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May 8, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:17:35
Christopher Rufo: On Civil Liberties, the American Founding, Academic Freedom, and More

Christopher Rufo and Glenn Greenwald debate the role of government in higher education, the meaning of academic freedom, the American Founders' vision for universities, and more.  ------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Follow Christopher Rufo Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook   LinkedIn  

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It's Wednesday, May 7th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every single Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
Regardless of what you think of him, or really about any issue, there's no denying the profound influence that tonight's guest, Christopher Ruffo, has had on conservative politics and then state and federal policy more broadly.
Though he has often focused on educational debates and educational institutions, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, appointed him to a key position to transform that state's new school from an institution largely producing left-wing thought to one that is more...
Aligned with conservative educational dogma and policy.
He was also instrumental in publicizing the plagiarism, the serial plagiarism of Harvard President Claudine Gay, which, along with issues regarding Campus Israel protests and anti-Semitism, led to her firing after only six months in that position.
And in general, he's become one of the most influential voices.
That shapes the views of leading conservative politicians and media figures.
Riffel appeared on our program once before back in 2023 where we spent an hour exploring his core beliefs and goals, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not.
The conversation was spirited but unfailingly civil and I think illuminating some of the controversies surrounding his work.
What prompted Rufo's appearance tonight were comments that I had made about him and other right-wing figures in an interview I gave about the Trump administration to Reason Magazine.
Rufo saw those comments, noted them, and objected to them on X. And when I responded, it led to a back and forth, but it became rapidly apparent, at least to me, that social media was the absolute worst venue to try to sort through those issues we were discussing, some of which have a lot of complexity and nuance to them.
Things like the core values of the American founding, the values and views that most influence the founders, and how all of those questions apply to our current political debates, especially over civil liberties and the freedom of academic institutions.
So I suggested that we remove the conversation to a platform more suitable to a constructive exchange, and he quickly agreed to come on this program for us to do so.
Rufo's influence and accomplishments are not really captured by his official biography, but for those unfamiliar with it, he is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute.
He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where his writings explore a range of issues, including critical race theory, gender ideology, homelessness, addiction, crime, and the decline of American cities.
He has been published in Fox and the New York Post and has been the subject of numerous corporate media profiles.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
And as a filmmaker, he has directed four documentaries for PBS, Netflix, and international television, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities.
The issues we hope to discuss are, in my view, some of the most consequential for American politics and the West more broadly, and I'm very much looking forward to our exploration of our agreements and our disagreements on all of those questions.
Before we get to that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting after this message from our sponsor.
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So just about two minutes ago, I read you the full biography, the influence and accomplishment of tonight's guest, Christopher Ruppo, as well as the background for what had led us to this conversation.
So without further ado and having to go into all of that again, I want to welcome Chris to the show.
Chris, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Thanks so much for coming on and agreeing to do this.
I'm not able to hear Chris.
I don't know if that's- An issue on our end or his, but I'm going to ask my question.
Okay, we're just going to figure out, because I know everybody loves to hear me, but I think it's good if they can hear you as well.
I don't know if...
All right, you know what?
I'm going to go ahead and ask my first question, because it involves the contacts, and we'll figure it out in the interim to make sure that people can hear you.
Yeah, you know what?
We're just going to wait a little bit.
Builds up the drama and the tension.
How about this?
Yeah, now I can hear Chris now.
I think everybody should be able to.
Is that accurate?
Can you confirm that?
All right.
We'll try around.
Yep.
All right.
Sounds good.
Just a little warm up, and now we're ready to go.
So, you know, it's interesting.
When I was thinking about...
How to do this?
How to conduct our discussion?
The issues that we discussed, even though it was just a few tweets, were so far-reaching and kind of complex that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, so the hard part was figuring out what to kind of focus on.
And there was a series of tweets that you posted in response to that interview I had given in Reason, where I basically said, and it was part of a larger conversation, I was asked specifically about you and I said basically I think you're very shrewd and influential and successful operative and journalist but to me it seems like you've gotten to the point where you care more about this kind of Machiavellian quest for power than you do about principles.
And in response he said this.
This is absurd, Glenn Greenwald.
I have advanced a consistent set of principles this entire time.
The problem is that many, quote, classical liberals believe that anyone who doesn't share their principles have no principles at all.
It is a form of parochialism, an ideological blinder.
The American tradition is much broader than post-war civil libertarianism.
The philosophy of the founding is not the same as the ideology of the 1960s ACLU.
Before criticizing others is un...
And that was the end of your quote.
So what I want to do is ask you this.
You kind of defined this worldview that I presume you were attributing to me and other critics of yours, which is a worldview that you reject, and you defined it as post-world...
Post-war civil libertarianism, as well as 1960s ACLU ideology.
What I wanted to ask you, what specific parts of those phrases, like 1960s ACLU ideology, post-war civil libertarianism, do you object to and not share?
It's really a mistaken conception of some of America's core freedoms, some of America's core conceptions of equality, and then really, I think most importantly, the conception that the founders had of how the republic worked, meaning what kind of institutions comprise the republic, what kind of values are important to be practiced, developed, and advanced through the republic, and then what is this actual relationship between the institutions and the state?
These are complex questions that I think have been boiled down to a series of kind of one-sided, one-dimensional ideologies encapsulated in, say, post-war civil libertarianism that has an extreme conception of many of the things that are on the screen here of Free speech,
of so-called academic freedom, institutional autonomy, that these are all, in a sense, fictions that were invented in recent times that are then back-projected, supposedly representing the Bill of Rights or Enlightenment values.
But if you actually scrutinize them, there's really a kind of tenuous connection between the two.
I think it's...
Highly contestable, and my own principles haven't changed at all.
And I'm sure we'll get into it, but the relationship between principle and power is very key.
And the problem with many, you know, kind of centrist, civil libertarian types, is that they want to really back away from power altogether.
They think that any exercise of power is inherently corrupted or corruptible.
But actually, the founders believed in, you know, not arbitrary power, But the judicious use of power towards virtuous ends, I think that is a defensible position and actually, in many ways, an inevitable position because power exists in the world.
The question is, what do we do with it?
Absolutely.
But just to drill a little bit more deeply and especially to kind of try and extract some specifics of what you disagree with in those worldviews as you've defined them.
