November 2, 2024 • 21 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Barry Show. We started the Saturday podcast as
a bonus podcast, but also as a way to well
We got a lot of email from listeners who said,
I wish you were on on Saturday, and you know what,
(00:20):
I would love to do more shows. I think Ramon
and Chad and Jim and the team would probably punch
me in the face for saying that, but.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I would.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
But I also recognize that by taking two days off,
we're fresher and do the show better. That's just a fact.
But what we decided to do on our Saturday shows wells.
During the course of the week, we're constantly sending things
back and forth to each other, Hey have you heard this?
Is there anything from this speech that we can use
(00:54):
on the show? And we go back to a series
of a very very influential things in our lives to
our intellectual development, and one of the most common is
Thomas soul He is an economist. He started life as
(01:15):
a very very left wing, practically a communist, went to
the University of Chicago. He studied under Milton Friedman, but
as he says, Friedman didn't change his outlook. It wasn't
until he left there and went to the Department of Labor,
a government job, and they were pushing for a minimum
(01:35):
wage hike, and he was one of the people crunching
the data. And at the end of it, this very liberal,
socialist leaning economist, Thomas soul Young in his career, said, hey,
the data is showing me that increasing the minimum wage
hurts the working poor because those positions will just be cut.
(02:00):
And his bosses at the Department of Labor, who were
pushing for a minimum wage increase, said, this isn't about
helping the working poor. It's a political issue. It's not
a quality of life issue. We're not doing it for them,
We just want them to support it. And it changed
everything for him. He started questioning everything. He has become
(02:23):
on more than just economics. He has become one of
the greatest social commentators of all time. He is the
leading social commentator today. And he happens to be a
black man.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Pah.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
You would think that his virtues would be extolled, that
they would be building monuments to him. Quite the opposite.
The black intelligensia hates him because he speaks of opportunity
and self reliance and accountability and consequences and good descis
vision making not victimhood. He has several very good books.
(03:06):
You can get them on tape as well. One of
the most influential to me was called Basic Economics, and
he drills he makes it very simple. He drills down
in some deep concepts, but he simplifies it. He also
wrote one called Black Rednecks and White Liberals, which I
highly commend. He argues that certain behavioral patterns in what
(03:33):
we would call modern black culture as it's defined, are
rooted in the cracker culture of early white immigrants from
the border regions of Great Britain like Scotland, Northern Ireland,
folks who settled in the American South. And he suggests
(03:54):
that some aspects of this culture, like honor and defiance,
influenced the cultural development in ways that still affect what
are called the black communities today. So I want to
play for you audio of Thomas Soul making the case
(04:15):
that people like Barack Obama and Neil de grasse Tyson
pose a threat to America. You don't have to agree
with the conclusion, just give it an open minded listen.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
The vision of the annoying it self. Congratulations is a
basic for social policy. I mean you positive here that
their group of self anointed elitists who are responsible for
what in.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
America, well, for much of the social policy of the
past thirty years, and for the disastrous consequences that have
follow from those policies.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
And who are these people?
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Well, there'll be people in the media, in the academic world,
and in politics, particularly those who believe that third parties
can make better decisions than people can make for those
and particularly when they are those third parties. I think
most people who have not been in the academic world
would have to see the academics in action to realize
how deeply they believe this. I can remember a conference
(05:12):
at Middlebury College some years ago and which they were
laying out these plans for how they would manipulate the
poor in order to get them to do this, to
do that, to do the other than I said, who
are we to be running these people's lives? And they
looked at me as if I were a man from
Mars speaking the language they had never heard before.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
Do you therefore believe, I mean this is almost you know,
university kind of debate. Do you therefore believe that the
government has no responsibility for those less fortunate than ourselves?
If free enterprise, they cannot find a place in the
(05:52):
market economy.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Well, there are many things the government can do. I
think the most important thing they can do is maintain
a framework of law in which people do, in fact
find jobs and find progress. After all, this is not
a hypothetical question is if this situation has never come
up before. I mean, you look up the entire history
of the United States, I mean the United States that
I've become a prosperous country only after the New Deal.
I mean history didn't begin in the nineteen sixties or
(06:14):
even in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And you look at the history of blocks.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
For that matter, you know that the blocks have come
a very long way long before the first civil rights
law was passed in nineteen in the nineteen sixties. Uh.
