It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind Diversity in Medicine with Heather Mac Donald

Summary

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

Episode: It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind Diversity in Medicine with Heather Mac Donald
Release Date: July 21, 2025
Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts
Guest: Heather Mac Donald, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of When Race Trumps Merit

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Introduction

In this episode of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton delve into the intricate relationship between diversity initiatives and meritocracy within the medical field. Joined by Heather Mac Donald, a renowned fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of When Race Trumps Merit, the discussion explores the tangible impacts of diversity policies on medical education, practice, and patient outcomes.

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Impact of George Floyd's Death on Medical Admissions

Heather Mac Donald begins by addressing the seismic shifts in medical school admissions that followed the tragic death of George Floyd. She asserts that the medical profession, along with other elite sectors, underwent a "mass psychosis" concerning racial disparities.

Heather Mac Donald [18:08]:
"The medical profession went through the usual mass psychosis that every elite profession went through after the George Floyd race riots. Every medical association declared itself guilty of and responsible for white racism."

Donald contends that this led to a systematic lowering of standards to increase racial diversity, including setting aside MCAT requirements for Black applicants and admitting students with significantly lower academic scores than their white and Asian counterparts.

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Consequences of Reduced Standards: The MLK Hospital Case

A pivotal part of the discussion centers on the Martin Luther King Jr. Drew Medical Center in Southern California—a hospital purportedly established to serve the Black community. Donald outlines a harrowing account of the hospital's operational failures, attributing them to policies favoring Black employment over qualifications.

Heather Mac Donald [Insert Timestamp]:
"Within three years of opening, there were major issues of incompetence by the staff. The hospital pharmacy was regularly being raided, and staff began calling it the 'Killer King' due to rampant malpractice."

From 1999 to 2004, the hospital was labeled as the nation's most troubled facility, incurring $20 million in malpractice lawsuits and witnessing numerous preventable deaths. Examples include misdiagnoses leading to fatalities and staff members lacking necessary medical licenses.

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Licensing Exams and High Failure Rates

The conversation shifts to the broader implications of admitting less qualified medical students, highlighting high failure rates in licensing examinations. Donald presents alarming statistics indicating that Black medical students admitted under diversity quotas often underperform in licensing and residency placements.

Heather Mac Donald [Insert Timestamp]:
"A black student with rock-bottom MCATs has a 56% chance of being admitted, compared to an 8% chance for a white student with identical scores."

These disparities suggest that diversity initiatives may compromise the overall competence of medical practitioners, potentially jeopardizing patient care.

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Meritocracy vs. Diversity in Medicine

Donald passionately argues that the current emphasis on diversity undermines meritocratic principles essential for maintaining high standards in the medical field. She criticizes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies for prioritizing racial proportionality over qualifications, leading to systemic inefficiencies and diminished medical outcomes.

Heather Mac Donald [Insert Timestamp]:
"Any institution committed to diversity has discarded meritocracy. The skills gap is too large, and until we address foundational educational deficiencies, diversity without merit is untenable."

She highlights that over 50% of top medical schools now require courses in structural racism, diverting valuable educational time from critical medical training.

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Potential Solutions: Addressing the Skills Gap

In response to the challenges discussed, Donald proposes solutions aimed at bridging the skills gap among underrepresented minorities. Emphasizing early educational interventions, she advocates for:

• Enhanced Educational Support: Ensuring Black students receive adequate academic support to excel in standardized tests like the MCAT.
• Merit-Based Admissions: Reinstituting stringent academic criteria to uphold medical standards.
• Policy Reforms: Reversing federal funding for institutions that prioritize DEI over merit, thereby incentivizing excellence.

Heather Mac Donald [Insert Timestamp]:
"We need to monitor homework, eliminate racial impact standards in school discipline, and focus on closing the educational gaps from an early age."

Donald also references legislative efforts, such as the reintroduction of bills aimed at cutting federal funding for DEI-focused medical schools, as steps toward reinstating meritocracy.

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Conclusion: The Future of Diversity in Medicine

Heather Mac Donald concludes by warning of the long-term ramifications if the current trends persist. She envisions a future where medical institutions continue to prioritize diversity at the expense of excellence, leading to more failures like the MLK Hospital and further deterioration of patient care standards.

