Elephants in Rooms
Hi, I’m Ken LaCorte. I spent 20 years behind-the-scenes at Fox News and now host “Elephants in Rooms”.
Here, we jump into topics that many people avoid and that the mainstream narrative often vilifies. Even when they’re true.
If you’re looking for true insight into issues – without straw men or sensationalism – you’ve found the right place.
Elephants in Rooms
Heather Mac Donald | Is crime increasing due to false charges of racism?
Heather Lynn Mac Donald is a best-selling author, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at City Journal.
She joined the podcast for an interesting conversation about the reality of crime and racism in our country, what we’re doing wrong, and what we can do to fix it.
I spoke with Heather McDonald, a best selling author and editor at City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She offers no nonsense approaches to homelessness and makes a strong case that today's rising crime is a direct result of politicians pandering to false accusations of racism. Thank you again for having for being here. I sure appreciate it. So let's start off easy. You know, we were talking about about California, we both live in different parts of the states, and we both live in nicer parts of the state. How have you seen that shifting going around? And how do you see the future of California right now?
Heather Mac Donald:What do I see the shifting going around? What do you mean by that?
Ken LaCorte:What I mean is, is there's some really great parts of California. In fact, there's some even great parts of San Francisco. I mean, I live right across right across the bridge from it, I go into a lot of neighborhoods, it's fine. There are no homeless people in Pacific Heights. Somehow Pacific Heights solve that problem. Somehow the Asian communities on the western part of the city completely solved homelessness. And and you know, I've seen in the past few years, the bad parts of Los Angeles get out of what have always been bad parts, at least in my lifetime and move to the suburbs and move to places where they never were before. We were talking about the fox Bureau, before the LA Fox Bureau now has people living out on the tents within, you know, within 100 yards of it a couple 100 yards of it and that was miles away. Do you see the kind of bad parts shifting around more more around like that? Or how do you how do you see that playing out? Well, the
Heather Mac Donald:bad parts are expanding and it's all due to the lack of will to enforce bourgeois values. California has embraced what I call the Great inversion, which is that it puts the so called needs or interests of the vagrants and people with antisocial behavior, deviancy ahead of those of law abiding, property respecting authority respecting civil order respecting Californians. And this is a complete upside down betrayal of the obligations of our public officials to look out first and foremost, for the interests of those who are playing by the rules and are trying to get ahead through their own hard work and self discipline and deferred gratification. We have lost the will to enforce bourgeois norms the solution to widespread dystopian street colonization and vagrancy is very simple. You enforce laws that are dedicated to maintaining public order, you are not allowed to colonize city streets. This is how police took care of the problem of the marginal for decades. And it focuses the mind you know, if San Francisco or Los Angeles were to declare, as they did for decades, that you are not allowed to take over City Sidewalks and force law abiding employees to gingerly pick through feces and hypodermic needles in the morning in order to get to their workplace. And so they were the vagrants and drug users and, and those in in refuge and flight from the law, were not allowed to take over the streets. It would focus the minds of policymakers away from these utopian schemes to give every street Vagrant, his own private apartment in San Francisco, or Los Angeles at the cost of over $800,000 and make us come up with immediate, financially viable solutions like congregate shelters outside of urban areas. I would advocate using abandoned industrial land or rural land outside of cities. I am a big fan of people that have the guts to embrace the nimbyism ethic, not in my backyard. There is nothing shameful about saying you don't want a homeless shelter in your backyard. You don't want your kids to have to walk past a population that is extremely problematic. But the elites of California have simply lost the will to say that traditional bourgeois values are not racist. They're not classes. They are simply the bedrock of civilization.
Ken LaCorte:So here the phrase that you hear here being San Francisco, the phrase you hear over and over again as we can't, we can't criminalize poverty. And and that argument has kind of won out I would say among a majority of people who live in this city More at least pretty darn close to it. How did that argument windy affect
Heather Mac Donald:this same lack of will the same lack of confidence of this country's elites. In our traditional values, though a lot of the abdication of responsibility on the part of our leaders to enforce basic, common sense, wholly legitimate civilizational norms is race related. And that's a good part of this ridiculous idea about criminalizing poverty. But if there's broader issues going on as well, which is a failure of confidence in our civilization, again, a lot of that is race related. But the idea that enforcing laws against street vagrancy urination, public drug use, public crime is criminalizing poverty is completely specious. There are many, many low income people who are holding jobs, who are not living on the streets. The reason people are living on the streets, as I've been told many times in my on the ground reporting, whether it's at Skid Row in Los Angeles, or the tenderloin District in San Francisco, is because it's a lifestyle of complete hedonism, self indulgent self destruction, destruction of others, somebody in Skid Row said, oh, yeah, people know that you can, you know, people in Iowa know that you can come to LA and do drugs on the streets without any kind of consequences. People are just going to leave you alone. So contrary to what Chase abou Dean are, the coalition on the homeless in San Francisco or the ACLU in Southern California says this is not about criminalizing poverty. It's about criminalizing illegal behavior.
Ken LaCorte:So Chasa had a bad day has I think you might have been a little bit surprised that he got he got tossed out. Does that? Is that a small, minor tiny step? Is it a is it a larger symbolism? How do you how do you kind of view that in the in the whole war that that's going on right now
Heather Mac Donald:could be a huge step, we'll have to see what happens with the George Gascon recalled gaesco Is the elected District Attorney in Los Angeles, who already survived one recall effort and is facing another. But is that
Ken LaCorte:gonna do that come to the come to the ballot? Or did they just not get enough signatures to get it up?
Heather Mac Donald:I think there's still gathering signatures. I haven't I'm not really sure whether it was the targeted for voting now or voting in November. But it could be the Boudin recall, could be a very, very important moment in the overdue effort to reclaim civility in America's cities, and to whether voters knew it or not to reject the most destructive idea in our society today, which is disparate impact. I'm got a book coming out on this topic next year. And the disparate impact can see it holds that any civilizational norm or meritocratic standard that has a disparate impact on blacks is per se racist and illegitimate. And so the reason if you want to understand what's going on in across the country today in criminal law, you know, the puzzle of why are these prosecutors who are there to uphold the law? Why are they seemingly on the side of criminals that are saying we don't want to put people in prison, we're not going to prosecute, we're going to ignore whole categories of crime. Whether it's Jason Medina, George Gaskell, or, or Alvin Bragg in in in Manhattan in New York City, or Gonzales in Brooklyn, there's a Chris Kim Fox and in Chicago, Larry crasner. In Philadelphia, the DEA in New Orleans, the reason that all of them have Forsworn, the traditional role of of prosecutors and district attorneys is because if they do enforce the law in a colorblind constitutional, neutral manner, it will disproportionately affect blacks. It will put blacks in prison at a higher rate, and that is undeniably the case. But the explanation for that is not that the criminal laws are racist, it's that blacks have a much higher rate of criminal offending. But boo Dean, you know, and when you hear these explanations for why we're not going to prosecute turnstile jumping, why we're not going to prosecute, resisting arrest, why we're not prosecuting looting, or gun crimes. There will always be dimension of racial justice. And that's code for we've decided that we would rather not enforce the law than enforce the law and have it fall disproportionately on blacks. So whether or not people understood what they were doing in recalling chase a good Dean, that is what they're doing, and it's a blow for the fact that the criminal justice system is not racist. And that and when you stop enforcing the laws, the people that you hurt most, of course, are law abiding minorities, who are the first line of victims in these insane drive by shootings, and, and robberies and other types of crime.
