Heather McDonald

 

I took notes (in my own words, not 100% what was said or how said) on the 7/24/24 Real Talk videotaped interview conducted by Marissa Streit (CEO of Prager U) with conservative thinker and author, Heather Mac Donald.

 

Below I will display my notes and then comment periodically on them.

 

M is short for Marissa: “You used to be a liberal?”

 

My response: I was a liberal in 1972, attended a George McGovern rally, and considered draft dodging by fleeing to Canada, but soon I realized that I was actually a conservative.

 

H is for Heather: “I didn’t know anything. While living in New York I saw the poison of big government, and the insanity of welfare on demand. DEI has allowed students with lower entrance exam scores to be admitted to university and graduate, but they have to take licensing exams many times, and some never pass.”

 

M: “You warned us about BLM and DEI. You warned us about Academia and the arts. How did you become so discerning with instincts about social issues?”

 

H: “I was fortunate. I received a great classical education in the liberal arts which now has been destroyed by professors. I was privileged to know the great tradition.

 

I was saddened and furious to see artists and professors turn on the Western canon and beauty, causing the loss of a great inheritance. We have to reject phony accusations of racism and sexism and tell the truth.”

 

My response: Amen.

 

M. “You are well-trained in the classics. You are fighting for what we have lost. Kids are not learning the classics. Kids do not know what they are missing or at is worth fighting for. You had access to that great tradition.”

 

My response: Marrisa is correct. Children need access to the great, Western educational canon. Then some multicultural exposure to minor artists and thinkers from other cultures could be included Each student needs to be reared as an individuators that individual-lives and self-realizes.

 

H: How true. My school had not been colonized yet. In the 60s and 70s I got to read great books without a chip on my shoulder, saying it to be rejected because it is not written by a white female. I will not read anything by a dead white male. Childrens’ ears need exposure to this great language (English) to gain what the rhythms of that language can share and what great imaginations can offer.”

 

My response: Progressives are groupist and close-minded: only books written by members of an admired group can be read, and brilliant literature, art or music generated from dead, heterosexual, Christian, white males must all be abandoned as suspect. Notice that groupists, especially true believers, assign worth through pack association, and assign complete blame and rejection to any unaligned individualist or rival group.

 

M: “The rejection of the Western canon is heartbreaking and dangerous.”

 

H: We should be down on our knees in gratitude, but privileged professors betray their own tradition, disparaging it.”

 

My response: Both women are quite correct.

 

H: “I grew up in west Los Angeles, and absorbed its liberal, typical West Coast culture. I absorbed the knee-jerk assumptions that we were an unjust society.”

 

My response: We are the least unjust people on earth.

 

H: “I thought income inequality and capitalism were unfair. In the last few years, I am amazed that this microphone works, that we have clean water to drink; fresh milk is amazing. Low mother mortality rates and plastic bags are amazing.”

 

My response: Amen, Heather.

 

H: “One can overcome the blindness of the view that we are part of decadent Western society and start to see its greatness.”

 

M: “I didn’t realize before that you were a liberal. How did that change?”

 

H: “I studied hard. I wanted to be a comparative literature professor but feminism, identity politics, multiculturalism, black studies were movements that provided students with the easy excuse for their ignorance, and they were taught to hate the past ruled by dead white males with nothing of value to offer, who were inherently oppressive. I got angry. I had always opposed attakcs on meritocracy. I never favored racial preferences. The insanity of people getting welfare with nothing demanded of them. Mother just got bigger welfare checks if they had more babies. Just what the Republicans had said.”

 

My response: I admire her for waking up and becoming angry. Marxist ideologues slaughtered and defamed the Western canon. Westerners are not only were and are the least oppressive people on earth, but they are increasingly such. Their denouncers and detractors have lied about them and defamed them, and now Western youths and the whole world accepts that slander as established fact, the embedded Big Lie.

 

It occurs to me that Heather’s being for meritocracy of racial preferences is implicitly a backing of individual identity, individual rights, and individual morality (egoism-individualism) above group identifying, group rights and altruism-collectivism, group morality.

 

I also assume Heather the conservative atheist is also an ethical hybrid like other conservative thinkers (Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager for instance). Her ethics likely are altruist-egoist while mine is egoist-altruist, a more moderate, noble uplifting moral system.

 

We will not unleash meritocracy and suppress oppressive racial or any other group preferencing until we adopt Mavellonialist morality—egoism/altruism—which will radically enable, empower, and liberate each individual student to maverize, becoming the best version of herself.

 

H: “I saw with my own eyes the failure of the welfare state, but the New York Times journalists still saw the same things that I as an amateur, student journalist observed, on the streets of New York, but they differently concluded that the welfare state was fine.”

