0:00

So, you know, it's one thing to speak honestly

0:02

about the fact that the Journalists

0:04

the journalists in this country have become part of the matrix,

0:07

but there are still Great journalism being

0:09

done in this country and that will continue

0:11

to be true as long as there is a heather mcdonald Uh,

0:14

you've seen her on this show a million times because

0:16

I just love talking to her She's a great journalist

0:19

the author of several critically acclaimed best-selling

0:21

books including the diversity delusion

0:24

and the new york times bestseller The war on cops. She's

0:26

got a new book out called When race

0:29

trumps merit how the pursuit of

0:31

equity Sacrifices excellence

0:33

destroys beauty

0:34

and threatens lives heather. Always

0:36

great to see how you doing Thank

0:38

you for such a great introduction andrew. I greatly

0:40

appreciate it. Well, I mean it This

0:43

is you know, this is something i've been reading the book.

0:45

I haven't finished it yet, but I just i've just been starting

0:48

it It's it's a heartbreaking

0:50

book in a lot of ways. I mean you bring

0:52

your usual Uh great journalism

0:54

to it, but the stuff that you're talking about is

0:57

really difficult to face Let's

0:59

let's just begin you say this has its roots

1:01

in the past, but really got started with

1:03

the george floyd riots What exactly

1:05

are we talking about when we say when race trumps merit?

1:08

We're talking about the idea

1:10

that if we look around and we see an institution

1:13

that does not have exact racial

1:16

proportionality based on the national

1:18

population So for instance if

1:20

you look at google and it doesn't

1:22

have 13 black engineers Working

1:25

there or black computer scientists,

1:28

which is 13 is what the national

1:30

population is Therefore we have concluded

1:32

it is per se racist and

1:35

it must lower its standards

1:37

in order to uh create

1:40

the requisite diversity or

1:42

if you look at Uh a medical

1:45

school and you see that it doesn't have 13 black

1:49

faculty or an alzheimer's

1:51

research lab, and it doesn't have 13 Uh

1:55

black neurologists working there the

1:57

federal government

1:58

the medical school whether Whether it's Harvard Medical

2:01

School or Duke Medical School will conclude,

2:03

the lab is racist, we the medical

2:06

school are racist, we have to lower

2:08

our standards of admissions, we have to

2:10

lower our standards of hiring in

2:12

order to engineer racial

2:14

proportionality. On the criminal

2:16

side, if viewers are

2:18

sort of scratching their heads of what the hell has

2:20

been going on with criminal law enforcement

2:23

for the last two years, why are

2:25

these crazy prosecutors not

2:28

prosecuting

2:29

theft, shoplifting, turnstile

2:31

jumping, trespass, disorderly conduct,

2:34

resisting arrest, which is the most appalling

2:36

of all? Why are police chiefs

2:38

often telling their officers don't

2:40

make car stops, don't arrest

2:43

for quality

2:44

of life infractions

2:46

like

2:47

public camping? All

2:49

of this is the same issue. It's

2:51

driven by, in this case, the

2:53

over-representation of blacks

2:55

in prison and the disparate

2:57

impact that the enforcement

3:00

of the criminal law inevitably has on

3:02

black criminals. The thing that

3:04

my book tries to do, Drew, is

3:06

provide an alternative explanation to racism

3:10

for why we have those racial disparities.

3:13

Before we get to that, I want to talk about

3:15

that, but before we get to that, this

3:17

is such a bad idea. Obviously, I

3:19

mean, let's just start. We've mentioned the medical

3:21

profession. I want a surgeon

3:23

who is the best possible surgeon. I don't

3:26

care if he's Scandinavian

3:28

or Zulu. I want the guy who can

3:30

do the job best. So this is such a bad idea.

3:34

Obviously, he's going to lower the quality of the schools,

3:36

the practices. How did we get to this

3:38

point? How did we get to the point where somebody

3:40

thought that this would work?

3:43

I don't know if they're thinking about whether it works. They

3:45

don't think it works in terms of meritocracy

3:48

and success. They think it works simply

3:51

as a way of engineering and

3:53

imposing racial quotas on everything. I

3:55

think the reason we got here, Drew,

3:58

is America, white Americans,

3:59

in particular are very guilty about

4:02

our racial past. And I freely

4:05

admit that that racial past was

4:07

appalling. It was gratuitously

4:10

nasty for decades, way after

4:13

we got rid of slavery.

4:15

The South was behaving like a bunch

4:17

of absolute psychotic neurotics

4:19

towards blacks. And at this

4:21

point,

4:22

we are not that country, Drew. I

4:25

can both say

4:26

we were white supremacists in apartheid

4:28

country. And today we have done 180 degree

4:30

turn.

4:32

The reality today is black

4:34

privilege. And that can get you fired if you say that

4:36

on a college campus. Fortunately, neither of us

4:38

is there. So we hope we can keep our jobs.

