The Culture War #59 Indoctrination in Schools & School Choice w/ Christopher Stewart & Corey DeAngelis
Host:
Tim Pool
Guests:
Corey DeAngelis @DeAngelisCorey (X)
Christopher Stewart @citizenstewart (X)
Producers:
Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X)
Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X)
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Alright, well, it's no secret that I think schools are garbage, and it's not my opinion, it's actually a fact, and it's a fact that for 40 years, the phrase, school sucks, has existed, and probably longer than 40 years.
I think there's a problem with how we've institutionalized and industrialized learning in this country.
But that's my bias, just put it right out there.
I think right now there's a big controversy and obviously a big debate over indoctrination in schools and the importance of homeschooling or school choice.
So we're gonna talk about this!
And maybe we can save the world, so we got a couple of guests.
Who would like to introduce themselves first?
Chris?
Corey?
unidentified
I'm Chris Stewart.
I'm known as Citizen Stewart online, on Twitter, and other places.
I also run a non-profit, education non-profit, that focuses on everything you just talked about.
I might disagree with a little bit of what you just said.
Cory DeAngelis, I'm at DeAngelisCory on X, formerly Twitter.
I have a new book coming out called The Parent Revolution, available on Amazon, basically everywhere else, and I fight to fund students, not systems, what most people call school choice.
That's because of the one-size-fits-all monopoly that we have today that the government has on K-12 education.
We're forced to pay for the school that we're assigned to through property and other types of tax revenues, and basically 90% of the K-12 education market is run by the government-run schools.
And Milton Friedman put it best a long time ago when he said, just imagine if the government were going around giving away cars for free that cost $500,000 to make.
It would be astonishing if any private car dealers even existed at all because they would have to compete against a Well, let's identify the problem first, because I think there's probably a disagreement on what the issues we're facing are.
When you go to the football games on Friday nights and you see older people wearing the jackets still, you can't tell them... Is it a Letterman jacket or whatever?
Well, they're from different eras too.
You might bring your grandfather, you might bring your dad or whatever, but On a Friday night, on this beautiful football field, the lights are on, they're playing ACDC as the kids run and rush the field, right?
You can't tell anybody that this is a government school that's terrible and blah blah blah and all that.
They're federally funded and influenced by the federal government.
But to be more direct, they are run by local government school boards, basically.
And they're regulated heavily by the government.
But that's not the point I wanted to bring up really at all.
What I heard from what you were talking about, Chris, is something that I probably agree with, that there are some good public schools out there, that a lot of families do have access to schools that might be objectively over-performing schools, or schools that are doing a good job, for whatever reason, based on whatever metric you want to use.
And my response to that is, if you like your public school, you can keep your public school.
But for real this time, unlike with your doctor, with school choice, you can still choose that.
I don't want to take that option away, but if that's not the best fit for you, if the school that you're assigned to isn't a high-quality public school, you should be able to take that money to a private school, charter school, or home-based option, too.
You know, so I suppose, you know, I'm very jealous, and what you're saying makes me very communist, in that I think that the people from my neighborhood, by force, because the only way we could have done it, we should have marched into Minnesota and seized that school for the low-income people in Chicago, where I'm from, because we had gang violence shootings, we had abuse.
A block from the school, people are hiding guns under cars to shoot and kill each other, So yeah, I didn't want to be there, so I didn't. - And Chicago spends a lot more than Minnesota on average.
I think the average private school tuition in Chicago is less than $20,000 per student per year.
There's obviously $50,000 private schools too.
I'm just talking about the averages, but just imagine if you could take half or even two thirds of that money, let's say you could take $20,000 with you to go to a private school if you so choose to do so.
That's the only argument I'm really making here today, that we should fund the people as opposed to the buildings.
Just like we do with higher education with Pell Grants, you can take that money to the public university if you want, or the community college.
You could also take that money in the form of a Pell Grant to a private, even religious university.
I'm just The only argument I'm really wanting to make here today on the show is that if we're going to fund education at the K-12 level, just like we do with higher ed, the funding should be portable and it should follow the decision of the family, just like we do in pre-K.
In pre-K, you had the Head Start program.
You can take that money not to an assigned pre-K, you take it to where you want to go.
You can even take it to a religious private provider if that was the choice that was best for your kid.
I'm arguing that you can have a philosophical view of what the world ought to look like, your North Star, your utopia as a libertarian, but also understand that we live in a society where we have a certain layout for the government-run school system today, where we're forced to pay for these schools according to the National Center for Education Statistics, We spend about $19,999 per student per year.
It's probably a lot higher now.
That was from 2021, the latest data available.
An amount that has increased by about 160% after adjusting for inflation since 1970.
And you can still maintain your libertarian beliefs and consistency while saying that it would be an incremental improvement to allow a portion of that funding While saving taxpayer money, because 68 of 73 studies of private school choice programs have found that they save taxpayer dollars, including in Arizona for example, despite Katie Hobbs, the hypocrite governor there who sent her own kid to, who went to private school herself,
is now arguing that it's going to blow up the state budget because a lot of people want school choice.
She's only looking at the costs, not the benefits.
She's using the $7,000 scholarship amount, multiplying it by the number of students, and saying, this is going to cost $900 million a year.
Well, how much would those same kids cost in the government schools?
An argument that school choice is more popular than they could have ever anticipated is an argument for education freedom, not against it.
Oh, look, they thought only 10,000 people were going to apply and 100,000 people applied.
That's a great argument.
unidentified
I'm not going to let you get away with this.
You know what?
People love free stuff.
If you have a kid already in private school right now, and you're paying full ride, and someone comes to you and says, hey, I'm the government, I'll pay half of that for you, and you've never been in public school.
You've been in private school, your parents are wealthy enough to pay for it, and you're there, and someone comes and says to you, hey, you want some free stuff?
Let me pay half of your tuition to go to your private school.
And if they are higher income families, if anything, they pay more into the system than the lower income families that are also benefiting from school choice as well.
So nobody should be forced to pay twice.
unidentified
I don't care if you already... But you do have to concede that it's welfare.
I can't speak for anything outside of Chicago, but I mean the public school system in Chicago is like taking children, beating them, I'll refrain from swearing, mercilessly beating them.
I mean we have the story where the kid was locked in a room, in a padded room, where he crapped his pants because they wouldn't let him out.
me having, I grew up there, you've got an area that's predominantly Latino, you've got large sections of the city predominantly black, and then you've got pockets that are predominantly white, and people only choose to live next to people who look like them.
unidentified
That's what they do. - Italian and Polish and Greek? - Yeah. - Like Chicago's one of the only places that I've seen that.
I think Illinois is one of the only states where we actually went backwards on school choice.
You can correct me if I'm wrong.
In the past few years, and they had a low-income scholarship program for families of, I don't remember what the actual income cutoff was, but it was for lower-income families, about 9,000 students using the program.
JB Pritzker, their governor, vowed to get rid of the program when he first ran for office in 2017.
What's interesting is that in the midterms in 2022, He answered a candidate survey from a local newspaper saying that he actually supported the same program that he vowed to eliminate back in 2017.
He did really nothing to save it this year.
He answered the Chicago Tribune telling them that if a bill were to come to his desk, a Democrat saying this, that he would sign it to save the program, he probably knew that it would never make it to his desk.
But I just bring that up because I think the political winds on school choice are shifting too.
It has been kind of a Republican-led movement.
unidentified
Everything you just said is political.
Everything you just said.
You are offering a political solution to an educational problem.
And this is where we really differ.
The problem with American public schools is not that you don't have enough choice or that there hasn't been a political decision.
It's because that everything that we know about the science of learning, teaching, learning, strong curriculum, data-driven instruction, those are the things that make for good outcomes for students, strong outcomes.
We know this.
This has been proven by research over and over and over again.
But you are offering a political decision to give people... This is how crazy this is.
This is really where it becomes welfare.
Let's go back in time.
You and I both have been libertarians for a long time.
If someone would have came to us 10 years ago and said, hey, I want you guys to start a program that's going to give kids free tickets to SeaWorld, free money to buy trampolines, to buy new computers, espresso machines, because we think all kids should have access to espresso machines, trampolines, SeaWorld tickets.
Guess what they have in the teachers' lounges in the public schools?
unidentified
- Don't change the subject! - Don't change the subject! - But they're already paying-- - Don't change the subject! - Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. - Don't change the subject! - Hold on.
It's just that we gave away all the cheese and now it's still welfare.
So my point is, just to what you were saying, You're saying, go to someone and tell them we're going to give you all this free stuff, or every kid deserves an espresso machine, and it's like, did I already pay for the espresso machine?
Well, you did, so you can now have it.
unidentified
I'm saying something just a little bit different than that, though.
I meant if you would have went to a conservative politician 10 years ago and said, I want to start a program.
I think American children should have access to SeaWorld, to trampolines, to piano lessons, and all these things.
