- Are we heading towards
a point of no return
and how do we get back from this?
This is the most difficult thing.
The way we actually
demolish identity politics.
And again the founding engine
of this is disparate impact.
We have to counteract the myth of bias,
that as long as the only
allowable explanation
for socioeconomic disparities
is the Ta-Nehesi Coates view of the world,
the Michelle Alexander view of the world,
that everything is driven by bias,
the AOC world, they win.
- Hey, I'm Dave Rubin
and unless I've been impeached
by a completely partisan vote
this is still The Rubin Report.
As always a quick reminder
to click the subscribe bell
so you guys have a small chance
of seeing our videos
right here on the YouTube.
And more importantly joining
me today is an author,
political commentator and fellow
at the Manhattan Institute,
Heather Mac Donald, welcome
back to the Rubin Report.
- It's such an honor Dave.
Thank you so much for having me on.
- I'm glad to have you back.
Had you on about a year ago.
And people they love you.
That's what I learned--
- Oh good (laughs).
- That's what I learned in
the YouTube comments section.
- It's just the aura of being
in your presence, you know,
it's there's so much love coming at you
that a little spills over.
- All right, well, then you're killin' it
in the scarf game today.
So I feel like I have to be very sharp.
- Thank you.
- So here we go,
so one of the things I
wanted to start with here is
something that we discussed briefly
about five or 10 minutes
in our last interview,
you are a secular conservative.
And I think a lot of conservatives
seem to think that is either an oxymoron
or just simply cannot exist
because conservatism has to have
some sort of religious underpinning.
So I thought that would
just be an interesting place
for us to pick up the conversation.
- I base my conservatism
on empirical truth,
on what I've observed in life.
I can talk about the necessity
of the two parent family
because we can see
empirically what happens
when the marriage norm
breaks down in communities.
I support most traditional values
because I think we have a history
of stability when those are honored.
I don't think it's
particularly stable to rest
a set of political principles
or moral principles
on the basis of revealed wisdom;
That this holy book supports this.
And I'll notice this, people
who I respect enormously Dave
whether it's Dennis
Prager or Michael Medved
that are making the argument that
you cannot have a moral society
without a foundation of religious belief
I would ask them, these are
two brilliant Jewish thinkers:
Why don't you believe that
Jesus is the son of God?
It's revealed truth.
The new testament says
that this is gospel.
They don't believe that.
- So basically if you're
going that far with religion
and you're saying you
need this revealed truth,
this belief to organize a society
why not the next level
of the revealed truth
or whatever the next level
is or something like that.
- Right, they will not take
it as simply necessary truth
the fact that the new testament
claims to be the word of God.
Why don't they believe that?
They're basing their same
belief in the old testament
on the same claim that
the new testament makes.
They just choose to be
agnostic or atheistic
about one of those holy books.
I could apply the same challenge
to their belief that the old
testament is the revealed truth
because it's simply self-validating.
So I would look for a
different set of principles
that does not depend on
one's suspension of disbelief
and an acceptance that
something is revealed truth
for my moral code.
- So with that being said,
does it matter to you
if the end result is the same, right?
So I'm gonna guess that on
most of the important issues of the day
you probably agree in large part
with both Dennis and Michael Medved.
And most conservative thinkers
that maybe come from a
more religious background.
So at the end of the day
when it all washes away
do you think it really matters?
Do you think that's sort
of a long term problem?
- No, I guess if we
arrive at the same place.
I think it's a problem
for that segment of voters or thinkers
who don't find those appeals
particularly interesting.
But I have to, I'll be very honest Dave,
part of my resistance to this is simply
I don't find claims of petitionary prayer
and the idea of a personal loving God
consistent with what I see, what I call:
The daily massacre of the innocence.
To me it's a very hard claim to make that
I should expect God to pay attention
to my well being when
he's willing to allow
horrific things to happen to people
far more deserving and innocent than I am.
So for me it's partly just a truth value.
I cannot stomach what appears to me
to be a patently false claim
about a personal loving God.
- It's interesting.
I've mentioned that I've
had John Kasich in here
who is the former Governor of Ohio
and presidential candidate obviously.
And when I asked him about faith
he said something that sounded
sort of almost flippant
but I thought it was really
actually pretty insightful.
He said: You know, some
people can do it with God,
I just can't.
And I thought that was actually, you know,
for a certain set a people
where you're able to sort of
always sort of maybe go back
to your intellectual side
some people just sort
of get tired of that.
Does that make sense to you?
- And I also think it's a
very, I think it's genetic.
I know that I am not particularly
predisposed towards metaphysical questions
because I don't think they
can really be answered.
So the idea of: What started the universe?
We can't really answer that.
I think that to say, God,
that's just a place holder for ignorance.
That doesn't help.
You know, 'cause you get--
- I may have to get you
in here with Prager.
- (laughs) I'd love to.
- To discuss it.
- You get infinite regress
So, where did God come from?
It's just putting off
that moment of ignorance
a little bit further.
So I don't find those questions
particularly relevant.
On the other hand I recognize that
for much of humanity
that is a very deep need,
to ask these basic questions
about origin and end point.
Where are we all headed?
What is the meaning of life?
To me anybody who claims that
he doesn't find meaning in life
when there is Mozart and Haydn,
to invoke a Dennis Prager favorite,
or Beethoven or John Milton or Aeschylus
or Anthony Trollope is missing something.
- Or just waking up with purpose--
- Exactly.
- For whatever you do.
- Doing, trying to do the best you can do.
I don't find meaningless for one second.
- Yeah, so does it worry you then
when republicans or more
broadly conservatives
talk about God all the time?
Or now that we're seeing
sort of a huge fracture
in what's happening with the left,
they're like completely afraid
to even mention God or anything like that.
Bernie, I think, is basically an atheist
although he won't really say it
'cause I think there would
be political repercussions.
But are you, does that
make you sort of feel
not totally at home
with the conservatives?
- Well, I grew up in a
very secular environment.
So it was a novel
discovery to me in the '90s
when I was in a more
conservative writing circle,
and I grew up as a default liberal.
I hadn't been exposed to religion.
I mean, it is an amazing thing.
I had been educated on the coasts.
And I didn't realize
how different they were.
So in one sense I'm very parochial
and I hadn't been exposed to
the degree of religious faith.
I guess I find it,
I'm always amazed what
to me seems parochialism
when I hear especially Christians
in a political environment
getting up there and
talking about Jesus is God.
My view immediately is,
well, there are Jews around,
you know, at the rallies
and there are muslims.