 

M: “Those journalists were ideologues and their biases showed through.”

 

H: “A journalism degree was not worth it, but as a student journalist, a young person could learn to write, meet deadlines, write, write, report and investigate.  I could admit my ignorance so then could grow and did.”

 

My response: Her admission of wrong concluding and being ignorant was the smartest, wisest, humblest, and most objective piece of self-assessment that she or any young person that wants to become educated and wise must admit so they like young Heather could grow and then did. This painful, humbling process of making mistakes and then admitting to them is the only way that one can stumble along the road of individuating.

 

M: “The best journalists are not ideologues but speak the truth.”

 

H: “We have our cognitive biases and we select the facts that confirm our biases. For example, the police are not after black men; that I know.”

 

My response: I agree with both women fully.

 

M: “DEI: Where did it come from?”

 

H: “It began in the corporate world with racial preferences. People were hired with lower qualifications, and they ended up not doing as well and the only answer given is that they were performing less well for having suffered double standards. Race hustlers, diversity consultants abounded while managers were taught how to handle black people, and managers were taught not to expect promptness from black people (not a black value). Managers were taught not to expect promptness from blacks or accuracy either.”

 

My response: There is no need for tolerance to be given for double standards; the only standard applicable or useful in any hierarchy is meritocracy, grounded in human nature, that all humans are born more or less equally of worth, and blessed with a modest range of talent difference, that, any person, black or white, with adapted character traits like discipline, fierce desire and determination to excel by self-realizing, very hard work and a sense of self-worth being practiced over time consistently, then anyone can compete against anyone. Lower the standards for none, and invite each individual to individuate, and she can self-challenge to come up to any standard imposed by the institution, knowing full well that she can compete against the best candidates from anywhere in the world.

 

H: “Then diversity overtook Academia, a code word for racial preferences, and now we have 66% of black seniors with no basic math skills. ACT scores indicate that only 3% of black seniors are ready to work towards a STEM degree. If you do a Google search which indicates that 13% of Americans are black, so 13% of engineers have to be black, or you are racist.”

 

M: “Liberals defend poor black student academic performance as low because society discriminates against black students, not giving inner city schools the resources they need to compete with whites.”

 

My response: These two women are spot on.

 

H: “Even poor black urban schools receive Title I welfare largesse--$30,000 per studentand yet are failing, while Catholic schools only receive $6,000 per student and student score high on all national tests. In Catholic schools, high expectations, order in schools and families that value education in the home, are all contributing factors leading to high student success rates.

 

The financial explanation does not hold up. There is no correlation between funding and performance. America is no longer racist though it once was. After the 1960s racial identity changed. Today it is black privilege not white privilege.”

 

My response: Yes, blacks are now privileged and whites are second class. DEI is about racial revenge and reverse racism under which blacks are ascendant and whites are discriminated against and persecuted. This divides our peoples and grows racism, conflict. and hatred, one day perhaps culminating in race war.

 

Only individual identity—the true and human intersectionality—individual morality, individual rights, individual-living, and individuating can lead us away from racism and prejudice, and this Mavellonialist reform is purely opposed to the anti-DEI ideology of hatred.

 

H: “I’ll believe in white privilege if black kids call themselves white to get into college. Heterosexual white males are not getting into law school and medical school now. Our schools are lousy, taken over by an anti-meritocratic ideology.”

 

My response: Any ideology that is not color-blind and 100% supportive of meritocracy is against individualism and individuating for each student.

 

H: “We also need to see a change in inner city black culture.”

 

My response: That is a mouthful. Dennis Prager wisely reminds us that good values allow humans to flourish; bad values lead to self-destruction, poverty, chaos, and crime. Black children need a married dad in their lives, and they need to appreciate their egoistic, divine requirement to man up, self-realize and learn all they can. Then racial preference would never again need to be called for or justified legally or culturally.

 

H: “If black parents acted like Asian parents, the performance gap between black and white students would disappear. The DEI lie is just an excuse for under-performance.”

 

M: “Let’s talk about medical schools. MCAT scores for blacks are 31 and Asians and whites come in at 39. This is racism to allow blacks with lower scores to be admitted to white schools ahead of higher-scoring white and Asians. The lower diverse standard for blacks increases diversity which is good for medicine, the Progressives argue, and it is good for non-white patients.”

 

H: “It is an untrue myth that blacks in medical school get remedial help and catch up. It is not true, and they do not catch up. It never happens. These lower-scoring students are less able students that are black and Hispanic meet lower standards. These graduated doctors never catch up and cannot pass the licensing exams. We must go to a color-blind standard of achievement.”

