 Hi, I'm Nick Gillespie with Reason, and this is our latest live stream featuring myself, Zach Weismiller, my colleague at Reason, a video producer and author, and the one and only Chris Ruffo, the Manhattan Institute-affiliated scholar, researcher, journalist and activist. Chris, thanks for joining us. Good to be with you. Sorry, I got in right under the wire. Thanks for your patience. That's no problem at all, no problem at all. Zach, are you coming through loud and clear? Yep, I think so. Okay, so what we're gonna talk about today is Zach recently released a video documentary about the Stop Woke Act and related Florida laws that dictate or would have the state dictate what is allowable or unallowable speech at higher ed and in certain types of corporate settings. We'll get into some complications of that. Chris, you were instrumental in kind of coming up with this bill, and we're gonna run a short clip right now that shows you next to Ron DeSantis. Then we're gonna ask you what you were trying to accomplish with this bill. And from there, we're gonna have a long, wide-ranging conversation about what's going on with trying to control, what's going on in the battle over controlling what's being taught in schools and in the culture in various ways. But Zach, do you wanna run that clip? Believe in education, not indoctrination. Yeah. And that's, I guess my first question for you, Chris, is how did you choose what to wear when you were standing next to the governor who was signing legislation based on part of your work? It's like that. Do you rummage through the wardrobes? It's just laundry day and you show up in a maroon blazer. Yeah, you just show up. Yeah, I think so. I try not to worry too much about it. But to the point of it, I mean, that was a great day. It was very exciting. I had been actually at the launch event when the governor announced the Stop Woke Act. He's got an amazing team of policy makers and comms professionals. Got to spend a lot of time with him flying down from Tallahassee down to Central Florida. And a truly amazing accomplishment. And I think that what's fun about it as an intellectual, as a writer, as a think tank scholar, you have an idea, you run a campaign, and then at the end you're celebrating with the governor and he gives you the pen that he signed the bill with. What do you hope, quickly sketch what the Stop Woke Act does and why is that a good thing? Why is it a necessary thing? Yeah, the Stop Woke Act is really the culmination of a long campaign on looking at critical race theory in public institutions. And the Stop Woke Act followed, I believe, 15 or 16 other states and really went a step further. It's a much bolder piece of legislation. And it basically says something very simple. It says teaching that one race is inherently superior to another, teaching that one should feel a sense of shame or inferiority because of your skin color. And a whole other set of what are called divisive concepts are not in line with the values of the state of Florida, not in line with the legislators and the voters and the taxpayers. And we're not gonna be promoting those racist ideas through public institutions. You still have a First Amendment, right? You can publish a book, you can stand on the street corner, you can go online, you can say whatever you want, but we're not gonna have taxpayers subsidize the idea, for example, that one race is inherently superior to another. Okay, and I just got to even in with one thing because just to be totally accurate about it, it's not just about publicly funded universities, the Stop Woke Act also required or banned private corporations from having certain diversity seminars that had these so-called divisive concepts in them. It does certainly take things to the next level. How do you feel about that aspect of the law, Chris? Well, I think it's fairly simple is that there is a whole host of speech and behavior that is restricted by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And presumably this would already be included in that. I think, for example, that if a corporation tells a member of one racial group that he is inherently inferior because of his ancestry, I personally think that that is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many state attorneys general that I've worked with and in the past two years agree, and yet corporations were doing it over and over and over. So the real design of that section of the law, which is unique to Florida, is that you're essentially strengthening and elucidating and clarifying in legislative text the principles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and you're applying them in a direct way to solve a direct harm that is being done to employees in the state of Florida and of course other places. I've reported on this at length. These are the kind of racial reeducation programs that we see in many corporations that try to break people down on the basis of race, try to shame and humiliate people because of their ancestry. And the stop will simply says, we're not gonna do that anymore. Okay, so I mean, your broad context for this is that the 1964 Civil Rights Act had effectively already eroded many of the, at that point, more conventional traditional distinctions between public and private activity. So you're building off of that to say we're gonna start applying it to certain kinds of DEI training that we see in private companies. Can you give me an example of like, what's one of the statements that corporations was foisting on people to say, okay, you need to feel inferior because you are white? Sure, you can look at my archive at City Journal or on my website. There's tons of stories that I did on the Fortune 100 companies. But just what's the paradigmatic example? Sure, I would say this. For example, the Sandia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, which is a private corporation that contracts with the government to produce our nuclear weapons, took their white male executives on a three-day, white male reeducation program. It told them that all white men are racist. It told them that individualism and hard work and the rugged pursuit of excellence is a racist concept perpetuated by white males. It had them apologizing and repeating statements, denouncing their white privilege, their male privilege, their heterosexual privilege. And by the end of it, they were writing letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color, simply for the fact of being white men. In Florida? In the state of Florida? Yeah, I'm just asking what, in Florida? In the state of Florida, that kind of activity would no longer be permitted. Okay, was it being practiced though in Florida? No, the Nuclear Weapons Laboratory is in New Mexico. It's just an example from different corporations. But look, I mean, we know in Disney, I had another story with Walt Disney Company, their quote-unquote anti-racism program. I don't have the details. Again, you can look at the reporting, but it was probably one of the most horrific that was being practiced in the state of Florida. And actually when I exposed it, the folks at Disney, the executives, were so embarrassed by it, because it was so obviously racist and discriminatory and illegal in my view, even prior to the Stop Woke Act, that they actually nuked the entire program from their internal servers. And so listen, corporations know that this stuff is wrong. They're bullied into it by DEI consultants. And the Stop Woke Act is very simple. It says, look, if you're gonna do business in our state, there are certain guardrails that were established, again by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and we're simply codifying and clarifying them and updating them to the new challenges that we see. And so I guess the question for you guys is simple. If you are critics and you are, and that's fine, that's why I'm here, it's fun to debate, but if you're critics of the Stop Woke Act, would you also not be critics and seek the abolition of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? You know, I think that's a great way to kind of frame the debate. Yeah, well, we'll get to that in just a second, but one of the things that's interesting is Zach, you talked to one of the plaintiffs in Florida who challenged the Stop Woke Act because the corporate part of it has been put on hold because a judge ruled that it was overreach. Let's just listen to her and then we'll get to that. And Chris, I agree. I mean, I think it's a brilliant strategy, you know, both rhetorically and legally to frame this in terms of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I think Zach and I actually disagree a little bit on that because I'm probably from a libertarian point of view, I'm more comfortable with certain