I want to start a new program where we just give families money to buy those things.
So Chris, you're arguing against ESAs, from what I hear, based on the allowable expenses.
So if you're going to go to there, are you okay with vouchers then, which can only be used at private school tuition?
So you're nitpicking about, well, some of these programs, they allow you to use the money for field trips and other types.
What if we just made it for the pure voucher model that a lot of states do have where you can only use it for private school tuition.
I think that's, I think we could maybe agree there that, you know, hey, more advantaged families can already afford to pay for private school tuition out of pocket.
How about we let a fraction of the funding follow the student and then let other families who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it send their kids to private school?
unidentified
I think you're framing the problem wrong and you're offering because you're framing the problem wrong, you're offering a solution that actually doesn't meet the moment.
The moment that we're in right now is that millions of American kids have fallen behind because of COVID, because of the pandemic.
What we knew was going to happen was there was going to be a massive American remediation project that was going to be necessary, meaning we're going to have millions of kids.
First of all, we have 1 million kids we can't even find right now.
And you know about the, I mean, even Josh Cowan has admitted that the competitive effect studies at least are positive.
No, he hasn't.
Yes, he has.
And I have a video recording of it.
I'll show you later.
Can I crank the altitude?
We disagree on the problem, right?
So I think the problem is that we are assigned to schools based on where we live.
That gives those schools monopoly power.
Just imagine if you were assigned to your nearest grocery store or restaurant and you couldn't go anywhere else unless you moved houses to be assigned to another restaurant that was run by the government.
If they had poisoned food, if they served you expired food and you had no recourse and couldn't do anything, They would probably just say, well, we need more money.
And the argument I'm making is not how much we should spend on food stamps, not how much we should spend on education, that if we're going to spend money on food stamps or if we're going to spend money on K-12 education, the money should go to people, not buildings.
So we shouldn't residentially assign low-income families to government-run grocery stores and say, you have to use those taxpayer dollars there.
I think a better solution is give the money to the people.
You're giving them money, they are able to make a choice to purchase something for their kids, and I'm asking you if you believe that people on welfare are making good decisions for their kids.
I'm saying it is relatively better than if we were to assign them to a government grocery store where they gave you government cheese or whether they would probably have empty shelves like they do in the socialist countries.
unidentified
That's a weird hypothetical, but what I will say is I think we're poisoning American children and we're paying for it.
One of the Democrats in the house said, you know, I don't think we could do this here.
They did it in Virginia where higher income families are using it and they're figuring it out.
But here we're trying to target it to low income families.
Do you think they're going to be able to shop around?
They said.
Implying that low-income families either don't have the wherewithal or ability or knowledge to be able to choose a school that works the best for their kids.
I think that's a paternalistic argument against school choice.
I think it's an elitist argument against school choice.
And I think in general, parents from all backgrounds have more information, on-the-ground knowledge, and incentive to get the decisions right for their own kids than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away.
I think the bigger issue outside of who's gonna pay for it, to me, doesn't really matter all that much.
I mean, like, obviously budgeting and taxes and all that stuff are a big issue, but I really do feel like if you go to the average person and you start talking about things they can't see, like, they don't know where this money's going anyway, it's not gonna matter as much as, say, like, Hey, my kid ran away from school because he hates it, and now the police have issued a warrant for my arrest because my son has been truant too often.
So the issue I see is, for instance, like there was one day, I think this precipitated my ending high school when I was 14, is it was miserable.
It's like a prison, it's torture, and they did this thing to us where in grade school it was 7.30 to 2.30, and then the way this particular public school operated is they did recess in the first hour, which was a trick, I guess.
Yeah, it's such BS.
They said, okay, 7.30 to 8.30 is recess, which meant you only had to show up for school at 8.30 and then you got out around 3.
And then when high school started, the local high school, which we had to go to, district locked or region locked or whatever, said, okay, now it's 10.45 a.m.
for freshmen and you get out at 6.
And so their parents were pissed.
They were like, it's winter!
Like, there's gonna be 14-year-old girls walking home in the dark!
W-w-why are you nuts?
It was massively disruptive to the sleep schedules and the routines of everybody.
That wasn't even the... like, that was bad.
All of a sudden, I wake up at 7 in the morning staring at the ceiling, sitting around watching daytime soaps until I had to walk to school at 10.
And then one day I just started crying.
I fell down on the ground halfway to school and then just went home.
I said, I will not do this anymore.
I'm done.
I called, I can't remember who I called, my mom or my dad, and I was like, I'm never going back there again.
My parents could go to jail for that because the school was so miserable.
I remember one day when I left school, I was with my friends.
No, no, no, this was after I left.
There was fighting, there was gangs.
There were a couple of different gangs that were operating in the school.
And then like my friends who were still going there were like, hey, meet us after school.
We're gonna go skate or something.
I think I was like 15.
And one block to the east of the school, a fight was scheduled.
And one dude hit a gun under a car.
And when he got knocked out, knocked down, he wasn't unconscious, he crawled and everyone's hooting and hollering.
And then he grabs the gun.
stands up, or no, no, no, I'm sorry, he grabbed a 2x4, and then he hit a 2x4, and the other guy pulled a gun out of his back, and he's like, you want to bring weapons?
And then everyone started screaming and running.
If you don't, if your kids leave that environment, they don't want to be there, the police will come and arrest the parents.
unidentified
And I think this- Unless you do some paperwork with the district to homeschool, and that's the way many- And that's what we did.
Yeah, many families, so it's not, it's, you're not going to get arrested.
This gets at another point that I wanted to bring up.
Chris talked a lot about academics and I think that's important too and it has been part of the school choice conversation for a while.
I think families care a lot more about what you're talking about Tim things like safety and that that actually gets to one of the evaluations out of DC where they actually they do have a voucher program in DC.
It's only a couple thousand students using it.
Disproportionately low-income, non-white students using the program in DC.
But they find that students that won the lottery, this is an experimental evaluation, you can say it's caused by getting a choice to go to a private school, they had no impacts on test scores after the first three years on math or reading test scores.
No effects.
At a third of the cost, which I think that implies a benefit.
It's a good ROI.
If you're getting the same academic outcomes for $10,000 as opposed to $30,000 a year, I think that's a win.
But all that aside, the main finding that I saw was an increase in satisfaction, safety, and a reduction in absenteeism.
So these are things that are captured not by standardized tests, but that go into the decision-making process when parents are selecting schools.
I think our culture is Absolutely degenerate and corrupt.
Parents hand off their children to strangers, and then you get these stories of abuse.
There was a teacher at my high school who was raping young boys, and I don't know, I think he went to jail for it.
It's shocking to me that we live in a world where it's like, I have no idea who the teachers are at the school, but you're going.
And then when these kids come home and they say, my teacher is bad, they go, oh, shut up, you're lazy.
Like the kids are wrong.
It's so insane to me.
That we used to live in a society where the kids grew up with their parents, the families lived together, multi-generational family houses and estates.
You know, a big farm or whatever, where a bunch of different people had different houses or whatever, but they were in the same community or village.
And now it's, dad goes to work, mom goes to work, they don't see the kids until three, the kid gets handed off to a stranger who hates their guts, the kids come home miserable, say, I hate you mom, I hate you dad, and this is supposed to be normal.
I'm not saying literally everyone is like that.
But that we know that these things do exist, particularly in cities.
It's become a common trope in American culture.
The, I hate you dad, you can't tell me what to do, I hate you mom.
Like, how these things come to be.
And then, it's, the idea that the phrase school sucks exists.
It's remarkable to me how bad American public schools are beyond the idea of how much we're spending, beyond scoring and tests and all that.
These are miserable places kids hate.
We make TV shows about kids beating each other and we're wondering why there are school shootings.
And we're like, no, no, no, by law, they should be forced to go there.
I mean, when you type into Google, right, this is why you're bringing this up, when you type in school, the school sucks come up, or when I think of school, if you type into Google, when I think of school, I think it'll say, I feel depressed, I want to cry, or it's a lot of negative things.
Like, something is happening in these buildings that is shattering the minds of young people to the point where we're seeing not just shootings, in Loudoun County we had a girl get raped.
And then when he shows up angry saying, what's happening?
I'm sorry, I do not believe that the schooling system is redeemable.
And I think the problem is adults are self-righteous and refuse to accept that kids in this country are suffering, depressed, and hate the environments.
And those that work their way through it are unaware of what could be.
So, I mean, how is it that we have hit TV shows for 30 years I'm saying a 30-year-old TV show that lasted for seven or eight years, where the premise is school is miserable and kids hate it.
And it's basically every single show where kids are like, yes, school sucks.
And the response from parents is always, you're just a bad kid who's lazy.
But they were spending that much in the government schools too for those same kids, so it's still a fraction of what would have been spent.
unidentified
I mean, I understand the strategy of talking over it, but you're underestimating the cost of the ESAs and overestimating the cost of the public school.