4:42

White privilege is not the reality. I don't

4:44

know a single black high school

4:46

senior applying to a selective

4:48

college that puts his

4:50

race down as white

4:52

because he knows that being black will give him an enormous

4:55

advantage. Whites are terrified

4:58

that the skills gap, despite

5:00

decades of trying after the

5:03

height of the civil rights era in the 1960s, we

5:06

spent trillions of dollars on redistribution

5:08

programs, on de

5:11

facto reparations, on

5:14

social outreach, on

5:17

doing affirmative action up the gazoo. And

5:20

still there is a standard deviation

5:22

in virtually every objective test

5:25

of academic skills. The

5:28

whites are terrified that that will

5:30

never close. And so they

5:32

are out there saying, proleptically

5:35

the only allowable explanation is racism.

5:38

They're terrified of looking at black culture.

5:40

And they're certainly never gonna look

5:42

at the whole very vexed issue of heritability,

5:45

but they won't even look at the pathological

5:48

inner city culture that says that academic

5:51

achievement is acting white.

5:52

You know, you talk about,

5:55

it's so easy to see

5:57

how this is gonna lower standards in medical

5:59

school. and medical practice, how it obviously

6:02

lowered standards in policing. It's

6:04

been a disaster in terms of repealing

6:07

the great advances we

6:09

made for 20 years in lowering

6:12

crime. But one of the

6:13

subtitles of your book, the title

6:15

of the book is, is when race trumps merit,

6:17

how the pursuit of equity sacrifices excellence,

6:20

destroys beauty, and threatens life. How does it

6:22

destroy beauty?

6:26

The elites have turned on the

6:28

extraordinary legacy of Western

6:30

art, whether it's music,

6:32

museums, art, visual

6:34

arts, theater, dance, it

6:37

is all coming down. It is all

6:39

being accused on a completely

6:42

specious basis of fomenting

6:44

white supremacy. So if

6:47

you love classical music as I do, and I

6:49

know for a lot of people, it's a very alien

6:51

idiom, but I can just assure

6:53

you that it is one of the most sublime

6:55

expressions

6:57

of the human spirit once your ears

6:59

get acclimated to what is by now sadly

7:02

a very strange and foreign

7:04

idiom.

7:05

The idea

7:07

is that because the vast majority

7:09

of European musicians

7:12

writing in this

7:13

tradition of notated music

7:16

were white because they were Europeans, therefore

7:19

the only reason anybody thinks that

7:21

Bach and Mozart and Haydn and Schubert

7:23

and Beethoven are great is because they were dead

7:26

white males. And their power

7:28

is due to white supremacy. This is

7:31

a preposterous idea, but you have since

7:33

the George Floyd racial psychotic

7:36

breakdown, you have the very

7:38

leaders of arts organizations,

7:40

whether it's an opera company, a

7:42

symphony orchestra, or an art museum,

7:46

betraying their most profound

7:48

obligation, which is to

7:50

celebrate their traditions, pass

7:53

them on and teach young people why they

7:56

should be down on their knees in gratitude for

7:58

these works. And instead,

7:59

they're saying, oh,

8:01

we're no longer an opera company. We're an anti-racist

8:04

institution. We're no longer an art museum.

8:07

We're an anti-racist museum. Let

8:09

me show you the various ways that

8:12

the last 5,000 years of Western art

8:14

are racist. You

8:17

know, what's terrible about that is you have

8:19

guys like Wagner, who actually was

8:21

a racist, one of the greatest writers

8:23

of opera who ever lived. It

8:25

just doesn't account for anything. You know, I mean, talent

8:28

is talent and talent is blind.

8:30

So let's talk about this. I mean, you are one

8:32

of the few people who actually

8:34

speaks with, not

8:36

just with frankness, but without bias about

8:39

some of the causes of this.

8:42

What is another way of approaching this

8:44

problem where blacks don't seem to be

8:46

able to move up? I mean, everybody

8:48

has faced prejudice in this

8:50

country. Obviously, the blacks are special

8:53

in the sense that they faced this

8:55

slavery in that long Jim Crow

8:57

period. But you know, Jews have been put upon,

9:00

the Irish have been put upon, everybody else sort of gets past

9:02

it. Why can't blacks get past this?

9:05

Boy, that's such a difficult

9:08

question, Andrew. And you

9:10

know, I'm gonna put my neck out here

9:12

and say, I look at this inner city culture

9:15

and it is absolutely counterproductive.

9:18

It is destined. There's no

9:20

way you can look at this and think that there's

9:23

any possibility of closing the skills

9:25

gap. You have the hip hop culture

9:27

that celebrates violence, cop

9:30

killing, misogyny, drug

9:32

taking, theft, bling.

9:35

And you have what I mentioned before, the

9:37

anti-acting white syndrome,

9:40

which says that if you're a black kid and you're

9:42

actually taking your

9:43

textbooks home to study

9:45

and you're not going and running the streets, you're

9:48

acting white.