Heather Mac Donald [Insert Timestamp]:
"If the medical profession continues to water down its standards, we're looking at more hospitals like Killer King. Diversity without merit is a recipe for disaster."

Clay Travis and Buck Sexton reinforce the urgency of reevaluating diversity initiatives to ensure that the pursuit of racial representation does not compromise the fundamental quality and reliability of medical professionals.

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Notable Quotes

• Heather Mac Donald:
  "The medical profession... must be the product of systemic racism." [18:08]

• Heather Mac Donald:
  "A black student with rock-bottom MCATs has a 56% chance of being admitted, compared to an 8% chance for a white student with identical scores." [27:33]

• Heather Mac Donald:
  "If the medical profession continues to water down its standards, we're looking at more hospitals like Killer King." [31:43]

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Key Takeaways

• Shift in Admissions Policies: Post-George Floyd, medical schools have increasingly prioritized racial diversity, sometimes at the expense of academic qualifications.

• Case Study of MLK Hospital: Demonstrates the potential dangers of prioritizing diversity over competence, resulting in poor patient outcomes and financial strain.

• Statistical Disparities: Significant gaps in MCAT scores and licensing exam pass rates between Black and other student groups suggest systemic issues in admissions and training.

• Meritocracy vs. Diversity: The debate centers on finding a balance between achieving racial representation and maintaining high professional standards.

• Proposed Solutions: Focus on early education interventions, reinstating merit-based admissions, and policy reforms to prioritize excellence in medical education.

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Final Thoughts

This episode underscores the complex interplay between diversity initiatives and meritocratic values within the medical field. Heather Mac Donald provides a critical perspective on how well-intentioned diversity policies may inadvertently undermine the very standards that ensure quality patient care. The discussion calls for a reassessment of current strategies to foster an inclusive yet competent medical workforce.

Transcript

[Ryan Seacrest]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Ryan Graduski]

