Good evening everyone. Thanks for joining us to note the release of when race trumps merit how the pursuit of equity excellence destroys beauty and threatens lives. Im brian anderson, the editor of city journal. And its my honor to introduce the books heather mac donald. Thank you. Thank you for heather is the manhattan Thomas W Smith fellow, a contributing editor of city journal who has written for the magazine almost since its inception, and her byline appears regularly in the wall street journal and many other leading publications. Shes also the author of the best the war on cops and the delusion just for kicks. I asked chat gtp, who the most influential journal writers are, and heathers name headed the list. So i like that. I like that i a a i yes. Over the years heather scrupulous and groundbreaking has shed light on trends in american life. Her new book brings relentless reporting to perhaps the most dangerous one yet, which is the equity craze that is threatening our scientific, cultural and Public Institute shines in this new book when trumps merit, she details the rise of disparate impact ideology and its potential to do enormous harm to our society. Her book also represents a powerful defense of our civilizational inheritance, so well discuss all of that more tonight. So let me start so in the wake of george floyds. In may 2020, activists heightened their cries. Socalled Racial Equity and the proportional representation of races in american institutions, organizations, the press published countless stories about minorities, underrepresentation and various fields and firms, corporate nations began to fall over themselves. Their guilt in, perpetuating racial inequity. Now, driving this shift, the concept of impact, which is really at the center, your book. So what is the core of disparate impact . And can you trace briefly its origins and how its kind of metastasize in this post . Floyd period. Thank you, brian. And first of all, let me give a i to use the phrase, but a trigger warning. Im going to discuss things that are very uncomfortable to talk about. Im talking about group averages in in average skills, average behavioral cultural predilections. Im not making any judgments, any individual within any racial group. There are thousands of individuals in this racial group of that racial group that outperform everybody else. We cant make any about individuals based their membership in groups, but the discourse that is tearing down our civilization, that is tearing down meritocratic standards is. Couched in in grotesque generalities. And it has to be answered with certain observe asians about group performance. So just please steel yourself for some truths that are really taboo across our population. The idea of disparate impact is the idea that any. Meritocratic in of Academic Skills that has a negative impact on certain minority groups and above on blacks is by definition racist unless in the legal it can be justified at a very High Standard of business necessity. So for instance, if youve noticed for the last decade several decades theres been challenge, challenge to Police Entrance exams or firefighter exams. And the accusation always is these are racist exams for no other reason than blacks fail them at higher rates than whites. And so the assumption always is, well, the exam racist, the marriage cratic standard is racist throw out the test and lower standards until we get a standard that will not have a negative disparate impact. What is never allowed to be looked at and examined is what are the underlying average rates of Academic Skills. The the standard is not racist. But now we are going around any standard that has disparate impact on blacks per se racist and were throwing them out this initially in the context of employment hiring it was a way of expanding the civil rights laws beyond requirement that you needed to intentionally discriminate an employer needed to intentionally say, i dont want to hire qualified blacks. That is per say, illegal. Unconstitutional. Disparate impact arose because it was getting harder and harder. Find employers that were intentionally discriminating against competitively qualified minorities. And so the new rule was you could be completely colorblind as an employer, but if youre using employment criterion that that disqualifies blacks disproportionate finitely, youve got to get rid of it. And now that idea has leapt beyond the the judicial opinions and legal codes and is simply the lens through which we judge all of our mainstream institutions. So this this ideology is, as you document in the book, corrupting the sciences, this is the opening section of the book. Its very alarming and and its happening fast. So increasingly, diversity equity criteria are ruling everything from grants and scholarships to government scientific appointments to, even how medicine is being practiced. Right. Merit is no longer the leading criteria in many of these situations. So i wonder if you could give an overview of this development and what stand to lose with the deemphasis merit in the sciences. Well were putting both lives at risk. The insistence on pushing people ahead into medicine who are not competitively qualified. And were also putting Scientific Research at risk. But heres an example of how the disparate analysis works of College Seniors applying medical school take something called the mcat, the Medical College admission test. And those have a disparate on black students. Blacks mcat scores up at the rock bottom and so various medical schools now are deciding that for black students theyll either waive the mcats completely thats a developing trend for decades. They have been having to separate standards for admission so blacks are admitted with mcat scores that would be automatically disqualifying if presented by a white or asian