XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.politics.usa, alt.education.higher
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.college.us

MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello America, I am Mark Levin, this is "Life, Liberty & Levin" with our great guest, Heather Mac Donald, how are you?


HEATHER MAC DONALD, FELLOW, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE: Fine, thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me on.

LEVIN: Well, you have a BA and MA in English. You have a JD. You are a
lawyer, but you are a scholar in so many areas -- race relations,
immigration, policing in colleges and universities. And this is where I
really wanted to delve in with you. You have a new book, "The Diversity Delusion: How race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture." This so relevant today, and you that argue toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance and widened division in our larger culture. And I think we see
this everywhere now.

MAC DONALD: We certainly do, the Kavanaugh hearings was an example that were all in gender studies 101 now, Mark. Virtually every aspect of the
culmination of hysteria that greeted Judge Kavanaugh was perfected over the last decade on the college campus.

Above all, the preposterous mantra to believe survivors regardless of the evidence, regardless of due process. This is the campus rape hysteria that
has been transforming the lives of males on campuses, creating an extraordinarily costly bureaucracy, moved into the real world and it is not going away, it's only going to get worse.

LEVIN: What have our universities and colleges become? And when did this happen? I mean, they were always kind of liberal in the last several decades, but in some ways, they are not my phrase. They are almost sort of a Soviet- style system where there really isn't free speech, you're not allowed to challenge the so-called norms in the universities, where race and gender,
seem to have a priority over other things and that sort of thing. When did
all of this happen?

MAC DONALD: Well, the 80s was when it started in my view. That is when you
got radical multiculturalism that hit. I was in college in 70s, I am grateful for because I was allowed to read John Milton, William Wordsworth and Shakespeare without anyone thinking to complain about the gonads and melanin
of those authors. I got to lose myself in beauty, in greatness and sublimity.

Come the 80s, and students were given a license for ignorance. They were
taught that the only thing they needed to know about book was the race and gender of author to know whether it was thoroughly dismissible without even being read and they could go to instead wallow in their own delusional oppression, and it has only gotten worse since then, and what we are doing is breeding the grounds for I fear, Civil War because students are being taught
to hate, to hate the greatest works of western civilization, and frankly to hate east each other.

From the moment a student steps on a college campus today as a freshman or a fresh person, I should probably say, the bureaucracy is determined to drum in to that student's head, identity politics, which says, he is either a victim
or an oppressor. Oppressors are obviously most famously white males, heterosexual white males. The only way they can get out to of their oppressor category is to become an ally - an ally of the oppressed.

The most preposterous delusion of all of this is student actually believe
that they are at risk of their lives from circumambient racism and sexism on
a college campus. This is an environment that in traditional liberal terms is the most tolerant environment in human history for society's traditionally marginalized groups.

Yet, there is a massive bureaucracy dedicated to cultivating in students this delusional sense of their own oppression, which then they carry with them,
it's a chip on their shoulder that prevents them from seizing the magnificent opportunities to learn, to read every book that is ever been written, and
they carry this chip, this delusional victimology into world at large, and
they are going around blaming American institutions of endemic racism and sexism, when that no longer is true.

LEVIN: You see it with respect to professors and tenure, you see certain professors are sort of drummed out of the classroom, you see rise in confrontation - physical confrontation on college campuses. You see that commencement speakers are almost totally of the left.

And you see when some conservatives dare to go to a college campus and want
to speak about things that are really not particularly controversial, how
often you have to bring in riot police or the security guards have to come
into the facility.

The administrators, are these old 1960's retread types or who are these
people?

MAC DONALD: Yes, the administrators are even more left wing than the faculty, and they are part of this massive bureaucracy. If students are wondering "why is my college tuition so expensive," look no further than diversity bureaucracy. At the University of California Los Angeles, their Vice
Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion makes over $400,000.00 a year. This is mindboggling. This is multiples more than your average faculty member makes. It could pay for free tuition for four years for 12 undergraduates and that Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion has nothing to do because there isn't a single bigot on a university campus today.