Welcome back to a numbers game with Ryan Graduski. Happy Monday everyone. I hope you all enjoy the last week of the podcast on immigration. Jeffrey Epstein it's definitely been very interesting doing podcasting about politics and elections during a non election season in the middle of the summer. There's only so many polls about New York City that I could do regularly to keep your interest. So I'm trying to get the expand the conversation until we dig deep into election season, which is coming up faster than you'd expect. We're headed towards the end of July and in the final stretch of the summer I think a lot of people are looking at what their summer goals were. Mine was to catch up on my summer reading and a lot of times people send me books for free from publishers so I would talk about them on my substack or my twitter or write about them or have my podcast. We're headed to the end of July and the final stretch to achieve your summer goals. I'm trying to catch up on my summer reading. A lot of times publishers will send me free books to promote on either the podcast or my substack or my social media and and I spent way too much time reading this book called Demon Copperhead this year. It was very, very good, but it was could have been cut by 150 pages at least. It was very repetitive. Towards the end I'm like I I don't need this. And then I received a book called Class Matters. Now I only read parts of it because I rejected the premise entirely, but it was a book about how higher education should weigh economic class over race as a part of the admissions process. The author laments how some schools should take in the top 10% of all high school grad students regardless of economic status, and that would level the playing field for people who aren't financially off. They can't take advantage of early admissions or special classes or maybe some sports. That is a very dumb idea because there are plenty of school districts in this country where the top 10% of graduating class is still failing. They still don't have meet the curriculum level or the academic level in the curriculum of math and reading. You wouldn't take them into Harvard just because they make the top 10% merit should be the only way we weigh in college admissions. It just makes sense if you want to keep American colleges the best in the world and make sure that all the students begin at equal footing. I mean some will do better than others based upon their skills, but you want to at least start on a decent playing ground and not have the ability for students who have been brought in for diversity to fall so far behind and have to qu college. It hurts their. It hurts them more than anybody else. So I put the book down after a few chapters and I read a story online that has to do with merit and I want to talk to you about it. For those listeners from Southern California, you may have already been aware of the story. For me, it was the first time that I heard of it and I actually. It was one of those stories that was so shocking I had to do the research on my own because I didn't believe it was actually true. It's the story of the Southern California hospital called the Martin Luther King Jr. Drew Medical Center. And from its inception, the whole point of it was to be a hospital for the black community that hired almost all if not entirely all black people to run it. Black members, members of the. Of the black community to run it. Although they weren't overtly involved in racial hiring. In 1996, the Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission upheld a report finding that The King Drew MLK Jr Drew Medical center had an unwritten policy of favoring black candidates for leadership positions to the exclusion of non cadets. This was highlighted in a case involving Dr. And I'm going to mispronounce his name. You know, I can't speak when it's difficult like this. Dr. S Saran Basal Samaran. That is absolutely not how you say that name whatsoever, but go with me on it. A non black emergency room physician who was not reinstated despite evidence of discrimination. This suggests that historically there was a focus on hiring and proming only black staff. Though this led to accusations of racial discrimination which, you know, only go so far for some people. Now this because it was a basically black only hospital for the black community and employed almost only black staff. Any criticism of the hospital was deemed as racist. So they never acted. People in administration and in elected government never acted on fixing glaring is obvious problems in the hospital. I'm going to talk about some of them, but I want to warn you, some of this information is very disturbing and very graphic. Within three years of opening, there were major issues of incompetence by the staff. Many were showing up drunk or high. Many weren't showing up at all. And the hospital pharmacy was regularly being raided by the people who work there. The staff started calling the hospital killer king. That came from the staff. From 1999 to 2004, the hospital was among the worst in California. Two prominent accrediting groups said it was the nation's most troubled Hospital and received the lowest possible rating in two reviews from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. And students were no longer being sent there for training programs in surgery and radiology. They spent $20 million on malpractice lawsuits in just five years, the most of any hospital in California. It was so bad that people would come in for minor injuries and end up dying. Someone bled out in the emergency room for not being treated for nearly an hour. The police had an unspoken agreement that they would not send their partners there if they shot. Once a 9 year old girl from a Guatemalan immigrant family was brought there after she was hit by a car. She just had a few broken teeth and some minor scrapes. They ended up putting her on sedatives meant for a grown man. They put her on a ventilator with almost no oxygen. They ended up pulling it from her without checking to see if she could breathe on her own. And she died alone there because no one looked at her, looked after her for more than a half an hour. Another time, a woman came in for a hysterectomy and they infused her blood that was positive for the AIDS virus. Another woman died in the waiting room because nurses ignored her after she suffered a perforated bowel. She'd been in the hospital six previous times and the doctors had misdiagnosed, misdiagnosed her with gallstones. It became so bad, another patient called 911 talking about, talking about that woman and they refused to take her because she was already in an er. She died there in the middle of the waiting room while the cameras rolled watching her. A 53 year woman named Yolanda Bell died in 2004 after receiving an overdose of blood thin due to a nurse's error in administering the drug. The nurse, it turned out, failed to follow proper dosage protocols and the error was went unnoticed by the supervisors. In 2004 alone, five patients died inside the hospital from MRSA due to poor sterilization practices. Another time, a nurse turned off a 28 year old's alarm for his vitals and reported in medical charts that he was fine for hours after he already died because they were so determined to make sure the staff remained mostly black. Many employees falsified records, lacked medical licenses and had criminal backgrounds. In 2004, a nurse's aide was found to have a prior felony conviction and lacked any certification, yet was allowed to provide direct patient care. The aids were linked to cases of patients suffering from injuries due to their improper handling. Nurses were asking janitor's assistances to mix up IV medication. Another time, a hospital hired a man with a long history of academic and medical problems. And even though they eventually fired him, he used his old medical ID to gain access to the hospital and set up videotaping equipment on patients. Eventually, he was arrested for a homicide, and police found 140 tapes of him taping male patients being nude in the hospital. Some patients even reported that employees were selling bootleg DVDs and peanuts in the hallways. The lack of proper credentialing was a major factor in the hospital's failure to pass federal inspections, and it resulted in losing $200 million in federal funding. In 2006, the issue of funding became a major topic for activists who constantly insisted the hospital was just underfunded. It was just about money. You see the same cycle in the education fields where they say these failing schools, schools in Chicago and Baltimore, they're just underfunded. But in fact, the Killer King Hospital was the most well funded in Los Angeles county per patient. So where did the money go? They spent millions paying disabilities for employees. Between 1994 and 2004, there were 122 employees who sued for falling out of chairs. They paid $3.2 million on those claims. Another time, a cashier hadn't asked her supervisor to be a bridesmaid at her wedding, causing the two to fight. Well, the cashier said, it caused her so much stress, the hospital had to pay her $216,000 in disability. Doctors were overcharging the hospital. One neuroscientist made $500,000 per year and logged in 26 working hours when he'd only spent six in the hospital. Overall, the hospital spent $34 million over a five year period on employee injuries, with many employees habitually not showing up for weeks or even months each year. Or when public officials raised these concerns about the hospital, figures like Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters decry that everyone was just racist. They were constantly being racist towards the hospital for servicing and hiring black people. Finally, the LA Times reported on what was going on in the hospital. In 2004. They won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so, and the hospital closed in 2007. But it gets better. In 2020, after the George Floyd riots, the LA Times apologized for their reporting that closed that hospital down. This is why merit matters. People should only be hired for jobs or admitted for schools if they have the knowledge and skills, not because they're wealthy or they're poor or have certain sexual preferences or different anatomies or skin colors. But sadly, since 2012 and the death of George Floyd. Many medical institutions have watered down merit as a condition getting their school more diverse. If anything, we're going to have more hospitals like Killer King in the future. Despite many companies backing away from DEI practices that were so obviously bad for businesses, medical institutions have not done the same. My next guest has written about this phenomena in a nauseum about how medical institutions in the medical field is changing for the worse because of the need to promote diversity at all costs. You won't want to miss this interview. Coming up next, you.

