 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your very own libertarian fighter plane shooting down the balloon of statism. I'm Matt Welch joined by Nikolas B., Catherine Mangu Ward, and special guest star Elizabeth Nolan Brown, please clap. Howdy. Hi, Matt. Hi. It seems like you cannot open up a browser tab these days, in my case period, but for people who are more agile, without running into Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opening up a new front in his ongoing administrative culture war against what you might call, and he probably does call the woke state at a press conference last week, DeSantis unveiled a package to go after what he called academic discrimination and indoctrination in the Sunshine State's higher education system, including dismantling various diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. That's DEI for short, and letting college presidents and boards hire who they want to instead of deferring to faculty, which would be kind of a major shift. He has rejected a pilot Advanced Placement High School course in African American Studies. He's installed anti-woke activists like Chris Rufo in key oversight positions. It's not just school. He's going after the liquor licenses of establishments that hold drag shows viewable by kids, allegedly. Also the business licenses of companies that don't use the federal e-verified database for confirming the immigration legality of employees. This week, he's repeatedly, reportedly, and probably both, reconsidering opening up those libel laws to make it easier to sue big media. It's kind of a lot. What's going on? Of course, it comes against the backdrop of him, presumably, he presumably running for the president in 2024. Catherine, these moves, it seems like have opened up a bit of a split between some conservatives who are applauding him fighting and a lot more classical liberal types who may have joined the conservatives in the underlying critique of the woke capture of institutions but don't like what he's doing. Let's say you from a kind of high-level generalized approach of dissantism versus the woke-isms. Dissantis is doing what this new generation of Republicans said they were going to do, what the kind of TreadCon, NatCon, whatever you want to call them, guys told them to do which is abandon the pretense that we can achieve the ends that we want by letting people be free and make their own choices and instead are just using the power of the state to get what they want everywhere and always. Matt, you did miss one important thing that Dissantis did last week, which was to make gas stoves tax-free, so just keep that in mind as well. No more woke stoves. No more woke stoves. No more woke induction. Electricity is the enemy, Matt. Yep. I mean, they're putting it in the cars, Nick, and in the stoves. What are they going to do next? That Chinese weather balloon, all electric. I mean... No, I mean, I am troubled by this trend because it's what I think the interpretation will be is that this is working, that Dissantis is raising his profile every single week. He is putting himself in a better position to potentially win the presidency and he is doing it through indiscriminate use of state power, not only to achieve kind of broader ends, but also just to score points. I mean, the gas stoves thing is a great example. It turned out that the kerfuffle about the potential banning of gas stoves wasn't real. It's not happening. And it doesn't matter. Dissantis still said, I'm just going to get myself a headline on this. That is not a good way to run a state and it's not a good way to run a country at the same time. Florida budget looks kind of good and, you know, he is doing stuff that I like in between the stuff that I hate and I can see how Republicans who are not already deeply committed to libertarian principles will say, round it up to good enough, let's vote for this guy. To be clear, there is some local skirmishes in the gas stove wars that are real. I think in Manhattan, new construction of apartments can't have them in that way. But this was in direct response to what turned out to be essentially a misunderstanding in the last couple of weeks. I think he should ship gas stoves to Martha's Vineyard. That is what we're talking about. Using COVID funds, I think it would be ideal. Nick, I know that you have some skepticism about the underlying kind of assumption that they're based on that the institutions have been captured higher education in particular, but other ones by a sort of dominant woke. Explain that maybe against the backdrop of what we have seen or read from people like Jonathan Haidt over the years, which is, you know, he'll go in front of a bunch of social psychologists or whoever and say, raise your hand if you're conservative and there's just nobody. I mean, it's just, it's a shutout. So what's your sense of the underlying kind of felt need by conservatives and desantisists to fight back? Yeah, what I mean by that is not that faculty and universities aren't overwhelmingly not just liberal but left wing. And I think it's important to, you know, maintain a serious distinction between people who are far left and people who are kind of centrist liberals. And I remember back in my grad school days in the early nineties when, you know, it was the commies in the hallways of the SUNY Buffalo English Department who were ranting about how Bill Clinton, you know, was a conservative, et cetera, you know, and they have a point. Bill Clinton was not a progressive leftist, et cetera. But in any case, you know, the professoriate is one thing, but the effect on children or on students is something very different. And I think there's often a confusion there. Because, you know, like throughout throughout the 80s and 90s as the left made a long march through the institutions, you know, Republicans kept getting elected president for the most part and taking over Congress and things like that. And I think what bothers me in the latest Desantis stuff and Zach Weismiller has done great work on both the laws about increasing transparency for parents in Florida K through 12 schools, which I think is important, you know, and this is part of the don't say gay law, you know, part of it, which is, I think, legitimate and under discussed by many critics of Desantis is the idea that parents absolutely have a right to more transparency about what's going on in schools and things like that. But when you start talking about higher education and like a stop woke act and things like that, I mean, it leads to a absolute diminution of academic not I don't even want to say academic freedom just intellectual seriousness, where, you know, professors can't talk about certain things without being worried about other things, his attempt to kind of replace the trustees at New College, which was an experimental college or is an experimental college in Florida, and put in people who don't even have advanced degrees or any understanding of higher education governance is pathetic. And it's so profoundly anti intellectual. I think we should all be worried about that. The other large thing that I'll say about Desantis, who I, you know, I'm not opposed to in many ways. And like what he has done is he's stayed in the tradition of Florida governors, including Democratic governors who basically keep regulation low, and taxes low, and services relatively low, push towards school choice. And you know, this is something that Jeb Bush