The Charlie Kirk Show - How One Investigative Journalist Discovered the Shocking Truth About Red State DEI Policies
Aired: 2023-11-28
Duration: 37:42


=== Join The Amfest Movement (02:56) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, John Salier joins us to talk about Ohio State University, Texas Tech, NIH, and the deep state leviathan known as DEI, the DEI Commissars.
[00:00:11]  A really important episode about how entrenched DEI is.
[00:00:15]  The Soviets had commissars, the Maoists had the Red Guard, the French Revolution had Jacobins, and all were tasked with enforcing party orthodoxy and punishing anyone who stepped out of line.
[00:00:25]  And DEI bureaucrats are America's commissars of wokeness.
[00:00:29]  Email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:32]  Fight back against all this nonsense with Turning PointUSA at tpusa.com.
[00:00:37]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:00:39]  Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:44]  Email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
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[00:02:16]  Amfest.com.
[00:02:18]  Just coming in a couple weeks, Phoenix, Arizona.
[00:02:20]  We're doing our show live, by the way, from Media Row.
[00:02:23]  Love seeing all of you taking selfies.
[00:02:25]  It's great.
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=== Diversity Officers Control Professors (09:31) ===

[00:02:56]  Here we go.
[00:02:57]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:02:59]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:03:01]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:03:04]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:03:08]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:03:09]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:03:10]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:03:12]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:03:17]  Turning point USA.
[00:03:18]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:03:27]  That's why we are here.
[00:03:30]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
[00:03:39]  Joining us now is John Salier, Senior Fellow and Director of University Policy at the National Association of Scholars, a great organization and also contributor at the Wall Street Journal.
[00:03:49]  John, welcome to the program.
[00:03:51]  Several stories here I want to hit with you.
[00:03:52]  The first of which is inside Ohio State's diversity, equity, inclusion factory.
[00:03:59]  You obtained 800 pages of the diversity faculty recruitment reports from Ohio State, the Ohio State University.
[00:04:08]  Let's add insult to injury.
[00:04:09]  It's been a tough couple days for the Buckeye Faithful, but beyond a football game in Ann Arbor, this is real damage to Ohio State University.
[00:04:17]  What's going on here?
[00:04:18]  Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
[00:04:20]  So, part of my role is to investigate what's happening at universities.
[00:04:25]  And I think you can't understand the university culture and all of the problems that we can see in it from the outside without looking at how faculty are hired.
[00:04:38]  And so, I was given a tip from a professor at Ohio State that every single search committee in their College of Arts and Sciences, which is a big part of the university, was required to submit a diversity faculty recruitment report.
[00:04:57]  In order to bring job candidates onto campus to interview them, they had to do this.
[00:05:04]  So, they had to describe on this forum how the search committee discussed diversity, how they used diversity statements to evaluate candidates, and how each of the candidates they were proposing to bring to the university contributed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
[00:05:26]  And now, there's something very interesting about these documents because Ohio State stands out for its commitment to DEI.
[00:05:34]  They have 189 diversity officers who are compensated at $20 million a year total.
[00:05:44]  Their president two years ago announced a massive DEI-focused faculty hiring initiative saying that we're going to hire as many as 150 new professors who focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
[00:05:58]  And so, what these documents really do is give us an inside look into what universities mean when they say they're going to invest heavily in DEI.
[00:06:07]  And the results are not pretty.
[00:06:09]  So, I just did the math.
[00:06:10]  So, that's $20 million divided by 189 people.
[00:06:13]  That's an average of $105,820 a year average in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:06:19]  You can live on that in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:06:22]  Great, great spot, low cost of living there.
[00:06:24]  So, let's walk through this.
[00:06:26]  What I think is striking, though, is that Ohio has become, both gubernatorially and from a state legislative perspective, a red state.
[00:06:36]  The taxpayers of Ohio on all elections, they do not want this DEI thing.
[00:06:41]  If a candidate like Sherrod Brown were to run for the United States Senate re-election on the message of DEI, he would lose by 10 points, right?
