 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly libertarian podcast that was combining top secret documents with Corvettes decades before it occurred to Sleepy Joe Biden. I am Matt Welch joined by Nikolas B. Peter Souterman and Catherine Mangue, ward happy post MLK day gang. Howdy. Matt, hello. Happy Tuesday. Since last week convened, it has been announced that President Joseph Robbins Biden II has been caught not once, not twice, but three times so far, admittedly, by his own team, possessing classified documents, occasionally even top secret ones. The first at his previously little known Washington think tank, discovered by his own lawyers and reported to the National Archives last November. Is that the No Malarkey Institute? That's setting a good tone right now for this podcast. Yes. Bus-based think tank. That was caught on November 2nd and revealed by the White House January 9th. Mind the gap. The second was in the garage of his Wilmington Delaware House, discovered and reported on December 20th and revealed publicly January 12th. And the third, in a room next to the garage, was found last Wednesday, revealed on Thursday. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel that Thursday to investigate how the documents got there and if there are any prosecutable implications. You may recall that Garland had previously appointed a special counsel to look into the classified documents handling of Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump. Yeah. Catherine, libertarians tend to dislike or at least distrust over classification and presidents and the FBI and just Merrick Garland. So what are libertarians to make of this unfolding legal drama? I think as usual, libertarians are to make that they were right all along. Yes. Yes, finally. This is such a shock coming from me at the top of the Reason Podcast, I know. But the sort of deep, deep, deep desire to make political hay out of this is making both the coverage stupid and the remedy stupider. So I actually this morning went and just read the most normy stuff I could find about this because I realized I was getting most of my information on this from Twitter and whatever else sources I've kind of dumped it in my lap because my bubble contains this scandal, but I don't care. So I was not seeking out information. I went and read NPR's coverage. I read The New York Times' coverage. Every single one of the pieces is like, what? I mean, is this really the same as the Trump stuff? It seems, I mean, Donald Trump, though, he's bad and Biden is good. So in that sense, these seem different. Like, it's really embarrassing the tone of the coverage, I think. You know, I actually do think it is different in some important ways, but it is the same in this crucial way, which is, as you said, Matt, the libertarian point. The reason these guys don't know that they randomly have classified documents in their garages or locked closets or whatever is because too much stuff is classified because presidents are dealing casually in this information all the time. And because presidents are narcissistic assholes who want to hold on to lots of documentation for their presidential libraries and their memoirs and stuff, and I think that that's at least part of what's going on here, too, the sort of doubling of records for personal or partisan purposes, which results in violating these rules. I don't think the nation is in danger from any of this. And so in that sense, I think we're making too big a deal out of it. Like, the Ruskies aren't going to get their hands on this. And even if they did, there's nothing in them as far as we know that's really, really actually super simple. Nuclear football. Right? Come on. Just say it occasionally. Nuclear football. The codes. Yeah. Peter, is there anything weird about the timeline here that I over-focused on in the little intro bits? It takes the White House more than two months to publicly acknowledge the first discovery. And then when they do so, they don't mention the second one, whoops, until a few days later when people start to report more out about it or am I in my own filter bubble? Oh, I don't know. I don't think it's at all weird when the sitting president and his staff kind of fail to report doing the exact same thing that they strongly suggested that their predecessor might be locked up for. That seems pretty normal for me. Yeah. I don't know. What are you talking about? Yeah, okay. Bear it up. This is Searman coming out swinging. Spicy Searman. Spicy Searman. That's fine. And uncharacteristically brief. Nick, have you seen as many Republicans pouncing in subheads since Phil in the blank, Nick Gillespie joke? Yeah, they have been pouncing like nobody's business. But I also am kind of annoyed that nobody pointed out that Joe Biden has like 20 cars. I mean, he's like second to Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld and kind of duplicative automobiles, none of which get more than five miles a gallon. I think that should be the focus of this. Eric Clapton as we learned this weekend from Dave's car ID service. Oh, yeah. Well, and you know, of course, Jeff Beck, major gearhead, Matt Welch, can we stop talking about ancient politicians, the old ones, and talk about classic rock stars who are recently dead? Yes. Yeah. I don't have much to add to what Catherine and Peter said, but the one thing I was thinking about as this story came out, this topic that was a focus of concern, not just for reason libertarians, but for a lot of people, particularly people on the progressive left in the early years of Guat of the global war on terror, which was the overclassification of government documents, particularly at the federal level. And I dug up, there was a study from the early like around 2006, 2007 that said like fully a third of documents that are put into some category of, you know, classification, like of high classification so that they can't just be publicly released immediately, a third of those shouldn't have been done. And the government agency that actually looks over all of this, the information security oversight office and its 2021 annual address to the president's office actually said, you know what, like particularly because of COVID, there's a huge problem with a spike in stuff that's both classified and a backlog in getting this stuff out. So if this brouhaha is going to do something other than just kind of throw a few more fuel pellets on a kind of tribal political polarization fires, for God's sake, you know, let us revisit the idea of why are so many documents being classified in the first place. We're supposed to live in an open society and a free society and a transparent one. So for fuck's sake, let us see more of the JFK assassination