Because the public schools have legacy costs and fixed costs that your new schools won't.
Now, everything you just said, Tim, everything that you just said, Corey, everything you just said that's bad about the public school system, The answer to any of those things is not to put a bunch of kids with a bunch of money into an unregulated, accountability-free, quality-free system of private schools that nobody's going to be able to know what's happening to those kids with, and that it's intentionally been written into the law that you can't measure them, and you can't keep track of what they're doing on purpose.
So it's not transparent at all.
That's not the answer.
But I do want to say this, because I hear these conversations all the time.
And I just wonder what country you guys live in.
It sounds like a media bubble to me.
Everything's awful.
Everything's terrible.
There are 14,000 school districts in the United States.
100,000 schools in the United States.
I guarantee you that not everybody's having the experience.
You guys are painting the bleakest possible picture, but it's not what people are experiencing everywhere.
It's just completely relatable in modern media to make a show that lasts for 10 seasons where the kids are like, this is what school is like and it's miserable and I hate it.
unidentified
Well, there's a bunch of shows where they're, like, where they're great and they love, you know, Seventh Heaven.
My kid watched Seventh Heaven coming up and whatnot.
The family was perfect and, you know, they were a Christian family and, you know, that's primetime TV.
It depends on what you watch.
Your algorithm determines what your story should be.
If we buy that Hollywood has a general leftward bias, if they are saying marriage is bad, maybe that has to do with it.
Maybe it's conservative values that they think is bad.
But if they're still saying that school is bad, and then they generally support the teachers union, that should tell you that the school is even worse than what they're depicting it as.
But let's just say you're right.
unidentified
You are Dr. Corey DeAngelis.
Dr. Corey DeAngelis does I'm not a real doctor, though.
My point is that, not that television shows are scholarly research, I'm saying our culture has normalized this idea and finds it relatable to display to people that schools are miserable and kids are bullied and beaten.
I mean, why do we have these big anti-bullying campaigns?
Why are we seeing so many kids suffering from increases in depression?
I was the first one to do one, peer-reviewed at Social Science Quarterly.
And he's a doctor.
I'm a doctor.
You better listen to me.
I'm the expert.
You better listen to me.
But we all found in each of these studies, different research teams from the left, from the right, finding that in places with stronger teachers unions, all else equal, controlling for the political persuasions in the area, the race in the area, the income in the area, all else equal, stronger teachers unions, the schools stayed closed longer.
And there have been other studies that have linked the school closures to mental health issues as well.
So I mean, we could disagree about why the schools were closed.
unidentified
So you throw those out there.
But you don't educate the public, which you're talking about right now.
In those same places, they had three times the number of kids of color who were actually dying from COVID.
They had higher incidence of COVID, and they had more old teachers that were afraid of getting COVID.
So you can say teachers' unions, but when you say teachers' union, you're just talking about teachers.
And America loves its teachers.
Every poll after poll after poll after poll says that.
Because they're idiots.
Well, I mean, or because teachers are actually a necessary part of a functioning democracy.
To me, when you say that teachers are necessary, I think that's incorrect.
I think the way it should be is that local communities should allocate time from parents in the community to handle specific subjects in which they're pretty good at or better at.
They can easily teach better to the kids they know in their own communities.
You could do these things by a few block radius where the parents come together, decide, we're going to do pods.
Each parent can take a certain day where they'll have the kids for a day and teach them specific subjects.
I could bring you in, and you could actually start working with young people tomorrow, showing them, because you have, and I said this to someone else, you have had something happen in your life That nobody gets counseled on doing.
All of this is actually something that is blazing a different path that nobody counseled you on doing, right?
Right.
There is a designation in public schools where you can go and teach this right now to kids and show them the entrepreneurial spirit that it took to build this.
I think one of the biggest prob- I think so much of the political crises that we see in this country is based on the fact that there is no longer a community.
So, uh, policing, for instance.
Everyone says you gotta abolish the police, defund the police, or back the blue.
And the real issue is the cops don't know you and aren't actually trying to protect you, your family, and their community.
So, uh, for instance, the example I often give is I get pulled over on Lakeshore Drive in Chicago.
I was not speeding.
I was exiting at Belmont.
Cop pulls me over and says, you were speeding.
I said, no, I wasn't.
I'm on the exit.
I have to slow down to get off.
And he goes, tell it to a judge.
That ticket, I was uh, I think I was 20 years old, suspended my license.
So I couldn't drive for for three or some odd years.
I ended up getting arrested and charged for driving a suspended license because I didn't know that because they don't tell you that if you get two moving violations under 21.
And so I had to like leave my job to go to court or just pay 75 bucks, which I did, which was a guilty plea.
Now, in a small town, and you hear this quite often, in fact, we have viewers who'll be like, that's exactly what it's like in my town, a town of 3,000 people, the cop pulls you over and he goes, aren't you Jim's kid?
Why are you speeding?
I'm gonna see your dad down at the bar tomorrow night, and what am I gonna say, I caught your kid speeding?
And the kid's gonna be like, oh, please don't tell him I did.
Dramatically different experience.
unidentified
What we've done now- What you just said is the America nobody ever talks about.
So in these discussions, we have gotten so negative about everything, and so the sky is falling about everything, and so awfulizing everything, to the point that the thing that you just said is invisible to us.
It's not invisible to me because it's what I live.
I live in a part of America that's the middle of America, it's the mainstream of what America really is, and it is not what these discussions are.
We have just painted in this conversation the most bleak possible picture of American institutions in America.
And everything's terrible and it's the left and it's the right and all this.
And then, Corey, in your state, in your state, you have some school districts that have 80 and 90 million dollar football fields at a high school level, right?
Why?
Because Texas loves football the way that Indiana loves basketball.
That is America.
That is what the system really is for us.
Yes, we can pull up anecdotes about really bad things happening.
We could do that.
And if your entire algorithm is that, if your entire algorithm is bad, it's bad, it's bad, it's bad, guess what?
You start reflecting that, and the rest of America is doing things like, when somebody dies, they bring casseroles to your house.
When somebody has a baby, stuff starts showing up at your house for free.
When you need something, when you need a lawnmower in my neighborhood, if you needed a lawnmower, you can go and knock on a couple doors, you're gonna get a lawnmower.
But you have people in New York writing about their police fighting with cops and then they want to abolish the police and it ends up affecting small towns.
So I think it was at the height of the abolish the police movement, something like half of police departments had some kind of budget removed because of the movement.
You get people who live in suburban areas who will hear on the news like, oh, the cops did this bad thing right now.
The big story is Dexter Reed in Chicago.
And then they're going to say, we need police reforms.
I don't know.
You don't.
But this is the most is half of the influence of the country.
And especially when you look at Democrats controlling institutions, media or otherwise, it's based on these big cities.
So if we're talking about, you know, what big cities are going through, where large population density is creating this culture, which is affecting the greater society.
Yeah, those are the problems.
I don't think, when we talk about the problems in schools, I'm not referring to a small town, I'm not talking about Inwood, West Virginia, I don't know how it goes out down there.
This is the second most Trump-supporting state in the country, and the schools started to bring in really offensive stuff.
So, there was a reaction.
Jefferson County, which is the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, outright banned child drag shows with kids.
Berkeley County, just to the west, allows it and actually has it in the public streets.
So you actually have now parents who are furious.
There was an election, I had people come to me, they were trying to set up a pod schooling system because woke left types who want to bring in graphic sexual content to schools masquerading as conservatives got elected to school boards and then started doing that.
And these kids have no choice but to go there.
And so, the other issue that we're seeing is, sure, okay, let's talk about, fine, we don't care about cities.
Political influence in captured institutions.
If it is by law requirement to have your kids in these location-locked schools, it's a prime, it's an open door for extremists to come in, lie, and then start giving kids really messed up stuff, and then they tell the kids, don't tell your parents.
Again, it comes back to this culture of we hand our kids off to strangers and then cross our fingers.
We have multiple stories of young girls trying to commit suicide and the parents did not know that the teachers were giving them things and saying, don't tell your parents.
Not only that, Florida, I believe it was until DeSantis and the legislature changed the law, actually were saying don't out, like, They're doing this in California still.
Yeah, they're saying it's a requirement to not tell the parents.
It's not about teachers telling them, it's about the law.
unidentified
I just feel bad for parents that have that going on with their kids because it just seems like they need to have a better relationship with their children, with their young people in their house, because I have five kids.
I don't know how many kids everybody here has, but I'm a parent.
I've been a parent since the 90s.
I've put multiple kids through these systems.
I'm not talking in the abstract.
I'm talking about somebody who has been very cynical about the schools.
I've been very militant, especially with my first one, about public schools and public schooling.
And I look for every problem, but I can tell you, as an expert of my kid, that all of that framing that you just gave, it sounds like something that I've heard before, and I'm going to keep hearing it, but it's not the reality for many people.
