Well Whiskey from power Line blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot com.
This is the Three Whiskey Happy Hour with your bartenders Steve Hayward, John Yu and power Lines International Woman of Mystery Lucretia.
Got a given that whiskey where you're being in loud down?
Well, Hi, everybody, We've got the three Whiskey Happy Hour band back together again in person, drinking Glenn Levit and Maker's mark in John U's office in Berkeley.
And hot chocolate and hot chocolate.
You can put whiskey in hot chocolate, you know, I know. And and we have a mystery guest, a very special guest who's actually just lurking in the background and hiding. But I think John we should out her anyway. It's Judge Janis Rogers Brown.
But hello, Hi, say hi, there goes your confirmation to be Attorney General in the trunk.
A Supreme Court.
Well, all right, and all those things. I actually think though that and you may want to jump in on this Judge. We should tell listeners why they were late. I put an announcement they were going to be late with the podcast, but why we're in person? Yes, what are you doing? The last three days. You want to start and we'll correct you.
Guys, the audience will sympathize with me so bad. And locked in a room with Steve and Lucretia for three days arguing about natural law, I have undergone the worst punishment that the civil society could ever impose on me. Three days. There was no release, no escape. Lucretia would not stop yelling at me.
Oh I never even got a chance to yell at you. It would never allow me to wait a minute.
John. Three days, and how many times did I make mentioned to Clean Air Act? Not one?
Not one.
In fact I mentioned it more than you. Sort of shocking, you know.
So we offered a class for the listeners. Actually we should offer it online, you know, because it was a great class. We had a class thirty students, which was triple our enrollment from last year. Right, and we went through the different theories of how to interpret the Constitution. But I would say because of my co instructors here a heavy bias towards natural rights.
Even though I am a skeptic, I gave them full full rain to.
Talk about their what could do all theories to their hearts content.
I haven't even had much whiskey. Yet you would you haven't either way to it yet? Really really well, you know, first of all, sometime we ought to do a really organized podcast on long economics and what we think are its defects. But we want to do that an organized wag otherwise it could be a train wreck like our show on Prudence a few weeks ago.
Wow, it wasn't a train wreck. You guys were the wreck. We were fine.
We were I will, I will confess. And I told John, who doesn't look at the comments, but he counts on me. He counts on me to tell him what the comments are, and the commenters count on me to tell John what their comments are. And in that particular week, they were more pro John than they were pro lucretia. That's happened every week. That's happened once in history, in pre human posthuman, in history once and that was that week.
But I do I'd like to get your impressions. I mean, you're around more the students than we are, John and Judge Brown. If you have a sentiment or thought on this, I thought that as the three And by the way, we were in the classroom six hours a day for three days right at least Yeah, and then yeah, lots.
Of listeners have felt like twenty four hours a day.
Well, there were lots of side conversations during breaks and lunch and all the rest of that. I mean, it was a continuous conversation three days. I did get there very bright students, many of them are pretty liberal progressive. I'd say what you'd expect here. I did think that by the last day today, that the sort of tone and direction of some questions, while still many very skeptical,
had changed. I thought they were sort of getting some of the things we were trying to get across, and I won't say being converted, but I thought there's a noticeable change.
And the questions I got after the fact, Yes, definitely so, But that may have been just because they were trying to be nice. They probably felt sorry for me because John was being so mean to me the whole time.
I was.
All right, well, one way, sure, I think that many of the students had never heard any of this before.
Yeah.
I was particularly like natural rights, which right and is treated as like this archaic thing that was banished with the.
Horse drawn carriages.
Yeah, and so actually talking about the means of thinking about law and more for two thousand years was actually rather interesting and I didn't feel guys disagree. I didn't feel like liberal students were Rawlsians like they used to be. I think they're a little bit at c they're liberal, but they don't really have a guiding.
System of thought anymore.
They can thank the new Progressives for that, because the new Progressives have torn down Rawlsianism, but they haven't replaced it with anything just a.
Crude kind of human rights, you know, yeah, in the very basic kind of crude sense of human rights. Give you an example of a conversation I had with a student. How can you say that there's a social contract that should be legitimate and recognized today because who's consenting to it? And how do you show consent? And I said, well, one of the ways you do it is is through
is the right to emigrate. The fact that you can leave the country if you no longer want to be bound by the social contract and the constitution created pursuant to it, you can leave the country. Well that's you know that that that that doesn't make any sense because you might be too poor to leave.
By the way, listeners, there were many volunteers who wanted to help Lucretia emigrant voluntarily.
But my point is this that that rather than think about theoretically, from the point of view, how important the right to emigrate really is. And I said, professor you, isn't it true you cannot emigrate from North Korea, you could not emigrate from East Germany and so on. It was, well, if you don't have if you're not rich, if you know, if you're poor, then you can't. You don't have the
means to immigrate. So I said, interesting that there are literally thousands of supposedly impoverished people who are emigrating to the United States. I can't go the other way. Why couldn't they go the other way? Sorry, please go ahead, Jim.
But then, but you don't believe in secession, So why can't people emigrate out of the country and mass?
But I do believe in the right to revolution. Yeah, but you don't think either, No, because Cecil emigration, it's not the same as immigration. It's it's share and Amy Schumer and let me see who else. But they say they here's the point, they say, if this new dictator gets into office, this horrible, autocratic, absolutist dictator gets in office, I'm going to leave the country. What does that really mean.