reports. I think it was Martin Luther King who said a republic, if you can get your federal document retention procedures right. Yeah. Now, then we wouldn't judge his, we wouldn't judge his sculptures. Truly inspirational. Yeah. Catherine, before we leave the topic, what's a good way going forward to judge whether any of this stuff is of actual concern to people who are not necessarily trying to score a political fight? And what does that have to do with Hunter Biden's nudity? Right. I mean, this is the thing, right? The battle that we are having right now in all of our politics is who gets to control what information other people are allowed to see. Maybe that's the battle of all politics. I don't mean to get existential about it here, but that could be what politics has always been about. And it's just more text than subtext these days, but we are, we're like retaining this last little delusion from an earlier era that maybe secrets can be kept and that the public can be prevented from knowing things. Now, of course, the public often doesn't know things because people don't care or are lazy or stupid or not interested. That's fine. But I think in general, our bias both in terms of say, I don't know, social media misinformation policies and also probably classification documents is that the bar should just be very, very high for really, truly throwing up a wall in which we prevent people from knowing things. Do we need to casually announce the exact position of US troops in the time of war? No, probably not. We could keep that one on the down low, almost everything else. Yeah, people should probably know what's going on for crying out loud. Yeah. And just to throw some more on the social media thing, the ongoing Twitter files, which are kind of been possible to keep up with on some level, and they tend to bore and I'm not sure I need to read a lot more. Alex Berenson in life, but over and over again, they come around to politicians and other institutions nagging, nagging social media companies. Can you please suppress this person? Can you please suppress that person? These are elected officials in many cases asking to suppress opinion. That's awful. That's just awful and that instinct is awful. And all of you people, you're all awful. OK, moving on. Last week was a was was that an Adam Schiff impersonation? No, but it might have been on, you know, sometimes we work on a subconscious level and it just, you know, flows out. I think I was reading Nick Cave and he was explaining how the process works. Moving on. Last week was a busy one, speaking of various culture wars of our ongoing culture and policy wars over public education and wokeness. And I use that word because they're all using that word. The newly majoritarian House, GOP, introduced the CRT Transparency Act and CRT, in this case, does not stand for critical race theory stands more like against critical race theory. It read this stands for Curriculum Review of Teachings, Transparency Act. They're doing it again. Nick, they're doing it again. Sponsor Scott Fitzgerald from Washington, Wisconsin, Washington, Wisconsin. Sure. This side of paradise who explained, quote, it's clear bureaucrats and teachers unions have no reservations about putting divisive material such as critical race theory in front of our children that seeks to put people in groups based on skin color or gender. The CRT Transparency Act will solve this problem by helping parents get a straight answer about what their children are hearing in school. And quote, other news in this category of recent vintage includes House Republican Jim Banks of Indiana announced the creation of an anti woke caucus to push back on, quote, wokeness tyranny on, quote, in governmental and private institutions. New Republican governors in places like Iowa and Arkansas have announced upon swearing in some pretty bold schooled choice aspirations, while also in the case of Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signing an executive order, banning CRT and the official use of the word Latin X in government documents. Catherine, there's a lot of micro stuff to respond to here, which is what we should normally do and focus on the most. But I want you to give us a sense of a macro question, especially as we are ramping up to National School Choice Week, right? Is in your estimation, the school choice movement, which we tend to like over here at reason at this point, inextricably linked to the anti woke movement, which is producing a more, let's say, mixed bag of policy results from a libertarian point of view. Yeah, that hurt. That question hurts my heart a little. That's why I asked it. Yeah. Thanks. I would like to. Sorry. I would like to think that it is not. I would like to think that the push for school choice is decades old. It is it represents a very, very real and successful policy initiative that came just out of Milton Friedman's brain, basically, and into the world. The fact that in the last couple of years, it has become entangled with these, you know, extremely kind of high temperature fights over race and gender. I don't I don't think necessarily spells the doom of the school choice movement as a concept, but it certainly has confused the brand. And I don't think that's a coincidence to be clear. Like the Republicans did this to themselves for the most part. But I got to imagine that the teachers unions, your Randy Weingartons and such are absolutely delighted to see this smear that they have tried to perpetuate for a long time, that somehow school choice is secret, you know, conservatives being racist and anti-gay, now manifesting in the real world. That is is not a need, not be what school choice is about. And I hope that we can get back to the real thing. I will say, though, just to kind of do the like high level analysis here, like bands on talking about and teaching critical race theory are not pro free speech. They're just not like the Republicans that are out here saying, I'm defending free speech, I'm defending free speech. And so I'm banning certain speech. It's just really important to say again, like, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. And and I think that it's sort of easy somehow for some people to gloss over that in this debate. I don't understand why. But Peter, on the Randy Weingartons side of the sin, the sins in education, I mean, are not teachers unions, particularly in bluish areas or deep blue areas, pursuing kind of some crazy equity stuff. I mean, there's news out, I think it was Virginia, Maryland, you guys will correct me, of school officials suppressing national merit scholarship awards because that's not good for equity or something like that. There's some crap out there. So isn't it isn't it a good