 Yes, history is here to help. And yes, we need help. This is ThinkDekuay, I'm Jay Fidel. It's the 12 o'clock clock. I'm joined by my co-host and contributor, Peter Hoffenberg, history professor at UH. And we're talking today about affirmative action because there's a case coming up in the Supreme Court. They agreed to take it. And they could have said no, but they agreed to take it. And it involves what? Harvard and the University of South Carolina, all about affirmative action in those schools. But it goes far beyond that. And today we'll talk about the history of affirmative action, what it means, where it fits in the context of the American experiment, and where it goes. Peter Hoffenberg, welcome to the show to your show, Peter. Good to see you. What questions do you have to start us off? Well, OK, first question, because I don't know if everybody fully understands what it is. What is affirmative action? Well, affirmative action has two definitions and two goals. Sometimes they're not consistent. Sometimes they are consistent. One goal is affirmative action is to redress, particularly historical disabilities. And those include employment and education. And so it's an affirmation for usually a group which has not had the same advantages. So you could see that the discussion, and I think we should probably keep our discussion reasonable and not ill-tempered, if I say that's what affirmative action is, then, of course, one side says it's racism. The other side says it's structural racism, et cetera. So let's, for us today, think about it as trying to redress. Like, how can we redress where, as you said, the great experiment has failed? Can I add a nuance to that, Peter? Yeah, let me give you the second one, and then let me add the nuance. The second one, because a nuance may also address what you say. The second one, and one that is equally commonly expressed, but was not the original intent of affirmative action, is that the goal of American institutions is to reflect the face of America and diversity in and of itself is a goal. And what we've seen in the conversation today is both, but particularly African-American historians and journalists remind us that initially, this was not about the goodness of diversity. Initially, it was about redressing historical imbalance. So those are the two threats, right? Redressing historical imbalances, trying to make a fair playing field. And so we see equity, not equality. And perhaps one of the byproducts is seemingly something we always talk about, which is the significance of diversity. And sociologists and psychologists say, all institutions are much healthier, make healthier decisions when there's dissent, when there's variety, when there's diversity. So I would introduce that as the two thrusts and arcs. Now, let me add one. My point of digression related to the first one, and I would add to that this notion that over time, the way the country has worked is that certain racial groups have not had the same opportunities that you might have expected. And so this is catch up ball. This is let's give them the opportunities on an expert. Let's help them, incentivize them, create a pathway for them to catch up. And to have the opportunities retrospectively, they might have otherwise had. And when I say that, I'm thinking about my own experience in the United States Coast Guard. When I got into the Coast Guard, which was October 1st, 1965, it was really an organization of white men. And it was largely based in the South, perhaps even more than the Navy was. And it involved families that had been involved, that had been members of the Coast Guard for generations from the same cities and towns, same families over time. And one day, I guess it was under Lyndon Johnson, the word came down from Washington that they were gonna directly commission a certain number of African-American officers. There weren't a lot of African-American officers in the United States Coast Guard at that time. And it was an addictive, that's the way it's gonna be. Gentlemen, here are your colleagues and they directly commissioned a whole bunch of them and spread them around the Coast Guard. And really the interesting aspect there was, these guys did not come from the same place as the rest of the officer corps in the Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard is very, it's a very altruistic organization, a very patriotic organization. And at first the worry was that they wouldn't accept these guys as their colleagues, as their fellow officers. But soon enough, it was clear they would accept them because it was in the national interest to do so. And so the whole thing worked pretty well. But I thought from my point of view to watch it happen and I was there watching it happen, I thought, this is a catch-up ball. They didn't have the numbers, the diversity they wanted. So let's create diversity right now in one day. And they did and it worked and it has worked since. That's my footnote to your comment. Okay, important footnote. And I know you well, so I know your strong ethical background and your strong moral base. But you see how the description about catching up when it becomes a political slogan, the next sentence is giving somebody an opportunity they may not deserve otherwise. And that's an incorrect, that's not your point of view, but you could see how what you just expressed. No, they were prevented. They were prevented by the institution, whether they were qualified or not. It was not a question of qualification, it was just didn't have the opportunity. Right, and that's the conversation we need to have. So with affirmative action, the attack on Harvard is the understanding and the individual who's bankrolling this and leading it, this is his second attempt, his previous legal attempt to attack affirmative action failed. And what he politically did, which was quite canny of him is make it a question of Asian applicants, particularly East