Ken LaCorte:I mean, I remember when I was in early criminal justice classes, like in college, many, many years ago, there was often the blacks are being charged at higher rates, because cops are racist yet, etc, etc. The one that kind of blows that out of the water, though, is murder rates. You have a body, you know what color it is, you eventually find a certain percentage of those, it's hard to overcharge murder, right. And I was blown away when I first discovered the disparity in in murder rates between blacks and whites in America. And I was looking at I was I was I was comparing a couple Texas cities trying to see some cities that had more permissive concealed carry permits versus and open carry permits versus or other places. And you know, when you dig into those numbers, it's not 10%, higher, 20%, higher last year, I guess it was 2021 or 2020. It's 600%. Higher, it's 700. It's out of control craziness. And yet, I wonder how even in those communities and I haven't really looked at any any polling in that, because I suspect that most blacks thinks that the criminal justice system is against them still, and and that it is a racist system that targets them. On the other hand, they all know, in a lot of neighborhoods, everybody knows a number of people who's been murdered. I mean, how do you think that, that the black community kind of kind of deals with those two conflicting notions?
Heather Mac Donald:It's a very complicated problem. And I've given a lot of my professional life to giving voice to those good law abiding blacks in high crime areas, who want the police to enforce the law, we see them as their friends as their protectors, who completely oppose criminal behavior, and are not playing the race card. But there's no question that there is support in the black community for the Black Lives Matter narrative, which is completely phony. You know, it's just amazing to me that these activists continue to get away with this idea. And the very phrase Black Lives Matter is so ridiculous, as if for the last 20 years, America has not been acting as if Black Lives Matter. Of course it has. Now we have an absolutely appalling history. We were gratuitously violent, nasty, hostile, condescending, cruel, towards blacks, up until quite recently, the Civil War did not take care of that the Civil Rights Act did not take care of that. And that is a profound blemish on America's self conception and, you know, desire to see itself as the shining city on a hill. But we have done 180 degree about faiths and public policy has spent the last 5060 years trying to uplift blacks, every employer, mainstream employer in this country, is twisting himself into knots to hire and promote as many blacks as possible. And so the idea that we needed George Floyd race riots or, you know, pro riots after Michael Brown shooting to say that Black Lives Matter is ridiculous, utterly ridiculous a lie. But there are I it is, it is true, that many blacks continue to believe that they are that their biggest oppressor is whites, not other blacks. And I can tell you whites are not the problem affecting blacks today. They simply are not
Ken LaCorte:but we might have started it but yeah, I get it.
Heather Mac Donald:Absolutely. But you know, it's very worrisome after this horrible stomach, churning, nauseating, tragic heart wrenching buffalo race massacre that was a white supremacist massacre, but it is a drop in the bucket 10 blacks unjustly killed compared to 10,000 over 10,000 blacks who will be found to have been killed in 2021. There was 2020 20 there was 10,000 blacks there will be more We're in 2021, that race massacre is not the way blacks die. And yet, you know, we keep hearing man on the street interviews from black saying, gee, you know, they're just terrified that they're going to be shut down by a white supremacist when they go out their house, and they're being fed that lie by the mainstream media. It's preposterous. But I fear that that sense of accelerated paranoia and belief that whites are out to get them is going to lead to what is the an increased amount of what is the predominant type of interracial violence in this country, which is black on white blacks commit 88% of all interracial violence between blacks and whites and whites and blacks. It is blacks who are routinely sadistically beating up on white people dragging them in carjackings running them over, you know, running over them and bikes in rot and urban robberies, and whites turn their cheek away, they look away and the only time we hear about an interracial crime is when it's white on black, but those are extremely rare. Your your garden variety, black on white, interracial crime is completely swept under the rug.
Ken LaCorte:How much of it is is driven by and I guess the phrase white guilt is probably a little a little overused. But when you go through a black neighborhood, you don't want to be born there. I mean, I mean, there's there's a decent amount, you know, I just read my Mike Tyson's biography, who's done a lot of thuggish awful things in his life. Right. But the first couple chapters were were horrific. It was it was almost unbelievable. The level of violence and of poverty. And of just I mean of growing up in a, if it was in another country, I'd have a hard time believing it and it was Brooklyn. And and so as a white, you go through those neighborhoods, a lot of times you lock your doors, and you get you know, because you see a lot of bars on the on the windows. I think a lot of it seems to be driven by by that by the Thank God, I wasn't born in that situation. Because I think if I was born in in certain parts of Brooklyn, how different would you be than some of the people who are creating all the problems? And at what point in life, you know, a point in life, does a victim become a perpetrator? Right? I mean, you are, you're a victim, when you're an 11 year old growing up in that system, when you're 15 and you're robbing houses at a certain point, you're you're you're you're not that victim anymore. And and it you know, we hear the term cycle of violence used when people are trying to equate countries in the Middle East, but but it is a cycle of violence, and it is cycles that hasn't seemed to been breaking at any decent rate in our lifetimes.
Heather Mac Donald:Yeah, I would add as a source of guilt, just the historical knowledge of, of the travesty of this country's behavior when when lined up against his ideals. Let me however, bracket and say that no other country is any better than America ever was, I mean, nations tribes, are, are have been defined by violence. And if you want to see real violence and slavery and genocide, go to Africa today and go to Africa 400 years ago, when it was enslaving itself, will long before the Westerners showed up. And of course, we all know that the West African kings were utterly complicit in the transatlantic slave trade. But nevertheless, you know, America does pride itself on its ideals, and we violated those ideals, just appalling ly for centuries. So there's that guilt as well as as well as seeing the current vast opportunity gaps. And that's an extraordinarily difficult issue. But the fact of the matter is, is that, I would say the the ongoing civilizational, backwardness and squalor of inner city neighborhoods today. It's it's not helpful or accurate to attribute that primarily to alleged structural racism. It is behavior that is driving these terribly dangerous dilapidated, depressed areas. And how do you change that behavior is very difficult, but certainly, the child rearing practices are are horrible. The breakdown of the family nationally 71% of black children are born to single mothers. And that's a national average that takes into account you know, more bourgeois blacks in inner city areas like Milwaukee or southside of Chicago, it's closer to 8185, probably 90%. And boys take no responsibility for the children that they spawn. And there's very little attention to academic performance. We all know about the anti acting white stigma. And yet we pretend that that doesn't affect school performance. And if blacks lag behind academically, it must be because their teachers are racist. Or if they're disciplined disproportionately as school students, it must be because their teachers are racist, which is a complete ludicrous proposition given that teaching is probably the most left wing profession in the country. So you know, when can we we can trace these problems back to segregation and slavery, but at this point, the change is going to have to come from within, you know, it's a lie that we are stiffing inner city schools in per capita spending just not the case. I mean, the the highest funded schools, our inner city schools, but And and, you know, you can put an Asian kid in there. At the end, there was a woman, Ying ma that wrote a book several decades ago, about her experiences growing up in the Oakland, California School District. And she had parents that insisted that she study and her her black peers, you know, we're all dropping out of school, the same school she went to and joining gangs, and and she got her way out of that environment. And, and it's the same elsewhere as well. Amy wax, the beleaguered University of Pennsylvania law professor wrote a book called rights and remedies. That is a very astute analysis of how to think about ongoing black inner city problems. She said, You know, you can in the area of tort law and remedies, if somebody has been hit negligently by a car, and there's no question that the driver was at fault. But at some point, the person who has been injured in that accident, the only person who can make sure that that person is rehabilitated, the victim is rehabilitated and able to get back on his feet is himself by doing physical therapy by taking care of his own his own betterment. And so even if we want to say that all problems today in the black community originate from slavery, there's not a whole lot more I believe, that whites can do in the area of reparations, the changes are going to have to come from within and they are cultural. They are junking the anti white ethic junking the philosophy that we have also turned our ears away from that we hear in rap music, which tells us all we need to know about that culture that it is grotesquely misogynistic, grotesquely anti police, pro violence pro drive bys, that change has to come from within.