1960s ACLU ideology or post-war civil libertarianism to me are very similar.
And I think if you ask a lot of people who identify with those evolutions, at least, or progress as a lot of people see them, they would cite things like the Brandenburg case of the Supreme Court where A KKK leader had stood up and given a speech and basically saying if the government doesn't stop treating white people unfairly, it'll be time for revolution or violence.
And he was convicted under a terrorism statute, which said you can't advocate violence against the government.
And the Supreme Court overruled that conviction and said the First Amendment basically is so broad that any kind of expression of political views, even as they said abstract advocacy of violence.
It's protected by the First Amendment.
The only exception is if you are directing a mob toward imminent violence, like you gather a mob and you say go burn in that house.
And then one of the other kind of hallmarks or landmarks of ACLU ideology or post-war civil libertarianism is the Skokie controversy where the American Nazi Party asked for a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois, which was filled with Holocaust survivors.
That's the reason they wanted to march there.
The city denied the permit, saying it's too traumatizing for Holocaust survivors to see people in Nazi uniforms.
The ACLU notoriously or famously defended them, cost them a lot of support.
They almost went bankrupt.
But their argument was that unless you're willing to defend universally applicable rights, even to or even on behalf of your most intransigent political enemies, that Essentially those rights will cease to have any real meaning.
Are there things about those specific ideas or values that you find objectionable?
Well, I mean, look, these are the two kind of canonical and mythological cases for the ACLU.
And so the problem is not with the Skokie story, the Skokie case, where I think I'm broadly sympathetic to your view.
The question is really about the work that I'm doing, perhaps that the Trump administration is doing.
That is really much more complex and really not reducible to, let's say, a First Amendment claim.
The question is, you know, what do we do with America's institutions?
What do we do with state universities in Florida or in other places?
You know, what is the authority of the president over the administration?
How does Article II powers work?
You know, and I think the real hot issue, and perhaps this is where we have...
Some disagreement, and perhaps you can articulate why you have argued that I have abandoned my principles in pursuit of power.
But if we take what's happening right now with the Ivy League, it's highly contested, it's highly controversial, it's a really heated and I think an important fight.
I think all of these things are consistent, and all of the policy work that I did in Florida, all of the advocacy, you know, starting back then, leading up to the present, is kind of part and parcel of one basic principle.
And the principle that I'd like to advance is, you know, in a republic, the people through their elected government get to decide the shape of institutions.
They have an absolute authority over the institutions of the state, and they have a reciprocal obligation to enforce contractual agreements between the state and its contractors or recipients of funds, for example, the Ivy League universities.
I don't think that that compromises the, let's say, the liberal principles of the American founding, but in fact, if you look at the founding, what I'm advancing is really consistent with that.
And I don't think oversteps abound of any kind.
So I definitely want to delve deeply and spend a good amount of time on the authority or the extent to which the government or the state can kind of mess around in the curriculum or the ideology that professors or the school as a whole are defending because I do think that is crucial to A lot of these current debates under the Trump administration,
but just to answer your question, it is interesting because I think you know this, but I've been critical of MAGA or the right.
For what I perceive to be a sort of hypocrisy when it comes to, or an inconsistency when it comes to championing free speech principles, but then turning around and seeming to endorse certain kinds of censorship when it comes to things like antisemitism or Israel or even other issues.
But whenever I would say that in interviews, I would always say, and by no means does that mean all of them.
In fact, there are some very notable exceptions who have been pretty consistent in objecting to censorship, even when it applies to They're political adversaries, and you were always one of the people that I cited.
And part of that reason is because you had many times or several times spoken up in agreement with my critique where I was criticizing Republican governors or political officials.
And one such time, and I went back and looked at these, and this is the one that caught my attention.
I had been attacked by some Jewish leftist on the grounds that I was essentially associating myself with white supremacy because of my arguments that the threat of white nationalism, which the Biden administration was saying was the greatest threat, had been overblown, that it was being used as a pretext to increase surveillance, to punish political enemies.
And he, in response, referred to this long thread about my work on free speech and how sometimes it brought me in alignment with white nationalists and the like.
And he said, "What were you doing here?" And I said, The same things my heroes at the ACLU of the 1970s did.
It's called having principles.
And then I pointed to Skokie, Illinois, and said, these are the principles that would cause them even to defend the right of anti-Semites like you to call your Jewish critics insects, and so would I. So it was a little Twitter spice.
But the point was that that's the value that I most defended.
In response, you said...
Glenn is on fire.
So for me, I was using the Skokie case.
As I said, the Brandenburg case is probably the more important one because that was a Supreme Court ruling defining what the First Amendment covers and what it doesn't.
But it seemed to me like in that case you were also ratifying a belief in what you're now calling the ACLU ideology of the 1960s.
And it seemed to me like that that has diluted a bit.
Am I wrong about that?
Yeah, I don't think you're right.
Look, I don't accept it wholesale.
I accept it, of course, in part.
And on this part, I think that we're in alignment.
You know, one of the things that I've, you know, consistently opposed and have written in opposition to is, you know, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that was moving its way through Congress and related pieces of legislation.
You know, I've also kind of voiced strong opposition to this idea around campus life.
Where there was a temptation, I think, for many American Jews to say, hey, let's also get the coverage and protection of DEI policies.
So let's just have DEI and also include Jews in the DEI formula.
I've, of course, opposed that.
I think we should have no DEI of any kind.
We should have no specific legislation like the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that I think is a...
Unnecessary, unproductive.
And so on these core and I think really discrete speech issues, we can agree.
But I think it's really up to you to make the case.
If you're going to say that I've abandoned my principles or that I've adopted some kind of unprincipled quest for power, I mean, that's a heavy accusation.
I don't think it's true.
And I'd be curious, you know, why you think that?
Yeah, for sure.
You know, as I noted when you pulled out that excerpt, it was part of this, like, much broader conversation.
I gave a very long answer.
And so I don't want to abandon that accusation and just, like, let's say, oh, let's forget about that.
But I think having read a lot of what you've written, having followed your work, having listened to a lot of the interviews that you've given and the like, Sometimes there is a kind of ambiguity in what you think.
So all I'm trying to do is just try, and maybe it's just me, maybe it's my perception, but to try and get a more specific understanding of what it is that you actually do think so that then we can talk about whether you've changed.