did. It's even something that Charlie Chris did. And Lawton Childs, etc. Like, you know, those are good basic ideas that are really important. And I think what's going on now is that in order to play to the base, particularly to the Trumpist base, Desantis is pursuing a bunch of actions, which may work well to get the Republican nomination, but are going to irradiate him and actual limited government policies when it comes to taxing and spending with a broad population that is like, Yeah, I want, you know, I think the left is insane. I don't want to live in a world where we're paying, you know, 40, 50, 60% taxes. Everything is regulated to hell. But I also don't want to roll with a guy who seems to have a an obsession about, you know, grooming and about gayness and about African American history. That is just beyond what I can sum it. Liz, picking up on that, you live in America's heartland. And in the Republican state, pretty much fully by now. Is it your impression that, that, you know, opposition to drag time story hour is just going to be a Republican litmus test for the foreseeable future? Or is that like kind of a conservative Twitter bubble concern that would draw blank stairs from the modal Republican voter in, I don't know, Cincinnati, Ohio? I mean, Ohio is not. It's not a super rabid cultural conservatist or it doesn't seem to like people around me don't seem as into some of the cultural war battles as you might find in some southern states or other places. I don't, I don't, I have not heard anything about drag Queen story hour from anyone around me. And it's not, I have heard, you know, some people, my parents, friends worried about critical race theory being taught in schools. And when you ask them to explain it, it is, they just really kind of stammer and have no idea or they just say something like, you know, a teacher said after an act of police violence, like if anyone wants to talk to me about like race or racial divisions and policing or about my sexual orientation, I'm open to ask, ask me it's like a button. Ask me about my sexual orientation. But but no, I have not, I have not heard any any freakouts about drag queens at all in Cincinnati. I don't know. Maybe we're just behind the times. Maybe they're coming soon. Yeah, you haven't gotten COVID yet there, have you? That's true. It's a couple, a couple of steps ahead. But what do you take about this sort of pugilistic approach that we're seeing, you know, the but he fights, which they used to say about Trump, they're now saying about DeSantis. What is your feeling about that kind of next step in conservatism? I think it's very unfortunate, you know, as even if you don't like some of these things that he is, you know, cracking down on or getting revenge on, it's definitely one of the classics, sort of the cure is worse than the disease kind of thing where, you know, he's he's asked, you know, pretending to make a stand for freedom of thought and all this stuff by being super authoritarian, and you can't can't accomplish freedom through authoritarian means. It is interesting, because I feel like he is what happens when you focus Trump's grievance politics, like Trump just got too distracted by his own, like, weird petty grievances, which were sometimes in line with the general, what people were mad about in conservative spheres, but also were sometimes just like, weird idiosyncratic stuff that Trump was just obsessed with. So he couldn't really, I think totally capture. I mean, he was he was good at it to a degree, but then he'd get distracted by weird things. But DeSantis seems to just be like, very laser focused on what is the cultural grievance that is going to get me the most traction at any given moment in time, and just sort of laser honing it on that and going with it. Catherine, I can hear a thousand Federalist writers screaming as one in agony. It sounds beautiful. At our at our discussion to date. Is there something necessarily wrong with a politician in an executive position, just sort of looking at things like preferential hiring practices, affirmative action, positive discrimination against Asians or whatever the hell and saying, hold on, this might be illegal. And but also it's immoral. And I'm gonna to the extent that I can put a stop to it. I mean, it feels jarring because people haven't really been talking about this stuff for 30 years, maybe or maybe I'm wrong about that. But is there something like by definition wrong with it? Isn't that kind of a declaration of preference for a more individualistic approach? I think that there's just a really important distinction, which is everywhere and always, I don't know, maybe I'm a broken record. But there's some stuff that DeSantis is in charge of where he could remedy these problems, right? So, hey, should he just you know, does he want to get rid of preferential hiring in government? Feel free, my guy, you are in charge of Florida's HR, like for the government positions. Do you do that? Can he get rid of it for Joe Schmo on the corner? Absolutely not. Joe Schmo on the corner is welcome to engage in preferential hiring of whatever form he likes. And I just think like losing that distinction, sort of getting lost in the like, our institute, these these important institutions, they've gone wrong and I can I alone can fix them. That's not the right approach. Like he's the absolutely and Biden, I will say, has done this, right? The the coverage around the protections for gay and interracial marriages that that Biden made a big stink about really did not emphasize the fact that it was federal recognition for federal employees, which he does have the power over and that is an appropriate use of his power. And I think the trouble with DeSantis is that he is sort of fudging those distinctions. He's doing it on purpose to kind of maximize his splashy headlines, his impact. I generally do not take the federalist as my imagined interlocutors, but I will say like I've been on Jonah Goldberg's podcast and he and I have talked about this, that he's he is genuinely worried about the fact that there are many many institutions that he perceives that DeSantis perceives to be in the thrall of the left and that university is first among them and that that actually is an important problem that that is a real and important problem for people who think that uniform leftist ideology in our elites is not a good thing. You know my answer is the I think always true and always unsatisfying that when the pendulum swings too far alternate institutions will spring up or people will lose faith in those institutions and just turn away from them. I think we're seeing that there's there is a you know there is a loss of faith in our universities and that's fine. It's OK if we don't look to universities to guide our culture forever and ever amen. There's plenty of other ways that we can put together you know high brow culture in this country and frankly on the scientific side like on the stem side universities seem to have completely screwed the pooch like this is different obviously than our fight about CRT or whatever but like all of science is broken like we don't need to we don't need to hyper focus on making sure that universities are doing that work that work is that work is not effective. So I guess I think it's OK to turn away from an institution and not know quite what's going to come next. The only answer isn't always like a capture of the flag you know king of the hill. We got to