In fact, in the five years prior to the Civil
Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, blocks rose into professional
and similar occupations to a greater extent than in the
five years afterwards.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
So you would have even if you were if you
look back now mm as an economist and in and
in some ways as a historian, at the civil rights
legislation that was passed in sixty four sixty five and
through the great society you and in terms of voting
rights as well, you would say those laws, those civil
rights laws were unnecessary in counterproduction.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
Oh no, no, there and so oh you had to
get rid of the Jim Crow system. You had to
have throw a voter, had to have voting rights, and
so on. But I remember back in nineteen sixty four
writing to a friend, as the Civil Rights Act of
sixty four was being bought out in Congress, that I
hope this law would pass with absolutely no crippling amendments
exactly as it was written, because, among other some good
(07:18):
things in it. But was one reason. But the other
reason was that I was convinced that they would not
have the effect that they thought it would have. And
that one and what I assumed very incorrectly was that
once people saw that, yes, this would break down the
Jim Crow system, it would not cause any dramatic improvement
in the economic condition of black people, you know, and
that people would then say, no, now we have to
turn to something else in order to do that. And
(07:40):
I was completely wrong about that that when it didn't
produce that result, they said, well, it just shows we
need more of the same, which is the old argument
you know, we tried policy X and it absolutely goes nowhere.
We need stronger policy X.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
This argument has been I'm sure voice to you before
Clarence Thomas benefited from affirmative acts.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
So Clairece Thomas says, so, I bet no, he doesn't.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
No, he does not.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Clarence Thomas does.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Not say that that affirmative action programs helped him in
terms of the educational opportunity.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
He never said it to me.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I believe he. Do you think he would say no
to that question?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
He might.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
Well, for one thing, I for one thing. My understanding,
and I haven't researched it. My understanding is that he
was admitted to college the year before they began their
affirmative action program. I don't know and what and what
and and what the program did was to delegitimize what
he had done.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
That he had he was a man with outstanding the
academic record.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
Uh. And he and he goes out into the job
market and people and despite.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
This they look at him and they say, you got
there only because of affirmative action, right, because.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
Of your own marriage, where ordinarily someone with that kind
of record you look at saying this guy is really
a world beater. But no, and I've seen that in
my own life. I'm old enough that I can rive
going through the whole metamorphous.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
And what have you seen in your own life?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
All right?
Speaker 5 (08:58):
When I was in the in the Marine Corps, and
then this and during the Korean War, I was trained
as a photographer, and I was signed to Campus U
in North Carolina, where a great many of Southerners. When
the Marine Corps white Southerners, and in that barracks, whenever
somebody had a photographic problem, This camera wasn't working, these
pictures didn't come out right, and so forth they would
come to me. I was astonished. The most biggest redneck
(09:18):
in the barracks would come to me.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
They asked me, and there were all these white photographers
in my camera.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Yeah, you see why is this? And I finally figured
it out. They said, you know, if this guy is
black and he's a photographer, he must be some photographer.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
You know.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
Now, When I started teaching in the night early nineteen
sixties at the Douglas College, I read up on all
this stuff about new teachers, you seeing how it's hard
to get the respect of the students, particularly if you're
not much older than they are, and I looked younger
than I was, and so I worried about that, you see.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And I walked in that room in.
Speaker 5 (09:47):
The first day and it was instant respect, and you know,
it sort of took me aback and I realized, no, no,
they're there. They're saying, look this guy, I was the
first black male to teach there. This guy must be
something else. Go forward now ten years. By this time,
I've completed my degree, I've written my books, journal like
all the whole thing. I'm now teaching at UCLA, and
(10:09):
students will come up to me at the end of
the term and they'll say how much they like the
course and all that, and somewhere in the course of that,
they'll be a slip up and they'll let it, let
it out that they were quite surprised that the course
was as good as it was. And one one of
the things that struck me even before the end of
the term, one kid cheme to me one day and
he had a passage in the book he was having
trouble with, and he said, can you tell me what
this means. I had explained to him what that passage meant.
(10:30):
He said, are you sure? And I said, yes, I
wrote the textbook and he looked on the front and
he's really embarrassed. But this is what affirmative action has done,
you see.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
So you can't see any positive I don't doubtative action.
