Why “Anti-Racism” Is the Worst Form of Racism | Coleman Hughes | EP 474

since the great awokening of 2014 when mainstream media Outlets began using terms like systemic racism and white supremacy what you would have predicted is that black voters Hispanic voters would be going to the Democratic side and that perhaps white voters would be going in the other direction what's happened is Republicans have been doing better and better with Black and Hispanic voters it's embarrassing for for for Democrats I don't think that they understand it [Music] hello everybody I have the opportunity today to talk with Coleman Hughes Coleman has written a new book published in 2024 called

the end of race politics Arguments for a colorblind America in which he does exactly that to lay out his case for a return I would say to the classic civil rights attitude of the 1950s and early 1960s and that attitude was that individuals in society would be best served if we used standards of evaluation other than intrinsic group oriented characteristics to Define select promote and evaluate one another and so what does that mean well it definitely doesn't mean race ethnicity sex gender mostly because all of those attributes are actually irrelevant as the classic civil Libertarians

presumed to complex job performance to productivity to contribution to society and so they shouldn't be considered when making those sorts of evaluations and if they are it's a detriment to the people who are being selected by that means even if it's in the service of some hypothetical reparation and certainly to society in that we should always select the person who's best qualified for the position in question we should always select the person who can do the job in the most efficient and effective possible Manner and that's not for them exactly even though that's beneficial to

them it's it's for everyone in our important positions we want the best people why so that we can ACR the benefit of their ability it's is it selfish well it is in a sense because only in a sociological sense is because Society works best when it's able when everyone is able to reap the benefits of the best in everyone and you don't Define that racially and if you start to do that you actually interfere with the selection of excellence and so what did we talk about today we talked about that and it's a a crucial

issue what does it mean to be colorblind what neither Coleman and I are naive enough to assume that that's something that could be attained easily people have a pronounced ingroup what a pronounced proclivity to ingroup favoritism and that can certainly manifest itself in the form of a very pathological racism and that's something that has to be mitigated against but the proper solution to that the time honored solution the solution that led to the emancipation of the slaves was something approximating uh an attempt to establish non-prejudicial colorblindness and we're deviating from that and we also discussed

why so join us for that well Mr Hughes it's been about four years since we talked long time uh especially now the whole world has Twisted itself into a frenzy even more over the last four years so why don't we start just with an update like tell me can you can you walk everybody through what you've been doing over the last four years and and what you're doing now what your Ambitions are let's position everyone so they understand where you're coming from yeah so four years ago uh I think you said we talked in December

2020 I had just started my podcast conversations with Coleman uh I was still in the research phase of of my book which is now finished and has been out for a few months called the end of race politics Arguments for a colorblind America um and I think the most press the most pressing uh issue at that time was the you know the aftermath of the George Floyd riots um the the recent election of of of Joe Biden and um you know the the uh the tricky and eventually violent transition between Biden and and Trump so

you know what I've been up to in the in the intervening years I've been releasing podcasts for four years I've I've uh been going around talking about the message of my book especially this year I think some of your viewers will probably have seen some of those exchanges especially on The View with sunny host where uh I I tried to have a conversation about colorblindness and race and was met with uh a pretty large amount of hostility from one of the hosts of that show and um and so that's really what I've been up to

this year is really just trying to talk to as many people as possible about My Philosophy around the issue of race um I've also been you know talking to to people like Joe Rogan and others who uh with whom I don't see eye to eye on the Israel Palestine issue and um and and like everyone I've been following very closely all of the uh 2024 election news uh Biden and KLA Harris and more recently Tim Walls and and all of that so um I'm happy to talk about any and all of those topics well let's

start with your your tour you you said you've been touring around speaking tell me about that first yeah so as you know when you have a book come out um you know you you you have a pretty punishing grueling schedule of of talking um and my schedule has been nothing like yours have been over the years but I've gotten to talk to a lot of different people um you know from all over the political Spectrum about the message of my book which is that you know color blindness is uh the best philosophy to take with

respect to racial identity in other words you know you're a white guy uh I'm Black and Hispanic but those are not the features of our s that should ultimately matter right what matters when talking about Peterson is his qualities his values uh his actions and likewise with me and so uh our culture has become kind of deranged on this issue especially on the left uh which used to be the the Bastion and actually the really the founder of of color blindness as I explained in my book chapter 2 I devote to just a historical examination

of where this idea of color blindness comes from there's been a false history written that suggests that color blindness came from conservatives and even reactionaries um and there's kind of a uh a kind of subterfuge a trojan horse for white supremacy this this has no basis in in in fact in fact I in my book I go all the way back to the 1860s to a man named Wendell Phillips who was one of the most prominent anti-slavery activists uh of his era his nickname was abolitions golden trumpet and he was the ear person to mention

the word colorblind uh in the context of advocating for what he called a government color blind by which he meant a government that cannot and does not recognize race anywhere in the law as a reason to discriminate between people so that's where the idea of colorblindness comes from and actually comes from the most radical wing of the abolitionists uh since the 1960s you see in a process that began in the academy with civil race uh critical race Theory and since 2013 or 14 has metastasized uh far more broadly on the left uh into Elite leftwing

institutions that has Rewritten the history of color blindness as if it's a uh a bad faith idea coming from the the worst corners of the far right um to the point where as as an experiment right before I started writing this book I just Googled color blindness race because I wanted to see what would come up nine of the 10 links that came up were all articles arguing why color blindness is bad racist reactionary naive Etc and the 10th was a Wikipedia page so um it's there's been a very successful PR campaign against the concept

of colorblindness to the point where you've had celebrities that advoc advocate for it have to walk it back and apologize publicly and so forth and so my goal with this book is to tell the truth about the history of color blindness where it came from to tell the logic behind the principle why is it such a good principle for a multi-racial society why is it the only path forward and uh that's been uh that's really been my project for the past many months modern people often ask themselves why do I have to study history well

you're a historical being you need to know who you are and where you came from and why you think the things you think that's why you have to place yourself in the proper tradition I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world oh wow this is amazing to ReDiscover the ways our ancient ancestors developed the ideas that shaped modern society it was a monument to Civic greatness to visit the places where history was made that is ash from the actual fires when the Babylonians burn Jerusalem from 2500 years ago to walk the

same roads We are following the path of the crucifixion and experience the same [Music] Wonder we are on the site of a miracle what kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable Universe science art Poli ICS all that makes life [Music] wonderful and something new about the world is revealed let me comment on that from a psychological and legal perspective okay so I spent 20 years looking for markers for psychological markers workers that would predict performance performance of managers performance of students performance of entrepreneurs performance of creative people and then on

the negative side predictors of antisocial Behavior criminality proclivity to alcohol addiction and so forth okay and to as part of that it was very practical Enterprise a because what I wanted to do was partly financially motivated and partly motivated by curiosity um I wanted to master the literature pertaining to the description of individuals so that they could be optimally fitted for their careers let's say or perhaps uh optimally diagnosed and understood if they were manifesting signs of the kinds of pathology that upset them and other people typical clinical work now there's quite a body of