Asian applicants. So we're not talking about Filipino's or Burmese or probably Laotians. He understood that there was a movement in the United States, particularly among upwardly mobile East Asian immigrants and their families, who felt that their position was being taken by an African-American. The implication being that the African-American only is taking that position because he or she or they are African-American. Are you saying that he really isn't talking about Asians at all? He's really talking about African-Americans. This is an indirect way of attaching. This is a Trojan horse. Yes. He himself, and I don't want to speak from him and certainly the Sarah Palin attack on the New York Times, I don't want to be charged with libel or slander. But I would say that he himself and the architects had shown no interest in the Asian-American community until recently went for his own effort. So this is not to deny what could be the gravitas of the effort, but we all know that cases arrive at the Supreme Court, whether we like it or not, with the vapors of politics. There's a political trail behind them. The case is more than behind them. It's all around them. It's all around them. They are politicized. I don't think you'll disagree with me. And as Sotomayor would say, it has a stench. The politics has a stench. Yes. And the stench is a couple of things that Harvard was chosen to try to stoke the populist anti-elitist sentiment. Harvard's hardly the only university that includes race. Hardly the only one. They're all around the country. We all do it one way or another. So we have to look at why Harvard, why Asian students, and those all suggest to us about how affirmative action, in this case, is really being used politically. For I think we have to admit some rather unsavory, generally white, generally Christian, but not entirely, because there are Jews who have joined the anti-affirmative launch as well. So for your audience, that's the case that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up. And the nuts and bolts, as Toby Siegler said, don't look too closely at a sausage. But the nuts and bolts for your audience are that in surveying applicants, the plaintiffs argue that personal characteristics, which allegedly Asian immigrant, Asian American immigrants scored low on, were being used disproportionately to keep them from getting to Harvard. So their argument is essentially the notion of personal characteristics or social skills is really a racial category. And so what they've done, of course, is they've called for the various surveys and emails, et cetera, about how students are ranked. But if your listeners are listening, that's kind of the nuts and bolts. You apply to Harvard, there's what we'd call an algorithm these days, right? There is a column, and the column isn't just your test scores and your recommendation, the column includes some kind of social interpretation. And the argument of the attorney and the plaintiffs is that social argumentation is biased and is biased against, in this case, not necessarily white students, it's specifically biased against Asian American students. Now I'm using Asian American, a lot of Harvard students are Asian from Asia. So I don't know actually the numbers, right? There are plenty of Harvard applicants from Malaysia and Japan and China. So I don't know, I haven't looked at the brief to see whether there's a difference between Asian American and Asian, but the racial category I presume would include both for the plaintiff. That's probably more than you wanted to know, but I think it's good. No, but it's really flipping things on its head. Cause let me throw a proposition at you and see if you agree or disagree given your starting comments here. These guys are racist. No, I don't think they're, I don't not think they're racist. What I think they are is what we might call racialists, which is that race is one of the components. They would be racist if, for example, they took an African American who scored poorly on everything else just because he was an African American, only for that. Now that could be construed as racism, but racialists is a, and I think I would be- I understand the distinction you're making, but when I ask you what I propose to you, these guys are racist. I mean, the people who are mounting this lawsuit, the people who are taking this case against Harvard and South Carolina are racist. They want to keep African Americans out of those schools and any school. They want to deprive them of affirmative action. They want to make it harder for them to achieve opportunity. And it's not just African Americans. I don't know what the accepted term is, maybe Latinx right now, but also we want to remember that attacks on African Americans, while that gets the press, are also attacks on Native Americans who might be applying to Harvard and also Latino Americans. So this is racist in the sense that it is anti those groups. And if so, facto then, unless those groups of course, and look, this is the real world, right? Not every African American applicant is poor. So they also include income and education, et cetera. But in general, you're right. If we look at this as a group issue, I don't think there's any doubt because their documents even say African Americans, for example, are allowed admission because Asian Americans or Asians have scored poorly on this. No, I don't think there's any doubt. Now, whether Harvard's racist or not, I think requires a lot more of a nuanced discussion. And that's why I use it to your racial list in that, yeah, race is a category. It's a factor. I mean, it's a factor for a reason. And it's a factor, I think, for both reasons, so. It's a factor because there are groups that have historically been obstructed from what the economists send would call the full liberation of their capabilities. The second reason is, like we're talking about President Biden's appointment to the Supreme