aspects of public accommodations legislation than Zach might be. But we'll talk about that in a second, but let's look at an actual business owner in Florida who was against the Stop Woke. Diversity is good for business in many ways. Companies with diverse leaders are shown to be more profitable. Sarah Margulis and her husband co-founded Honey Fund, a Clearwater Florida-based company that administers online cash wedding registries. They're plaintiffs in the case against Florida, arguing that the law restricts their freedom to provide diversity training seminars to their employees. What was in the trainings that you believe might have run afoul of those kinds of restrictions? So one thing that comes to mind is the idea of privilege that white people or males have privilege that non-white people or females don't enjoy. And I think that the concept of that, the idea of that is not something for us to shy away from understanding and actively trying to mitigate in our business. So Chris, I would say that challenges your assertion that corporations are all just being forced into this. I mean, Sarah as someone who clearly thinks that this is valuable for her company and agree or disagree with the kinds of... Well, I said that the Fortune 100 companies, please tell me, Sarah's company is not a Fortune 100, right? Is maybe, you know... How many people are saying that big corporations are the only ones that are being bullied into this, but someone like... Yeah, totally. There's gonna be hyper-progressive people. She's obviously one of them, recruited to do the lawsuit, that they wanna do it. There's communist businesses that share all power to you. You can be a communist business. Well, not all power to you because... You know, you can't do this. I'm sorry, can you say again? I can't hear you. Go ahead, Zach. Yeah, I was just saying, it's not really all power to you because the state of Florida has said you cannot conduct these kinds of seminars that you find useful in your own company. I mean, at what point do you say, this is state overreach in this endeavor to squash wokeness or whatever the end goal is? Again, I think I'd frame, I put the question back to you, Zach. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. It might be prohibits this, but certainly prohibits other things. We have a long history, more than a half century. Well, I'm so stressed, and so should be. Should all be... If you reject, no, but hold on, if you reject the legitimacy of this bill, which is your fine argument, there's a libertarian, principle libertarian argument to make it, do you also reject the legitimacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Yes or no, it's a simple question. Well, I would say that it should not be, we should not be expanding civil rights law at this point. If anything, it should be like, we need to be moving towards more freedom of association and more ability for people to set up companies as they see fit and run them the way that they want to see. So yeah, I do think it's, whether the original act was constructed in the right way that was a kind of historical question and I think it was necessary at the time, but moving forward, I would say, we wanna be moving away from more intrusive state regulation of how people do business. And Florida is a place that has attracted a lot of business and investment. And I think that the more that they start implementing a management strategy, I guess, basically from the state house, I think that puts that kind of pro-business environment in danger and that's not a good thing that I wanna see. Sure, but you've seen Florida since the passage of the South Woke has record business growth. Oh, but wait, wait, wait, you can't attribute any. When did the South Woke act pass? When did the South Woke act pass? The South Woke act pass, I don't know the exact date. You're gonna have to. I mean, you could say you've seen business growth since the judge struck down that part of the South Woke. You can't really. Yeah, I mean, that struck me. But you're making an argument that somehow this hurts the competitive business environment of Florida. There's no evidence of that. In fact, I think it's the opposite of Florida has shown. The state of Florida has shown to actually be the most business friendly state in the country. And again, I'd be curious to answer my question. You kind of hedged it a little bit. You didn't quite give a clear answer. I probably know why. But let's say on the other side, if there's a business in the Florida Panhandle and they want to train their employees that actually everything went wrong during the Civil War and whites are the superior race. If they wanted to train that, I would oppose that. To me, that should be illegal. You should not be able to compel employees. It should be illegal. That one race is superior to another. But you are saying that you would like to, just as this woman would like to say that whites have inherent racial guilt, you would say actually, well, a kind of white supremacist business should have the equal right to say that no, actually whites are kind of inferior or superior on an ancestral basis. Yeah, actually, who would apologize to, certainly no libertarian would say, you know what, white supremacist should be banned. What does that even mean to say like- They're not banning white supremacists, they're just saying- No, no, but you're just saying the law says that if you have a business and then you teach this, you make your employees sit through a meeting where they have to listen to this bullshit. That is illegal. I assume then there are fines, et cetera, that go into all of, into protecting into making sure that kind of speech doesn't happen. I mean, you're putting everything into an extreme motion. What the woman was saying was, I mean, I don't know anything about her, but like she wasn't saying that whites are evil, you know, and that, you know, I mean, or anything like that. She wants to run a business a certain way. And I think within the greatest latitude possible that should be allowed, you know? And then the state, you don't want the state coming in and saying, you know what, any more than you want the state coming in and dictating how you cook your eggs or how you cook your meat, you know, in a restaurant, you don't want them saying, oh, and you have to phrase it this way or that way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, it's, I think it's a problem. Oh, the state has very elaborate, elaborate kind of restrictions and prohibitions and guidance for the storage of food. I mean, you know, the problem I think that I see with the libertarian position is twofold. One, it's that, you know, there's a lot of people that say, well, you know, well, do you want to repeal the civil rights act? Everyone gets uncomfortable. They say, no, I don't want to do that. I just want, I just want history to stop in 1964. And what libertarians do is they mistake the status quo for the kind of liberal ideal. So it's really a defense of the status quo rather than a principle defense of liberty, which takes you again in a direction that most people don't want to go. A kind of unlimited. What do you mean most people? How many corporations, how many, I mean, how many corporations now or how many businesses are creating DEI, you know, concentration camps or reeducation camps where the employees are like, I cannot fucking take it, I'm quitting. Oh, oh, well, first of all, 100% of the Fortune 100 have adopted DEI programs. I have- What is the best way to kind of minimize the stupidity of those programs? And I would argue first and foremost, I mean, we're talking kind of in principle terms here, is not through law and not through giving the government, which is going to be changing hands at various points, carte blanche to come in and say, you can talk this way, you can't talk this way. I think it's what you have been doing, which is exposing the silliness and the stupidity and the right- Exposing it is not going to change behavior. Because again, the status quo is not the, the libertarian should not defend the status quo as if it were the kind of classical liberal ideal. The status quo is what businesses want to do and employees want to put up with and customers want to value. I mean, the world is so different now that it was in 1964. That's one of the reasons why Zach is saying, you don't need to keep expanding civil rights protections because we're not living in Florida in 1964, you know, part of, and this is true throughout the South and many parts of the North, the Federal Civil Rights Act, we're pushing back against local and state ordinances that disallowed businesses to act how they wanted to. It was, you know, it wasn't, you know, government overreach against not government