law around this so imagine you're an employer and you want to screen your potential employees before you make them a job offer now you should do that because you could make a case that you should just assign jobs randomly because that would be the most unbiased way of doing it right if you just accept all comers there's no question about differentiation discrimination Prejudice anything like that but and so then might say well why shouldn't you just hire people randomly well there's a bunch of answers to that is first thing is is that people actually differ

in their abilities and their talents and their interests and so it's in the interest of the person that you're hiring as well as you not to be mismatched to their job now one of the ways you might match someone is by General cognitive ability and you want people of higher General cognitive ability in jobs that require rapid learning and quick transformation because otherwise they can't keep up and then you might say well even if they can't keep up it's not fair to deny them a job and the proper response to that is well that means

that someone else will be doing their job and that's hardly fair to them so for example if I hire a manager who has none of the attributes of a manager all that means is he'll fail or she'll fail in that job which is very painful for them and it will also mean that they compromise the performance of not only everyone that works for them but everyone that they're responsible to and so there's just nothing in that that's good you want to match the person to the job okay so you can evaluate their temperament you can

evaluate their General cognitive ability those are the fastest and most efficient ways to make a determination of ability Merit okay now but the other thing that's interesting is that Merit is actually described in employment law so for example if I want to hire you for a position and I want to use a test to see if you're suitable and by the way an interview is such a test and not a very good one because interviews are not accurate they're very inaccurate unless they're standardized and done by a group so interviews are actually not without their

Prejudice so what I have to do is I have to take the job and I have to describe what it consists of and then I have to demonstrate that there's a statistical Rel and I have to have an evaluation structure for those aspects of the job so say it's quantitative um then I have to show that my test is statistically associated with those outcomes so Merit in that case is defined as the ability to perform whatever the job happens to be and then the acceptability of my screening technology is dependent on my ability to demonstrate

a relationship between the technology and the outcome so there's a bunch of reasons for making this clear because what that means in a sense is that there's no difference between defining a job and defining the Merit that goes along with it because the what the Merit is is the ability to do the job and so if there's a job there's something that needs to be done and if you're meritorious you're better at doing it then the tests you use have to predict that now there's no IND there's no indication whatsoever that attributes such as race

or ethnicity are relevant contributors to any job not not in and of themselves so you can't screen on the basis of race because race can't be demonstrated to be relevant to the outcome of the job now the radicals say for example well if you're black you should have a black physician because only a black physician can understand your lived experience and there's no measure for that there's no demonstration whatsoever that that's the case no one's ever demonstrated that even a little bit certainly not in a way that a court would find acceptable and compelling if

someone used that criteria for employment the reason I'm I'm pointing this out is because in some ways the psychological and the legal communities had already addressed this issue it's like you're actually legally mandated to be race blind now unfortunately there are now the law is set up now essentially so that if you hire anyone you're probably doing it illegally you can be challenged no matter what you do so I'll give you an example of that so if I interviewed you and you didn't get the job you could take me to court by claiming that an

interview is not the most valid currently available means for assessing your suitability and as far as I know there haven't been court cases of that type but they would as far as I can tell wi because the statistical evidence that interviews unstructured interviews are unreliable and not valid is extremely strong so so the reason I'm bringing that up is because this issue of race blindness is in some ways it's already embedded in our legal and Psych in our legal structures and our psychological practices I can't evaluate you on the basis of race because it's irrelevant

to your performance so so how do you understand the leftist objection to that yes so you're exactly right so so many important features of the history get memory hold here here and the one that pertains directly to your point is the Civil Rights Act of 1964 this was the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement it was thought over bitterly uh at Congress I mean most of the opponents at this time would have been Southern Democrats um this is you know before the the voting scenario and the geographical scenario in America rearranged itself and uh

this was as close to America has ever come to enshrining color blindness in the law what do I mean by that what I mean is that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being debated on the senate floor the the lead sponsor of the bill famously said if a single word of this act requires you to reverse discriminate or practice affirmative action to correct for imbalances I will eat the entire Bill Page by page on the senate floor that's what the lead sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 um said uh hu Hubert

Humphrey now and now if you actually read the the text of the bill it's very clear you just can't discriminate against anyone for any reason and nothing in the bill requires you to reverse discriminate so 2 plus 2 that is a colorblind bill right really that's you know that's as colorblind as you're going to get now how has it happened that in the 50 60 years since then that law has been interpreted by various uh judicial decisions to essentially require to effectively require a kind of reverse discrimination in certain cases right um the the the

story of that is uh well told in in Richard hania's book and people can look to that if they want the details but the intent of the Civil Rights Act was to be a colorblind uh you know it was to enshrine color blindness in employment law and it ended up over the decades kind of pointing in a different direction and that's one of the things that I think people memory hold because uh the progressive left has now long abandoned color blindness and so it's an embarrassment to that fact that the entire Civil Rights Movement was

premised on it um so with respect to this you know question of discrimination this is this is some a question I get quite often uh people ask Coleman is it really that there are no situations in life in which it is valid to racially discriminate and the way I answer that question is is this um if you imagine an x- axis and a y- axis imagine four quadrants on the x- axis you have Stakes are you in a low stake situation or a high stake situation a low stake situation would be chatting with your friend

at a coffee shop right a high stake situation would be um trying to find someone who on an airplane who you've just learned has a bomb right um and now on the Y AIS uh you you can picture information how much information do you have right do you have lots of information about someone because you you've been you know talking to them or hanging out with them for weeks or do you have no information about someone is this person a total stranger to you that you can only size up by sight so if you picture

that three of those quadrants are situations where you really do not have a reason to racially discriminate ever which is to say if you have lots of information about someone this goes to your point um if you know their uh psychological traits if you've IQ tested them if you've talked to them if you put them through a series of battery tests if you if you've seen them under all of that information is way more useful to you than knowing their race knowing their race adds no extra information because you've already got lots of information right

so right there that eliminates two quadrants that that eliminates both High information quadrants now if you're in a situation where you don't know somebody you're at a coffee shop meeting a friend of a friend for the first time very low stakes but you don't know anything about them well then rather than judge them on the basis of their race the smart thing to do is just to get more information about them and it's a low stake situation so you stand to lose Nothing by doing that right have a conversation with the person in 10 minutes

you'll know more than you would know merely from a racial stereotype most of us live our lives in those three quadrants and so there's not a good reason to racially discriminate now if you are in the fourth quadrant if you're in a situation that is high stakes when there's lives on the line potentially and all you know is that say there's a terrorist on this airplane who intends to blow up the airplane well then yeah it's it's valid to take race into account because you've got you've got no time uh and you can be pretty

sure that the person W with the bomb doesn't look like uh like an old white woman right so so so I'm not saying there are no emergency situations in which you you've got to you know not be an idiot and uh pay attention to stereotypes and likelihoods and and so forth but the truth is most of us are living our lives in the other three quadrants 99.9% of the time remember when your personal life was actually personal the internet changed all of that now every search every click every tweet it's all out there just waiting