student. A black student with slightly below average mcats and gpa has a nine times greater chance of admission to a medical school than a white student or asian student. Again, these would be scores that would be disqualifying otherwise the medical School Licensing exam has gone past failed. Rather being graded because again, the the licensing exam has a disparate impact on black medical students. It is used to screen students for some of the most residencies during medical school. The schools have decided we would rather get rid of grades and the and the actual medical licensing body would rather get rid grades and dis and our ability to actually students than give a completely colorblind neutral test that has no racial bias. It. Its objective its computer. That has a disparate impact on blacks. The preferences never end the pressure is enormous on schools promote to higher based on race to promote doctors based on race to put them in the charge of medical research and the is also coming from National Funding agencies. The National Institutes of Health NationalScience Foundation are now making race a more important qualification for receiving medical than actual scientific. If you want to get a grant for your alzheimers lab or your neurology, a greater neurology lab, you have to show how your work affects and improves diversity and how your own lab is working to change the demographics of its of its research core. Now, frankly, i dont care who discovers the neurological pathways that are responsible for alzheimers. If that lab is all chinese, if its all female, if its all black, if its all white, i dont care. The only thing that matters is are these the most qualified scientists. But in the United States and uniquely in the United States, weve made decision that diversity is more important than meritocracy. Meanwhile, china doesnt Pay Attention to identity politics, and it is racing full speed ahead, trying to throw everything got at its most talented, mathematically inclined and scientifically students without. We have to pull down their capacity in order to make some make sure that all groups end up at the same rate at the of the line so thats science. The major part of the book is something very close to your heart which is culture and the arts. So you describe the distortion and vilification of western high culture by activists who see it now primarily as for a regime Racial Discrimination and domination. I think what most striking in reading your book this part of the book is complicity of leading artistic and institutions in this kind of ongoing attack on our western cultural inheritance. And this too, i think you would say, has accelerated since since george floyd killing. So maybe you document a little bit whats been happening there as you do in the book. Yeah, its just its stunning to me if you if youre running an Opera Company or an orchestra or youre max holland, head of the metropolitan museum of art, or james rondeau, the head of the Art Institute of chicago. You should be down your knees and gratitude every day at your privilege and existence to curate artistic traditions are among the most sublime in World History that the human being to escape his petty narrow but sad, ignorant self and and expand into forms of consciousness and understanding that are so much greater than any of us could ever hope to experience. Whether its the the oresteia sclass, one of the great tragic trilogies of the of the classical of athens. To to read sends chills down your spine. And with perception of the human thirst for vengeance and the the transcendence of finally reaching a rule of law and hope for justice, or whether its renaissance poetry, pastoral or the the and eros of late brahms piano music or chopin nocturnes or, the tragic cathar crisis that we get from the box. Saint matthew passion. These are works that none of us really deserve. And it turns out that the heads of our Classical Music organizations and our literature departments, our art museums really dont deserve them because they are going around telling public and what is most criminal is telling young people to hate these traditions on the pathetic that they are came out of europe and thus by definition and inevitably were created by caucasian people. That is the european tradition. Get over it. It is the past. We cannot change. Europe not 13 black. It probably still is not to expect that the canon of classical composers should be 13 black. And if its not its per se racist is preposterous. Now of course there are phantom stick black composers but they arose much later in our tradition. But now you have alex the one of the leading Classical Music in the country writing for the new yorker, apologizing for himself being white and a tradition that is hes, as he puts it, blindingly white, hes he apologizes for white audiences. He apologizes white donors. The other most important Classical Music critic in the country, Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, has called for making an orchestral auditions. Color so that musicians can be hired. The basis of race currently. They often start for several levels behind a screen so that the auditioners do not know the identity of of the performer. And as with all things in our disparate, impact obsessed world today, we have now decided that mechanisms that are inherently colorblind are racist. And so this applies to the audition screen. It applies to red light cameras a red light camera does not know whose driving the car. But if red light cameras show us that in certain blacks are running red lights or speeding at higher rates, then the camera is racist and will be thrown out. That is going on across the country. So you have museums now erecting wall labels that teach their viewers to see the great baroque masterpiece of the dutch golden age, the still lifes