It's obviously not that much of a dictator, because if you can leave the country, this is not an absolute dictator.
Also, they never do it, so that's that's all.
I mean, that's that goes without being saying.
But I'm willing to charter the heavy Michael Moore. By the way, John, this glen live at fifteen is drinking.
I'm yeah, yeah, because people are mad at us for forgetting that. We're actually a three whiskey happy.
Right, So we have these so people should know if they visit my office, I won't talk to you and the uns you bring me a gift because I'm Asian and so people have learned to bring me alcohol.
So I have a huge box of alcohol sitting in my office, which is just the gifts.
And I have a Costco size Maker's mark and a brand new bottle of glen Livett which Steve opened without asking for.
Permission, not prior appropriation, acquisition.
Lost benefit analysis. Okay, that's very sexist of you.
I don't even know what this is.
Well, we're not going to do a whole inventory right now. That's a Maderra oh from.
Yeah is that Jefferson's favorite.
I think so yeah, and that wine maker is actually a good you know, without a video, this doesn't work, John.
Well, okay, but I've got really Steve Well. I'm going to ask John onemore question. This will divert him. One last question about the whole lot of econ thing.
Uh.
Isn't it correct to say that Ronald Coast was one of the really seminal figures who started off the whole thing? Did you ever meet him?
By the way, No, I think he Uh did he die in like ninety one or.
Just fell asleep.
I'm not going to go on.
I met Coast might be one of the most influential you know axioms in law that's been applied.
To love Well. I did get to medium two three times. He was a member of the Philadelphia Society. He was a little short guy, British and very friendly.
Uh.
And the Coast. I was going to say, we we spare the students reading the problem with social cost, which is this very dense essay. But I'll just pass along that this is in some of the histories of it. But I actually heard Milton Friedman tell the story that you know, he presented his thesis on this is the
cornerstone of an economics which I'll want get into. But of course, but it was he presented to, you know, a workshop that included Friedman and George Stigler and the Nobel Prize winner and Aaron Director and all these famous Chicago economists. They start out very skeptical at the beginning, and Friedman said, we were absolutely convinced he was right by the end. It is that's an amazing I.
Can explained very quickly, but we have absolutely no context for this discussion.
I don't even know what you want to go ahead.
So the basic idea of the coast theorem is UH basically says this, no matter what the legal rule is, UH, the arrangement of property rights will reach its most efficient outcome. The only thing that changes is the distribution of wealth. So the way to put it is, if you are in a factory and you want a pollute in the river, it doesn't matter whether the law says you can't pollute or you can't pollute. The pollution will occur or not
based on whether it's efficient. Yeah, and it's just a question of who gets more money.
At the end.
Is the factory going to keep it by polluting. What does the factory pay people downstream when they pollute? Yeah, this simple insight has been incredibly influential in the law.
But my problem with it always, as I said to you in the class, is that it assumes that you're making an economic only argument and you're not at all considering the moral implications. Who cares about pollution? Who cares about pollution one way or the other? Why is pollution even an issue? Why are you? I mean you have you begin with an assumption that pollution is somehow a bad thing, and then you decide based on supposed cost benefit analysis. How to you're limited to here?
Now Steve Hayward now the front man for polluting interests.
He thinks pollution is a good Now, kids, if you keep going, I'm going to bring up the Clean Air Act again. So let's move on to the first subject. That will I'm sure be of more interest than our drinking habits and our classroom habits. Uh okay, nothing happened this week on in the election front. In this sense, Kambella did more word salads from her word salad shooter the pole. New polls came out, a ton of them. They all are unchanged. They'll say it's essentially tied.
Was this little thing called a debate or interview by.
I think some desperation the.
Well, that's why I'm coming to the question is every We've always tried to look at poles and all these other things, and I talk too much about them. My proposition is the body language of the election, if I can use that as a metaphor, it just looks very definite that Trump is pulling ahead. He looks confident, he's having fun.
Uh.
I thought he killed it at the at the Al Smith dinner.
Uh.
And he's you know, more of his rallies are happening with bigger crowds and lots of enthusiasm. He's enjoying himself, which looks to me, and that's always the look of a winner in these presidential campaigns. I think, I don't know, I mean, what else is there to say? I don't know.
I mean, I would think that, like you said last week, Steve, there's internal poles, which actually costs real money, right, and the campaigns only have and they're not really telling us what they say.
But if you look at the way they're acting, yes, you would think.
Harris's internal poles show her losing and Trump's show him winning, right, so he's he looks happy he's going on.
I mean, I watched the clip of his appearance at the Smith dinner.
He was having a great time making fun of people. You don't do that if you're like ten points behind. Yeah, and you would say, Harris realizes she's got to pick up more votes because she went on Fox. Waltz has been on Fox twice now. I mean the interview was actually quite illuminating and that she still won't answer substantive questions. But that's good for the American people to see. But
it also shows she's they're gambling. They're in gamble mode, which you don't know if you're a head, right, And it's totally contrary to their you know, play it safe campaign so far.
And somebody sent me what was supposedly in Insider piece of information about Kamala Kamalama ding Dong's campaign manager, whose name is Julie something or other I forget anyway who The claim is that after the debacle of the Al Smith dinner and her showing us some stupid video that went over like rocks a Led Zeppelin, Yes, like a Led Zeppelin that Kamala m ding Dong called up her campaign manager and just made her cry, yelled at her, screamed at her. If I lose, it's because you don't
know how to do your job. And da da da da da. And so that that was yet another piece of information that the whole thing is kind of imploding a bit.
