an ideology that is based on hatred, as I said before, of a civilization deemed too white and too male.

JAG: All right, we're going to jump back into these many, many questions, and I am just going to let you guys know in advance, there's no way that we're going to get to all of these in the last 12 minutes or so that we have. George on Facebook asks: “Do you believe there is currently a competency crisis? Is there a single source or multiple factors?”

China is not obsessed with identity politics. It obviously has its massive economic and political problems, but in the field of education and technology, all it cares about is competence.

HM: Well, yes, I think that we're inevitably going to be facing the deterioration of public service, of the services we can expect from corporations. There will be more errors made because we are determined to promote people again on the basis of skin color, not on the basis of competence. It's happening everywhere. I'm particularly worried about the judiciary. Biden announced at the start of his presidency that he was not going to be submitting his judicial appointments to the ABA for pre-clearance because the ABA, according to Biden's spokesman, didn't care enough about diversity. Well, this is an absurd claim. The ABA is obsessed with diversity. It's all it talks about. So, what Biden was signaling was: “My judicial nominees, yes, they're going to be diverse, but they're going to be so mediocre that even the diversity-obsessed ABA will not give them its rubber stamp”. So, he's putting people on the bench that are not the best choices in the country. This matters, the quality of our jurisprudence matters to private parties and being able to plan commercial transactions based on clear legal rules set down in the case law, it matters to the constitutional integrity of our country. We're going to see this in medicine. Already, there's a few studies that I've been told about that are actually trying to empirically measure what happens when you promote doctors in hospitals on the basis of race. As you can expect, it's not a pretty picture. So yes, China is not obsessed with identity politics. It obviously has its massive economic and political problems, but in the field of education and technology, all it cares about is competence. Meanwhile, we are tearing down gifted- and talented-programs across the country, preventing gifted students from advancing or accelerating in math for one reason and one reason only. There's not enough blacks in those programs. Everything is coming down. If we are not prepared to say that the reason for our racial disparities is not racism, it's the skills gap and behaviors gap. I can tell you, JAG it is all coming down. Yes, we will have a complete competency crisis.

JAG: All right. We've been talking about various forms of privilege. I'm going to assert some family privilege. There is a questioner on Zoom, Melanie Grossman; as you might imagine, she is related. She says, I am familiar with the academic community, and I would say there are many top-notch doctors coming through the system. Now, I would also say that some of the training programs offer summer internships in minority neighborhoods. All of this is good. We need to hear about some of the positive ways in which this is working in medicine. Are there any positive aspects of these initiatives to try to offer additional training or mentoring or what have you?

The scientific journals are completely captured by the idea that science is racist, that medicine is racist. They are selecting articles to publish based on the race of the author.

HM: Well, that's fine. I don't object to outreach in communities, but I can tell you it's been going on for a long time. I would also say that a doctor’s comparative advantage is not social justice work. I think that doctors should be involved in applying their medical knowledge to solving the problems of biology and on the terrible diseases that we have conquered so extraordinarily thanks to the scientific method, but that continue to afflict us. So, to the extent that doctors are being told they have to spend time on their diversity, equity, inclusion statements to get promoted I think that's a complete waste of time. Yes, of course, there's still good doctors coming through, but I hear from doctors all the time, people working on cancer in labs at Ivy League schools, who are saying, “I'm spending more time trying to explain how my work on cell-signaling and nematodes has a diversity upside to it than I am actually doing basic research.” So, of course, there's still good things happening, but the scientific journals are completely captured by the idea that science is racist, that medicine is racist. They are selecting articles to publish based on the race of the authors: who's being cited, are you citing enough black articles? So, I am not at all sanguine about what's happening, as is obvious by now, <laugh>.

JAG: Alright. So, Robert Bidinotto, I see you there, but your questions are a little long, so I'm not going to be able to get to them. I am actually going to jump back into some of the questions that I had prepared for you that I wanted to be able to try to get to, maybe to just wrap things up. Well, oh no, this one—one of our big themes at The Atlas Society is postmodernism, which we try to make accessible with our Pocket Guide to Postmodernism and our animated video, My Name is Postmodernism. You mentioned Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, as academia's most celebrated book on incarceration. I was not familiar with it. So, how have Foucault and others influenced modern incarceration theory?

HM: Well, Foucault is a strange character. I mean, that book was, actually.

JAG: That's an understatement <laugh>.

I've spent so much time, Jennifer, in inner-city police community meetings in Harlem and the Bronx and Southside of Chicago, Farwest side of Chicago. What those good law-abiding people yearn for is a safe, orderly environment that is not taken over by thugs.

