The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 474. Why “Anti-Racism” is the Worst Form of Racism | Coleman Hughes

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, podcaster, and opinion columnist Coleman Hughes. They discuss his latest book, “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” why color blindness should be re-implemented as a cultural goal, the Marxist actors who have deliberately moved to repel it, the need for a meritocratic system, and instances when racial discrimination is appropriate. Coleman Hughes is an author, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. Coleman’s writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, City Journal, the Spectator, and the Washington Examiner. He appeared on Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. In 2019, Hughes testified before the U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee at a hearing on reparations for slavery. In 2024, Hughes released his first book, “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.” He has appeared on prominent TV shows and podcasts including “The View,” “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Joe Rogan Experience,” and “Making Sense with Sam Harris.” Hughes is a columnist at the Free Press and a contributor at CNN. This episode was recorded on August 8th, 2024  - Links - Foundations of the West, out now on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/3ABnIgR For Coleman Hughes: Buy tickets to see Coleman Hughes in conversation with Josh Szeps on August 25th in Sydney and August 28th in Melbourne. Sydney link: https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/a-colourblind-society-uncomfortable-conversations/#tickets Melbourne link: https://www.ticketmaster.com.au/uncomfortable-conversations-live-with-coleman-hughes-and-josh-szeps-melbourne-28-08-2024/event/130060E1D02C314C On X https://x.com/coldxman?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On youtube https://www.youtube.com/@ColemanHughesOfficial 

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 in 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'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 for everyone. In our important positions, we want the best people. Why? So that we can accrue the benefit of their ability. Is it selfish? Well, it is in a sense because, only in a sociological sense,

it's because society works best 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 crucial issue.

What does it mean to be colorblind? Neither Coleman and I are naive enough to assume that that's something that can be attained easily. I mean, people have a pronounced in-group, what? Pronounced proclivity to in-group 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 an attempt to establish non-prejudicial color blindness. 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, 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? Tell me, can you walk everybody through what you've been doing over the last four years 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, I think you said we talked in December 2020. I had just started my podcast, Conversations with Coleman.

I was still in the research phase 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. And I think the most press, the most pressing issue at that time was the, you know, the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, the recent election of Joe Biden and, you know, the tricky and eventually violent transition between Biden and Trump. So you know, what I've been up to in the intervening years, I've been releasing podcasts for four years. I've 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 Sonny Hostin, where I tried to have a conversation about colorblindness and race and was met with a pretty large amount of hostility from one of the hosts of that show. 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 I've also been you know talking to people like Joe Rogan and others who with whom I don't see eye to eye on the Israel-Palestine issue and And and like everyone I've been following very closely all of the 2024 election news, Biden and Kamala Harris, and more recently, Tim Walz and all of that.

So I'm happy to talk about any and all of those topics. Well, let's start with your tour. 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, you have a pretty punishing, grueling schedule of talking. 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, you know, from all over the political spectrum about the message of my book, which is that,

you know, colorblindness is the best philosophy to take with respect to racial identity. In other words, you know, you're a white guy, I'm black and Hispanic, but those are not the features of ourself that should ultimately matter. What matters when talking about Jordan Peterson is his qualities, his values, his actions, and likewise with me. And so our culture has become kind of deranged on this issue, especially on the left, which used to be the bastion and actually the, really the founder of colorblindness. As I explained in my book, chapter two, I devote to just a historical examination of

where this idea of colorblindness comes from. There's been a false history written that suggests that colorblindness came from conservatives And this kind of a kind of subterfuge, a Trojan horse for white supremacy. This has no basis in fact. In fact, 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 of his era. His nickname was Abolition's Golden Trumpet. And he was the early leader of the most prominent anti-slavery activists of his era. His nickname was Abolition's Golden Trumpet.