[00:06:50]  Tim Ryan, when he would run against JD Vance, if he would say, Look, I want black-only dormitories and white people are to blame.
[00:06:59]  Yeah, you're not going to win Ohio with that message.
[00:07:03]  I'm saying this for a reason: is that the Ohio State University, which is a flagship publicly funded institution of the great state of Ohio, is out of lockstep with their voters.
[00:07:13]  This is not State University in New York, Albany, right, where critical race theory is really embraced by the Manhattanites.
[00:07:21]  What's going on here?
[00:07:22]  How could something so unpopular be funded so generously?
[00:07:26]  Yeah, it's really remarkable.
[00:07:28]  You would expect this kind of initiative in the University of California system, but this is just about the worst I have ever seen.
[00:07:40]  Look, we have positions in freshwater biology, molecular genetics, a whole just wide array of sciences where search committees very explicitly said we're going to focus on DEI and prioritize it heavily throughout the hiring process.
[00:07:59]  And if you look at the way that they actually evaluated these scientists, it involves basically the use of a political litmus test throughout.
[00:08:10]  I mean, it's really remarkable.
[00:08:11]  And you're exactly right.
[00:08:13]  This is happening not in California, not in Illinois, where there's not really any, you wouldn't expect political pushback.
[00:08:20]  This has happened in Ohio and it's been allowed to happen in Ohio, which is really, I think, stunning because you're right.
[00:08:30]  This kind of thing is remarkably unpopular, even amongst faculty.
[00:08:34]  When I made this request, the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State emailed all of the faculty in the college and said, we're going to turn over these documents to the National Association of Scholars.
[00:08:48]  What happened after that was I got multiple faculty members reaching out to me telling me, you need to look here too, telling me, here's some tips.
[00:08:59]  I heard from one faculty member, look, there is a total sense of impunity.
[00:09:04]  And ultimately, that's not just a problem with a few rogue actors.
[00:09:08]  That's ultimately a problem of priority that starts from the top.
[00:09:13]  And I think that there's really some, you know, anyone reading this should think really hard about how we got to this point where Ohio State is the exemplar of, you know, basically the craziest DEI policies you could possibly put down in writing.
[00:09:34]  Yeah, I mean, MAGA might be winning politically in Ohio, but DEI is winning culturally and academically.
[00:09:41]  I mean, Ohio used to be a battleground state.
[00:09:43]  Now it's not.
[00:09:44]  It is, it's a place where the media libels Ohio as a white working class revolt.
[00:09:51]  Okay, great.
[00:09:52]  I mean, there's some truth to that, I guess, but I don't know why they have to racialize it.
[00:09:55]  But again, the average person in Athens, Ohio, whose grandfather used to work at the steel mill that got shut down, and they've seen their wages go down, they want to hear that there's some bureaucrat at Ohio State University earning $108,000 a year.
[00:10:12]  So let's walk through this.
[00:10:14]  What does a DEI czar do?
[00:10:16]  Like, what is their day-to-day job?
[00:10:19]  You said there's 189 of these people at Ohio State University.
[00:10:23]  Yeah.
[00:10:24]  And, you know, in some ways, it's a mystery to me how they could possibly employ 189 people in these kinds of roles.
[00:10:33]  But the documents I acquired give a few hints as to what they do on the day-to-day.
[00:10:39]  So for instance, there was this really crazy moment in one of the documents.
[00:10:43]  It was a search for an astrophysicist.
[00:10:46]  So a professor who studies astrophysics and teaches astrophysics.
[00:10:50]  And they said that they required a DEI statement.
[00:10:54]  So a statement from the candidate on how they contribute to DEI.
[00:10:58]  And they then go on to say that the DEI statement was given equal weight to the professor's research and teaching statements.
[00:11:06]  You know, research and teaching are really the only two other things professors do.
[00:11:11]  So they're saying that DEI was on par with the most basic thing a professor should do.
