commerce subcommittee. live coverage starts at 2:30 p.m. eastern on c-span3. and then tonight former president barack obama will sit down with former secretary of state james baker for a conversation at rice university. live at 8:45 p.m. on c-span2. also tonight, the victory and concession speeches in the mississippi u.s. senate runoff elections between republican smith and espy. live coverage here on c-span. >> when the new congress starts in january, there will be more than 100 new house and senate members. the democrats will control the house. the republicans the senate. new congress, new leaders, watch the process unfold on c-span. >> next, a look at the rise of identity politics. authors and political scholars talked about whether this trend is harmful to a free and open

society. the hair stage foundation organized the united states -- the heritage foundation rganized the discussion. mike f.: i am the director of the washington, d.c. office of the hoover foundation. i am honored to be cohosting this event with heritage. work closely with mike gonzalez who you'll hear from in a second. i want to thank kay james, kim holmes, mike, and all his colleagues at heritage for allowing us to co-host this event. i have a couple minutes. i want to offer a couple quick thoughts on why we're doing this, why this is so important. some of you may have read a ook written by francis

," and i "identity thought he had a pretty good and useful introduction where he offers a global perspective on the origins of identity politics. and he says "20th-century politics has been organized on a left-right spectrum defined by economic issues. the left wanting more equality and the right wanting more freedom. that spectrum appears to be giving way in many respects to one identified by identity. less focused on broad economic equality and now on the wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized. the right is redefining itself as patriots perceived to protect national identity and an identity that is often explicitly connected with race, ethnicity or religion. and while material self-interest is and remains important, fukuyama says there are motives

he calls the politick of resentment where political leaders have, quote, mobilized followers around the perception that the groups' dignity has affronted, disparaged or otherwise disregarded. this creates often intense demands by the group in question. the modern phenomenon known as identity politics extends both to nations as well as groups of citizens within nations and can rise with nationality, religions, ethnicity, sexual -- orientation or gender. why is this significant? his answer is both provocative and intimidating. "identity politics encompasses a large part of the political struggles of the contemporary world from democratic revolutions to new social movements from nationalism to islamism to the politics on contemporary american university campuses." that is quite a challenge for now, one panel to resolve.

no matter how insightful they may be. i think we can all agree that understanding identity politics is an essential endeavor and one we will be returning to in the future. thank you for letting us be cohosts and i would like to invite mike up to the podium. mike g.: i am mike gonzalez, a senior fellow here at heritage. i want to welcome you all. i know it's kind of a dreary day to come out, but i want to thank you. first, remind you to turn off your phones. we have -- because we have cameras here. we have c-span with us. i have to introduce people. we are going online as well. i always wonder why i have to introduce really famous people. but for the purpose of the people watching us online and on the broadcast -- peter, which made it, he made it from chicago. he just landed. wow, i thought you would be here at 5:30 p.m. i would like to welcome peter

berkowitz from the hoover institution. john fonte from the hudson institute. michael lind from the university of texas. heather macdonald from the manhattan institute and andrew sullivan from the new york magazine. andrew sullivan is typical of this dilemma. you could say he's a blogger but you could also say he invented blogging because he did. the thing we all do now, he was synonymous with it about 20 years ago. what mike and i did was we brought together the best minds we could think up on this issue of identity politics to discuss not just the nature of the problem but some solutions to it. a friend of mine told me when he saw the list of speakers -- heather macdonald, michael lind, peter berkowitz, these people have very strong personalities. how are you and mike going to control that? i said i'm not going to control them. i do not think andrew sullivan has ever read anything i have written. he disagrees with some of what

i write. i disagree with what i write. john fonte is a good friend and mentor and he disagrees with me a lot. it is not a question of agreement. just different perspectives of this issue of identity politics. we are all here because we agree that this is a problem and we want a solution. we approach it from different perspectives. my own solution is to stop the government from coercing us into different categories. expanding a number of racial and ethnic groupings. but now you will hear other perspectives. we will go alphabetically. -- they will each have about 10 minutes. after they have finished, we will open to questions from the audience. after that, we will have some wine and hors d'oeuvres out in the foyer. at 6:30 p.m. ms. macdonald has graciously agreed to sign her book. for about a half-hour. peter, would you mind going first? do you want to catch your breath a little bit? peter: i'll go second.