And he was the earliest person to mention the word colorblind in the context of advocating for what he called a government colorblind, 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. It actually comes from the most radical wing of the abolitionists. Since the 1960s, you have seen a process that began in the academy with critical race theory. And since 2013 or 14 has metastasized far more broadly on the left into elite left-wing

institutions that has rewritten the history of colorblindness as if it's a bad faith idea coming from the worst corners of the far right to the point where as an experiment right before I started writing this book, I just Googled colorblindness race because I wanted to see what would come up. Nine of the 10 links that came up were all articles arguing why colorblindness is bad, racist, reactionary, naive, et cetera.

And the 10th was a Wikipedia page. So there's been a very successful PR campaign against the concept of colorblindness to the point where you've had celebrities that 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 colorblindness, where it came from,

to tell the logic behind the principle, why is it such a good principle for a multiracial society? Why is it the only path forward? And that's been, 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 burned Jerusalem from 2500 years ago. To walk the same roads. We are following the path of the crucifixion. And experience the same 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, politics, all that makes life wonderful.

And something new about the world is revealed. Let me comment on that from a psychological and legal perspective. OK, so I spent 20 years. Looking for markers for psychological markers 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, tail call addiction, and so forth. Okay. And to, as part of that, it was very practical enterprise, because what I wanted to do was partly financially motivated and partly motivated by curiosity.

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 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. If you just accept all comers, there's no question about differentiation, discrimination, prejudice, anything like that.

But, and so then you might say, well, why shouldn't you just hire people randomly? Well, there's a bunch of answers to that. 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 wanna hire you for a position and I wanna 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 what it consists of, and then I have to demonstrate that there's a statistical relate, and I have to have an evaluation structure for those aspects of the job. So say it's quantitative. 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 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 indication whatsoever that attributes such as race or ethnicity are relevant contributors to any job,

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 pointing this out is because in some ways,

the psychological and the legal communities have 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, win

because the statistical evidence that interviews, unstructured interviews are unreliable and not valid is extremely strong. 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 structures and our psychological practices. I can't evaluate you on the basis of race because it's irrelevant to your performance. So how do you understand the leftist objection to that. Yeah, so you're exactly right So many important features of the history get memory hold 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 fought over bitterly at Congress. I mean, most of the opponents at this time would have been Southern Democrats. This is, you know, before the voting scenario and the geographical scenario in America rearranged itself. And 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 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 said, Hubert Humphrey. Now, if you actually read 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, two plus two, that is a colorblind bill, really. 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 judicial decisions to essentially require, to effectively require a reverse discrimination in certain cases.

The story of that is well told in Richard Hanani'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, it was to enshrine colorblindness 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 the progressive

left has now long abandoned colorblindness. And so it's an embarrassment to that fact that the entire civil rights movement was premised on it. So with respect to this, you know, question of discrimination, this is this is a question I get quite often. 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 this. If you imagine an x-axis and a y-axis,

imagine four quadrants. On the x-axis and a y-axis. Imagine four quadrants. On the x-axis you have stakes. Are you in a low-stakes situation or a high-stakes situation? A low-stakes situation would be chatting with your friend at a coffee shop, right? A high-stakes situation would be trying to find someone on an airplane who you've just learned has a bomb. Right? And now on the y-axis, you can picture information. How much information do you have?

Right? Do you have lots of information about someone because you've been 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. If you know their psychological traits, if you've IQ tested them, if you've IQ tested them, if you've talked to them, if you've put them through a series of battery tests, 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 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 valid to take race into account because you've got no time. and you can be pretty sure that the person with the bomb doesn't look like an old white woman. So I'm not saying there are no emergency situations in which you've got to not be an idiot and pay attention to stereotypes and likelihoods and so forth. But the truth is most of us are living our lives in the other three quadrants, 99.9% of the time. So from a statistical perspective

and from a psychological perspective, the appropriate thing to do as a industrial organizational psychologist, for example, or a 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? It's more accurate than nothing. Right, and that would be particularly the case in those high stakes situations that you described. 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 wanna 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 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 worse. Now, you also might wanna, people might also wanna understand that we're also not only doing this prediction for the sake of the person who might be employed. 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. 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, 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 wanna allocate resources. You wanna allocate scarce resources to those who will be most productive with them. And that's for social benefit,

not for the benefit of the person, even though they will also benefit. So now I wanna dig into something else that you described. I'm gonna take the side of the leftists for this inquiry. So, cause 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.