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[Ryan Graduski]

Heather McDonald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of many great books including When Race Trumps Merit. Heather, thank you for being here.

[Ryan Seacrest]

It's a pleasure, Ryan, thank you.

[Ryan Graduski]

Heather, tell me about how the death of George Floyd and the following racial reckoning really changed the way our medical schools admitted applicants.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Well, the medical profession went through the usual mass psychosis that every elite profession went through after the George Floyd race Riots. And every medical association declared itself guilty of and responsible for white racism and concluded that medical standards in medical school admissions and medical licensing, anything that produced any lack of absolute proportional representation among black medical students, among black doctors, must be the product of systemic racism. So the already existing set of double standards throughout medical education, it was already bad. It got even worse, Ryan. And so schools started setting aside MCAT requirements for blacks, started admitting black college students with grotesquely lower MCAT scores than their white and Asian peers. And that pressure to set aside standards has continued throughout the medical licensing process. It occurs throughout medical hiring for faculty within hospitals, deciding who gets to be deans of medical schools. There is absolutely no priority placed any longer on colorblind merit. It's all about achieving racial proportionality.

[Ryan Graduski]

Now, none of that has changed since the Harvard case.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Not so far, not that I'm aware of. These schools are deeply committed to the idea that science, and medicine in particular, is a racist enterprise. And you also have professional organizations declaring that science is racist and the medical curriculum is being changed. Over 50% of the top 50 medical schools now require a course in structural racism. Well, of course, learning time is zero sum. Every hour that medical students spend on the first phony racism of intersectionality is an hour spent not learning how to save a life that comes through the emergency room door after being battered in a. In a near fatal car crash.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah, and there's been many times for decades where the idea that black Americans have lower standards of health, lower life expectancy, higher core mobilities, that. That is inherently racist. In my monologue, I talk about the MLK hospital in California, which was had endemic series of preventable deaths because they were hiring people without a medical license in many cases. What is the. I mean, we saw in the case of the MLK hospital, it was horrific ramifications. Is that kind of level of medical malpractice, for lack of a better term. But is that kind of. Is that going to be seen at more hospitals, more medical professions under this type of DEI standards when it comes to admitting students to become doctors?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Well, quite appropriately, the or case of all or cases in the field of racial preferences generally arose out of the medical school racial quota back in the 70s, and that was Bakke versus Regents of California. A white medical student who had very good GPA and MCAT scores was not admitted to the University of California Davis Medical School. And he found out that the UC Davis Medical School had set asides for black students with woefully low qualifications. And he appealed this and said his civil rights, constitutional rights are being violated because he was being penalized for the color of his skin. And that led to the awful Supreme Court decision by Justice Powell that said, well, you can have racial considerations in college admissions and medical school admissions if it's in the name of student diversity. Famously, one of the black students that was admitted when Bakke was not went on as a practicing obstetrician and generated an absolutely horrific record of medical malpractice. This is, of course, a nearly taboo topic after George Floyd and even before it became a professional suicide to study any reason for racial disparities and outcomes other than racism. So it was once possible to study black and white driving habits in order to explain why on dark highways, when everybody's going 70 miles an hour, the police officer cannot possibly see the race of a driver, why blacks are nevertheless stopped at higher rates. It was once possible to study driving. And the two studies that got through the racism screen found that blacks speed at twice the rate of whites and at speeds over 90 miles per hour, even higher still. It was once possible to study outcomes, medical malpractice outcomes, and found that those were correlated with diversity variables. But that's now, of course, completely off limits. So it's going to be hard to get this data. Schools refuse to collect it. They refuse to look at the outcomes of students that they've admitted with a standard deviation below white and Asian students in MCAT scores that have been licensed with a standard deviation below of licensing scores. They refuse to see. How are those students? Are they actually ending up practicing? What is their medical malpractice? We're just not going to be allowed that data. But for certain, it will happen. Unless we're nihilistic enough to think that all standards of achievement and accomplishment are totally arbitrary. There's got to be a reason. Let me