mike g.: ok. we'll welcome john fonte then. [applause] john: identity politics has been with us a long time, at least 50 years. i am not going to discuss obama and trump or events that have occurred in this century. but talk about the 20th century, and the historical background. identity politics could be understood as a trinity. a triad of multiculturalism, diversity project and critical theory. there is a soft and hard multiculturalism. the soft is benign, the celebration of ethnic subcultures including st. patrick's day. cinco de mayo. not really part of identity politics. on the other hand, hard multiculturalism has damaged american society. the multicultural argument runs something along the following lines -- the united states

should be thought of as a multicultural society in which different cultures: african-americans, hispanic americans, asian americans, native americans, and women have their own values, histories, and identities separate from and sometimes in opposition to dominant anglo white male culture. this argument has consequences. in july, 1991, new york state released its social studies curriculum. it was entitled "one nation, ny peoples: a declaration of multicultural independence." references to the american peoples as opposed to the american people abound in the national history standards put out in 1994 and 1995. for example, one standard in the national history standards declares, quote, stuneds should understand how big business, heavy industry, and mechanized farming transformed the american peoples in the late 19th century. by inverting the language of american unity, the concept of

the peoples of the united states creates a counterpatriotic symbolism that subordinates the -- this is deliberate, rhetorical subversion. moreover, the national history standards described in the formation of the united states as a product not of western civilization, but instead as a convergence of three civilizations. european, west african-islamic, and amer indian. three worlds meet. that was the formation. this historically inaccurate view is dominant today. it is incorporated into the new ap history course that just came out. second, diversity. there are two ways of looking at diversity. first, there is a diversity that comes from free choices in a free society. this is the interplay of the institutions of civil society. the traditional pluralism of american civic life. the second is the diversity

project or diversity as a goal of society. the standard measure for achieving this type of diversity is statistical equality for groups or group proportionalism. the internal logic of this argument is that in a given labor market, if 10% of all potential workers are asian-americans and 50% are women of all potential workers, then 10% of all job categories -- accountants, park rangers, attorneys, electricians and so on should be filled proportionally. 10% by asian-americans and 50% by women. if this does not happen, and in a free society it never does, there is a problem of underrepresentation or a lack of diversity that must be solved. racial, ethnic, and gender group proportionalism ignore how people behave in free societies or indeed in any

society that has ever existed in the history of the world. professors donald horwitz of duke, meyer from m.i.t. and cynthia inlow clark and thomas from stanford have spent their careers studying the distribution of gender groups in numerous occupations across the planet and they have found no evidence to support the ssumption that without discrimination, different groups would be equally discriminated against -- across all occupations. everywhere in the world in every occupation some ethnic groups are underrepresented and some overrepresented. examples of overrepresentation northern ibus in nigerian, east indians as dentists and veterinarians. italians in the wine industry in brazil and california and jewish immigrants in the clothing industry in the united states, south america, and australia. ne interesting case of

overrepresentation, "the wall street journal" reported in 1995 that more than 4/5 of all doughnut shops in california were owned by people of cambodian origin. ownership of these small businesses are a mobility ladder for cambodian americans to enter the middle class. it also means that cambodian americans are a relatively small percentage of the population, they would be underrepresented in maybe most other occupations. so how could a policy of ethnic gender proportionalism remain consistent with a free society? well, it can't. the diversity project. diversityism meansdiversity. coercive there is repressive tolerance. i have a coercive society. a diverse society, as the term is currently used, is not compatible with a free society. professor donald horwitz of duke declared "it remains

problematic whether any of the most heavy-handed preferential policies operating in a command economy can move a society to such a state." racial, ethnic and genderthe third leg of the triad, proportionalism. critical theory. critical theory tells us that western societies are divided between two basic groups. the privileged and the marginalized. the dominant and the subordinate. the oppressor and the oppressed. the marginalized groups include racial, ethnic minorities and women. power is exercised by privileged groups through force and morethrough ideological hegemony. importantly the supremacy of the world view that supports the group interest of the dominant groups. the key concept for critical theorists is systemic epression. the system is the problem. let us look quickly at the work of one particularly influential critical theorist. catherine mackinnon.