thing for the House GOP to go out there and say, hey, look, we want transparency. We're going to mandate transparency, telling you you can't receive federal funds unless you show us everything that you're teaching out there in the world. If you pronounce the letters C, R, T, like a word, like a word. What do they sound like? They sort of sound like cart, but like without the a cart. But it sounds kind of like cart, right? And I think that what this whole debate is doing is putting the horse before the cart. Oh, my God, I hate you. This is what long weekends do. That was just for Catherine. No, I'm actually I'm actually serious here, which is what is happening is that Republicans are assuming the primacy of public schools and then saying, well, they have to they have to be transparent about everything and then we're going to inform parents and then we're going to have the debate after that, right? When instead what we need to do is say, let's give parents a choice about what kinds of schools and what kinds of education their kids are going to have up front, and this is why school choice works much better than arguing about the curriculum in schools. Now, once we have public schools, they exist, we're not going to not have public schools this semester next year, the next five years. That's the public schools are a given. And I think it's just completely unrealistic to say, oh, we will just not have public schools in some sort of near future like foreseeable timeline. Once we have that, I don't think it's entirely crazy to give people information, right? Like the to let to let parents know what they are being taught. And I certainly think there's a lot of stuff that many parents would find objectionable being taught in public schools. But I don't think that arguing that trying to use public schools as the locus of that debate is going to solve this problem. Instead, it's going to intensify the conflict. And you have folks you have folks like Jim Banks from Indiana, who in the House of Representatives said he would be forming a new caucus to take on wokeness and like the whole thing just sounds like a parody of Republican, conservative, anti-woke, you know, politics, right? Like wokeness, which presents his quote, the greatest domestic threat to America today, a tyranny that's changing America through indoctrination, right? Like this is this is just wildly overhyped and overblown. And it's not it's not a good it's not like a responsible approach to solving these problems because a responsible approach would say, look, let's try and give people choice wherever we can, rather than fight over what the one thing that every kid should be taught actually is. I also want to say, like, if you want transparency about what your kids are being taught in the classroom, and this is as I'm creating two categories here, people who just want to be mad about it and then actual parents of actual kids in actual schools, and if you want transparency about what's going on in the classroom, by far the best approach would be to ask your kid's teacher what they are teaching your kid. Like, I don't know why the federal government needs to be involved at all. It's just a mystery, like it's not a mystery, it's a zero percent mystery. People want to be mad about it. But it's not hard to find out what kids are learning in school. If you have kids, it's really not. I disagree with that. I mean, I or let me I think it's more complicated than that. And, you know, the one good thing in Ron DeSantis's don't say gay laws was, you know, an insistence on transparency for parents or actually for taxpayers. It should be because all of us, whether we have kids in school or not, are paying for this and in a lot of places, that's not the case. You know, my both of my kids went to public school in Ohio and it was not always clear what teachers were teaching. And, you know, you try talking to them. They're oftentimes either obfuscating or just not very good at communication or. So a federal bill to solve that, Nick? No, no, no, no, that's these are two totally separate things, right? You know, the idea that the federal government is the place, you know, the one place of redress for this is obviously stupid and insane. And it's funnier, it gets funnier and funnier, the more hysterically, reactionarily conservative, the Republicans who are calling for this. And somebody like Jim Banks, who has also sponsored legislation in shrining, qualified immunity and law rather than a shitty court decision. You know, who denies the federal election, you know, who denies the election of Joe Biden, who went back and forth on January's investigating January 6th after Trump was like, hey, I really don't want it to be investigated. I mean, it's great that small government conservatives are the ones who are now saying, you know, that this needs to be, you know, legislated at the federal level, if not at the UN, that'll be the next step, right, where they go for we need one world government that stamps out wokeness everywhere. So there's a lot of bullshit about that. The way forward, particularly in K through 12 situations is school choice. That's not a mystery. It's not a miracle. And it's exactly what should be happening. And the one thing I would say without going into vowel, you know, vowel challenged jokes and things like that is that transparency, demanding transparency on the local level and at the state level or at the district level is really important. And that probably will help fuel school choice, support for school choice, because the more people know what's being taught and what's not being taught and what values are being transmitted through education, which they always are going to be, I think there will be more and more backing by parents as well as taxpayers to say, you know what, I'm not going to support everything that's being taught in every school, but I'm much more comfortable with the idea that kids and parents get to choose among a lot of competing curricula that will be very different with very different focuses and very different kind of moral valences. Catherine in potential defense of Jim Banks and even reactionariness, neither which are categories that I tend to defend. But the purposes of furthering the conversation, one of the things on Jim Banks' anti-woke caucus to do list is to reverse President Biden's first day in office or certainly first week, first two days in office, executive order, calling for a whole of government, sort of audits and an action upon judging everything through an equity focus to determine whether the outcomes of X or Y or Z public policy has a disparate effect on different communities based on their immutable characteristics. And if so, doing something about that, that