How can you be so confident
that everybody in this audience
is of that particular faith?
And I also would notice
simply that religion
has been tamed by the enlightenment.
It has now been taught
to mind it's manners
and sit quietly in the corner.
The great kissy wissy
between Jews and Christians
that we all now talk about
the Judaeo-Christian
environment, heritage.
And perhaps rightly so.
That's a novel thing.
- Right, it wasn't like that--
- It wasn't like that.
- For a long time.
There were things called The Crusades
and a whole bunch a other stuff.
- Exactly, exactly.
And all these religious supporters
are saying we cannot live without it.
They are conveniently overlooking
what the history of religion
has been in our tradition
and still is in many other places
that have not gone
through the enlightenment.
The concept of tolerance
is not a religious concept,
it's an enlightenment concept.
And religion in the west
has been forced to accept tolerance,
which is a very good thing.
But that is not an idea that
is inherent to religion.
- Right, so I don't wanna
be Prager or Medved's--
- No, do--
- Lawyer at the moment but
I think what they would say
is that it was all the religious stuff
that organized society
that allowed us to get
to the enlightenment
so that the enlightenment could then
unfurl all these good ideas.
- Well, I don't think Christianity
or Judaeo-Christianity
has any necessary
monopoly on moral virtues.
I think there's a certain core sense of
I don't know any culture
that says: Murder is okay.
But every culture starts to
make certain distinctions.
- They don't last that long.
- (laughs) Right.
But it's fun for a moment.
You get to give into your
most aggressive tendencies.
- Right.
Where do you think
Trump furls out on this?
'Cause I don't think anyone really thinks
he's a religious person
or perhaps even a believer
in any real sense of it.
Yet Christians or evangelicals especially
really seem to like the
job that he's doing.
- Well, I don't think he
has particular principles
or deep thoughts about much of anything.
I think he's a chameleon.
He takes on the coloring of
what is convenient at the time.
So whether he believes
or not, I don't know.
I don't think he's thought
much deeply about it either.
And it doesn't really matter.
But certainly he's willing
to speak that rhetoric
in order to get that vote.
And it's an interesting question.
We're more ready to have
a gay politician probably
than somebody who is
an avowed nonbeliever,
which is interesting.
- So taking the other side of this,
as we watch sorta this
internal civil war of the democratic party
between the socialists
and the last few remaining decent liberals
or whatever you wanna call 'em
I do see a connection between
not necessarily belief
but they no longer have any
sort of guiding principle
that they believe in other than the state.
Do you see something like that?
Not that you need God or
you're gonna have the state
but because they have something
they have almost nothing.
It's starting from nothing
other than the state.
They just want that state
to grow and grow and grow.
- Well, you're sort of making
an argument that I hear a lot
which is that the left
progressives, liberals
are relativists, they're
moral relativists.
I don't, that's not what I see.
I see an absolute dogmatism.
They just have a different
set of values or virtues
in which they are absolutely convinced.
I mean they think that they
know the truth of America
and that truth is one of
endemic, enduring white supremacy
and that everybody unless
he has been proven otherwise
is filled with bigotry and hatred.
So I see them as judgemental,
as the worst caricature of puritans.
So I wouldn't say it's an amoral view.
And it's not one that is
particularly individualistic.
It's group based and identity based.
- Does it seem to you
that the remaining piece
of whatever the democratic party is
that it just can't hold?
I mean AOC, who I think
is pretty much wrong about everything
she did say something a couple weeks ago
that I thought was relatively insightful,
which is that she
basically as a socialist,
they still call themselves
democratic socialists
but they'll get rid of that
first part soon enough.
But that she shouldn't be in
the same party as Joe Biden.
And that strikes me as actually true.
What are these people
doing in the same party?
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton
should not be in the same party,
that this thing just
can't hold much longer.
- Well, I don't know.
I think that that's, the
gravity is with the AOCs
and I would love to see
a very strong defense
of the free market system of
individual entrepreneurship
of the nobility and bravery and courage--
- But is there literally--
- But I don't think they're gonna make it.
- Any democrat?
Even Biden, like he's the
last vestige of it, right?
- No they won't, no they
won't, they won't, they won't.
- So what do you think that is?
That would lead someone like Biden?
That you know that he's
not one of these people?
What do you think that
is that weakness point?
- I think that the idea that
there is a western culture
has been so devalued.
There's a constellation of complaints,
of accusations that
are deeply intertwined.
And it is involved with identity politics.
I think that the identity politics
is what's gonna take this culture down.
But I think to support capitalism
you are leaving yourself
open to supporting
white male capitalism and
white male entrepreneurship.
And so I think what Biden fears
would be less being accused
of being a hard hearted
vulture on the body politic
as being somehow involved
in a long tradition that
led to colonialism,
that led to imperialism
and that leads to oppression
by white males of everybody else.
So that's what I think
is going to prevent him
from giving a strong throated
and full enthusiastic defense
of the values of capitalism.
And for me the question is,
again, as we mentioned before
the Marc Benioff Salesforce.
You know, the Jeff Bezos's of the world.
When are they gonna demand
a candidate that will
defend their right to become
billionaires legitimately
because they created products that
the world over is hungering for?
- Isn't it pathetic then
we see Tom Steyer up there
and he's like a little
puppy dog around Bernie,
just like me, like.
Well, it's 'cause he doesn't
wanna get sent to the Gulag
once Bernie's in power, right?
- Right, yeah, no, no.
Politicians, I mean, they still have
this incredible power, you know?
And he's not about to say,
he occasionally invokes
that I did create something.
And of course he has to
have his humble roots.
But he's not about to say:
I did something that you guys
wouldn't have a clue to do,
which is mastering the supply chain.
- Right.
Do you think it's funny
that the billionaires
that are thought of as
the good guy millionaire,
so, you know, Bill Gates is
thought of as good, let's say.
And Warren Buffet is thought of as good.
You know, Koch brothers bad
or whoever the right ones are bad.
But the ones that are thought of as good
they sorta think that they
can give away enough money
or say enough things
that it will save them.
But it will never save them, right?
In the eye ultimately of the base,
no matter if they could
give away everything,
they can destroy their
fortunes and empires
and it just it will never end.
Do you think they just don't realize that?
Or it's like, you just have to do it
no matter what 'cause you wanna survive?
- Do they not realize it, yeah,
they don't really have a choice.
But they are playing with fire.
I mean, they have to realize that
to the extent that they
continue feeding this,
and Mark Benioff is just a great example,
there he is in San Francisco
promoting this idea that
San Francisco's not done enough
to help the homeless, and, you know?