There's a detail led Zeppelin. There's a detail all of that that does connect with one bit of news I think from the last twenty four hours as we're talking here Saturday afternoon. Part of that account who's who leaked it? Part of that account is that Harris is blaming her campaign manager for her decision not to go to the Al Smith dinner. And the reasoning was, oh, Vice President Harris, you don't want to get too close to Catholics. You'll
upset the LGBTQ two community. And that's why you shouldn't go.
The population exactly Catholic overall thirty in Pennsylvania, the must win state.
Now, progressives think who is their favored people to whom they listen to and bend over to. And so this is something that happened here. I've been seeing this as all over Twitter.
So this is not.
These accounts. We don't know how true they are, but they have a ring of truth to them. At some appearance yesterday, I guess it was somebody, you know, Harris has got a crowd and all that, and somebody says Jesus's Lord, and Harris stop says, oh, honey, I think you're at the wrong rally. Really, let that sink in for a minute. Really you want to say something like that. I mean that sort of ratifies the problem they have.
With being a nothing else. There there are some constituencies traditionally aligned at the Democratic Party who actually believe that Jesus's Lord. I mean, go figure, what a concept? Yeah, what a concept. Yeah. It really is a little bit sad the bubble these people live in, where a vision of America is defined by these supposedly marginalized but really marginal constituencies that seem to drive all of their very bad policies. And on that note, Steve, I'd like to
just add that I think it's been very interesting. John had commented on this to me earlier too, that, or maybe it was you, one of you two said the sleeper issue of this campaign that was you, But John was talking about it too. The sleeper issue of this campaign is tapping into the what would the right word be, the ickiness, the achiness of the transgender movement, and the fact that probably ninety percent of Americans are opposed to
most of the agenda of the radical transgender group. Most people don't really want to be mean or cruel or outright discriminatory to somebody who's transgender, but they don't want to celebrate it. They don't want to see transgender men
in little girl's locker rooms and bathrooms. They don't want to see transgender men you know that weigh two hundred and eighty pounds, have been bench lifting all their life, come in and compete against a woman, you know, on and on and on, or kill somebody nearly a in a boxing match, and the idea that somehow that's a winning issue. Even there is even evidence now that kamal Emma ding Dong in her campaign have to walk away from it.
Well, but you can't. This is the whole thing, and they're hoping that they can scrape by and not have to confront it. I don't know if you you guys were having an argument at lunch and I was at the end of the table and the football game was on. But what I figured out was we were It was Berkeley versus North Carolina Wolfpack in the way we've demented college football and.
Athletics, and just now they lost.
They lost Kallas. Oh boy, they'll be bad traffic. There's a lot of.
Angry physicists on campus.
But while we're at lunch and you guys were arguing, I noticed is the game was on, but we were getting a North Carolina feed because I kept seeing North Carolina political ads, which we won't get here in California. But the newest one from Trump they had up was talking about the trans business and the slug line at the end was Kamala Harris is for they them, Donald Trump is for you. Wow, that is real.
Why are you.
For me too? I mean so, having spent a week in Philadelphia two weeks ago, every ad for Republicans, for President, for Senate, for McCormick, for members of the House has at the end Kamala Harris and the Democrats want to use taxpayer money to pay for the sex change operations of people in prison and for illegal aliens.
Every single ad has a little thing at the end.
Now, so they must have figured out this is a real vulnerability for the Democrats because it's like they're all hitting it as a unified issue.
Now, yeah, and it is.
I think one of those issues that the squishy middle has sort of refused to pay too much attention.
To, and.
What this is doing is bringing it front and center. Of course, it shows up on the publications that we read, the news stations that we watch, and it's very much a salient issue there. Judge Brown and I were discussing
this last night. But the average voter, even the average kind of liberal left leaning suburban mom who shouldn't have the vote, Sorry the suburban mom, but they're a little bit ignor, I think, either purposely so on their port or kind of cynically so on the part of the you know, the powerful left about how extreme some of
these things really are. Or they are convinced that somehow this is the trendy, happy thing to believe in, and if they don't believe in it, they won't be accepted at the cocktail parties, or you know, their kids will be shunned at the soccer game.
I don't know, No, well, I think it's actually people can't believe it's true. So one species of these ads was like, it's actually true. She actually said it. Everyone thinks it's like, you know, Fox or Donald Trump made it up. So they produce a clip of her seeing this in great detail because people I remember when I first heard that in the I guess it was in the debate, right, it was in the Trump Paris debate.
I was like, nah, we made that up. That's too good to be true.
They she can't really be in favor of gender change up orations for illegal aliens.
And actually, but it's actually people on death row.
And I think the New York Times wrote a story saying it's actually true, like that was the headline.
Yes, it's actually true. Kamala Harris does support this.
And did they do that because they were proud of it or did they do that because they're turning on kamalamading doong.
Oh.
There have been several, I would say, somewhat negative stories. I know you don't read the New York Times, so I do it for you, But there were several There's a bunch of negative stories about Harris because there are people, you know, jump you know, the rats are leaving the ship.
There are people who are saying, oh, they've screwed up Pennsylvania.
That was a big New York Times story last week that the campaign isn't turmoil, they're just wasting money.
So this is right.
It's got to be internal campaign people have seen the polls too, and they don't want to take credit for the defeat. Yea, because if you lose the Trump this time, all those people never held another job in campaign politics.