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also encrypts 100% of your network traffic to keep your data safe from hackers when you're on public Wi-Fi the best part it's not rocket science One Tap and you're protected across all devices I use expressvpn because I'm not a public figure nor do I want to be expressvpn helps me keep my personal life private protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com Jordan that's expressvpn.com Jordan and you can get an extra 3 months free expressvpn.com Jordan so um from a statistical perspective the and from a psychological perspective the appropriate thing to do as a industrial

organizational psychologist for example or forensic psychologist is to take an approach that's very much akin to the one that you just described so the first thing is is that people default to stereotypes when there isn't any other information that's how we actually think so when you don't know you use a stereotype is it accurate um it's more accurate than nothing right and that would be particularly the case in those high stake situations that you describe with regards to prediction so I could imagine generating an equation to decide whether I was going to hire someone imagine

I analyzed the performance of 200 people and I threw in general cognitive ability past work history and personality that'd be a pretty good start I might want to use some screeners of Psychopathology I could also throw in gender and race now what I would want to do is see if gender and race sex and race sorry sex and race I would want to see if they added anything above and beyond those additional hypothetically more informative predictors and the general answer to that almost the invariant answer is no if you if you can control for factors

that are more well defined and again that's usually General cognitive ability and personality then sex and race are irrelevant it's not always the case but it's virtually always the case and so that means defaulting to sex or race makes your prediction uh worse now you also might want to people might also want to understand that we're also not only doing this prediction for the sake of the person who might be employed so so like here's an example it is the case that if we made admissions to the ivy league universities race blind that there would

be an overwhelming proportion of Asians that would happen very rapidly and you might say that's unfair well it depends on how you define unfair but I can tell you one thing that it would produce see one of the things we might assume is that Society itself benefits when we can extract the maximum value out of the most able people and so it isn't it isn't exactly that we want to admit people to Harvard because it's good for the people who get admitted it's that we want to admit the people with the most potential because then

we can extract the highest possible value from them socially across their lifespan there's a huge see it's so interesting to me that the argument is always from the perspective of the student it's like well that's something that has to be taken into account but that's really from a social perspective that's not the fundamental point is you want to allocate resources you want to allocate scarce resources to those who will be most productive with them and that's for social benefit not not for the benefit of the person even though they will also benefit so now I

I want to dig into something else that you described I'm going to take the side of the leftists for this inquiry so because I could say to you well it's all well and good to promote color blindness but it's practically impossible and here are the reasons um people are ethnocentric by Pro by their innate proclivity which by which I mean that we have a pronounced ingroup preference so you know I am going to favor my wife over other women I'm going to favor my children over other children I'm going to favor my family over other

families and I'm going to default on the stereotypical level to people with my ethnic and racial and economic background and that's all true you know like if you look at how people make snap judgments overcoming that in-group favoritism let's say is very difficult now we also might ask whether we actually want to overcome that right because you might say well let's just dispense within group favoritism but what are you going to say that I shouldn't prefer my children to other people's children like that means you're implying that I have enough care in me to love

the billion children of the world as much as I love my own two children and my answer to that is well I don't have that much time or energy and also that if everyone loved their own children that problem would be taken care of so like we can't just dispense within group favoritism and so the leftists even if we think we might the leftist might say well your vision of a colorblind perceptual Horizon is uh naive so there are rejoinders to that but but I'd like to hear what yours are so uh here's what I

would say to that first I totally acknowledge uh human nature is what it is and we are never going to and uh probably shouldn't want to stamp out every aspect of our animal nature including tribalism um tribalism comes in many forms it it comes in the strongest form in a a a deep attachment to your actual kin uh like I you know I can't I I can pretend to care about your sisters as much as my sisters but I can't actually do it like I can say those words but I I'm literally incapable of it

really so you know and as I'm sure you agree uh every every system that tries to completely deny and rewrite human nature fails spectacularly and creates much more suffering uh than uh than happiness so the question is how do we deal with this aspect of human nature tribalism in particular ethnic tribalism that when uh when taken to an extreme uh when when watered and and uh allowed to grow tends to cause some of the bloodiest and most terrible outcomes that have happened o over the course of human history my answer to that is uh I

guess twofold one is we have to we have to use culture to Tamp down on the worst excesses of tribalism by that I mean we have to make certain things taboo we have to raise kids to think that it's taboo to express pure race hatred right by maintaining that taboo you you Tamp down on um you you create a clear sense for kids growing up where the boundaries are where you're not allowed to go and then you combine that creation of a taboo with the allowance of benign expressions of it right and and you know

if if you think what do you mean what do you mean by benign Expressions I mean that if you go to a comedy club a lot of the comics are going to make jokes about racial stereotypes and if they're funny everyone of every race is going to receive it in in a good way right they going to receive it as a joke uh you know Dave Chappelle can make jokes about how black Santa Claus would be showing up late everywhere and you know because of the way he says it and how he's coming at it

everyone can laugh at it and and make light of differences between uh ethnicities and cultures in a way that's safe and fun and doesn't actually lead to Intergroup strife and the analogy here is something like sports it's it's like clearly I think this is a point you've made many times clearly sports are a kind of substitute for war um they they tap into you know they tap into the exact kind of psychological Machinery that that men kind of have inbuilt for war but um you know nobody dies at the end of it so it's it's

in way it's a kind of benign release valve for that aspect of human nature that polices the boundaries between the benign version and the truly destructive version and so I think something like that has to be true for right it highlights the distinction so I guess you're saying in part it seems to me Russell Peters is very good at that too by the way yes right and he's always making ethnic jokes and he he it's interesting to watch his audiences because he picks on every ethnic group and if he ever misses any they feel left

out and it it's partly an opportunity for the racial or the ethnic group to indicate that they can take joke at their own expense which is something like an indication of their civilized nature right I mean when when men get together on a work crew one of the first things they always do is poke the hell out of each other to see if there's anyone who can't take a joke and if there is anyone who can't take a joke they are viewed with extreme suspicion immediately yeah and so it's interesting that that benign expression of

it's it's like a it's sort of like the jokes that people make about sexual impulses as well so so the argument there is something like I I think the argument we're developing is something like there's going to be an implicit tendency towards well all sorts of things on the instinctual level aggression lust gluttony and and like this this ethnocentrism or ingroup favoritism that can spiral out into actual Prejudice and there's no denying that there's no escaping from its effects comprehensively but we can use our own cons cultural striving to mitigate against that you know and