 

My response: I agree with both women.

 

H: “Black doctors are not graded, just graded pass/fail. Medical schools are now graduating incompetent doctors, lacking skill, and knowledge. There is a lower bar for less competent doctors. They take the licensing exam over and over and some never pass it. There are now lots of lawsuits over malpractice and unnecessary deaths of patients. The emphasis must be less social justice and more competence to protect patient safety.

 

Bernard Davis of Harvard is now a pariah and his career is over because he said that racial preferences leads to less qualified doctors. Do you want a less competent doctor because he is of your race? A doctor needs to understand microbiology and the Kreb cycle. Blacks are taught that science is racist.”

 

My response: We should always go with the best candidate based on merit does not race, and science is the jewel of the West, and the Divine Couple are Scientists, as well as poets, creators and Awesomely Rational. Science is not racist, but the fear of, the rejection of, and hatred of science is a hatred of the brilliant, hardworking scientists that gave us our wondrous modern civilization and culture.

 

H: “The Tuskegee experiment was complicated, a cruel effort, and medical experiment. White doctors may have been racist back then but are not now. Western science is the flower of humanity and one of the most extraordinary accomplishments to overcome rank ignorance, superstition, phony cognitive mistakes and erroneous causation, correlation comparisons. We enjoye the benefits of the beautiful double-blind random experimentation, that is an incredible breakthrough.

 

If we are told to hate and suspect science, we will never get what we deserve. Racial disparities are the cause of different health outcomes. The common story told is dangerous and irresponsible. The Scientific American post after George Floyd’s killing in 2020 confessed to phantom racism and accused everyone else of racism, that US us systemically racist, and that one way to talk of this is to talk about obesity as a health risk for black women. That is now racist too. If black women are obese, doctors are racist. All American behavior is abysmal. We eat too much, not exercise, we smoke, take drugs, and these behavior cause health problems. To pretend that that does not matter is against the Hippocratic oath. Medical schools are now total left-wing ideology factories. Feminists insist that they must not teach about obesity, that that would be racist.”

 

My response: She is totally correct.

 

M: “Can you imagine a white person refusing to see a black doctor?”

 

My response: At my Dad’s funeral in 2011, I got bad hotdish from a neighbor bringing infected hotdish to the farmhouse after the funeral in North Dakota; I had H. pylori bacertial infection that causes ulcers, and the two exploded quickly with infection in my intestine. I drove myself at least 15 miles at night at 20 below zero from a motel where I went to rest in Drayton, North Dakota and went to the hospital emergency room in Grafton. The doctor on duty was from Africa, a handsome man, and as nice, sharp, and intuitive about diagnostics as I have ever encountered. It did not occur to me to refuse treatment because he was black; I could care less what his color was. He saved my life; I almost died from toxic shock during the night, and the nurse told my wife that it was touch and go, and they did not think I would make it to morning. I made a remarkable recovery rather fast, and I would recommend that stellar, kind physician to anybody.

 

M: “That white person would be called racist, but blacks are not called racist if they refuse to see a white doctor. People are taught this garbage by the culture.”

 

H: “Yes, people are told this in a well-intentioned but misguided way. The reason for ongoing racial trouble is racism, the only allowable explanation.”

 

My response: The actual reason for ongoing racism is identity politics, both cultural and political, the ongoing emphasis on group rights, group-living, group-identifying, groupist morality, the emphasis on one’s own group pride at the expense of shaming and downgrading the group pride of rival groups and tribes. Judging people by their group affiliations, pro or con, is racism.

 

H: “There is no free speech at colleges now—not even in private conversations. A professor lamented that black students were struggling after being admitted to college based on racial preferences. She said this in a private zoom call and was fired. If you question the ubiquity of systemic white supremacy, your career is over.

 

At colleges, the fear of the truth is so great that those that speak it must be  banned.”

 

M: “How do we get inner city minorities to become smart, educated, good doctors, based on competence, not racial preferences?”

 

H: “Stop tearing down standards. The standards are not racist.”

 

My response: We must never lower standards or fail to give good grades. A governmental, academic, corporate or education standard of meritocracy and color-blind candidate admission, hiring, promoting and reward must be based on merit alone, and, merit is an individual effort and enterprise.

 

The challenge is to invite blacks and anyone to individuate, individual-live and work very hard to excel. Then inner-city blacks would excel so much, that the transformation would seem miraculous.

 

H: “We have to stop apologizing for standards of excellence. We have to stop having double standards. If you tell a student that he will not have to meet the same standards as whites and Asians, why should he try?”