I don't doubt that, in fact, it increased the pool,
as you know, as frequently used the expression of what
ammorive action can do is increase the pool of I
don't know what.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
That means, and I've never had anybody explain it to me.
I've studied affirmative action in this country, in India and Malaysia,
you know, in Sri Lanka, in Nigeria they have some
version of it.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
In the Israel.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Well, I mean, explain it as it was explained to me.
It is the notion of it.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Let's a new oralan missions committee at Harvard, and you're
going to choose so many people. You're going to let
people in for a variety of reasons. One is sheer
academic merit. They scored sixteen hundred on their college boards.
That's a good entry. They've got a brilliant academic and
athletic background, and they happen to be a virtual.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So violent player.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
And the violin player helps or Let's say they come
from Nevada.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
They don't have a lot of Nevada at Harvard.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
And let's also say that they are come from Sri Lanka.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
They don't have many people from Sri Lanka there.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
And let's also say that they also are African American,
and that that ought to be a factor.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
In choosing from that pool. Maybe that's one of the generations, because.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Because diversity of a student body is a healthy factor.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
I'm fascinated with the extent of which words were conditioned
to react like Pavlov's dog to words.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I hear diversity.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Someone was asking that, don't make me look.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Someone today who was.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
A trustee of a college was saying that they were
going to pick it a new college professor. I said,
what you should do is have a stopwatch there and
just count how long it is till each of the
contestants says the word diversity. And the guy who says that,
you know, he's thirty five minutes into the interview, and
the other guy who says that you know, the first sentence,
the guy who said takes thirty five minutes, he should
be at the top of the list. The guy who
(12:34):
said that the first sensing should be at the bottom because.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
The question what's wrong with diversity? I don't get the point.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
My point is that this is a word that has
become magic. What does it mean, if anything? Are you
saying to me that all black people are alike? Therefore
you've got to mix and match by race. It's not
diverse unless it's diverse along the I want to.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Sell you what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
I'm saying that I think there would be different to
have people of different kinds of experiment. Instance, uh and
me mentioned Sri Lanka, didn't we and you know, and
to be interesting to have some people with an Asian back. Wait, wait,
an Asian back in African American people that come from
uh Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue as well as from Henderson,
(13:16):
North Carolina. All of that would make a healthy student body.
I don't think everybody ought to come from the sons
of Harvard.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
Graduates daughters, but because they're not always the best. But
all right, that all even I think that that doesn't
make it. I slipped my point there for for a minute.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Well, I mean, you have thought long and hard about this,
and much longer than I have, and.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
You bring it up. But that's the theory.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
That's the theory, and unfortunately the facts are quite different.
It plays like Harvard and Stanford and Cornel.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
What you have.
Speaker 5 (13:57):
What you have is the black son of a black doctor, right,
who lived in the same neighborhood with the white son
of the white doctor. And now you're giving me diversity
because these two people.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I'm not necessarily they have scholarships that they offered to kids.
Speaker 5 (14:10):
But now we're getting wait from the whole racial thing.
I'm saying, the racial thing has been used as a
proxy for something that is not a proxy for because
the vast majority of blacks who go to places like
Harvard and Cornell and Stanford are not blacks from the ghetto.
Those are blacks from out there. You know, they're from Malibu.
You know, they're from Pacific Palisades. Uh, they're from and
(14:31):
so for and they're from the very same neighborhoods. They're
from the very same neighborhoods as the whites are there
and so and so. Now you call it diversitly because
you see something with the naked elly. Right.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Let me make a couple of the points because I'm
gonna wave ahead of myself here. Uh, do you think
that the era of these uh social engineers from whatever
establishment they come from, media, academia, government, is over?
Speaker 5 (14:54):
No, I wish it were. I think they're gonna go underground.