People are ethnocentric by their innate proclivity, by which I mean that we have a pronounced in-group preference. So, you know, I am going to favor my wife over other women. I'm going to favor my children over the 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 gonna 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 with in-group favoritism. And so the leftists, even if we think we might, the leftists might say, well, your vision of a colorblind perceptual horizon is naive. So there are rejoinders to that,

but I'd like to hear what yours are. So here's what I would say to that. First, I totally acknowledge human nature is what it is and we are never going to and probably shouldn't want to stamp out every aspect of our animal nature including tribalism. Tribalism comes in many forms. It comes in the strongest form in a deep attachment to your actual kin. I can pretend to care about your sisters as much as my sisters, but I can't actually do it.

I can say those words, but I'm literally incapable of it, really. And as I'm sure you agree, every system that tries to completely deny and rewrite human nature fails spectacularly and creates much more suffering than happiness. So the question is, how do we deal with this aspect of human nature, tribalism, in particular ethnic tribalism, that when taken to an extreme, when watered and allowed to grow, tends to

cause some of the bloodiest and most terrible outcomes that have happened over the course of human history. My answer to that is, I guess, twofold. One is 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 tamp down on, 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 you think of- What do you mean by benign expressions? I mean that if you go to a comedy club, a lot of the comics are gonna make jokes about racial stereotypes. And if they're funny, everyone of every race is going to receive it in a good way.

Right? They're gonna receive it as a joke. Dave Chappelle can make jokes about how Black Santa Claus would be showing up late everywhere. Because of the way he says it and how he's coming at it, everyone can laugh at it and make light of differences between 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 like clearly, I think this is a point you've made many times, clearly sports are a kind of substitute for war. They tap into the exact kind of psychological machinery that men kind of have inbuilt for war,

but nobody dies at the end of it. So it's in a way, it's a kind of benign release valve for that aspect of human nature that polices the boundary 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's partly an opportunity for the racial or the ethnic group to indicate that they can take a joke

at their own expense, which is something like an indication of their civilized nature, right? I mean, 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 like a, it's sort of like the jokes that people make about sexual impulses as well. So the argument there is something like, 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 like this ethnocentrism or in-group 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 conscious cultural striving to mitigate against that. You know, and that can be very successful by the way. 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 gone far enough in Toronto, we'd actually got to the point where people were colorblind. It didn't matter. There were the kids, as far as I could tell in the elementary and junior high schools in particular, and this was even true of the high schools

that the kids were at, the Asians and the blacks and the Caucasians, 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 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 the thing is, 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,

Woldridge, Adrian Woldridge wrote a great book on meritocracy. And this is another thing that's very much worth highlighting. He'd be a good person to talk to, by the way. He pointed out the historical alternatives to meritocracy. So that would be like colorblind selection. Cause you might say, well, the alternative to meritocratic selection, which is going to produce some biases and outcome, the alternative to that might be something like the equity that the radical leftists are chasing. But that isn't this case historically.

The alternative to meritocracy has always been twofold, dynasty and, and 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 universities 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 gonna fail, and that's not fun for you or anyone else. But there's something more immediate that's the case as well. It starts to devolve into something like who you know,

or what strings you can pull, or what story's being told at the time, because 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 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 gerrymandering the selection criteria. The left is think, well, we'll get rid of the objective tests

and we'll have equity. It's like, no, you won't. You'll have ideological selection, nepotism, or aristocracy. 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. 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, 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 any kind of deep sense of racial tribalism in particular. Kids naturally play with other kids of different races without a second thought. It's usually not until you get older that the kind of racial tribal part of human nature begins to show itself.