overreach. It was a clash of values. Sure. And I think that it was very much necessary. And I think that again, the Civil Rights Act of the time, I think was a necessary remedy to a real significant problem. Our problem today, of course, it's not as significant. I mean, the kind of level and policy of racism in 1963 was much greater than it is today. But that doesn't mean we should simply say, we're gonna just turn history off in 1964 and say we're gonna accept these as the basis of law forevermore. Societies change and laws have to change. And I think that the kind of libertarian or classical liberal argument, which is, well, fight it through the culture, don't fight it through the law, makes two immense mistakes. One is that the architecture of the law today is the reason that a lot of this stuff exists in the first place because companies are reacting to what are now kind of abusive and frivolous civil rights cases. They adopt the EI programs as a legal defense mechanism because the civil rights apparatus as it exists today has gone a bit off track. And they're in for huge liabilities. You know, for example, Tesla, I think faced a judgment of more than $150 million because one contractor had a racist comment to another contractor in the elevator or something. Some kind of things, hey, look, that's wrong. You should get fired maybe. That person should get fired. So you support getting rid of the Civil Rights Act because that's, okay, but then you're just saying, but it's the bedrock or, you know, the flower bed in which it's- That's where you and I differ though, Chris, because when you say the Civil Rights Act, there's a lot there. People think of, you know, the Woolworths counter and the segregated buses and everything and public accommodations. But if we're talking about, you know, the ability to, you know, sue a company into the ground because some employee made a racist comment or something like that, I am, I would be in favor of, you know, rolling that sort of thing back. I think that's probably excessive. And so I would support initiatives that take us in that direction and not initiatives such as the Stop Woke Act that are like, well, we're just gonna pile more and more categories on top of what we already have. Let me finish my point though. So the first problem is that it's a kind of blindness to the fact of where the problem originates from. You can't change something culturally that originates in a law. And then the second thing is just from a practical standpoint, you know, it's like saying, you know, we're going to, if culture and law are the two fists of political change, it's like telling a boxer to go in the ring with one hand tied behind his back. I mean, you're yourself kind of neutering. What is the point of having elections, of having legislators, of having a legal system? If you're not willing to use it to improve the law from what it is previously or what it is currently. I'm not sure, yeah, but I think we disagree that improving the law is empowering the government to go into private businesses and telling them what they can and cannot do in different terms than, you know, whatever overreach exists, this goes further than that, going into higher education, going into, you know, traditional public schools. You yourself said that your, you know, exposing of the way Disney was dealing with it that they changed their strategy. That seemed like it was effective without the law. It is, that one example was effective, but for every Disney that they rolled it back, you know, there were, you know, 10 others that did nothing because these are deeply entrenched economic players that don't have to really respond to day-to-day public incentive and pressure. But the other thing, and I'm glad you mentioned it, is the public schools. I think this is a good section to turn to is, you know, again, it's like saying, you know, would you support a kind of renegade school district that says we need to teach, you know, clan ideology as the official ideology of our school system? You know, of course not. You would, I would hope you would oppose that. Thank you for extending that kindness. Yeah. No, I'm really true. I hope you would say, hey, wait a minute. This is not, this is not what we want. Let's talk about K through 12 schools in a second because the Stop Woke Act actually deals with higher education. Zach, you want to run a clip and this, you know, the corporate side has been struck down so far. It'll be appealed and that'll continue to be litigated. But in Zach's reason, TV documentary on this, he talked to a guy at Florida AMU, a legal professor, law professor. Let's run that clip and then let's talk about how this affects higher education. And partly in that is whether or not is higher education, whether it's public or private, is a quantitatively different, qualitatively different than K through 12. But Zach, run the clip and then let's talk some more. Should not be banning ideas, particularly on college campuses. When you have such a blatant attempt to control thought, and not only control thought, but have the state control thought, that's reminiscent of societies and governments that we are supposedly fought wars against. Leroy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M University, or FAMU and historically Black College, is a plaintiff in the ACLU's case challenging that part of the law. He's afraid that the law will outlaw discussions of systemic racism, which he says is part of FAMU's institutional history. The state created the law school in 1949 to accommodate two Black law students who applied to the racially segregated University of Florida. In 1966, the state forced it to seize admitting new students until then Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed a law to reopen it in 2000. Pernell worries that if instructors were to characterize that history as systemically racist, they'd run afoul of the law's restrictions around teaching the concept. I have no way of knowing that my passion for teaching students about history, about change, about the ability to bring about change, I have no way of knowing that that isn't offensive to these subjective judges of what is endorsing, what is not endorsing, what is promoting, what is not promoting. So I do now live with the idea that at any moment, the state can come and take negative action against me because of my thought. I mean, this is an incredible clip for a couple of reasons. The first reason though, first and foremost is that this is a law professor. Did I hear that correctly? Yes. It's a law professor who hasn't read the bill. I mean, a law professor who's, I mean, astonishingly ignorant of the actual content and the text of the law. The law says very clearly that you can teach about systemic racism as a concept. There's no prohibition against that. I would challenge you to find me the line or the section of the law that would prohibit that. And so I would say either maybe less charitably that this person didn't read it, doesn't understand it or maybe more charitably trying to demagogue around it to try to kind of create a reenactment of the civil rights drama in our current time that again, as you stated, doesn't apply in the same way. But you can absolutely discuss systemic racism. Actually among the divisive concepts, there's no prohibition against discussing the idea of systemic racism. And there's also a note in the law that says very specifically, none of this prohibits a discussion, a kind of neutral objective discussion of any of these terms. You can all talk about them in the classroom. What can I accomplish then? Pernell, well, let me just say the real quick because Pernell, he also authored a book about the concept of colorblind, a colorblind legal system and how that he believes that's completely mistaken. There is language in here, just to explain it right now about how you can't say that racial colorblindness is racist, for instance. So that was one specific concern of his. And so the idea here is by saying these broad concepts and then like you can't endorse them well, what if that is what he believes that promoting an idea of racial colorblindness is just a way to paper over systemic racism in the system and therefore you're banning him from really talking about systemic racism and saying that exists. It creates a chilling effect is his argument. And it creates a chilling effect in classroom discussion. I mean, look, everything creates a chilling effect. A couple of things though, I'd like to finish my original point. The first point is that I think it's a misreading of the law and likely a deliberate kind of demagoguery about the law. But the second point, again, for libertarians this is a public institution. This is chartered, funded by taxpayers. It's enabled