So there's a viral TikTok where this woman says, a mother came to me and asked if her daughter was in the LGBT club and her name was, I don't know, the name was Hannah or something.
And then she goes, I think that's her dead name and her real name is Mac.
She goes, there's no Hannah in the club.
Sorry, maybe she's in Bible study.
You have all of these teachers publicly declaring they're doing this.
It became a political problem where a young girl tried to kill herself in Florida because the teachers were telling her she was trans when she wasn't.
And the policy was not to tell the parents because it's outing.
And they're doing it in California.
They do it in Virginia.
That was another big issue.
And I just find it fascinating that we know for a fact that's happening.
You have an entire state saying teachers can't tell the parents what's going on with the kids, and you have kids getting raped?
Fine, anecdote, whatever.
This triggered the flipping of the governorship in Virginia, because in Loudoun County, which is literally 30 seconds from here, a pre-teen girl was raped, and the individual who did it apparently did it on more than one occasion, and the school tries to cover it up.
- So just let that clear, in this case, you think that schools, if students tell things to schools in private and the schools don't tell that to parents, You're saying that that's wrong.
I just want to make sure that I'm hearing this right.
That's wrong.
Because I do want to let you know that that's the number one way that kids actually get into child protective services when they're being sexually abused by their parents or by family members at home is they look for the school system is the number one place that kids get help for those things by talking in private to their school system.
If there is evidence of the parent abusing their kid, regardless of whether you have a disagreement with what's happening at the school, that parent should be dealt with if they're abusing their kids, obviously.
We find that desistance rates, and we knew this for a long time because the studies have been out and many leftist activists and trans activists try to ignore these.
Desistance, meaning a child who presents as gender dysphoric upon reaching puberty will cease to be dysphoric and find themselves more aligned with their biological sex and gender or whatever.
And so desistance rates can be from like 65 to 95%.
We're now finding that the aggregate studies and the studies of studies where they analyze all the data.
And now we're looking at the actual scientific research on puberty blockers and things like that at the UK, Denmark, Sweden, they're all saying, stop this.
It is not working and it's bad.
There's now something called the Cast Report which is this big controversy among the left which is advocating in the UK to stop the puberty blockers and things like this.
So this stuff has been known for a long time.
If desistance rates are greater than 50% and suicidal ideation is higher than 50% and actual attempts at suicide among young people are, I think it's around 35 or 30 to 40%, I think it might be like 30%, among trans people, if desistance is higher than the rate of suicide, Advocating children go on medication, puberty blockers, or social transition is increasing the risk of suicide among them.
And the policy among schools in California and many schools until parents started finding out what was going on, especially because of these Zoom classes, the policy was Tell the kids.
Affirm the kids.
I mean, you've got teachers now, numerous teachers, who have been fired for refusing to affirm children.
We're talking about kids who are experiencing something distressful.
I get it.
The science says the proper treatment is do not give them blockers, do not give them medication, do not social transition them.
They need therapy.
And they will likely desist.
And this can prevent suicide.
But the school policy was to affirm.
Affirm this.
And don't tell the parents.
But this is widespread.
And let me add a couple more things.
We have this book is gay and genderqueer over here.
And those were found in hundreds of schools, maybe more than that, even in Florida.
And you've got descriptions of scat.
You've got explanations in that book on how to use Grindr.
A teacher in Illinois was giving instruction to 10 to 12 year olds on how to use Grindr to hook up with adult gay men.
And they called the police on her.
And the policy at many of these schools is not to tell the parents.
unidentified
Is that the teacher that had like a book fair and she had a book?
Yeah, and the police investigated, the district investigated, and it was a completely blown up claim and the parents pulled out of the claim and didn't want to testify anymore.
So they made this big claim, it became national news, and the parents themselves who made the claim actually ended up pulling out of it, and it ended in a nothing burger, right?
So this teacher had a hundred different books at a book fair, and this was one or two books in that book fair.
So I just want to, like, level set some things a little bit, because we get, I think, a little bit into panics.
It was a book tasting, and one of the books that was added was, this book is gay.
The parents found out and were upset, and they called the police.
unidentified
Here's the fundamental question that I have for both of you guys.
First of all, I don't mean to be flippant, but I really don't care about the trans panic.
It doesn't take food off of my table.
It's not an American issue.
What if it was affecting your kids in your school?
I'm not done.
It's a made-up panic, and people are talking about it incessantly like it is war and peace, like it's, you know, geonational politics or something.
It came out of nowhere, it went up, and people took the bait, and there's a bunch of sheep following that thread while we're being distracted from other things that are more important.
But, Libertarian, my essential question for you is if I do have a child that's trans, Who should make the decisions about what course of care we take?
You're trying to say that parents should have unrestricted ability to direct their children.
They aren't allowed to abuse their children.
unidentified
I'm saying to you, as the person who goes around the country talking about parents' rights, I'm saying to you, if I go home tomorrow and find out that one of my kids is trans, and I have to make some decisions about what course of action we're going to take, me and my wife, we're going to take to handle that, I'm just asking you who you think should get in the way of me researching the different courses of action and talking to doctors and going through these long-ass processes that these parents go through.
Because in California, if you say the state, in California what they'll do is they'll take the kids from you and give them medical transition, and in Florida they will stop you from doing it.
So the state is not the answer, and neither is the parents.
There is no answer to that question in a country that is hyper-partisan and hyper-politically divided.
unidentified
How often are you okay with the government getting in between you and a medical decision?
So, in Florida, for instance, you've got no vaccine mandate.
That's your choice.
And no trans kids.
In California, it's the inverse.
The state intervenes, you must get vaccinated, and if you don't, trans kids will intervene.
They're mirror images of each other.
So if I live in a state where I think it's wrong that children are being chemically castrated with puberty blockers, I would prefer it if my community and me, I'm not a libertarian, big a libertarian, I actually am in favor of the government intervening to stop parents from giving their children drugs that will sterilize and chemically castrate them.
Or getting surgeries to remove their breasts.
In California, I wouldn't want to live there.
It's inverted.
There's a reason why we're moving everything over to West Virginia completely and why I live in West Virginia.
So Chris, I think there's something we can agree on, since we're disagreeing so much.
I think the last time we talked, it was me, you, Steve Perry.
We were trying to have, like, Steve was trying to be the middleman.
Like, hey, you guys should get together and get along because you guys used to be good friends.
And now that hasn't been the case in quite a while.
I think one of the things that we had talked about was there was a lot of top-down bills to ban CRT or to implement one-size-fits-all curriculum in the public school system, and my response to that was, Chris, I think the better solution is from the bottom up, something that we had agreed upon in the past, that families should be able to choose the schools that align with their values, and that would make Bans in the public schools, basically irrelevant.
I understand why conservatives still do it because 90% of kids are still there.
But if we're solely focused on this policy of school choice that we're focusing on today, couldn't we agree that is a good solution to people who disagree about how they want to raise their kids?
Like if you want to send your kid to a school that does have CRT, you would have that choice.
Whereas if I want the school just to focus on the basics, not through a CRT lens, Then I could choose that for my kid.
I think we used to be able to agree on that.
unidentified
So, first of all, to go all the way back to the beginning, because for me, going back to basics, is we're talking about education.
And everything that you just said and everything we're talking about right now are political issues.
They're not educational issues.
Education is about teaching and learning and outcomes.
And what happens to kids?
Are kids becoming educated?
A nation needs educated people.
We have a moron problem right now.
The moron economy in the United States is recession proof.
And it's a problem for us right now.
We need more educated people, and we need science and data that tells us that they're becoming educated and at what point they are not.
That's the education issue with schools and children and students.
All these other things that we are talking about, they're not education issues.
I'm saying that one day we're not talking about trans people who make up like 0.001% of the population or something, and the next day everybody's talking about it.
I said, it's an interesting point in perspective on- The left-handed thing.
Right.
When they stopped whacking people's hands for writing with their left hand, you saw people are left-handed.
And I said, that's a good point.
And then they act like, oh, he got Tim.
I'm like, but I didn't disagree with him.
unidentified
Well, just for listeners so that they know, we're saying this left-handed thing, but Lance, when he was on the show, showed a chart and the chart showed an extreme uptick in the number of people- And it didn't show you before.
So what they do is they cut off the early history where they're left-handed people, showing it being low, and then going up and saying, see?
It used to be low, but now it's high.
And it's like, actually, it was high, then low, then high.
unidentified
What I saw Lance say was, when we stopped demonizing- I'm completely out of- So what Lance was saying about the left-handedness was, there was a time in which we thought left-handedness was a product of the devil.
So we thought it was demonic to be left-handed.
So of course everybody said they weren't left-handed.
Even left-handed people started trying to use their right hand for that period of time because you would be of the... When we stopped saying that it was demonic, the number of people that were reporting that they were left-handed actually went up really high and then it plateaued.