And so colorblindness is actually very intuitive to kids. This is one of the big differences between my message and the message, you know, between my style of anti-racism, if you will, and the kind of anti-racism on offer by Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, etc. Robin DiAngelo, 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 with indoctrination and woke kindergarten to quote the San France, the actual San Francisco program. My view is that actually kids are basically born with the right attitude

about race, which is to say they don't care. And the best thing to do is to essentially reinforce that by show them, you know, Martin Luther King's famous, I have a dream speech once a year on Dr. King Day, and, you know, live the value of colorblindness. You know, you don't need more than that gentle hand with children in order to keep them on the right track. Now, I want to address the second point too,

about meritocracy and the impossibility of equal outcomes. Thomas Sowell has spent a whole career proving this every which way that equal outcomes across the board are not on the menu. And once you admit that, I mean, just consider the fact we live in a multicultural society. We celebrate cultural diversity. We believe that cultures are different. That's what cultural diversity means. It's not possible to have different cultures that all behave and execute the same. That's a contradiction, right? So just on that alone, we should admit that we have to,

even if everyone gets treated equally, there's gonna 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 descent to white people of Russian descent 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 so to your point, at Harvard, when they looked into this, I think in 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, primarily at kind of expensive, hard to access sports like rowing, or otherwise the children of donors, right? So that's a huge, that actually surprised me because my assumption like yours was that

Harvard used to be like that, but they've kind of reigned that in to a significant degree. Not nearly as much as you'd think it turns out. So you're right that the alternative to this is nepotism. 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 people on the left worry about this. So I want to give two examples of ways in which it doesn't. In fact, it helps. So there was a study in Broward County, Florida, where I believe they had gotten rid of universal IQ testing

for kids. These are grade-age kids, but pre-college. They'd gotten rid of IQ testing and then they reinstituted it and found that there were a lot of gifted, 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, you know, my mother was a perfect example of this. 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 Stuyvesant, the highly selective public school, specialized public school in New York City, on the basis of a test. Now, I can guarantee you, growing up in the kind of chaotic household where she did, her mother 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 in six or seven different clubs. She wasn't going to be, she wasn't going to have necessarily the best essays written by committee, by a committee of parents and tutors. Right. Really all she had was

basically her smarts. All she had was a test of really her inner intellectual potential. The ironic part about all of these other aspects, the essays, the 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 out of Duke University in the early 2010s where they

looked at, they essentially looked at what happens when you admit a group of students under a different regime of standards. They asked this question in the abstract because obviously this is true of black students that quote unquote benefit from affirmative action, but it's also true of legacy admits. It's also true of legacy admits. It's also true of student athletes, right? So you can actually study as an abstract phenomenon, how do kids fare 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 majors. And how do they know this?

It's because they asked all the freshmen on day one, what do you plan to major in? And they've got something like 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 GPAs. 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 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 become an engineer. Instead, just to survive with the median of the class of kids that were smarter than him, 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 there's really no way of, there's no end run 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 quartile of intellectual capacity. Now, so you can 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. It's gonna 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 the Harvard environment, let's say in the 1990s, cause 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 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 the wrong impression of their abilities. Now it might mean that, you know, if you're gonna compete at the upper echelons

of any discipline, let's say you wanna be a great scientist, you're gonna need all things considered. You're gonna need an IQ of 145 and you're gonna 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 gonna hit that upper echelon rung.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't gonna 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 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 askew. 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 while 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, it 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's not in anybody's interest to demolish that. I think Thomas Sowell has a great book called The Quest for Cosmic Justice. And I remember him saying in that book that meritocracy, like capitalism, is a word that was actually coined by its enemies. And often when the enemies of the idea coin the idea, they frame it in a way that is dishonest.