Every faculty search is one desperate effort to find qualified females or so-called underrepresented minorities, this refers to blacks and Hispanics
who haven't already been snapped up by better endowed schools. So what do the Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion do? Because they are certainly not routing circumambient racism and sexism, what they are doing is drumming into students' heads this false narrative of victimology.

And what is amazing to me is that colleges are somehow held harmless for the rising tuitions. The solution that's always bandied about in public discourse is, more Federal aid. No. Don't feed the beast. Cut the bureaucracy, get back to the basics of learning, which now is a distance after thought, no faculty has the guts to say, "We know what you should learn, you are ignorant, we're here to put knowledge in your empty noggins. Instead, students are given
utter carte blanche to decide what to study. The faculty have abdicated their intellectual responsibility, and as you say, we are in a very weird situation where speakers such as myself, who was prevented from talking about policing
at Claremont McKenna College, when I need a police escort to come on to a college campus, an alarm bell should be going off in the faculty's ear
saying, "Something is wrong here." But instead, the faculty are nowhere to be found.

LEVIN: Let me ask you this. So why do we passively subsidize this? Through
our taxes? Through tuition? Through student loans? You know, you have Bernie Sanders out there saying, free college for everybody. Well, of course, these are, as you saying more indoctrination mills more than anything else, so free college, and Obama with - you know, the Federal government should assume all these student debt. So they talk about college as if it really is academic, rather than in so many respects, propaganda oriented.

They know about this then. They know what they are doing. It bleeds into the greater society, doesn't it? It bleeds into politics. It bleeds into the
media. Some of the things you're talking about, I see in the media. I see it with anchors on TV. I see it with commentators on TV.

MAC DONALD: Well, identity politics is everywhere. I am so sick of hearing somebody preface his remarks by saying, "Well, as a white female or as a
black female, XYZ," I am sorry, that a non sequitur. It is not the case that
I can predict your views knowing that you are a white male. I cannot predict your views if you are a black female, and it is height of both arrogance and condescension to think that somebody can be type casted on the base of.

But of course that is now currency of political the realm. So it has
certainly bled into politics. The Democratic Party now is an extension of
this poisonous identity politics on college campuses and to be honest, I can only hope it continues because American by and large are not buying it.

But the thing that worries me worries the most, Mark, is what this is doing
to our scientific advantage in the so-called STEM fields. This is the
science, technology, engineering and math. For a while, people who were optimist, thought, "Well, okay, you've got the gender studies here, you've
got the women studies there, you've got the Chicano studies there," it's all going to stay put.

Science will be the one realm that remains committed to meritocracy because
we all understand, of course, that there no such thing as female physics.
There is no such thing as Iranian physics. There is physics. There is math. This is the accomplishment of human reason that is open to everybody. Well, that was a false hope.

Anybody that knew anything about university would have known, it is not safe, and now, you have nothing less than the National Science Foundation, a
Federal agency that is the premier funder of basic research on college
campuses that has itself been columnized by this poisonous identity politics.

The National Science Foundation is spending billions of our taxpayer dollars funding gender theorists on college campuses to study so-called intersectionality and micro-aggressions in the STEM fields on the assumption that the only possible explanation for why we do not have 50/50 gender parity in our engineering departments and math departments must be by definition the result of sexism, that is the diversity delusion. That is the fundamental lie that we've been fed that any disparity in a representation whether it's a gender disparity or race disparity must be the result of discrimination, and
so our STEM fields now are obsessed with gender equity and race equity.

LEVIN: So it also is an attack as you write on competition, obviously and on merit.

MAC DONALD: It is.

LEVIN: And so we kind of dumb down our society, we tribalize our society, we balkanize our society, who does this benefit?

MAC DONALD: Well, it benefits the bureaucracy because let's start again with the college campus, but it goes to corporations as well. On a college campus, students are being taught to hate, they are being taught to think of
themselves as victims. I would argue, this is a side issue we can get or
can't get into racial preferences, which are a poisonous policy feed into
this in complex ways, but every time that students hold these protests like Brown students occupying President's Office saying, "Well, it's very hard to have to go to class and study for exams because we're working so hard at
quote, 'staying alive at Brown,'" this preposterous, this is delusional.