Well, they're gonna want to blame her same way. Well, Hillary is a bad candidate and the Russian stall.
Oh that's true, right, No, not the Russian part, but well, I mean Hillary is a bad candidate, Kamalama ding Dong is a bad candidate. But they're also bad candidates because they stand for things that most Americans truly, truly don't believe in.
Well, the interesting thing to me is, I mean, I think if I look closely at this, one of the reasons this is one of those the trans most intuitive issues the Trump campaign, and maybe some polls or maybe the candidates figured out, wait a minute, this is the sleeper issue. I call it sleeper because how does Pew poll people. They ask you, here's twenty issues to rank, and they don't include you know, identity politics and looker and transgender stuff. Other people ask you for open ended question,
well do you think your top issues? And not many people are gonna name that, and so it does remind me. You know, you can go back to nineteen seventies, actually go back to the sixties and Reagan's running for governor and he starts complaining about the mess on the campuses, and his manager's saying, this isn't showing up in our polls. Nobody's talking about this, but Reagan had an intuition about it, and sure enough, you've got a huge response in campaign appearances.
Fast forward ten years. He says we're not giving away the Panama Canal, damn it, and the audience would go nuts. And that was not showing up as a main campaign issue in polls, but it struck a chord with people, right it was anyway, because they.
Usually don't ask what are your top five issues? They also don't ask the put abortion as and I'm always hesitating to even say yes to that because they don't want it to appear as if somehow I'm pro abortion, because it's not. I mean, you could at the very least put pro abortion pro life as options you're not. Abortion isn't an issue for you if you're anti abortion? Does that make sense? And they do that with a lot of things. Yeah, they do that, say with gun
rights right, is gun right our gun rights important to you? Well, that depends what do you mean by gun rights? You know our gun policy and you know that you just don't know what they're going to make of it, so you can't really get an honest answer out of people. Also, Steve, you're right, would transgenderism be my number one topic? No? Would it be my number four?
Maybe?
Well, you know I've been saying that, No, we're gonna down the range. I've been saying for a while that there the two key issues in this election. Really it's just one. It's wokery and national identity. Those of course overlap, and that's really what this election is about because the exactly and so the campaign's not talking about the national debt, which I think is a crisis. They're not talking about the state of the world, which is a crisis, and
you kind of wish they would. On the other hand, if we don't settle these other problems, you know, the economy and war overseas will be the least of our problems, right, and so we'll see how it goes. The gives me a chance to do a segue to a related issue that overlaps and that's more directly woke y. So I think if you followed this, you might remember when the so called female swimmer, Leah Thomas was at Penn UH and the Penn administration threatened the women on the team,
you may not dissent. You'll lose your scholarships. You might be I mean they were, and you know, telling people not to complain. Well, now fast forward here for four years, whatever it's been, we're now up to I think five universities that have decided to Oh, by the way, I said at the time, because we're also in high school track meets of people who were well, let me finish the other example. I suggested the time.
This is what class was like, this bickering between felt divorced couple of.
You can't Well, the point is is they said you can't complain. I suggested at the time that what the other female swimmers should do, and women and women's track, they should go to the starting line. The gun goes off, and they stand there and allow the transgender swimmer to swim alone, a good old fashioned silent protest that would outrage people, but it would make a statement. Now no one did that, except now they are. I let that
part out. Now five colleges have said we are not going to allow our women's volleyball teams to play San Jose State. By the way, they did the right argument with this, because we don't want to subject our women athletes to the risk of injury from a man playing for the women's team who hits the ball so hard they injure people. And so now people are standing up
to it. Now. The University of ad Arino, the administration put out their own statement saying we don't approve what our team decided here, but nonetheless, more and more teams are doing it. So we're now having a preference cascade more important. So maybe the tight is turning, and I guess the question will be what will be success or a real turning point. But the other data point is this amazing in the New York Times magazine from Nick Confessatory,
who's a leftist reporter. He's the guy who dragged the emails out of me and John some months ago for no purpose. Yeah it's that guy, say, well, he didn't inturns to it, but it was him and uh so, Nick Confessatory wrote, University of Michigan doubled down on DEI, sub had what went wrong? Now the headline writer, I think we can tell what went wrong from the first part of the headline right. But there's some amazing things of the story just too. It's a very long article.
Uh he said, this was his narrative. These growing bureaucracies represented a major and profoundly left leaning reshuffling of campus power. You wouldn't have seen that in the New York Times about de I or anywhere in the mainstream media. And then the other one, I like, and this is just too out of a lot of absolute slams that the whole thing for large swath of students and professors, Michigan's DEI and have become simply background noise, like the rote
incantations of a state religion. My analysis always but that's like blaring car alarms we always ignore these days.
There was one fact that I thought was amazing was, according to him, the studies that Michigan themselves undertook was they found that racial tension on campus has gone up in correlation with more DEI professionals who just predicted this right, I would have thought it had no effect, but actually to cause it to go up is incredible because totally counterproductive.
Yeah yeah, yeah, because what I mean, how do you if you believe in racial equality. One of the precepts to that is you really cannot emphasize whatever differences that you create that might be evident or not evident between the races, between the sexes and so on. And the more you talk about that, and the more you differentiate on the basis of that, the more you remind people that they have less in common instead of more in common. I mean, I know that sounds so trite and obvious,
but it's not obvious to the left. It's not obvious to these DEI people. And the real problem I see, I call them the DEI pimps, that that.