into being by the legislature. And again, the principle of libertarian argument is to tell the professor, that's great all well and good or maybe on libertarian grounds, we oppose this specific measure but we actually support abolishing your institution altogether. And I'd like to get you guys, I mean, do you support that? Would you like to just abolish? No, I don't. I have a BA, two masters and a PhD all from state universities, state supported universities. In many cases, state supported universities get less money than private institutions from public sources. That's a red herring. That's a red herring. I don't really see any of you running at university. It's okay. That's fine. You would have more luck telling me that I should support the abolition of any mandatory education. That I might go with you whether it's public or private, but that's not what's at issue here. The question is, is that, do you create an educational space? You get into that a very bizarre position though, right? I'm not saying a very bizarre position. I don't think. Hold on. We support the existence of these publicly financed, publicly chartered institutions that are created by legislatures, but we oppose the public having any say in what goes on inside of them. I mean, it strikes me as this kind of, what you create and what we've seen created, and this is empirically validated, is a fiction of academic freedom, of freedom of speech, a kind of surface level allegiance to it, but you don't have any of those things in the large public university. Because what is the point of higher education? You're having adults going to this institution to either seek knowledge or skills for the job market. That should be, these are all consenting adults that are involved in this. To the extent that the government should or shouldn't be funding it, that's kind of a side issue, which we can discuss if you want. How is that a side issue? That's fundamental. You say that you're against and then treating the government. Chris, you're not libertarian. Do you think all publicly funded or publicly supported education should be disbanded? No, I'm not libertarian at all. Okay, well look, there's a difference between being libertarian. Milton Friedman, when he was talking about school vouchers, was not saying that all education should be privatized. The state need not necessarily provide it, but it can fund it. So there is no fundamental libertarian argument. You're going to have a state institution. Ultimately, it has to reflect the values and the will of the voters of that state. At a higher education, no. Chris, what's the value that we made? Zach, if I might just ask, what are the values of Florida, of the voters of Florida? Is it that we should never talk about systemic racism or that every discussion and every research project by every academic should have to go through some kind of ballot initiative process? It seems ridiculous what you're proposing, Chris, that you create universities that allow for the production of knowledge and the discussion of that. And there are going to be some limits, I assume, violent overthrow of the government, causing immediate violence, fighting words. But other than that, I think most people in most states are like, you know, that makes sense to let it go as far as possible. Sure, but the people of the state of Florida have expressed their will through their representatives in the legislature, through the governor's. That's what's in line with the values of the people of Florida. And again, I would also say, even from a broader perspective, I agree that the purpose of the university should be the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth. It should be done in a way that those are the highest values of the public university system. I don't, like you, I guess, I don't support abolishing them. But when they're off track, when they're not supporting those values, when they're not pursuing those as the telos or the highest principle of the university, it's up to the voters to institute reforms. And what we have is a situation where there is not, there is a kind of written idea of academic freedom, but the actual on the ground facts, I've talked to a lot of professors in the UF system that are conservative that say, I can't express my opinion. I can't do the research I want. If I say that I'm conservative, I won't get tenure. My ideas are suppressed. I'm forced to go through these diversity trainings. I'm forced to wear BLM T-shirts. I'm forced to mimic the kind of ideology of the far left. Clearly, nobody. I'm forced to attend oppression exercises that deem you a white male oppressor. Nobody should have compelled speech. Nobody should be forced to wear a BLM T-shirt. And yet, this is exactly why the Shostakovac is necessary. And I would love to, I would love, I would love to. The hands-off position has yielded, this is the status quo. This is a problem for people within the system. It's also a problem for the public to say, hey, wait a minute. If you're public, if you're professoriate, if you're faculty because of the hiring and because of the funding and because of the selection process is now in many public universities 20, 30, 40 to one depended on the departments between progressives or liberals and conservatives. You have a massive imbalance in faculty. You have an administration that has adopted DEI as the highest principal of the university. So, how does this stop work now? Forcing professors to bow down to left-wing diversity ideology. They're forcing professors to sign diversity statements. They're forcing professors to be hired on the basis of their commitment to these ideologies. You have a huge problem. And yet, what I'm hearing is that, well, you can't do anything about it because, you know, government bad. Who said nobody can do anything about it? But then to say that you cannot talk about certain things. You cannot talk about certain concepts. If there's no prohibition of talking about anything. If students feel aggrieved or taxpayers, they can take, they can have lawsuits. They can bring charges up against people. Throw that up. That does not seem to me to be a particularly workable person. And you can just say that they're not being prohibited about anything. There's been prohibited concepts that they're not allowed to touch. This is a blind acceptance of the status quo. Mistaking the status quo for some kind of liberty. And you're saying, well, file a lawsuit. Well, so if you recognize the basis of the law to regulate the behavior of the institution, but you can't pass any new laws, we have a crisis in our universities. Our universities are- What's the crisis? What's the crisis in our universities? The crisis is that you have conservative state universities that have excluded conservative academics and administrators. Wait, conservative state universities have excluded- They use the public dollar. They use the public charter. They use public resources to promote a far left-wing ideology, not just in the classroom, which again, is fine, whatever, not a huge problem. But more importantly, through the organs of the administrative apparatus. You have, you know, some universities have, you know, multi-million dollar budgets for DEI commissars that are there to regulate the minute behavior of students. There to have professors bow down to diversity ideology. And I believe that, well, you can't do anything about it, you know- No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. You're making all kinds of leaps and bounds here. But first off, does the Stop Woke Act also apply to private universities? No. Correct. No, it's public universities only. But I mean, yeah, I mean, about pulling funding from DEI departments, pulling funding from DEI departments is a separate proposal that, you know, you might be, you know, to the extent that federal funding is going to that, you might be able to get libertarians on board with something like that. What we're talking about with the Stop Woke Act is you're prohibiting certain concepts, adults teaching other adults about these concepts, whether you agree or disagree. That's not true. That is- I'll read line 104. This may, you know, the previous prohibitions may not be construed to prohibit discussion of the concepts listed therein as part of a course of training or instruction provided such training instruction is given in an objective manner. And- What does that mean? That means you can't force students to believe that they're inherently inferior because of their ancestry. Yeah, of course. But you can talk about it as a concept, you can have an objective discussion. You can't force anybody to believe anything, but you can endorse and say, I believe that this view of the world is correct and I'm going to teach a class