like didn't get a lot of press. We wrote about it at Reason. Conservatives tend to write about it, too. But in if there are places and there are places where the governing culture, the media culture, the culture that people misnamed the cathedral, where those are just sort of dominant and do things that no one really pays attention to, because it all seems like the temperature of the water to the fish who are swimming in it, isn't it useful to have someone saying, look, we need to reverse this, which is on his things to do less. Like we need to stop this equity executive order. Of course, you can't do that until you have dictator for life, Donald Trump is the president. But like you need someone who's organized around a almost reactionary opposition to these things that otherwise people don't pay attention to, but then insinuate themselves in perpetuity, in public policy. Yeah, I mean, I I'm sympathetic to that desire. And I don't think that Biden's approach is the right one. I guess I think that, you know, it is it is particularly reasonable to make these things a priority when it is exclusively about the conduct of government. Right. And I think that to me is the thing that's the most troubling about the structure of the woke caucus and the structure of so much of our fights about wokeness is that it is perfectly is a perfectly reasonable thing for members of Congress to say to the president, hey, I'm not sure that I agree with your goals and guidelines for creating public policy. That's how we should be doing the creation of public policy at the same time to just allied the distinction between that, say, Twitter's moderation policies, hypothetically, and then this thing in between where public schools live. I mean, this is this is something that in our ban books issue we wrote and talked about a bunch public school curriculum setting is in many ways the stickiest wicket of of where where free speech starts and stops. And it is there are public institutions, they are mandatory attendance, lest we forget truancy laws still exist. And and so and same with public libraries, you know, there is a difficult question there about what can and should be taught. I I appreciate Nick's focus on transparency, but I still think the thing that matters more here is individual responsibility. I think that transparency laws are far, far, far too often ultimately used as cudgels. I think that the compliance costs of transparency laws are sometimes weaponized and that I'm not it's not clear to me that transparency will be better for school choice in the end. If we end up requiring everyone who wants to start a school to data dump every single thing about that school just because one dollar of government money goes into that school, that's that doesn't feel like a good and glorious school choice future to me. And so I think that, you know, again, the place that I would say it's like if taxpayers have a say, but not not that big of a say, honestly. What matters, I think, is the kids themselves, the parents themselves, the teachers themselves and the lower you can devolve that, the better. Certainly, again, the federal government has absolutely no business here. Peter, you're from Florida. Catherine mentioned the governor, Ron DeSantis. Clearly has some possible presidential aspirations. He recently appointed to the board of a public liberal arts school called the New College, Chris Rufo, Christopher Rufo, as his byline would suggest, who is arguably the leading anti-CRT, meaning in this case, a critical race theory, activist in the country, just wondering if you can give us any insight onto that transaction and what it might tell us about DeSantis or just on the state of applied Republican anti-wokeness in education. It's mostly symbolic hippie punching. New College is the weird college in Florida and it's it is a public institution, but it's the weird college and like that's really the best way to think about it. It's not just artsy. It's out there. It's sort of fringy. It's where they send the kids who like you don't you kind of think they're maybe smart, but you don't really know what to do with them. And then they all go and do you don't really know what for a bunch of years. There's no transparency there. And it's like self-consciously the weird college. It's also not very large and not very influential relative to the to the genuinely big schools in the Florida public university system, FSU, University of Florida. And so to me, the choice of of locale, a venue here to make the move that DeSantis made is really telling, because if DeSantis wanted to make a big change in the public university system, then he would start with the big, highly dominant, highly influential schools. Instead, he just went after the one that is known for being kind of kind of silly and absurd in certain ways. But like that's it's you know, it's it's it's not it's not an important school in the sense of like they're setting the the woke agenda for Florida or for the nation. It's important in the sense that everybody knows that's where the weird lefties go. I just want to point out two great alums of new college in Florida. One is one is Rick Doblin, the founder of Maps, the psychedelic research group, which is pushing MDMA through FDA trials should be online and fully legal. MDMA, assisted therapy, psychotherapy within a couple of years. And then also Bruce Beretsford Redman, a MTV Pimp by Ride reality TV producer who was convicted of murder. So that's what you get. This is what you get with that kind of experimental state college, you know, with no grades and just let people be. Can I just throw a little bit in here, which is that I was talking with someone this weekend who is not, who does not pay attention to politics, who is not anywhere inside my bubble and it emerged. Yeah, it emerged that she had confused George Santos and Ron DeSantis and thought that all the George Santos identity stuff was about Ron DeSantis leading contender to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for president. And if that, I don't know, that just feels like great to me. Like, I love that people are out there living a life where George Santos and Ron DeSantis are functionally the same person. May we all just wish that they would combine them. And I think I made this suggestion last week that they combine them into Ron Santos, Matt Welch, the diabetic Hall of Fame, third baseman for the Chicago Cubs, who really. Yeah, let's not let's not confuse people. I will add to that, Captain, that I once, thank God, it never aired, but I was once interviewed by 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl by Dint of where I was living at the time, they were doing a feature on it. And she was trying real hard to