give you. You know, I've been speaking in general terms, Ryan, about the extent of these test score gaps. Let me give you an example. If you look at white MCAT scores, the average MCAT score for whites is at the 71st percentile. That's a technical term. That merely means that the average score for whites is better than 71% of all other white test takers. The average black MCAT score is at the 35th percentile, meaning that it is worse than 5% of all other. Other of other test scores. Let me. Excuse me. For whites, it's better than all other test scores. For blacks, it means that it's better than only 34% of other MCAT takers. And yet nevertheless, a set of mediocre MCATs and GPAs that would for a white student would be virtually automatically disqualifying. If you presented this profile of low MCATs, low GPA, a white student would have only an 8% chance of getting admitted to medical schools. So basically, forget about it. You're too unqualified to get in. If a black student presents the identical rock bottom MCATs and GPAs, he faces a 56% chance of being admitted. A black student with those low MCATs has a 7 times higher chance of being admitted than a white and a 9 times higher chance of being admitted than an Asian. So we are definitely admitting students that are not qualified. And what's happening is they're not passing the licensing exam. So what do we do? We throw out the grades. The step one, the first step of medical licensing. Blacks were doing so poorly on it that they were not qualifying for their favored residencies. And so the AAMC that administers this test said, no problem, let's get rid of the standards. We'll just go past fail. So nobody admitting students to hospital residencies will know where blacks stand on the, on the curve. This is going to happen more and more. If you are in an emergency room and a black doctor walks through the door, be very, very scared. He may be the best doctor around. He may be there because of the color of his skin.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, that's what I was going to ask you is the licensing. I mean, to go through medical school is one thing which is very rigorous and I couldn't do it. So I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm not putting anyone down who can go through it. But then there is the licensing exams afterwards, which have enormous fail rates. And so are they. Like I saw it in a lot of times in law school, after they go through, after applicants who've been there because of a DEI standard are going through law school, they are not able to pass bars at enormously high rates. That must be the same case with the MCATs.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Yes, it's absolutely the same case. So that it's a waste of resources. You're taking slots that are precious and giving it to people who have a very high rate of failing out. Let's hope they do fail out and that the system doesn't figure out more ways to keep them along. You know, professors are under pressure. There's studies that have shown that black residents get consistently lower, far lower scores ratings from the faculty advisors than white and Asian residents. And the only allowable explanation for that is Racism. And we need to retrain the supervisors. Stanley Goldfarb, a nephrologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, when the study came out, it showed these disparities in ratings. And the study only allowed three possible explanations. Racism in the ratings, racism in the doctors, or racism systemically throughout society. And Goldfarb, who is not putting up with any of this bs, said, well, maybe the black residents were just worse at being residents. He became even more of a pariah. People called him human garbage. And the University of Pennsylvania dean set out numerous emails apologizing for the trauma that Goldfarb's tweet had caused and setting up all sorts of counseling sessions and whatnot. So anybody who speaks the truth will be canceled. This happened to an editor at the Journal of American Medical association, jama, who dared to say that maybe systemic racism was not a problem in medicine. He was disappeared. He lost his job. And the editor in chief of JAMA lost his job, even though he had nothing to do with the podcast. And of course, the editor in chief of JAMA was replaced by a black female who specializes in systemic racism and who promised to bring more diverse voices into medical publishing. This matters. Quality of medical leadership matters. We have got diversity quota hires now running cancer centers across the country, whether it's Memorial Sloan Kettering, whether it's University of Chicago, whether it's Cleveland Clinic. It matters what their qualifications are. It matters who's running medical journals, because this still is. Although the journals are dedicated to publishing vast tomes of virtually indistinguishable black studies rhetoric, they should also be publishing cutting edge research. And every, every article that they're publishing on the phantom problem of systemic racism is one less article on actual scientific research that will allow scientists to pool their intellectual resources to finally solve Alzheimer's disease, to finally solve cancer. Instead, the medical profession is dedicated to solving a non problem, which is systemic racism. And let me also say this. If you care about black lives, you should care about honesty in medicine. The medical profession is staking everything on the proposition that disparities in health outcomes is due to doctor racism. And so it's putting all of its marbles in training doctors against their own racism. But if the reason for disparities in health outcomes is actual behavioral disparities, no attention is going into that. We know you cannot talk about obesity because that would have a disparate impact on blacks. You cannot talk about behavioral change. The Scientific American had a whole issue devoted to systemic racism, the Science of Racism, that declared, if you talk to black people about obesity. You are a racist doctor. If it turns out that disparities in health outcomes, and they are real blacks, do have shorter lifespans. If those disparities are due to higher rates of smoking, higher rates of drug use, less compliance with doctor's orders, higher rates of gun, of shootings, of involvement in crime, poor dietary habits, and doctors are now forbidden to talk about that, guess whose health is going to suffer further? Blacks.