have control of the thing that currently has power that again I can hear people being frustrated with that. It echoes a common complaint that you hear from the Chris Ruffos of the world as he's like criticizing Steven Pinker for being like insufficiently serious. There's ever a squish. It's that pinker. He's just. But it's like OK Libertarians or classical liberals or other people. What's your remedy. Is it to file a lawsuit that takes five years to go through the court system. That's what so Rob Amari says about David French in his critiques. You know are we going to wait for Catherine's alternative institutions to spring up 13 years from now. Is there not a more robust remedy and maybe kind of as part of that. You know are we in a position now where like all the seemingly neutral or impartial institutions in society are just under too much stress from polarization and we can't think our way out of it. I don't know how to really respond to that with any specificity but you know in terms of K through 12 education the solution to these problems is robust school choice which Florida is pushing on and things like that and that is good but you can't have school choice where you say let the dollars follow the student and you know what the parents want and then also start saying you say you have school choice but you can't teach whatever we're going to dub CRT. You can't have schools where drag queens you know apparently are the only faculty members and they also staff all the teams you know they're all the coaches and things like that part of it is the the hysteria that the right the culture war hysteria that the right is stoking and that the left Stokes to some degree is not as universal or as you know terrifying drag queens are not taking over all of America's public libraries or private libraries or public schools or anything like that fix it through school choice and allow people to find the play the institutions that they want for their kids on the K through 12 level at add you know the college level the fact of the matter is is that you know there is school choice in college and Catherine is right there is a souring on some level of the romance of college it really isn't showing up yet in terms of the percentage of people who decide to go on to college because there is a wage premium but in places like Florida and in places like Ohio my older son graduated from Ohio State one of the largest institutions in the country and in many ways very representative he said if he graduated in 2016 he said if you wanted to hang out exclusively with like left woke people you could have if you wanted to avoid it you could do that etc there's a lot more range out there than we're giving credit for and the point is you know if you believe in limited government you should be empowering individuals to access things on their terms and I think to the extent that DeSantis does that whether we're talking about business or school or education or whatever or theme parks it's all to the good but to the extent that right-wingers are trying to focus on these culture war issues to the exclusion of other things or even more important they are going to lose a lot of people that they actually need to win things like the presidency or a controlling you know majority in congress I mean let's not forget the lesson of the mid-term elections was that when you in when you nominate and run insane douchebags who have a very tenuous grasp on reality and are obsessed with drag queens and with you know non-existent election fraud that turns elections and all of that kind of stuff you lose the republican should be in a place in congress where they're implementing an agenda that they might have articulated but they didn't articulate an agenda and they didn't take they didn't take power in congress like in a in a in a strong way because they're obsessed with these issues that have very little to do with their you know supposed limited government interests you lose except in Ohio Liz the to to put a cap on this part of the discussion one of the critiques that you'll see conservatives make about woke capitalism or whatever is that it wasn't just that you know a constitutional recognition of gay marriage took place it's that the winners were sore winners there's a sort of a sense of forced tolerance you have to wear if you're a hockey player a russian hockey player on the Philadelphia Flyers I know you follow the NHL a lot you have to wear a gay pride shirt like it's not enough just to say okay you won and we're not going to discriminate against you anymore it's that yeah have to like make pledges fealty or affiliation with various groups and that is what's provoking the backlash you think there's any validity to that critique not really I mean I think there are definitely people who want that to be you know people on the left who are who are trying to do that but I think like Nick said about so many you know different institutions it's overblown this idea that you have to is overblown um there's a lot of people I think conservatives who feel pressure just because they want to be not questioned at all and this isn't obviously this isn't just a thing on the right you know the left does this in their own way too but I think you know that there's a lot of conservatives who want to not feel uncomfortable at all about their beliefs I want to not feel pressure at all they want to be able to be in certain institutions and not feel like they are the minority or to you know they want to feel cool and conservatism you know it has never been cool they want to be you know the cool kids and it's not but that doesn't mean you're being oppressed you know I think people tend to confuse those things um I also just wanted to say uh I've been doing some lectures at the University of Cincinnati um talking to political science and journalism students there and this also gets to you know Nick's point about about some of this being overblown what we think of as as you know this infection on campus of woke is on um we often take these stories about elite colleges or about you know particular activist groups who are very loud on certain colleges as representative but I just don't think they are and you know I was fully prepared for the students that we that I talked to at the University of Cincinnati to be very as strident in their in their social justice politics and not open to things you know I haven't been on a college campus in years I was like oh gosh are they just going to be they're just going to be horrible you know like we hear about all the time and it it has not been further from the truth like they've been I mean I think that there's definitely a liberal bent among them although there have been some conservative students but but it has been you know a sort of normal centrist normie centrist liberalism they've been very open to different ideas they've been very open to discussions and not gotten uh mad at at me and and my husband also in soup saying he was way farther to the left than um than I am when we talk about our work and I've shared reason work with them which you know definitely challenges some of these liberal ideas and and they've been very receptive to it and not at all like this you know these social justice monsters that we often hear about nice um all right let's move on tomorrow night president joseph robin at biden the second is set to deliver not only the state of the union address but reportedly some possible hints about