But every time there is a little outbreak of student hysteria, the diversity bureaucracy walks in and says, "Well, we need more diversity bureaucrats,"
and sadly the students agree, and they inevitably ask for more Vice
Chancellors of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

LEVIN: But you also brought up the Kavanaugh hearing. And so what I'm getting at is, when you indoctrinate people this way, when you affect their thinking this way, I mean, eventually, they leave college, they leave the university, and they go out into the broader world, and I feel like the Democratic Party plays into this. I feel like the Democratic Party plays into this, more and more media play into this because a lot of these people in politics more and more and the media more and more come out of this mind set, do they not?

MAC DONALD: Well, yes, the media believes again, that race and gender
determine everything. There is not a single mainstream media outlet that is
not determining what stories to cover, who to source them to, who to quote,
and who to write them that is not looking at race and gender on the
assumption that those attributes determine our world, that America is profoundly racist, profoundly sexist and they are seeking stories that they think support that narrative.

And it's also incorporations, HR departments, you know, one of the main milestones that show how much the university identity politics is
transforming our competitive edge was when Google fired a young computer engineer named James Damore in August of 2017.

Damore wrote a factual reason-based 10-page memo simply questioning the feminist orthodoxy that reins at Google. He was fired. Well, one of the interesting comments on the Google chat board said, "We need to stop this diversity madness before it goes any further." Right now, our HR department
is simply an outpost of gender studies and black studies.

LEVIN: All right, don't forget, folks. Almost every week night, you can watch Levine TV, Levin TV, I will be there at crtv.com, crtv.com. We'd love you to join us. Just give us a call at 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV. We'll be right back.

Heather Mac Donald, you've talked about how the ideas tear at the American fabric. But they have real world consequences, not only in our politics, not only in our media but in competition with countries -- China, Russia and so forth. Explain.

MAC DONALD: Well, China is ruthlessly meritocratic. It doesn't give a damn about identity politics. It wants the best engineers and the best physics. If they are all female, great. If they are all male, great. Who cares?

The United States is diverting vast sums of money into trying to engineer gender parity in its labs. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead with ruthless competitive drive. We are putting our competitive edge at risk.

Right now, we are still ahead, but do not assume that that is going to last forever if we continue to put these irrelevancies of gender above all else
and race to a lesser extent ahead of scientific competitiveness. Because
again, it's not just China, it's also Russia, they are spending 100% of their science research money on doing science. We are devoting ever increasing percentage into gender politics, whether it's at MIT, Harvard or UC Berkeley
or whether it is coming out of Congress through the National Science Foundation. This has to be stopped.

LEVIN: This has to be stopped. You've got almost a monopoly ideology on these college campuses, you're getting to a point of a monopoly ideology in newsrooms. In the Democratic Party, you have almost a monopoly ideology.
There aren't many so-called centrist or moderates left, certainly very few conservatives left. This is quite daunting, isn't it?

MAC DONALD: It is daunting but one has to fight for truth against falsehood.

LEVIN: How will you do that?

MAC DONALD: Well, I think for one, we need to defund the universities. Alumni have to stop giving money, realize that these schools, you have a false ideal about them, they are again, generators of ideology, not of wisdom. And there needs to be alternative venues, the support of classical learning and the humanities, but I think frankly, and certainly, we need to talk about the
value of free speech, but the free speech problem is a symptom of something much more deep, which is this cultivation of victimology.

I think what also needs to be done, Mark, and this may be a false hope, I
don't hear enough voices providing an alternative explanation for why there
is not necessarily 50/50 gender parity in a math department. Right now the
sole explanation out there is implicit bias that females are somehow being discouraged from studying math. The fact is, this country with the most
gender equity have the greatest disparities in STEM because on average,
females and males are interested in different types of work.

Males on average and there's always individual differences, you can't assume anything about an individual based on an average, but on average males are
more attracted on abstract work, to competition. They are higher risk - risk prone. Females want more hands on, relational human-based work.