They're gonna hunker down and and when when the wait,
wait out the storm to change. Absolutely, And we have
people in the room, and then among among the Republicans,
for example, who were I said, these things like this
are like crab grass. You've got to root it out,
not cut back on the appropriations for the national and downward.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
You're not gonna get rid of it.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
You don't want to gut Come on, I mean you
clearly don't want to gut them, and.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
I do not.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
I want to destroy it entirely. You I don't want
to gut it. That's right, because it's like.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Get public television as well.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
You got it.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
But uh well you'll never appear on the nail again,
thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I never have anywhere. Oh no. But it's like crabgrass.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
These people are gonna hunker down and then they'll they'll
wait for the change the political thing. And I say,
these guys are like somebody who's putting the lawn more
over crab grass.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
But these guys. You seem to be saying, are everywhere
these guys. I mean, but you're not talking about just
bureaucrash you were saying.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
I mean, you're saying, it's the New York Times, it's CBO,
it's Harvard University, and the faculty, u cl A faculty,
the Stanford faculty, all of them.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
You know what amazes me is that you buy into
these conspiracies like this.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
It's conspiracy. No, not conspiras at all.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
No.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
People, these people, people somehow have come to a power
in the establishment, have come to this like minded idea.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
About Well, that's happening many times and history appointed.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
And I don't believe for a minute. I think people
have harbored me.
Speaker 5 (16:32):
Wholly independently and sealed off from people from Stanford. And
they go into those committee rooms, they will come out
with the same kinds of policies because they went in
with the same assumption.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
And because their experiences, you suggest, are essentially the same.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Probably, well, I don't know about that. I don't know
about that.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Then why did they come to the same conclusion?
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Oh, of course they operate under the same assumptions, And.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Why do they have the same assumptions.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
For reasons which you can go back into the history.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Come on, why do they have to have a something
women even go back in history.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
Uh, this has been a set of assumptions that have
been very popular among intellectuals. What has happened in our
time is that intellectuals have been taken much more seriously
since the sixties than they were before. I think we're
suffering the consequences of it. It's not the first time
in history of intellectuals have been taken seriously and disasters.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
So we shouldn't have taken Milton Friedman seriously.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Milton Friedman as a very this.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Game and say, well, no, we shouldn't take intellectual seriously then,
except those happen to think.
Speaker 5 (17:26):
By seriously, I mean in the sense I should have
clarified this in the sense that they are exempted from
the test of facts.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Did it work?
Speaker 5 (17:33):
When I hear people come on the end and say
these lofty things, I say to myself, show me where
we've ever gotten better off listening to people like this?
All right, I see these psychologists coming on to how
you raise your children? I said, how are children better today?
Now that we've been listening to these people for thirty years.
Are they happier, are they more learned? You know, testcores
(17:54):
go down, for neural disease goes up, suicide rates go up,
And what way are we better off for having listened
to them?
Speaker 4 (17:59):
But it's seems to me that you do engage a
little bit in group dismissal, that you in a sense.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Wave your hand and anybody saying.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
That that each of these kinds of institutions or that
there is not a group think in the institution.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
You tell me that the group think. Someone that did
a survey and standard a couple of years ago, they
found whole departments in which there was not one Republican.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
Why why is it that on the Washington I mean,
look at the editorial people are right the editorials and
under the bylines or for the paper of the Washington Post,
you've got George Will there. And certainly what George Will
says is different from what David brother says. Certainly what
Bill Sapphire says is quite different from what Tom Friedman says,
from what absolutely Marine Dowd thinks.
Speaker 5 (18:46):
Absolutely, but there of the New York Times, that's that's
very true.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
But the fact is that they are the.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
Exceptions they are the exceptions, as Milton Freeman is exceptions.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
And only good guys are the exception and meaning getting
theer free.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
But you use the word dismissal.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
That's one of the words I latch onto in the
chapter about the vocabulary of the annointed, that whenever you
reach an that is different from from what they have,
they say you've dismissed it. You can spend three volumes
analyzing it, and at the end you're going the thing
is wrong, Oh, you dismissed it.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
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(19:43):
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(20:07):
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(20:30):
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(20:55):
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Speaker 2 (21:02):
Three
The Michael Barry Show. We started the Saturday podcast as
a bonus podcast, but also as a way to well
We got a lot of email from listeners who said,
I wish you were on on Saturday, and you know what,
(00:20):
I would love to do more shows. I think Ramon
and Chad and Jim and the team would probably punch
me in the face for saying that, but.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I would.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
But I also recognize that by taking two days off,
we're fresher and do the show better. That's just a fact.
But what we decided to do on our Saturday shows wells.
During the course of the week, we're constantly sending things
back and forth to each other, Hey have you heard this?