running for a second term in 2024 when he will be a record setting 1000 years old um we tend to criticize joe biden on this podcast a lot because he's the president um but in the spirit of intellectual flexibility of nothing else kathryn let's each go around the table and come up with the very best thing you can say about the biden presidency so far we'll get to the bad stuff too but kathryn do you want to start no come on you can do it why are you so mean to me matt um uh so i i i will say that um though i think he could have done more um it is worth keeping in mind that um biden has done some good work to restore us immigration policy to a slightly more sane position and um you know i think we can agree that he is screwed up at the border in terms of both messaging to people who are coming in and putting kamala harris in charge of it in the first place but um the fact is that you know visas are back up um approaching pre-covid levels and um he has made a sincere effort to finalize the status of dreamers although he has not been successful so i will just say now and always i think that's like an important issue that we don't talk about that much because it's very very hard to make progress on it and biden has at the very least returned us to a pre-trump status quo more or less and i appreciate that liz can you say something nice about the show biden president maybe nicer than i managed the mind wasn't very good i mean we got us out of afghanistan that's the thing that immediately jumps to my mind that's that's big for whatever else his president you know he is that that is something that other presidents before him have refused to do it is something that there was not a lot of political i mean well there's a lot of popular will to do there's not a lot of political will to do it took some balls to just be like i'm doing it i'm doing it i don't care what everyone says this is the right thing to do what i'm doing it and i think that was admirable that was my vote too yeah me too he botched it really badly yeah so since we all agree on that one thing let's go straight to the bat stuff i was gonna say he also is pretty he's he's better on the drug war than his predecessors which isn't you know this is faint praise but it's something particularly given the fact that he is one of the architects of the drug war and the penumbra of you know carceral conditions and stuff that come out of that so and he also murdered the balloon he did someone had to do it yeah and he absolutely murdered that balloon you know it wouldn't even have made it across the pacific ocean matt if trump had been in office so that is absolutely true all right let's go to our sense of what would be from your point of view individually and asynchronically the worst thing about a second biden presidency kathryn he's gonna lie about the economy again for four years god he is he's gonna lie over and over again and lie it's it's it's really quite infuriating so uh i read um and you should always read the excellent glenn kessler on um presidential and political lies uh he did a looking back at last year's state of the union which promises did he keep which problems promises did he not keep and uh he reminded me of biden's plan promise to cut energy costs for families an average of five hundred dollars a year by combating climate change and that number was from nowhere about nothing like that was a fully made up number it's savings that were supposed to take place eight years from now which we're not gonna have anything to do with like current inflation and from a report that said that the savings on utility bills would be five dollars not five hundred so what the hell man like we can't just be out here lying and you know i have a particular pet peeve on his like weatherizing your house will save the world thing it just for some reason has always annoyed me but to just throw that totally fake number a four pinocchio number according to glenn kessler into his state of the union and bear no consequences for that and then of course his claim to look to be in a position to lower the deficit that is as kessler called it shell game and biden will not stop misleading people about what he has done on that front and i i don't know if i can take a bunch more years of it matt especially are you gonna move to canada with his tweets on the did you see the one yesterday where he said he promised that like or that a competition lack of competition was costing the average household five thousand dollars a year just like no no citation just like where did that never come from sure sure for sure like five thousand let's just lack of competition for the government's monopoly man and it's costing me more than five thousand dollars a year damn it liz what's your worst thing about a second biden i'll stick in the in the vein of the whole competition thing i mean he's obsessed with this idea of you know big businesses not not allowing enough competition and he's really been weaponizing the federal trade commission and and put you know filling it with people and filling his administration with people who really want to use antitrust law in a in a new weird way and you know not worry about whether practices are harming consumers but instead worry just about are they you know making businesses too big and they've just really been pushing a whole lot of terrible antitrust policies and they would really continue to do that and just sort of stifle I mean and even everything from that like the non-compete clauses there's just so much where they're just trying to sort of you know take more control of American business under this guise of fighting monopoly power and they might actually make progress on that I mean you know I think all you know everything that he's going to say in this state of the union obviously has the big asterisk on it of Republican you know Republican opposition but there as Liz has written awesomely many times there is a weird transpartisan I guess coalition to punish big businesses and I could I could imagine a world in which Biden put something together yeah maybe it's this like NDA stuff or whatever that kind of thing where he just like chips away at the edges of there's a business it exists I know its name it is therefore the enemy Nick what's your worst nightmare about Biden too Biden's second term is spending you know because I mean he had a tweet where or he didn't have a tweet but it was somebody tweeted a moment of him at a press conference saying he has nothing to do with inflation that you know and it's you know he's been in office for two years has overseen spent budgets you know in the first year it wasn't all him but it was a large part due to him but two consecutive budgets over six trillion dollars which you know bumps us up almost 50% from a couple of years ago it's like you know that's part of the reason we have inflation is that the government has flooded the zone you know the treasury with money you know there's the whole fed thing going on and things like that but it's just you know the spending is out of control and I don't think that's going to change and that is something that I think libertarians in particular need to come up with if not new arguments new ways of talking about this because we have gone from a place where you know it was common for the federal government to spend 19% or 18% of GDP and now we're comfortably residing well over 20% and you know and this is a ratchet effect and like we have to figure