that can be very successful by the way when so I lived in downtown Toronto when my kids were little and we sent them to the Local Schools only a block away and the schools at that point in Canada hadn't become entirely corrupted with politically correct idiocy although some of the writing was on the wall now Toronto where I was was very very ethnically and racially diverse and as far as I could tell as far as the kids were concerned that was irrelevant like we had got far enough in Toronto we had actually got to the

point where people were colorblind it didn't matter there the kids as far as I could tell in the elementary and junior high schools in particular this was even true of the high schools that the kids were at the Asians and the blacks and the and the and the Caucasians they're they weren't discriminating against one another when it came to the establishment of friendships it never seemed to be an issue now that's changed to some degree in Canada because we've insisted on re importing the racial tension that characterizes the United States into Canada because we're jealous

of it I suppose or God only knows what the reason is but that has disintegrated to some degree in Toronto which is a very sad thing to see so so the thing is is you we have to accept that that proclivity towards ethnocentrism is going to be there axiomatically and that that has to be mitigated against culturally you know now wridge Adrien wridge wrote a great book on uh meritocracy and this is another thing that's very much worth highlighting he'd be a good person to talk to by the way um he he uh he pointed

out the historical alternatives to meritocracy so that would be like colorblind colorblind selection because you might say well the alternative to meritocratic selection which is going to produce some biases and outcome um the alternative to that might be something like the equity that the radical leftists are chasing but that isn't the case historically the alternative to meritocracy has always been twofold Dynasty and and uh what's the other word nepotism so so you know and I can see this already happening let's say at the Ivy League schools so when the university start to dispense with objective

testing for selection criteria like the SATs for example which are a very classic example of a objective test you might say well that gives everyone a fighting chance but first of all it doesn't because if you get into an Ivy League school and you're not able you're going to fail and that's not fun for you or anyone else but but there's something more immediate that's the case as well um it starts to devolve into something like who you know or what strings you can pull and or what Stories being told at the time because with

in the absence of objective data there's only subjective decision making right and then the manner in which the subjective decision is made is dependent on all sorts of things that immediately become invisible now so it's generally the case in societies that haven't managed to produce objective testing criteria for let's say admission to high stakes institutions that it's who you know your family background that's what it was like at Harvard up until like 19 1960 right the average IQ at Harvard in 1960 was something like 105 which is just above average and the reason for that

was well it was a rich young white people's club and you got in because of your family like it was an aristocracy so Harvard replaced an aristocracy with a meritocracy before they started Jer mandering the Jerry mandering the selection criteria you know the left just think well we'll get rid of the objective test and we'll we'll have Equity it's like no you won't you'll have ideological selection nepotism or or aristocracy that's that's what'll come up and that's not good for anyone not if you're trying to facilitate Merit right so I want to react to that

but just before I do I want to pick up on what you said about raising kids in Toronto I grew up in a very similar scenario I grew up in Montclair New Jersey which is a very diverse town and I had friends of every race and I did not think of them as belonging to a race right right I literally just thought of them by their first name and by their attributes this is one of the profound sources of Hope is that of all the problems and flaws that humans are born with for instance you

know children often have to be taught to share right that's not something that comes naturally to one thing they're not born with is actually a any kind of deep sense of racial tribalism in particular kids naturally uh play with other kids of different races without a second thought uh it's usually not until you get older that the kind of racial tribal part of human nature begins to show itself and so uh color blindness is actually very intuitive to kids this is one of the big difference differences between my message and the message uh you know

between my style of anti-racism if if you if you will and the kind of anti-racism on offer by Robin D'Angelo ibram kendi Etc Robin D'Angelo her message is that kids are essentially born racist that they drink it in with their mother's milk and it has to be Stamped Out of them at a very young age uh with indoctrination and woke kindergarten to quote the San Franc the actual San Francisco program uh my view is that actually kids are basically born with the right itude about race which is to say they don't care and the best

thing to do is to essentially reinforce that by show show them you know Martin Luther King's famous I Have a Dream speech once a year on Dr King day and uh you know live the value of of colorblindness that you know you you don't need more than that gentle hand with children um in order to keep them on the on the right track now I want to address your your the second Point too about meritocracy and uh the the the impossibility of equal outcomes Thomas Soul has spent a whole career proving this every which way

that you know equal outcomes across the board are not on the menu and once you once you admit that I mean ju just consider the fact we live in a Multicultural Society we celebrate cultural diversity we believe that cultures are different that's what culture cultural diversity means it's not possible to have different cultures that all behave and execute the same that's a contradiction right so Ju Just on that alone we should admit that we we have to even if everyone gets treated equally there's going to be different outcomes okay we haven't even in America we

haven't even achieved equal outcomes between different white ethnic groups which is to say if you compare you know white people of Irish Des to white people of Russian descent to white people of Polish descent vastly different outcomes across the board that's because equal outcomes aren't on the menu we have to focus on meritocratic processes and and and so um to your point you know at Harvard when they they looked into this I think I think in the the recent affirmative action lawsuit it came out in Discovery that something like 40% of white Harvard students were

either the children of professors student athletes you know arily at kind of expensive hard to access sports like um uh you know uh rowing and um or or otherwise the children of donors right so that's a huge that's a that actually surprised me because my assumption like like yours was that Harvard used to be like that but they've kind of rained that in to a significant degree not not nearly as much as you'd think it turns out um so you're right that the alternative to this is is is nepotism you know I and I think

a lot of people worry that meritocracy is going to hurt Black and Hispanic students I think that's at the core of a lot of um a a lot of people on the left worry about this so I want to give two examples of uh ways in which it doesn't in fact it helps so there was a study in Broward count Broward County Florida um where they I believe they had uh gotten rid of universal IQ testing for kids these are uh you know grade age kids but pre-ol they'd gotten rid of IQ testing uh and

then they reinstituted it and found that there were a lot of gifted uh just naturally gifted but poor Black and Hispanic kids that were not going to be identified any other way except for a universal IQ test and uh you know my my mother was a perfect example of this she she was born and raised in the South Bronx at the time where that was really one of the worst neighborhoods to grow up in in the 60s and 70s and she ended up going to stent the the the highly selective uh Public School specialized Public