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah. No. And, and we see those, a lot of those same problems in white communities, poor white communities as well. I always told people in Texas, if you live in East Texas or West Texas, the most Republican parts of Texas, you live on average about 20 years shorter than Austin or the more liberal parts. So it's not a single singular race thing. It's a thing with a lot of things to do with poverty and other things. But they've made an entire race thing. And I'll say one other thing, is that when you, when you water down the standards, someone who is an excellent black doctor, like Ben Carson, their achievements still matter. But they kind of the assumptions that they're there because they are so brilliant in their field is watered down as well. So, so many companies have walked away from DEI policies in the last two years. The medical industry seems to be opposed to those same changes, especially in medical journals that I've read. Is there any solution? And then lastly also, is there any way to achieve diversity while upholding meritocracy?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Well, there was a bill that was introduced by Republicans in Congress in 2024 that would end federal funding of medical schools that are committed to dei that went nowhere, but it was recently reintroduced in May. Certainly cutting off the federal spigot would help. And Trump is also trying to change the appalling use of taxpayer dollars through the National Institutes of Health and National Science foundation to fund research in why engineering is a biased profession and against blacks and how we need so we're wasting vast amounts of money. Cutting off the federal spigot would certainly help. And no, there is no way at present to have diversity and meritocracy at the same time. You have to have one or the other. Any institution that has declared itself undying fealty to diversity has told you that it's discarded meritocracy. The skills gap is simply too large. Ryan, the solution is to close the skills gap. It begins early on. 66% of black 12th graders do not possess even partial mastery of the most basic 12th grade math skills, like doing arithmetic or reading a graph. The number of black 12th graders who are advanced in math nationally is too small to show up statistically. So it's essentially zero. Given those skills gaps, the idea that absent risk racism, phantom racism, we would have 13% black representation in medical student bodies and medical faculties is absurd. The skills are not so that the community has to get its act together and say we are going to be fanatically involved in our children's schooling. We have to monitor homework. We have to make sure that black kids aren't running the streets and getting involved in gangs. We have to get rid of the racial impact standard in school discipline. So if black students are raising hell and Trump, one of his executive orders did try to restore colorblindness to school discipline and not penalize schools who had higher rates of discipline for black students. And we need to get back to basics in education and give up the whole equity agenda.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah. You know, it's so funny. I don't know if you've heard. Have you heard of the miracle in Mississippi? I've written about it a little bit, but it's about Mississippi stopped allowing third graders to advance to fourth grade if they could not meet reading curriculum. And Mississippi is now the number four in the nation for fourth grade reading. Biden did not not increasing the cost of schools. And for black students, I think it is number two nationwide for black students overall because they refused to allow kids to fail forward. But the idea of failing forward in the early grades leads to all the subsequent consequences in the later grades when they want to achieve these miracle levels of diversity across different institutions. And it's happened in engineering and in law firms and unfortunately medical fields. Heather, where can people go to read more from you? Because you write great things for the, for the Manhattan Institute, but where can people get your information from?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Oh, thank you, Brian. Well, the best summary is my latest book, When Race Trump's Merit, that has a canvassing of the atrocity of diversity in STEM science fields in medicine, but also in policing and in the arts. And the hope now is that Trump will get a handle on this. But, but believe me, they're dug in and they're going to try and keep a hold of their hatred for Western civilization and excellence as long as possible.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, thank you for being on this podcast. I appreciate it.