HM: I'm told that he is not at all trustworthy as a historian, and I do not have the historical knowledge to be able to test what he's claiming. But he starts out with an extremely vivid juxtaposition. He describes an absolutely gruesome act of torture in early Renaissance Europe. I don't think it may be the 15th century, but it's completely grotesque and chilling and nauseating: the vivid destruction of the bones and the flesh, and the infliction of pain. And he contrasts that to our modern punitive system, which is sort of off limits. It's not a public display and it's all just, it's incarceration; we don't use physical abuse any longer. He calls it the panopticon. He says that our modern penitentiaries are based on a surveillance system, and Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher of the 18th, 19th century, designed some of these where the guards can sort of observe the entire penitentiary from one spot. He analogized that to all of modern society, which is trying to control behavior through a sort of invisible state. And, you know, that one contrast between the idea of punishment as a public display versus what we have now, which is more sort of a surveillance state; it's interesting. Of course, we were also back in the 15th and 16th, 17th century, before we had habeas corpus, people were being thrown away into the dungeon moat and not being seen for the next 30 years until they died, if they lived that long. So again, these are not really perfect. A comparison was drawing what Foucault has influenced now in a very bad way. There's a law professor at Columbia, Bernard Harcourt, and he has used Foucault to completely attack something known as broken-window policing, which is the idea that public order matters. That people in communities want orderly communities. They don't want litter, they don't want people loitering, they don't want kids hanging out by hundreds fighting with each other, smoking, weeding, trespassing, and that the police should pay attention to this. They shouldn't necessarily arrest everybody, but public order matters. Harcourt says that is racially oppressive. It's just another way of criminalizing non-conformity. That's just not the case. I've spent so much time, Jennifer, in inner-city police community meetings in Harlem and the Bronx and Southside of Chicago, Farwest side of Chicago. What those good law-abiding people yearn for is a safe, orderly environment that is not taken over by thugs.

JAG: We didn't have much time to talk about this excellent book, The Diversity Delusion. I also want to just commend all three of these. The narrators that you've selected are really excellent and just make it an enjoyable experience. But you provide an example of hysteria taking place on campus, your own harrowing experience at Claremont College. What happened, briefly?

They all think of themselves as victims and oppressed. It's absolutely disgusting. What's even more disgusting is that the campus faculty and administrators and presidents encourage them in that fantastical delusion, which will only handicap them for the rest of their lives.

HM: Well, this was with the War on Cops. I was supposed to talk there in, I think, maybe 2016, I can't remember, maybe 2017, on policing and the Black Lives Matter narrative. I was going to argue that no, the police are not systemically racist. There's not an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men. That's an optical illusion created by selective press coverage. So, the students there decided that I was simply a black- and a fascist homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, I don't know. They came up with these, and that I was not allowed to speak. So, they shut down the auditorium. They wouldn't allow anybody in to hear me. So, I spoke to an empty hall, and then eventually the police decided it wasn't safe for me to be there because the students were all outside banging on the glass panels and stuff. I was escorted out through the kitchen. It was and it's just simply depressing, Jennifer, to experience the campus mob up close, to hear the level of hysteria. These are the most privileged individuals in human history, simply by virtue of being on an American college campus and having access to the thing that Faust sold his soul for, which is knowledge. And yet they all think of themselves as victims and oppressed. It's absolutely disgusting. What's even more disgusting is that the campus faculty and administrators and presidents encourage them in that fantastical delusion, which will only handicap them for the rest of their lives.

JAG: Well, as Ayn Rand says, “You can evade reality, but you cannot evade the consequences of evading reality”. So, we shall see how all of this plays out. Heather, I admire your remarkably prolific ability to publish on an annual basis or every other year, all of your articles. What is next for you? What's the best way to keep track of your work and what can our audience do to support you?

HM: Thank you so much. Well, you know, I hate saying this, but it would be great: Buy the book, my most recent book.

JAG: Definitely buy these books. These were excellent.

HM: Well, thank you. So, that's number one. Buy When Race Trumps Merit. You can follow me, I think, most easily: I have a Twitter account, although I confess I don't run it. It really is basically just posting all my recent articles, writings and appearances and stuff. So that's probably the easiest, and because I do not run it, I can't even tell you what the damn Twitter handle is. It's some weird acronym or, you know, shortening of my name. If you just Google Heather MacDonald and I think Twitter, if you use it, that probably still pulls things up. I don't know when this full X transition is going to happen, but then you can get me that way. There's also the Manhattan Institute website.

JAG: Good. Well, we will. One of our gremlins will pull that, put it in the threads. Thank you, Heather. Again, the invitation stands. Hope to get you up to Malibu one of these days. I am there.

HM: Alright, thank you.

JAG: I want to thank all of you who joined us. Apologies for not being able to get to all of your excellent questions. As you can see, I'm quite a fan of these books and I had taken a lot of notes and I wanted to ask a lot of questions. Special shout out to some of the newcomers who have started to watch us, and join us every Wednesday afternoon. A particular thank you to those of you who are just watching, who aren't just partaking, who are just consuming, but have actually stepped up and made tax deductible donations to support our work to be able to bring you more of this. Also, I know there aren't a lot of freeloaders in our community, so, maybe you've just forgotten. If you haven't yet stepped up and made that donation, you can do it at atlassociety.org. If you're new, that will be matched and that support is what is enabling us to bring you, again, another great episode. Next week I'm going to be joined by former sportscaster, Michelle Tafoya. She's going to share her increasing disenchantment with the advance of wokeness in the sports world and why that got her to leave that field and create her Sideline Sanity podcast. So, hope to see you guys there. Thanks.