Meaning the number of actually left-handed people We're free to come out of the shadows and say... So it wasn't an epidemic of people just becoming left-handed all of a sudden.
It was just that we stopped the stigma on them from being left-handed.
Not the story here.
I just wanted your listeners to know because, you know, I'd seen it on the show before.
If you're talking about specifically trans, I can pull the number up, but I'm willing to bet it's much higher than you think it is.
unidentified
Pull it up.
Pull it up.
Let's see what the number of trans is, because it's taking up so much of our political discourse and our time, and on something so important like education and schools, it should not suck the oxygen out of the room.
Our real problem with education is Data, science, research, teaching, resources.
- But that's because that's the permanence, right?
So it's like if a kid is being given a book about using Grindr or whatever, like we have a problem with that for obvious reasons, but showing a kid graphic things that they shouldn't is bad and can have psychological traumatic effects.
Giving a kid surgery or puberty blockers is debilitating.
So we care about, you know, it's the argument Black Lives Matter use.
We spray the fire hose on the burning building and not the one next to it.
So if we've got, that's the argument Black Lives Matter use.
They said, yes, everybody has problems and all lives do matter, but this one's on fire.
So if we have 30% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ, we should ask ourselves why that is.
Is it a social contagion?
Or is it that throughout history, for all of time, all humans have been 30% LGBTQ, but we just never knew because it wasn't socially acceptable?
I'm sure there's a certain number of this which is true, that LGBT people hid, but I don't believe it's 30%.
unidentified
So wait, just so I'm clear, you think some percentage of that 30% of kids or young people are not really gay, but they're They caught something that makes them want to have sex with the same... Caught!
They caught something that makes them want to have sex with the same... sex?
No, I'm saying that there are kids who, first of all, half of the Gen Z say they're bi.
And now you've got, uh, if you actually like read the blogs and read what they're saying, they say things like, uh, Lance, for instance, did you know that Lance is LGBT?
The point here is, certainly, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that in one generation we found 30% of humans are LGBT and have just decided to engage in behaviors we've not seen before or something like this.
Humans Would not be reproducing if a third of the population growth would be substantially smaller if a third of humans were not interested in having families and having kids.
Now, to be fair, half of them say they're bi, which opens the door for reproduction.
So then let's look at the other half.
who are not bi, in which means that's the implication of homosexual behaviors and things like this.
They're not gonna be reproducing.
I don't think we've ever seen anything like that.
15% of a generation saying that they're going to be engaging in these atypical behaviors.
And I'm not saying no to them, I'm saying we should ask ourselves why this is happening.
unidentified
In my lifetime, and I'm older than everybody here, in my lifetime, I watched it go from, you could be canceled from everything for being gay, Like from everything.
Your job could drop you.
Insurance companies could drop you.
There was all kinds of things that being gay, it was just something you stayed in the closet about.
You didn't tell people about it.
This generation, Gen Z, I think is actually the most kind of de-stigmatized generation on a lot of things.
Not just this.
And also, I want you to talk to the number of people, period, that are just not interested in having families and babies anymore.
It's pretty high, the number of people that are not having babies anymore and having families. - So the important distinction here is, I think this story itself lends itself to my point that it is social contagion and not a legitimate awakening or acceptance. - And do you think the schools have something to do with that?
Yes, and media in general.
So not only is Gen Z the most LGBTQ, they're actually experiencing the greatest decline in support for same-sex marriage.
Now certainly the people who are LGBT are not the same people who are saying they don't support same-sex marriage.
It's hyperpolarization.
And it is dominantly among males and females.
Females are substantially more likely to identify as trans and non-binary.
Males are substantially more likely to oppose same-sex marriage.
And I think this is what parents are upset about with the schools.
They see the schools as a way to transition their kids at a very young age when they don't understand these concepts at a very young age.
So I see the problem as us being forced into a one-size-fits-all system where this culture war, Name of the show.
We'll never stop if we force people into this one-size-fits-all system of people who just disagree about how they want to raise their kids.
And I think you and I have agreed for a long time, and I think I've heard you recently agree, that something that you don't like is that people getting into other people's business, that you should just mind your own business.
unidentified
I wish America would be so much better if everybody would mind their damn business.
You can send your kid to a school that is aligned with how you want to raise your kid.
I can send my kid to a school that Aligns with the way I would want to raise my kid or I could homeschool or you could homeschool and then we'd be able to choose instead of saying no you guys all live here you got to go to this school and then you know whoever runs that school they get they get veto power over all the parents and and what they want so like I brought up like what if it's you're in an area where it's a hyper Trump supporting school and they taught you that Trump was the divine right of King and
unidentified
You know, if you're on the left, you're probably saying— No one would call it indoctrination if it happened on the right, though.
I have advocated for it on TimCast IRL, and I'll advocate for it right now.
The indoctrination in schools that we want is the American flag, the Constitution, meritocracy, individual liberties, responsibility, and personal freedoms.
Instead, what we're getting is...
I would say on average schools are mechanic, industrialized.
Yeah, you'll learn some stuff here and there, but it's really about pop culture.
And then you'll see leftist ideologies emerging, which triggers the right.
On the right, you're not getting a whole lot of only American flags allowed.
Certainly those things do happen, but you're not getting it as much.
What you typically get in schools is... What's your measurement for that?
unidentified
When you say not as much, how are you measuring how much of that there is?
Bill Requiring Ten Commandments in Texas fails in house.
unidentified
Well, then it's got to be somewhere else.
Because the problem that they encountered was people were putting it in Arabic, the Ten Commandments in Arabic, and the districts didn't want to put those on the wall.
They were putting the Ten Commandments in, people as a, like a protest, they were putting the Ten Commandments in Arabic and giving it to the district and saying, the law says you have to put this on the wall now, and they were like, okay, now we meant the Ten Commandments in the Christian version, we did not mean the Arabic version.
This idea of this neutral world where, you know, it's like we should not have indoctrination in schools, you should not have the pride flag or the commandments, it doesn't exist.
Yeah, I think there is no such thing as a value-neutral school.
There's always going to be, even if it's not an explicit set of values that the school runs by, you're going to have people in the school that just naturally have their own values.
And, you know, that might make its way to the students if they don't do a careful job.
unidentified
I think what you guys are saying right now, from my perspective, is the opposite of America.
I feel like what America has invented and given to the world is a country where 300 million people from all over the world who have all different languages and religions and whatnot can live in one place together and operate a society together.
And one of the main ways that that happened through all of the 1900s is the public schooling system took people from all around.
The United States is rare and unique in that it had to invent ways for people to live together.
Because we are one of the only countries that has the population that we have.
Right?
You can eat a different kind of food every night, go to a different kind of festival every week.
This is the only country that has to figure out how people live together.
It has to be our number one export.
It has to be the thing that we decide on.
How can we have systems together?
How can we share parks?
How can we share education?
How can we do democracy without killing each other?
Right?
You have countries where everybody looks like each other.
That's not the United States.
You have some countries where everybody's the same.
What I think you're getting at, though, is that one way to kind of have a functioning democracy is the argument that we have to have residentially assigned schools to do that so that people from different backgrounds... No, no, I didn't say that.
Real quick, 88.6% of the country was white in 1960, 89.3% in 1950.
I'm not saying it was good or bad, I'm just saying that was the number.
So for a long time, this country was dominated just by like An overwhelming supermajority of white people, and now I believe white people are at, like, 70%.
unidentified
What I would argue about that a little bit, though, is those people weren't always white.
That's one of the things.
Like, DeAngelis wasn't white for a long period of American history.
Well, I mean... Like, among Jewish media writers, they say, I'm not white or I am white.
It's like, not everybody agrees.
unidentified
Yeah, I think though, if you think about people like Al Shanker, a lot of people credit him for making New Yorkers see that Jews were white at some point.
Up until that point, they had a very tough time in New York.
the wider you are, the better you are among everybody there. - Within the same population. - Yeah, but even among the, I forgot the name of the native population, the darker skinned, because it's not black people.
They do have black people, there's like a native.
But my friend was always explaining to me that black women proudly marry white men and show off their white grandkids because being whiter is better culturally or culturally.
I don't know if it's still that way.
And he said it was to the point where he's like, he's like, man, I will see like two black guys arguing over who's blacker.
It's like, that's a deeply ingrained racism they have down there.
Well, you know, there was a point in time where we were, I think, a lot more cordoned off, partitioned from each other.
You mean like pre-Loving v. Virginia?
Yeah, and even in my lifetime, I grew up in New Orleans, there was parts of New Orleans that actually stayed pretty segregated for a long period of time.
So if you look at the actual demographic breakdown of elections, the Latino neighborhoods voted for the Latino candidate, the white neighborhoods voted for the white candidate, the black neighborhoods ONLY voted for the black candidates.