So for example, capitalism, right there in the word suggests that it's all about capital expanding itself, which seems totally disconnected from labor, for example. 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. But the word stuck. Meritocracy, Sowell pointed out, implies that the testing regime is a comment on your worth as an individual, your moral worth, which it's really not. If I do better on the SAT 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 gonna do better than you at law school, and I'm probably gonna do better on the LSAT. It means that in the 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 one-to-one relationship and I'm not implying that, but generally speaking people regard those who are conscientious, diligent, hard-working, reliable,

industrious as moral. Now that's not the only dimension of morality because you also have agreeableness 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 the places where virtue seems to be captured and agreeableness as the liberal virtue if you wanted to. It doesn't matter. Those are the places where virtue seems to be captured to some degree in the personality models. There's zero correlation with IQ, like zero. 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 evil figures of mythology are always stellar intellects gone spectacularly wrong.

That's why it's always the evil 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, because you can learn faster and the differences are not trivial. It's the biggest 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 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 investment banking as a career strategy. And it's an, it's 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 develop that sense of 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 not, I was really shocked in my clinical practice, 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, virtually unemployable, regardless of how much effort was poured into that, virtually unemployable, regardless of how much effort was poured into that, 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, 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 a very easy thing to do. It's a hard thing to fight against. But it's a pernicious, pernicious problem. I have a question for 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 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 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 five years behind the computational revolution? Like you have to what, have an IQ of 95th percentile to be anywhere near the bleeding edge? Cause things are changing so quickly. You know, 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 is equally relevant. You see, the worship of the intellect in and of itself 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 contradictory. 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 accrue,

regardless of the discipline, resources accrue in the hands of a few. Doesn't matter what the discipline is. And that's what Marx observed when he said that capital would accrue 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 accrue 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 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 adjoining neurons, right?

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 misused turns into your enemy. 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, 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 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 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, what's that sitcom about the physicists, 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 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.

Because 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 when did your book launch? My book came out in February. And how's it doing? It's doing well.

My publishers seem happy. I'm happy with the response. I've, 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. Hmm, hmm. 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 Thomas Sowell, which is a good mantle to be cloaked in for sure. But like what's the most effective criticism would you say of the positions that you've taken? If you had to steel man the people who are opposed

to the notion of colorblindness, I wanna 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. And so the attack on meritocracy, let's say, and the attack on colorblindness, 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 Ibram Kendi and Robin D'Angelo are that much concerned at all about 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 the glorious revolution can proceed. And 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 I see fundamentally motivating the people who oppose the idea of colorblindness. Like, of course 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 did 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 funny when you put it that way. I mean, it really is directly contradictory. I wanna pick up on what you said here, James Lindsay and, I mean,

the point that I hear you making is about pretext. 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. You know, we claim to be 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 one-on-one, is that sometimes we're even blind to our own pretexts.

So more and more I think about political projects as pretextual because the contradictions, you know, so often reveal themselves. So for example, Ibram Kendi, you know, his whole book is about equal results. And the idea that, you know, if black people are 13% of the population, black people should be 13% of people in prison and no more. 13% of the wealth, 13% of the teachers, 13% of the nurses, 13% of the wealth 13% of the teachers 13% of the nurses 13% of every single domain you do and he he is apparently very consistent about this and And that's his worldview. Okay, so putting that putting that to the side take it at face value

why is it that someone like him and The people he disagrees with have never once, and I really mean never once, highlighted all the domains in which white Americans are underrepresented in good things or overrepresented in bad things? So for example, suicide, no small issue, white Americans much more likely to die of suicide than black Americans. In my- Alcoholism too. Alcoholism and drunk driving. 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, nothing to do with what I'm saying. 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 disparities that black people are on the worst end of? I think that the whole equity campaign is a pretext for what is at base just black and brown identity politics. That's all it is. 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 much- 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 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, what would you say, moral superiority as an avatar of my racial community. 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 rejoinder could be thrown back at either of us. You know, I could say, well, the reason that you're promoting colorblindness 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 aggrandizement. And I certainly don't think it's true in 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-aggrandizement 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 complained about the dearth

of women in bricklaying, for example, it's always the C-suite. And 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 what are we going to do? Are we going to DNA test everyone? I think my wife is 3% African American.