[00:11:16]  Now, what's really interesting about that document is then they make a comment right in those notes that say we prioritize DEI just as much as teaching and research.
[00:11:26]  They said that this was basically explicit instruction in the diversity faculty hiring training, which was conducted by, you might expect, some of these diversity officers.
[00:11:43]  So often what these diversity officers end up doing is they end up telling professors what they should do.
[00:11:50]  They end up telling faculty, this is how you should prioritize these diversity criteria throughout the selection process and in other parts of the whole university life.
[00:12:03]  I want to build this.
[00:12:03]  This is such an important detail.
[00:12:05]  So $20 million a year, 189 people that basically create a DEI administrative state that are like a permanent DEI deep state at Ohio State University.
[00:12:16]  So the astrophysicist has to bend their knee to that all white people are racist or whatever garbage that Nicole Hanna-Jones is publishing.

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[00:14:06]  Texas Tech University.
[00:14:08]  I've been there.
[00:14:09]  In fact, we might be going there this spring.
[00:14:12]  Lubbock, Texas is one of the most conservative places on the planet.
[00:14:18]  And yet there was some reporting here that we want to explore.
[00:14:20]  John Saylor continues with us.
[00:14:22]  John, what did you learn about Texas Tech University?
[00:14:26]  So in the summer of 2020, Texas Tech University's Department of Biological Sciences passed a DEI resolution that created all sorts of policies that the department was supposed to follow to essentially embed Kennedy style anti-racism into the biology department's basic operating system.
[00:14:50]  And so one part of that resolution happened to say something that was of interest to me since I use Freedom of Information Act requests and public records requests to do a lot of my investigative reporting.
[00:15:03]  It said that for every job candidate, they have to submit a diversity statement describing all of the ways they contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
[00:15:13]  I mean, already that's pretty remarkable for a department of biology to even require.
[00:15:19]  And they said they're gonna heavily weigh that statement and that they have a rubric for evaluating the statement, which was, I would say, very ideologically charged.
[00:15:31]  But it also noted that every single candidate who was evaluated would get a specific report done on their contributions to DEI, the way that the committees evaluated them.
[00:15:46]  So using the public records law in Texas, I asked for those evaluations.
[00:15:52]  And what I found was truly remarkable.
[00:15:55]  So we have instances where candidates were said to be weaker because they couldn't describe the difference between equality and equity, which, as I'm sure you know, is pretty much a progressive political talking point.
[00:16:09]  Most of the time, people say, well, equality is equality of opportunity.
[00:16:13]  But in order to achieve true justice, you need to do more than just strive for equality.
[00:16:19]  You have to strive for equity, which is really equality of outcomes.
[00:16:23]  You have people like Kamala Harris on record saying basically exactly that.
[00:16:27]  So now, if you're applying to these positions in high-stakes science at Texas Tech University, until recently, you could have been docked for not making that progressive distinct, that distinction about basically progressive politics.
[00:16:45]  Other candidates were praised for things like starting their job talk with a land acknowledgement.
[00:16:53]  And the list just goes on, but what you saw here was not just that they evaluated it in a politically charged way, which is probably in violation of the First Amendment because it constitutes compelled speech, but it was also a significant part of faculty evaluation.
[00:17:11]  We're talking about 30% of their total score went to these DEI statements.
[00:17:17]  That means that you have candidates and positions applying for positions in virology, immunology, cell biology, which is integral to studying things like the cures for cancer.
[00:17:31]  You have people applying for those positions, scientists hoping to do serious science instead being weeded out on the basis of their political views.
[00:17:39]  It was truly, this was the first time we ever got a look into how these statements were evaluated.
[00:17:45]  It confirmed everything that people like, you know, groups like NAS have been saying for a long time, that these constitute political litmus tests and that they're basically a disgrace to academia.
[00:18:00]  After your reporting, the Texas Tech Chancellor testified saying that race would not trump merit play cut 39.
[00:18:09]  It was a single department in a single school within the university, but and the way the article read, it made it look like it was university policy.