Court, maybe our institutions should begin to look like America and maybe looking like America, not just your national interest, but social inclusion. And as Cass Sustin and others have argued, any organization, any organization that is interested in growth or interested in sincere discussion, any organization needs diversity. And there are people in this country that oppose diversity in any shape or form and they have emerged. But I wanna go back to the history of it because I think the history is very instructive. Now, my recollection, whatever shallow it may be, is that just this whole notion of affirmative action did not exist prior to the 60s. And it came up in the 60s. It came up, as I mentioned, in my experience with the military. And I don't think it existed before that. And then it sort of took, it took root around the country, around the educational institutions in the country. And within, I'm guessing here, 10 years or so, it was pretty much institutionalized. And a lot of schools had adopted affirmative action policies. The military certainly did, but a lot of companies, a lot of institutions in the country had adopted it. And there was no great resistance. Everybody felt this was the right thing to do, the fair thing to do. For the reasons you articulated, but the first reason you articulated, I think was the stronger one. That is redress. And that was my footnote about giving them an opportunity to catch up. So the question, I really, I put this question to you is, how could that have happened? What were the forces in play that made affirmative action the issue of the day that made affirmative action, get through the system and become the law? What was happening there? It's a wonderful point question. Let me just quickly address a couple of what you said and then talk a little bit more in general. First of all, there was resistance. You could look at Nixon's white Southern strategy as a resistance to affirmative action. So it's resistance and culture is resistance and local. So you had the advantage out of the goodness of your heart and being in an open institution. But there was a lot of resistance and much of that resistance we're seeing today. The second point is, I think you're absolutely right that affirmative action as we know of it was involved in the notions of the great society, the civil rights movements and institutionalized in an office that Nixon finally executed, the office of economic opportunity where affirmative action was in the White House and the White House oversaw it. Okay. Now as a historian, I think you're absolutely right. And we all know everything has some kind of precedent. So to me, a key precedent for American life is when Eleanor Roosevelt convinced Truman to integrate the army. And that could be looked at and there was resistance, right? There was resistance, but that could be looked at as the test case, particularly coming out of the Second World War, the quote unquote good war. And I don't mean that in a negative way, but we call it the good war and that's another discussion for us. If you win the war, it's usually a good war. Well, that, I agree with you. It's also a good war if clearly your opponent was so evil. So, you know, it's an interesting discussion and I would love to have it with you and your audience about, you know, what makes for a good war, but I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying that coming out of World War II, right? There was much more confidence in America's mission. We talked about this before, not that there was dissent, but America could be seen marching through the streets of Rome. A significant number of soldiers who didn't make it home were African-American. Truman, as historians remind us, Truman was reluctant, but there was nobody with the force of nature in American history like Eleanor Roosevelt. Maybe John Lewis, maybe Frederick Douglass. So I think the answer to your question is, yes, the 60s, but when Johnson and the Great Society sat down, they had a very powerful precedent. Now, what happened in the 60s? I think legitimate historians will be wary of pointing to any particular atom in the molecule. So let me give you a sense of the molecule, right? Let's put ourselves back, probably after Kennedy's assassination. Johnson from a dirt-poor background. There's all this discussion today about politicians making money. Yeah, he made money off of politics, but he also knew what it meant to be poor. And so his idea for further action also included Appalachian kids, Appalachian families, white Appalachians who had migrated to Chicago. So from the get-go, right? This was not only a black or white or Latino thing. This really was, you could almost say, a class issue. And there really, there was not a significance. Black middle-class professionals, those grew, certainly grew, but a lot of the pressure came from the realization that there was a large chunk of our society that as Johnson said, had been left behind. Then of course, let's not forget the direct action, right? People talk about disorder now. You and I are old enough to remember when Watts and Detroit and Trenton were all up in flames, right? Let's not forget the impulse of direct action towards this. And I think in this case, this was pre-Nixon's white strategy. The face of white supremacy was Barry Goldwater. That was not a captivating face. You could just even compare Trump's call to what Goldwater thought about. I remember Goldwater was a highly educated, snobbish Jewish senator from Arizona. He was a John Bircher and clearly was out of step. But Nixon understood that parts of what Goldwater said were not out of step. Okay, that's a long way to answer, but I think- It's another show, it's another discussion, but at that point, you had to have to say the Republican party was not the party of equality at all. The Republican party was looking to divide and looking to make a class society and a racist society. Yeah, I