that way. That is academic freedom. That is kind of fundamental to just a liberal society, the idea that it's the marketplace of ideas. No marketplace of ideas, no. And let's talk about the marketplace of ideas. Okay. It's not a marketplace of ideas. When, again, a marketplace of ideas is predicated on the idea that there are kind of unlimited number of potential competitors that are operating in the private market that can compete against one another for customers, that can compete against another to produce, in this case, educational material, ideological content, and so forth. A public university is a publicly financed cartel and in the K through 12 system is a publicly financed monopoly. Is there it? Is there any, let's go to K through 12 in a second, okay? Because we're all higher education is elective. So it's a separate category. But it is not in a competitive marketplace. It's subsidized, it's created and subsidized over in the state. There are over 4,000. Again, even in a principled libertarian philosophy, a principled libertarian, kind of looking at classical economics would say, in the conditions of a cartel, such as the public university system, in the conditions of an economic monopoly, such as the K through 12 system, state intervention is justified. And so the idea that the public universities are a free marketplace of ideas is so contrary to the basic facts on the ground, it takes a kind of so abstraction, a leap of abstraction. It takes you out of a realm of reality. It takes a basic look at reality. There are over 4,000 four year colleges and universities in the country. The vast majority of them and the vast majority of students, I think it's something like 80 or 85% of students go to state supported schools. There is massive choice. There is massive choice. It's true. No, that's not true. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Chris, just let me finish my comment. There's no question that the academy is, and particularly elite schools tend very hard left. And I'm somebody I went through, undergrad, graduate school, I have as much education as you can get. I was virtually with the exception of my ex-wife as a grad student. I was the only libertarian that I met for most of those years. I understand what it is like and it has gotten worse in the past 30 years. There's no question of that. But to say that there is no possibility of choice, there is no academic freedom or to say given the certain circumstance, now all we're gonna do is empower the state and actors of the state to change the way things are allowed to be discussed. That doesn't seem to me to be a very workable solution. That's a good point, I'd like to respond. I'd like to respond. So first of all, it's not the priveting discussion. That's the kind of most challenging portion of this to kind of defend on a political basis. But this is really targeted at administration. This is targeted at DEI seminars. This is targeted at the orientation programs that separate into two ways. But that isn't in the prohibited concepts and in the way the law is. And it actually, it does hit classroom discussion and it hits whether or not professors feel a chilling. It provides a special exemption for classroom discussion that I read off earlier. But it's really, I think fundamentally targeted at administrative behavior, injecting these concepts, forcing students to bow down to these concepts and using the public funds to promote and endorse these concepts as the truth. But the second problem, and I think that it's an even greater problem, is as you said, somewhere between 85 and 90% of college students, university students, attend state affiliated or state financed colleges and universities. And so I know that a libertarian, if you said, well, 85% of the breakfast cereal that Americans consume is produced by the government. You guys would go apoplectic. You guys would say, we need 1,000 breakfast cereals. May 1,000 breakfast cereals remove. We need to remove all regulation and financing for the breakfast cereal cartel administered by the state. And yet when it comes to public universities, it's like the kind of, the principles start to dissipate. And again, if 90% of students attend state universities, how is this not at a minimum of cartel and at maximum really? You said, well, 90% of the cereal is produced by the government. I agree with you that. This is a monopoly. Break it up. I agree with you that it's a cartel. I agree with you that it is a cartel. And I want to see the measures I'm interested in are things that break down that cartel and move it. Nick already mentioned there's a lot of choice out there. There's conservative leading universities. I would like to see that pushed further. If 90% of students are attending state universities, that's the definition of being a liberal. There's a wide variety among state universities anyway. I mean, you know, different schools. There are many departments of the government that you can appeal to. That strikes me as a weak argument on libertarian growth. No, no, what I agree with you that when public funding is involved, it does call for a different type of oversight than if it's the private business. But you've already made it clear that you don't care about that because private corporations should be forbidden from teaching certain types of concepts. I'm not a libertarian. I'm not a libertarian. And I deal in the realm of reality. Yeah, no one. And what I'm saying is we're gonna get to K-12 education in a second. Zach, did you wanna finish your thought? No, my only point is that if it is a cartel and I tend to agree with you that there are cartel-like tendencies there that why wouldn't the effort be towards breaking down that cartel and making it easier for universities to get accreditation, yes, disentangling federal money from the universities, getting rid of federal student loans, all this stuff is things that libertarians can get behind and I think would help with a lot of these problems that you're talking about because it would weaken the power of these institutions to the degree that the ideas are just being subsidized and not truly triumphing in the marketplace of ideas. I'm fine with that. I actually support all of that. I'm working on some model legislation to address some of those points. But the fact of the matter is that we still have a situation in the here and now where roughly nine out of 10 college students attend state government institutions. And so you have to deal with that problem. And again, I think the libertarian problem and classical liberal problem is that you want to deal with it in abstraction. Well, I'd prefer that all the universities are private I'd prefer massive regulatory reform. But A, that's not practical. It's not going to happen in the near term. And you're still left with the problem that well, what do you do with the institutions that exist today? And so you're preferring an abstraction which is easy to defend because it's not really in the political realm right now. You went to Georgia. I would prefer the big institutions today be able to everyone be treated like adults that can discuss ideas like adults and not have the governor of Florida saying what concepts are allowed to be endorsed in a college classroom or not. That would be my preference. That's great. But again, that's not the main focus. And as I told you, there's no prohibition on discussing the concepts. I've read you the language. Yes, if they're endorsed. Yes, if they're endorsed, it is. Okay, so let's turn. Hold on, let's get an example here. You think that a university floor professor should say in a classroom, I hereby endorse and will inculcate into you and it will require you to believe that Nordic people are the Aryan race and are vastly superior to the other races of the globe. Is that happening? He should not get a freedom to say so. Yeah, I don't know how that person gets hired in the first place, but honestly, whatever crazy thing some professor is teaching, it doesn't matter what I think about it. It matters what, if the students want to take their class. Yeah, he's saying yes, Chris. Yes, okay. He's saying yes. Then that's a principal position. It should be allowed. If you think that you should have a white, that students should be forced to believe. What happens is when you start Nazi-style talking points in the class, there are white supremacists to teach in universities in America. It happens. I wouldn't want to take their class, but yes, there are terrible ideas that get put forward in college classrooms. I'm not going to argue with you there. The whole question is whether I think, hey, I'll give you credit for being principled. You don't want to allow re-rein to kind of a- Let's shift to K through 12 education because this