We need to save the children and whatnot
through just endless bulking
up of the bureaucracy
without dealing with
the profound questions
of norms, public norms of behavior.
He probably thinks he can buy exoneration
but it's just not gonna happen
because again it's all connected.
The same left that has been
dominating homeless politics
in San Francisco for decades,
the Coalition on Homelessness,
they are connected to
the entire woke discourse
whether it's regards to illegal aliens
or white supremacy or
male toxic masculinity
it's all part of the same thing.
- So let's shift actually towards
the homeless portion of this.
'Cause I watched this
morning a talk that you did
about the San Francisco situation,
which everyone know is horrific.
I've told this story a million times
but when I was there about a year ago
I went out to dinner with a friend.
And we were at Morton's Steakhouse,
so it's a nice street we're
on, supposedly nice street.
Our car got broken into
right outside the restaurant.
They stole my bag and my
notebook and all this stuff.
And I took a picture of the broken glass
and I tweeted it out.
And I kid you not, I got hundreds
if not thousands of responses
basically all saying the same thing:
Dave what kind of idiot
leaves a bag in a car in San Francisco?
Because there is such
an epidemic of break-ins
that they know that,
regular people know not
to leave a bag in a car.
What is happening up there?
- Well, it's happening across the country.
We're in a massive process of de-norming.
We are unraveling every standard
in the name of racial justice.
So what happened in your car,
that's a product largely
of Proposition 47,
one of the ballot
initiatives in California
that downgraded a whole bunch of felonies,
including felony theft
to misdemeanor status
because of the problem of criminal laws
having a disparate impact on minorities.
- Do you think the people
that are pushing these laws
that it's the road to hell
is paved to good intentions always,
do you think that they really think
they're doing something good
even though all the evidence
always points to the
fact that it gets worse
after these policies are implemented?
- I think you've said yourself
you're not a big fan
of conspiracy theories.
I'm not either.
I really, I take people at their words.
I think that they really do believe that
the over-representation
of blacks in prison
is due to criminal justice racism
and that we're throwing a whole bunch
of trivial offenders in
prison, which is not the case.
You have to work very hard
to get yourself a prison sentence.
Most, any big city you're triaged out.
If you steal somebody's car a DA
is gonna be completely
uninterested in you.
You have to steal it at gunpoint
with the driver still
in to get a big city DA
interested in actually
prosecuting your case
as opposed to just giving you probation
and sending you on your way.
But, no, I think that they
really do believe that
the criminal justice system is racist
and that the way to solve
that is to not prosecute,
not put people, and de-fang the police.
And, of course, the problem is, yes,
there's a vast over-representation
of blacks in prison
but the thing we should be concerned about
is that blacks are
victimized by crime the most.
And I go to community meetings
in inter-city neighborhoods all the time.
Those good law-abiding bourgeois residents
of high crime neighborhoods
beg for more police protection.
Those are the voices that never get heard.
- So when these policies are put in place
or like in New York City de
Blasio has now done this thing
where you're allowed
to jump the turnstile,
they will not stop you.
So it's like you're basically
saying to everybody that pays,
right, and I lived in New York
City most of my adult life,
I never jumped a turnstile.
You're basically saying:
If you pay you're an idiot.
Like, why should you do it?
So they're actually encouraging
more and more people
to not follow the law.
- I know.
And AOC has as well.
I mean, this is really for a politician
to defend turnstile jumping
should be, that's an impeachable offense.
Because social norms are fragile.
And respect for the rule of law
is the essence of a civilization.
We lose that and you
get third world anarchy
with everybody trying to game the system.
You know, queuing is a thing of beauty.
We take it for granted.
But for people to be able
to quietly wait in line
and wait their place as
opposed to trying to,
you know, get to the top and
just muscle everybody else out,
break the rules, whatever, to get ahead.
That is, has been a sort
of normal condition.
And respect for the rule,
for the law is incredibly precious.
And to say it doesn't matter,
and the police should walk on by.
You are playing with fire.
You are on the road to anarchy.
- Do you sense that we're in a much more
precarious place right now
related to that then we've ever been
or at least or maybe in the
last let's say 50 years,
something like that?
- Well, we had this
extraordinary revolution
that nobody foresaw in the 1990s.
In the '80s the reigning wisdom
in law enforcement itself
was that police could
do nothing about crime,
that crime was a product of
inequality and injustice.
And until you solved poverty
and economic inequalities
all the police could do
would respond after the fact.
So why even bother?
- So this is like why New York City
and especially Times Square was a drug den
when I was growin' up goin' into the city.
- Because police would just walk on by.
The FBI publishes an annual crime report.
Throughout the '80s they
had a disclaimer saying:
Well, of course, we know
homicide is a social problem
that the police can't solve.
So the '90s had this
incredible profound moment
where that whole ideology of passivity
before social anarchy
was turned on it's head
and you had Mayor Giuliani coming in.
Giuliani on his good days,
I don't know what's happened to him now
it's very depressing to me
but he was one of the greatest mayors
if not the greatest
mayor New York ever had.
And his Police Commissioner
William Bratten said:
No, we are actually gonna, the
police are gonna lower crime
by enforcing the law.
And we learned that enforcement matters.
You change people's behavior,
you deter criminal offending
and they started paying attention
to those low level crimes in Times Square,
the squalor, the turnstile jumping,
the graffiti, the
urinating in the streets.
And they changed public norms.
And the whole broken
windows theory is correct.
And even if it doesn't
prevent higher level crimes
it's what people in high
crime neighborhoods beg for.
They want public order on the streets.
And now that is all being thrown away.
And again the reason is disparate impact.
- So, all right, so as
someone that deals in fact
and that's what your
books have been about,
and that's why my
audience digs what you do.
Do you ever find that sometimes facts
just aren't enough to
change the discourse--
- Yes.
- So, it's like.
Oh, right, well then.
Then, okay, we could probably move on.
No, but, so how do you
deal with that then?
'Cause I find this to be the most
sorta strangest place for
conservatives to be right now.
Which is that most of the facts seem to be
on the conservative side
of things at the moment.
Like it just seems to
be reality right now.
But I think conservatives
have a really hard time
breaking through either the cultural part
I think that's actually
really changing right now
partially 'cause a Trump.
But sometimes facts just
aren't enough right?
I mean I was telling you,
right, when you sat down
we were talking about the homeless thing,
the Target that's a
half mile from my house
there is a massive homeless encampment.
Massive, I mean, it's like a city
there now when I go to Target.