There's a whole bunch more places we've been banned.
Because they I think they actually know that and don't care. I think that they are aware of the fact that that DEI practices, that critical race theory consultants who come in and force white people to confess their white guilt and that they're white racist and that they have privilege and all those other things. Who really thinks that that's gonna have a positive outcome. They can't think it. There's no way. It's a power trip for them, and they don't care how much it hurts.
There's a lot of money in it.
There is, but there's only money in it because people are stupid enough to pay for it. Well, they're not doing the cost benefit analysis.
John, She's saying that to me because I was defending utilitarianism in class.
But I agree with you. It doesn't even pass the cost benefit analysis. And I agree these are really expensive, these programs. I mean, I don't does the story say how much Michigan spent like, I mean it was outrageous?
Feel like, was it like two hundred and fifty million dollars over twenty years on the.
Well, it depends on how you look at it too. It depends on how you catalog it, because you can you can count just the provosts who are like, we have seven of them who are in one way or another confined to not just DEI, but DEI for a special marginalized group. We have seven of them, and they all make We have seven and they all make high six figures. Yeah, Okay, so so start there. That's a lot of money. But every college has a deim available.
I'm available for half.
I think we overachieving Asians that need to be overachieving.
There was I have to say, in class, there was this one student who did make this comment that I was just shaking my head. He was an Asian kid, and he said, I come from a privileged background where all US Asian families send our kids to special.
Tutoring after school. And he felt so bad about it.
He's like, not because he was forced to go to math school after class, but we felt bad that no one that everyone else didn't get to too.
And I was in there going, god.
Did marka I broke and I was like, I'm glad I didn't have to go to force math class after after school.
Why would you want to make everybody do it?
But he thought a fair and just society everyone into an overachieving Asian.
And then they get into Harvard that was the point, and then they give it. Would you managed to do without after school math classes? John, But you did spend all of your free time studying. Let's be honest. I did spend a lot that yeah, yeah, which is which is culturally unfair, that's what he.
Said to Yeah, he said it was culturally unfair that his the Asian families want their kids to study and other kinds of families don't.
Well, because remember very very smart, will older white gentleman who confessed to me after the fact that he had actually had a perfect LSAT score a four point zero, graduating from his undergraduate alma mater, and he had applied to twenty law schools and the only one that led him in was this one.
I'm not allowed to usuration and missions.
Yeah, and.
And he was very bright and very insightful, and yeah he was didn't apologize for having his white privilege because I don't believe he thought he had it. Let's just leave it at that. But yeah, it was It was interesting to listen to that and to to listen to students talk about out what they considered inequities that really could be had to be solved before you could move to more important questions. Does that make sense? What I'm saying this is the.
Listeners will realize Lucretia and I have totally different attitudes towards teaching because she listens to the students.
Let me just point out that John confessed to me he learns nothing from his students. So there you go.
Well, I didn't say that exactly, but close to it.
Yeah, close to it. We learned a lot over the years.
Well, I was asking about it. Have we turned a corner here? And it's encouraging to see the New York Times up on this and encouraging to see so the sports team stand up to the men and women's sports. But here I'm ur usually the one who says nothing good is happening. I'm optimistic. I think that nothing is going to happen meaningfully until some university presidents and or trustees decide to clean house and Austin right, some places are.
Doing Florida Florida's But can I take a diversion for a second on Florida, the whole state of Florida and
their their university state system. The legislature has directed the whatever the Board of Governors is called there that no more required courses that advance and it wasn't just DEI but basically advanced DEI unproven theories like critical race theory, identity politics, or that are too specific to be catalogued as a too specific or perhaps a little bit too advanced to be cataloged as a General ED course, and they forced the universities to go through their General ED
catalog and get rid of or move those required gen ED classes to electives. And then the board whatever I forget, I apologize whatever the board was, went back and double checked their choices and removed it even more. And DeSantis came out and said, when you know, everyone, everyone and their brother was complaining about this because when they took uh,
let's see myth magic and non binary. I mean, it was just these crazy, stupid courses that have been added to their gen ED And you know, of course you take away those courses from certain programs and those programs die because nobody wants to take their courses. But DeSantis' argument was, if they're popular, if you're really depriving students of the benefit of these wonderful courses, they'll take them. Yeah, right, if they're electives.
You better start drinking, because you're starting to sound like Steve.
Sounds like Steve what an insult?
Well, okay, so he really cares about academic organization and classes and you do, oh, I know, and the disciplines and everything.
So now you care, So all.
Right, let me.
This is wait a minute before Steve answers, I care, and I want you to know that since I have been a dean, I have eliminated nine programs from my college.
That must have been you a popular person, I'm so popular, not well, all of them that needed.
To be well.
Here's so. First of all, these sort of civic education centers being set up around the country in red states at flagship universities very promising. They're hiring killer faculty. I'll bet they'll be popular. The permanent faculty hates it. A lot of these universities. I'm worried they're going to work very hard to try and marginalize those centers. They probably won't succeed, but it's still going to be a fight about all that, and all right, so watch that. The
second thing is civic education is so bad. I'm not civic education, and even liberal college presidents saying, oh, the problem is civic education is so bad, and you know so, But the K twelfth crriculum is so bad that you're not gonna get much progress until essentially you smashed the schools. Make that proposition. But then the third thing is that you and I have argued this before John a long time ago, but I want to bring it up again. Well,
we need to have robust protections for free speech. And my argument back is, okay, we've seen that fail here at Berkeley recently with Simica Rothman.