 

M: “Whites are now pretending to be minorities to be admitted to college.”

 

H: “I will believe in white privilege when I see a black student call himself white. We should not lower expectations, for that is the soft bigotry of low expectations. The Left argues that we can end the skills gap with more resources. The Right is pushing vouchers, private schools and charter school scholarships. Nothing is working.”

 

My response: To blame society for minority student low achievement as a denial of resources is a lie. With almost no resources, any poor individuators of any color, race, gender, or creed, will academically excel and be unstoppable because she is determined to excel—the quality of school and availability of resources are of relatively minor importance.

 

H: “The solution has to be the emphasis on internal cultural changes: we must stop making excuses for blacks and blacks have to quite making excuses. There are black voices demanding high expectations: there is no excuse for criminals, and there is no respect for the police and law and order.

 

We do not lift people up by tearing down the standards, telling them the world is stacked against them.

 

There is nothing more enraging than Biden’s speech at Morehouse College asking why blacks should believe in democracy when they are being killed by whites, a complete lie. Blacks are killing blacks at a rate of 24 times the rate of whites, and between the ages of 10 and 15, black males died at nearly 25 times the rate of whites.

 

Biden said today a black has to be 10 times better than anyone else and the reality is the opposite. We have to quite sending the message that gives blacks an excuse to hate our culture. Yes, our past was deplorable. One thing I agree with the 1619 project is we still not fully acknowledge our history, but we need pay no reparations because every other culture was worse. West Africa had slavery decoupled from it only when the British navy occupied Lagos—no more slave trade. I will pay reparations when all countries pay reparations. We must no longer tell this white supremacy lie or we will never get over racism.  Don’t give blacks an excuse to hate our culture”

 

My response: Amen.

 

M: “Let us talk about crime. Explain California’s Racial Justice Act.”

 

H; “No, I can’t. It is inexplicable. It is the worst. It is CRT injected into the legal system, now called CRT legal, saying fundamentally that US is rotten to the core in all institutions, including the legal ones, a plot to keep blacks down.

 

This Racial Justice Act claims the system is racist: it is so racist that if you are black, you do not even need to prove it. Allegedly in part blacks are treated more harshly under the legal system. So, if I murder you, you can’t prosecute for murder. And one-off murders being excused is bad enough, but it is much worse to let of gang-murderers affecting entire communities due to the tit-for-tat murders, so I get off.

 

The Supreme Court precedent in Georgia where a black killed a white cop and got the death penalty. I am not saying I was prosecuted unfairly but others in the strudy in Georgia were, and the study showed blacks killing whites were more likely to get the death penalty.

 

The Supreme Court responded that it is not good enough to make the general case: you must show the judge, jury and prosecutor in your case were racist for you to be let go and escape the death penalty conviction.

 

McClusky vs. Kemp was that case and it was thrown out by the California legislature. They said the defendant did not have to show general bias to be let off. No individual proof was necessary as all past cases in California led to bias in my county so they must overturn my conviction. I get to relitigate my case. Public defenders are ecstatic, handed a tool they think to take down a racist system, and it is burying DA offices with request for data and phony statistics. It is going to take down a state that cannot protect  toothpaste and hard-working business owners, who put their savings and egos on the line.”

 

My response: If individual black murder cases can demonstrated by defense lawyers to have bias built in against the black defendant, okay, but this overly broad dismissal of the need to prove the innocence of the defendant, and that there was or was not discrimination at his trial, is a monstrous invention that will allow criminals to run free and commit murder and other felonies with no repercussions.

 

Crime going unpunished will destroy our civilization and that is unjust and must not be tolerated, regardless of the skin color of the perpetrator. We must have law and order.

 

H: “The California government is not protecting business. If we enforce the law that will have a disparate impact that would put more blacks in prison. The government is telling citizens and businesses to twist in the wind.”

 

M: “It is scary when crime runs a community. I cannot go to CVS to get stuff; it is all locked up. This DEI is working its way down to lower rungs of society. It is hitting the ground, the street: we are not just talking about woke ideology: DEI is allowing people to be mean.”

 

My response: I agree.

 

M: “Your book describes how in a New York theater how white people were told to leave so blacks could enjoy their time there, and the NYT lauded this.”

 

H: “This is symbolic of what is happening in all our institutions. It is zero sum are these racial preferences. It is anti-white and anti-Asian, and it gets white members down while putting up with this. It is double standards. If whites talked about blacks the way the culture talks about whites, white privilege and white pathologies, whites would be control-freaks and racists. There should be a revolution but this is just the norm.

 

Crime relief is not an ivory tower issue, a hot house concern: it effects the poor and the small business owners that will suffer.