Is there anything from this speech that we can use
(00:54):
on the show? And we go back to a series
of a very very influential things in our lives to
our intellectual development, and one of the most common is
Thomas soul He is an economist. He started life as
(01:15):
a very very left wing, practically a communist, went to
the University of Chicago. He studied under Milton Friedman, but
as he says, Friedman didn't change his outlook. It wasn't
until he left there and went to the Department of Labor,
a government job, and they were pushing for a minimum
(01:35):
wage hike, and he was one of the people crunching
the data. And at the end of it, this very liberal,
socialist leaning economist, Thomas soul Young in his career, said, hey,
the data is showing me that increasing the minimum wage
hurts the working poor because those positions will just be cut.
(02:00):
And his bosses at the Department of Labor, who were
pushing for a minimum wage increase, said, this isn't about
helping the working poor. It's a political issue. It's not
a quality of life issue. We're not doing it for them,
We just want them to support it. And it changed
everything for him. He started questioning everything. He has become
(02:23):
on more than just economics. He has become one of
the greatest social commentators of all time. He is the
leading social commentator today. And he happens to be a
black man.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Pah.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
You would think that his virtues would be extolled, that
they would be building monuments to him. Quite the opposite.
The black intelligensia hates him because he speaks of opportunity
and self reliance and accountability and consequences and good descis
vision making not victimhood. He has several very good books.
(03:06):
You can get them on tape as well. One of
the most influential to me was called Basic Economics, and
he drills he makes it very simple. He drills down
in some deep concepts, but he simplifies it. He also
wrote one called Black Rednecks and White Liberals, which I
highly commend. He argues that certain behavioral patterns in what
(03:33):
we would call modern black culture as it's defined, are
rooted in the cracker culture of early white immigrants from
the border regions of Great Britain like Scotland, Northern Ireland,
folks who settled in the American South. And he suggests
(03:54):
that some aspects of this culture, like honor and defiance,
influenced the cultural development in ways that still affect what
are called the black communities today. So I want to
play for you audio of Thomas Soul making the case
(04:15):
that people like Barack Obama and Neil de grasse Tyson
pose a threat to America. You don't have to agree
with the conclusion, just give it an open minded listen.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
The vision of the annoying it self. Congratulations is a
basic for social policy. I mean you positive here that
their group of self anointed elitists who are responsible for
what in.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
America, well, for much of the social policy of the
past thirty years, and for the disastrous consequences that have
follow from those policies.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
And who are these people?
Speaker 5 (04:50):
Well, there'll be people in the media, in the academic world,
and in politics, particularly those who believe that third parties
can make better decisions than people can make for those
and particularly when they are those third parties. I think
most people who have not been in the academic world
would have to see the academics in action to realize
how deeply they believe this. I can remember a conference
(05:12):
at Middlebury College some years ago and which they were
laying out these plans for how they would manipulate the
poor in order to get them to do this, to
do that, to do the other than I said, who
are we to be running these people's lives? And they
looked at me as if I were a man from
Mars speaking the language they had never heard before.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
Do you therefore believe, I mean this is almost you know,
university kind of debate. Do you therefore believe that the
government has no responsibility for those less fortunate than ourselves?
If free enterprise, they cannot find a place in the
(05:52):
market economy.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
Well, there are many things the government can do. I
think the most important thing they can do is maintain
a framework of law in which people do, in fact
find jobs and find progress. After all, this is not
a hypothetical question is if this situation has never come
up before. I mean, you look up the entire history
of the United States, I mean the United States that
I've become a prosperous country only after the New Deal.
I mean history didn't begin in the nineteen sixties or
(06:14):
even in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And you look at the history of blocks.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
For that matter, you know that the blocks have come
a very long way long before the first civil rights
law was passed in nineteen in the nineteen sixties. Uh.