And it's like, well,
I could talk about why
some of the reasons that you just laid out
are allowing this to expand.
But a lot a people don't wanna hear that.
- Well, you know, this is something
that you have been thinking about
for much longer than I have of:
How do you change minds?
What is the nature of rational discourse?
What is it's limits?
And you know we learn from
people like Jonathan Haidt
that in fact reason often
acts as a after the fact
justification for people's
instinctive value systems
and ways of looking at the world.
So while I would like
to claim non-ironically
that I have the facts on my side.
And in fact I believe that.
I mean, that's what drives me.
And it's sort of a hatred
of what I call: Idiocy.
I have to acknowledge that
the progressives would say the same thing.
They would say: My God can't
you see the relevant facts?
For me one of the dividing lines
between a conservative
and a liberal outlook
is that liberals or progressives
will tend to see structural
explanations for inequality
as the most powerful ones.
And conservatives are more inclined
to see individual choice,
personal responsibility,
personal behavior as more significant
in leading to ultimate social outcomes
with economic disparities.
And so a liberal is gonna say:
But can't you see the facts of
people growing up in very
different economic circumstances,
there's not equal opportunity yet,
so how can we possibly demand
one single set of behaviors from people?
And they would not view the facts,
for me, probably the most profound fact
of our social existence today
is the breakdown of the family.
And if this continues going
you cannot have a civilization that way.
- Right but as you know--
- Liberals won't see that.
- Right, well, that's the
thing if you say that to them
and well we see this all the time.
If you say that to them what do they say?
- Racist.
- You're racist.
- You're a racist, right?
- So you're being extremely kind to them
by saying that they're
dealing in their facts.
But it's like they're
dealing in their facts
at just sort of a different layer,
that the real facts are beneath.
- Generally again I'm not gonna say that
all of the hypocrisy or blindness
is on one side and the other.
I will however say this, I do think that
the silencing tactics of
liberals are not symmetrical.
I don't think that conservatives have that
all-purpose silencing tactic,
which is to call somebody a racist.
So in that respect I do think that
there is more open-mindedness
on the side of conservatives.
But again all I can,
you know, you've been in
these environments as well,
you know all the arguments.
They have arguments.
We don't find them persuasive,
they don't find our arguments persuasive.
How you change minds in the face of that
is the big mystery of our time.
And I know that again I
grew up in liberal default.
What changed my mind is
starting to do reporting
and go into environments,
I started doing journalism in the the '90s
in this great renaissance of
New York under Mayor Giuliani
who was taking on one
sacred cow after another
whether it was the
welfare industrial complex
or the crime justifications.
And I would go to homeless shelters.
And I would go to welfare offices.
And I would talk to the clients.
And I would hear things that
the left would characterize as:
Oh, that's just Ronald Reagan,
his disparagement of welfare cuts.
The welfare clients themselves would say:
You know these welfare mothers
they're just having more babies
to increase their welfare check.
And I would say, The New
York Times goes here,
how do they not hear this?
- Well, they don't wanna hear it
because it's too counter to the narrative.
- Yes.
- One of the most interesting examples
of what you just said there,
David Horowitz once told me this story,
he told me this privately.
I'm sure I can say it publicly,
it wasn't on the show.
But he said that he was in New York City
in the early '80s when the
AIDS crisis was booming.
And this is right when he
sort of made his conversion
from a lefty to a conservative.
And he said that they all knew
it was coming out of the gay bath houses.
You know, these people are having orgies
and there's drugs and all this stuff.
And they knew it was proliferating
and it was killing people.
And that basically the republicans,
the conservatives said:
We have to close down the bathhouses
because there's this massive
public health crisis.
And the democrats because the road to hell
is paved with good intentions said:
You guys are a bunch a homophobes.
You can't tell gay people what to do.
So they were trying to do something nice,
we like gay people, let
them do whatever they want.
The republicans sorta sound mean,
we're not gonna let the gays do that.
And then what did it do?
It exacerbated the situation even more.
So there's a lot of that,
what you just laid out there.
- And I would also say,
I mean, this is another classic example of
the divide between
liberals and conservatives.
The liberal definition is somehow
this is Ronald Reagan's fault.
And AIDS is treated as a airborne disease
without the acknowledgment
that it is absolutely
behaviorally motivated.
You can avoid it a hundred percent
by not engaging in certain behaviors,
by acting personally responsibly.
You can say the same thing
about campus rape, you know?
- Well, not a hundred percent
just to be totally clear.
You could get a
transfusion that's botched.
- True but that's minor part.
The real transmission
was in sexual contact.
And that's true for
heterosexual sex as well.
But again that reluctance to say,
there are things that
individuals can do that,
ironically, look at, just
notice they tend to be things
that do conform to traditional behaviors.
Which is sexual prudence and modesty
and self restraint protect you.
And, again, let me just
say, the campus rape thing
it's the same thing.
You could avoid a hundred percent,
virtually a hundred percent
what is called: Campus rape,
by, on the female's part,
by not getting drunk
and getting in bed with
a guy you barely know
because the amount of stranger rapes
going on on college campuses
are minute, they barely go up.
- That's meaning just
a guy that finds a girl
walking on the street--
- Gets into your, breaks into your room
and uses knife or force.
Campus rape is a
voluntary sexual encounter
that is a hundred percent avoidable
if you don't wanna get involved.
- So you know that
that's gonna be the part
that gets clipped out of this--
- And I'm happy to defend it.
Right.
- Yeah.
So when you hear--
- I believe women have power.
You know what, I don't wanna
give any sort of nauseating
strong feminist bromides here
but the fact of the matter is
is that females do have power
to determine most of the outcomes
of their lives today, especially today.
- So the message though that we hear
when we hear about this
campus rape epidemic
really I guess the way you're framing it
is that it boils down to
it's almost as if the
left that's pushing this
they think women have no capacity--
- Of course.
- Over their own lives.
- It's infantilizing.
This has been pointed out many times.
The rules on campus are:
A male who's very drunk
is responsible for his actions
and the actions of the female,
a female who is very drunk has
no responsibility for herself
and she certainly doesn't have
responsibility for the male.
Now I would frankly be very
happy if we'd go through
a full throated revival
of Victorian ethics.
I believe that chivalry
is an important value
and it civilizes males,
that for males to regard females
as something worthy of respect.
And to reign in their power and strength
to have a sense of dignity
of females and of themselves.
That's a very good thing.
And I also believe it's a very good thing
for females to realize that the
male libido is not the same.