School in New York City on the basis of a test now I can guarantee you have growing up in the kind of chaotic household where she did uh um her you know her her mother could couldn't read mother had a third grade education crime all around her drugs all around her there was no way she was going to be able to do extracurricular activities okay she wasn't going to be uh in six or seven different clubs she wasn't going to be uh she wasn't going to have necessarily the best essays written that written by committee

by a committee of parents and tutors right really all she had was basically her smarts she you know all she had was a test of really her inner intellectual potential the ironic part about all of these other aspects the the essays the the uh Club memberships leadership positions is that those favor privileged kids more than the actual test does and so I'll give one yes clearly yeah I'll give one other example of this there was a very interesting study uh out of Duke University in the early 2010s where they looked at um they essentially looked

at what happens when you admit a group of students under a different regime of Standards okay and they asked this question in the abstract because obviously this is true of black students that that quote unquote benefit from affirmative action but it's also true of Legacy admits it's also true of of student athletes right so you can actually study as an abstract phenomenon how how do kids fa differently when admitted under a different set of standards and what they found is that not only black students but also Legacy admits also student athletes which is how they

knew it was an effect of being admitted under a different regime of Standards rather than say racism what happens is that you had a very high degree of attrition out of the Sciences into the soft uh the soft majors and how do they know this is because they asked all the freshmen on day one what do you plan to major in and they've got they got something like you know 70 they got a ton of black male students and black female students interested in studying the hard Sciences right everyone pretty much had the same rate

of being interested in the hard Sciences but what happened by year two by year three you found all of those groups of kids accepted under lower standards dropping out going to easier majors and getting superficially similar GPA so that if you only look at GPA you actually don't see the effect of admitting people under lower standards and what happens is if that s that black student that was interested in being a chemistry an engineering major at Duke if he had gone to a college if he had not gotten into Duke gone to a different College

he might have survived and gotten a pretty good engineering degree at a pretty good state school and went on to to become an engineer instead just in just to survive with the median of the class of kids that were smarter than him he he got some frankly sorry kind of BS degree that he didn't want to get and now he's not even an engineer so this is a very real phenomenon and you know there's really no there's no way of of of there's no end run about around meritocracy where you can have your cake and

eat it too without all of these other consequences so two things on that the first is if you're a parent you don't want to send your kid to a university where they're in the bottom cortile of intellectual capacity now so you could imagine if you go to Harvard and you have an IQ of 120 you're pretty smart but you're not smart compared to someone with an IQ of 145 like you're not in the same game and so you're going to find exactly what you just described is it's going to be a failing game for you

and that's not entertaining and it's also not good for you and it's also not realistic in a sense because like uh the Harvard environment let's say in the 1990s cuz I don't know what it's like now wasn't the real world right you're bringing they have a tremendous capacity to discriminate because they have so many applicants and so even with the Legacy students they can pick high IQ Legacy students because they have so many applicants so so so then you go there let's say with an IQ of 125 which puts you at about 90th percentile or

above you're no dummy but you're at the bottom of your class now you could go to a decent state school and be in the top that's better for you that's better for you why would you put someone in a position where they're likely to fail and also get a the wrong impression of their abilities now it might mean that you know if you're going to compete at the upper echelons of any discipline let's say you want to be a great scientist you're going to need all things considered you're going to need an IQ of 145

and you're going to need to work flat out 80 hours a week and that's that and so if you go to a state school and you take a hard science degree you're probably not going to hit that upper Eon rung but that doesn't mean that there isn't going to be all sorts of opportunities available to you with that degree and it's much better to be positioned in the right place it's much better to be positioned accurately with regards to your comments on U non-meritorious selection so I did a study that we were never allowed to

publish at the naval Academy with like 4,500 people it took a long time to do this study we gave them a full comprehensive neuropsychological IQ and personality battery and we could predict military performance and academic performance because we had those outcome measures from the institution and they preferentially admitted athletes not least because Navy wants to beat Army in the football game which is actually not that big a priority when you're trying to produce people who are going to be piloting warships worth hundreds of millions of dollars in very complex situations and so you know maybe

the priorities there were a bit a skew and so we had the opportunity to investigate that and it was clearly the case that people who were admitted on any basis other than psychometric Merit performed much more poorly in terms of the evaluation criteria that the Naval Academy themselves had used now the argument from the radicals would be well then the assessment criteria themselves are prejudiced but that argument Falls apart if you accept the idea that well jobs have a quality and Merit you know like if you're a linesman working for a power company it seems

reasonable for me to evaluate you on how effective you are at generating the repairs that you do generate does someone else have to go mop in after you and then how many of those operations can you perform per day it's like it's the very definition of the job and to be anti- Merit in a situation like that is to make the simultaneous claim that jobs have no content right there's no hierarchy of ability within a job but that means there's no job because the hierarchy is there implicitly with the job right there's a job when

doing something is deemed better than not doing it and then there's a difference you know wouldn't matter what the competition is you could have four-year-olds lay on the floor of the gymnasium and roll horizontally towards the other wall if you did that repeatedly with a hundred of them you build a hierarchy some kids would be reliably faster and then you could generate measures that would predict which kids could roll faster they'd probably be older and stronger for example you know maybe they'd be more competitive and motivated I don't know what the criteria would be but

if there's any outcome you immediately build a hierarchy of rank and then you can derive tests that will predict it that's essentially what meritocracy boils down to and it it's not in anybody's interest to demolish that I I think um um Thomas Sol has a great book called The Quest for Cosmic Justice and uh I remember him saying in that book that meritocracy uh like capitalism is a word that was actually coined by its enemies and and and often when the enemies of the idea coin the idea they frame it in a way that is

dishonest right so for example you know capitalism right right there in the word suggests that it's all about you know Capital expanding itself which seems totally disconnected from you know labor for example and now if you actually look into it you find every time capitalism has been opposed to Communism the workers from the Communist Regime are fleeing banging on the doors of the capitalist Society trying to get in right so clearly there's something at minimum flawed about that framing uh but the word stuck meritocracy so pointed out uh implies that uh the testing regime is

a comment on your worth as an individual your moral worth which it's really not um if I do better on the SAT uh than you that doesn't mean I'm a better person all around all it means is that I'm better at the tasks associated with this sat which predict that I'm probably going to do better than you at a university on almost any subject I'm going to do better than you at law school and I'm probably going to do better on the elsat it means that in in in subset of life that has to do

with intellectual tasks problem solving quick problem solving quick learning model building I'm better at that than you right that doesn't mean I'm a better person than you okay it doesn't mean I'm that's technically true you know because the well if you look at the personality attributes the two or three that you would most associate let's say with morality Like It's Tricky and there's not a oneto one relationship and I'm not implying that but generally speaking people regard those who are conscientious diligent hardworking reliable industrious as moral now now that's not the only dimension of morality

because you also have agreeableness when and more people who are more agreeable in our society at least are also deemed more moral because they're more caring they're more empathic they're more polite and so you could even see conscientiousness as the conservative virtue and agreeableness as the liberal virtue if you wanted to it doesn't matter those are those are the places where virtue seems to be captured to some degree in the personality models there's zero correlation with like zero interesting right right so technically yeah yeah well and so another way and it's very important the case

that you're making to discriminate intellectual capacity let's say or Merit from moral worth because it's also the case that the intelligent have their Temptation right the the evil figures of Mythology are always Stellar intellects gone spectacularly wrong that's why it's always the evil side scientist in the modern mythologies right all the enemies of the superheroes are evil scientists they're all Evil Geniuses and that's because to your point General cognitive ability is not only not associated with morality per se it's also it's worse than that in a sense I think Coleman because it is definitely the