a university of michigan law professor wrote, the role of law and the rule of man are one thing, indivisible because state power embodied in law exists through society as ale power. therefore, male power is systemic, coercive, legitimized. and epistemic. thus it is the regime. thus she declares that rape is not an isolated event or a moral transgression or an individual interchange gone wrong but an act of terrorism and torture within the systemic concept. groups subbed gation like lynching. -- subjew gation like lynching - subjugation like lynching. her father was a judge on the d.c. court of appeals for over 20 years. she argues that sexual harassment is not an individual issue but an issue of group power exercised by the dominant group over the subordinate group. her legal theories are in direct conflict with almost ny understanding of liberal

democratic jurisprudence since she believes the entire democratic system is oppressive. but her writings have proven to be influential. the u.s. supreme court spoke of er theories as the basis for the interpretation of sexual harassment law in a landmark case in 1986. in 1994, congress passed the violence against women act. the bill's supporters filled the narrative of critical theory, that women are being attacked because they are members of a subordinate group and the attacks are not individual crimes. motivated by gender and reinforced the disadvantaged status of women as a group. another leading feminist of those days who was influential, in the 1980's and 1990's, carol gilligan. professor gilligan's core argument is that patriarchal social order and norms and western thinking are

the major obstacles to educational opportunities for american girls. again, the american liberal democratic system is the problem. the concept of white privilege goes back for decades. at a freshman orientation session at the university of nebraska in the 1990's, they produced a film funded by the ford foundation for training students entitled "skin deep," which explains the meaning of internalized oppression or false consciousness and white privilege. it's explained in the film that a member of the dominant group who rejects his or her unmerited privilege and becomes an advocate for the subordinate group becomes an ally, a much sought-after position on campuses today. the trinity of identity politics -- multiculturalism, coercive diversity and critical theory are saying that the american way of life is oppressive and american constitutional liberal democracy is illegitimate. if traditional liberalism,

small l has an emphasis on individual rights and individual opportunity, then identity politics is a thorough rejection of liberalism. it is quintessential iliberalism. mike asked for solutions. hard to do. all i can think of is that we need to take identity politics as a direct threat to american constitutional democracy. that means vocally opposing its concepts, assumptions and presuppositions wherever they appear in the political world and the academies, the schools. media, business, culture. when choosing a primary political identity, our american national identity will do just fine. therefore, we should remember the admonition of george washington in his first -- in his farewell address. washington -- "citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your

affections. the name american which belongs to you in your national capacity must always exult the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discrimination." in 21st-century terms, more than any appellation derived from race, ethnicity, gender, class or partisan affiliation. mike g.: thank you, john. thank you very much. [applause] peter: thank you very much. please pardon my tardiness and informality. i will resist the temptation to regale you of comments of ineptitude regarding my seven hours at o'hare this -- today. instead, i'll stick to my assigned topic -- identity politics and what it can be done. i'll try to make three large

points. one, problems we are facing have been a long time in the making. second, unsurprisingly overlapping some of what john said, it is a kind of affinity but also a very important difference between the postmodernism that dominated our universities for almost 30 years from the mid-1980's and the identity politics that is ominant today. and third, what we can do nside the universities is very limited but that does not mean there is nothing to do. first, a remark about norms. for the last -- since about the summer of 2015, we have been hearing that norms are under threat in the united states because of the utterances and actions of donald trump. and i think the actions and

utterances of donald trump should be inspected very carefully. no doubt he has disrupted politics, governance, and campaigning. but trump's overturning our undermining of norms, it seems to me, is very little compared to what has been taken place in our universities for now going on -- actually going on about 80 years. it seems to me identity politics represents the latest, the most recent of these assaults. what is identity politics? i had a few propositions to what john has very ably said. first, it's the idea what's most important about you is your group identity. usually the most relevant groups, it seems, are race, class, and gender. individual rights come second. we'll say second. group rights come first and group rights are sdwribted on

the basis of the discrimination or oppression that the group to which you belong has suffered. identity politics prize their victimhood to see victimhood as a virtue, to see victimhood actually as resulting in greater moral status, as meaning you're deserving of greater political power. identity politics also teaches if you belong to a prescribed victim category, then criticism f you, to say -- that only criticism but not accepting your opinions amounts to a form of violence against you and expression of racism, hatred and bigotry. even we're sometimes told,