Ken LaCorte:Yeah, I mean, it's a very good point, because actually, that they'd kind of have me on some of the discussions if instead of the term institutional racism, which every time I asked somebody to really explain it to me, it all comes about well, redlining districts in the 50s, and civil rights in the 60s, and I'm kind of like, get it up to speed, because most of the institutional racism that I see is, is in favor of blacks and other minorities at the expense of at the expense of Asians and whites. had had they use the phrase, historical racism, then I'd say, you know, what, we actually got a point there, because, you know, the racism of America, from the selection and pulling these people out of their own culture into this for, you know, for hundreds of years, has certainly been the driving force of creating, I think a lot of the problems, maybe most of the problems in that in that culture. Now, you have a good point at what, you know, are there still things that that white America or America can do on that? And I don't know the answers to that. I mean, I actually think affirmative action which, of course, just as another word for racial preferences, made sense at certain points in life when when there's no doctors in a community and a young kid can't see a doctor of that looks like him or her. It kind of makes sense to put your thumb on the scale and say, Let's jumpstart that I don't know what the answers are. I mean, I know that if I had the answers and you had the answers, probably the last people the black community want to listen to is two middle aged white people who are doing pretty well off living in the suburbs bitching about black crime. But I don't see it coming from any I mean, you know, it was one of the terrible things about about Bill Cosby getting getting torn down there was you know, he was one of the guys that was like, okay, he is a he's a cultural icon there he is saying some some things that I think that community needs to hear, and ain't gonna listen to me. And then of course, it turns out, he's a serial rapist. And that kind of blew up, up up on it. What's, what's the path out of that?
Heather Mac Donald:I would bracket the rapist aspect. Maybe he is I don't know, I think me too, is has so discredited itself that I am skeptical towards all of its claims. But that's a side issue. You know, I agree there are there are black political leaders that don't get much attention, that are very much embracing an ethic of personal responsibility, respect for bourgeois values. There's a guy out in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Kendall Quarles, who gets qu ar l e. S, that is very forthright about the need to embrace self discipline. And and there's others as well, you know, I would say Tim Scott is a bit compromised. I don't by his line about having been racist, pulled over disproportionately by racist police officers, I would want to know, what his rate of speeding is. And maybe he was, I don't know, but you know, there's the driving while black conceit also rests on a complete ignorance of of disparate rates of, of speeding and other types of traffic violations. That was possible to study those and found that black speed at much higher rates than white. So if they're pulled over more, that's probably the reason.
Ken LaCorte:Well, you had some you had some cameras, you had some red light cameras, that, that they had a certain problem within certain neighborhoods, because the cameras were disproportionately catching black people running red lights, and it was like now what do you do?
Heather Mac Donald:Right I mean, this is the search for racism is so desperate because it's so there's so little racism, in fact, among well meaning whites now you're absolutely right. There are realities black privilege, not white privilege, that we now are claiming that machines are racist whether you know, the algorithms of facial recognition or red light cameras, license plate readers, the town of Oak Park, Illinois recently in the news for its decision to use different standards for grading students. And it managed to persuade the left wing fact checking press that this was a fake story, whereas it was in fact quite legitimate, but it also declined its police chief's request for license plate readers as a way to counter the rising tide of carjackings because those readers were going to be racist. So it's it's simply amazing. I mean, whites are involved in this Lady Macbeth like hand washing its burden bordering on neuroses at this point of blaming themselves for phantom racism. Rather than being willing to hold all groups responsible for the same standards, it doesn't help the underclass to be held to a lower standard of expectation, that is not the way to solve those cultural problems.
Ken LaCorte:I do think that there is is a racial and sometimes age, ism, whatever, whatever the word is on that by a lot of police in the sense that like when I was a kid, a lot, and I was a pretty good kid. I wasn't I wasn't I'd never talked back I served I did the whole thing. Cops were bigger assholes to me when I was young, because they could be and I experienced that a handful of times there. The black glasses went on their chest puffed out and and a good chunk of cops. I don't know what that percentage is, but my gut tells me it's in the 20s You know, they've they like being bullies and they love having a badge and I think that blacks experience that a lot they get they get mistreated a lot not not necessarily arrested for crimes they didn't they didn't commit but but treated like lesser people. And once I started driving and you know, you drive a lesser you drive a junkie or car you're also treated less by cops. Once I started getting of the right age and having cars that were shiny, all of a sudden they started using the word sir on me. Back and back and forth. I mean, I talked to one I remember when I was talking to an executive at the Fox News Channel. And you know, he talked about Going through stores and, and I don't think he was making this up, you know going with his son who happened to be a Marine and this guy was you know, probably a millionaire but because he was one of the top executives they're talking about how he definitely could tell that they were being watched by by the the owners and by the by the people there because he was black. He feels that a lot. Now you can see the other side because they say what percentage of people are black? What percentage of those people are, are are robbing the place or doing things but it seemed like a lot of the resentment towards maybe cops and other things were kind of that low level insult more than you know driving while black I pulled you over? Well, seems like a dysfunctional relation seems like a bad marriage sometimes.
Heather Mac Donald:I think you've described two different phenomena, one, illegitimate and one, arguably legitimate. If you're right, that cops are gratuitously treating black drivers with contempt with lack of courtesy and respect and professionalism, that is completely abhorrent and unjustified. I don't know, you know, where you get that information. And if it is truly worse for blacks than it is for whites. My experience with police officers is the New York Police officers are universally obnoxious, you know, you try and ask them, please, how do I get through this parade? You know, where to wow, how many blocks dozens of blocks north? Do I have to walk before I'm allowed to cross Fifth Avenue?
Ken LaCorte:A lady? I'm not a tourist guide?
Heather Mac Donald:They'll be you know, they'll be completely unhelpful no matter what your skin color is. But But generally, I think that cops they they believe in what I hear from them all the time is they they want to believe that the good people of the community support us. And they they know who the gangbangers are? And yeah, they're probably sort of cynical with them. But I think towards law abiding blacks, that is not my experience. But you know, maybe you've got better sources than I certainly,
Ken LaCorte:there's no numeric way to do that. But again, I can tell in my own life. When I when I aged a little bit that all of a sudden the dickish behavior reduced itself. Well, maybe maybe that was me, but maybe not.
Heather Mac Donald:I mean, technically, age is probably a protected category in the civil rights laws. I would say if cops are dickish towards young boys, I really don't care if they're dickish, towards blacks, that is a problem.
Ken LaCorte:Well, I think what it is, is they, they they will often throw their weight around the people that they think that they can throw their weight around, right? I mean, that's what bullies do. Bullies don't, bullies don't push around people who they think might push back. And that pushing back might be when I get home and call my, you know, call my attorney or something like that. So that's where I think that that's similar.