case that higher General cognitive ability confers upon you a tremendous advantage in a complex society cuz you can learn faster and the differences are not trivial there're it's the biggest s single difference between people is General cognitive ability and it's an appalling literature to familiarize yourself with to some degree because it does seem to violate the principles on first glance of universal Cosmic Justice it's like why is it fair for some people to be born with an IQ of 85 which barely makes you competent even to be a member of the Armed Force forces regardless

of what role you're in or to have an IQ of 145 which opens the doors let's say to places like Harvard and and Investment Banking as a career strategy and it's an AR it's the the cards are dealt out in a relatively arbitrary way well that's a very bitter pill to swallow but it is also the case that those who are intelligent have the temptation of Lucifer essentially if you think about it mythologically because it's very easy to worship your own intellect and then to worship intellect per se and that's a very very dangerous that's

a very dangerous thing to do to to develop that set of that sense of wound wounded intellectual Pride if people aren't bowing at your feet or even the presumption that merely because you've been gifted with intelligence because it's not something you earn you've been gifted with intelligence that means that you're of Stellar moral character that's simply no I was really shocked in my clinical practice you you know with this quite regularly because I had some people in my practice who were definitely in the lower quintile of intelligence let's say very very impaired unable to read

certainly unable to use a computer um virtually unemployable regardless of how much effort was poured into that um yet often unbelievably admirable in their ability to Bear up under the complex and stressful conditions of their life without being bitter or resentful while still being of service to other people it was really shocking to me to watch that you know and and and a reminder that just because you're intelligent doesn't mean you're good and that does we do in our culture and the leftists are particularly egregious in this regard I would say to casually elude General

cognitive ability with moral worth I you know if you have a materialist Viewpoint that's a very easy thing to do it's very easy thing to do it's a hard thing to fight against but it's it's a pernicious problem I have a question for you you you said and I think it's right and I feel it too that observing the vast difference between the intellectual skills people are born with is a bitter pill to swallow and that the more you learn about it the more you despair at the unfairness of the universe in some way I'm

curious do you think that I share that reaction do you think that reaction is a a natural consequence of learning about that or do you think it's only because we have some deep Western background assumptions about fairness like do you think that that would strike a pre- western tribe as unfair as well as a bitter pill to swallow or do you think it's really a function of some deep kind of assumptions we have well okay well I think there's a couple of things going on there the first is that our society does differentially award people

with high General cognitive ability because our society is very complex and rapidly changing and so in a societ in a traditional Society where roles remain unchanged for Generations IQ is much less relevant so but in our society because look how fast do you have to be to stay among those who aren't at least 5 years behind the computational revolution like you have to what have an IQ of 95th percentile to be anywhere near the bleeding edge because things are changing so quickly you know so so we differentially devote resources to the cognitively skilled and our

culture is set up so that that's more and more the case but then there's another issue too that I think's equally relevant you see the worship of in of the intellect in and of itself has a has this danger of Pride that's associated with it and it's a very big danger so the way we should be conceptualizing intelligence is the manner in which gifts are portrayed in the gospel accounts for example so one of the things Christ says two things that are in some ways cont ictory one of them is that to those who have

everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken okay so that's the Matthew principle that's what the economists call it and it is a pointer to the fact that resources acre regardless of the discipline resources acre in the hands of a few doesn't matter what the discipline is it's and that's what Marx observed when he said that capital would acre in the hands of fewer and fewer people now that's true it happens all the time it happens in every society and it doesn't matter whether it's a capitalist Society or

a socialist society by the way and so he attributed that to capitalism which meant he misdiagnosed the problem because it's way deeper than capitalism but it is the case that rewards are differentially distributed okay and that those in the higher echelons of the cognitive distribution are more likely to acre those rewards but there's another statement there that's also relevant which is that to those who have been given much much will be required and so this is a very useful thing to know so like I had clients in my clinical practice who were very creative now

that's a also an innate proclivity so creative people they have a wide ideational space so one idea is likely for them to remind them of many other ideas and many distal ideas and they tend to be rapid at generating such ideas and that's probably something as fundamentally biological as threshold for co-activation of of adjoining neurons right it's it's that low level okay now so let's say you're gifted with creativity now let's say that you don't exercise that responsibly you don't pursue your creative Mission it turns into your enemy like a gift that you misuse turns

into your enemy and it and this is more to the Justice elements like you might be rewarded like your IQ is Stellar you wouldn't have accomplished what you've accomplished so far had that not been the case and you've been successful in multiple different Enterprises and so you know thank your lucky stars okay does that make you privileged absolutely does it make you unfairly privileged it depends on what you do with it like if you bore a responsibility that was commensurate with the talent then you've paid existentially for your gift and the the warning the classical

warning in deep religious texts is that if you misuse a gift that you've been granted it will become an unbearable burden and turn itself against you and like I had plenty of people in my clinical practice who were they call them let's say Underachievers you know IQ of 140 and uh a 20th percentile social class position that's a recipe for extreme bitterness many of the people who I had in my practice who were like that were unbelievably annoyed that the world hadn't bent itself over to bow at their feet because of their undeniable intellect and

God the internet is crowded with people like that I mean that's what's that sitcom about the physicists U The Big Bang Theory all the humor that went along with the big bang theory was essentially at the expense of arrogant but socially dysfunctional intellectuals so so there is a Justice this is what I'm pointing to Independent of the relationship between your intelligence and your social positioning which looks unjust as hell there's another form of Justice in operation which is if you're smart you better learn to be humble and you better learn to be grateful for the

fact that you've been gifted and you better take that on as a serious responsibility like a serious moral responsibility cuz if you don't it will work against you and if you're super smart and your intellect is working against you you are in serious trouble so that's where I see the Justice element of that so okay so you're when did your book launch my book came out in February and how's it doing it's doing well my Publishers seem happy um I'm I'm happy with the response I you know I frankly got I got more of a

response to it than I was anticipating so I count that as a huge success okay so in what way did you get a bigger response and what's been the varieties of the response I mean and I guess I'm curious about well you know you're one of the you're a rare you're a rare figure politically in some ways I suppose in some manners akin to Tomas Soul which is a good mantle to to have to be cloaked in for sure but like what what's the most effective criticism would you say of the positions that you've taken

if you had to steal man the people who are opposed to the notion of colorblindness I I want to add one thing to that you know James Lindsay who's not very fond of the Communists says all the time and this goes to the radical leftists that it's always about the revolution you know and so the attack on meritocracy let's say and the attack on color blindness and I believe this to be the case is just another way of furthering the kind of race Consciousness that can be transformed into the kind of class Consciousness that can

further the anti-patriarchal and anti- capitalist Revolution and so I don't believe that people like ibam kendi and Robin D'Angelo are that much concerned at all about um fostering better relationships between the race they're just using the enhancement of race Consciousness as a adjunct to what Marx was trying to do when he tried to Foster class Consciousness so that you know the re the Glorious Revolution can proed and you know you have to break some eggs to make an omelet as the Communists are so much inclined to say and if people are disunited in their racial