quote invalidation of your humanity. as i kinditied at the beginning, these ideas which indeed are in conflict with the basic foundations of liberal democracy presuppose individual rights distributed equally to all. these misguided doctrines that are now being promulgated by the university have been -- are part and parcel of an anti-liberal and anti-democratic doctrines that have been disseminated for a long time. one could tell a history -- i'll be very brief here, but we have documentation going as far back as the early 1950's, william f. buckley wrote a book about how the curriculum at yale promulgated progressive ideas even as professors of that era protested their own neutrality. already by the late 1960's, the public interest devotes an

tire -- they criticize the apparent willingness of faculty and administration to transform the curriculum into a vehicle for advancing a progressive genda. in the 1970's, those undergraduate students go to graduate school in the humanities and the social sciences, and many of them bring the idea that scholarship and teaching should be seen as politics by other means. in the 1980's, late-1980's, ellen bloom publishes "the closing of the american mind," criticizes what she regards as a kind of soft, thoughtless relativism that has become the orthodoxy of the day. on the campuses. he believes that this orthodoxy impairs students' abilities to understand the civilization of which they are a part. he advocates the return to the

study of the great books. 20 years ago, in 1998, many students think that the assault on due process and free speech began in 2015 at yale in a ebate over halloween costumes, but 20 years ago, two published a book called "the shadow university," which documents an assault on free speech, an undermining of due process that ad been underway all through the 1990's, part of it john legitimated by the work of catherine mckinnon, which had become very popular in the law schools. a course called "fire," they hoped would be out of business in 10 years. through the vigorous defense of free speech on campus, unfortunately, they find themselves in a growth industry. they are bigger and busier than ever. now, sometimes, postmodernism and identity politics are

conflated. they should be distinguished, even if they are related. what was postmodernism, which dominated through the 1980's, the 1990's, part of the 000's? postmodernism taught that truth is a fiction, reality is socially constructed. it proclaimed the death of grand narratives. that meant there was no overarching account of history of western civilization, of america. t wasn't invented. of course, the professors who promulgated these doctrines to credulous students didn't appreciate the incoherence of treating these precepts as absolute and incontrovertible. identity politics, though, which has come to the fore may be in the last decade, although it has been building, i agree with john, for a long time, is quite different.

it replaces those modernism's dogmatic relativism -- postmodernism's dogmatic relativism with dogmatic dogmatism. identity politics says we know exactly what happened. we know how the past nfolded. it is an endless tale of racism, classism, sexism. we know who the oppressors are. we know who the oppressed are. dissent from our narrative is an act of violence, an expression of racism and atred. this doctrine is very common on ampuses today. even though a dogmatic dogmatism has replaced a dogmatic relativism, the threat to liberal democracy, it seems to me, remains the same. both the postmodernism that

dominated from the 1980's, this identity politics dominant today, regard free speech, due rocess, the very idea of limited government, which gets in the way of doing good with government, as fraud perpetrated by the strong to subjugate the weak. so, what needs to be done? short answer, restore liberal education. not going to happen anytime soon within our universities. why? within our universities, most eople think -- most professors and most administrators think nothing particularly is wrong. they are not interested in self -- self-criticism, let alone external accountability. and very likely, any inherently educationally appropriate practice such as a core curriculum, these days, is likely to be hijacked by illiberal lens within the niversity.

what do i suggest? i suggest more energy, more resources devoted outside the academy before students arrive at college, homeschooling, charter schools. would like to see even more in the way of the programs now being run, often funded by conservative philanthropists or sponsored by conservative foundations to remote the study of -- promote the study of liberal education outside the universities. i think this is extremely important, not least because we want to be able to evaluate to say our current president or any president -- it would be extremely useful to have a sound appreciation of the principles of liberal democracy and american constitutional government, and that's what liberal education ought to be providing us. thank you. [applause]