To be honest about
the extraordinary hunger
of the male libido.
And to exercise their
own control over that.
But you can't have it both ways.
You can't decide that
we're gonna celebrate female promiscuity
at the same time that you're gonna
hammer males for taking advantage
of the sexual caravansary
that we've created.
- Right and then you
hear these crazy stories.
I'm sure you heard the
one a couple months ago
about the guy and girl that got drunk
and then the next morning
they both accused each other of rape
because they basically wanted
to beat the other one to the punch.
- Sure the principles, absolutely,
do the principles, right.
And so much of this is also just,
uh-oh I cheated on my boyfriend.
- [Dave] Right, you feel
bad the next morning.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And then social media
just brings this thing
to a whole other level, right,
because then just everyone is
just at everyone's throats.
- Well we're desperate to find
another example of rape culture.
It's very hard to find.
You know, in fact, again.
- What would be rape,
like, when they say:
We have a rape culture.
Rape culture really would be,
certainly it's not in America.
- No, it's in India, it's in Afghanistan.
It's like being forced
to be in a hut in Nepal,
in rural Nepal if you're menstruating.
It's a tolerance for group rape.
That is, finally, you know, people,
women in India are finally trying
to sort of push back against this.
But in a lot of Afghan villages it's,
the problem is now the female
is now banned from the village
because there was rape with force.
But please do not tell me that
females in this country are
victimized by rape culture.
In fact, females from the
time that they are sentient
are the target of non-stop
messages of female empowerment.
You go girls, Girls Who Code,
whatnot, it's incessant.
It's the males in our culture today
who get no positive encouragement.
And they are withdrawing.
The failure of males,
you can see it in the social
indicators, is huge because--
- Suicide rates, all that.
- Absolutely.
They are told that they are
the bearers of toxic masculinity.
This is a very dangerous
thing that we're playing with.
- What tools have you seen
to get men out of that?
I mean, I think Jordan
Peterson was as close
to a sort of mass move to get
young men out of this thing.
- Right, I think we need more
voices like you and Peterson.
And if somebody was a political genius
to try and organize your followers
because they're out there.
But they need to be more
vocal and more empowered.
I mean, one of the things I love,
but, again, this is precluded
by the moment we live in.
I think the boy scouts was one
of the greatest inventions.
This was an invention to try and help
poor inter-city kids that
were themselves the subject
of breakdown of social mores.
But it gives boys a code
of virtue, and goodness,
and honesty and achievement.
But unfortunately the gay lobby
put the boy scouts out of existence.
Corporate money dried up.
You've never seen such a thing of beauty
as an inner-city scout troupe.
I've been in church basements
in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
to see these little kids tying knots,
pledging allegiance to the flag.
It breaks my heart that corporate America
has been bludgeoned into
supporting inner-city scouting
because the employees said:
You cannot support a
homophobic institution.
It is tragic.
- All right, so let's dive
into that a little bit.
So I'm with you that the gay lobby
they attacked and tried to
basically destroy the boy scouts
but you as a person would you,
I know you don't wanna push your values
on the boy scouts per se.
Would you have cared if there
had been a gay scout master,
you personally?
- I wouldn't have cared on a--
- Because that's really what
it seems to have boiled down to
when the lobby moved on them.
- I don't know.
You know I would be
sympathetic with parents
who were worried about child
abuse on a camping trip.
It's a small risk.
But it is a risk nonetheless.
I'm sorry, let's be honest, it is a risk.
So I would say the good compromise was
you don't have to be out about it perhaps.
But I just don't think,
I don't think that issue
is relevant for the vast
majority of scouting
especially again in the inner-city.
It's just not relevant for these kids
what their stance is on homosexuality
doesn't really matter.
- Right, see, well that's the part.
So I agree it doesn't matter.
I would wanna know what
the numbers bear out
I suppose relative to like
a predator infiltrating
and then molesting a kid.
Obviously, you don't want that.
But yes, I think the way
that the lobby comes in
and then just bludgeons them to,
you gotta do what we want you to do
thus sort of destroying
all the goodness there.
I'm completely in line
with you on that one.
- Yeah, I guess I would just say again
the kids are more important
than asserting gay identity.
There's plenty of other
places to have gay pride.
You don't have to do it in the boy scouts.
- So with that in mind are you concerned
that all of our institutions
are gonna succumb to this stuff?
It seems like everything's--
- They already have.
No, no it is not.
I mean we wanna be optimistic, you know,
you don't wanna be (laughs).
- We're all pretending now,
we're past that point.
- 'Cause I know you think
that 2020 is gonna be
the year it all crashes apart,
that identity politics is self defeating,
it can't go any further.
I wish I shared that view.
- Yes, so I'm basically,
well, what I think is gonna really happen
not that it will ever burn out completely
'because I think it is
so psychotic in nature
and unhinged from reality
but I think this election will cause it
to have a necessary split,
something like that.
So the split that we talked about earlier
about the AOC and Biden should
not be in the same party.
I think enough people are
gonna fully realize that
that the social justice worries
will carve out whatever their thing is.
And then the other sane
people will have to decide:
Are we still democrats or are
we gonna become republicans?
But yes, I don't know will
it crash to the point of
that they're gonna give up.
Well, these people show no
signs of ever giving up.
- Well again, I hate to sound apocalyptic
but, again, this is a genetic thing.
I know that I'm inclined
towards that by definition.
But it is impossible to overstate
the power of the assault
on meritocratic standards
in our culture today.
Colorblind, gender blind,
meritocratic standards.
There's not a single institution
that is not on the defensive.
If it has any kind of achievement standard
that has any kind of disparate impact
that does not result in exact
proportional representation
whether it's 50/50 males or females
or minority based representation.
Any standard whether it's in
the STEM fields in science
that does not result in that
halcyon proportional representation
is now under assault.
Every corporation--
- There might be some Christian
private school, right,
that has withstood some of
this, something like that?
- Yeah, that's dedicated the classics.
- Yeah, maybe has fought some of it.
- I mean, I'm always cheered
on whenever I see a panel
that's coming out of some
think tank and it's all males.
I think, ah, one last run, you know?
And frankly let's be honest.
I mean, what I track is
the natural experiments.
They absolutely explode
the feminist explanation
because there are a few
institutions out there
without any gatekeepers.
And so it allows you
to test the explanation
for lack of 50/50 male/female
is inevitably sexist discrimination.
So let's look at the
places with no gatekeepers.
A, that's Wikipedia.
The editors of Wikipedia
there's no barriers,
there's no historical
preference for Wikipedia.