out a way to bring that down if we want to actually have longer term economic growth so to me it's really the spending because you don't hear a lot of Republicans in Congress you do hear people like Rand Paul and it's nice to hear him you know doing this now about spending the Republicans have shown that they're fair weather you know budget hawks and things like that but for me the second term of Biden is spending is just going to stay super hot I'll add to that and synthesize with Liz a little bit trade policy four more years of Biden is four more years of the Donald Trump trade policy more or less and that's a bad policy and it goes against actually kind of expressed at least in public opinion research desires of the American public and it just needlessly impoverishes us it makes everything more expensive including all aspects of government when you make you know have made in America provisions to whatever you know 10 feet of tunnel the federal government's going to pay for digging under the Hudson River 10 years from now it's just nothing's going to get done everything's more expensive it makes the world a more fractious place it impoverishes the poorest people it's bad don't like it all right let's go if I may Matt also yeah please it's it's also the long shadow of if Biden is president again and this is not an argument for anybody else to be president that I could think of but you know it's winding down I mean he is punching the clock he is you know waiting for retirement and or death or whatever and it's like you know we we need a we needed a reset before welcome to the reason round table your very own libertarian fighter plane shooting down the balloon of statism I'm Matt Welch joined by Nikolas B Catherine Mangu Ward and special guest star Elizabeth Nolan Brown please clap howdy hey Matt hey seems like you cannot open up a browser tab these days in my case period but for people who are more agile without running into Florida governor Ron DeSantis opening up a new front in his ongoing administrative culture war against what you might call and he probably does call the woke state at a press conference last week DeSantis unveiled a package to go after what he called academic discrimination and indoctrination in the sunshine states higher education system including dismantling various diversity equity and inclusion programs that's DEI for short and letting college presidents and boards hire who they want to instead of deferring to faculty which would be kind of a major shift he was he has rejected a pilot advanced placement high school course in african-american studies he's installed anti-woke activists like Chris Ruffo in key oversight positions and it's not just school he's going after the liquor licenses of establishments that hold drag shows viewable by kids allegedly also the business licenses of companies that don't use the federal e-verified database for confirming the immigration legality of employees and this week he's repeatedly reportedly and probably both reconsidering opening up those libel laws to make it easier to sue big media it's kind of a lot what's going on and of course it comes against the backdrop of him presumably he presumably running for the president in 2024 Catherine these moves it seems like I've opened up a bit of a split between some conservatives who were applauding him fighting and a lot more classical liberal types who may have joined the conservatives in the underlying critique of the woke capture of institutions but don't like what he's doing what say you from a kind of high level generalized approach of dissantism versus the woke isms dissantis is doing what this new generation of Republicans said they were going to do what the kind of trad con nap con whatever you want to call them guys told them to do which is abandon the pretense that we can achieve the ends that we want by letting people be free and make their own choices and instead are just using the power of the state to get what they want everywhere and always Matt you did miss one important thing that dissantis did last week which was to make gas stoves tax free that's right so just just keep that in mind as well no more woke stoves no more woke stoves no more woke induction electricity is the enemy Matt yep I mean they're putting it in the cars Nick and in the stoves Chinese weather balloon all electric I mean no I mean I I am I'm troubled by this trend because it's what I think the interpretation will be is that this is working that you know dissantis is raising his profile every single week he is putting himself in a better position to potentially win the presidency and he is doing it through indiscriminate use of state power not only to achieve kind of broader ends but also just to score points I mean the gas stoves thing is a great example like the it turned out that the kerfuffle about the potential banning of gas stoves wasn't real it's not happening and it doesn't matter dissantis still that said I'm just gonna I'm just gonna get myself a headline on this that is not a good way to run a state and it's not a good way to run a country at the same time Florida budget looks kind of good and you know he is he is doing stuff that I like in between the stuff that I hate and I can see how Republicans who are not already deeply committed to libertarian principles will say round it up to good enough let's vote for this guy to be clear there is some local skirmishes in the gas stove wars that are real I think in Manhattan new construction of apartments can't have them in that kind of stuff but this was in direct response to what turned out to be essentially a misunderstanding in the last couple of weeks I think he should ship gas stoves to Marthurs Vineyard that is what we're talking about Nick, using COVID funds I think it would be ideal Nick, I know that you have some skepticism about the underlying kind of assumption that they're based on that the institutions have been captured higher education in particular but other ones by a sort of dominant woke explain that maybe against the backdrop of what we have seen or read from people like Jonathan height over the years which is, you know, he'll go in front of a bunch of social psychologists or whoever and say raise your hand if you're conservative and there's just nobody I mean, it's just it's a shutout so what's your sense of the underlying kind of felt need by conservatives and desantisists to fight back? Yeah, what I mean by that is not that faculty and universities aren't overwhelmingly not just liberal but left wing and I think it's important to maintain a serious distinction between people who are far left and people who are kind of centrist liberals and I remember back in my grad school days in the early nineties when, you know, it was the commies in the hallways of the SUNY Buffalo English department who were ranting about how Bill Clinton you know, was a conservative etc. You know, and they have a point Bill Clinton was not a progressive leftist, etc. But in any case, you know, the professoriate is one thing but the effect on children or on students is something very different and I think there's often a confusion there because, you know, like throughout throughout the 80s and 90s as the left made a long march through the institutions you know, Republicans kept getting elected president for the most part and taking over Congress and things like that and I think what bothers me in the latest Desantis stuff and Zach Weismiller