So it's like the white and Latino candidates don't even appear on their top three.
The top three were all black.
And then you look at the Loyola area, which is younger white progressives voted for Brandon Johnson.
And so that's what got him the win, is that although I think Johnson was not leading in the black neighborhoods because he was like typically second or third plus the white votes from the progressive area, that was what put him over the edge.
But overwhelmingly, I mean, it's shocking if you look at Chicago, and you go by... I pulled up two maps.
Racial demographics of Chicago by neighborhood, and voting by neighborhood, and it is absolute, except for the progressive area.
The white neighborhoods vote for the white guy, Latino for the Latino guy, and black neighborhoods for the black guy.
And I'm like, that's bad.
That shouldn't be how we're voting.
So the only ones that broke from that were the socialists.
Yeah, so we've talked a lot about, you know, like, disagreements and, you know, we've disagreed about how often things are happening in the public school system, and I think, you know, I haven't really received an answer from you, like, if it isn't happening that much, Let's say it's only really happening 0.1% of the time.
Any type of ideological disagreement that you might believe is being amplified by certain segments of the media.
If it isn't happening that much, shouldn't school choice not be a big threat to the public schools since, hey, if everybody likes their own public school, they're still gonna send their kids there.
There should only be maybe 1% of the population that actually votes with their feet.
You know, shouldn't it really not be that big of an issue?
I guess that's one set of the questions.
And then two, you know, for those families that are in objectively failing schools academically, or maybe the kids getting bullied, or maybe there's some other thing that whether or not it's a widespread thing nationwide, should that small percentage of families have that choice to go to a safer school or to Whatever school works better for them than the assigned one.
unidentified
So I'd say yes to that.
We should always create avenues for young people that need different environments, and we do that through the public school system right now.
We do it through magnet schools.
You went to a very good magnet school, and you're Dr. DeAngelis.
You're Dr. Corey DeAngelis, and you went to magnet school.
We do it with charter schools.
We do it with open enrollment, PSEO, dual enrollment, and all those type of things.
So we have ALCs, alternative learning systems, right?
We have to stop talking about the system as if it's one system.
It is not one system.
It is a United States with 100,000 different schools and 14,000 different school districts that have wildly different things going on and different options depending on the local kind of need, right?
So we already have a lot of choice.
The problem with choice that I'm having right now probably is a couple things, specifically with you, Corey, right?
So the first thing is, number one, I said it before, it's not an educational intervention.
We need an intervention in our schools.
Kids were doing better under NCLB.
For that period of time, they were just doing better.
Everything was going up.
When we had bipartisan agreement on the fact that data matters and teaching matters and the curriculum matters, that's what the education discussion is, right?
When you get to the choice thing, two problems with that, number one, is that you guys broke off from the multicultural school choice movement and started selling it as anti-woke.
And when you did that, you threw a lot of us under the bus.
We were a multiracial, multicultural, bipartisan movement.
And then at some point, that conversation you talked about with Steve Perry, you told me specifically that you weren't going to sell this with the anti-woke stuff.
And then you went on to do this kind of white-only type of thing.
I've been consistent, and I said it on the show today, that if people want to go to a school that has CRT, that should be the parent's decision, and we shouldn't all be forced into it at once.
I've said it a couple times on the show.
unidentified
But you didn't use to sell it as a way for white people to get away from those other people.
My argument is not about getting away from those people.
It's about going to a school that aligns with your values and has curriculum that's aligned with your values.
And a lot of the times it's talked about in terms of the schools focusing on the basics and not having any type of political injection into the classroom.
unidentified
So literally, and you know this story, So literally there was a research study put out by the Heritage Foundation a couple years ago that basically said we've been trying to sell school choice as a multicultural, bipartisan thing for too long.
We actually should go hard on the people who matter most.
That's a political... Who were the people that mattered most?
So we used to be part of a school choice movement nationally that was everybody.
black schools for black kids if they need it, and we can get vouchers, and we could start our own schools, and we'll create our own solutions, and we'll be able to have self-determination.
And if you want something else, you know, like, so was the everybody movement.
It became, at some point, this movement of, we should just go for white moms.
Everybody can still have the choice to take their kids' education dollars to the public or private school that works best for them.
What's interesting is that before these bills weren't passing, we didn't have a universal school choice program before 2021.
It has been on the Republican Party platform since before COVID already, but, you know, it wasn't really passing even in red states.
And now we have 11 states with the universal school choice that have passed with Republican-led legislatures, the red states.
I think that's when you kind of jump ship on the movement.
It's like, you saw that the Republicans were passing this, so I can't be for this anymore.
unidentified
No.
Because at the very same time... And I think the point of the heritage... The very same time that all those were passing, it was packaged in these education censorship laws that were pulling black books off the shelf and rewriting black history.
And I said to people like you and others, I don't know why we need to sell school choice that way.
The rewriting of, the outlawing of entire thought systems.
We don't like this thought system, so we're gonna outlaw it.
That to me is education censorship and gag orders.
When you're setting up teacher hotlines so that people can snitch on teachers if they teach something that feels divisive. - So if that wasn't happening in these states, you would support school choice.
- No. - Because that's when you kind of divided, right?
unidentified
You kind of started disagreeing when you saw the anti-CRT bills, the books... When I started seeing the negative tail of what this was gonna mean for my community, that's when I broke off.
And actually, here's a couple of places where it became a negative tail.
When you made it universal for everybody, including people who weren't in the system already, who were in private schools, that actually started a dilution process of what this was going to mean for everybody else still in the school system.
When you have people who are able to access even the private school market now, the black private school market, the market and opportunities for low-income kids and the black market is going to be way different than it is for the more affluent people, right?
For instance, I would say I think one of the big mistakes DeSantis made is you don't need the Stop Woke Act to stop books like this because this book is already illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
You literally cannot accuse white or any other race of being inherently wrong, bad, evil, demonic, devilish, or whatever.
That's not telling black kids that they can't succeed.
That's black parents actually parenting black kids in the United States, and we should be the ones that determine whether or not our message is right for them.
Well, it's illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
unidentified
Part of the way that you frame it can make it illegal, but I don't think that the hate you give as a book should be pulled from the bookshelf because one white woman doesn't like that type of material in the school district.
I don't believe that we should be allowed to present books that disparage positively or negatively discriminate against races.
unidentified
And I don't think that that should lead white people to pull black books off the shelves that they disagree with and take it away from my kid to even be able to access it in the library.
I'm saying in the principal argument, you can isolate bad things we don't like and you bring that up and we'll say, agreed, that was bad.
Now, as for the calling white people devils, Yeah.
That should not be allowed.
unidentified
So you think this is more important as a problem than AP black history being rewritten, but AP European history being left alone just the way it is right now?
They pulled out very specific scholars and they replaced them with scholars that they thought were more appropriate for black people to learn from, meaning that they were more conservative scholars.
But who did it?
DeSantis had a commission of people that worked on this.
So they actually worked on attacking those specific standards, and they left all the other ones whole.
So they left the European standards and everything just the way that they were.
So if you're a white kid and you're in Florida, you can go and get that, and it's just the way it's supposed to be.
So this is an egregious example that we can easily pull up because it's easily discernible to the average person why it's wrong, illegal, and shouldn't be allowed in schools.
And then we end up with our things like Kimberly Crenshaw and Derrick Bell, where many people aren't familiar with their writings, which I also believe should not be allowed in grade school curriculum.
If schools want to teach CRT in a broad sense of this is what CRT is, totally fine.
unidentified
I don't think that's appropriate for kids, but this was the game that- You don't think it's appropriate- For kids to learn a major—whether I agree with it or not, I don't even want to say—but to learn major thought systems.
I mean, like, even, like, I'm not a Marxist, but I have no problem with my kid, like, my kid— Listen, we're not going to have a sixth-grade philosophy of Marxist thought class.
If you want it in high school, start getting into this stuff.
I have no problem with sixth graders learning about how Marx was influential in the Soviet Union, if they're doing social studies in history, but to sit down and go through the nuances of critical theory, gender theory, race theory with fifth and sixth graders, I'm like, a little bit, and this was the woke argument.
The left said, no one thinks college level legal classes should be taught to children.
And then we're going, that's not what they're doing.
Now, the problem is conservatives tend to be Reactionary.
And so what you get is people who don't actually know the deeper layers of what's going on.
They didn't know.
It's not critical race theory in schools.
It's critical race praxis in schools.
Praxis, for instance, is what should be banned.
That's when, and this is what Asra Nomani brought in when she brought in these books.
There was one, it's hilarious, it's like, It's a math book, and you're learning math problems.
And remember the famous math problems where it's like a train leaves Pittsburgh, traveling at 70 miles an hour, and a train leaves Philadelphia.
At what point will the trains collide?
This one said, Jimmy is stopped by the police two times in one year, and Jamal is stopped 17 times in one year.