get me. And this is like 90 one or two trying to get me to be really angry at Bill Clinton, even though I wasn't and didn't live in America. So why would I be? And like stop the tape at some point to like coach me. Remember, like you're angry at Bill Clinton. OK, going to do it is 60 minutes. You know, I'll do whatever they tell me I'm going to do. And they start the role and say, what do you think about Clinton? I'm like, you know, that George Clinton, you know, I eat just enough of him. And I ran it for about five minutes while their face went totally blank. And I have never been prouder to be as stupid as I am. Did you make a little slap base motion? Yes, it was pre slap at a base time, sadly. We're going to extend the conversation via our listener email of the week here in a moment, but first a reminder that this episode is brought to you by Better Help Friends. Remember what it was like to feel awesome? It's kind of hard for some of us to imagine that during these dark days of January, living in lousy cold cities and fending off the post COVID doldrums. But once upon a time, we would skip and sometimes even hum a little. It's time to ask what's keeping you from getting back in touch with your inner happy, go lucky person? How do you get to your good place for millions of people? Therapy can help remove obstacles and build new pathways toward getting to your very best self. That's where Better Help, the world's largest therapy service comes in. Better Help has matched three million people with an M, with professionally licensed and vetted therapists. It's an affordable service, 100% online and super flexible. If you don't like your first match, swap them out for another until you find the right fit and listeners who act right now can get 10% off their first month. Just go to betterhelp.com slash roundtable, fill out a brief questionnaire and find a quicker path to your better self. That's better. H-E-L-P like Peter Pan. Go there today. You'll be glad you did. All right. Reminder to send your brief email queries to reason at roundtable.com. No, that's not right. Roundtable at reason.com. What am I doing? This one in a bridged form comes from Jim Mellowan. And I hope I'm massacring his name. Who writes? I have long held what I considered to be a libertarian position on college admissions and affirmative action, that private colleges ought to be able to control their own admissions policies and that those who don't like these policies can seek admission elsewhere. I am somewhat surprised that I do not find any libertarians making this argument. It seems to me that if the Supreme Court makes a determination that affirmative action is illegal, as well as other types of arguably discriminatory admissions policies, such as preferences for alumni at attempts to achieve geographic diversity in the student body, then we are in for a tsunami of lawsuits in which every damn college applicant of the country was turned down by her top college pick will argue that she was the victim of discrimination. Where does it end? So what does the panel think? By what logic are the details of private college admissions policies a matter for the courts? How does the Constitution say that the courts need to make these decisions? And again, where will it all end? Nick, is there a meaningful distinction here that libertarians ought to be policing between private and public admissions policies? You know, there is, you know, theoretically but legally under current, you know, under current court rulings, there is not. And so Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which are part of the Supreme Court case, which has been heard and will be, you know, the ruling will be revealed later this spring about discrimination against Asian Americans. There is effectively no difference between being a public and a private university. If you take federal money in any way, shape or form, you're covered by federal anti-discrimination practice. So just as a matter of legal reality, there's not a case. I think Jim Malone raises a lot of interest in questions there. I am a little bit disheartened and sad at his need to get Wesleyan in there. I'm surprised that he didn't mention that Lin-Manuel Miranda went there because that usually is the other reason why people bring up Wesleyan. And we have friends and co-workers who went there as well that we won't embarrass by naming them. But, you know, a lot of what's going on with the anger here, I think, is Harvard in particular is doing an incredible job of gaslighting Asian Americans because part of it, you know, part of that case, which I followed a lot, we did a recent live stream, Zach Weismuller and I, at Reason, with David Bernstein, the George Mason law professor, and Vala Conspiracy Blogger, and Kenny Zhu of Color Us United. And they both were, you know, talking a lot about how Harvard is lying about how they are processing Asian American applications. And if they were a little bit more honest about that, it wouldn't take the sting of rejection out, but it would change the conversation. And it turns out that, you know, the way that Harvard, and this has gotten a fair amount of press, and it's worth thinking about, is that way they de-emphasize or, you know, like downgrade Asian applicants, which is mostly Chinese students, by the way, and some South Asian Indians, but is that they say they have bad personalities that wouldn't, you know, that they're, you know, they're deficient. And what's fascinating is that what the court, you know, the discovery process and the court case has shown so far is that the alumni interviewers who talk to these Asian American applicants are like, you know what, these people are really good, like they're as good as white students or maybe even a little bit better, and then somewhere in the admissions office, that gets changed into a de-merit, and that's why Asian Americans who are over-represented from the general population of America at Harvard, but they're not in at the same numbers that you would think their test scores, class rankings, extracurriculars, et cetera, would point out. But it's the lying about stuff. And this reminds me of the way that FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, talked about private universities that don't follow the First Amendment because on that grounds, they don't have to be as as kind of robust as public universities. You know, people like Alan Kors and Greg Liganoff say, you know, part of the problem is that these schools are lying to students when they say you're coming here and you're going to be able to have a robust, you know, no holds barred intellectual experience because they don't do that. So in a way, the legal issues aside, what's going on here, particularly