has done great work on both the laws about increasing transparency for parents in Florida K through 12 schools which I think is important you know, and this is part of the don't say gay law, you know, part of it which is I think legitimate and under discussed by many critics of Desantis is the idea that parents absolutely have a right to more transparency about what's going on in schools and things like that but when you start talking about higher education and like a stop woke act and things like that I mean, it leads to a absolute diminution of academic not, I don't even want to say academic freedom just intellectual seriousness where, you know, professors can't talk about certain things without being worried about other things his attempt to kind of replace the trustees at new college which was an experimental college or is an experimental college in Florida and put in people who don't even have advanced degrees or any understanding of higher education governance is pathetic and it's so profoundly anti-intellectual I think we should all be worried about that the other large thing that I'll say about Desantis who I, you know I'm not opposed to in many ways and like what he has done is he's stayed in the tradition of Florida governors including Democratic governors who basically keep regulation low and taxes low and services relatively low push towards school choice and you know this is something that Jeb Bush did it's even something that Charlie Chris did and Lawton Childs etc like you know those are good basic ideas that are really important and I think what's going on now is that in order to play to the base particularly to the Trumpist base Desantis is pursuing a bunch of actions which may work well to get the Republican nomination but are going to irradiate him and actual limited government policies when it comes to taxing and spending with a broad population that is like yeah I want you know I think the left is insane I don't want to live in a world where we're paying you know 40, 50, 60 percent taxes everything is regulated to hell but I also don't want to roll with a guy who seems to have a an obsession about you know grooming and about gayness and about African-American history that is just beyond what I can sum it Liz picking up on that you you live in America's heartland and in the Republican state pretty much fully by now is it your impression that you know opposition to drag time story hour is just going to be a Republican litmus test for the foreseeable future or is that like kind of a a conservative Twitter bubble concern that would draw blank stares from the modal Republican voter in I don't know Cincinnati, Ohio I mean Ohio is not it's not a super rapid cultural conservatist or it doesn't seem to like people around me don't seem as into some of the the culture war battles as you might find in some southern states or other places I don't I don't I have not heard anything about drag queen story hour from from anyone around me and and it's not I have heard you know some people my parents friends worried about critical race theory being taught in schools and when you ask them to explain it it is they just really kind of stammer and have no idea or they just say something like you know a teacher said after an act of police violence like if anyone wants to talk to me about like race or racial divisions and policing or about my sexual orientation ask me it's like a button ask me about my sexual orientation but um but no I have not I have not heard any any freak outs about drag queens at all in in Cincinnati I don't know maybe we're just behind the times maybe they're coming soon yeah you haven't gotten COVID yet there have you that's true it's a couple a couple of steps ahead but what do you take about this sort of pugilistic approach that we're seeing you know the but he fights which they used to say about Trump they're now saying about DeSantis what what is your feeling about that kind of next step in conservatism yeah I think it's very unfortunate you know as even if you don't like some of these things that he is you know cracking down on or getting revenge on it's definitely one of the classics sort of the the cure is worse than the disease kind of thing where you know he's he's us you know pretending to make a stand for freedom of thought and all this stuff by being super authoritarian and you can't you can't accomplish freedom through authoritarian means it is interesting because I feel like he is what happens when you focus Trump's grievance politics like Trump just got too distracted by his own like weird petty grievances which were sometimes in line with the general what people were mad about and in conservative spheres but also were sometimes just like weird idiosyncratic stuff that Trump was just obsessed with so he couldn't really I think totally capture I mean he was he was good at it to a degree but then he'd get distracted by weird things but DeSantis seems to just be like very laser focused on what is the cultural grievance that is going to get me the most traction at any given moment in time and just sort of laser honing and all that and and going with it Catherine I can hear a thousand Federalist writers screaming as one in agony it sounds beautiful at our discussion to date is there's something necessarily wrong with a politician in an executive position just sort of looking at things like preferential hiring practices affirmative action positive discrimination against Asians or whatever the hell and saying hold on this might be illegal and but also it's immoral and I'm gonna to the extent that I can put a stop to it I mean it's it feels jarring because people haven't really been talking about this stuff for 30 years maybe maybe I'm wrong about that but is there something like by definition wrong with it isn't that kind of a declaration of preference for a more individualistic approach I think that there's just a really important distinction which is everywhere and always I don't know maybe I'm a broken record but there's some stuff that DeSantis is in charge of where he could remedy these problems right so hey should he you know does he want to get rid of preferential hiring in government feel free my guy you are in charge of Florida's HR like for the government positions do you do that can he get rid of it for Joe Schmoe on the corner absolutely not Joe Schmoe on the corner is welcome to engage in preferential hiring of whatever form he likes and I just think like losing that distinction sort of getting lost in the like our institute these these important institutions they've gone wrong and I can I alone can fix them that's not the right approach like he he's he absolutely and Biden I will say has done this right the the coverage around the protections for gay and interracial marriages that that Biden made a big stink about really did not emphasize the fact that it was federal recognition for federal employees which he does have the power over and that is an appropriate use of his power and I think the trouble with DeSantis is that he is sort of fudging those distinctions he's doing it on purpose to kind of maximize his splashy headlines his impact I generally do not take the federalist as my imagined interlocutors but I will say like I've been on Jonah Goldberg's podcast and he and I have talked about this that he's he is genuinely worried about the fact that there are many many institutions that he perceives that DeSantis perceives to be in the