What percentage of police stops affected black people disproportionately?
Going to the original core of Crenshaw's argument, Karl Marx didn't understand racial dynamics in the United States, so the idea of a class-based oppression system overlooked race, because the United States has a race-based oppression system.
Therefore, critical race theory must be brought, and now you have in schools things like this, the idea of the oppressed versus oppressor, where they quite literally have the, they call it the progressive stack.
- This is a big distraction. - And you have an opportunity right now to end the distraction by writing a bill to ban something that you think doesn't happen. - By banning what local school districts actually do with their curriculum?
- No, no, no, no, no, no.
So we're talking about saying that there's a class, a race-based class hierarchy.
And that schools utilize this in their curriculum.
You say it doesn't happen.
If it's not happening, let's just be done with the distraction, and you can easily prove all these conservatives will be like, fine, draft the bill, we'll sign it, and we win, we're done.
unidentified
I don't know that that's 100% what I was saying doesn't happen, but what I will say is this.
There's a difference between San Francisco and Idaho, right?
There are these things, they're called school boards.
And there are these other things that are called superintendents.
And there are these things called state laws that allow local school districts to decide for themselves what's the community standard for their particular curriculum.
And if you want to have a problem with any of these things, you don't go on Fox News, you go to your school board, and you start saying, I have a problem with these things, and then you end up on a curriculum committee.
Or they silence your mic because you're reading from those books and they want to have the books in the classroom.
unidentified
As a school board member, I'm not going to do the Fox News line.
When you actually sit on a school board and you actually look at how these things happen, there is a process for all these things, and it's based upon local community stuff.
So it is very different in Seattle and San Francisco than what you're going to get in my state.
And in Sacramento, they created white racial affinity groups where white kids could come together to learn white history and what it means to be a white person and only white people are allowed to be in it.
You're saying so they'd have to create a black only at the same time to create- There probably is a black one, and there's probably a gay one, and there's probably- And segregation.
unidentified
Well, I mean, okay.
So let's stick with that for a second.
In Washington, D.C., they wanted to start an all-boys school because they thought that black boys were falling behind in D.C., and they thought that they needed a school where they could concentrate and focus on them becoming successful.
There was one city council member who said, that's segregation, you can't do that.
Well, so long as any race is allowed to go to those academies, it's no issue.
unidentified
Yeah.
In the Hmong one, it did end up having some black kids there, but we do have a local person that actually is for integration, and he opposed all of those.
And he wanted to actually... That's a different argument.
This is a lawsuit.
In Minnesota, this is a lawsuit.
They want to pass a law that means that if black charter schools don't attract more white kids, they will lose their money.
If there was a school and it was called like Black Americans Academy for Excellence, and it was 100% black, And a white guy showed up and said, I think my kids would learn from you and I'd love to have them.
And they said, that would be fantastic.
By all means, come on in.
That's great.
That's fantastic.
unidentified
Did you know that there are like certain historically black colleges that actually are all white now?
And did you know that Morehouse actually, I think it was Morehouse, had a white valedictorian?
Right?
It was like groundbreaking.
And it was not a problem at all.
This is like one of the most popular guys in the school.
And he had no problem going to a historically black college.
If someone wanted to set up a school Like a university, I don't know, public schools are different, but if there was like an academy, a university, a charter school that was centered specifically around black scholars, black history, or even Asian or Latino or whatever, I have no problem whatsoever, so long as they don't bar people or require quotas based on race.
I think that is all bad.
If we really want to have this big melting pot, we need to say that people are welcome to learn from each other and not exclude them.
The worrying thing to me is like, when I was covering the BLM stuff, I was in St.
Louis, I was in Ferguson, when I was in Ferguson I was in Baltimore, and Ferguson, for example, had at their organizing space a black diaspora-only room.
But I want to hear what the other definition is, because that's how I would define it too.
Just if you're saying, because you are this race, I'm going to... I have a certain feeling about you because you're this or that or the other race.
So it's based on... I don't know how else you would define it, right?
unidentified
Yeah, America is a racial caste system and has been from the very beginning.
So there were laws that were passed all along that actually created the caste system.
And it's the reason why you have a legacy of differences in different populations in the United States, with almost always black being on the bottom and the white being on top, and then some other groups actually in the totem, in the racial totem.
And that actually wasn't an accident, that was actually structural.
And that is what racism is.
Racism is the intentional system of a racial hierarchy.
When you talk about things like eugenics and the science of eugenics and where that came from and how they were ordering the races, and when you start talking about scientific racism and the origins of those things, that actually is not made up.
Let me clarify the idea of making... So words are used, and I shouldn't have to say this, to convey meaning.
And that means that when there is a group of people that use a word, we try to understand what idea is being conveyed by that word.
Throughout my entire life, and in most historical contexts, and according to Oxford, what you said does not align with the typical English use of the word racism.
Now there is an academic leftist worldview of institutionalized or systems of power based on oppression or whatever, but that is an atypical What is?
definition that the average person doesn't understand.
So if we're talking about how to define a word, I look at this and I say, this is a blue bottle.
When someone says, I had a hot dog, you don't have to stop there and go, now, hold on.
What do you mean by hot dog?
Because you know what a hot dog is.
But imagine now a bunch of people started deciding that hot dogs were hamburgers.
Okay?
No one is saying that word to describe what you're talking about.
unidentified
I don't know what the hamburger and hot dog thing is, though, but just so that I follow, you're saying that the understanding of racism was never about a hierarchical structure of race.
I would say, within... Like white supremacy as the guide, starting with people like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote notes on Virginia, and actually used science to say that science proves that the races should be separate and should be different, and that actually worked its way into the fabric of our country.
The general idea that a person has when they say the word racism is positive or negative discrimination based on race or the presumption that one race is superior to another.
This is a core component of the culture war in the left versus right in that The left goes around as a fringe group representing between eight to 12% of the U.S.
population, not the world, saying things that people don't get, like Latinx, which is supported by almost no one.
So what happens then is they show up to a group of 100 people and they say, did you know that this country is racist?
And what they're actually saying is, did you know this country institutionally has a scientific view that was used in the formation of its country?
No one thinks that's what you mean.
Because you're using a word in a way the average person doesn't comprehend or understand and assuming it's the definition or asserting it is.
If we're literally talking about the Oxford definition of the word racism, and you use a definition that is atypical and not aligned with academia, I will correct you.
unidentified
I was talking about Latinx.
So you said this fringe group of leftist people make up these things like Latinx and then they go into places and spaces and they start saying these things and people are like, what the hell are you talking about?
What did you just say?
And I'm just asking, is there a right-wing version of that?
Now, my point is when it comes to grade schools, I said, I think it's fine if a teacher wants to explain what CRT is to a student.
I don't know that most parents would think we need college level legal courses on like Marxist philosophies for grade students, but I have no problem with them saying, I want you to learn about the history of critical race theory.
The problem I have is praxis, not the teaching of legal theories.
So if they said, here's a book on CRT, Here's a book on Marxist-Leninism.
Here's Adam Smith's The Invisible Hand.
or whatever. - Wealth of nations. - Wealth of nations, dust capital, all of these things.
I'd be like, yeah, sure.
Now imagine they started incorporating the ideology into the fundamental underlying through praxis of the entire school that I take issue with. - Okay, so one of the previous examples that you gave was of a piece of material that said, whiteness is this and white people do that.
unidentified
And it was identifying a group of people that do a certain thing, and you said that that was racist.
And this is identifying white people as doing a very specific thing because they're white.
Right, that's a good question too, but this is a specific White liberals present themselves as less competent could be viewed positively or negatively.
In fact, I'm sure there are a lot of progressives who say, well, you have to understand black people don't know how to get IDs and they don't know where the DMV is.
So they need us to act like there are people who say those things.
They think they're being good by doing it.
And so perhaps this is not positive or negative, it's an assessment from a study that was done.
If it said white liberals treat black people like they're morons, I'd say we shouldn't frame it that way.
unidentified
I believe that this would probably be legal under the divisive concepts laws.
Under the divisive concept laws, because you are saying that white people specifically, because they are white, are doing something specific.
See, I have no problem With, you know, if they come out and they said something like, according to FBI crime statistics, young black men commit substantially more murders than white men, I say, okay, well, I don't know if that's the stats they found or whatever.
But if it disparaged black people in that process, I'd say we don't need that.
What we need is a greater contextual understanding of what these stats are, whether there's underlying biases behind them, whether it's prejudice from police or socioeconomics, whatever it may be.
Yale putting out a study like this is why I said perhaps parents would agree these kinds of topics aren't appropriate for 5th and 6th graders.
But certainly in high school, you're getting into your later years and learning about these things and definitely into college.
One of the recent polls at a University of Houston in Texas about the, they even called them vouchers, so they use the politically charged term that gets you typically lower positive rankings of school choice than if you were to call it school choice or education savings accounts.