[00:18:18]  It's not that.
[00:18:19]  When we find out about something like that, we correct it because it's not appropriate to have litmus tests.
[00:18:25]  And so we do do things to correct it.
[00:18:26]  And then you take action to make sure it's not going to occur in other departments as well.
[00:18:31]  That preventative action, Chancellor Mitchell said, is underway right now, calling for a thorough review of the hiring practices in all departments to ensure they focus on merit and not ideology.
[00:18:44]  Is he telling the truth?
[00:18:45]  You know, the day after I published my article, Greg Abbott sent a memo to all universities saying, you cannot use this criteria.
[00:18:55]  It is against the law.
[00:18:56]  So I think they are telling the truth, but they're telling the truth because they face political pressure.
[00:19:02]  And I think any politician looking at these at times blatantly unlawful policies, they should take note of that.
[00:19:08]  It requires political pressure to actually end these disastrous policies.
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[00:21:01]  Okay, so John, I want to continue to the third story here, which I think is really important.
[00:21:06]  How the NIH pushes DEI on scientists.
[00:21:09]  You mentioned this at Ohio State University, the astrophysicists, but now are you saying that the federal granting system is laced with DEI requirements?
[00:21:18]  Walk us through it.
[00:21:20]  Yeah, so the policy at Texas Tech might have ended because Governor Abbott took action, because state legislators took action.
[00:21:32]  In Texas, at least in theory, it's no longer allowed to require a job candidate to submit a diversity statement, which I think is a big win for academic freedom and for the universities in Texas.
[00:21:47]  But I don't think that policy is going away anytime soon.
[00:21:50]  And I have really good reason to think that, because right now, the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, has a quarter billion dollar program funding faculty hiring.
[00:22:03]  The main mechanism that they are pushing with that program is precisely this policy, using DEI statements as a heavy criterion for assessing all faculty candidates.
[00:22:16]  Now, what's particularly noteworthy is the NIH is the predominant way that we fund medical science in the United States.
[00:22:25]  Really, if you think of medical schools, if you think of medical research, you should be thinking of the NIH because that's the way that academic medical researchers think about their job.
[00:22:35]  It's science funded by the NIH.
[00:22:39]  So what's really remarkable is exactly what they're doing.
[00:22:42]  They created this grant program, which gives money to universities across the country for faculty hiring.
[00:22:48]  And they say, go out and hire university professors.
[00:22:52]  And what they do is they say as a condition for getting this money, your grant has to show how you are going to, or that you're going to require the use of these diversity statements and that you're going to heavily weigh them in the evaluation process.
[00:23:07]  And doing some investigation on this, I found that when I asked for the rubrics at public universities that received this grant, the way that they evaluated diversity statements, here's the most remarkable part of that.
[00:23:22]  One of the rubrics that was used at the University of New Mexico and the University of South Carolina explicitly gives a low score to job candidates who say they want to treat everyone the same.
[00:23:35]  That's not an exaggeration.
[00:23:36]  That is literally what the rubric says.
[00:23:39]  So I want to take a step back here and play the opposition advocate here, which is people will say, but what's the big deal?
[00:23:48]  This is anti-racism training.
[00:23:50]  It's just workforce development.
[00:23:52]  It enriches our environment.
[00:23:56]  Why are you racists being so difficult to get in the way of the new progressive standard operating procedure?
[00:24:06]  Why should we care about this?
[00:24:08]  Give us some evidence of where this leads us.
[00:24:11]  I would say there are a couple of things.
[00:24:13]  So first, when you make ideologically charged statements a requirement for hiring faculty, what you're going to do is create a political echo chamber on campus.
[00:24:25]  And I think that that's so important to recognize when we see university professors increasingly say crazier and crazier things.
[00:24:35]  Look, I'm a believer in free speech.
[00:24:37]  I think university professors should be allowed to say crazy things if that's what they believe.