And honestly, I think what you do think now is a more interesting question than the extent to which you've changed.
You had mentioned, in that quote that I gave, I said something like, you had this Machiavellian quest for power, and you gave a response basically saying that Machiavelli was a positive influence on the founders, especially John Adams, and you agreed with that.
I want to get to that in a second.
That question in a second, because it seems a little abstract, but I think it's important.
But the interesting thing about the founders when it comes to one of the topics on which you most focus, which is the role, what academic institutions are supposed to be, What universities are supposed to be is that several of the key founders actually founded or were part of the founding of educational institutions, Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia.
And when Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, he wrote a letter to William Roscoe, this was in 1820, and he said, This institution, meaning the University of Virginia, will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind.
For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
Basically meaning academia is the one place, and there's a lot of Enlightenment thinkers who said the same, where we have to be even more aggressive about ensuring that our debates are unlimited.
You can question any orthodoxy.
You can express any view that might offend people gravely.
You can even be wrong about things, where the solution is just to make sure that discourse is always free from government interference, from outside interference, or even from internal administrative interference, that the idea of an academic institution is full academic freedom and unlimited free discourse.
Is that a view of academic institutions expressed there by Jefferson that you share?
No, that's actually not even Jefferson's view.
And so he's talking in a kind of philosophical and speculative way about the illimitable freedom of the human mind.
But if you actually read his Rockfish Gap Report, which is the charter document of the University of Virginia, part of his legacy of which he was most proud, he writes that the university should be, quote, at all times and in all things subject to the control of the legislature.
And what he means by that is that this is a public institution, and the highest authority of that institution was the legislature, which chartered it, funded it, and guided it.
This doesn't mean that the legislature should micromanage in every case or have too much of an influence if things are going well.
But the point was, if the university were to get out of hand, if it were to lose balance, if it were to, you know...
Compromise the pursuit of truth.
Jefferson knew that in a republic the people are the ultimate authorities and he wanted to make clear at that very initial point that the legislature had control over reforming the institution and when that institution had violated its core commitments the legislature had unlimited authority to Bring its power to bear to actually reorient, reform, and really restore the purpose of those institutions.
And my argument this whole time is that this is exactly where we are now.
And that because the universities have been so deeply corrupted, and this has been documented from the closing of the American mind, or even before that from William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale, all the way to what I've tried to document in my book.
That it's time now for the people to exercise their proper authority.
And so Jefferson's own political sense was right because he was balancing on the one hand the kind of spirit of inquiry of the mind, but he was bringing also to bear an administrative power and arrangement.
That would correct this excesses of what could be ideological capture or a failure of administration in universities.
And I still think that that's important.
To the extent that we can have universities function successfully autonomously, we should grant them that.
But to the extent that they can't do so, the Constitution and as well as the work of Jefferson in the early 19th century shows us the way.
It's time to use that power that has really been abandoned and dormant for too long.
Well, I want to get to this private-public distinction that you're drawing because a lot of the universities that we have that are most influential, that are now the primary targets of The Trump administration are not actually public schools in the sense that they're a state school.
They're run by the government.
They do get funding for research projects that the U.S. government thinks is in the national interest in order to pursue.
But they're not actually private.
They're actually public schools.
But let's leave that to the side for a moment.
And even with regard to what you just said that you're attributing to Jefferson's view and— It's too difficult to debate that or dispute that, but I'm going to ask you, when you say that ultimately in a republic it's the people who have to decide how institutions function,
presumably you mean public institutions or state universities, would that mean that, for example, if a significant majority of the population were very Passionately convinced about a particular view,
so much so that they thought it should be prohibited, essentially, to even question or challenge it, that Jefferson's idea of an academic institution or yours is that once there's enough public support for a particular view, that it would be legitimate to basically ban the university from permitting or allowing any challenge or questioning of it?
Well, there's a couple different ways to tackle that question.
I mean, obviously the context now is the Constitution of the United States, and so that provides some guardrails and some limitations, of course, on the government.
But let's break down that question, I think, in a way that makes it tangible, that makes it operational.
If the people decide, you know, that...
Let's say a university has a department of, you know, phrenology or witchcraft, and then the people decide, hey, we don't want to actually spend our money supporting the witchcraft studies department at, you know, University of Texas, let's say hypothetically.
They can pass, legislators can pass a bill saying we zero out funding, we abolish the department.
And in fact, we did that precisely that at New College of Florida.
We determined...
Through all of the proper democratic channels and through an analysis of the evidence and some real prudent thought that our Gender Studies Department did not meet a scholarly threshold, was not providing enough value to students, and was not in line with the wishes of the voters and the citizens of the state.
And so we abolished that department.
Obviously, very clearly within the purview of political power and orienting, again, the university towards truth.
But there's the secondary question.
You have to look at speech and conduct.
And so I don't advocate for restricting classroom speech.
Some legislators in Texas, for example, have said, oh, we need to really kind of...
You know, I've made my opposition to that known.
I continue to express opposition to that.
There is a constitutional question, but even setting aside the constitutional question, I think it's unwise for a few reasons.
One is that, again, it's micromanaging to the point of futility.
Legislators cannot successfully do this.
But second, you know, you should be hiring Faculty members whom you trust, whom you would like to give latitude, and whom you believe are grappling with these hard questions in the most productive way possible in the classroom, and you grant them as much autonomy as possible.
And so if you're talking about pure speech, you and I may have a similar view, but when we're talking about administrative speech, for example, DEI programs that Scapegoat, stereotype, demean, and discriminate for or against different groups based on their ancestry.
The law, and I think just good judgment, is quite clear.
At a state university especially, a private university is a slightly different story, but at a state university, as legislators have done in Florida and Texas and Tennessee and other states, they have every right to say this is not an academic issue, it's not a free speech issue.
We don't want to promote these ideologies as official conduct, as official policy, and as official decision-making of our state universities, of the government.
And so I think that is a quite defensible road that we've been running down successfully and abolishing these programs that don't serve the mission of the university, don't serve the interests of the people, and really...
Don't even meet a basic threshold of responsible governance.
So just on the question of what you did at New College, if you, and I'm sure you've seen it, you talked to professors there, you talked to students there, what you were doing was very, very polarizing, very, very controversial.