So I do not expect that people working for the Nobel Prize in physics or earning it in math are going to be 50/50 gender, and I am also willing to
talk about something that is very taboo, Mark, which is that skills are not evenly distributed among different groups. High-end math skills, if you look
at the 0.1% of the highest in math skills and also the dummies who are the worst math clods, it's males who are the greatest math geniuses, 0.1% of the highest in math skills, males outnumber females 2.5 to 1.

So Larry Summers, when he was President of Harvard dared talk about this distribution of math skills, he got fired. We have to keep talking about that though because they dominate the explanation for inequalities or lack of
parity is always racism or sexism, we have to fight that.

LEVIN: Let's overlay this with immigration. Because if diversity based on physical characteristics and so forth is the key, which takes place in
colleges and universities and more and more in the broader society, this complicates it even further, because people coming into this country, many of whom are we would consider minorities, south of the border -- Asia, Africa,
the Middle East -- how do we account for that? In other words, when I see
these statistics about the percentage of the population that is this group
and why aren't they a part of this group, well some of them are first generation. Some of them haven't event Where are they not part of this group, some are first generations, some of them haven't even assimilated into the country yet.

So many of these statistics are bogus to begin with. And aren't we teaching people who come into this country, newly come into this country the wrong thing? Shouldn't we be teaching assimilation? The American culture,
meritocracy as you put it, and so forth, and yet, I don't see us doing that?

MAC DONALD: No, of course not. Assimilation is now a dirty word. You cannot speak about that on a college campus. And what I find most interesting is the way Asians are tending. Right now, to be a victim in the United States is to
be highest elite position you can occupy. Power ironically flows from being a victim. You have this ruthlessly competitive drive to see who can be top
victim - top dog victim.

And it is mano-y-mano, people are pulling each other down. Now, the top
victim is trans, but I can guarantee you, in another five years, trans is
going to be pulled down and they will be somebody else on top victim, and anybody who can predict that gets the prize.

LEVIN: You were talking about --

MAC DONALD: And Asians - Asians are the most academically competitive,
because the academic culture at home is so strong, and yet, a large
percentage of Asians are saying, "Well, don't call us the model minority, we want to be people of color against whites." You have a lot of Asians that are voting democratic, that actually support racial preferences in universities because even though it acts against them, Asians are the ones that most penalized by racial preferences.

LEVIN: Well, let me slow you down there. You don't see that at Harvard? The Asian community or part of it is challenging.

MAC DONALD: A small --

LEVIN: That they are challenging the admissions at Harvard because they are being discriminated against because it is not based on merit.

MAC DONALD: Right.

LEVIN: And so this is a problem for that community, but I don't even like
this kind of talk -- that community -- we so dehumanize humanity. We
dehumanize the individuals is what I am trying to say. We'll be right back.

LAUREN GREEN, CORRESPONDENT, FOX NEWS: Live from "America's News
Headquarters," I'm Lauren Green. Alaska experiencing more than a thousand aftershocks following Friday's earthquake near Anchorage. The magnitude 7.0 quake ripped open roads and left thousands without power. Fortunately, no deaths or serious injuries have been reported.

Meanwhile, memorials beginning for President George H.W. Bush. The 41st President will lie in state at the US Capitol starting Monday evening through Wednesday morning. He will then be honored with a state funeral at the
National Cathedral in Washington before his body returns to Texas for a
second memorial service and a burial at his presidential library in College Station, Texas.

President Bush's spokesman just tweeted this image showing President Bush's service dog, Sully lying next to his casket, forever loyal. Mr. Bush passed away Friday at the age of 94. I am Lauren Green, now back to "Life, Liberty & Levin."

LEVIN: Heather Mac Donald. We've seen this caravan, this invasion that's been taking place for a period of time. The President wants to put an end to it. I look at this and I think to myself, shouldn't the nation be united in wanting to secure the border whether you are for immigration, opposed to immigration? This is a law and order matter. This is a sovereignty matter and when you see these pictures and the video of individuals throwing rocks, throwing bottles
at ICE, at our law enforcement, and yet there is a significant percentage of our society including members of Congress, including people in the media, including so- called scholars, who don't denounce this. In fact, they
denounce the President for trying to resolve it. What do you make of that?