In fact, in the five years prior to the Civil
Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, blocks rose into professional
and similar occupations to a greater extent than in the
five years afterwards.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
So you would have even if you were if you
look back now mm as an economist and in and
in some ways as a historian, at the civil rights
legislation that was passed in sixty four sixty five and
through the great society you and in terms of voting
rights as well, you would say those laws, those civil
rights laws were unnecessary in counterproduction.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
Oh no, no, there and so oh you had to
get rid of the Jim Crow system. You had to
have throw a voter, had to have voting rights, and
so on. But I remember back in nineteen sixty four
writing to a friend, as the Civil Rights Act of
sixty four was being bought out in Congress, that I
hope this law would pass with absolutely no crippling amendments
exactly as it was written, because, among other some good
(07:18):
things in it. But was one reason. But the other
reason was that I was convinced that they would not
have the effect that they thought it would have. And
that one and what I assumed very incorrectly was that
once people saw that, yes, this would break down the
Jim Crow system, it would not cause any dramatic improvement
in the economic condition of black people, you know, and
that people would then say, no, now we have to
turn to something else in order to do that. And
(07:40):
I was completely wrong about that that when it didn't
produce that result, they said, well, it just shows we
need more of the same, which is the old argument
you know, we tried policy X and it absolutely goes nowhere.
We need stronger policy X.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
This argument has been I'm sure voice to you before
Clarence Thomas benefited from affirmative acts.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
So Clairece Thomas says, so, I bet no, he doesn't.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
No, he does not.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Clarence Thomas does.
Speaker 4 (08:04):
Not say that that affirmative action programs helped him in
terms of the educational opportunity.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
He never said it to me.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
I believe he. Do you think he would say no
to that question?
Speaker 3 (08:16):
He might.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
Well, for one thing, I for one thing. My understanding,
and I haven't researched it. My understanding is that he
was admitted to college the year before they began their
affirmative action program. I don't know and what and what
and and what the program did was to delegitimize what
he had done.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
That he had he was a man with outstanding the
academic record.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
Uh. And he and he goes out into the job
market and people and despite.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
This they look at him and they say, you got
there only because of affirmative action, right, because.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
Of your own marriage, where ordinarily someone with that kind
of record you look at saying this guy is really
a world beater. But no, and I've seen that in
my own life. I'm old enough that I can rive
going through the whole metamorphous.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
And what have you seen in your own life?
Speaker 3 (08:57):
All right?
Speaker 5 (08:58):
When I was in the in the Marine Corps, and
then this and during the Korean War, I was trained
as a photographer, and I was signed to Campus U
in North Carolina, where a great many of Southerners. When
the Marine Corps white Southerners, and in that barracks, whenever
somebody had a photographic problem, This camera wasn't working, these
pictures didn't come out right, and so forth they would
come to me. I was astonished. The most biggest redneck
(09:18):
in the barracks would come to me.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
They asked me, and there were all these white photographers
in my camera.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Yeah, you see why is this? And I finally figured
it out. They said, you know, if this guy is
black and he's a photographer, he must be some photographer.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
You know.
Speaker 5 (09:30):
Now, When I started teaching in the night early nineteen
sixties at the Douglas College, I read up on all
this stuff about new teachers, you seeing how it's hard
to get the respect of the students, particularly if you're
not much older than they are, and I looked younger
than I was, and so I worried about that, you see.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And I walked in that room in.
Speaker 5 (09:47):
The first day and it was instant respect, and you know,
it sort of took me aback and I realized, no, no,
they're there. They're saying, look this guy, I was the
first black male to teach there. This guy must be
something else. Go forward now ten years. By this time,
I've completed my degree, I've written my books, journal like
all the whole thing. I'm now teaching at UCLA, and
(10:09):
students will come up to me at the end of
the term and they'll say how much they like the
course and all that, and somewhere in the course of that,
they'll be a slip up and they'll let it, let
it out that they were quite surprised that the course
was as good as it was. And one one of
the things that struck me even before the end of
the term, one kid cheme to me one day and
he had a passage in the book he was having
trouble with, and he said, can you tell me what
this means. I had explained to him what that passage meant.
(10:30):
He said, are you sure? And I said, yes, I
wrote the textbook and he looked on the front and
he's really embarrassed. But this is what affirmative action has done,
you see.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
So you can't see any positive I don't doubtative action.
I don't doubt that, in fact, it increased the pool,
as you know, as frequently used the expression of what
ammorive action can do is increase the pool of I
don't know what.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
That means, and I've never had anybody explain it to me.
I've studied affirmative action in this country, in India and Malaysia,
you know, in Sri Lanka, in Nigeria they have some
version of it.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
In the Israel.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Well, I mean, explain it as it was explained to me.
It is the notion of it.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
Let's a new oralan missions committee at Harvard, and you're
going to choose so many people. You're going to let
people in for a variety of reasons. One is sheer
academic merit. They scored sixteen hundred on their college boards.