 

Progressive pros do not prosecute to hold down the disparate impact. They do not enforce the law, so blacks do not go to jail. The system is not racist but crime by blacks is so high. Again, do not tear down the standards of meritocratic college admission standards or behavior standards. You do not get to beat up old ladies. No more flash mobs. The standard is not racist. The behavior has to change. Keep the standard and expect everyone to live up to them.”

 

My response: Yes.

 

H: “The disparagement of whites and our civilization make me realize that we have nothing to apologize for because every other civilization engaged in the same imperialism, the same colonization, and the same slavery as ours. I will not apologize until these civilzations apologize as well.”

 

M: “What are you warning us about now? The attack by the universities on American civilization. Students love affair with Hamas for example. How are American kids marching for a terrorist group?”

 

H: “It comes from such rank ignorance. They do not know what the rest of the world looks like. The only thing that they know that has been drummed into them that they are part of a guilty culture. Anything that comes out of Europe is Caucasian and that is just reality like Chinese is Chinese or Africa is filled with Africans. Our culture is white and that does not make it guilty.”

 

My response: This binary thinking, that non-whites are good and superior to whites, and that all whites are racist and crule from birth, thereby inferior to non-whites, is typical of groups, tribes, and associations in their natural bigotry to outsiders and rivals. It is not cured by race-baiting and overemphasizing guilt or innocence, unworthiness, or worthiness, based solely on race or tribal affiliation. The only cure is world-wide voluntary individual-living in accordance with egoist ethics, as citizens self-realize in a way that they see fit, and which works for and fits them.

 

M: “What has this got to do with Hamas?”

 

H: “Anything outside the West by definition is a victim of that civilization. So Israel to them is part of the West. Anything opposed to Israel by definition is virtuous. If Israel is fighting terrorists, that are not of the West, those terrorists must be virtuous because they are in a binary relationship with Israel.

 

The terrorists are victims and virtuous: that is the simple formula applied by college kids. It falls under the Western camp. If the enemy of Israel falls outside the Western camp, they are good, virtuous and can do no wrong.

 

Israel is the epitome of Western success: meritocratic, competitive, economically successful, mastered poverty and paucity, mastered the harsh desert climate—therefore it is evil.

 

The kids know nothing of Middle East history. What they know was taught in their anti-colonial classes and in the context of 50 years of student protests. It is assumed the kids have something to tell the world when in fact they should be seen and not heard. Kids have nothing of value to tell the world. The exception is the Tinnamen Square massacre, and they were right about the civil rights struggle. They were not right about much over 50 years. We went way overboard, glorifying student protests. The 90s baby boom professors whined that there were no student protests. That was a good thing if they were studying, though they were partying.

 

The less we hear from students the better. Our culture will be better because they are total ignoramuses. They are privileged and live in a cocoon. They have no idea of the centuries of success and how lucky they are to live in America.”

 

My response: So true.

 

M: “Culture takes its cues from college. Students who have no life experience. Students do not care about Christians killed in Africa or Muslims in Syria.”

 

H: “The structure is the same: the victim is an excuse; it is all fake. It is not about the victim—it is about the alleged perpetrator.”

 

My response: Heather is sharp. When Leftist ideologues attack Americans, Israelis, whites, males, and conservatives as victimizers, they are lying. The alleged victims: blacks, Hamas and immigrants are not victims and are not picked on by the alleged victimizers. The Left could care less about the so-called victims, who are just tools and useful fools, instruments allowing Progressives to attack and get power over the groups of innocent, but alleged victimizers, who actually are under attack as the new victims of Leftist reverse racism against white, Leftist hatred of conservatives, and Leftist group hatred of capitalists, individualists, etc.

 

H: “Black Lives Matter says nothing about dozens of blacks killed every day. Blacks are 13% of the population but much more than whites and Hispanics. It is not about these black victims it is about whites.

 

In the Middle East it is the same—it is not about the Palestinians—it is about the Israelis.  It is about hatred for Israelis because they are white or seen as white, and they are part of the West.  That is how you explain the puzzling, binary dichotomy about the victims. BLM does not protest a black-on-black killing.

 

Al Sharpton and other activists went to Minneapolis on the one-year anniversary pf George Floyd’s death. They went to George Floyd hagiography square and did obeisance to the drug addict. Just then two black children were on life support in hospital. The girl died and the boy is on life support for life. Their names were never mentioned.

 

It is not about the victims; it is about the perpetrators—phantom perpetrators. Police and whites are not the problem for blacks. Other blacks are the problem for blacks. No fathers is a problem. Some blacks want police support, often elderly black women. The New York Times never talks to these women.”