[Ryan Seacrest]

My pleasure, Ryan. Thank you.

[Ryan Graduski]

Hey, we'll be right back after this.

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[Ryan Graduski]

And now for the Ask Me Anything segment. If you want to be part of the Ask Me Anything segment, email me ryanumbersgame podcast.com that's ryanumbersgame podcast.com I think this segment is quickly becoming the favorite of the show and I get a lot of emails now and I love answering them. This question comes from Leah Schutz. She asks about the state of Colorado. She says that her family moved from Texas to Colorado for work and she asked if her new state is becoming more purple. The short answer is simply no. Colorado is probably going to become one of the bluest states in the country over a very short period of time. Its trajectory is very obvious. Since 2016, the US overall movement 4 points to the right nationally, with obviously some states like Florida or New York moving more than four points. Colorado has moved six points to the left during the same time period. It did move 2.5 points to the right between 2020 and 2024. But that's while as the country as a whole moves six points to the right. So it's moving to the left respective of the rest of the country and part of the state has moved to the right. The city of Denver moved to the right pretty substantially. It moved four points overall between 20 and 2024. But other areas like Fort Collins, the suburbs of Colorado Springs and the areas between Boulder and Denver are moving hard to the left. In 2016, November of 2016, Democrats had a 7,000 person voter advantage over Republicans in the state. They now have over 110,000. Over the course of those eight years, from November 2016 to November 2024, Democrats advantages been pretty substantially growing and then the independent numbers have grown by almost a million between the same time and the independents in Colorado lean to the left. So in the long and short of it, no, it's not moving to be more purple, it's moving to be more left. It's one of the states that I would not be shocked in the next decade has very very few elected Republicans from it. I'm, I mean I wouldn't be shocked if one day there's only one or two Republican congressmen from the entire state of Colorado. I think right now they have four. So yeah, unfortunately that's just the way the state's moving and maybe demographics will shift and Hispanics will continue to vote more right and other other people more move more right. But a lot of people from Texas and California who are left wing and want to be around left wing people have seen Colorado as their new home. So that's just the way that's Colorado is not going to be able to be the state that makes the next Republican president. I think I wouldn't be shocked if go voted Republican before Colorado. Anyway, that's the show. Thank you so much. Be back on Thursday. I will talk about polling and we will go into election season again. I promise you all. Thank you. See you then.

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