Just three days ago. John eastmanth spoke, true, but I don't protest the disruption.
But well, that's because of the You know, if you've been here a year ago, it'd be different. But you know, the whole Israel thing has taken over everything on campus. Is right, But here's my point is, even a commitment to free speech doesn't mean very very much if there aren't people on the campus to speak the heterodox things. And that I don't mean just a guest speaker now
and then. But your faculty is deranged. Until you change your faculty and make it more have more ideological breath, all the guarantees of free speech and free expression aren't going to do very much. That's my view.
So I don't agree with that.
I know you don't, because the law.
School experience is is because of the Federal Society. I mean, all the things I heard about conservative constitutional law came exclusively from visiting speakers from the Federal Society, mostly appellate.
Judges, like famous conservative judges.
But like Jenice Rogers Brown, she was still a kid.
Back when we're in law school.
But yeah, but that's what I mean, Like if Janice Rogers Brown comes to your in law school and speaks, and you go, you don't need a classic constitutional law because you already heard it, and then but that was the that's the replacement. And actually the Federal Sciety has been remarkably successful. They have any cultivating the interests of conservative students, even to most of these law schools have no conservative con law professors.
But look at how far up the chain you have to get before you see that kind of ideological diversity at being able to be effective, and that is to say federalist. Then we have the Federalist Society, and once in a while they have something for undergraduates, but not very often or underge you can, So that's I think that's Steve's point.
Yeah, it's very hard to replicate the Federal Society in undergraduate levels or in under disciplines. I mean, law school I think is kind of kind of suey generous because people are going there as a professional program and not necessarily as I mean some people go to you know, we go to Harvard Yale because you want to be a law professor. But a lot of people in undergraduate or in graduate political science or history programs or whatever, they're there for a different thing, and the nature of
it's different. Let me give you a second example, though, and here I'm gonna throw down big. A few days back, maybe we could go. A professor at the University of Kansas caught on tape said, you know, you men, you men who don't any men who don't vote for Campbell Harre should be taken out and shot. You just line them up and shoot them. And then he thought betteran says, maybe I shouldn't say that. Please take it off the tape. I don't want the dean to hear about it. Well,
poorest that dean heard about it. He was immediately suspended. And then a day or two later, the announcement came for the administration that Professor so and so is no longer with the University of Kansas. Wow. It did not say whether he oh, no, see, I disagree. Let me give you two more little bits of information about it. The announcement didn't say whether he'd been fired or whether
he left voluntarily didn't say what a status was. I don't know if he's a tenured professor or you know, a lecturer or somebody without the kind of protections of tenure. But you know our friends that fire the Foundation for Research or Free Expression or whatever it's called. And some other civil libertarians said, oh, I don't know about this. Maybe even Keith Wittington might have I'm not sure. Yeah, see you know what I mean.
See I would.
Have agreed with that once upon a time, some years ago. But my point now is, if there are any adults in higher education, they have to start with the premise that things are bad because we have allowed our university to be taken over by crazy people. We need to clean house. We need to clean these people out of this place by whatever means necessary.
Because if you unministrators clean out people who are unacceptable, the first people they're gonna clean out are gonna be conservatives.
Yeah.
I think that's that's probably that's probably true. It really is. It's a catch twenty two because on the other hand, so if you're a student in that professor's class and you're even the slightest bit inclined to think about voting for for Donald Trump.
You're really going to vote for Donald Trump?
After the professor goes off like that, you're good because the one thing college students all have in common is they hate their elders.
Well, but but what's gonna happen in the space of that class. It's one thing for some crazy person like me to stand in front of your law school class that's made up of mostly not entirely mostly left.
Wing was triggering left and right. It's like she had two six six shooter colts in her hands. So many people triggered by her in just like one hour.
But did anyone was did Was there any evidence whatsoever that I alienated as student?
I couldn't tell over in the back row.
How many times did you have to drag me away from a gaggle of students after the after a session was over because because they wanted to talk, so they probably didn't.
I think you were probably the first conservative woman professor they'd ever heard from. There are very many, no, but I'm saying I bet like they'd never seen a creature like lucretia.
That sounds like bad, but but but there is a serious point to it, and that is that no I know and I appreciate that. But my point is is that if you are the kind of opinionated person and I you know, anybody who's not opinionated doesn't deserve to stand in front of a group of people because they if you haven't made up your mind about important questions, you have no business teaching anyone. However, there is a way to do that, and that you know. I never
insulted a student. I took every dumb question seriously. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I took every question seriously. I returned to their questions and wove them into my responses later in the in the discussion.
No one observer, I don't think they were satisfied with your answer.
No, I don't think so.
But I also it was a lot of resistance. There was a lot of rest on this podcast. There was a lot of resistance.
But they'll think about it after this. They won't automatically just write a paper that they think will make me happy because they know I don't expect that. I don't expect that to just to hear. I can't tell you how many times I talk to students at at my college at the university who say, you know, I just I just I'll just say what the professor wants to hear because they need a good grade. Yeah, that's that's
it happens all the time. Well, because there's nobody that they disagree with except maybe you.
I don't know, people do it so much.
Yeah, you're the one owned. Maybe it was.