You became kind of the symbol of, obviously you had a lot of support, including from Governor DeSantis, who was elected, but you also had a lot of opposition.
One of the main critiques is that you are describing or characterizing your motives in this very kind of neutral Inherently virtuous manner.
Like, we just want to improve the quality of education.
We want to make sure it's meeting a certain scholarly threshold.
That we want to make sure that these academic norms that are being permitted to govern how faculty operate align with public values.
But they will say that what you basically did was you identified new colleges problematic.
Because there were a lot of faculty members, most faculty members, who were essentially left-wing, and that was reflected in their teaching and in their curriculum.
And by the time you were done, it basically turned into the opposite, namely that it aligned with your political values as a conservative.
Is that something that you do think, in fact, happened, that new college became less left-wing, the ideology that you reject, and more?
Associated with the ideology that you personally or Governor DeSantis promotes, which is conservatism?
Yeah, I mean, look, that's how it always works.
That's how it works everywhere.
And in fact, that's how it's supposed to work.
You know, the conservative voters and taxpayers of Florida, you know, you can read the Florida Constitution and nowhere does it say.
That they must be forced to continue funding left-wing ideological programs within universities, you know, against their will, against their express wishes.
And so, you know, this is how it works.
And I think that I'm totally happy with California universities being kind of more left-leaning and Florida universities being more right-leaning.
That's completely fine.
Do not have to be and actually should not be totally homogenous across the country.
And at New College in particular, you know, it was by every metric that the state had put out the lowest performing university.
The university was functionally insolvent when we took over.
It had failed to meet even basic.
Student retention metrics for year after year after year.
The legislature in the previous session was thinking about actually just dissolving the university entirely and transferring its assets elsewhere.
And so this was really a rescue operation of a struggling college.
And whereas so many universities are hyper left-wing, especially in their conception of the humanities, actually providing a counterpoint or a counterbalance.
I think is really salutary for not only New College, but for the university system as a whole.
And this doesn't mean that this is an ideological imposition in toto.
And in fact, we abolished the Gender Studies Department because it was really a terrible performer.
It was not oriented towards truth.
Faculty members could not even tell you what a woman was.
I mean, basic kind of kindergarten level understanding of the world was just...
Impossible for these folks.
But we still invited Judith Butler, who is the most famous gender theorist in the world.
She's been a fierce critic of me personally.
We invited her to speak and she actually hosted an event at New College to provide a counterpoint and a contrary view.
And so I don't actually buy the idea that there is a, you know, kind of Particular composition at a university that has to be required everywhere.
But even if you say you want to have a wide range of discourse, what we've done at New College is not narrow the range of discourse.
We've actually expanded it.
We provided, I think, a much needed balance.
And then we've implemented a classical liberal arts curriculum that gives an ethos to the place that really had been lacking for But the way you describe what you did at New College in that interview that you did with the New York Times last month is you talked about,
I think with a certain amount of pride, the fact that basically you purged the entire previous administration, the president and the deans and the administrators, and replaced them with people that you thought aligned more with the Values and ideology of the residents of the state, which happens to be your ideology as well.
And this is what I wanted.
This to me is like the nub of the question, which is You know, so often people talk about, oh, we need to return to the values of the founding.
We need to preserve American values.
And, you know, you can debate what the influences were on the founders, like Machiavelli.
To what extent were they influenced by him?
Did they really like him or not?
Which parts did they like?
But I think nobody doubts that the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment thinkers were a— Major, major influence on the American founders, just because that was the tradition out of which they were working.
It originated in France and in the UK and in the Netherlands, sort of Europe, where, of course, they all came from.
You read any Enlightenment thinker, and one of the core values that they emphasize most is the need for academic freedom, which they saw as kind of a cousin to free speech, that there was supposed to be these institutions free of control.
And I'm wondering how that can be reconciled with what you just described your view being, which is that you have to have universities that are teaching things and expressing values that align with the majority of citizens.
I mean, if you're kind of forcing universities to align with the ideology and politics of 50% plus one of the residents, what does academic freedom then mean?
Or maybe you don't believe in academic freedom, but if you do, what does it mean and how can it be reconciled with that view?
Yeah, I mean, I think you have two problems with your position here.
The first is a historical problem.
You know, you're not going to find the sentiment that you expressed about academic freedom anywhere in any document related to universities and, say, the founding period in the United States.
That concept was something that came much later, and which is why William F. Buckley in the 1950s said academic freedom is a superstition.
You don't think Voltaire or Rousseau talked about that?
I don't think that Voltaire and Rousseau were a heavy influence on the American founding.
I think you could go to John Locke and the Scottish Common Sense Enlightenment figures.
And again, these people would disagree.
And just read the charter documents of the original universities in the United States.
But I think there's another problem.
The problem is that a university will have a set of values.
Human institutions operate according to either an implicit or explicit set of values.
It's how you make decisions.
Do we open a gender studies department or do we open an American history department?
Do we open a DEI bureaucracy or do we open a school for civic life?
Because of the limitations of space, time, and money.
You have to make decisions under pressure of which direction your university is going, what you support, what you don't support.
And so, in essence, your position boils down to universities should be left kind of a random selection and whatever happens should be untouched.
But my point is that the opposite is a much bigger problem.
The problem is if you have universities that are monolithically aligned against the values of, let's say, 70% of the citizens, you have then citizens being compelled to fund the government that in turn is waging a kind of ideological war against the citizens.
And they have no redress.
They have no mechanism for reforming their own government, which uses their own money.
And so given the fact that Every university will have a system of values.
The question is not, you know, who should do it or should we not do it?
The question is, what will that system of values be?
At New College of Florida, we said the classical liberal arts tradition in pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
We rewrote our mission statement to that effect.
And, you know, University of California, Berkeley has, you know, nonstop DEI and social justice activism.
That's their mission.
And so, given that...
A system of values is inevitable.
The only responsible question is, can we actually do the right thing philosophically, but also do the right thing democratically?
And so I think honoring what I believe is the pursuit of truth, but also what has the consent of the governed, of the citizens of Florida or other states, really any state, I think is the right thing to do.
It's the responsible way.
And there's no getting around that problem.
And certainly not by appealing to the Enlightenment.