mike g.: thank you. there is an article outside by michael. michael? michael: thank you. thank you to hoover and heritage for the invitation. y predecessors have spoken about the intellectual roots of identity politics. 'm going to talk about demographic factors involved, hich make it likely that you're going to have identity politics of the nationalist and populist variety, as well as multiculturalist, for some time to come in the western world. some of you may have seen these ery interesting computer visualizations of voting in the united states, where the info graphic imagines that democratic voting areas are islands in an ocean. you see this archipelago of

democratic cities, big cities, college towns, in this ocean. the reverse of that, if you've ever seen this, is red america, epublican america. t is this continental landmass with a bunch of lakes. it is kind of like minnesota. lakes where the democratic cities and counties have vanished. you see michael here, a great analyst of this. "to me if i'm mistaken, but you see -- he can correct me if i'm mistaken, but you see a convergence between western europe and the united states, in what used to be regional differences. in america, we've always been a north-south division, up until the 1970's and 1980's. it was the great division. it is now being replaced by what i think of as the big cities and ex-urbia. it's no longer suburbia. it's not the countryside. it always amuses me when i read people, you know, journalists in new york and washington

talking about the cities versus the country, as if it were horses, country mice and the city mice. if the land of outback teakhouse and subdivisions and highways and so on, low density america and europe and high density america and europe. i think we need to grasp this, because the answer to the question, are western societies, not just united tates, but western societies in general, are they mosaics or melting pots? the correct answer is yes. yes. it depends on which of these zones you are in. so, let's begin with cities. in the united states, 12.5% of the population is foreign-born. in los angeles, it is 39.7%. in new york city, it is 37%.

in the five biggest cities in the united states, 48% speak a language other than english at home. that is 59% of the inhabitants of los angeles a majority. in california, texas, nevada, new jersey, new york, and florida, 44% of public school students speak a language other than english at home. and those non-english speakers are divided among various populations. the largest is latino, but increasingly there are various asian american immigrant roups. so, if that is half of america, almost half of america, that is a deeply multicultural society. this is not new. 100 years ago, boston, new york, in the other big industrial cities with the european immigrants, you had little italy and little germany and little poland. don't let anybody tell you there was no identity politics

before you had left-wing intellect ules, right? -- intellectuals, right? right? people voted their ethnic bloc. there was ethnic bloc voting. if you have a city that's made up largely of foreign diasporas of immigrants and their first generation charron children because a lot is chain migrations. you can hold villages and regions transport them in the cities. and now it's also vienna, london, paris. it is not just western hemispheres anymore. you are going to have a kind of brokered multicultural politics. right? where the leaders of these immigrant subcultures, many of the voters don't speak the language. maybe german and austrian. maybe english in britain. they are going to take their cues from their ethnic leaders and vote for this party or that party. i think there is a structural fact there, which is going to defeat efforts to change

university curricula and public policy. it is just the nature of things. if these really were city states, if san francisco did secede from the united states, and i have san francisco friends who want to, then it would be a multinational city state. it would be like singapore. that's just baked into it. k, let's look at ex-urbia. let's look at this realm in britain outside of london. in france outside of paris metro. other big metros in the united states, between the big cities and the college towns. it is not the case that this is an ancient, non-varying white tribe by any means. it is becoming more and more diverse over time. sometimes immigrants themselves -- or the descendents of immigrants move, assimilate. we know from studies of ethnic

attrition from steven trejo rom the university of texas and richard assimilate at more or less the same rate that the germans, the irish, the italians did in the past. by the fourth generation, people who have one mexican grandparent cannot say they are latino in the way one who has a german grandparent can say they are german americans anymore. so the melting pot, when everything is an ideal, it is a reality in working class dominated suburbia -- ex-urbia. in small towns and rural areas. the thought i want to leave you with today is that all ideologies, all ideas have an address, a constituency, a popular base. if -- in the case of multiculturalism, particularly this hard-edged

multiculturalism, i don't believe that, unless these categories, which are sort of artificial -- it is just a brief digression. it was the office of management and budget in 1977 that unvented the five race system we have, where their assignment was to come up with a number of official races between three and 10. there was just too much stuff congress passing. that's where we get non-hispanic whites, asian and pacific islander, which is kind of an absurd category. i found out last night researching this that it was in 1909 that congress hastily passed a law saying that jews and armenians are white for purposes of white supremacy in those days. syrians and arabs were not, and neither were south asian indians. they could not marry white people, and so on. but absent some social reality -- in this case, it is immigration