Heather Mac Donald:A cop would have to be absolutely ignorant today to think you can push around a black person. I mean, the as soon as a cop gets out of his car, if he's investigating a shooting, he finds himself surrounded by people with their cell phones out cursing at him. You know,
Ken LaCorte:and having a cell phone out. I've seen I've seen videos of 180 degree differences in behavior when somebody realizes they're being recorded. And that's that's probably in my opinion, the best thing to come out of the Black Lives Matter this whole you know, this this whole Ferguson 2.0 And I'm going to talk about Ferguson a little bit is is police body cams. It is I think it's good for them. I think it's something that a lot of cops resisted just like they resisted you know, the cameras in patrol cars, and all of a sudden that turned out to be their their their best friends. There is a I don't know. I don't feel like watching people shooting each other but I guess I do sometimes there's a YouTube site called police activities, police activity. millions of followers shocked it's still up on YouTube. And it is basically they're the best at grabbing you know, because now all cities after a shooting, especially after a fatal shooting, for the most part very quickly released that when they're smart quickly release that that body cam because 95 times out of 100 it shows exactly what happened and you know, that unarmed person, you know, suddenly had a knife or whatever it is. And I would say you know, and I've watched I probably watched police kill over 50 people on on these things, but you get tremendous lessons from it. I mean, one of the lessons you get is a large percentage of the people they shoot the guys they shoot, want to die, that you know a good chunk of those are are suicides by cops. And then a good chunk of those are I think a rage switched hit, you know, they're smack in their wife, their their their, their their their brain short circuited, they get into a rage the door opens up they got a knife and they then they jump at the next person who they see who you know happens to have a Glock pointed at them and and they end up and they end up dead I would say between those two things, you know clearly mentally ill people slash suicidal people and and just the rage machine that's 80% of of shootings in police shootings in America. And I really think that they should almost make that a mandatory class for kids to watch those videos. Because you learn a lot, you'll learn a lot about human behavior.
Heather Mac Donald:Well, and you know, this is another truism of our age that conservatives like to say, you could also decrease I would say the vast majority of fatal police shootings by not ever resisting arrest, you know that that's behind practically all of these people that are running to the cops beating them up, you know, comply, comply, take it up with your lawyer afterwards, if you think the COP is acting illegally, but that, you know, you're not going to get killed. I think in the vast vast majority of cases, if you comply with author's authority,
Ken LaCorte:like 98%, I mean, there's a couple instances the guy running down the street and the cop decided to shoot him in the back. And those guys usually go to prison for murder.
Heather Mac Donald:But I want to return though to your your two instances of Alleged Racism, which is the cops treating blacks with contempt. And again, I just want to bracket that if that's the case, then it's really bad. And we have a hell of a lot more police training to do. I I'm, I'm I'm skeptical that that's widespread. But your second example is the being felt followed around or watched more closely in stores. And that's a difficult issue, because that's perfectly rational behavior, right? You know, there are stereotypes and there are stereotypes that are correct. And the fact of the matter is, is that blacks do commit the vast majority of shoplifting. We've seen this the videos since the George Floyd riots of these remarkable increasingly sort of casual mass looting events, most recently, the Sephora in somewhere in LA Cerritos, I think of these young kids or, you know, adolescents with the big black trash bags, just casually walking through the store and dumping the shelf contents into their bags and walking off. But we saw one of those again a year or so ago. And the videos of these mass looting events are virtually all black. And yet, we're pretending that that's not the case. And the reason why stores in your neighborhood up in San Francisco, like Walgreens have closed down and are denying the elderly senior citizens easy access to their prescriptions, is they would rather just shut down entirely then a cost somebody for shoplifting and call the cops and be accused of racial profiling. So we again as as a society, we're backing away from enforcing neutral norms in order not to have a disparate impact on blacks. And it's it's an incredibly frustrating thing. I am sure, if you're a law abiding black to be followed around in a store and felt like you're being watched,
Ken LaCorte:that's rational to get upset, it's, you know, you can understand the rationality on both sides, right? And can
Heather Mac Donald:the solution, you know, the solution to that is not to stop enforcing the law. And it is human nature, to say we are going to make judgments based on averages, the solution is to get the crime under control.
Ken LaCorte:I've read your your columns or articles for years, and you've been consistent on this. And and I very rarely disagree with with the things you write does it? Is it tough in the sense that in the last two years, everything that you've been writing about for the last 15 years, has has taken such an overwhelming loss? I mean, in the sense that, that it's like, you know, I'm saying this, this makes sense. We you know, look, we're old enough that we've seen these cycles go before we lived in the 70s the 80s we I saw New York go from a shithole to a place where you can let your kids go out into Time Square at four o'clock in the morning, and now it's turning back into a shithole again. And you know, you had a lot of things that made common sense, and a shooting and a summer of riots, and a few things and the essential truths that you write about have gotten jammed down into a corner like I've never seen in a in a period have six months month. Does that get second depress? How do you? I don't know, how do you how do you? How do you deal with that? Personally, when it's like holy shit, I've been helping move this debate in the right direction. One shooting a bunch of a bunch of politicians abdicating their their role in life. And it took such a backwards hit.
Heather Mac Donald:I greatly appreciate your your kind words and and following me and sense that I may have had any contribution to this discourse. I would say that what I find depressing is more just the substance of it as opposed to the sense of not getting hurt. What is difficult is feeling like I'm repeating myself all the time. I mean, there's only so many times you can say, but what about the black victims? Like what about the 50 black children who are gunned down and drive by shootings in 2020? In their beds in front yards and porches, barbecues at barbecues? Jumping on trampolines? What about those black kids? I thought Black Lives Matter? Why aren't you protesting that? There's only so many times you can say that. And I search for new ways of making the same arguments. But what depresses me is rather than seeing the things that I love, and revere being torn down now in this mass psychosis, of white people deciding that they are the source of all evil, and the effects on say classical music on art museums that have now all declared themselves anti racist institutions, and or declaring classical music, a racist tradition, or, you know, Dutch Baroque 17th century portraiture or still lives, a vehicle of an era of colonialism and slavery. These are ludicrous arguments, and yet they are being embraced now by the guardians of our traditions, those who are the have the great privilege to be leading classical music organizations or opera companies are leading the great encyclopedic museums, whether it's the Chicago Art Institute, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that have now declared that their collections are racist and need to be decolonize. This is sickening to me, because I feel like the greatest privilege we have is to be the recipients of the works of sublimity of Western civilization. My life has been so much enriched by the study of literature by immersing myself headlong into the tradition of classical music. And now that is all at risk and and, you know, the assault on literature has been going on for since the 1980s. With the rise of no nothing multiculturalism and feminism, the classical music attack is post George Floyd. art, art was regarded as as a means of, of silencing voices in the academy starting in the 1980s. But now, as I say, you have the leaders of some of the greatest art museums in the world, turning on their own collections, it's absolutely appalling. So that, to me, is a source of other spirit crushing fatigue, and a sense of, I don't know how we're gonna get out of this. But the only thing you can do I just get so angry. Every time I see another unjustified assault on this extraordinary tradition of Western civilization and science, that you just have to fight back, even though I do feel I mean, I'm a pessimist by nature. But at this point, it sure does feel like a losing battle. Not withstanding, you know, if you want to be optimist, you look at the Virginia Glen Younkin and Jason butene getting voted out and whatnot. But those, there's still a heck of a lot of elite institutions that have gone 100% insane since George Floyd and I don't see that turning around. What will it take is white people saying, I refuse to be called the problem any longer. I refuse to say that George bot, Joe Biden is unifying. When he says white people in this country today are still meeting out racial injustice and are filled with hate. It's just not true. And whites have to stop turning the other cheek and accepting this calumny
Ken LaCorte:where I have seen a line that that clearly exists is when it comes to kids. And that's and that's why I think, you know, like a bunch of assholes, on college campuses, whatever. You know, there been there have been crazy assholes ever since I was ever since I was 15 years old. I think the average person kind of rolls their eyes that, you know, you look at a number of institutions and you talk about art things and things that I'm I'm, I'm not high class enough to be be involved with, although watching, you know, watching the pull down of statues of brilliant thought leaders who advanced human civilization has been has been kind of kind of depressing. But it does seem that one line is when you get that stuff into schools that certainly helped push Younkin I think that that's, I'm seeing that and kids, the Florida kind of kind of flipped around on it, you know, the one place that I'm not convinced that is going to have that same kind of same kind of backlash to was California, considering you know, considering some of the new, the new algebra standards where, you know, one plus one equals zero white supremacist. Did this stuff start at the colleges and burble out and successfully get off of that? In other words, where I kind of think that I saw that the the anti Free Speech Movement really started on college campuses, you were a victim of that, you know, I can I can point to person after person. And and, you know, you were you were mistreated at college I went to which was one of the few conservative conservative liberal arts schools in the world. And you know, they did their best to drive you off off off of there. Did it start in the colleges and burble out? And if so, how? How was it finally effective considering that kind of school of, you know, America sucks, and everybody was racist thought has been out there for a long time.