I mean, it's like academic freedom was essentially invented by the professor's lobby.
And then you kind of back project it as some, you know, great value that doesn't exist anywhere in the tradition of the, let's say, the late 18th or early 19th century.
I've spent a lot of time on the Enlightenment.
It was a major focus of mine for a long time.
And like I said, we can't resolve that now, but I'll certainly get a lot of very specific quotes from people like Voltaire and Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers about academic freedom.
It was not invented in the 1950s or by a lobby, in my view.
But let me ask you this, because you're relying very heavily on this public-private distinction.
Where, you know, when you talked about Jefferson and the need to make sure the legislature controls the University of Virginia, it's because it's a public school funded by the government.
Same, that's your view with New School as well, that that's a state school funded by the government.
So you have this argument that it should be reflective of the people who are paying for it, which are the citizens.
I also think there's this interesting dynamic where, you know, right now Harvard is a major focus of the U.S. government.
It's located in Massachusetts.
And if you want to say Harvard is a very left-wing school, I think you can make a good argument that that aligns far more with the values of Massachusetts residents.
Same with the University of California at Berkeley, which you mentioned as well.
Certainly the community around it and the entire state is more on the left-wing than the right-wing side of the equation.
So by your reasoning, those schools ought to be, I think, oriented.
Toward a more left-wing ideology for the same reason that new college should be oriented toward a right-wing ideology shared more by Florida residents.
But what I want to ask you is this, is public-private distinction.
Let's try and leave that aside just for hypothetical purposes.
And let's imagine that schools that are actually private schools, private universities, private colleges, they're not managed by the state, they're not funded by the state.
They really don't have any dependence on the state at all.
Which is true for a lot of universities and colleges in the United States.
Do you think there, there is any justification for the government to try to interfere in or dictate either curricula decisions or administrative decisions?
Well, here, too, we have to make an even finer distinction.
And so there are certain universities, the last count that I saw, it was something like a dozen or two dozen, a very small number representing less than 1% of all universities around the country, actually do not accept federal funding, do not accept federal financial aid.
You know, I'm a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College, which is really the shining star of classical liberal arts education.
And a proud sponsor of this program as well.
Oh, fantastic.
I'm glad to hear that.
So I'm sure you know about Hillsdale is that they don't accept any federal money because they want to maintain their maximum independence and autonomy.
And so they don't take money from the government.
They don't have contractual obligations with the government.
And so they are really as free and independent as can be for an academic institution in the United States.
That should be protected.
But there's a further question about these kind of private mega universities.
You know, they operate like hedge funds with some scientific research and then humanities departments.
You know, they don't have the same arrangement.
And so if we take Harvard, of course it's in Massachusetts.
And so if it were a state university, Massachusetts would have influence.
But there's two things about Harvard.
One is a very interesting kind of historical observation.
That if you go back to the Constitution of 1780, written by Samuel Adams, John Adams, and other of the original revolutionary figures, there's an entire section on Harvard in the Constitution.
And actually, they had an obligation between the state and the university.
The state provided land, grants, monies.
And in exchange, the state actually had representation on Harvard's Board of Overseers, written into the Constitution.
The governor, the lieutenant governor.
The magistrates, the local clergy, and they wrote into the Constitution the explicit mission of the university, which was radically enough, from our eyes, included to honor God and to create good Christian men who could then assume leadership positions in church and state.
So the idea that there was this founding of radical autonomy is just...
Totally not true compared against the actual evidence.
The question now, though, is not really between Massachusetts and Harvard, which has a limited but important relationship.
The question is, does the federal government, which provides Harvard, say, upwards of a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding, what is the relationship between the federal government and what is essentially a national university, Harvard, or international?
They think of themselves as an international university.
I think that's largely true.
But the question is, what is the obligation for Harvard because it does accept federal funds?
And what is the contractual nature of that relationship?
There are reciprocal duties and obligations.
Harvard has to follow the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Harvard has to follow basic standards of conduct in individual grant agreements.
And then, in my view, the president has the authority to renegotiate the relationship with Harvard in itself.
If the president decides...
Under his Article II powers, and the administration decides that it needs to take another look at Harvard because, for example, it's violating American civil rights law, which, based on my reporting, it absolutely is doing.
You know, Harvard is then jeopardizing its 501 tax status.
That's settled case law.
It's bipartisan.
Harvard is jeopardizing future federal contracts because, of course, the federal government can choose to not do business with an organization that is violating fundamental American law.
And even beyond that, it's totally within the right of the legislature or, in my argument, the Department of Education or the White House itself.
To negotiate with Harvard to say, if you want to have access to a billion dollars a year of taxpayer money, you have to meet these reciprocal obligations.
And so those negotiations are happening right now.
And there's going to be, you know, legal disputes.
There's going to be political disputes.
There's going to be even personal disputes.
But I think the underlying reality is that if the American taxpayers are sending a university a billion dollars a year...
It is well within their right to have basic expectations loaded into it.
And so on certain provisions like viewpoint diversity, which was in one of the Trump administration letters, I don't think that specific provision is wise or prudent at this point in time.
But I think the other positions, like, for example, requiring Harvard to eliminate its discriminatory DEI bureaucracy, is totally within the kind of not only legally fair, but actually morally.
Intellectually and politically desirable.
Right, but there's a lot more going on with the Trump administration's attempt to interfere in or shape what's happening at these universities beyond just the admissions policy, which a lot of people, and I think there's a good argument to make about this, has become discriminatory.
There's a lot of attempts to...
I think there's been a lot of distortion about this idea of public funding to universities as the kind of reed on which to hang the government's authority to mandate what colleges do.
Like charitable giving.
This is not the administration funding Harvard so that they can pay their sociology professors and archaeology professors or create gender studies programs.
The reason the federal government funds universities is in a very specific way, which is there are certain kinds of research that the U.S. government wants.
Some of it's military research, some of it's technological research, some of it is...
About medical treatments and medical cures.
When they give this money, they say this has to be used for these specific kinds of programs.
Marc Andreessen will tell you that that kind of arrangement is what led to U.S. dominance of the Internet, because Al Gore got mocked for saying I'd met to the Internet, but he really did lead the way, says Marc Andreessen, in funding Internet research, what was called the information superhighway that led to all of these things.