think there were plenty of Democrats as well though. You know, the Dixie Crats. So Johnson's brilliance was using the bully pulpit. And combining that as a historian, I probably am too self-congratulatory. The important publication of Michael Harrington's The Other America. You know, historians always look at key books, right? It's hard to understand Mao without his little red book. It's really hard to understand the French Revolution without him. So I don't think any historian would take an exacto knife and remove this book. This book was reviewed, commented upon, read by people at the White House. And sometimes, right, it takes that synergy. With, let's remember though, a society who's willing to go beyond the 15 seconds social media prompt. You open this book and still so much resonates. But it was not a particularly black or white book. It said the poor are being left behind. So Nixon's strategy was the old Confederate strategy. You're poor and white, but you're really so much better off because you're white, you're not black. And that helps crush LBJ's really rather, look, let's be honest. I mean, LBJ would not have let his daughter marry a black man. We know that, okay. But that doesn't mean that he did not see both the moral and political advantages. What he did say though, remember is when he signed the Voting Rights Act, he turned the pen to Martin Luther King, Jr. and said, I just signed over the South to the Republicans. So what we're seeing today is really, we see that in the seeds of the early resistance to the great society. Okay. So I make a comparison between affirmative action and maybe if you will, and I'm making an assumption about what our politicized the Supreme Court's gonna do in that case. But Roe v. Wade, it meant resistance. The resistance grew over the past how many years, decades and then resistance was so well organized and ultimately now it's at the point where they will destroy Roe v. Wade. And I make a parallel. See if you agree, affirmative action. The resistance was there, it grew. And now we're gonna have this case from the Supreme Court and they're gonna do away with affirmative action in the same way the country's turning right on both of those issues. And it's the same process, isn't it? I think you're absolutely right. And I think in this case, you can take a GPS view and you could see the 30 year effort of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society vets, judges throughout the federal system and the Federalist Society has a particular ideological view connected to their particular constitutional view. And I think in their minds, affirmative action probably violates the 14th Amendment in the sense that for them, affirmative action does not give equal legal opportunity and equal legal protection. I think you're right. I think it's gonna be very difficult for Roberts clearly has no interest in the Voting Rights Act. He's been at the lead of destroying the Voting Rights Act. I'm not sure where he leans as far as the precedent which says, right, you can use race. I mean, Bakke said you can use race, it just can't be the only thing. He has a slightly different view about precedent, but I think with the 6-3, it doesn't really matter, right? Because it's 5-4. We've seen that, that Roberts can hide himself and take a position which is with Sotomayor, Kagan, and I think you're, I'm sorry. Well, not prior, not prior anymore though, but right. Right, right. Right, so no, I think you're absolutely right. And I think that again, it's a consideration of some major aspects of the great society and doesn't just include women's rights, which are part of that, it's gonna include unleashing the freedom of religion. So anything that's seen to violate freedom of religion, including masks will be thrown out. It's gonna destroy entirely the Voting Rights Act. I think we can see from the decision yesterday or two days ago. And these are all parts, right, these are parts of great society. LWJ was no great feminist, but let's remember the feminist movement began in the late 60s and 70s as saying, look, the great society needs also to include us as then the gay and lesbian community did. And the other issue I think in here, we really got to look at Amy Cohn and Bear and Alito. They have a religious interpretation. It's not just an original position. It's a religious interpretation. And I think the founding fathers and mothers would be quite concerned when religion is interpreted by the highest court, freed up by the constitution, you're really beginning to at least challenge the Second Amendment. You're beginning to say, right, that religion is of the ultimate importance and it's never really individual religion, right? It's not my right to be pagan. I would gladly build Stonehenge outside my house, but that's not what's gonna be defended. I doubt that Islamic practices or Muslim practices, we're really talking about a Christian view of America, but a Christian view, a Christian view which is not just part of society as in 50 churches up and down Nuanu, exactly what the founding fathers did not want, which is religion integrated into the structure of government and into the state. But that's where we're going. We are going? It's a faith-based nation according to W. Bush and it's been going that way for a long time, but back to affirmative action, right? I wanted to know from you, let's assume for this discussion, it's a reasonable assumption that the Supreme Court knocks off affirmative action or modifies, pulls the wings out of it in some way, I think you make it sound like it's somewhere in the middle, but in fact, if you attack it, everybody runs away from it. And that's my question. What will happen? What will happen on the college campuses? For example, you're on a committee, you're an administrator, you wanna handle an application, and you see this person as African-American. And the rules had to change because the Supreme Court