- I know where you're goin' with this
but it ends up being mostly men.
- It's overwhelmingly male.
Why?
Because males on average
and I'm not talking about your daughter,
Ben Rubin, the Dave Rubin listener.
She's gonna be a Nobelist
but on average males are
more interested in facts,
in things, in ideas, in
accuracy, in sports trivia.
And they're the ones that
wanna get involved in that discourse.
Recently we saw there
was the historic matchup
of three greatest Jeopardy winners.
They were all male.
If you look at, I wrote
about Scrabble championship.
There's no barriers to entry for Scrabble.
Like, all of the winners
throughout history
of a very short history
have all been males.
- So if we were to take this back
to what we discussed earlier
where then the lefties would maybe
look at a separate set
of facts to explain that
they would say something like:
Well, it's because we teach boys
to care more about math
or something like that.
You would just say, no, that's
there's biology before that.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
Turns out the most gender equal countries
are the ones that have
the biggest disparities
in preference for professions.
- [Dave] So this is The Sweden Experiment.
- Exactly, exactly.
And again this has not
been the case for so long.
We've had, again, strong females together.
That has been the ethos
of American education now for decades.
It is just not possible to say that
females are being discouraged from math.
They are being encouraged
at every single moment.
That there's any male
mathematicians is a miracle.
It just shows how strong
that imperative is
at the extreme versions.
Again we all know that distribution curves
males are the worst math dummies.
But they also at the highest
end the most math gifted.
- Do you think that there's
just a certain amount
of cognitive dissonance
that comes with a lot of this?
Like, did you happen to
see a couple weeks ago
Stephen King sent out a tweet
that he's against diversity in arts
because, of course, you
wouldn't want painters
and authors and creative people
to have to have some
sort of diversity quota.
But this guy's a lefty progressive,
you know, the whole thing.
And he's definitely for diversity quotas
in all the other things but not in arts.
- [Heather] Ha, wow.
- And I think it's partly
because he's an artist.
So it's like, not in my
field because we're creative
and creativity should
always rise to the top.
But for you people.
But in essence what he's saying is:
Well, doctors and pilots
and the rest of you,
you should, it should
be based on skin color
and sexuality and blah, blah, blah
but not artists 'cause we're.
- Hilarious, well, I'll take it.
I mean if he's actually
willing to defend the arts
because that is, I mean
anybody who subjects themself
to The New York Times Arts Pages today
it's, all it is, it,
all it is is diversity,
female and people of color diversity.
So his position it may be a narrow one
but I'll take it because--
- Right, 'cause they're the
kernels there at least, right?
So then it's like maybe
somethin' can grow out of that.
- Yes but it's also on the other hand
I really relish the fact that
Hollywood is being pressed
to sacrifice it's best box office judgment
for the gods of diversity.
And are they, they're absolutely torn.
Which do they do?
Do they choose to have
female remakes, you know,
that may not be the box office sellers
or may not be as good in order to placate
the Oscar bean counting and
the Golden Globe bean counting?
Or do they just say: To hell with it,
we're just gonna tough it out.
I don't know, I don't know.
But it's really great.
- Yeah, what an interesting
time to live in.
So I sense you're pretty enthused about
sort of the way the world is.
But like everybody sorta seems,
everyone feels like it's
crazy, it's never been worse.
We hate each other more than ever before.
I mean I think all of
that is nonsense anyway.
And social media makes us
all feel a little crazier.
But you seem to, even though
this is serious stuff.
I mean, you're talking about
institutions all being infected.
You got a smile on your face
as you're talking to me--
- Yeah but it's a pleasure to
have a fellow skeptic here.
And I would say to get back to
an earlier question of yours:
Are we heading towards
a point of no return
and how do we get back from this?
This is the most difficult thing.
The way we actually
demolish identity politics
and again the founding engine
of this is disparate impact.
We have to counteract the myth of bias,
that as long as the only
allowable explanation
for socioeconomic disparities
is the Ta-Nehisi Coates view of the world,
the Michelle Alexander view of the world
that everything is driven by bias,
the AOC world, they win.
- But if we've lost the schools already,
which I suspect you think we have.
Certainly at college level.
But even if we've lost--
- K-12, ethnic studies--
- Yeah if we've lost all of that
then suddenly this rosy picture
gets a lot more murky, right?
- Yes.
I am not a rosy person.
All I know is the way we get it back
is to start giving
alternative explanations.
And if people are terrified to talk about,
no excuse me there are
behaviors, the education gap
I mean, what we see now it's tragic.
Your average black 12th grader
reads at the level of your
average white eighth grader.
That is huge.
40% of black eighth graders
on the National Assessment
of Educational Progress
this is one of these
national standardized test,
40% of black eighth graders
do not even have basic math skills.
Basic is the most, it's,
you know, simple arithmetic.
Those types of statistics
make this expectation
of proportional representation ludicrous.
And yet the cowardice on the part
of our mainstream institutions
cannot be overstated.
Within the last couple weeks
The American Physics Association,
the premier professional
organization for physicists
came out with a completely predictable
just beating Mea culpa saying:
If we do not have
proportional black physicists
it's because we are biased,
there must be bias in our credentializing,
in our physics education.
These are people who we're
supposed to believe are smart.
If they can't look at the data--
- It's anti-human actually, in many ways.
It's anti-human.
- It's saying you have
no control, you know?
But what has to happen is
there has to be a major change
in inner-city black culture
to get rid of the
anti-acting white stigma.
There has to be behavioral change,
a different attitude towards
academic accomplishment.
But as long as the myth of bias,
as long as bias is the only explanation,
as long as The American
Physics Association
does not feel itself able to say:
There needs to be more studying,
students have to take their
textbooks home in K-8,
less truancy, nothing is gonna change.
- Do you think in a weird way that Asians
might be the key to this whole thing?
That basically Asians will get fed up
of being quota-ed against
and not getting into Harvard
even though no one gave
Asian people anything
just like no one gave
my ancestors anything
or your ancestors anything?
But Asians may just be
like, you know what,
Harvard is actually, everyone
talks about systemic racism.
Harvard has actually put it in the system.
It's harder to get in if you're Asian.
- Right.
- Right.
And now the courts have
said that's actually okay,
which is bananas.
But that basically Asian
people will get so fed up,
even though they're not
a very vocal minority
they'll get so fed up
about being genuinely
discriminated against
that perhaps that fixes the problem?
I mean, it's almost a very backwards way
of looking at this thing.
- No, it's a great idea.