MAC DONALD: It is remarkable. It is a divide that I cannot even get over. I
can sometimes put myself in the shoes of the left on other matters, but on
this one, it seems so obvious that you do not - nobody is entitled to enter
any other country illegally. I am not entitled to walk into Germany, and say "Take me in." This is a fundamental right of citizens on determine themselves who comes in and who doesn't.

So it is a matter of principle. We can also say as a matter of consequence,
if you lose that right, the migration flows that are going to take place in
to United States would absolutely crush us.

LEVIN: Milton Friedman famously said, you cannot have a welfare state and
open borders, you will destroy a country. And I look at this and I say to myself, "It is really in recent times that people try to break into country, carrying the flag of the country they come from, and then claim that they
want asylum." And then to have people in the United States, people of prominence, public officials, media figures and so forth excusing it while
they are hungry, while they want a better life, well this and well that.

Okay, so if somebody robs a bank because they need money to pay their
mortgage, that is okay. If somebody goes in a grocery store and steals a
whole bunch of steak, because they need to feed their children, that's okay? There is a breakdown in respect for law and order, whether it is immigration, whether it is Baltimore or any of these types of situations. Why is that?

MAC DONALD: Well, we have ideology of you do not blame of victim, and so what you are saying is absolutely correct. That has been a factor in the left wing culture for a long time that if you get to claim victim status, you are absolved from following the rules. You can colonize, you can defecate on the street because, well, you are a victim. You can steal because you are a
victim. You can shoot other people because you are a victim - do not apply -
we have given up on the idea of the single moral standard for all people.

Obviously, for the Democrats when it comes to immigration, there is a belief that the more third world people of color that they bring in, the more they
get a larger base for identity politics. I think what is driving this as well is some just profound hatred for western civilization, which is perceived as being a function of white males and so there is a desire to somehow deluge it and destroy what created just extraordinary advances in human wellbeing, prosperity, reason and obviously, affluence.

But you know, what I find so extraordinary is the left in the morning has one narrative, which is that, there no place more oppressive on earth than the United States for people of color. It's just, if you are a person of color in the United States, you are the subject of constant oppression and then in afternoon, says we need every third world person of color to come here. Well, they cannot both be true.

Why is it that so many people in the third world are begging? They are
breaking law to come into the United States because they will be oppressed?
The ACLU should be saying - the ACLU in its morning mode should be saying to those third world people of color stay put. You are much better off, and you are freer and more affluent and nobody is going to kill you by oppression in your third world person of color country. Instead, they will want them to
come in.

So it's a completely incoherent ideology that can only be unpacked by understanding that the agenda here ultimately is to try to bring down western civilization.

LEVIN: When we come back, I want to pursue that again, why would there be forces in this country that live in the lap of luxury, that live in the lap
of liberty, that live in the lap of law and order, justice, trying to destroy it? I think that is the big question.

Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget, most week nights you can watch me on
Levin TV, Levin TV. I hope you will join us. Go to crtv.com/mark,
crtv.com/mark or give us a call 844-LEVIN-TV, that's 844-LEVIN-TV. We'll be right back.

We do need to ask the question, I do, why would there be such powerful forces in this country that want to destroy these various instrumentalities of liberty, these constitutional standard and so forth, and let me give you my idea. Isn't it because that's the nature of progressivism. Progressivism is
the - really the progeny of Marxism, of Hegel, of Rousseau that they've told
us this. John Dewey told us this. Woodrow Wilson told us this. Many of them told us this. The intellectuals beginning of the last century, and they tell
us this today. Pretty much.

That is, we need a clean slate. So this country was founded by slave owners,
it has got to be destroyed. The Constitution is okay if we can use it to get where we want to go. Liberty is good as long as we can exploit liberty to get to where we want to go. And so they talk about radical egalitarianism -- college for all, healthcare for all -- and this isn't new. We've seen it in
all these societies that basically destroy liberty and empower government, centralized government. It's the same story relative few control the society, while they claim to be populists and reformers and so forth. Isn't that the scent of what is taking place here?