with the Harvard case, UNC is a little bit different. You know, is that they're lying about how they are saying, well, you know what, Asian-Americans really aren't that interesting. And that should be deeply offensive, I think, to all Americans. Catherine, you went to non-Harvard. Are you cheering on this Supreme Court case? And do you think that, like Nick, that there isn't that much of a meaningful legal distinction that we should be thinking about? I mean, I think that there is what this case and what this general kind of controversy has forced people to confront is that you I think many, many people share the natural intuition that schools should be able to put their thumbs on the scale in the favor of certain student groups, but only the ones sort of semi-arbitrarily that society is comfortable with or that we've always done. And the thing that Nick just described with native, with Asian-Americans is a very, very close parallel to the way that Ivy League institutions treated Jews a century ago. They basically crafted their admissions policies in order to make Jewish applicants score lower. This is the source of a lot of the geographic diversity requirements, which our questioner actually noted in the longer version of his question. You know, if you have to admit some kids from Wisconsin, you know, they don't got a lot of Jews out there problem solved. And so this is this isn't going to go away, regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on this case. Schools are still profoundly deeply motivated to racially select their student bodies, and they're going to keep doing that. And that, I think, is a thing that's underappreciated here. They're just going to figure out another backdoor through which to do this. But Nick is right. It's, you know, actually kind of shocking how these schools are leaning into negative racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans in the service of this other this other goal of kind of balancing schools. I think that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate based on race. That's why libertarians don't talk about this, because that sentence freaks people out. It freaks me out. I don't even like to say it, but I think that you can't really solve this problem without confronting the deepest underlying question, which is, should it be legal to discriminate based on race? Not should it be good? I think it's not good, but should it be legal? And we have separate jurisprudence right now for school admissions and say, you know, being able to book a room at a hotel. But it's still the same underlying question. It makes people nervous. It should, because we have done this so badly in the past in this country. But we are still doing it badly in school admissions. And and I hope that the court sides with the with the folks who are pointing out the real injustices in in these cases. Peter, does it make you nervous at all in this bit of a curveball? The kind of polarization of race related policies we are seeing exist and being championed by in different parts of the country. And here's what I mean by that. The Supreme Court, I think, is probably going to look at it that closely, but probably going to strike down affirmative action in this case. A lot of people are going to be really, really mad about that. And, meanwhile, in San Francisco, I think this week or recently a board that was appointed to look into the possibility of reparations is like, yeah, we should give five million dollars per black person here or some kind of like 250 years worth of rent relief. I mean, these things are couldn't be more opposed. Are you worried about the way that those visions clash and even the way that the people talk about it clash with one another in a way that seems kind of incompatible? Sure, I'm worried, you know, just in general, but for some specific practical reasons here, one of which is that it's not at all obvious that the sort of the let's the left leaning DEI approach to the world actually makes the world a someplace that is better for the minorities, for the minority groups that the DEI folks want to improve life for. And so there's a great piece just in the New York Times today by a recent contributor and sub-stack writer, Jesse Single, who basically just outlines the evidence that diversity trainings almost certainly don't help in corporate settings and also may it may, in fact, make race relations worse in corporate settings by highlighting by highlighting racial differences or I shouldn't even say by highlighting racial differences by emphasizing by emphasizing and the idea that there are that there are of racial disparities. It might it creates resentments amongst amongst white people. It sort of over overplays the idea that sort of, you know, that there's that there are victim classes and that there are sort of aggressor classes. And that like that that produces a psychological effect that actually deepens those divides in ways that are at best not productive and at worst counterproductive. And I think that a lot of our conversation around race in America in twenty twenty three looks a lot like that, where you've got folks who are trying to emphasize racial difference as like as something that like, oh, you is basically is something that you can judge a group by as that there's that there are mutable group characteristics rather than the idea that we should be judging individuals as individuals. I guess I also just slightly want to offer a little bit of a tweak to Nick's argument that there's no meaningful legal distinction between the two cases here. So the Supreme Court is hearing two different cases about affirmative action, one of which involves the University of North Carolina, which is just a public university and as a public university as a as a government institution, effectively, it must comply with the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, and that is a further requirement that Harvard and other sort of nominally private institutions don't have to comply with. And then when it comes to Harvard, they just have to comply with a federal statute that says that if they receive private, excuse me, if they receive government money, federal money, then they have to comply with a sort of with something they can't discriminate in their admissions. And I don't think it's actually crazy for the federal government to say that if we're going to give your institution money and in Harvard's case, it's quite a bit. So just a quick googling, I can see that in 2019, Harvard appears to have taken five hundred and sixty million. So I have a billion dollars just in research funding, much of which pays for staff salaries. Right. So this is going directly to instruction and to, you know, to