driven. real diversity in these big cities on both sides of the tlantic -- i think over time, yes, it would be incentive to identify yourself as this category or that category depending on one of your grandparents. but over time, the melting pot is working. so, why am i pessimistic about hat happening? because of dem graphy. -- denothing raffy. -- demography. again, the native fertility rate in western societies is below replacement. i'm in favor of it. we need to have replacement immigration of some kind in order to have -- prevent the population from going into a death spiral. the east asian societies have avoided having significant immigration to date with not terrible impacts, but i think when your birth rate is 1.4% or

1.7%, and it takes 2.1% to maintain a population, and you are losing 1/4 or 1/2 of your population every generation, at some point there is a crisis there. i don't see the birth rates in the developed countries rising rapidly, so i think there will be continued pressure, which will succeed, for migration. but what that does is, it constantly replenishes the demographic political base for multiculturalism, which is a social reality in cities that are gateways for immigration. so, even if you got rid of all of the particular ideologies and studies programs and so on, you're still going to have these quite different communities in these big cities. you are going to have that kind of brokered politics in bloc voting. we had this 100 years ago in the united states, but it was european immigrant groups.

we are seeing the same thing now, on both sides of the atlantic. so, just one final thought, there are identity politics in the majority as well. i was 2 years old when my aunt was being arrested with her african-american friends in austin, texas, for dining together. i was 4 years old -- no, i was 3 years old when it became legal for african-americans to vote in my part of the country. i was 5 years old when african-americans were allowed to marry white people. it was 1965 that our racist white supremacist immigration system, which went back to the founding fathers, who said in 1789, "only free white persons can become naturalized citizens of the united states."

it was in 1965, when i was a toddler, that we got rid of this. i urge you to bear this in mind. e are half a century, less time than i have been alive, away from american identity politics being white, christian identity politics, reinforced by law. and it didn't just vanish overnight in 1965. so, one can reject some of the more hard-edged versions of multiculturalism, but, at the same time, i don't think we should simply say that it's easy to create a post-white supremacist identity, without making some changes in the way we think about america. in which, up until i was a little kid, to be an american was to be a white christian, if not a white protestant. thank you. [applause] mike g.: thank you, mr.

speaker. a lot to think about. so far every speaker has stayed within 10 minutes, which is great. also a lot to think about. heather? heather: thank you so much. i want to express my extreme gratitude to be on this panel and for heritage and hoover to have invited me. thank you so much. i'm going to start with the olution. which is that we need to take on the oppression narrative. unless this idea is rebutted that every difference in american society today is the result, by definition, of discrimination and that, as coates says, it is the very essence of america to destroy the black body, there is going to be no end to identity politics. it is that core idea that is driving this. it is completely forebiden to talk about differences in --

for biden to talk about differences -- forbidden to lk about differences in skills, about differences in skills, interests, aptitudes. instead, the only allowable explanation is iscrimination. so, those of us who are worried about the consequences of these identity politics have to screw up the courage to start talking about another explanation for disparities, which is behavioral differences and cultural differences and different interests and aptitudes. now, where do we start? well, the best place to start is the american campus, because there is no place that is more insane, that is more in the

grip of a mass hysteria, than the college campus. there is an ecstatic search for martyrdom and for victimhood that has become an absolutely ruthless crawl of -- up the totem pole of victim beatitude. currently the top victim dog is the trans identity, but, believe me, that is not going to last long. anybody who can guess the next category will be the farthest thinker among us, but, believe me, it is coming. so, put your thinking caps on now. students actually believe -- get this -- that, to be on an american campus today, is to be the subject of relenting threat, lethal threat to their existence. this, of course, if you are in one of the metastasizing

categories of beatific victimhood. primarily, of course, females, students of color, and the 116 now gender categories. and that they are literally at risk of their lives. and that circumambient racism is so great that they should be exempt from such ordinary academic expectations as going to class. minority students at brown occupied the president's office and complained that they were still expected to go to class, because they were working so hard at, quote, "staying alive at brown." now, does a college president ever say, grow up? learn the difference between a real problem and an imaginary problem. micro-aggressions are imaginary problems.