is the focus of earlier laws that were coming out of Florida that you were involved with, Chris. And again, you are on a hot streak. You are Neil Young, like circa 1970. Whether or not you're going to have the next five years, you're going to just be pumping out a great album after a great album. We're not, it's not clear. But let's turn to K through 12 education and some of the concerns that are being raised here about limiting what is, at what level is public education controlled? And Chris, do you want to talk about your efforts to essentially have the state, and when we say the state, we're talking about at the state level, control like ultimately what is the domain of what is taught? Yeah, I mean, look, I would prefer in the abstract that each school district set its own curriculum. There's more latitude, there's more decentralization. I've advocated for universal school choice. And in fact, my work on critical race theory, according to the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey was a contributing factor for them actually passing universal school choice in Arizona after they passed an anti-CRT bill the year prior. And so I think we're probably largely in agreement on decentralizing, on creating more options on universal school choice. I think we can say bracket that aside. But again, the reality is two things. The status quo is really two-fold. That the public education system, like the public university system is a cartel, more actually a monopoly. You have 90% of the student basis. And the curriculum in the state of Florida and in most other states is already set at the state level. And so you're trying to say, hey, what do we decide as a people that we want to transmit, the values that we want to transmit? And I'll concede, private corporations is a tougher argument. Public universities is a tougher argument. We've had, you've made some good points. I've tried to defend the best I can. But K through 12 argument, the K through 12 schools, I mean, the fact is very simple. The state sets the curriculum. It's a 90% monopoly control. And then it's also minors who are in many cases compelled to attend. No, they are always compelled to attend. And I think that you should have the widest latitude. I think, you know, frankly, that the state could say, you know, the state could actually go much further and say, this is what we do teach. This is what we don't teach. This is the behavior that we want. This is the behavior we don't want. And I actually don't think that that's even the right. I think that's a duty of legislators. Legislators actually have to do that because you're shaping the values of kids. And you need to make sure that those values are in accordance with the people in the state. You consider yourself, I mean, you know, just as a backdrop statement, it's like when you talk about, you know, a state like Florida, which has millions of people and attends of millions of people to talk about the values of that state, that is an abstraction. I think where you're just saying, okay, you know what, they all believe this one thing where this is the orthodoxy that we're going to impose on everybody throughout the state. But what I was gonna- It's not an abstraction. It's actually very personal, very intimate. And you have- No, but you're acting as if there is one, so somebody who lives in the Florida Panhandle and somebody who lives in the Keys, they are all of the same hive mind that is Florida. And we're going to impose an orthodox centralized educational curriculum on them. But that's the status quo, A, and then B- Wait, you were just saying- In a republic, you have a legislature, you have an executive and you have courts that can- As a conservative, as a conservative, traditionally conservatives, and particularly on the school issue, we're always saying that local control is better. And they were always trying to move things out of this space- I agree, that hasn't been the case in decades. But that isn't what you're doing here. With your legislation centralizes power in the state house. No, it doesn't. The power's already centralized. There's no change in how these things are going- Okay, so now you had been haranguing us for like putting up with the status quo, but now you are saying, I want the status quo, but I want to be in the driver's seat. I want mine to be in the driver's seat. But it's not right. As I said, no, I actually support an all of the above approach. I think that, you know, I've advocated for universal school choice. I would support a bill that says we're spinning out curricular control to local districts, local school boards. I would support that. I think that parents should have a kind of- Should it be to the parent? Should it be the parent? Ultimately, the parent or guardian of the kid who actually controls where the school dollars go. That's what's revolutionary in Arizona. Yes, of course I do. But I also- Why are we talking about your efforts on that as opposed to your efforts on saying, okay, these are certain concepts. These are certain books. These are certain themes that cannot be taught, that should not be taught. Anywhere- Where have I said that? I'm not saying that there are books- Isn't that- That cannot be taught. I think that certainly the pornographic materials should not be included. And then school districts and school classrooms and parents, frankly, as a kind of veto force as participating in the institution should have a sense of curating a curriculum. You have a limited time. You choose certain books and you don't choose others. That's not re-spanning a book. And the fact is, again, I think that the kind of problem- I'm not talking about that, but I'm just saying why aren't schools, I mean, isn't the, and I think this is something that we might agree on, you know, both from a conservative and a libertarian point of view. If you have universal school choice, issues about what the school curriculum disappear as a public matter because its schools will put out curricula and parents will either choose them or not. And that's exactly why I support it. I've flogged for it. I've advocated for it. I worked, I think I have some contribution, certainly the activists on the ground in Arizona, but the legislators and the governor whom I spoke with all said, hey, CRT was a huge boon for us to get universal school choice after having tried for over across two decades. And so I'm happy to take a very limited credit because look, I support that. But even in Arizona, where I think you now have 25,000 families that are going through the application process to get their dollars, you're still going to have for the foreseeable future a public school system with 70, 80% of K through 12 students. And so you can't simply say, well, we have choice so we can advocate responsibility. And the problem with again, with the classical liberal or libertarian view is that what happens is that the refusal or the fear to act in the public sphere seeds the territory to the people on the far left who have no such compunction, no such hesitation, and they will go all the way until they get dominance over the administration, dominance over the curriculum, dominance over the ideology that's transmitted from the state to the child. And so you have this problem that I think actually spans across all three of these domains we've talked about where classical liberals, libertarians really are not willing to dismantle left-wing civil rights, apparatus, but they're unwilling and they really come out furious about any kind of right-wing civil rights apparatus or civil rights campaign. Well, you know, you say, well, I wouldn't get rid of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I don't support strengthening it to protect people from their publishing. You should read reasons, reasons, voluminous coverage on why masterpiece cakes shouldn't be forced to bake cakes they don't want to. I mean, would you argue that under civil rights legislation that if you're talking about this, that Christian bakers, whatever that means, people who are Christians who bake cakes should be forced under civil rights law to bake gay wedding cakes, whatever they want to do. I would not. So I think we're probably in alignment there. But then that changes your embrace of the civil rights. I think a small three-man bakery is not comparable to a multi-billion dollar publicly funded kind of state-organized public education system. And so they're categories that you cannot compare. If you want to disrupt the left's control of the public schools, isn't the best way to do that is to give people the right of exit through giving them money. I'm aggregating for both. Because I'm pragmatic. Because you don't get both. You don't get both because what you're arguing is if Ron DeSantis