That's a good entry. They've got a brilliant academic and
athletic background, and they happen to be a virtual.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
So violent player.
Speaker 4 (11:32):
And the violin player helps or Let's say they come
from Nevada.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
They don't have a lot of Nevada at Harvard.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
And let's also say that they are come from Sri Lanka.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
They don't have many people from Sri Lanka there.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
And let's also say that they also are African American,
and that that ought to be a factor.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
In choosing from that pool. Maybe that's one of the generations, because.
Speaker 4 (11:57):
Because diversity of a student body is a healthy factor.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
I'm fascinated with the extent of which words were conditioned
to react like Pavlov's dog to words.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I hear diversity.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Someone was asking that, don't make me look.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Someone today who was.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
A trustee of a college was saying that they were
going to pick it a new college professor. I said,
what you should do is have a stopwatch there and
just count how long it is till each of the
contestants says the word diversity. And the guy who says that,
you know, he's thirty five minutes into the interview, and
the other guy who says that you know, the first sentence,
the guy who said takes thirty five minutes, he should
be at the top of the list. The guy who
(12:34):
said that the first sensing should be at the bottom because.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
The question what's wrong with diversity? I don't get the point.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
My point is that this is a word that has
become magic. What does it mean, if anything? Are you
saying to me that all black people are alike? Therefore
you've got to mix and match by race. It's not
diverse unless it's diverse along the I want to.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Sell you what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
I'm saying that I think there would be different to
have people of different kinds of experiment. Instance, uh and
me mentioned Sri Lanka, didn't we and you know, and
to be interesting to have some people with an Asian back. Wait, wait,
an Asian back in African American people that come from
uh Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue as well as from Henderson,
(13:16):
North Carolina. All of that would make a healthy student body.
I don't think everybody ought to come from the sons
of Harvard.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
Graduates daughters, but because they're not always the best. But
all right, that all even I think that that doesn't
make it. I slipped my point there for for a minute.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Well, I mean, you have thought long and hard about this,
and much longer than I have, and.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
You bring it up. But that's the theory.
Speaker 5 (13:50):
That's the theory, and unfortunately the facts are quite different.
It plays like Harvard and Stanford and Cornel.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
What you have.
Speaker 5 (13:57):
What you have is the black son of a black doctor, right,
who lived in the same neighborhood with the white son
of the white doctor. And now you're giving me diversity
because these two people.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
I'm not necessarily they have scholarships that they offered to kids.
Speaker 5 (14:10):
But now we're getting wait from the whole racial thing.
I'm saying, the racial thing has been used as a
proxy for something that is not a proxy for because
the vast majority of blacks who go to places like
Harvard and Cornell and Stanford are not blacks from the ghetto.
Those are blacks from out there. You know, they're from Malibu.
You know, they're from Pacific Palisades. Uh, they're from and
(14:31):
so for and they're from the very same neighborhoods. They're
from the very same neighborhoods as the whites are there
and so and so. Now you call it diversitly because
you see something with the naked elly. Right.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Let me make a couple of the points because I'm
gonna wave ahead of myself here. Uh, do you think
that the era of these uh social engineers from whatever
establishment they come from, media, academia, government, is over?
Speaker 5 (14:54):
No, I wish it were. I think they're gonna go underground.
They're gonna hunker down and and when when the wait,
wait out the storm to change. Absolutely, And we have
people in the room, and then among among the Republicans,
for example, who were I said, these things like this
are like crab grass. You've got to root it out,
not cut back on the appropriations for the national and downward.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
You're not gonna get rid of it.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
You don't want to gut Come on, I mean you
clearly don't want to gut them, and.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
I do not.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
I want to destroy it entirely. You I don't want
to gut it. That's right, because it's like.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Get public television as well.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
You got it.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
But uh well you'll never appear on the nail again,
thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I never have anywhere. Oh no. But it's like crabgrass.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
These people are gonna hunker down and then they'll they'll
wait for the change the political thing. And I say,
these guys are like somebody who's putting the lawn more
over crab grass.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
But these guys. You seem to be saying, are everywhere
these guys. I mean, but you're not talking about just
bureaucrash you were saying.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
I mean, you're saying, it's the New York Times, it's CBO,
it's Harvard University, and the faculty, u cl A faculty,
the Stanford faculty, all of them.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Oh. Absolutely.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
You know what amazes me is that you buy into
these conspiracies like this.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
It's conspiracy. No, not conspiras at all.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
No.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
People, these people, people somehow have come to a power
in the establishment, have come to this like minded idea.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
About Well, that's happening many times and history appointed.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
And I don't believe for a minute. I think people
have harbored me.