A state school where they're funding Harvard's operation.
They're giving grants for very specific projects only because the U.S. government believes that that will benefit the country and its interests.
But one of the problems that I have with this framework is that Every four years or eight years, the president changes.
And as a result, what these universities might be required to do as a result of this argument that the minute you accept one penny in federal funding, you're now subject to government supervision or control, is that let's say if the Biden administration had the view that the Trump movement was an insurrectionary movement threatening to the very core democratic values that shape the country, which is what A lot of them believed.
And would they be able to then say, look, Yale, you get federal funding, and yet you have these three faculty members and you have these student groups that defend this insurrectionary movement, which is the Trump movement, and that is a threat to our way of life and to our democratic values?
What objection would you have if the Biden administration used that leverage from public funding to demand that no Trump supporters be on the faculty or that no student groups be permitted to be formed in order to defend the ideology of the Trump movement on the grounds that they're insurrectionary?
A couple things.
We'll take them in sequence.
I agree with you that the bulk of the federal funding is designated for scientific, military, You know, and medical research, because those are very expensive things to do.
They require a lot of money.
But there's two things.
It's not exclusively that.
Of course, they had funded DEI programs.
They had funded humanities programs.
They had funded gender studies programs.
But even on those scientific grants, universities skim off the top sometimes more than 50 percent of the funds.
That then goes to their central administration.
And given that those funds are somewhat fungible, it does end up actually supporting the university as an entity.
And if that university has a large DEI bureaucracy, as Harvard does, for example, I think that you have a very clear argument that taxpayer funds are either directly in many cases or indirectly through overhead funds supporting these discriminatory and illegal practices.
Even setting that aside, your question is, I think, about, well, what if the Biden administration comes back and does the same thing?
Or worse.
Or worse.
The premise of that is actually, again, not factually accurate.
The Biden administration was doing the same thing and was doing much worse.
I mean, if you look at the federal grants to universities under the Biden administration.
If you look at the promotion of DEI practices by the Biden Department of Education, you're talking about a You know, billions of dollars sloshing around supporting extreme and, in many cases, even illegal left-wing ideologies in universities, in K-12 schools.
And so the idea that— But was that a legitimate exercise of state power?
I mean, your theory is if the government's giving money to these institutions, they have the right to dictate to these institutions that they can or can't do things based on what they consider to be— Threats to the country?
Was the administration justified in doing that?
In many cases, in my view, was it morally justified?
No.
Would I support the same program?
No, legally justified.
But were they legally justified?
Many of them, if not most of them, yes.
And so that is, again, how it's supposed to work.
I don't like what the Biden administration was spending taxpayer money on.
But I recognize that the Biden administration has a right to dictate policy.
That's why we elect presidents.
That's why we have a republic.
And that's why when Trump enters office, he...
Has the authority to then change the policy, to change what is funded, what is not funded.
And I know that people worry, well, what if it changes this way and that way and four years and eight years?
It's just going to go back.
That's how it's supposed to work.
I mean, you know, when you have a new administration that makes new promises to voters, that administration should have the ability to execute on those promises.
And in some cases, there will be continuity.
In other cases, there will be radical disjunctions.
But the alternative is much worse.
And the alternative is actually what we'd had previously for many decades.
The alternative was permanent left-wing bureaucratic rule within the federal administration and then with the kind of satellite university system, no matter who is in office.
And so what Trump is doing by disrupting the universities By dismantling the Department of Education, by unleashing the DOGE team to identify some of the worst ideological excesses and terminate those programs.
He's actually restoring the basic democratic function of our republic to say he was elected on a promise to do something and he has the authority to do it.
And so I think that this is, while it's temporarily maybe uncomfortable or provides some turbulence, Democratic rule is turbulent.
Democratic rule means switching things at four years, eight years, sometimes 12 years.
That's the nature of our system.
It's always been that way.
And actually, the aberration is this idea that the president should go in and essentially cede any discretion to bureaucrats who were never elected.
Never earned a single vote and feel entitled to unlimited public money.
You know, America fought the revolution for the Stamp Act, which is like a minor imposition.
And if you compare that to what has been happening in education, it's like a hundred times more an affront to our liberties.
And I think that Trump is moving things in the right direction.
I never understood at all, I've never heard it be said before, that American elections are about choosing a leader who will then dictate not only the policies of the government which he's leading, but also the administration and conduct of American universities or how private law firms function and trying to tell them what kind of pro bono cases they can and can't do.
In fact, certainly conservative ideology, as I've understood it, has always been about limiting the role of the federal government, not saying, oh yeah, now you're not only in charge of the federal government, but all private actors and private institutions, which you can dictate to, to make sure they're aligning with the ideology on which you ran and which voters want you to do.
But let's get a little specific.
I know we've gone about an hour, so I'm going to be very respectful of your time and just try to narrow down these last couple of questions so I don't consume too much of it.
But just today there was a perfect example that I think really illustrates this tension.
The Congress, yet again, summoned university presidents to answer questions to politicians about how they're running their schools.
What kinds of views they're allowing or not allowing, whether they're punishing professors who express a certain view.
And it was Elise Stefanik who made a lot of headlines when she basically helped get several different Ivy League presidents fired when it was.
Came to the controversy about protests on campus and Israel and the like.
And she was questioning the president of Haverford College, which is a private college in Pennsylvania.
And I just want to show you this clip and ask you about it.
Let's play that clip.
Sure.
I want to ask you another example.
There was a professor of mathematics and statistics who posted after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks, quote, These scenes of an imprisoned people breaking free from their chains.
This was a historic moment to be recorded in their history books.
Jewish students have reported that you said this post could be "perceived in many ways." Does this post simply depend on the context, President Rabin?
And were there any disciplinary actions taken against this professor?
Such posts have been incredibly harmful to our entire community.
And I disavow them and that outcome for us.
Was there an investigation of the professor?
Investigations happen in all such cases.
So yes, in this case.
Investigations happen in all such cases, as I have said.
This is a simple question.
The other presidents are answering this straightforward as to disciplinary action.
Again, these university presidents who are former presidents fail to answer these direct questions.
In this case, was there disciplinary action taken or an investigation of this professor?
Respectfully, Representative, I will not be talking about individual cases.