is in charge of things and you agree with Ron DeSantis, you're okay. And for me, what I worry about, and Zach, why don't you pipe in after this? But what I worry about is like, okay, I don't particularly go along with Ron DeSantis on a lot of stuff. I don't want Charlie Christ. I don't want, you know, lot and childs if we go back in Florida, governor history, or Jeb Bush necessarily. I want to be left to, you know, make my own decisions where I send my kids to school, how I run my business, what kind of colleges courses can offer. I agree, but that ship has sailed, you know, many, many decades ago. Again, you have a public, a government monopoly in K through 12. You have a government cartel. I know the way to destroy the public monopoly, as long as- You have a government-enforced HR, a government-required HR system in a large corporations. You leave me alone is not a viable, is not a viable political platform in 2020. It wasn't a viable political platform in 1995. And so you have to deal with the world as it is. I would prefer an abstract utopia in which parents can go to, can go take their kids to schools in a way that they can take them to restaurants. There's an unlimited number of restaurants that are organized by small things. It's tailored to them. I would love that system. But we will not have that system in the next half century. And so we have to deal with the system as it is today. And my friends who are in the classical liberal camp, I cannot stress enough to them that abdicating the responsibility of governing public institutions creates a vacuum and a void in which the worst people in the country will take extreme measures to control the ideological transmission from the state to the child, from the state to the student, from the state to the corporate HR office. This must be disrupted. And Florida is doing a great job at actually disrupting it in a way that is meaningful, not just appealing to some future abstract utopian- Zach, talk a little bit about your school choice situation in Florida. And you moved from California to Florida. Why don't you talk a little bit about that? And we've got a few more minutes, but let's do that and then we'll come to both. That's why I don't understand why you are saying it's abstract when the momentum has been building and really accelerated through the pandemic. I mean, you mentioned Ducey already. They have universal vouchers now in Arizona. Here in Florida, we don't have vouchers, but we have pretty much unlimited school choice. There's like three great schools within driving distance of five minutes of where I am. And my worry when you say it should be all of the above is that all of the above is sort of intention with each other. Because if you're like, okay, we need school choice, in the meantime, we need to implement these anti-CRT bills and also we're defining CRT in this very broad way. Well, then you're saying, well, we are going to implement from the top down what the proper curriculum is gonna be. And in the meantime, you're kind of dividing the school choice coalition because some people who like school choice might want to send their kids to a woke school and some might want to send them to like a Hillsdale Classical Academy or something like that. I mean- And a private school is not restricted by these, private schools are not restricted by these laws. Private schools are restricted by economic reality. I mean, this is- But do you think that charter schools should be restricted? And just, I wanna ask you this because if we do go to a voucher type system, then we are gonna be talking about state money going to private schools. Do you want these kind of strings attached to that state money? Cause- No, I support the bill in Arizona wholeheartedly and explicitly forbids any kind of curricular interference in private institutions that receive essentially the voucher money from parents. I think that's right. But again, let's deal with empirical reality. Universal school choice is a reality in Arizona. And yet, you know, 85 or 90% of student, K through 12 students in the state of Arizona next year will be in public schools, traditional public schools. And so you have to deal with that. And again, in the abstract, I would love that if people choose to exit, that the system is reshaped, that's gonna take time. There is no possibility of kind of this private, this private, totally decentralized, parent-driven universal school choice system in the near term. Most people attend public schools. And again, if you say, well, I would prefer a system that doesn't exist to a system that does exist, the duty is on you to say, well, what are we gonna do in the meantime? How do we manage the transition? And how do we say the next generation or two generations of students that will pass through the traditional K through 12 system? What do you want to transmit to them? It seems like such an application. To be honest, I'm not convinced that your vision, first off, that you'll be able to implement these things immediately and then it all disappears. I mean, this is one of the reasons why Corey DiAngeles, who used to work at Reason, highly known in the school choice era, he says that the attempt to end bad curricula through top-down approaches, whether it's at the federal or the state level, are always doomed to failure because the entrenched bureaucracies always work around this kind of stuff. The way to do it is to change the system fundamentally. And he can already show where places where this stuff has been banned and then it comes up in a different way and they come up with different languages. You have to create it with this question. No, no, no, no. It's actually been quite effective. I was worried about that. But what we've seen, it's actually been very effective. So you can't simultaneously argue that, well, they'll get around it anyways. So there's no point to it. Well- No, no, no. If you have a large pot of money and where the school is controlled from the state house or even from the school board, you have to fund it from the bottom up. That's the solution. And you say, oh, we're not doing anything. If you have universal school choice, which is already rolling out now finally COVID, help push that. And to be honest, your exposure of different types of like the insanity, and it wasn't just you. I mean, it's like as COVID put, what kids were learning in people's family rooms and living rooms that were like, holy shit, like I got to do something different. This is moving forward and it will be fast. It's not doing nothing to say we want to radically restructure the way that school funding is done. That's what changes. I agree. We're just not reading the new boss. I'm saying from a pragmatic perspective, I agree with that completely. And from a pragmatic perspective, even the rosiest projection the school choice leaders in Arizona predict maybe a maximum in say the next generation, 15, 20% of students will opt out. That's in the most optimistic projection in the next generation. And so in the meantime, even if they hit that optimistic projection, which I hope that they do, you're still dealing with the vast majority, millions of kids running through the traditional K through 12 system. And I think that the defeatist attitude of saying, well, they're gonna work around it. Well, it's really bad. Well, we'd prefer a system that is radically different is abdicating the responsibility that legislators have. Legislators inherit a system in which they are the deciders of what values are transmitted, how education is structured, what curriculum is required of schools. But see, I don't think it should be that way. I think you have the defeatist attitude that you're accepting that it has to be that way. It's transmitting values to the students. I don't think it should be that way. I do want that future where people are choosing to opt in to the systems or the classrooms or the workplaces that already reflect their values. And what do you do in the meantime with the public schools that will still have 80 or 90%? You just throw up your hands and say, well, forget about that. No, you don't throw up your hands. First off, everybody changes as this stuff starts happening. But what do you mean? Like, because overnight, just because something is an edict that doesn't get rolled out immediately, everybody's worked in companies where it takes forever for stuff. So the idea that like you have the one switch that can change everything overnight and anything else is kind of bullshit is I think that's an overdrawn argument. I'm saying, even if it agrees on the future, in the meantime, the facts are reasonable, even according to the most optimistic estimates, you're going to have in effect a public school dominated system. You are assuming