of translucent and lemons and silver that is shining in light to see those still lives as colonialist because at the same time as they were being painted holland and the had colonial territories and and so you have this massive magical that is being promulgated filled by people whose only obligation in life is to share beauty and to tell young people come to my museum, listen to this music. If you die without hearing these works. You will have lived a poor life than you could otherwise have lived. But everything now is being through the completely lens of racial inequity. You began to talk about the question of law and order, which was also discussed in the book that gets into a Public Policy question. You describe and you have described and written about this in the past the disconnect between residents of minority neighborhoods have in the past said they in Law Enforcement and the the relentless policing rhetoric of many legislators and activists. And you found that blacks and other minorities have in the past anyway appreciated visible proactive policing. In fact theyve called police to take more stringent measures in their communities. I remember used to go to meetings in the bronx and, elsewhere where that would be. What was discussed. I wonder if that disconnect continues to hold in post george floyd era and you know, more broadly, what influence has the disparate Impact Analysis had on Public Safety . Well, disparate Impact Analysis, Public Safety has been disastrous. Absolutely disastrous. The narrative is, is that colored constitutional Law Enforcement that has a disparate impact on, black criminals is per se racist and. And you have the the re doubled false that black parents right to fear that their children will be killed by a cop or by a white person every they step outside the joe biden ran on this during the president his president ial campaign he said it before the before he was inaugurated. He said it is inaugural speech. He said it constantly. It is a constant theme that is a falsehood. Blacks have a tragically higher rate of death by gun homicide. Blacks between the ages ten and 24 die of gun homicide at 25 times the rate of whites between the ages of ten and 24. That is a civil Rights Problem that you would think that civil rights activists would care about. They will not talk about it because if they were to talk about it honestly and look the actual data, what we know from the victims of witnesses to shootings and nonfatal shootings and the witnesses to fatal shootings is that that black death by gun homicide rate is caused almost exclusively by black criminals. You could take out all Police Shootings of black men today. You could take it all white of black men today. It would have virtually no effect on the black death by gun homicide rate. And yet we blaming the cops. Were blaming the criminal Law Enforcement. Everything that you see that you may have been puzzling over in the post george floyd era. Why are these prosecutors not prosecuting trespass turnstile jumping resisting arrest which is the most thing not to prosecute because its basically saying to cops, you know, open season you guys and we dont as prosecutors we dont care were decriminalizing arrest. Why they not prosecuting gun possession drug possession and prostitution, Disorderly Conduct act loitering. It is all driven by disparate impact. Its all you need to know to understand our world today. The reason that tim fox in chicago that melvyn bragg in new york, the george gascon, the worst source prosecutor in the whole country, has decided to put entire categories of crime off limits to his district attorneys is because enforcing them have a disparate impact, not because that enforcement is racist, but because the black crime rate is so much higher. I have spent a lot time in high crime neighborhoods talking to the residents there. I go to Police Community meetings and i talk to the good law abiding people who deserve same freedom from fear as residents of park avenue. And what ive heard again and again, we want more police. I smell marijuana in my hallway. Why cant you do something about it . Theyre smoking weed on the at the club that i see outside the window. Why cant you arrest those people . Why are you allowing kids to hang out by the hundreds on the corner fighting . Whatever happened to truancy laws. People want proactive enforcement that are living with the effects of policing and the disparate impact crusade. They never get heard. It is a very bizarre thing. If you were a civil rights activist and were going to do of a rawlsian experiment of like imagine before we know actual reality of things you could imagine a civil rights activist taking the side of black victims rather black criminals. One even might have expected did that because black victims are the ones that are whose lives are being destroyed. But all our civil rights activists have taken the side of black criminals. They say that they would not put more criminals prison where they cannot continue preying on elderly, black ladies who are terrified to go into their building lobby to pick up their mail when when kids are there, trespass icing, smoking weed and selling. They would rather allow those honest, law abiding people to just have to figure things out themselves, then make arrests and increase any Racial Disparities that we have in prison. And that, to me, is a very perverse decision. Its sort of looks to me at this point like the only people who care about black lives are the police, white conservatives, because the only people who are talking about crime before 2022 elections were basically concerned news outlets. But they were accused for four for doing racist whistles. If you talk about black victims, you a racist . Its a very curious thing. I can tell you if black and white conservatives stop paying attentio