Respectfully, President of Haverford, many people have sat in this position who are no longer in the positions as president of universities for their failure to answer straightforward questions.
Another question I have...
All right, so that last part was obviously...
Not even an implicit, basically an explicit threat that she's gotten college presidents fired before, and maybe that will befall this president as well.
So that case was one where a professor, not in the classroom but on social media, posted essentially an argument saying that because the Israelis are occupying and repressing— The Palestinians in Gaza, like all people who are being occupied and oppressed, they have the right to pick up arms' resistance.
That's a view offensive to a lot of people, at least in the United States.
There have been other cases where conservatives have defended professors who also expressed views very offensive to people, such as Amy Wax, who's been on my show before.
They tried to actually fire her for making statements I would say most people regard as racist.
And I supported her tenure in academic freedoms rights, and a lot of colleges did too.
So to me, I would say this is something that people debate all the time.
What is terrorism?
Who should be on the list of terrorists?
In the 1980s, as I'm sure you know, the U.S. government classified Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as terrorists on its official list, and yet people all the time Including on universities, especially on universities, defended Mandela, defended the ANC, disputed the government's view of them being terrorists.
Is that the role, a proper role as you see it, of the United States Congress to be demanding that college presidents, not of public schools but of private ones, that they fire professors for political views that they believe in and express outside of the classroom?
Well, a couple of answers to that question.
I mean, if you're asking me what is my belief, you know, I think the answer would be no.
I think that you want to have kind of core protections for academics so that they can express views even if they're controversial.
I think there are limits institutionally to that.
I don't think that it is.
I think that academic freedom comes with the corresponding academic responsibility.
I think that is important to understand.
So in this case, though, I think what's happening with Congress is that Congresswoman Stefanik is very skillfully using this issue to enact a series of cultural reforms.
And so she's putting the professor on the hot seat.
You're now in between...
Congress and in theory you're in between a huge constituency of the American public and then also on your other side, your radical faculty members.
And so politically what's happening is that you're creating a wedge that is advantageous for Republicans and then in theory will lead to some knock-on cultural effects that might be salutary in broader university reform.
I didn't hear her call on this person to be fired.
Maybe she said so later in the clip.
Well, she said punished.
She said punished.
Were they punished?
She asked a question, and so I think it's a bit different to ask than to demand.
Obviously, Congress should not be— Well, it was followed up by that threat that the university president may get fired for not having taken action against this professor for what he said.
Sure, sure.
So, okay, yeah, and I'm not sure on all the details except for the clip that I saw.
I wasn't aware of this.
But to your broader question, Is it appropriate to have Congress weighing in on academic issues?
And the obvious answer is yes.
We have an education committee.
We have $140 billion dollars a year that goes from Congress to universities.
And so look, Haverford College accepts federal funds.
And so they have to accept the responsibilities that come along with that.
And part of that responsibility is showing up and testifying and taking hard questions.
This is how it's supposed to work.
And you might have a different opinion than Congresswoman Stefanik on this particular issue, Israel-Palestine.
But I think that it's totally fair for her to do so.
And I think it's totally fair for, let's say, a left-wing congressman to take the same tack from the opposite direction to a university president that is vocally pro-Israel.
This is good.
We're bringing these questions into the public sphere.
We're engaging in them in a way that is, I think, fruitful and revealing.
And then Congress then has to deliberate.
Do we want to keep spending $140 billion a year subsidizing these people?
Or do we want to actually have real and significant reforms?
I think what the Congresswoman is doing is good because I hope that it will lead to significant reforms.
And this is part of that deliberative process.
And using salacious individual examples like this professor.
It's part of how politics proceeds.
Again, that's always been the case.
I don't see this as anything different.
I guess I'm just shocked to hear anybody, but especially people...
Who identify as conservatives, which for as long as I've been alive, has been arguing for a much more limited role of the federal government in our lives and in our freedoms to believe that the proper role of the U.S. government, the president or the Congress, is to insist that certain views be made off limits or prohibited or even just a generalized But I don't believe that.
And I'm not advocating that.
But she was, and you defended that.
Yeah.
I don't think that she was doing that.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization.
And look, again, I put my own opinion at the top of my previous answer.
I think I'm on the record with that.
But the point about conservatism is an important one.
And conservatism is at an inflection point.
In my ideal world, I would like to see a university system that is almost completely untethered from the government.
We could reduce universities by half as far as federal funding, let's say.
I would very much support that.
I would support actually even zeroing out the federal budget of support for universities, given a choice between one and the other in some ideal world.
But that's not the world we live in.
That's not feasible.
That's not likely.
That's not going to happen.
And so the question for conservatives is, given the fact that we spend an enormous amount of money on universities, and until we get to, let's say, even libertarians who want a utopia of no federal funding, no even state funding.
I support state funding for universities.
Federal funding is a little bit different.
But until we get to this utopia, we have to deal with the hard questions, which is...
What is the money going towards?
What are the basic conditions of law?
And if a university is violating civil rights law, I think that conservatives have to be ready to enforce it.
Because what's happened in the past is the worst of both worlds.
Conservatives take a totally laissez-faire approach.
And in a sense, what they do is they delegate all of the regulation, enforcement, financing, funding, and governance.
To their opponents.
And so I think that the Trump administration is fundamentally changing in the right direction.
And I don't buy the argument that you're making that we're making things off limits, we're censoring.
That's not true at all.
But what we are doing is saying, hey, if you're going to take federal cash, you can't discriminate on the basis of race.
And you have to meet some minimum standards to qualify for that money.
You know, conservatives argued against building this machine for many decades.
You know, the left didn't listen.
They created the machine.
And now I think conservatives are learning how to use it.
Is that ideal?
No.
Is that the system that I would design from scratch?
No.
But that's the political reality that we live in.
And so, in order for us to move towards that ideal, I think we have to come up with a prudent policy in the intervening years.
Yeah, I think it was pretty clear what she was doing.
People can make that own judgment.
But also, there is a lot of imposition of the limits of debate being imposed by the Trump administration, including requiring Colombia to put their Middle East studies under receivership and subject to the monitoring of the federal government, or forcing schools to adopt this much.
More radically expanded definition of anti-semitism as their hate speech definition that's prohibited.