to employer to people who are employed by Harvard. They're taking half a billion dollars in federal money. And the there's some strings attached, one of which is you can't discriminate. Now, the Supreme Court President has said in the past, oh, actually, you can consider race as part of a contextual, holistic sort of view of the diversity, which is a good unto itself. But that's the question here is whether Harvard is actually meaningfully private in the sense that the libertarians talking about private institutions want to talk about. And there are colleges, not very many, but there are colleges that do not take federal money and and it seems like Harvard could decide, oh, we're just not going to take the federal money and then we'll do whatever we want and we would be and we might be free of some of those limitations. And that's not on the table because Harvard isn't going to give up half a billion dollars in research funding alone. Yeah. And if I may, as David Bernstein explained, those distinctions ultimately don't really matter in this in these two cases. But the question is, is using race a determining factor? You know, like, is it the thing? And I actually suspect that the federal, that the Supreme Court is going to basically maintain the status quo and say that these are not the determining factors, you know, front and center in a way that goes against existing precedent. And there's a couple of cases that were settled having to do with the University of Texas and University of Michigan, both state schools, that kind of set up the current process to go to the larger question. And there are not many members of the court who are left over from those links. No, I know I'm making a prediction here. But the the other thing that what, you know, if to kind of draw a theme from earlier talking about K through 12 education, if we want to talk about transparency, the fact is that both public and private universities use affirmative action all of the time in various different ways to kind of sculpt an incoming class that they think best represents what they supposedly are about. And, you know, the number of women who are attending college now who are undergraduates is approaching 60 percent. And there's a ton of schools in the country, public as well as private, that are using affirmative action to keep men in the mix. Because once you, you know, typically the way admissions officers talk about this is that at the very elite schools, there's a ton of male candidates who, you know, who would come in if it's straight married. They bring in women who do fine, et cetera. But then at second tier institutions, you know, it's actually women are much more likely to be represented. But girls and boys don't want to go to schools that have more than about 55, 60 percent, one sex. And so I know at one of the universities, Miami University, which is a public school in Ohio that my ex-wife used to teach at, they were openly admitting dumber, on average, dumber male students in order to keep the student body kind of, you know, near 50-50. And they were doing that because otherwise boys and girls would stop coming. You know, there are athletic scholarships which have apps of fucking literally nothing to do with higher education, music, blah, blah, blah. And I do think one of a larger question here, which is maybe not particularly libertarian, is if we had a wider discussion of like, what is, you know, what is merit, what is a good, you know, what's a good college freshman look like and things like that. We'd have a more interesting conversation about education policy. It's hard to be a man. It's nope. Let's go to our end of podcast. What we have been consuming in the cultural arena. Catherine, why don't you lead us off? I started watching the latest Adams Family Reboot Wednesday. And I am enjoying it a lot. The first episode in particular really has like a Lanny Freelander ghost writing credit on it. And by that, I mean reasons founder Lanny Freelander, who in the first issue of our magazine really leans into the actually schools or prisons vibes in his writing. Wednesday agrees. She's been shipped off to Nevermore Academy after getting expelled from her previous school for putting piranhas into the pool to attack the water polo team. And she just refer. It's like the first five minutes, but it's she refers repeatedly to these educational institutions as, you know, prisons, holding cells, you know, all kinds of things. And fair enough, girl, school is prison a little bit. And so if you're if you're in the mood for what so far seems to be quite a charming series, I love me. I will consume all Adams Family content. And so I was an easy sell for this one. There is apparently some dancing and later episodes, which became like a whole viral thing. So so, yeah, it's I wouldn't say like I have a giant libertarian takeaway, but is school prison does seem to be a theme of this entire podcast. So I will recommend to those who made it to the end of this podcast. Matt, are you holding out for Pugsley? I don't even know what that means. You don't even have any idea what that means. Can I point out the equation of schools and prisons? R.C. Hoyle's the legendary libertarian editor-in-chief and or publisher of the Orange County Register, the only newspaper on the West Coast major daily to editorialize against interming Japanese Americans during World War Two. One said, you know, the difference between whorehouses and public schools is that nobody's forced to attend whorehouses, which is kind of great. I think there's some other differences. Speaking of which, Jesse Walker's incredible feature on the history of groomer politics is out, so do with that what you want. I'm sure Chris Ruffo is doing plenty with that as we speak. Nick, what did you consume? I consumed Helen Lewis, the British journalist. New BBC podcast series, The New Guru's, which I highly recommend it is like a seven or eight part series. They're half hour episodes about people who are, you know, people like pickup artists, people like End of Worlders, people who drink their own urine for health and profit. And what's great about this series is that Lewis actually goes and talks to various people that she's arguing with. She is like another British journalist and podcaster, John Ronson, just very, very good at actually talking with the people that she's interested in analyzing. And she does it in good-faced ways. She often is caustic and critical of them, but is open and fair and whatnot. The most interesting thing about this program, I think, is the first episode, which is titled The Birth of the New Guru, and she talks about Steve Jobs of Apple as kind of the model for a new guru, a new leader who is enhanced by or made possible