Heather Mac Donald:Well, first of all, thank you for the Claremont McKenna reference and I will just say that I wasn't mistreated speech was mistreated. You know, I don't really care although it was certainly sobering to hear this mob bang for my head and you you to realize you're facing sheer irrationality, and ignorance on the part of these students is, is is really an extraordinary experience as it on a visceral level. You can hear about it, but when you're actually in the presence of hysteria, it's it's very disturbing. With all due respect, your reaction when you say, Oh, you hear about college, you know, idiocy, whatever. Sorry, can you're part of the problem? You are those people that for decades did turn their eyes away from universities and say, Oh, it's a couple of vassals acting stupidly, they've act stupidly on college campuses for decades. No, every bad idea in college has gotten out it was a mistake for America to turn its eyes away. You know. There's a a Washington column mystic. His name reminds me Now Michael, fab fabulous, long, long standing columnist that wrote a book on hard America and soft America and saying, Oh, well, you know, soft America is the college campus with all these haha cute little snowflakes who say that they're, they need safe spaces in order to read off its metamorphosis. But as soon as they get into Michael Barone, as soon as they get into hard America, the free market economy, they're just going to have to pull up their bootstraps. Barone was so naive. We have seen the the annual belching of these of these self indulgent narcissists out of colleges each year, infecting corporations and turning them left the idea that speech is somehow a form of violence, and is rightfully censored, that is now taking over our society. That's not just big tech, you're gonna see government doing that. What's going on in law schools is terrifying. You have the most elite law students in the country at Yale and Harvard, embracing the idea of beliefs survivors, which is a violation of due process of the presumption of innocence, and they're going to accede to the bench because Harvard and Yale graduates from its law schools have a vast disproportionate share of federal judges. So none of this stuff should have been ignored. And I've I have been writing on it since the early 1990s. And I, it is, I will say it is discouraging, that apparently people just laughed it off, I guess. I mean, for me, I do have the independence. attachment to the university I aspire to be a comparative literature professor,
Ken LaCorte:let me go back to the Barone, the Barone, the Barone thesis, because that was kind of my own, and which certainly isn't now proven wrong. But for 30 years, seem to be there seem to be like there were there were, there were crazy lefties that were running colleges when before you and I went to college. And it did seem that, you know, youth who likes to my youth transitioning to adults, there's a lot of changes that goes on on that. And the concept that when they came out into the real world, they'd have to stop it, pull up their pants, wipe their nose and do it and started to be affected by the world. That worked for decades. And and then it stopped. In other words, you know, the corporations in the 70s weren't weren't doing this stuff, or in the 80s, even even throughout the 90s, whereas the colleges still kind of had that. Why did that side windy effect? Why? How did it escape from there, and whether the Barone to step my thesis was, was always wrong. And it just took that that kind of time to overcome itself. How did it? How did how did the craziness that was always there to some extent, on colleges in the last probably 50 years? How did it escape? And, and when?
Heather Mac Donald:Well, first of all, in the 90s, in the early 1990s, you had the corporate diversity consulting movement, or Roosevelt, Thomas and others that were going around there with sort of the precursors of Abraham Kennedy and Robin D'Angelo today, telling corporations that they were racist for having neural so called White norms about promptness and accuracy that were impeding black progress in the corporate world. And this, this consulting scam, took over corporations, and you had employees in the early 90s being sent to diversity training. So we have a very short memory this has been going on for a long time. The ADC may be right, I would just say it's a question of critical mass. You have enough employees coming out of these universities moving up the ranks in the corporate world that have been told that America is profoundly racist and that meritocratic standards are racist, and that you know, the whole revolution in sexual harassment law, the turning of men into per se, villains and bearers of toxic masculinity that was all happening in the 80s and 90s. So I don't think it was so sudden, I think it was a gradual accumulating idea. And the more I would also say, another problem is, I don't know if this is cause or effect, what drives this, but the feminization of our culture, with the more that institutions go female, the more left wing they are, and that's certainly true and universities, but it's true in businesses as well. And I would say the whole COVID hysteria phenomenon in the west at least, was certainly a product of the feminization of our culture and the failure to act rationally to apply cost benefit analysis to understand that risk is inherent in all human activities and, and civilization itself. So, but what why females started taking over and males seated, you know, we're sort of in a Zeno's paradox here of of endlessly receding a root cause it's a very hard thing to come up with one single, single cause here,
Ken LaCorte:you know, I use that dichotomy, the the feminization when I look at cities and homelessness, and the cities that, that have, that those more feminine characteristics than masculine characteristics are the ones with all the homeless people. And you know, and I use the word nice, it's probably not the right word, but a superficial, you know, people in in the, the cities that end up allowing people to be abused and having their life ruined out in public and, and, and to create those problems are often filled with people who are very compassionate. And, and that compassion, that's a better word, I guess, the niceness and that compassion just seems to create horrific problems. And I saw that when I you know, when it was it was kind of mind blowing when I when I first moved to San Francisco maybe maybe five years ago, and again, I don't live in the city I live I live outside of it into it into into just seeing the I mean, it's not a homeless problem. It's it's, it's it's a mental health problem. It's a drug problem. You know, the average person here still doesn't understand that if you gave homes away for $10,000 A piece Use you'd have the exact same number of homeless people on on the on the sidewalk but and you get you get used to kind of anything I was in journalism for years and and you build up walls to that doctors in emergency wards build up up walls to having people die and come in with blood on their face. And when I first came into the city and you know, and you you'd see a guy sitting, you know, with drool coming out of his mouth, in his wheelchair obviously screwed up and the whole world going by as there were there were there's no nothing was happening. It was it was it was a difficult transition. It was it was it was shocking. You know, it gets less so the 15th guy you see or the 50th guy. And and but you know, I wonder if if if this frog is boiled so slowly that people people have become numb to that here.
