 I wanted to show you a video of somebody who resents the whole idea of racial preferences. A short video, it's about two minutes long, but it really has the moral power, it really has moral power, it really reflects maybe the greatest evil of racial preferences. It really reflects the real outrage that somebody, not who doesn't get the job because he has a long race, but somebody who gets it, but who the world can't identify why he got it, did he get it because of some racial preference, or did he get it because of his actual ability. So let's jump in and start with that. This is a short video of Glenn Lowry, who I love, Glenn Lowry is fantastic and he is going to be the only one speaking during this two minute rant, but I think it's really powerful and I really wanted you guys to listen to it because it has that passion and moral energy of somebody who is morally offended by somebody, somebody who really wants to stand up and object. All right, so here it is, let's see what I need to do, it's Glenn Lowry, you can see him, I'm going to press play and listen to this. I was a brilliant kid, a little bit like the Matt Damon character in Goodwill Honey, you know, I was working class kid, I didn't have a lot of polish, but I had real, real sharp smarts. My life took a various turn, I was a father at 18 and at 19 and at 21 and dropped out of college and went out in the Bounce Around Community College, got discovered like Matt Damon in the movie, ended up at Northwestern University where I was a wizard, I was taking the PhD level courses in these technical subjects and acing them, went to MIT where I was at the top of my class again, forgive this, but I want you to try to understand the point. So my genius, yes I said it, my gift, my extraordinary abilities were what carried me forward, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of racism and discrimination in America. To have that minimized by somebody presuming that, oh, you didn't get the MIT without affirmative action and it's actually true, I didn't get the MIT without affirmative action because every black person is going to be the beneficiary of a firm factor, whether they ask for it, need it or not. MIT had three positions set aside in its entering class and those three were to be black students of the greatest promise. I was one of them in the year that I came in, even though I didn't need to be in that box in order to get in because I had A's in everything and the PhD level courses I was taking at Northwestern, my professors were writing letters saying that I was the best student they'd ever seen because I was. Again, I asked for your forbearance as I took my own horn here. God damn it. Don't dishonor my amazing achievement by chalking it up to favoritism. I resent it, I don't like it, I don't need it, I don't want it. That's not a political position. I'm defending my own dignity here. So you're going to call me a sellout because I'm defending my dignity, fuck you. I mean please, will you get your hands off of my dignity? Let me succeed or fail based upon my abilities. Don't patronize me, God damn it. I was a breach. Now I love that, I think that is fantastic. Here you get Glenn Lowry. First of all, tuning his own horn in a way that is so, it's so rare in our world. You know, I was a wizard. I was top of the class. My genius, my ability, he was good. Good will hunting kind of discovery. And no embarrassment, no shame, no guilt, no, you know, this is real pride. This is knowing who you are, standing up for who you are, declaring who you are to the world. And, you know, he gets really emotional there through the end. And I think he gets really emotional there at the end for a simple reason. Because his ability, his genius, which didn't just come to him, as he describes, he had a kid at 18, he dropped out of college in 1921. He had three kids before he was 21. Obviously he came from a difficult background, had to be discovered. He had to work hard, had to make an effort to achieve what he achieved. And what racial preferences does is it minimizes all that. It says, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're smart, but really you're black. So that's why you're going to get this job, and that's why you're going to get this scholarship at a university. And he finds, Glenn Lowey finds this offensive, and he should. I am smart. I got this based on my ability. But now, you know, how does anybody know that? How does anybody know that? And this is the thing about affirmative action and the variety of different racial preferences that exist in an economy, whether it's at workplaces or in schools, is the biggest victim, the victim's all over the place for this, right? There's the kid who's of the wrong race who could have got the position, who didn't because he's not of the right race, could be white, could be Asian, could be Jewish, could be, you know, whatever, however you want to define race. He could be, you know, that's one victim. But he also could be the brilliant black kid who got accepted and will never, never be acknowledged as brilliant because, oh, no, no, he's just a token, whatever. He just got in because of it. So any kind of system, there's a third victim. There's