thrall of the left and that university is first among them and that that actually is an important problem that that is a real and important problem for people who think that uniform leftist ideology in our elites is not a good thing you know my answer is the I think always true and always unsatisfying that when the pendulum swings too far alternate institutions will spring up or people will lose faith in those institutions and just turn away from them I think we're seeing that there's there is a you know there is a loss of faith in our universities and that's fine it's okay if we don't look to universities to guide our culture forever and ever amen there's plenty of other ways that we can put together you know high brow culture in this country and frankly on the scientific side like on the STEM side universities seem to have completely screwed the pooch like this is different obviously than our fight about CRT or whatever but like all of science is broken like we don't need to we don't need to hyper focus on making sure that universities are doing that work that work is that work is not effective so I guess I think it's okay to turn away from an institution and not know quite what's going to come next the only answer isn't always like a capture of the flag you know king of the hill we got to have control of the thing that currently has power Nick again I can hear people being frustrated with that it echoes a a common complaint that you hear from the Chris Ruffos of the world as he's like criticizing Steven Pinker for being like insufficiently serious there's ever a squish it's that Pinker he's just but it's like okay libertarians or classical liberals or other people what's your remedy is it to file a lawsuit that takes five years to go through the court system that's what Sorob Amari says about David French in his critiques you know are we going to wait for Catherine's alternative institutions to spring up 13 years from now is there not a more robust remedy and maybe a kind of as part of that you know are we in a position now where like all the seemingly neutral or impartial institutions in society are just under too much stress from polarization and we can't think our way out of it I don't know how to really respond to that with any specificity but you know in terms of K through 12 education the solution to these problems is robust school choice which Florida is pushing on and things like that and that is good but you can't have school choice where you say let the dollars follow the student and you know what the parents want and then also start saying you say you have school choice but you can't teach whatever we're going to dub CRT you can't have schools where drag queens you know apparently are the only faculty members and they also staff all the teams you know they're all the coaches and things like that part of it is the hysteria that the right the culture war hysteria that the right is stoking and that the left stokes to some degree is not as universal or as you know terrifying drag queens are not taking over all of America's public libraries or private libraries or public schools or anything like that fix it through school choice and allow people to find the play the institutions that they want for their kids on the K through 12 level at at you know the college level the fact of the matter is is that you know there is school choice in college and Catherine is right there is a souring on some level of the romance of college it really isn't showing up yet in terms of the percentage of people who decide to go on to college because there is a wage premium but in places like Florida and in places like Ohio my older son graduated from Ohio State one of the largest institutions in the country and in many ways very representative he said if he graduated in 2016 he said if you wanted to hang out exclusively with like left woke people you could have if you wanted to avoid it you could do that etc there's a lot more range out there than we're giving credit for and the point is you know if you believe in limited government you should be empowering individuals to access things on their terms and I think to the extent that DeSantis does that whether we're talking about business or school or education or whatever or theme parks it's all to the good but to the extent that right-wingers are trying to focus on these culture war issues to the exclusion of other things or you know more important they are going to lose a lot of people that they actually need to win things like the presidency or a controlling you know majority in congress I mean let's not forget the lesson of the midterm elections was that when you in when you nominate and run insane douchebags who have a very tenuous grasp on reality and are obsessed with drag queens and with you know non-existent election fraud that turns elections and all of that kind of stuff you lose the republican should be in a place in congress where they're implementing an agenda that they might have articulated but they didn't articulate an agenda and they didn't take they didn't take power in congress like in a in a in a strong way because they're obsessed with these issues that have very little to do with their you know supposed limited government interest you lose except in Ohio Liz the to to put a cap on this part of the discussion one of the critiques that you'll see conservatives make about woke capitalism or whatever is that it wasn't just that you know a constitutional recognition of gay marriage took place it's that the winners were sore winners there's a sort of a sense of forced tolerance you have to wear if you're a hockey player a Russian hockey player on the Philadelphia Flyers and I know you follow the NHL a lot you have to wear a gay pride shirt like it's not enough just to say okay you won and we're not going to discriminate against you anymore it's that yeah have to like make pledges fealty or affiliation with various groups and that is what's provoking the backlash you think there's any validity to that critique not really I mean I think there are definitely people who want that to be you know people on the left who are trying to do that but I think like Nick said about so many you know different institutions it's it's it's overblown this idea that you have to is overblown there's a lot of people I think conservatives who feel pressure just because they want to be not questioned at all and this isn't obviously this isn't just a thing on the right you know the left does this in their own way too but I think you know there's a lot of conservatives who want to not feel uncomfortable at all about their beliefs I want to not feel pressure at all they want to be able to be in certain institutions and not feel like they are the minority or to you know they want to feel cool and conservatism you know has never been cool and they want to be you know the cool kids and it's not but that doesn't mean you're being oppressed you know I think people tend to confuse those things I also just wanted to say I've been doing some lectures at the University of Cincinnati talking to political science and journalism students there and this also gets to you know Nick's point about about some of this being overblown what we think of as as you know this infection on campus of wokeism we often take these stories about elite colleges or about you know particular activist groups who are very loud on certain colleges as representative but I just don't think they