identity but that furthers the revolution well you know doesn't matter because the Utopia is forthcoming and so that's what that's what I see fundamentally motivating the people who oppose the idea of colorblindness like of course it's a it's a difficult goal I mean it's very difficult to bring diverse people into a union obviously and you also pointed to something very interesting that's paradoxical in the leftist formulation it's like okay it's diversity inclusivity and Equity well let's just toss Equity out of or let's just toss inclusivity out of the equation for a moment diversity and Equity

well how do those go together this was your point I see so we're going to be maximally different and we're going to celebrate that but all the differences between us are going to be eradicated and we're going to do those both at the same time that's the theory that's your theory you know it's no it's it's funny when you put it that way I mean it's it's it really is directly contradictory I want to pick up on on what you said here um that James Lindsay and and I mean the point that I hear you

making is about pretexts I mean often in life we think we're doing one thing for one reason but we're actually doing it for a totally different reason and often that other reason is unflattering um you know we claim to be do doing something out of moral concern but it's very quickly revealed with two seconds of thought to be coming from Envy or Revenge I mean this is like human psychology oneon-one is that sometimes we're even blind to our own pretexts so more and more I I I think about political projects as pretextual uh because the

the the contradictions you know so often reveal themselves so for for example um ibram kendi is you know his whole book is about equal results and uh the idea that you know if black people are 133% of the population black people should be 133% of people in prison and no more 133% of the wealth 13% of the teachers 13% of the nurses 133% of every single domain you and he he is apparently very consistent about this and uh um and that's his worldview okay so putting putting that to the side take it at face value

why is it that someone like him and uh the people he disagrees with have never once and I really mean never once highlighted all the domains in which white am Americans are underrepresented in good things or are or over represented in bad things so for example suicide no small issue white Americans much more likely to die of suicide than black Americans um in my alcoholism too alcoholism and drunk driving in my in my book I list nine different diseases that white people are more likely to die of now is my point that white people are

on the whole worse off than black people no that's a total it's nothing to do with what I'm saying what what I'm saying is that if your philosophy at a deep level were about equal results for equal races then you would expect someone like him to highlight those disparities as well right if it were about disparity as such now understanding that so much of human behavior is a pretext for more base motives what does it tell you that they only ever care about the disparity that black people are on the worst end of I think

that the whole Equity uh uh campaign is a pretext for what is at base just you know black and brown identity politics that that's all it is it's it's my group it's I like my group and I want us to advance to equal or even greater than other groups it's it's I think it's worse than that Coleman I think it's worse I think when we're speaking about pretexts like there are layers of pretext and I I think it's and I'm interested in your view I think it's I'm going to make a case that I like

my group better because that's to my advantage and I can cover that Advantage by claiming um what would you say moral superiority as an avatar of my racial Community that's right so it's like yeah it's my race first but not really it's me see I see this with the activist types all the time it's like the trans Community well first of all no it's not a community by any stretch of the imagination by any standards and you're actually not a representative you're just happen to be a member of that group and no one's given you

the power to do the negotiating or the speaking on behalf of your community and you're clearly doing it only for your own narcissistic Advantage you know and this is a very complicated thing to sort through right because that that rejoinder could be thrown back at either of us you know I could say well the reason that you're promoting color blindness is because you have a book and now you're on this podcast you're you know sawing the fiddle with regards to the sales of your book and it's all about you it's a very dismal worldview to

assume that all human motivation can be boiled down to you know narrow self aggrandisement and I I certainly don't think it's true any regard but it's definitely the case that much of what we see that's political is a pretext for something that's deeper and I'm at the deepest levels too I think it's not only self-aggrandisement that's at the root of let's say the demand for Equity it's also an envy and resentment that's rapacious Beyond Comprehension there's no satisfying that demand I mean all you have to do is think about it technically for a minute it's

like okay apart from the issues you brought up right which is that there's all sorts of situations like the feminists never complain about the dir of women in Brick laying for example it's always the sea suite and so so you just see that everywhere it's like okay well how black do you have to be before the equity distribution kicks in like and and what are we going to do are we going to are we going to DNA test everyone I think my wife is three % African-American I can't remember if that's the case it's something

like she she's more black than Elizabeth Warren was Native American when she claimed to be Native American well well there you there there well but but you know that begs the question is like well is this a genetic identity and if it's not a genetic identity well is it one you can just adopt that's the Rachel what was her name donil doal problem doelle doelle right right it's like well if it's not if it's racial is it genetic and if it's not genetic is it cultural and of course the leftists insist that everything is cultural

so how the hell do you define black and the answer is well it doesn't matter because that's not the issue right the fact that that leads to all sorts of logical contradictions and could never be implemented is completely irrelevant to the to the game that's to the power game that's being played no and so how do you know how do you know let let's let's take that apart you can ask me too like how do you know that you're not doing exactly what you accuse in some ways you accuse dangelo and kendi of doing like

you know you're you've been successful for quite a long time and you've been successful in part because you focused on racial issues now so that's what the harshest of critics could say and I'm sure that's sort of thing has been said to you like how do you personally it's very worthwhile to be attuned to your own shortcomings absolutely and to not note that there's good rationale for your there's always a rationalization at hand to put a moral gloss on your comparative success it's like what what do you have do you think in check that helps

you stay on the straight narrow path y so I think the the only way you can really tell uh from the outside is whether someone sticks to their positions when it doesn't benefit them and this is what you can say I mean this is the what separates someone Like Bernie Sanders he's the quintessential example of this from many people that hold his position is whatever you want to say about Bernie Sanders he could be a total total Satan in in your worldview he was saying all the things he was saying today when it benefited him

not at all when when really all all it all you know decades ago he was just such a such an outlier that um he really saw very little benefit politically and uh from what he was saying and he just continued saying it right uh whereas you know virtual you know someone like kamla Harris you know nobody knows what she actually thinks because she has flip-flopped on every issue just in the past month she was against the death penalty then she was for it and then she you know so she seems much more like an empty

vessel who will say whatever she has to say to get to the next rung uh and many politicians are like that I don't mean to single out Comm Harris but you know what I can say for myself and I think any of my close friends would vouch for this is before I had any public profile before I was a writer uh of any kind I was annoying My Friends by talking about these same issues when all it did was like get me a reputation for being the uh well frankly at Columbia it got me a

reputation for being some kind of right-winger which I I never have been so when when it was only really a minus in my life I still represented what I believed uh 100% And of course from the outside there's no way to verify that but it's true so well there's some there's some ways there is some ways of verifying that because you know we could look into the details of your autobiographical history and I think you have put your finger on on something that's relevant I mean one of the ways we do evaluate people for their