That includes a whole variety of common criticisms of Israel or criticisms of specific American Jews.
These are limits on the ability of what you can and can't say at universities.
But let me get that aside.
I have a ton more questions for you.
I just want to ask one more, or maybe two, if you can indulge that.
I just narrowed them down.
Yeah.
Because I really want to just close this up and just make sure your opinions are clear.
All right.
Let's leave the world of universities, which— You know, receive funding.
And I think we've covered that a lot.
And let's move to a different set of private actors, which are law firms that don't receive any federal funding at all.
Or if they do, it's only because they're doing work for the federal government, but they're not getting any subsidies.
One of the things the Trump administration has been doing is it has been punishing various law firms for work that they've been doing, either against Trump or the Trump administration.
Or against causes that the Trump administration dislikes.
And they've been using massive leverage, like removing classified access to lawyers at the firm, which basically prevents them from working on a wide range of cases for clients, or even banning them from all federal buildings, which would mean they can't even enter federal courts.
And in exchange for agreeing not to impose those punishments, they're requiring Law firms to promise to say, do $100 million or $500 million of pro bono work, not for the causes the firm believes in,
but for the causes the government wants, such as defending the Trump administration when it's sued for various violations of law or the Constitution, or working only on Defending people who claim that they're the victims of anti-Semitism, but no other form of bigotry.
So it's the Trump administration imposing these requirements on these private law firms that receive no money from the federal government.
Is that a proper role of the federal government as well, to dictate what pro bono work private law firms can and can't do?
Yeah, well, look, I've seen the headline.
I haven't looked into it at all, anything beyond that.
It's kind of totally outside of the domain of the issues that I work on.
And so, look, I mean, from your description of it, again, not having looked at any details, I think it's right to raise concerns and to try to learn more and investigate it.
But, you know, it's out of my purview.
And I would say that...
It's just kind of a cautionary note.
You know, I think the general context of this could be the kind of systematic, widespread lawfare campaign against the president.
That's my suspicion.
I think the context is important.
Again, I don't know enough to comment on it.
It's not my area of expertise.
I don't understand the facts.
But I would at least concede on principle to say...
Okay, given the facts you've laid out, I think that'd be cause for concern and certainly cause for further discussion.
That's more than fair.
I also don't like to comment on things that I don't feel like I have a special knowledge of or immersion in.
Last question, since that one went very quickly, and then I promise this is the last question.
On this question of the use of DEI practices by universities, to me it seems like there's a crucial distinction here.
Which is, on the one hand, you have very strong objections that, as I said before, I find at least plausible, if not valid, that when universities are choosing who gets into the school and who doesn't based on the applicant's race, that At least it's racism, it's immoral, and it may be a violation of Civil Rights Act.
You could probably even say that it is.
And so there are schools that have been doing that.
There have been legal challenges.
The Supreme Court has ruled that that type of admission practice is illegal as well.
And so that's one thing.
Are these universities violating federal law in terms of their admission practice, which obviously is a legitimate concern for the federal government to have?
Then there's DEI as a kind of ideology or belief system that gets taught in classes or where material is included in the curriculum that basically says, just to take a kind of common example that you focused on, there's something inherently imperialistic or colonizing or domineering about whiteness and white people.
A view that I personally find to be, I would say, racist and offensive, but which I believe people have the right to express.
Just like when Amy Wax goes into class and says, hey, FBI statistics show that black people commit crimes at wildly disproportionate rates in terms of the percentage of the population, a lot of people view that as racist, a lot of people view that as just bringing facts or a certain viewpoint, and it should be permitted.
Is that something that you think the government should be trying to prohibit as well?
Not DEI in how it does administrative work like admissions and hiring, but even what is taught by professors in the classroom.
I don't define that as DEI.
And in fact, I've said this since a speech at Stanford a number of years ago.
I think DEI should be really restricted to administrative policy.
And so it should be about administration, admissions, hiring, contracting, funding, you know, and other institutional questions.
But those DEI prohibitions should not apply to the actual academic work or classroom speech, etc.
And so I think that's a really important distinction.
Political figures on the right have blurred that.
I think that's a mistake.
That's been my position consistently.
And look, the Civil Rights Act itself is kind of another example of this theme that we've been talking about.
Some libertarians say that the Civil Rights Act is an infringement on speech and free association, and therefore is incompatible with the Bill of Rights and should be repealed.
I point out, you know, I don't support that.
That's not my belief.
I also point out that the Civil Rights Act is the most popular piece of legislation in the United States.
And so even as a practical matter, you know, it's not going to get repealed, even if some people argue that it should.
And so the real question before us is, okay, do we have a Civil Rights Act that applies to some groups or to all groups?
And the reason I oppose DEI is the same reason that I oppose the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.
I don't think that we should be codifying into law group preferences of any kind.
We have a complex, multiracial country.
That's the demographic reality.
And so I think that the only fair way for the government and for institutions of higher education to have any moral legitimacy and to have any coherence with the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act You have to have a strict colorblind equality policy.
And so while I'm, of course, sympathetic to entertaining speech, I think that there is a restriction already on administration because of the Civil Rights Act.
That's been the law of the land for many years.
And my argument is that it should be enforced equally to all groups.
And DEI is a violation.
When it's put into practice administratively, it's a clear violation of the law.
And so my ideal, my gold standard, the thing I'm moving towards, is simply to say every individual will be judged on his or her accomplishments, not on his or her ancestry.
I think that's the way to...
Reduce this kind of obsession and this animosity and this conflict on race.
And we'll create, on the other side, a true representation of accomplishment.
That's, I think, what we really want to see.
That's what I'm fighting for, and I think we can get there.
All right.
Yeah, I think that's a view that has gained more and more support with each passing year.
I venture to guess that it's probably the view of a majority of Americans now.
At first, affirmative action and quotas were intended to be temporary, like most temporary things, like the Patriot Act, for example, that was temporary.
They turned into permanent policies.
And I think a lot of people have agreed that we've gotten to the point where not only don't we need them anymore, they're actually quite pernicious.
All right, Chris, it was good to end on a note of agreement and even on the parts where we disagreed.
I really enjoyed our conversation.
I very much appreciate your taking the time.
Come on and talk about it.
It's always great to have you on and I hope to do so again.
All right.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
All right.
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