And indeed the Chinese in New York now
there's also a big Chinese parent movement
because Bill de Blasio and
his utterly terrifying--
- Yeah, he's a real
piece a work that guy.
- School's chancellor Carranza
are trying to destroy again
every meritocratic standard.
Get rid of it.
It's all gonna be based on quotas.
So the Chinese parents there
are protesting the destruction
of Stuyvesant High School
and Bronx Science.
But on the other hand it's
really a race against time
because Harvard in it's recent lawsuit
defending itself against Ed Blum
and the challenge to it's
discrimination against Asians
they assembled a big crew
of Asian Harvard students
who were defending preferences.
- Can you explain what their rational was?
I heard a couple versions of this.
- Just diversity.
And you know, we got in,
so like it didn't hurt us.
But I think the rationale is,
is that the lure of identity
politics and being anti-white
is the key to the elite.
That elite identity in this country now
is against establishment values
and it's against meritocracy.
And it's a commitment to
the idea of white supremacy.
So to the extent that colleges
can end up cloning Asian students
in their own image of identity politics.
And it is happening.
I mean, you can go to UC Berkeley.
You know, the degree of specialization
of the different ethnic groups there.
You know, so you have the Philippino club
and the Samoan club.
Where everybody, there's
power in victimhood.
And the sort of laughable irony is that,
so a lot of these left wing Asian students
want to be viewed as students of color,
you know, please, please we're
students of color as well.
The irony is is that
the administration said:
No, you're not students of color.
You don't count as our students of color.
- Right, your minority
thing doesn't count.
- You're whites for
the sake of our quotas.
Your guys are white.
So the poor students went
wait a minute, wait a minute.
When will we get to be students of color?
- But now they're super white.
They're not just white, right?
Like, they're extra white now.
- They trump whites, that's right.
Whites are actually, you know,
get preferences over
Asians, so I don't know.
It's a really good question about
self interest versus ideology.
And again the lure of ideology
and we see this also with Indians,
Indian-Americans in this
culture, the east Indians.
- That'll be the next one.
- They're very left wing.
- But do you think that that,
they'll sort of suffer the fate
of Chinese Americans
or something like that
and that it eventually
it'll turn it on them too?
- Yeah, they're discriminated against.
I mean the head of Google,
the guy who fired James
Damore for writing,
you've talked about this, you know,
a perfectly fact-based memo
about psychological truths,
things that the psychology
profession has known for years
about the big five personality traits,
one of which unfortunately
is called: Neuroticism.
Poor mister innocent Damore
used the word neuroticism
and everybody freaked out.
But sorry that's the psychology terms.
- James Damore who by the
way had gotten the promotion
for his job just two
months before the memo.
- He's a fantastic engineer.
He would have helped Google
but God forbid he put females
at risk for saying that:
The reason there's not more females here
is because average distribution
of personality preferences.
Anyway, but, Sundar Pichai
he's Indian-American.
And a lot of the schools chancellor's
in the University of California
that are doing all of
the multiculturalism BS
they're Indian engineers.
So it's very curious.
The trans thing, a lot of
the parents are Indian.
So again it shows
the gravitational force
of victim identity,
that that is how you
credentialize yourself
to enter the American elite
is to buy into this idea
that this is a racist and sexist society.
- So you just briefly mentioned
the trans thing there.
Have you read Douglas Murray's
Madness of Crowds by any chance?
- [Heather] Mm hm, yeah.
- So, you know, one of the things that
I think he brilliantly does is
he separates the T from LGB.
He says: These things have
nothing to do with each other.
Do you basically take that position
and sorta see why the trans movement
has sort of spun off into something
that's completely not about equality now?
- Yeah, it's so clearly a power play.
Why anybody takes these 14,
16 year olds seriously, at face value.
The desire of every adolescent is power,
it is to be able to bend adults
and the world to your will.
And this is the most brilliant--
- We call this Greta Thunberg--
- Exactly.
- Syndrome.
- But to be trans has even more power
because you can trip people up
in an ever more arcane linguistic thicket.
And if they make the most
innocuous linguistic
error, they are guilty.
And so you are,
it is a way of asserting
power over the world.
And it's endlessly fertile and fecund.
It generates more and more categories.
And it is something, amazingly,
I mean nobody thought
about this five years ago.
And now we're all supposed to
believe that this represents
some essential truth about human nature
where again it is just a
way of clawing to the top
of the viciously competitive
totem pole of victimhood.
And being top dog for as long as it lasts.
And who knows, you know,
big sweepstake award
to whoever can come up
with the next victim
that will de-throne the trans identity.
But it will come.
- Right and that's gonna be a big one.
Like, what that one could possibly be.
- It's something fun to look forward to.
- Right.
So I take it when Biden said
that when you're going to jail
you should be able to pick
which prison to go to.
Does that dependent on your
decision about your own gender?
You're not a big fan a that.
- No but again look at the power.
There you are a prisoner.
And you get to flip the tables and say,
now, you, state prison authority
or federal prison authority
you have to bend to my will.
It's just incredible.
I remember the time it was
maybe somewhere of 2014
The Times ran a front full page editorial
announcing the dawn of the trans era.
This was the new civil rights campaign.
And it's just not true.
Again, there's a very
minute number of people
for whom this is authentically
a psychological disorder.
But I think for most of it,
I've talked to college campuses
and I don't really address
the trans phenomenon
but in one talk at St. Olaf I just gave,
I read a section, a piece of prose
that was written by some trans guy
who was all, his head was
all like tied in knots
because he was trying to figure out
when his gay friends called each other
she and her in a gay rhetoric
and then they referred to
this trans person, Alex
as she and her, whether they
were respecting his identity,
disrespecting her.
And I thought and my point
was, this is so trivial.
This is so trivial.
You guys should be thinking
about things outside of yourself.
How 'bout you lose yourself in the past.
That's difference.
But that was my only reference to this.
And this girl came up to
me afterwards and said:
You're not respecting my identity.
This was just again
another pitch for power.
And where it goes but it's ridiculous.
It is not something that
is a civilizational truism,
this is something we should
all take that seriously.
- Yeah this seems to
be the one I think that
is actually helping let's
say our side the most.
Because it is so patently absurd.
If you just can't say
that there are biological
differences between men and women
that doesn't make you a bigot,
it doesn't make you a transphobe,
it doesn't mean you hate women.
But it's something that we all just like,
we just know, right?
My four year old niece
knows there's a difference
between boys and girls.
She's not a rocket scientist.
So something, it's almost like this one
they overshot to the point
that it might cause a
little bit of a bounce back,
which goes to again my prediction
of the implosion of this thing.