also that 100% that everybody is captive. I mean, I think part of what I find unconvincing in the way that you frame this is that there is universal agreement that all, first off, all schools are doing is all CRT all the time. And that's the main concern. But also that everybody agrees with you in your conception of what is good and proper. And this other stuff is being forced to, I mean, it's so- No, not everyone agrees. And this is empirically testable. In fact, approximately by a two to one margin, the public does agree with me, including white parents, black parents, Latino parents, Asian parents. If you want, that school should be better and they should be racist. That CRT should not be taught in K through 12 schools. And so nationally, it's a two to one margin that agrees with me these concepts. And the easiest way to change that is- And in conservative states, it's even higher than that. And so what you're saying is that if a overwhelming majority of parents say, hey, we want these values transmitted in our publicly financed K through 12 education system, I think that's a reasonable thing to say, well, the overwhelming majority of the public through the legislative process, through their elected representatives, gets to decide what is taught to their children, what is taught to the children- And the best way to do that is by giving the parents the money and then having them vote with their dollars. Because all of the other stuff- I agree. It's just as complicated. It's just as pie in the sky and all of that. And this will do that overnight. And it will leave the people left in schools where people are leaving, they'll either adapt or they'll die. It won't do it overnight. And we know- Nothing will happen overnight. Actually, that's the real truth. Can I just, in the last couple of minutes that we have, Zach, would you, and we'll give Chris the last word on this, but could you kind of summarize, both in your video about the Sapa Oak Act, as well as an earlier one about restrictions put on education in K through 12 schools in Florida, where your kids attend, what is, what's your sense of what, what are your reservations about the way Chris is talking about things and what do you think is the best way forward? Sure. And real quick, I just wanna bring up this one comment I saw someone pointed out, no, it is not state money, Zach, when I said that the vouchers were going to have strings attached to them. I agree with that. This is just refunding money to the parents. And so hopefully there would be no strings attached. But my point is just that, whenever these kinds of things are enacted, the government tries to attach conditions to money. And that kind of gets into the answer to my question is that I want to escape that. That's what I want to see. I'm grateful that Florida is a pretty good choice state and that I was able to find a school that I'm really happy with for my kids. I want that for everyone across the country. I, you know, in terms of the laws that have been imposed on K through 12 schools, I think a lot of it has been kind of overblown in Florida. You know, there was basically saying, don't teach about, you know, gender or sexuality in K through three, and then age appropriate at the older levels. I think I will concede to Chris, like, yeah, something has to, there has to be some standards if you're going to have a public system. I think there might now be a little bit of an overreaction happening where people are just like freaking out about the very idea of sex ed being taught and any sort of like LGBT aspect of sex ed being integrated into the curriculum. I think all that is part of, you know, evolving social progress. And that's what I worry about with this attitude of we need to have our state leaders transmitting the values as if we're just like radio responders and they're the antenna, you know, sending it out. I think that's just the wrong way to think about it, the wrong way to think about how social progress happens. I don't have all the answers as to, you know, what aspects of CRT, which has become this extremely broad category, are bad and what are good? I mean, it's a mixed bag and that all has to be worked out and it's only going to be worked out if we're allowed to discuss it freely and honestly. And so I'm supportive of ideas of both, you know, cultural projects like Chris's that expose kind of insanity, but also, yes, legislative and government action that enables a more vibrant competitive ecosystem at all levels of education from kindergarten all the way through higher education. And so I hope that the focus can be more, you know, laser focused on that going forward. And also I'll add, Zach, based on conversations, we had also the transparency elements and some of the DeSantis or the Florida legislation is really important. Chris, I think we all agree, the idea that schools are not being transparent with parents is fucking mind blowing. You know, the idea that schools would aggregate to themselves what information they share with parents, you know, it is just wrong. But Chris- I agree. Especially pressing in a, if it is a government run school, yes, they should have very strict transparency guidelines. I agree with that. And it's not even a question of- I developed a model bill on transparency for K through 12. I believe versions of it were introduced in maybe 20 state legislatures, none of them passed in full. I think that's something that we can certainly revisit. I guess kind of the closing thought is that there's points that we have agreement on. I think that the ultimate point is that there should be transparency in a public system. I think the ultimate point is that in a system that is dominated by the government as a cartel or a monopoly, more choice, more opt out, more decentralized control is good. I think we agree that ultimately it would be nice to have local school districts that are most responsive to local communities in control of the curriculum. And I think that all of those points are hugely important long-term goals. I think where we disagree and disagree quite strongly is in the interim period where you actually have to fight these fights. And my argument is, in essence, an argument that is democratic, an argument that I think actually contests the unaccountable state bureaucracy. It's fundamentally a liberatory or kind of libertarian in an old sense of the word that parents, when you get parents that show up at the school district saying, I don't want my kid taught that he's racist because of his skin color, I don't want my kid taught that, you know, that he might be a pansexual, genderqueer, and has his name changed and his pronouns changed without notifying me. This is inappropriate for the state to be manipulating my students, my child's sexuality. It's inappropriate for the state to be transmitting a inherently racist ideology as gospel truth. And my kind of realist preoccupation is to say, we have to deal with the system as it is in the interim, which will be a generational project, and that voters have the right to restrict the state from abusing and manipulating their children and other people's children, and working with the system as it is actually requires us as responsible adults to empower the people who are showing up at school board meetings, empower the 70% of parents who don't want gender ideology in K through five, empower the parents and the voters who don't want CRT by large margins, in some cases by 40 point margins. To deny them the ability to shape and reform public institutions is actually deeply anti-democratic. It's anti-liberation, it's anti-individual, it's anti-culture. And so we should link arms together in that long-term vision of decentralization and choice and flexibility and freedom. Well, I would say to my friends in the classical liberal and libertarian spaces, by working against what we're doing in the interim is actually working against those very fundamental structures of the Republic and those very fundamental values that we share in common. All right, well, thank you. There's a broad disagreement in that because I think what we're saying is you can cut to the chase immediately and also that doesn't explain why giving the government more control over speech that takes place in corporate boardrooms and things like that achieves that goal. But I appreciate you for coming on and talking as candidly and as forthrightly. I suspect we'll be doing this more. Thank you, Chris Rufo for talking to reason during this live stream. Zach Weismiller, always good to see you. And I'm happy if somebody has to live in Florida, it's not me and that you're doing so well there. It's great. Thanks, guys. I appreciate the spirited debate and conversation. I appreciate it. Thanks, all right, bye-bye.