pulled the wings out of affirmative action. Are you going to wind up giving this individual special consideration, even though that's not the law anymore, simply on your view of finding a diversity in the campus, finding a diversity in the country? Because you know, if an African-American in numbers, right, in a sort of a demographic way, gets to go to good schools, gets to go to school in general, then the next generation is gonna be better off and better off and better off. And that's what's happened. I believe affirmative action has had a huge effect on the country. It has been successful in many ways to raise up, racial groups that wouldn't have had those opportunities. So my question is, how does it differ if I pull the wings out of that, if the Supreme Court just trounces it, or somehow neutralizes it? What's it gonna be like for an administrator? What's it gonna be like for the schools? What's it gonna be like for the country? As far as college level, I think we need to differentiate between elite private colleges. And I don't mean elite in a pejorative way. I mean elite that selects versus public universities. So this is, as I said, deliberately aimed at Harvard. Okay, but I think the University of Chicago and the Stanford and the Harvard and the Yale and the Princeton admissions committees are gonna select the same people. They're gonna find other categories which in one way or another don't butt heads with the decision coming up about Harvard and they will find ways. I worry more about the other universities and in America, really unlike any other society, getting good or bad, we do encourage people to go to college. Most societies have a track, right? You don't go to college and if you go to college, you go to technical college. That's pretty much the world. So what we're really talking about is how is it gonna affect a majority of African-Americans and a majority of Asian Americans don't go to Harvard. They go to UCLA, they go to Chicago State. So I can't tell you because I don't know what the local political pressures are gonna be on. We see in school boards getting attacked. Are we gonna find parents screaming outside of college admissions offices? I don't think so, but I think probably those of the vast middle, which serve an incredibly important, I mean, UH is in the vast middle, but we serve an important purpose here, right? I mean, where else are you going to go to go to a university in the state with graduate students to get a PhD? So I assume we're not gonna pay very much attention because we have a public obligation in the state of Hawaii to include everybody who is worthy of going to this. Well, we're special on diversity, right? Unique, there's no state that is quite as diverse as we are. But I think there are other states that are in the same position where they're not the elite university, but they're the state where the parents might not have gone to college and suddenly the kids get an opportunity. And I think those are gonna be put in a difficult political position if their legislators give them the money and if their legislators have taken this the way that they've taken the book boycott. So I can't really predict. Milner could probably predict better than I can politically, but the quick answer to you is the elite of the elites are going to find other ways to make sure that affirmative action reaches out to people who have been historically disadvantaged and reaches out in a way which says that this graduating class or this graduate cohort looks a lot better like America than it did 25 years ago. Well, yeah, but then you're gonna have people who will attack that, who will come and say that de facto they're still doing affirmative action even though the Supreme Court knocked it off and they'll sue those schools where they can find improvement. Number four, you know, we'll be in court again. That'll be very intimidating to the schools. Harvard won't be intimidated, but again, a public university might not have the resources to go to court. You're absolutely right. Public university in a Republican state, how about that? Right, although yeah, either that or even, you know, the UH is taking some big hits from the legislature. I'm not even sure we can go to court to defend UH, but I think one of the issues looking down the road is while respecting the position of the African-American community, the largest number that this is gonna affect are Latino Americans. That's a growing population. And if this is a white slash Asian attempt, then as I said at the start, it's not just African-Americans, but really a very growing part of our community, which are as a Latin America, not really including Filipinos here, but from what we know below the Rio Grande. What do you do about Mexicans and Costa Derecans who come to America, become citizens or their kids? This is gonna affect them as well. So it's not just, you know, it's like, Ruby Goldberg tried to make everything a black-white issue. It's not just a black-white issue. This is that we are maybe next to, you know, India or Brazil, really the most diverse society. And being diverse, how do we take that diversity not as a way to, you know, exclude people, but to include people? And if you're gonna say to everybody, well, going to college is important for inclusion, then you're gonna have to make college open, right? It's easier in an elite society. If you're in an elite society, it says college is just for the elite. This is not an issue. But if you believe in democracy and you believe in education as a democratic, right, an opportunity, yeah, this is very much an issue. Well, you anticipate my next question, you know, that is assuming that there is pressure on a number of schools and you talk about, you know, the demographics. So Harvard only has a certain number of students and they have the ability to resist, you know, an attempt to cram down the lack of affirmative action. Other schools won't