[00:24:41]  But you have to ask, why do they exist in an environment where they can say that kind of thing and not be completely embarrassed by a number of people they who are colleagues pushing back and saying, no, you know, equivocating about a terrorist attack or something like that is just a really bad and dumb thing to do.
[00:25:06]  The reason they can get away with, the reason they can get away without being horribly embarrassed is because they live in a political echo chamber.
[00:25:14]  And why do they live in a political echo chamber?
[00:25:17]  It's policies like these that either formally or informally weed out any dissenting voice.
[00:25:23]  And that's really, really important that we have dissenting voices.
[00:25:27]  Otherwise, it just totally discredits academia.
[00:25:30]  And I think that's what we see today.
[00:25:32]  And so, you know, that's one of the main things I focus on.
[00:25:35]  But I think that there are also a lot of other reasons that this kind of policy is really bad.
[00:25:40]  So for instance, I think often it also just feeds into overt discrimination.
[00:25:45]  I actually think it's a good thing that we have moved to a point where we say, no, you should never be hired on the basis of race.
[00:25:53]  But now that's kind of what people are trying to do.
[00:25:56]  And I think often when you see these diversity statement policies, what you should think is you should be asking the question, is this an attempt to get around civil rights law that prevents discrimination?
[00:26:08]  I know of instances where it absolutely was.
[00:26:11]  And lastly, I would say it speaks to a kind of lack of seriousness.
[00:26:15]  This is the NIH.
[00:26:16]  This is the way we fund medical research.
[00:26:18]  There are still numerous forms of cancer that we have not cured.
[00:26:23]  We need to be spending our money on things that are going to improve people's lives.
[00:26:28]  And to say that we should instead spend money to prioritizing DEI is really an absolute shame.
[00:26:34]  And it just makes a mockery of what science is for.
[00:26:39]  Well, yeah, I mean, how about the NIH worries about why Americans are so overweight or why so many young people are killing themselves?
[00:26:46]  I mean, I just, it is almost gets to an obsession by certain ideologues that the greatest sin is to be racist.
[00:26:54]  Now, you deal a lot in kind of academic waters.
[00:26:58]  Is that, for example, when they write the AI code for Chat GPT, it's so interesting because elite values are mirrored into AI chat boxes.
[00:27:06]  If you really want to find out what the intelligentsia believe, just type something in the chat GPT and it can't say anything racist as if that's like the ultimate prime directive to use Star Trek language, right?
[00:27:18]  Like do not interfere with Native populations and you can never say anything racist.
[00:27:23]  But in their quest not to say anything racist, they almost create this new worldview of anti-racism that in reality is incredibly bigoted and hateful and spiteful.
[00:27:35]  I'll give you just one example.
[00:27:36]  The Wall Street Journal, where I know you're a contributor, had this very powerful story here today.
[00:27:40]  And I wanted to cover it.
[00:27:42]  And I think it's perfect to cover it.
[00:27:43]  I don't know if you saw this or not.
[00:27:44]  The Evanston High School.
[00:27:45]  I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where in Evanston High School, they say we have black classrooms and white classrooms.
[00:27:51]  That's all done in the spirit of anti-racism.
[00:27:54]  Now, when I say that to a regular everyday American, they almost refuse to believe it.
[00:27:58]  So I think part of our job is to say, hey, you know, that DEI commissar that's walking around, they actually do want you to end up in some form of segregation.
[00:28:06]  Your thoughts, John?
[00:28:07]  I think that's, you know, it's correct.
[00:28:10]  And it's also correct that it's hard to believe.
[00:28:12]  That's the kind of thing that prior to my, you know, career as somebody who does reporting, I would have had a hard time believing that.
[00:28:22]  But again and again, I find evidence that that kind of thing is happening.
[00:28:25]  You know, what you're describing is a form of racial affinity groups where people for trainings or classes or, you know, a variety of activities are separated by race.
[00:28:38]  So you have the black caucus or the Hispanic caucus or the white caucus.
[00:28:43]  Now, that already, to many, just sounds like segregation.