I can't remember if that's the case. It's something like that. We had 20,000. So she's more black than Elizabeth Warren was Native American when she claimed to be Native American. Well, there you, well, 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? Donazel? Dolezal, yeah. Problem? Dolezal, dolezal, 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 game, to the power game that's being played. Now, and so how do you know, how do you know, 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 D'Angelo and Kendi of doing?

Like, you know, 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 sort of thing is being said to you. Like, how do you personally, it's very worthwhile to be attuned to your own shortcomings. Absolutely, yeah.

To 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 do you have, do you think, in check that helps you stay on the straight and narrow path? Yep. So I think the only way you can really tell 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 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 Satan in your worldview. He was saying all the things he was saying today when it benefited him not at all. When really all it, decades ago, he was just such an outlier that he really saw very little benefit politically and from what he was saying, and he just continued saying it, right?

Whereas, you know, virtual, you know, someone like Kamala 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. And many politicians are like that. I don't mean to single out Kamala 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 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, well, frankly at Columbia it got me a reputation for being some kind of right winger

which I never have been. So when it was only really a minus in my life, I still represented what I believed 100%. Of course, from the outside, there's no way to verify that, but it's true. Well, there's some ways, there is some ways of verifying that because we could look into the details

of your autobiographical history. And I think you have put your finger on something that's relevant. I mean, one of the ways we do evaluate people for their moral propriety and reliability is their consistency during times of distress. You know, and so what I would say for myself, this is a relevant day 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 groundwork for that

for like 30 years beforehand, but it's still the case. But, you know, 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 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 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. 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 asked to appear on The View, which is not a show that would be friendly to my perspective, at least in my assumption. And I went on there and I had a good exchange with Whoopi Goldberg where

we disagreed respectfully. And then Sunny Hauston, who, you know, she essentially asked me, kind of accused me of this very question. She said, you know, a lot of people say that you've basically been co-opted by the far right. And what do you have to say about that? And obviously her way of distancing herself from the opinion, she was distancing herself from opinion that she actually held. And 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 on my character. There's no evidence I've been co-opted by the right.

There's no evidence that I'm getting coke money pumped into my bank account in exchange for saying the things that I'm saying. And as I pointed out to you, everyone 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 when it was very unpopular to do so. So I just pointed that out and I think, it was the contrast between her deranged evidence-free character attack, her very cable newsy, click-baity 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, went so viral that people were coming up to me on the street consistently for like two months, 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, and that therefore she had more kind of deeper insight into MLK's message than me, which is it's a total non-sequitur, of course, and 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 colorblindness 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's not a hundred percent, 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 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 poverty. 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, which is to say, you know, since the great awakening of 2014 when mainstream media outlets began using terms like systemic racism and white supremacy, tenfold, twentyfold, what they had been for the previous many, many decades, since the phenomenon of woke social justice, etc. What you've seen, if you're on the left, what you would have predicted is that black voters, Hispanic voters would be going even more 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, 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 The reason that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020 was not because he did better with black and Hispanic voters. It was because he won a lot of white voters from Donald Trump. So really white voters were-

Especially women. Yeah. And even white men in some places. 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 counter narrative happening in terms of just who people are voting for.

Right. And it's I think it's it's embarrassing for for for Democrats. I don't think that they understand it. It doesn't match their model of political science. And it's, you know, I mean, so the question is, why is that happening? Right? Okay, so 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. Cause 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. You can buy it on Amazon. You can also listen to me. I narrate it myself on the audible version. 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 foray in the musical direction as well

at some point in the not so distant past. Like what's on your plate over the next year or so? What are you looking forward to and planning? Well, I may write another book on a topic I won't disclose, but in the next five months, in the next three months, I think I'm, like many people in our profession, covering the election closely, both for the free press with Barry Weiss and at CNN and on my own podcast. So that's probably gonna take up the majority of my time in the next three, four months.

Tell everybody again about your podcast too. It's called Conversations with Coleman. Listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, sir. All right, well, thank you to everybody who is watching and listening today and to the film crew here up in Northern Ontario and to The Daily Wire for making these YouTube conversations

possible and well-produced. That's also a plus. 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'm 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.