Speaker 5 (16:32):
Wholly independently and sealed off from people from Stanford. And
they go into those committee rooms, they will come out
with the same kinds of policies because they went in
with the same assumption.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
And because their experiences, you suggest, are essentially the same.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Probably, well, I don't know about that. I don't know
about that.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Then why did they come to the same conclusion?
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Oh, of course they operate under the same assumptions, And.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
Why do they have the same assumptions.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
For reasons which you can go back into the history.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Come on, why do they have to have a something
women even go back in history.
Speaker 5 (16:58):
Uh, this has been a set of assumptions that have
been very popular among intellectuals. What has happened in our
time is that intellectuals have been taken much more seriously
since the sixties than they were before. I think we're
suffering the consequences of it. It's not the first time
in history of intellectuals have been taken seriously and disasters.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
So we shouldn't have taken Milton Friedman seriously.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Milton Friedman as a very this.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
Game and say, well, no, we shouldn't take intellectual seriously then,
except those happen to think.
Speaker 5 (17:26):
By seriously, I mean in the sense I should have
clarified this in the sense that they are exempted from
the test of facts.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
Did it work?
Speaker 5 (17:33):
When I hear people come on the end and say
these lofty things, I say to myself, show me where
we've ever gotten better off listening to people like this?
All right, I see these psychologists coming on to how
you raise your children? I said, how are children better today?
Now that we've been listening to these people for thirty years.
Are they happier, are they more learned? You know, testcores
(17:54):
go down, for neural disease goes up, suicide rates go up,
And what way are we better off for having listened
to them?
Speaker 4 (17:59):
But it's seems to me that you do engage a
little bit in group dismissal, that you in a sense.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Wave your hand and anybody saying.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
That that each of these kinds of institutions or that
there is not a group think in the institution.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
You tell me that the group think. Someone that did
a survey and standard a couple of years ago, they
found whole departments in which there was not one Republican.
Speaker 6 (18:24):
Why why is it that on the Washington I mean,
look at the editorial people are right the editorials and
under the bylines or for the paper of the Washington Post,
you've got George Will there. And certainly what George Will
says is different from what David brother says. Certainly what
Bill Sapphire says is quite different from what Tom Friedman says,
from what absolutely Marine Dowd thinks.
Speaker 5 (18:46):
Absolutely, but there of the New York Times, that's that's
very true.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
But the fact is that they are the.
Speaker 5 (18:53):
Exceptions they are the exceptions, as Milton Freeman is exceptions.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
And only good guys are the exception and meaning getting
theer free.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
But you use the word dismissal.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
That's one of the words I latch onto in the
chapter about the vocabulary of the annointed, that whenever you
reach an that is different from from what they have,
they say you've dismissed it. You can spend three volumes
analyzing it, and at the end you're going the thing
is wrong, Oh, you dismissed it.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
If you like The Michael Berry Show and Podcast, please
tell one friend, and if you're so inclined, write a
nice review of our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions, and interest
in being a corporate sponsor and partner can be communicated
directly to the show at our email address, Michael at
(19:43):
Michael Berryshow dot com, or simply by clicking on our website,
Michael Berryshow dot com. The Michael Berry Show and Podcast
is produced by Ramon Roeblis, the King of Ding. Executive
producer is Chad Knockane she Jim Mudd is the creative director.
(20:07):
Voices jingles, Tomfoolery and Shenanigans are provided by Chance McLean,
Director of Research, is Sandy Peterson. Emily Bull is our
assistant listener and superfan. Contributions are appreciated and often incorporated
into our production. Where possible, we give credit, where not,
(20:30):
we take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the
memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis, be a simple
man like Leonard Skinnard told you, and God bless America. Finally,
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Hope at eight seven seven seven one seven PTSD and
(20:55):
a combat veteran will answer the phone to provide free counseling.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
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