by digital technology, particularly online, you know, the miracle of cheap online distribution and marketing. I highly recommend it. It is a critical take. She's sometimes wrong about her topics, the way that she talks about Bitcoin gurus strikes me as, you know, overly arch and whatnot. But there's also a great episode about the women behind the dinners where you pay $5,000 for white women to go and eat and be lectured at by a black woman and Asian Indian American woman about why you are racist and whatnot. It's great stuff. The new gurus by Helen Lewis. Peter. I watched Megan, the new surprise hit horror movie about a killer AI doll. It's a it's a catalog of modern fears about technology and modern parenting and your Alexa devices and, you know, creepy eyed murder dolls. It's not a great movie, but it's actually a pretty effective one. It borrows pretty smartly from a bunch of influences, not just obvious stuff, like the great classic Jucky franchise, but RoboCop and Terminator. And does anybody else here remember Teddy Ruxpin? Right, like my body, my body. Oh, my God, I had one. And then there was like a girl. One of the eyes would always break and then it was like lazy, lazy. I automated automated this movie is basically like, you know what? We we call those challenged eyes now. No lazy eyes. Come on. This movie is basically what if Teddy Ruxpin were a full size American doll with a Siri inside her and maybe also chat GPT plus murder. And it's it's pretty good for a movie where that's the concept. And it also it also kind of interestingly makes the case for the theatrical experience in a way that I hadn't quite thought about before. Not so much because it demands a big screen and a top tier sound system. This is not like a big budget avatar level extravaganza, but it plays to the crowd really well. I saw this at a packed house on a Sunday afternoon at the local Alamo Draft House. And this sort of knowing pretty goofy high camp shocker is it's just a lot more fun in a room with a whole bunch of other people. I watched a theater production kind of a play with music called King Gilgamesh and The Man of the Wild on Saturday. And it's fantastic and it's only on for four more days. So if anyone is listening to this and they've been sold out, but they have walk up traffic that can accommodate people to New York City at the La Mama Theater, it's part of the experimental theater festival. It's a story, it's a bromance, frankly, true to life, a bromance about an Iraqi refugee in Toronto named Ahmed Moneka and a American living in Toronto, who's kind of a marginal actor named Jesse Levercomb, who have a chance meeting at a cafe on an important day for both of them and they end up spending a long and intense evening and then kind of go their separate ways. But as part of that initial encounter, the Iraqi references Gilgamesh, which is the oldest epic tale in humanity's history, as far as we know. And Jesse's like, what's that? And then he maybe Google some of it on the on the turlet. And then they start talking about it. And the thing of the play is that it goes back and forth between their encounter that night and a little bit later and also the story of Gilgamesh and his trusted buddy, who has some kind of name like and Gita, who is a beast and whatever. It's a lot of foreign, but that foreign words. It's Canadian, Matt. They speak a different language. And so they play Gilgamesh and Gidu, who is a beast who Gilgamesh tries to tames with the prostitute to make him a sort of human. And then they conquer various lands and attack the gods. But then Gidu suffers misfortune and Gilgamesh toggles back and forth in a really great way. And it's a funny case of a funny meta story of the piece itself, which is it's directed by a guy now named Seth Buckley. And they had worked on it in Canada. And it's kind of the true story of these two guys having forging an unlikely friendship and also a musical partnership. And along the way, COVID happened and it basically sort of incubated for four years. And over that time, the band that was sort of formed to tell this story became a huge local hit during like a world music and stuff. And Ahmed Moneka went from being kind of an obscure refugee figure who's kind of big back home in Iraq and he's and he's a refugee for a pretty interesting reason. He's now become kind of a celebrity. So it's very interesting. They're going to take the production back to Toronto and it's going to tour a little bit and you can also find their music. But just a really great, small, good play with good music. King Gilgamesh and the Man of the Wild, the La Mama Theater. Is it all is it all Gordon Lightfoot songs? Not even one. What's the music channel? Not even one. It's all in fact, it's songs in whatever devil tongue they speak in Iraq for the most part. And and it's great. So go check it out if you can and just follow those people. I think they're going to be throwing off interesting culture going forward. That's all the culture. Interesting. Otherwise, we have time for here. The reason round table podcast. If you like our podcast, want to hear more of them institutionally, go to reason.com slash podcast where you can find the reason. This is an interview with Nick Gillespie, the Soho Forum debate series moderated by Jean Epstein Stein. I never can figure that out. Who's got a rule of thumb about that, by the way? I know, but like, is there like a memetic? Is there no matter what you, no matter what you say, it's anti static. That helps. Thank you for that. And as Bruce Springsteen, Nick, is there any live, speakeasy event that you are taking part in in New York City that you would like to advertise to our dear listeners at this moment? Well, thank you so much about Welch on Monday, February 6. Cat Rosenfield, the novelist whose book, Catherine, whose latest book you must remember this, Catherine raved about just a week or so ago and who's also a great essayist for reason and for unheard. That website is going to be talking about her novel, about cancel culture, about sirens in the background and fights over people like Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Lizzo, censoring themselves to avoid woke sanctions and censure, as well as big online fights over whether or not liking big butts is a form of cultural appropriation, which should not stand. So that's Monday, February 6. The next reason, speakeasy in Midtown Manhattan. Go to reason.com slash events to get details, tickets for 10 bucks, beer, wine, soda, food and really great conversation. Fantastic. And if you like what we do as an institution, please think about giving tax deductible donation. Go to reason.com slash donate. All right, we'll catch you next Monday. Thank you and good night.