- Look at North Carolina.
I don't know, I mean, there
you had this conservative state
that buckled under corporate pressure.
Again, corporations, everybody thinks:
There's a AOC thing,
oh, big business, evil, white supremacy.
No!
- Or you can get them
to do almost anything.
- Corporations, they've all got,
the CEOs have wives, wives are a disaster.
They push husbands to the left.
And they have human resources departments
as the Google employee said
in one of the chat rooms
after Damore was fired:
We have to kick this thing
back because our HR department
known in Google-y language
is people analytics
'cause you can't just
call it human resources.
He said: It's just an
outpost of women's studies
and black studies now.
So these corporations are
promoting the trans thing.
And far too many parents are.
I did think that when the
dictates started coming down that
parents have to let their
girl, their daughters
have biological males in their
locker rooms and bathrooms
that there would be just pitchfork battles
and it didn't happen.
I keep waiting for the
massive rejection of this,
it's not happening.
School after school district
is enacting trans policies.
So you show me where
besides the Navratilova and Rowlings
that this has actually put any
kind of dent in this crusade.
- Well, I think Ricky Gervais'
speech at The Golden Globes
where he just torched identity politics
and torched this very town
that we're in right now.
I think the J.K. Rowling thing.
I think Martina speaking up
and then them attacking
her about trans athletes.
I think it's just starting to bubble up.
Which way that goes, we don't know.
But I think it's people are
getting a little bit braver.
- I hope so.
- Don't Burn This Book
comes out on April 28th.
It's about giving people the
keys to the bravery thing.
- Believe me, everybody's got
it in their calendar marked.
- All right, we only have
a couple minutes left.
You plow through so much
information at once.
And I feel like we've been
talking for 10 minutes
but it's been about an hour already.
- Okay, I don't wanna go over time.
So what else has sorta been on your mind?
Like what is somethin'
that maybe I'm not tracking
or that you think regular
folks aren't tracking
that you sorta see as another frontier
we're gonna have to be fighting on?
- Oh, man, that's a bad
question, without an answer.
- Without an answer.
Well, you said what's gonna
be the spectacular one
that knocks trans off this.
But is there somethin' else
that you're sorta seeing new data on
or just that's piquing
your interest lately?
- No I'm just paying a lot of,
I still for me, my heart
lies in universities.
For me there's no greater good
than the privilege of being
able to study the great works.
And so I keep hoping that
there will be push back there.
I guess I've seen there
are some signs of hope
in movement to start classical
academies at the K-12 level
that are explicitly dedicated
to teaching the great books
without identity politics.
I think that movement has to be supported.
I wish philanthropists would do more
to put their money behind beauty and wit
and irony and greatness and sublimity.
I think that nobody's cracked the problem
of the college credentializing
and the fierce hunger
of these allegedly left wing parents
to credentialize their child
with the most status
producing diplomas possible.
I would love to see a movement
to have a revival of tutors,
which used to be the way
that people got educated.
So, home schooling for college kids
because we've got to shut
these institutions down
so that you could have--
- By the way I think
that's happening right now
because of YouTube.
I think the amount of stuff
that people are learning
from pretty brilliant people
many of whom have sat in that chair
and in plenty of other shows.
I think it's happening already.
I think people are being,
well, The New York Times,
did you see The New York Times piece
a couple weeks ago about Prager U?
That the right wing organization--
- That's the second one,
they're terrifying, yeah.
- It's circumventing
parents and professors
to teach people right wing views.
It's like they try to make
that sound scary but, whoo!
It's like, thank God.
- I adore Prager U, I adore Dennis Prager.
I would say those, he's doing
basically political topics
which is absolutely necessary.
He is taking on the lies that
are so distorting our world
that he's not taking people through
books one through 12 of Paradise Lost.
One needs time, one needs
depth, one needs focus.
And so I would love to see,
basically there's a
lot of graduate schools
in this department now, in this country
that are not accepting white males
because they know they
are not gonna get the job.
I mean, white males, boys
are doomed at this point
unless we turn this around.
- I can't remember if I told you this
the last time you were here
but the guy who did the
lighting in my studio is a,
you know, we're in L.A. here
so you get great people to do things.
He's an Emmy Award wining lighting guy.
He's in his mid-60s,
been in the business for 40
some odd years, huge lefty
lefty, lefty, lefty,
progressive the whole thing.
We get into all sorts of political debates
and then we kind of
put it aside, it's okay
'cause he's a progressive of a certain age
so he doesn't have to
wanna kill you at the end--
- He can talk.
- He can do it
and never wanna kill you at the end.
Anyway he did our lighting.
He did a spectacular job.
I spoke to him a few months ago,
and he told me that he was told
by an HR person at a
major studio here in L.A.,
I won't say which studio that
as a white guy in his 60s
he should probably think about retiring.
- Yep, absolutely.
- And then suddenly, oh, so the reason,
so then he called me and he said:
Dave, maybe you haven't been as crazy
as I've been telling ya.
- Ah, God.
Well, a lot of people process, yeah.
Balise Siegel, this writer had a op-ed
in The New York Times
recently about his depression
and that America we've got
this crisis of mental health,
which I'm a little skeptical about.
But anyway he said: Well,
as a 62 year old white male
I, of course, I really
support the movements
that have basically made me
completely super annuated.
So he sees it too.
It's just remarkable.
But anyway I would say if
there's any white males
who are still doing traditional
studies in graduate school
and are not getting a job anywhere
they should be tutors.
They should say: I'll take
you on the grand tour,
we'll go to Rome, we'll go to Florence,
we'll go to Vienna, and we
will read the great books
to keep these books alive
because if we don't read them, they die.
The burden is on us.
Education is about
passing on an inheritance.
And we should be down on
our knees in gratitude
before works of such exquisite language
and insight into the human condition
instead of this preposterous
conceit of cultural appropriation.
I mean some of the most profound insights
into female sexual
psychology and competition
have been written by males.
Should I care that it's a male?
No, I don't, I just
want beauty and insight.
So that's what I would hope
is our next phase to get out of this.
- Man, heather, all I have to
do is just lob 'em up for ya
and you knock 'em outta the park.
It was a pleasure as always.
- Thank you so much.
- We'll do this again soon enough.
- Great talking to you.
- And you're not big on Twitter though.
You don't fight with everybody on Twitter.
You're on the Twitter.
- Twitter is just to send out
my recent writings and appearances.
- A good enough reason to follow her.
It's @HMDatMI.
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