I don't know. I don't think so. I mean I do had this one experience. I had a kid who took three classes from an undergraduate student, and it turns out he was a big liberal. He told me he didn't agree with any of my views, but he liked the stuff by His family are very close personal friends with the Pelosis. Yeah, but I said to why why are you taking you know, you came back for more, And he says, oh, I like the style of class. There's no other classes like this.
It's because both you and Pelosi could benefit from better wigs.
You know, we've got to put away to live it.
At this point, I told this story once, but it's been a long time, so I'll tell it again. So I'm teaching a class in ethics and I assign an essay based on the myth of Guy G's from Plato's from Plato, and you know, the guy who finds the ring. It makes him invisible, et cetera, et cetera. So I assign a very back in the day before AI, you would assign a very specific prompt so they couldn't use a bot paper, right, that's how you did it. Now.
I don't know what you do, but anyway, I signed a very specific prompt, and I get this paper from a student who I know is a Special Forces soldier. You know, smart guy. But this and this and this not impossible that he would have been a left wing lunatic, but unlikely. So he writes this stupid paper saying how Plato would have been an environmental activist greeny and would in favor of any methods necessary to combat climate change,
which had zero zero to do with the prompt. So I give him an F. Of course, actually that's not true. I give them an E because we don't do s at my university anyway. And then it bothers me. It really bothers me. So finally I reach out to him and I say, okay, I have to ask why did you do this? He says, I've been doing this all through my college career because I know this is how I get an a if I say what I really think. And it was at the beginning of class, the beginning of the semester.
Figured out yet and figured me out. And I try.
I try really hard not to be not I don't hide my views, but not to be strident like I might have been today. I try really hard with undergraduates because they don't want to immediately set them off in one direction or another. I want to present things anyway. So there's an example of it happening. But I'm told by students that it happens all the time, so much so that that that kid thought that was the right thing to do with me.
Can you imagine, Well, not after the second or third class, but that would be where a thing worth trying to get out with a survey, although it might be hard to get honest answers. But I'm not sure you did hear people say that some and maybe our pow Michael Anton, will try and research that's work for his book on Berkeley, which I won't tell listeners anymore about at the moment. All right, I'm kind of out of topics, but you know, we're tired. After three days of all this. We can wrap.
Unless you went to lighting each other. Well, we can do a lightning round.
I want to hear how you guys think the campaign is really going, Like, do you think Trump is gonna win?
Oh?
Yeah, I do.
Yeah.
I mean you know we're going to have two more podcasts for election Day. Well, I mean the betting markets are now opening up to like sixty forty I think, But.
There's been the manipulation with betting markets by dark shadowy private money.
You know, dark money, the darkest of dark money.
Well, actually it would be in this case, right, because because the new narrative is the only thing you can really trust is the betting markets, because the polls themselves. No, no, I'm saying I hate to use that word, but I'm not saying I believe that. But because the betting markets have real money involved, unlike the polar pollsters who just want to get close enough so that people will take them seriously in the future. Right, good track.
Record, Yeah, pretty good track record. Yes?
What did they say in twenty sixteen?
I don't remember now, Yeah, I think so. And but been Nate Silver's model, which you know he's been wrong in the past. I down god him. Nate Bronze after one of those electionists. But his model is you know, it's respected, it's see the plausible. He's got Trump pulling ahead right now.
What about Alan Lichtman.
Oh no, he's a buffoon. Yeah, he's a total buffoon.
But he's predicted nine out of ten the last eight.
Yeah, I know he's a buffoon and model of his stupid and eas of moron.
Okay, there you have it. You guys are worse than me.
I did say that. He did, right, he's one wants to get Yes.
Actually that's an opinion, that's not a yellowed.
Figures.
Yeah. No, I'll go back to see the beginning, the body language, the body politic. I should have put it that way. It's just looking more and more like a Trump win.
And your odds are sixty forty.
Yeah, and remember and I think by the way, it could be by a substantial margin. I think there, you know, opinion will break for him late. Won't be like Reagan Carter in eighty, but I think the dynamic may go that way. And uh so. Mark Halpern, the old ABC News reporter, He said the other day on Tucker Carlson that if Trump wins, it's going to set off the largest wave of a mental health crisis in American history.
That does bring one issue up, an additional issue before what is what Chucker Carlson and all these like World War two deniers that it's not Germany's.
Yeah, then it was the British and the Americans who.
Caused discussed this already.
Can you explain it to me? I don't remember. He explains, why is Tucker carl And promoting these kinds of He's just.
A bit of a forgive the expression, Maverick.
Has some limits. I would think, I would think the factual historical.
Reality, it could be that while he was at Fox, remember those strip shows, as they're called, right an hour day every day. Those are very demanding, a big production staff. They write a lot of the copy, they do the questions, they're talking in your ear. Now he's off on his own. I know he's got some staff, but now he's really the boss, and he doesn't have a producer. He doesn't have the network, which which would have had some control over him or some guardrails for him, and now he
doesn't have any of that. And I don't know. I think he's just gone a little bit nuts.
So I was just going to say the.
Counterpart to him, that's a good story, is making what's he built her career and is doing really well and very pro chump. Yeah, but I mean just as it's done a good job being responsible, right commentator and on.