9:49

And then you have an enabling elite

9:52

that has lost confidence

9:54

in the bourgeois values. I was

9:56

just today walking through Times

9:58

Square in New York City. and going

10:00

past a strip joint. And I remember the halcyon

10:03

days of the 1990s when

10:05

Giuliani, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,

10:08

transformed the city by saying, I'm

10:10

not gonna apologize for

10:12

bourgeois values like neatness, getting

10:15

porn out of Times Square, not

10:18

having people colonize the sidewalks, expecting

10:21

law and order, you jump the turnstiles,

10:23

you're getting arrested, and we've lost

10:25

confidence in that. And we're not enforcing public

10:28

order, and the elites have said, well,

10:31

maybe we'll still kind of try to live

10:33

by traditional norms when it comes to our

10:35

own child rearing, but we're sure not gonna

10:38

tell anybody, especially blacks

10:40

who now have a 71%

10:42

out of wedlock birth rate, which is cataclysmic.

10:45

It is impossible

10:48

to civilize young males

10:50

with 71%

10:51

of black children

10:53

being born

10:54

in a fatherless home.

10:56

We are not, we have lost the confidence

10:58

to say, children need their mothers

11:01

and fathers. And there's many reasons for that.

11:03

There's feminism, and there is also

11:06

gay rights. Let's be honest.

11:09

If you say that children need their biological

11:11

mothers and fathers, you will not only be

11:13

accused of dissing the strong women

11:15

who say they can do it all and be single

11:17

mothers just fine, you're also dissing

11:20

the lesbian couple, and everybody's

11:22

terrified to do that.

11:24

One of the things that is so appalling

11:26

about this is that blacks actually were

11:29

making more progress in terms

11:31

of, relative progress to where they were, rising

11:33

into the middle class faster before

11:36

the

11:36

1960s. I mean, basically after

11:39

Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Act, but before the Great

11:41

Society,

11:43

so much of the money being pumped into the

11:45

government is coming from these programs

11:48

that are basically have broken the back

11:50

of black culture. How

11:53

do you get people to unclaw

11:55

their hands from that money and

11:58

say, this is actually hurting people?

12:00

Well, Drew, I get asked all

12:02

the time, what can we do? And I

12:04

have to say, I've sort

12:06

of lost patience with that concept.

12:09

You could say, well, as a form

12:12

of reparations, we as whites, it's

12:14

still our responsibility. But

12:16

frankly, even if as a moral issue

12:19

you thought that were the case, and I'm not sure

12:21

I do, there's not a whole lot

12:23

more that so-called we can do. It's

12:26

up to the black culture right now to heal

12:29

itself. You

12:31

can throw all the money you want at these failing

12:33

inner city schools. The child learns

12:35

to read by actually putting in the effort.

12:38

There's no social worker that can do that for

12:41

him. There's no parent that can

12:43

substitute and say, I'm going

12:45

to actually monitor my child's homework.

12:48

Is he going to school? The black truancy rate

12:50

is astronomical in California. It's

12:53

at least four times higher than whites. You

12:55

better believe it's a lot higher than Asians.

12:58

And so if you're not in school, you

13:00

can't learn. If you're not taking your textbooks

13:02

home, you can't do your homework. I have

13:05

observed inner city classrooms, and

13:07

they are absolute frightening

13:09

zones of insubordination

13:11

and chaos. And of course, the other disparate

13:14

impact concept, the

13:16

book is about the fallacy of disparate impact

13:18

is that if teachers discipline

13:21

the insubordinate unruly students

13:24

as they deserve to

13:26

be, and it turns out that disproportionately

13:29

those are black students, then we can't

13:32

discipline the students because discipline

13:34

has a disparate impact on blacks. And

13:36

we're all supposed to believe that there's no behavioral

13:38

differences. Well, when you have black

13:41

teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17

13:43

committing gun homicide

13:45

at 10

13:47

times the rate

13:49

of white and Hispanic teenagers between

13:51

the ages of 14 and 17, the

13:53

idea that that population

13:56

is going to go to school and be

13:58

immaculately attended to their teacher

14:01

and doing

14:03

their homework and not disrupting their fellow students

14:05

is ridiculous. The same lack

14:08

of socialization, the same lack of

14:10

parental involvement that leads

14:12

to that gun homicide rate is

14:15

also

14:15

creating these chaotic inner city

14:18

classrooms. So we

14:20

can do our charter schools, we can

14:22

do our vouchers, we can try to

14:24

re-embrace a

14:26

belief in bourgeois values, but

14:28

at some point

14:29

the race hustle, which is what's going

14:31

on, we are all embracing a

14:34

fiction

14:35

of ubiquitous white supremacy

14:37

that race hustle has to stop

14:39

by the hustlers themselves. Wow,

14:41

now this is a big step toward this

14:43

book, When Race Trumps Merit, How

14:45

the Proceed of Equity, Sacrifices Excellence,

14:47

Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives by the great

14:50

Heather McDonald. And I'm just thrilled to say

14:52

I didn't even know this, that this is being published

14:54

by us. This is a Daily Wire book. I'm

14:58

honored to have you on the team, Heather. It is always

15:00

great to see you, and I look forward

15:02

to finishing the book. It's really good.

15:04

Thanks, Andrew. Well, I chose Daily Wire in order to have

15:06

you as a colleague, so it's mutual. I

15:09

appreciate that. Thanks a lot. It's great to see you. Thank

15:12

you so much.