moral propriety reliability is their consistency during times of distress you know and so so what I would say for myself this is a relevant dat to discuss this because the Supreme Court of Canada just ruled against me today in relationship to my battle with the College of psychologists I mean The Stance I've taken what's happened to me is that vast fields of opportunity have emerged for me over the last six years now I like to think I laid the ground work for that for like 30 years beforehand but it's still the case um but you

know I my job at the University became impossible and I lost my clinical practice and that was quite sudden and you know that so do I believe what I'm saying well I believed what I was saying enough to put that on the line right and I could have backed off although not really but in principle I could have backed off so you're saying it's something like I think this is right it's something like the cost of the sacrifice that's associated with the views this is another problem with casual activism you know because if you agitate

for something and it happens and goes cataclysmically wrong you you don't pay the price for that the people whose lives you were messing about with pay the price for that and so that false ideological activism that's a pretext let's say doesn't come along with any commensurate cost it it just gives you the advantage of appearing moral in the moment and I guess I mean I think the conservative thinkers have thought about that more in terms of skin in the game right is that if you're not risking something for your view then legitimate questions about the

rationale for your view can be raised H speaking about the view let's talk about what happened to you when you went on The View so walk us through that story a little bit yeah so I was I was asked to appear on The View which is not a show that would be friendly to my perspective at least in my assumption um and I went on there and I had a good exchange with whoopy Goldberg where we disagreed respectfully um and then Sunny htin uh who you know she essentially asked me kind of accused me of

this very question she said um um you know a lot of people say that you basically been co-opted by the far right and uh what do you have to say about that and and obviously her her way of distancing herself from the the opinion she was dist distancing herself from opinion that she actually held but and I I I think the reason it went viral is because I responded in a calm and fact-based way to what was just an evidence-free attack my character right like there's there's no evidence I've been co-opted by the right um

there's no evidence that I'm getting Coke money pumped into my bank account uh in exchange for saying the things that I'm saying and as I as I pointed out to you you know everyone who who who knew me years before I had any inkling of Fame knew that I was the kind of person to hold these kinds of views privately um when it was very unpopular to do so so uh so I just pointed that out and I think you know the it was the contrast between her deranged evidence-free character attack her very cable newsy

click baity um you know uh character assassination and my calm substantive answer that's something you don't see very often on Prime Time television and just that contrast I think uh went so viral that people were coming up to me on the street consistently for for like two months uh having seen that clip sorry and then the other funny aspect I think is that she offhandedly claimed that she you know knew Martin Luther King's Daughter which I imagine is true um and that therefore she had more kind of deeper insight into MLK's message than me uh

which is it's a total non Secor of course and she she got Martin Luther King's views all kinds of wrong in ways that I pointed out but I think people found that humorous well we could go back to that issue of color blindness and and to Toronto I mean it was a lovely thing as far as I was concerned to see that that characterized Toronto and at that time so let's say that was 15 years ago 10 to 15 years ago that was sort of emblematic of Canada like we'd actually done a pretty damn successful

job of that I mean there not 100% but pretty good and really good in Toronto and it's really been saddening to see that disappear and it has raised the question for me is well why would you want to disrupt that and if the goal is well o the overthrow of the oppressive patriarchy and the freeing of the victims then any movement I think it's the same thing that happened to the bloody Communists when capitalism that terrible word when the free market Endeavor turned out to actually reward productive workers effectively enough so they moved out of

the class of poty I mean Henry Ford did a stellar job of that right he famously overpaid his line workers he paid them enough so they could buy the cars they were producing and I mean you could hardly accuse Henry Ford of being anything other than a capitalist because you know by the leftist definition he certainly was and what happened as the free market systems expanded was that the poor got a lot richer the working class the productive working class got a lot richer now the rich got a lot richer too and the difference in

wealth distribution remained relatively constant but it's definitely the case that no other system than the free market system Has Lifted people out of poverty that's kind of rough on the Communists because it makes it harder to develop that kind of class Consciousness that would motivate the Revolution and switching that to the racial side well that's pretty good or the sex side or the ethnicity or gender side it just opens up all sorts of new axes for the Revolutionary spirit and it's a very effective move I think there's a similar Dynamic going on right now between

the Republican party and the Democrat Party uh which is to say you know since the great awokening of 2014 when uh mainstream media Outlets began using terms like systemic racism and white supremacy tfold 20 fold what they had been for the previous many many decades uh since the phenomenon of woke social justice Etc what you've seen it you know what if you're on the left what you would have predicted is that uh black voters Hispanic voters would be going even more to to to the Democratic side and that perhaps white voters would be going in

the other direction what's happened is strangely the exact opposite which is to say in the past eight years uh Republicans have been doing better and better with Black and Hispanic voters there is now no one serious who denies that that is a trend you can argue over how big the trend is but you actually can't argue that it's not a trend the reason that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 was not because he did better with um Black and Hispanic voters it was because he won a lot of white voters from Donald Trump so

so really white voters were especially women yeah um and and even even white men in some in some places so but but this is fundamentally I mean similar to your point about where workers actually vote with their feet in situations of communism versus capitalism there's something there's something very counternarrative happening in terms of just who people are voting for right it's and it's I think it's it's embarrassing for for for Democrats I don't think that they understand it um it doesn't match their model of uh political science and um it's you know I mean so

the question is why is that happening right okay so let let's do this because we're running out of steam and time here on the YouTube side let's Reserve our discussion of the political situation in the US for the daily wire side cool so yeah we can spend half an hour talking about that and for everybody who's watching and listening you could turn your attention to that additional segment of this podcast for that discussion because that is something I wanted to delve in with you anyways and that'll make a nice piece in and of itself so

let's close this up tell everybody again the title of your book the book is called the end of race politics Arguments for a colorblind America uh you can buy it on Amazon you can also listen to me I I I um narrate it myself on the audible version right right right so anybody who's interested in these issues is well advised to take that up and so well good luck with your it's continuing sales what are you what's next you finished a book you're going around speaking about it that's obviously occupying a tremendous amount of your

time you made a fory in the musical direction as well at some point in the not so uh distant past like what's on your plate over the next year or so what are what are you looking forward to in planning well I I may write another book on a topic I won't disclose um but you know in the next five months in the next three months I think I'm like many people in our profession you know covering the election closely uh both for the free Free Press uh with Barry Weiss and at CNN and all

my own podcast so that's probably going to take up the majority of my time in the next three four months right tell everybody again about your podcast too it's called conversations with Coleman listen to it wherever you listen to podcast all right sir all right well thank you to everybody who is watching and listening today and uh to the film crew here up in Northern Ontario um and to the Daily wire for making these YouTube conversations possible and well produced that's also a plus uh join us on the daily wire side and Coleman and I

are going to delve into the complexities of the American political situation for half an hour and that should be very interesting I very curious about your take on what has unfolded and what's likely to unfold in the next at least the next three months let's say thank you sir thanks for having me [Music]