Heather Mac Donald:Yes. Dennis Prager had recently a couple days ago was addressing just this issue of niceness and you know, places like Minneapolis, you know, these are really nice Midwesterners, and yet many people there are willing to tolerate behavior that is clearly it's not compassionate, you know, that one, the Conservatives tried so many types of jujitsu to safe, like, how do we get through to the left? Like, let's let's use their tools against them, and show that, you know, they say they're for black lives matter. But what about the black victims for God's sakes, and you can say the same thing. It's not compassionate to leave people on the street. I'm for compassion, too. And that doesn't work. I would say like with regards to the street vagrancy problem, there's two camps. There's the the dumb, idiotic, just nice people that don't get it. But there's also driving this are people that are on a very vicious ideological crusade, and that is the activist that is the advocates. And they want the homeless on the streets because they serve as, as they're Exhibit A in the callousness of capitalism, and they will fight tooth and nail any kind of policy that will get them off. And so I don't think they're driven by niceness. I think they're driven by hatred of of Western norms. And those people have to be fought tooth and nail. But yes, we do have I think as a society, generally we have lost the will to enforce stigma. And that is a niceness issue. You know, that we we don't want to stigmatize single parents, and a lot of us are compromised by divorce, you know, a lot of the white upper class middle class, they do marry initially, which is certainly better than starting out as a single mother. But divorce rates are very high and we used to stigmatize divorce. People would be drummed out of their country club, we certainly stigmatize single mothers 19th century literature is filled with heart wrenching stories from the perspective of a single mother who is who is exiled from her community for breaking the very powerful norm of, of chastity until marriage. And but society understood at the time that in order to have norms that are good for the largest number of people, you are going to have to apply stigma on those who break them. And now we've reversed things we're so unwilling to stigmatize individuals. And as a result, we have no more norms, we have no norm enforcement. And the result is a hell of a lot more suffering. Because those norms arose over centuries, as something that are is necessary for the best functioning of the largest number of people. And now we're two nights and you know, we're certainly not to stigmatize divorced parents and
Ken LaCorte:stigmatize anything. You can't stigmatize any you know, I saw
Heather Mac Donald:racism when I also disagree. You know, the, the Conservatives line on the left is always Oh, they're relativistic and nihilistic and godless and whatnot. This is what happens when you don't believe in God or values or whatever. No, the left is ruthlessly moralistic ruthlessly, they believe they have the truth. They're not they're not epistemological or ethical, relativist, it's just a whole different set of truths they have and they will, God knows you know, we've seen with canceled culture and hate speech, they will stigmatize the so called racist or sexist, but
Ken LaCorte:tolerate anything except intolerance
Heather Mac Donald:exact well. Yeah, but they were they are intolerant themselves. So,
Ken LaCorte:you know, when I grew up, so I'm 57 When I grew up in the high school years, the the social message that the schools were pushed on, on, you know, every every time that they could get it was Don't do drugs. That was Nancy Reagan years it was it was drug drug drug every time you go to a to a, you know, to the, to the rally or there are you know, you have that special speaker and he was always telling me not to do drugs in my kids generations who are now in their, in their, in their 20s It was all about bullying. And, and, and they would have an anti bullying conference or confab at my kids Junior High in high school, all the time. And and, and I do see how and you know, and of course, the opposite of a bully is a victim. And the worst person in the world is a bully, and therefore is often the person we should we should appreciate and love and support the most is a victim. And I've definitely seen kind of that group grow up into you know, when you say you can't, you can't stigmatize anything. Well, you can't bully somebody because they're mentally ill or poor, or taking a crap in the middle of the street, because he can't get into the Starbucks. Well, now he can get into the Starbucks, but I don't know, I think that those things are somehow somehow linked with with our progression over the last few decades.
Heather Mac Donald:Interesting. Yeah, I would say so. And so we have harm reduction. And people, you know, being celebrated, in a sense using drugs in public. And the bullying thing, of course, began really with the gay issue. And nobody wants to acknowledge, you know, the, the real cruelty there again, I'm sound race obsessed. But the the violence in black schools of student on student violence is really something. And there's a hell of a lot of bullying there. But that's not really the focus, it's on these white kids. But white girls can be absolutely cruel. So you're right, you know, this can get out of hand. But I would say, I mean, one problem, perhaps is just the introduction of the whole social service bureaucracy into the schools. And so little time is spent on true academic preparation, which is really their value added. It's not socializing. So but again, if we focus exclusively on academic accomplishment, then we come up against the disparate impact problem again, and so we're devaluing that, and we're getting rid of gifted and talented programs and algebra, and in middle school and high school, in order to try and pretend the academic skills gap doesn't exist.
Ken LaCorte:Again, no, no black community wants to listen to me. But it's, it's, I find it so sad when when you, you know, when you see some serious problems, and you can blame a community, but you certainly can't blame, you know, the young people born into that community that, you know, I can't imagine if I was born on a different side of the tracks. And then you see something like, was it the Washington or Oregon governor who signed the bill saying, we're going to, we're getting rid of of testing to get out of high school because it disproportionately helps or hurts minority people. And, and you're like, Okay, so now we've just once again lowered the standards, we've set people back in the name of progress, just you know, whether it's whether it's taking away taking away funding for police in neighborhoods, whether it's Holding, holding, you know, trying to push everyone to a high standard of, of academic progress. And when you see when you see that, that the solutions that are coming out of this, are doing the absolutely 180 degree wrong thing. It's a little depressing,
Heather Mac Donald:well, why to terrified that the academic skills gap and the behavior gap is not going to close, for whatever reason. And so they've decided to just give up on expecting it to close in her stead just tearing down standards. So that's there, as I say, the elites are absolutely terrified that this is a problem that is going to be with us. And they've adopted solutions that are are absolutely dysfunctional, and are guaranteeing that it will continue.
Ken LaCorte:All said the ad seem to be even worse. I mean, I mean, we're getting we're getting there when it comes to crime stats when it comes to murder rates, you know, you look at you and I did some back of the envelope envelope calculations the other day when you looked at I think it was murder rate was about in America was about 10 per 100,000 per year, then it in 1980 dropped down a little bit in the 90s but it was still pretty darn high. And then it's settled into about six of that and, and then it's of course in the last in the last couple years has been spiking up 20 30% You know between probably 1920 and 21. And you know when you calculate Get the number of people who would be dead if we still had that 80s crime rate between then and now. It's a half a million people. I mean, it's a city the size of Atlanta, that would that would be wiped out. I'm a little encouraged that because this came about so quickly, in the in the in the poster, we'll call it Ferguson 2.0. But the that, that we're reacting to it more quickly than we did in the in the late 70s or early 80s. But I mean, Crime and Punishment was, was much softer than it was it was crazily soft in the in that period of time. And we're, you know, we're not, we're not there yet. Do you see, are you are you encouraged by the fact? I guess that it's that it's come back quick enough that people are saying, wait a second, this is crazy. We need to tamp it down again? Or do you think we go through a three decade or two and a half decade? Time of insanity out there? Like we did, like we did when we were young?