have that ability and they will abide by the withdrawal of affirmative action, but the Supreme Court. And then when you take, you know, the numbers in general, the student body in general around the country over time, this will have an effect on the country because there won't be as much diversity in the colleges, period, there won't be. And then when you take it on top of, you know, Biden's effort to make free tuition, you know, that's probably gonna fail. Republicans are not gonna pass that. So what you have is a kind of an effort by the Republicans and the supremacists, conservatives and all that, to separate black and brown students from higher education. I mean, it's quite a part of their unwritten agenda. Maybe it's more than unwritten. And over time, over time, as a historian, you would have to have a reaction to that. That is going to change the country. How is it gonna change the country? Is it gonna put people in the street with direct action? Is it going to change the politics? I know Neil Miller could answer that, but so can you. Is it going to change the way we function as a democracy? I think it already is in some ways. But this seems to be a very important issue. So it's not only what the Supreme Court does in other things, it's this one had cast a long shadow. What will that shadow be? Yeah, I'm not sure how much time we have. One of the shadows is most statistical studies suggests that if you complete a college degree, you will make more lifetime income, which means the possibility of purchasing a home. So direct answer to you is restricting college admissions can be directly tracked to racial and ethnic economic inequality. And I don't really think anybody disagrees with that. The number of African-American homeowners is generally connected to their educational level. And you can begin to say the same things about Latino. So one quick answer is, it's gonna make economic inequality worse. It's political implications. I would say there will be student movements. There are student movements. I can't tell you, and again, Miller can tell you much better how that will be translated. I think it's connected to answer your question with the increasingly restrictive voting laws. If you have a large number of non-white, non-Asian-American, although Asian-Americans, believe me are not fully behind this lawsuit. So the plaintiffs would like to think that they're representing all of Asian-America, but they're not. There are plenty of Asian-Americans and important Asian-American figures who still abide by affirmative action. So this is really a white thing. It's a white movement, trying to use the trojan horse of Asian-Americans. But the question would be, all right, you're angry. You wanna get on the streets, but you're also recognizing that if you want change, you're gonna have to go through voting and get your representatives in office. All right, now, as Miller and everybody knows, it's not so simple, but you can't really do anything unless you get people into office. So if you take the attack on affirmative action and the attack on voting, you can see how they're happily married, right? The people who are going to be most hurt by ending affirmative action, ah, interesting enough, we're making it more difficult for them to vote. Right? It doesn't take a nuclear scientist to see that. I think they're all connected. They are connected. And they lead to a significantly different country than we would have if we didn't have the initiatives of undermining voting and undermining black and brown education. Absolutely, absolutely. And those are two pillars of at least the ideas of American democracy. I mean, I think we all appreciate the experiment, but the idea is one person, one vote to be protected. That's being undermined. And at least since the, well, I would say probably again, interesting enough, the GI Bill, we talked about the integration of the army. The GI Bill also helped say to America, right? That you should have the opportunity for an education. So I know that was reserved to GIs, but the idea, and we know that GI Bill was actually not distributed equally. African-American GIs got far less. But once you put it out there, it does have a life of its own. Yeah. And so as I said, integrating the army was important for civil rights. And for an election, the GI Bill was also a claim that, you know what? You're here in America. It's your democratic right to have an education. And then- Connects up with what you were talking before about marching through Italy. It connects up with the moral vision that the United States had after the war. It lasted for a while. It lasted until Vietnam kind of eroded it. But in my view, but all I can say is you haven't made me feel better today, Peter. I wish you had. I always looked for that. I don't feel very good either, Gail. I'm feeling better. I'm not sleeping at all. And we haven't even gotten to this, the third aspect of the unholy trinity, that the court is also gonna make it easier to have guns. So put all these together, right? Yeah. Less education, less voting, more anger, a white community in some places thinking it's besieged and it's right to defend itself. And now everybody gets to carry guns. Well, let me say- You really wanna lose your sleep. Think about that. They should be losing their sleep, those judges, but they're not. You know, they're not. And that's a conversation I'd be happy to have again with Abbie who knows more about the Supreme Court. They're really not in part because they aren't doing what judges really are supposed to do. You're supposed to weigh, right? You're supposed to weigh. And you're supposed to find some kind of working compromise. Well, the end law must follow morality. If you lose your moral compass, you know, it's not a good result. We gotta go now. No, we have to go to continue as always. Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. My pleasure. All right, Aloha. Aloha.