[00:28:46]  And really, that's what it should be called.
[00:28:49]  And we've seen really disastrous effects.
[00:28:52]  You know, we're creating a world where students, young people have started to think of race as one of the most important parts of their lives.
[00:29:02]  And that I think is a huge step backwards.
[00:29:05]  But, you know, one thing to tie it back to the story that I wrote about the NIH, the rubrics that I found through a public records request at the University of South Carolina and the University of Mexico, both of them also gave a low score to anyone who expressed skepticism about racial affinity groups.
[00:29:27]  That's literally a part of the rubric.
[00:29:29]  So you have these layered effects where first you have the policy, which itself, you know, creates an environment where people might be afraid to speak up.
[00:29:38]  You know, if you're a white student and you've suddenly been put in an all-white racial affinity group to undergo a kind of diversity training, it might already be pretty hard for you to say, hey, I think you're thinking about this the wrong way.
[00:29:53]  But then you have a layer of bureaucrats and policies that are adopted over time and kind of pick up steam over time that make it even harder to question at the second level, to question the very existence of those policies.

=== Donors Save Higher Education (07:31) ===

[00:30:10]  And that's what we have with this, you know, diversity statement requirement.
[00:30:14]  If you say in a diversity statement that I think we should live in a race neutral society where we are not separated out on the basis of our race, because that is not the kind of thing Americans should do.
[00:30:24]  And that is more an expression of true diversity as it should be than anything else.
[00:30:30]  That would get you a low score.
[00:30:32]  That would get a scientist disqualified from a job according to these rubrics that be uncovered.
[00:30:38]  And, you know, I think that's crazy.
[00:30:40]  I think that's absolutely crazy.
[00:30:41]  Wall Street Journal, school district offers classes separated by race.
[00:30:45]  I found it.
[00:30:46]  Evanston High School.
[00:30:47]  I mean, there's no mystery.
[00:30:48]  The headline in the Wall Street Journal, as you well know, they're not for sensationalism.
[00:30:52]  They really strive for accuracy.
[00:30:54]  It's not an exaggeration.
[00:30:55]  Let me read this from you.
[00:30:57]  Let me read this for you.
[00:30:58]  School districts in Minnesota, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland offer race-specific elective courses.
[00:31:05]  This is what's so funny.
[00:31:06]  It's right in the article, Wall Street Journal.
[00:31:08]  Federal anti-discrimination laws prevent public schools from mandatorily separating students by race, but education lawyers say optional courses can comply with the law.
[00:31:16]  I mean, the obvious thing is white-only classes are coming next.
[00:31:20]  It's just this is where we're coming to, you know, a rebirth of white identitarianism in public education, which you have to wonder is that what they're trying to provoke, right?
[00:31:29]  And it continues here.
[00:31:31]  And by the way, they changed their whole criteria as soon as the Wall Street Journal started to reach out.
[00:31:36]  And they're right here, the district offers middle school and high school students electives focused on black history and social-emotional learning support specifically for black students because they say it's an easier way for them to learn.
[00:31:50]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk.
[00:31:52]  You're exciting news to share about saving babies by providing ultrasounds.
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[00:32:53]  So, John, other work you want to plug, research you're doing?
[00:32:56]  Talk about the National Association of Scholars, please.
[00:32:59]  So the National Association of Scholars is a think tank and membership organization that focuses on exactly this kind of issue.
[00:33:08]  I would encourage everyone to go check it out.
[00:33:11]  It's nas.org.
[00:33:15]  And, you know, you can become a member.
[00:33:17]  I'd encourage you to do that, especially if you're working in education or academia.
[00:33:22]  That does a lot to support our work.
[00:33:25]  And at the same time, I do a lot of my reporting on, you know, I post it a lot on Twitter.
[00:33:31]  So you can follow me at John D. Saylor, S-A-I-L-E-R.
[00:33:36]  I have something on this story about Ohio State coming out a little bit later today, talking about what's really inside some of those documents following up on the Wall Street Journal story.