Heather Mac Donald:Yeah. And I would say you said the 80s were much worse, the 70s were worse than the 80s. And the 60s were really bad, too. I mean, the 70s was probably the absolute Nadir as far as urban crime and police killings, you know, I mean, killings of police officers were just off the charts. And, and so there was a reaction starting in the late 70s, early 80s, against alternatives to incarceration and, and movements to have determinate sentences so that it was reducing judges discretion. You had the rise of the three strikes, and you're out laws in California, which spread which were very good ideas, repeat offenders are, that's a serious problem. And the fact that somebody has so called you know, well, it's already stolen a pizza on his third strike, and he's out, yeah, but believe me between his second third strike and his first and second strike, he has been doing a hell of a lot of crime. And he knows he's unnoticed that he's, you know, facing a thirst, three strikes, that is somebody to get off the streets for sure. without apology,
Ken LaCorte:you know, you know, a lot of people won't remember that you're talking about a very specific case, and, and it was in Southern California. And I remember how it was misrepresented, even back in the day, because, you know, so in his life, he had, he had a rap sheet, you know, you're like, This is the type of person we should just, you know, let die and bury and do a do over. And his last strike was when he, and this was a big, big, angry, often violent guy, walked up to some kids. And and, you know, it wasn't like he was grabbed a piece of pizza and ran away, he demanded it from them, it was it was a robbery, not a not not a theft. And he then became and then they put him away for four. And he was exactly you looked at it, it's like, this is the exact same kind of person that that, that sells without doors, or are created for right. And he became the poster child for it. But the LA Times never, never really never really did that I was I was very involved in the criminal justice case, back back in the day.
Heather Mac Donald:So is it Are we are we learning the lesson faster now? And, you know, I don't know, I think that those all in the seven days, all of the parole and probation experiments probably also had a racial justice element to them. But now that racial justice element is so predominant, and we have every institution, unlike then, and you're right, I would agree with you that in the 60s and 70s, for God's sakes, I mean, the AMA and the ABA, were still sort of rock, you know, solid Republican organization. Imagine that now, you know, every pronouncement out of the AMA, the American Medical Association is, oh, woe is me, doctors are racist, and they all need to be sent to anti racism training, and we need to get rid of medical standards and in medical schools, because we're not graduating enough blacks are admitting enough blacks. I mean, the AMA and the ABA are almost indistinguishable from a Black Studies Department on at Yale University or UC Berkeley. But the fact that the anti racism and the racial guilt has spread so widely among our mainstream institutions, I think will make it more difficult to return to necessary consequences for criminal behavior. You know, we have a mayor in New York now, Eric Adams, who when he was within the New York Police Department was one of the worst racial rabble rousers constantly accusing the NYPD of racial profiling because it stopped and questioned more blacks than whites. Well, that's who's committing the shootings guys. Sorry. You know, that's just the way it is. But he seems to have done an about face and was elected as a law and order candidate. But to the extent that he can follow through and start using proactive policing again, and and getting the cops and the prosecutors to work together and enforce the law, he's going to run up against the disparate impact charge because he will be arresting blacks more. And that's already been used against him by Alvin Bragg, you know, that was just chasing butene every, that's the argument everywhere. So I'm not sure how easily it's going to be to return to that. The necessary crime policies, given the ubiquity and strength of the disparate impact concept today,
Ken LaCorte:until you get enough victims who keep having their I mean, I remember living in New York during the Dinkins years, you know, and it was and it was, and so people always ask me, When do you think San Francisco will turn around? And I'm like, I think it's got another lower to go. I mean, yes, yesterday's chase a butene thing was was was a good sign. It's a good sign that at least London breed whether I believe her or not, is now actually talking like she doesn't like criminals. Now, she was one of the first ones to take, I forget, it was it was over $10 million from from the police from the police budget, and literally be like, we're giving it to black groups. It was there was no there was no, you know, there was no ifs, ands or buts. There wasn't even any kind of like underprivileged groups, it was nowhere we're taking this money and we're giving it to this, this ethnic group here. And now she's pounding her fist. And, and, and, you know, sounding obviously, the polls are turning and enough people are saying, you know, I don't want to go into the city anymore. You know, we're also seeing cities people are voting with their feet. You know, one of the reasons why I asked you that early question about our people moving and shifting out. I mean, I made a decent amount of money from that whole nonsense because I owned a home that was kind of inland from Malibu a little bit a little bit of the country, it was 45 minutes to get to La between COVID People could work at home. And between now in Sherman Oaks, you have you have tents in the Ralph's parking lot. And and and the the crap from the central cities burbled out, everybody moved in, you know, prices jumped up 20 25% And those in those places and, and I sold a home and it was like, you know, I kind of hate to profit. I didn't hate to profit from it. I felt bad that the situation existed, but, but I but you know, and today we can we, you know, we see the migration of, of where people are still moving to. And so there are certainly a number of people, you know, a number of people voting voting with their feet, but I'm not sure if we've hit that that zenith, and those those bad points. And if they'll be overwhelmed by the concept of, of, you know, disparate numbers, you know, just equity when it comes to when it comes to that. But,
Heather Mac Donald:well, if why kids start getting shot and drive by shootings, things will turn around pretty fast. I think. Right now, you know, it's all black kids. And so the nation doesn't care. The media doesn't care, the me doesn't give a damn about black children dying and drive bys. Right.
Ken LaCorte:And in fairness, it's a very good point. I mean, I just don't see cops in my neighborhood that much. And I don't see too many criminals. It's It's just I live in a radically different world, that just over the bridge in in certain neighborhoods there that are just Lord of the Flies type
Heather Mac Donald:type. Well, nobody should apologize for that. You know, I think we've gotten to the point where you feel guilty about, oh, yeah, things are nice and stable and clean here. No, everybody has a right to that. That is not a, you don't achieve that at somebody else's expense. It's not zero sum. Public Order is when when and everybody has a right to it. But nobody should feel guilty about the fact that he can send his children outdoors without worrying about them getting shot. That is that is the case in black neighborhoods, and it's not white people are shooting it's blacks. But those good law abiding blacks have an entitlement, a right to have the same freedom from fear as white people do or as as bourgeois blacks do in their neighborhoods, so that you know, but we've gotten so guilty and so preposterously self incriminating, that people feel a little bit hangdog about about that if you're privileged. Well, it's a privilege. You know, here's the you want to talk about privilege. It's the two parent family privilege. That's the privilege if you want you know, if you're a child and you're you haven't been born yet, and you're in kind of a, a Rawlsian experiment. Mm. You can choose to be born to a single mother with $40,000 a year in, in transfer payments and you know welfare programs in kind and whatnot. Or you can be born to a family with $20,000 in earned income, but to parent, married parents, you're going to choose, you should choose a two parent household regardless of income, that it's the greatest privilege today, in Americans growing up with two married parents who stay together.
Ken LaCorte:You know, we always look at the proximate causes to current. What drove that? I mean, I mean, marriage rates are divorce rates and single single childhood rates are rising for both for all ethnic groups. And in America, it's obviously much, much higher with black, but whites are doing their best to catch up. How much of that was, was was driven by by financial benefits given in the late 60s? How much of that was from Johnson's Great, great, great initiative to end poverty versus more cultural acceptance of that? Are those two things do you think hand in hand?
Heather Mac Donald:Yes, I have to say I'm, I'm somewhat skeptical of the policy argument that this was all rational calculation, looking at the where you have the most money, whether it's being on AFDC, the welfare for single mother program, or we're having a husband and therefore becoming disqualified from AFDC. I'm just, I'm, you know, there's many people I respect, you've made that argument, Thomas soul and Charles Murray. But I'm not sure that people, at least in the underclass, are that rational in their calculation?
Ken LaCorte:What made it possible, though, didn't I mean, you know, you know, you don't have to be a, you don't have to be an economist to know that when you have a baby and you start getting a check for X dollars, because society doesn't want to see you living in the street with you know, society is being very nice to you. You don't think that, that knowing that you would be able to have financial help coming your way, if you decided to have that baby made that more likely? I don't know. I'm not an expert in this at all.