no, as we know, starting with the 1960's, presidents capitulate, kowtow, and grovel. of course, the growing diversity bureaucracy encourages this. there is a mutual codependency between self-engrossed delusional students who act out psychodrama's of oppression before an appreciative audience of deans and chancellors of equity, diversity, and inclusion, who use the students' breakdown to expand their dominions. nevertheless, it is something that can be taken on. because it is empirically provable that campuses, at least american campuses, we can prove are not places of discrimination. there is not a single faculty hiring search that isn't one

desperate effort to find qualified females and underrepresented minorities who have not already been snatched up by better endowed campuses. there is not a single school or professional school in the country that is not employing vast and extraordinarily destructive racial preferences to admit some critical mass of underrepresented minorities, putting those students at an extraordinary competitive disadvantage. that disadvantage, which has een called mismatch by richard , in a book that should be a required reading, is also what is driving the delusion, because students who are artificially catapulted into an academic environment for which they are not prepared -- and this is not limited to race. it would apply to gender. if i was admitted to m.i.t.

with a 650 on my math sat and all my peers had been admitted on merit rather than gonads had 800 on their math sat,. i would flounder, i would struggle, i would not be able to keep up in freshman calculus. i would have two options. i could say i was admitted to a school which i was not academically prepared for, or i can say i live in a patriarchal rape culture environment that is making me struggle and causing me emotional trauma. and guess which route most students choose? they choose the victimology route. so special preferences is another major driver of identity politics, and unless we start admitting students based on academic merit -- nobody is saying minority students shouldn't go to college. they should go to college for

which they are academically prepared, and they will succeed. they leave stem majors at an enormously high rate, because they are put in schools for which they are not qualified. so we can take on the victim ideology in college campuses because it is so demonstrably false. the interesting test case right now is where the asian identity goes. it's a very perverse thing. there's the narrative out there that we saw with the jong episode at "the new york times," this asian who was hired to run the editorial board pages, who had a whole history of tweets that were anti-white. people got upset about this. jong was simply a boring product of the american academy. anybody who was surprised by

her has not been paying attention. but there is a divide in asians now between those who support meritocracy and colorblindness. e see them in the asians supporting the lawsuits against harvard, possibly other places, and that understand that new york city, which is trying to close down its merit-based, competitive high schools, and impose racial quotas on those schools -- there is a large chinese contingent that is trying to fight that. nevertheless, you can go to any american campus today and find asian students choosing to identify as students of color, rather than, say, white. nd the irony there is that the administration doesn't regard asians as people of color. it reads them as white, because

it keeps an artificially low threshold on the admission of asians, because it doesn't get them the diversity points. the fact that a fair amount of asians choose to embrace the oppositional person of color mindset shows how powerful and attractive identity politics is to the elites. it is the way you gain tatus. so, just quickly, i just want to stress the urgency of this battle. it is obviously coming very fast into the corporate world. people who, like michael, who had a persuasive thesis that hard america was going to be the final line, where the soft america was going to end, and people were going to have to face reality, and we were going

to return to meritocracy -- a plausible thesis, but i think one, sadly, that is not necessarily, at this moment at being, being borne out. when you have google firing computer engineers not because they were incompetent, james demoore, but because he dared to question the feminist orthodoxy that reigns not just that google, but at every tech company that says, again, this is the key idea, the only allowable explanation for the lack of gender parity at google and facebook and youtube and microsoft -- the only allowable explanation is implicit bias and sexism. we are not allowed to say that males and females have different career aptitudes and preferences. we are certainly not allowed to say what larry summers got -- >> you can find these remarks online at c-span.org, as we get

ready to take you back to the floor of the house, working today on eight suspension bills including coast guard programs for 2019 and swearing in susan wild who won in pennsylvania's 15th district. the speaker pro tempore: the house will be in order. the prayer will be offered by our chaplain, father conroy. chaplain conroy: let us pray. gracious god, we give you thanks for giving us another day. you have blessed us with all good gifts and this past week with thankful hearts we gathered with family and loved ones throughout this great land to celebrate our blessings together. bless the newly elected members of the 116th congress who resume their orientation on capitol hill. give them calm and confidence as they prepare for a new role as servants of our nation's