That's the basis of this racism is that if we're going to uphold the victim victimizer narrative our worst enemies are minority people who've made a success of themselves and you know something I feel like that the people in Academia for someone like me if they can destroy us they do and I'm still standing and some of the attacks on me most of the attacks uh have backfired in a way that it just gave me a greater platform for but I think being a strong individualist I've always been a strong individualist and that's not something that's
welcomed when I think about my being um more conservative I did not think of myself as a conservative when I was in undergrad I wrote um my uh senior paper on affirmative action and I was critical of it and that was because I felt like it was hurting minorities even back then and certainly today I see how it has hurt uh minorities and the worst thing is this diversity equity and inclusion because it's like affirmative action on steroids and I strongly believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is what benefited me millions of other
people you know blacks uh even some whites and women benefited from an environment that focused on non-discrimination equal opportunity Outreach I think about my success I had an equal opportunity to succeed or fail the outcome wasn't guaranteed I chose you know to become an honest student I worked hard for that I knew that if I distinguish myself it would make a difference but they have just telling all minorities no matter where you come from that uh you can't because of racism and they are rasing accept Asians yes well they are considered white honorary whites right
right worse than whites maybe just like the Jews so okay so I'm going to tell you a story because I want to get to the heart of the this matter with regards to Dei so I worked at Harvard for seven years and I became friends with the dean of admissions there and I was very interested in predictors of future success so I did a whole research project at Harvard trying to identify personality and cognitive attributes that were predictive of success in managing IAL positions workingclass positions creative positions entrepreneurial positions and so forth was a pure
research Enterprise and that took me deep into the IQ and the personality literature before I knew anything about the political ramifications okay so what I found out was this I found out first of all that SATs Gres all the standardized tests that are used to gatekeep admission to highlevel institutions of higher education were essentially tests of verbal IQ and now people deny that but that's because they don't know what the hell they're talking about like I know this literature inside out and backwards and so they're IQ tests now I talked to Dean whitlaw about admissions
policies at Harvard and he told me that without an affirmative action structure that there would be very few black people in The Ivy Leagues and so Dean I wouldn't say was either a liberal or a conservative as far as I was concerned I think what he was trying to do was to find the best people the best undergraduates to come to Harvard and so now so that's a problem now another problem is is that if you just use SATs and grees and so forth you're going to get a majority disproportionate number of Asians and Jews
so that's also going to happen and then there's a third problem so I talked to this guy named Adrien Woodward he used to work for for The Economist very smart man he wrote a book on the history of Merit and he pointed out that if you don't use objective classifications of Merit for your hiring in your promotion the systems that don't rely on objective Merit default to Dynasty and nepotism so you don't get some sort of egalitarian Equity if you scrap objective tests what you get is is who you know who you're related to who
can pull strings and who can put your name forward well that's what's happening so but we're in a real conundrum right because if we use purely objective tests then we don't get an equal distribution of applicants from the ethnic and racial groups we get a lot more Jews and we get yep go ahead well I mean I I I've given that a lot of thought and I believe that racial and ethnic minorities can meet any standard put before them but when they started going the standards so far with affirmative action people learned uh what they
had to do if you were black to get into Harvard or to get into the elite schools and I can tell you my success story would not have been a success story if I had not gone to that Community College taken remedia math gone to Rono College in Salem Virginia liberal Art School uh and then Virginia Tech and it I I was never in an environment where I was struggling and my personal it is such that if I were at the bottom of the class if I were fing a class I would quit I would
have quit because I needed to do well and so they are harming racial and ethnic minorities that have high standards that really could have been successful at a state school or somewhere SSE when they bring them in to make them feel good I believe that if you hold everyone to the same standard you will have fewer racial and ethnic minorities uh maybe but now you know people people have had so many opportunities I don't know how many fewer but once people learn what the standards are that they have to meet to go to Harvard Yale
Colombia Princeton wherever they want to go I have confidence in racial and ethnic minorities being able to rise to meet that standard and even before affirmative action during the era when there was blaten discrimination the schools in new New England uh and I would say Harvard too if minorities were qualified they admitted them so they had graduates uh but not in large numbers and and now we believe that there has to be a certain percentage I don't think there has to be a certain percentage the difference between uh back when I came through and now
is equity they're seeking uh equal outcomes and they believe that you need people in certain uh percentages uh when I came through it was equal opportunity you had an equal opportunity to S to succeed or to fail well the other problem with the bloody Equity idea is that there's no limit to the number of ways you can categorize people and so the idea that we're going to get to some sort of Utopia where every single person regardless of how you categorize them intersectionally all of those people are going to be um represented in every single
profession in numbers equivalent to their proportion in the population is it's such an obser idea that you'd have to be educated at an Ivy League school for many years before you'd become daed enough to believe it even on arithmetic principles alone it's so Preposterous and so the question is exactly what's motivating and it's especially weird because it really strikes me okay so there's a worst thing about this too as far as I'm concerned so you know I was bounced out of Academia about the same time you were and under circumstances that were broadly similar let's
say you you were asking questions and for me I think that I fell out of favor when Boren and Bach published the shape of the river and I started uh talking about affirmative action I wrote opad piece I favorite class-based race neutral affirmative action that was not what the elites wanted and that was part of the beginning beginning to the the beginning to the end for me yeah well I stood up against a bill in Canada that mandated pronoun use and so but I was no I was also no fan for example of affirmative action
because I think it does I think it's clear that it does more harm than good I think it's clear now so there's another way it does harm and this is an ugly little thing too but I believe it's true you know as I as the Dei movement gains steam I found myself looking with increasing suspicion on anyone who was black let's say or of or gay anybody who could have benefited from preferential treatment under the Dei rubric I started to become skeptical of it was like maybe I'd be on a panel with someone maybe we'd
be on the same side or different sides but that person say on the opposite side would be the member of a favored minority and I'd think just who the hell are you and how did you get your position and this really makes me ill well and I saw this at Harvard too you know because the black kids there that I got to know they had an additional burden to bear like all the kids who go to Harvard have impostor syndrome when they first get there if you don't have impostor syndrome there's something wrong with you
right but then the minority kids who've benefited from the Dei approach they've got a lot bigger helping of impostor syndrome because it isn't exactly obvious to them and also to the people around them exactly what doing there and that's perfectly fine for the Scoundrels and scamps who are willing to twist the system to their benefit who feel no shame for doing so but for people who've actually worked their tails to the Bone let's say worked their hands to the bone in order to move ahead and to be credible to have that Shadow of Doubt cast
on them is well that's Satan's Choice like I there's nothing worse than punishing people for their virtues and you punish people who've got ahead on the basis of Merit by using Dei standards [Music]