Heather Mac Donald:Yeah, you're probably right. We did try to reform welfare and put some time limits on it and a work requirement in 1996 with the federal lawn in New York City. It didn't have any effect on out of wedlock child rearing, but maybe it was too late at that point. And these and the the reforms were frankly, pretty weak. I mean, they should have just said, no additional cash for new children, no cash at all for teenagers. And really, they should have said no cash period, you know, here's here's some food you know, we're giving food we're not going to give you food stamps, which you're going to use on soda and potato chips and and absolute crap, obesity producing processed foods. So had we been much more courageous in cutting back on the entitlement mentality, maybe it would have had a difference, but, but I do think that the cultural factors are important as well, which is the demonization of males and the hatred of bourgeois propriety, which is to parents in the glorification of promiscuity, and and, you know, liberation from from traditional norms.
Ken LaCorte:Is there a better word than bourgeois now might be the right one, it just sounds so upper class French.
Heather Mac Donald:I know. Sounds like people are wearing ascots. Well, the question is, maybe the battle has to be fought to reclaim that word, rather than getting a new word. Maybe the problem is we do react that way. But yeah, but you know, it also has Marxist roots, you know, we're viewed as the enemy so that's right. But I you know, I use it as a shorthand and I was once asked to define it, and was, came up short and since then I know how to define it, which is that if you find graffiti, self evidently repugnant, self evidently theft self evidently assault, self, evidently, an attack on everything is important to civilization. You are bourgeois, and if instead you find graffiti, cool and hip, and are the statement and self you know, and we're going to have a, a exhibit celebrating graffiti at the Museum of Contemporary Art Under Jeffrey Deitch and in Los Angeles or in Paris, then your anti bourgeois
Ken LaCorte:Heather I was in. I was in Athens a couple of weeks ago. And it is the cradle of human civilization, right. I mean, they invented the concept of human self worth. They invented the concept of self government, it's a shithole that every at least 50% of the buildings in there are tagged. Not by our, you know, I mean, like, you could see a couple pictures of 1970 subways, and you're like, you know what, that kid had something going on, this is just crap on it. And I'm not talking like, like, in some some areas where, where, you know, they'll they'll tag the, the metal grate that comes over. I mean, the, the marble buildings that were that were, you know, that were had been standing some of them for hundreds of years. It was like, it was like driving around in a trash can. And I just couldn't understand it, I'm sure it's the same thing that people now come and see when they when they see San Francisco, but I thought, you know, you guys can fix this shit in a week. You know, if you had to, you know, you could you could do one big cleanup campaign, and then grab the kids who you're catching to do it and turn them into your next cleaning rounds. And so it must be an acceptance of that, and a hatred towards the government and a hatred towards establishment that allows that to go but it was, it was, it was a shock to my senses that I wasn't expecting.
Heather Mac Donald:Well, I this is going to turn off a lot of your viewers, but I revere Europe in many ways. I think they're still on many things. They're still holding on to standards in a way we're not. I mean, Macron in France has said, you know, we're not going to tear down statues here. We're not going to rename cities and streets. We're proud of our civilization. And you know, it is the root of so much that I love but I have to say Europe on graffiti is way behind the United States, they still have this dopey idea that it's irrelevant or that it's artistic. And it is amazing. Even in the Germanic cities, the outskirts in Vienna for Munich. There's a much, much higher degree of graffiti now, I'm going to disagree with you. It's obviously utterly spirit killing to see it on important monuments. But it is just a spirit killing to see it on subways or unroll downgrades, and any graffiti anywhere, is a signal that public order and social informal social norms are broken down. And it must be eradicated it must not be allowed to stay.
Ken LaCorte:Yeah, I'm not saying it was good there. But I'm saying it just it it viscerally hits you more when it's on a piece of beauty, or when it's on. I mean, when I you know when I saw saw in Washington, DC when the World War Two monument was hit by graffiti. I want to get in the car and go go just patrol it and thump heads. It's not you know, it's just it's a next level to that and then seeing it. I know in fairness, I didn't see it as I went to a number of countries. Athens was was the worse by by a good chunk. So there is something culturally that was allowing allowing that to go on. Hey, before I let you go, I think that if somebody said, Heather McDonald will be remembered for this. I think it is I think it is your Ferguson Effect. And the way that you've you've gone into that and give me a two minute overview of that. How you see that affecting affecting the world, what that means, how that turns and how we're kind of living through that right now.
Heather Mac Donald:Well, the Ferguson Effect is the combined phenomenon of officers backing off of proactive policing under the phony charge of systemic police racism, and the resultant emboldening of criminals. And we saw this after the the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. And the subsequent riots that led cops to again go fetal, as Rahm Emanuel said in 2015, when he was the mayor of Chicago, and not get out of their cars to do discretionary stops. You know, there's a whole area of police activity that is discretionary, not mandatory, mandatory is going to a robbery scene when somebody's made a 911 call and taking a police report. The discretionary stuff is using a police officer using his powers of observation to see suspicious behavior and suspicious locales and tried to intervene asked a few questions. And cops stopped doing that because they were being told by the elites that they were racist, and they were worried about getting into a confrontation with the suspect who resist arrest and having to maybe escalate their own use of force. So they backed off in in 2015 and 2016. You saw the first iteration of the first Ferguson Effect, which was a the largest two year increase in homicide in 50 years. You had the massacre of of police officers in Dallas, in 2016. And in Baton Rouge, and in the end of 2014, the assassination in in New York City of Ramos and Lou and then after George Floyd death, as you say, it's either Ferguson Effect 2.0, or the Minneapolis effect, with 2020. Seeing an astounding and you referred to this earlier, 29% annual increase in homicide nationally, which is the largest in recorded history. And it's worse than 2021. And things are not really getting better in 2022. And it's the same phenomenon of officers backing off, and criminals being given license to absolute run riot and terrify people and terrorize people. And we're now living in really a cold rolling riots. You know, it's not they're not built burning buildings every day. But there's just a level of theft and shoplifting and looting that is persistent in cities after city that is a result of the glorification of racial violence after the George Floyd death.
Ken LaCorte:You mean, it wasn't COVID and guns? I tell you, I've read some, you know, I remember reading a Seattle, I guess it was post intelligence or who, whichever, and the you know, they were speculating on on the causes of crime. And they just never touched it. It was it was COVID. It was more, you know, people buy more guns. And if you look at this, you know, because that's buying guns to protect ourselves as if those are what's what's great in crime. Well, we live through the resurgence before I remember, you know, it felt like it was a dark hole in the in the early 80s. And, you know, I remember California was at 83, what year did Roseburg and a couple and two other Supreme Court justices get get bounced out? You know, they were the chase of bodines of the day. And, you know, I went through a period of time. I mean, there was a period of time in California, where if you commit a first degree murder, you were up for parole in five and a half years and first degree cold blooded murder and and, you know, the the three strikes the while we've backed off some of that we're still you know, we're still not as crazy as that was, but we got it. We got to stay away from that. It's like that, that that would be a horrific path to keep going through. All right, well, you have to be you have to be tired of, of fighting this fight, but I appreciate you. Appreciate you giving me some time today.
Heather Mac Donald:Great. Thank you so much. Can I appreciate it?
Ken LaCorte:Alright, other thanks again for your time.