[00:33:47]  And yeah, you know, I have over the last year submitted over 250 public records requests.
[00:33:54]  I'm constantly talking to professors and trying to get to the bottom of what's happening in higher education and show people, you know, what I think is a true scandal.
[00:34:07]  This is a true scandal.
[00:34:08]  I think a lot of people don't recognize that.
[00:34:10]  And to a certain extent, none of us knows how far it goes.
[00:34:14]  And so my job as an investigator is to look into these things and try to tell people what's happening.
[00:34:19]  That's what I'm doing.
[00:34:20]  I'm going to continue to do it.
[00:34:22]  And I really appreciate the opportunity to come on today and talk about it.
[00:34:25]  Well, it's heroes work.
[00:34:26]  So let me just ask you, Spitball, here about two minutes remaining, John.
[00:34:29]  When donors pull gifts to universities, does that make an impact?
[00:34:33]  What are some of the action items for our audience when we're fighting this rather calcified institutionalized leviathan?
[00:34:40]  It's like you turn around and there's another nine commissars here and 25 here and $20 million.
[00:34:45]  What are the effective countermeasures that can be done here?
[00:34:51]  I would say it takes three things.
[00:34:53]  First, it takes exposure.
[00:34:56]  And that's what I'm trying to do.
[00:34:58]  That's what a lot of people in this space are trying to do.
[00:35:00]  They're trying to get to the bottom of what happens.
[00:35:03]  And if you're in a role at a university, you can help me with that.
[00:35:08]  You can tell me what's going on.
[00:35:10]  You can tell me about things to request through FOIA.
[00:35:13]  And that actually makes a big difference.
[00:35:15]  But beyond that, yeah, there are certain levers of power that we have to take hold of and use effectively in smart ways.
[00:35:23]  That involves things like lawsuits.
[00:35:25]  A lot of what's happening is illegal and people are rightly pushing back.
[00:35:29]  And universities are afraid of that.
[00:35:31]  I think donors, I mean, it's, it's, we have still have yet to see what's going to happen because honestly, donors have been very slow to pull out funds.
[00:35:40]  I think that they should be a lot more aggressive about saying this stuff is bad.
[00:35:44]  Same with politicians.
[00:35:46]  Often they don't realize that the public and, you know, the just common sense is on their side.
[00:35:54]  They need to do basic smart things like pushback on the use of mandatory DEI statements.
[00:36:00]  But finally, I do think we need to think about building new institutions and building new things within existing institutions.
[00:36:08]  And I'm given a lot of hope by what we've seen, but I think we're really only getting started.
[00:36:13]  Just final question.
[00:36:14]  Where have you seen, if anywhere, an institution reclaimed once it goes woke?
[00:36:21]  Have you seen that at all?
[00:36:22]  You know, I have to give a shout out.
[00:36:24]  I live in North Carolina.
[00:36:26]  I've paid attention to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a long time.
[00:36:30]  And what their Board of Trustees and Board of Governors have done has been a fantastic start.
[00:36:38]  They eliminated, they explicitly banned compelled speech, no more diversity statements.
[00:36:44]  They explicitly followed up on the Supreme Court's decision saying we are absolutely not going to try to bypass this ruling.
[00:36:53]  And they've created a school of, I would say, intellectual freedom where they really want to hire, from what it looks like, they want to hire people who share this vision for open, free intellectual discourse.
[00:37:10]  And I think that that kind of thing is amazing to see.
[00:37:12]  I'm really excited about what's going on.
[00:37:15]  That's promising.
[00:37:16]  I will be, I'm scheduled to speak there in the spring.
[00:37:20]  So I'm going to put that to a test, John.
[00:37:22]  We'll see.
[00:37:22]  We'll see how open and accepting they are.
[00:37:26]  Excellent work, John.
[00:37:27]  Really great.
[00:37:28]  Thank you so much.
[00:37:29]  Thanks so much.
[00:37:30]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:37:31]  Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:37:34]  Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
[00:37:37]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.