They found a majority support of school choice, even when they called it vouchers in Texas, from the University of Houston for all Background demographics, they cut it by race and they cut it by party as well, liberal versus Republican, conservative, and they found that every group had a majority support for vouchers except for white Democrats.
Black Democrats actually had one of the highest groups of support for vouchers in Texas.
unidentified
But I was just an aside because we were talking about white liberals, but the other thing I wanted to ask... I mean, that was also the only group that didn't... I feel like you guys are okay with racism when it's white leftists that are getting the racism.
But I really wanted to ask, based on your definition of racism, let's say Tim's in Oxford is wrong, Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Wait a minute!
thing would you apply that logic to the public school system as it exists today would you say that there are systemic racism in the public schools oh yeah so shouldn't we be able to have our kids go somewhere else if they're being um subject to just wait a minute i like public schools now you like it now he's That's all it took to win him over, you know?
unidentified
That's the joke!
You know I've been saying for years that I think that there are racist structures within education.
The argument being these public school systems were built, and I think it's a historical fact, the public school system is Was absolutely created in a society of racism.
When desegregation came into play, a lot of white families formed suburbs and then passed covenants, housing covenants, which were on paper not racist, but were literally intended to isolate their communities and create small towns, resulting in something like 99 cities within one county, and they each have their own police department.
And so, literally built for the purpose of being like, we don't want to live with other races, you now have this massive multi-county system, sorry, a multi-city system within one county, where what ends up happening is, there's a, and we interviewed people who've been through this, there's a low-income neighborhood in western St.
Louis County, and predominantly black.
They make very little money, they have very little commercial industry, and they're trying.
And we interviewed a handful of these guys, good people, good hardworking people.
And one guy says, you know, I'm paying my rent, I'm paying my taxes, I can't afford to get my license plate updated.
So I have to make a choice.
Am I gonna feed my kids, or am I gonna spend the $35 on my license plate?
My kids are getting food.
I then drive to work.
When I drive to work, I drive through four different cities.
And in each city I drive through, I get pulled over for not having an updated plate, and I get a ticket for 50 bucks.
I get $200 in fines because of the way they built this system.
Now, I know none of those cops are doing it because they're racist.
They're doing it because my license plate expired.
But because of the system as it was built, it results in this negative impact on the lower-income communities, which are predominantly black.
I think that's a completely fair assessment to make.
Like, holy crap, this system was built because people were racist, and now it's perpetuating a disproportionate system on one group of people.
I think the solution is economic and not race-based.
So we should say things like, if your license plate is expired or it's a minor moving violation, you should not be able to get multiple tickets in multiple jurisdictions.
You should be able to show one city's ticket and say, it's the one fine.
What ends up happening is, They can't pay the fine, so they get a day in jail.
Some minor... Okay, we're gonna arrest you for the unpaid ticket.
They go... They call it going on tour.
So one kid was telling us, he's like, look man, my headlight was out.
I drive through four cities on my way to work, five miles.
I get pulled over.
I say, yeah, I'm sorry, man.
They're like, well, here's your ticket for a moving violation.
Now I can go home and stop driving and not go to work.
I don't have the money to fix the headlight, but I got to go to work.
So I keep driving.
I get pulled over the next one.
No headlight, another ticket.
Then I go to jail for a weekend.
As soon as I get out on Monday, the cops from the next city are waiting for me and they take me to the next police station.
That's called going on tour.
So, I don't think those cops are being racist.
I think a system was built a long time ago by racists that now has a perpetuating negative impact.
My issue with the critical race theorists, the woke and the left, is they think the solution is going to be based on race when the solution is going to be based on economics.
Because now, it's interesting in that these areas are predominantly black, but there are white people living there, there are Latinos living there, and they do suffer the same consequences.
What's the saying, the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination?
Yeah, Ibram Kendi.
unidentified
Well, I mean, you know, so I think what you just said, Tim, actually is the definition I was talking about of racism.
And it's funny because actually that is the way that racism was commonly conceived for all of the time that we've studied things like housing covenants and public housing and the way people were put into public housing.
Did you know this?
Did you know that in public housing it used to be mostly white?
And to live in public housing you had to be married and you had to sign something that basically said your kids will not be bad because if they do something you'll lose your public housing, which gave you a really good incentive to keep everything under control, right?
You had to be married, you had to be a family, and you had to keep your kids under control or you lost your...
So when they decided to lure those families into the suburbs and get them into single-family homes, they dropped all those rules, and then they moved Black people into those projects.
And they dropped all the rules.
Like, you no longer had to be married, you didn't have to... That is going to produce a racial result.
It is a structure you're putting in place that's going to create a racial result.
Here, I'll give you my thoughts real quick, and then we do gotta wrap up.
But growing up in Chicago, We had, I lived on 49th Street.
47th Street was the racial segregation line.
The unofficial line.
As soon as you crossed north of 47th, you were in an entirely black neighborhood.
Everybody, every single person.
And a part of it is called the LeClaire Courts.
They demolished a lot of it.
It was a lot of public housing.
South of this line was very mixed, but largely white.
When you crossed Cicero, you are now in the Hispanic segregated line.
You cross Cicero, all the ads are in Spanish.
And so, growing up the way I did, I then see these solutions where they're like reparations and things like this.
And I'm like, if you want to start riots and gang war, The fastest way to do it is to give one race any kind of public benefit outright.
Preferably not money.
But if it was a cash thing, or it was like a tax thing where it's like, we're gonna build schools... Yeah.
You know, the Hispanic neighborhood is gonna be like, we know where the money's at, and then all of a sudden you're gonna get race wars.
Because... These neighborhoods are racially segregated.
I'm like, what you should do is socioeconomic.
Why?
Because then, if you believe that the black community is on the bottom and...
Predominantly the lower income and oppressed because of this they will predominantly be lifted up without excluding the poor Asian Latino or white guy and that will alleviate the the white side and the Latino side looking at the black side as having the money now and then having like you just don't want to do that so You gotta make sure you- You don't wanna do that.
Well, I don't want the Hispanic guy living in a black neighborhood to be surrounded by a bunch of people all celebrating, and then he gets mad being like, because I'm Hispanic, I don't get anything.
He's like, I'm poor, man.
I grew up in this neighborhood, and that was the typical view.
Whenever people brought this stuff up, they're like, what?
You're my neighbor.
We both live in the slums, and they're gonna give you money because you're whatever race?
It just breeds racial animosity.
unidentified
I know we gotta wrap.
So I will say, on that last point, this is the argument that we have with reparations in the United States, and here's where I think it's different.
Black people have a particular grievance to make with their government, and that grievance has never been settled.
It hasn't been settled in court.
It wasn't settled anywhere.
They were emancipated, and they were going to be given land, and they were going to be given some outlay, and instead what they did was they paid reparations to the former slave owners instead of paying it to the people who were recently emancipated.
And every settlement that Black people have had, the Civil Rights Settlement, the Reconstruction Settlement, and all of those, actually did not get to the particularity of the Black problem, specific to Black people.
It doesn't have anything to do with Asian people.
It doesn't have anything to do with Hispanic people.
So in my state, where you have reservations for Native Americans, I don't look at those reservations and go, oh my god, I can't believe you're giving Indians land.
No, that was a settlement that the Indians made with the United States government.
Black people never got their settlement with the United States government that the Native Americans got.
The Bureau of Land Management has basically just taken over large swaths of American territory and has just isolated it.
Take it from the government, give it to people, I don't care who those people are.
unidentified
Well Tim, you have just solved the problem, because land is money, land is capital, and land is the one thing that was given to the Native Americans that wasn't given to the African Americans.
But would you be supportive of vouchers in that type?
unidentified
Something specific happening for the things that black people lost in the education system.
For instance, like in 1954 after Brown v. Board, the majority of black teachers were fired, and the majority of black principals were demoted to janitors, and the majority of black schools were closed.
But what if it's just in the form of, you've been relegated to the crappy schools, you're assigned to this school, the lines have been drawn based on race, this system isn't working, you get $10,000, but you can only use it to go to a private school.
unidentified
Yeah, I think you're talking like an integrationist, because I think integration has been the one way that people have posed an answer to that question.
Yeah, what we need to do is break down the boundaries of schools, right?
Because kids in white school districts are getting $2 billion more a year than districts right next to them that are all black.
My last thought, we've got a population density problems.
We have a bunch of an underdeveloped land, especially in the Midwest to West Coast, and the federal government sits on it, and we're seeing it sold off to Chinese investors and things like that.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Okay, I don't care.
You know, my only concern on, like, racial reparations of giving land away is that you might create big racially segregated areas, but I gotta be honest, I'd rather...
A private black citizen owned that land in the federal government or China.
So how about we just compromise?
But anyway, anyway, I'm going to open a can of worms.
unidentified
You just solved so many problems.
You just like, like literally I want a clip of what you just said.