are and you know I was fully prepared for the students that we that I talked to at the University of Cincinnati to be very as strident in their in their social justice politics and not open to things you know I haven't been on a college campus in years I was like oh gosh are they just going to be they just going to be horrible you know like we hear about all the time and it it has not been further from the truth like they've been I mean I think that there's definitely a liberal bent among them although there have been some conservative students but but it has been you know a sort of normal centrist normie centrist liberalism they've been very open to different ideas they've been very open to discussions and not gotten mad at at me and my husband also in soup saying he was way farther to the left than I am when we talk about our work and I've shared reason work with them which you know definitely challenges some of these liberal ideas and and they've been very receptive to it and not at all like this you know these social justice monsters that we often hear about nice all right let's move on tomorrow night president joseph robin at biden the second is set to deliver not only the state of the union address but reportedly some possible hints about running for a second term in 2024 when he will be a record setting 1000 years old we tend to criticize Joe Biden on this podcast a lot because he's the president but in the spirit of intellectual flexibility of nothing else Catherine let's each go around the table and come up with the very best thing you can say about the Biden presidency so far we'll get to the bad stuff too but Catherine you want to start no come on you can do it why are you so mean to me Matt um so I I will say that though I think he could have done more it is worth keeping in mind that Biden has done some good work to restore US immigration policy to a slightly more sane position and you know I think we can agree that he is screwed up at the border in terms of both messaging to people who are coming in and putting Kamala Harris in charge of it in the first place but the fact is that you know visas are back up approaching pre-covid levels and he has made a sincere effort to finalize the status of dreamers although he has not been successful so I will just say now and always I think that's like an important issue that we don't talk about that much because it's very very hard to make progress on it and Biden has at the very least returned us to a pre-Trump status quo more or less and I appreciate that Liz can you say something nice about the Joe Biden president? Maybe nicer than I managed the mind wasn't very good don't have to I mean he got us out of Afghanistan that's the thing that immediately jumps to my mind that's that's big for whatever else his president you know he is that that is something that other presidents before him have refused to do it is something that there was not a lot of political I mean well there's a lot of popular will to do there's not a lot of political will to do it took some balls to just be like I'm doing it I'm doing it I don't care what everyone says this is the right thing to do and I'm doing it and I think that was admirable That was my vote too Yeah me too He botched it really badly so since we all agree on that one thing let's go straight to the bad stuff I was gonna say he also is pretty he's he's better on the drug war than his predecessors which isn't you know this is faint praise but it's something particularly given the fact that he is one of the architects of the drug war and the penumbra of you know carceral conditions and stuff that come out of that so and he also murdered the balloon he did someone had to do it and he absolutely murdered that balloon you know it wouldn't even have made it across the Pacific Ocean Matt if Trump had been in office so that is absolutely true all right let's go to our sense of what would be from your point of view individually and using critically the worst thing about a second Biden presidency Catherine he's gonna lie about the economy again for four years God he is he's gonna lie over and over again and lie it's really quite infuriating so I read and you should always read the excellent Glenn Kessler on presidential and political lies he did a looking back at last year's state of the union which promises did he keep which problems promises did he not keep and he reminded me of Biden's plan promise to cut energy costs for families an average of $500 a year by combating climate change and that number was from nowhere about nothing like that was a fully made up number it's savings that were supposed to take place eight years from now which we're not gonna have anything to do with like current inflation and from a report that said that the savings on utility bills would be $5 not $500 so what the hell man like we can't just be out here lying and you know I have a particular pet peeve on his like weatherizing your house will save the world thing it just for some reason has always annoyed me but to just throw that totally fake number a four Pinocchio number according to Glenn Kessler into his state of the union and bear no consequences for that and then of course his claim to to be in a position to lower the deficit that is as Kessler called it a shell game and Biden will not stop misleading people about what he has done on that front and I I don't know if I can take a bunch more years of it Matt especially you're gonna move to Canada with his tweets on the did you see the one yesterday where he said he promised that like or that a competition lack of competition was costing the average household $5,000 a year just like no no citation just like where did that never come from sure sure for sure like $5,000 lack of competition for the government's monopoly man and it's costing me more than $5,000 a year damn it Liz what's your worst thing about a second Biden term I'll stick in the in the vein of the whole competition thing I mean he's obsessed with this idea of you know big businesses not not allowing enough competition and he's really been weaponizing the federal trade commission and and put you know filling it with people and filling his administration with people who really want to use anti-trust law in a in a new weird way and you know not worry about whether practices are harming consumers but instead worry just about are they you know making businesses too big and they've just really been pushing a whole lot of terrible anti-trust policies and they would really continue to do that and just sort of stifle I mean even everything from that like the non-compete clauses there's just so much where they're just trying to sort of you know take more control of American business under this guise of fighting monopoly power and they might actually make progress on that I mean you know I think all you know everything that he's going to say in this state of the Union obviously has the big asterisk on it of Republican you know Republican opposition but there as Liz has written awesomely many times there is a weird transpartisan I guess coalition to punish big businesses and I could I could imagine a world in which Biden put something together yeah maybe it's this like NDA stuff or whatever that kind of thing where he just like chips away at the edges of there's a business it exists I know its name it is therefore the enemy Nick what's your worst nightmare about that's uh Biden too Biden's second term is spending