a third victim, so those are two victims. The kid who doesn't get the job because of race, the kid who gets the job because of his race but could have got it anyway if it was based on ability and will never be recognized for that. And the third one is the kid who got it, who didn't deserve it and is now never going to have the self-esteem. He will never know why he got the job. He doesn't have the self-confidence and the self-knowledge of a Glenn Lowey to know what he deserves and to know what he is. And he will always live in doubt. People around him always will view him in doubt. And instead of him, and often he will get a job he's not qualified for, he'll get into university he's not good enough for, and that will just destroy his self-esteem as he fails. Instead of getting the best job he can based on his ability, getting into the best university he can based on an ability, now he's getting a better job because of his race or a better university because of his race. And that undercuts, undermines his self-esteem and therefore his ability to be happy, his ability to live a successful life, to live a successful life. So in this sense, getting a job, getting accepted into university based on the color of your skin or based on whatever random arbitrary assignment of race that is given to you, is destructive to everybody in the process. There's no winners. There are no winners. Nobody gains. And on top of that, on top of that, the fact that everybody is worse off, there's another element to this which is we resent people looking for the outside, resent the system, resent the people participating in it. And if anything, it breeds racism in the culture. Why are they getting something? Why are they getting goodies and other people are not? Do they deserve it? Don't they deserve it? So any form, any form of preferences with regard to race in anything that relates to ability is evil through and through. Now, I understand why it was put in place initially. It was put in place because for a long time, people didn't get jobs because of the race. There was clear discrimination. There was clear racism, particularly in the Jim Crow South, but really beyond that. And the idea was to break that, to demolish that. And while I think it was wrong to do even back then, that it was wrong to do even back then, it certainly, at some point, needed to be abolished. At some point, the doubts had to arise. At some point, you've kind of given them a boost to kind of compensate for the past sins, although you're not giving a boost to the people who actually were sinned against. Enough. Enough. So I think Glenn is such a good reflection of this. He is a super smart person who resents racial preferences, resents racial preferences, and work in everywhere else, and speaks up against it, and yet is accused of having benefited from them, and therefore being a hypocrite, when it's clear that you didn't. But go prove it. Go show it. And that explains his frustration. And I thought just the passion and the anger, just to show another dimension of the victims here, is important. Again, we can understand where the racial preferences came from post-Jim Crow laws. But it's never appropriate to resolve an evil with another evil. Evils don't wipe themselves out. Civil Rights Act was appropriate to the extent that it did away with Jim Crow laws, that it did away with government discrimination. It did away with the state discriminating. But once the civil rights laws started to tell people what they couldn't, couldn't do on their own private property, what they couldn't, couldn't do in their own businesses, what universities couldn't, couldn't do, and who they couldn't, couldn't hire, couldn't, couldn't accept. And then, of course, affirmative action built on that. Affirmative action, by the way, interesting fact. Affirmative action is not a law. And it's not a decision by the courts. Affirmative action is an executive order. Affirmative action could be done away with like that because it doesn't need voting. A president could reverse the executive action of, I think, Truman and reverse it. Isn't it interesting that with all the discussion of getting rid of racial quotas and racial diss and racial bad and everything, there's no discussion about a president actually doing that. There's no discussion about actually getting rid of affirmative action. To get to change the civil rights law, you would literally have to vote on it. That would be almost impossible in today's political climate. But a Republican president could just take out a pen and sign affirmative action into history and would change so much of this country, so much of this country. You know, maybe one day we'll get that. All right, so I want to show you the video for two reasons. One, I wanted you to see somebody with real self-esteem. This guy has self-esteem. And he's going to fight for who he is and what he is. And he has passion. And he is a real victim. Not a pretend victim, not a victim because of the color of his skin, but a victim of the system that treats people of his color skin differently than others and promotes them unjustifiably in some cases, and therefore makes it impossible to differentiate.