MAC DONALD: Well, that's certainly part of it and because it true that you
can say Marxism, at least in its embodiment in China and Russia. China at
least was not really a western phenomenon. To me, what I notice about our world, too, is that the peculiarity of American culture in Western European culture in general, being so self-hating.

This is, I think relatively new in human experience for a culture to want to claim that its own basis is founded in injustice. Rather than celebrating itself traditionally, maybe to a fault, countries in civilizations celebrate strength and accomplishment and power, and maybe not enough to appreciate
other cultures.

We're the opposite. It is a very corrosive, but very weird development in
human history for the elite to be so dedicated to a narrative of guilt and shame. And one can seek an explanation in ultimate power, as you say that the progressive elites are seeking to control society and to impose I guess, a radical egalitarian agenda. But one has to ask, like, why is that? And it is complicated. I think for America obviously, we did have an original sin at
the start of this country which was our treatment of blacks, and it was very ugly and very hard for us to understand now we could go for so many decades without seeing that fundamental contradiction.

Many people did. And one can say that even at the start of the Constitution foresaw that eventually this contradiction would be reconciled and worked
out. Nevertheless, it is understandable that we're guilty. Now, Shelby Steele on your program was very eloquent about saying it is time to move beyond that and realize that we now provide equal opportunity and opportunity for individuals to seize their own fate and better themselves through the
exercise of bourgeoisie values.

But a large part of the society wants to hold on to that guilt, exploit it
and continue with the idea that oppression is the defining characteristics. I mean, to me, the greatest exponent of these today is this highly sought after college speaker Ta-Nehisi Coates who is making just untold sums going around telling America, telling white America that the very essence of America is to destroy the black body, not in that 19th Century, but today, and people love it.

He goes to these all white colleges and tells them, "The essence of you
people is to destroy us," and people cheer. It is a very, very weird thing.

LEVIN: And you know, I don't think it is unique in the sense that you have greatest country really, that mankind has ever established, where this is
sort of rotting from within, and others have, too, whether it's Athens or
Rome and so forth. I don't compare us to them I am just saying ...

MAC DONALD: For different reasons. I don't think they were saying, "We are
the oppressors on earth."

LEVIN: But they didn't need to. They just rotted from within because of the
way they treated each other and the way they rejected their own initial founding. But that said, I'm not comfortable with just saying "it is weird" because it is weird. Because it is well too advanced, it's too ubiquitous in
my view to leave it at weird. I am not saying there's a conspiracy. I am
saying there is an ideology and the ideology is the ideology and it tells us what the ideology is.

What is past is bad. What's today is bad. Only the future counts. And only we masterminds can form the future. We've seen it in other societies in other forms and in other ways. And that is part of the puzzle of America, isn't it. We have freedom which allows people to do things to this country and in this country that I think can be extremely destructive. We'll be right back.

Heather Mac Donald, if we don't secure our border even - 90% to 95% secure
the border, know who is coming. Vet them. It we don't recognize that we are a sovereign nation, a nation state with borders, and for people who come here even legally. If we don't assimilate people generally into our culture, into our language, into our communities, where are we going to be? You cease to be
a country, right?

MAC DONALD: Sure, you become nothing. I mean, what the main problem is this large unchecked low skilled immigration flow that is imposing enormous cost
on the country in terms of welfare, schooling, prison construction, policing and is bringing a - they don't have social capital.

And what I have documented is the creation of a second under class where a
lot of the kids of these illegal immigrants who are coming from largely
peasant culture, instead of - again, because we're not having an argument or
a narrative about assimilation, they are being sucked into gang culture, you have the highest out of wedlock teen birth rate among Hispanics, highest dropout rate from high schools among Hispanics. Many are succeeding. They are starting businesses, but a significant number is getting sucked into oppositional values into sort of a gangster mentality.

And that is creating greater social divisions, and it's costing taxpayers enormous amount of money. Americans can see what happens, you know, in many communities when you have illegal people coming in, gang crime goes up. This
is not an illusion. And so, it is the right of any citizen body, it's not
just Americans, Mexico, nobody has birth right citizenship for illegal
aliens.

You want to see border controls, look at what Mexico does try to do, unless it's a caravan that's going through en route to the United States, but every

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