Her with no product behind her as nearly as I can tell, are very limited. Can I just make a comment about jd Vance? Yeah, and just first of all, of course, I'm gonna remind you, I'm going to be like the wife you remember that argument. I'm a total
jd Vance fangirl. I think that jd Vance is the best politician I guess I used that word that to come out of the Republican Party in the last thirty years, and that if the future of the Republican Party rests on JD Vance, we are in great shape, especially when we compare it to the abysmal situation in the Democratic Party. And we talked last time about the lack of a bench and there was a lot of there were a
lot of positive comments about that. But I mean just his his almost Reaganite sorry mister analogy man, his response to what's that woman beat with the ugly sticks name radits marratics. Sorry, I haven't said a lookism thing. For a long time my fans expected John excuse me that that you know, uh, it was just a couple of apart It was just several what did you say, a few several apartment call.
Not a lot?
And do you hear yourself? You know, there hasn't been a politician willing to listen to the dumb questions being put forward by the original media and and come back with a response like that, that's a talent, but he's good. That's why you can do it.
So once along upon time I did John Stewart's show, which is still concerned my greatest achievement.
And over the Fox qutie pies.
That I didn't beat the right, which is hard to do.
So no, So the thing I realized is, you know, when politicians are trained to go on the media, they're told to repeat the same three things over and over again, right because what they don't want you to do is create a sound clip for the other side to use, so they don't care what the questions are. And what I learned from going on John Stewart, why I think I did well is I listened to the questions and I answered them by trying to turn all the assumptions
of the questions. Back on the Questionner and John Stewart's a clever guy, but he's not prepared.
You know, he's quick witted, but he's not deep. So it's easy to do.
And I think that's what jdvans. This is a common law school thing that you get trained to do as a lawyer.
JD.
Van's is doing it. The you know, second string high school football coach can't do it.
No, but a lot of politicians are lawyers. John, and even some of them jail. They get this media train and and and Kamala Kamala mad example. She she gave a defense of it. She said, because what's what? Which one was? It? Was it that I can't say that dumb name Charlemaun the wishes God. I'm not saying that he is not anyway God, he is not God. I don't know if you whatever, But anyway, whoever it was, I thought it was him who asked why don't you
answer the questions? Why do you keep repeating the same thing over? And her answer back was, well, people are stupid and they need to hear things a whole bunch of Yeah. Basically, she didn't say stupid, she said she said, we know that unless most people hear something at least three times, they don't retain it. And she went in this whole ridiculous thing about the reason that I keep saying the same thing over and over again. I was born in a middle class household. I was raised in
a middle class household. The reason she keeps saying that is because you know, people didn't hear the first seventeen times.
She's actually not wrong about that from a marketing point of view. But when what you're saying is stupid. Yeah, Well, a last comment John about.
Wait, we didn't get Lucretia's odds on the election.
Oh yeah, they were sixty percent when you asked me three weeks ago, don't you remember? And you had a face of astonishment.
Now is it still sixty at least ago?
You know, a lot of things can happen. I know you are, but things can happen, and I don't want anyone to become complacent here.
Vote.
But I mean, if if you're smart enough to vote, vote, if you're smart enough to figure out where your precinct is and do all of those other things, then vote.
No.
I think it.
Probably still remains in about sixty percent because I do worry about electoral fraud. I worry about some of them efforts. No, no, no, not John, like we've talked like we've talked about like manipulating election laws to make.
It easier that's already occurred.
Yeah, exactly, I'm not That's what I'm talking about.
Happen.
It depends on what you think, what you can. But anyway, we don't have to go into that today because we're already long.
Well, probably one last thing about the which I'm not sure I think you must have known this, John, But of course remember listeners that your appearance on John Stewart happened a long time ago. I'm not sure still during the Bush years, but still the fury is over Bush and the oh yeah, you never see it achievement. Oh it's a classic. And what do you know about you?
Admitted the next day that he lost.
Well, that's just he apologized to the audience the next because the social media were furious with him for letting John off the hook.
I love it, you know, I love it.
The next day, John Stewart apologized the studio audience for failing to nail John.
You and it.
Aim I'm going to watch it.
I'm going to do that when the show closed. You know, there's kind of like obituary. Yeah, right, and I was in every single one. It's the only one the better.
Yeah.
I've never watched, so I don't really watch, so I was prepared. Okay, fair enough. I listen to them, think about I imagine they're all cuties, but I hardly ever see them. Is that driving? You don't believe in? Looks?
You know, Stewart is back and somebody actually Anne Colder made the point he's actually trying to be funny, whereas Stephen Colbert and those other late night guys are not. There's angry partisans and all right, it's.
Because I can't see it.
You can't see it. Okay, well, all right, I get to do the Babylon be headlines because we're sort of improvising the way we do this today.
Uh.
Nine bad things in your life that are probably the Jews fault?
What does that actually say?
Nation shudders to imagine how horrifying the incriminating photos are that Kamela has the Mark, Cuban has the Mark has the way about Mark? Oh I botched that will never mind? Yeah, okay, Uh, Harris complains she was not informed the interview would include questions. After Fox interview, Kamala calls McDonald's to ask if her old job is still available. All right, John, that's enough for today.
No, I was gonna do a Kamala.
You've been touting about NASA.
Yeah, I can't find that.
Yeah, NASA wants to know how Elon Musk is so successful without employing any gay Muslim trans dwarfs, trans dwarfs.
Like NASA does. Yeah, something like that. All right, let's.
Close it out. So always drink your whiskey. Meat. Let's go Brandon and Steve. What is our new sign off?
To quote Kamala? I can't think of a single thing.
Did she say that?
I can't think of a single thing. She's never spoken a more true and accurate thing in her life. Bye bye, everybody, You see you next week. H Ricochet joined the conversation.