Saving Lives Only When It's Politically Convenient
With news that Jared Kushner cobbled together a nationwide pandemic strategy that was scrapped to harm blue states, co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman wrestle with the implication that the Trump Administration carried out willful genocide. Also, higher education expert John Warner joins the show to discuss his upcoming book "Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education," the mess that is American public education, and the looming disaster as students are set to return to school.
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Hydroxy has tremendous support, but politically it's toxic because I supported it.
If they would have said, do not use hydroxychloroquine under any circumstances, they would have come out and they would have said it's a great thing.
I think we're doing very well.
I told Dr. Birx I think we're doing very well.
She was in my office a little while ago.
She's a person I have a lot of respect for.
I think Nancy Pelosi's treated her very badly.
Very, very badly.
Very nasty.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm JJ at Saxton's.
As always, I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We have a jam-packed show today.
Stick around later.
We're going to have John Warner, who is a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune and contributing blogger to Inside Higher Ed.
His next book is Sustainable, Resilient, and Free the Future of Public Higher Education out in October.
We're going to be talking about, well, the mess of higher education and what we're looking at particularly as we're creeping up on College is reopening in the middle of a pandemic.
We're also going to be talking about Jared Kushner's aborted plan to try and fight the pandemic that led to... We got to call it genocide.
It is what it is.
Rampant Trump corruption.
But in the very beginning, we have really exciting news.
Do we not, Nick?
Really, really exciting news, and the artwork on the Patreon is really, really good, too, if I don't say so myself.
So Nick is really happy about the artwork that he has contributed, but we have opened the Patreon for the Muckrake Podcast.
It's already off to a rolling start.
We just want to say thank you for everybody who has really invested in this thing already.
To support this podcast, you can go find it at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Again, we've talked about this in the past.
We're planning on doing some feature length audio documentaries.
We're planning on doing special exclusive coverage during the conventions.
Well, I mean, if the Republican convention has anything, which is a bizarre thing that has not happened in modern history, but we can get into that.
But we're going to be covering the conventions, the debates, election night, and we're going to be doing bonus episodes, including this week.
We're going to have our first bonus episode.
Where Nick and I are going to be discussing Steven Spielberg's Jaws as a metaphor for the current coronavirus pandemic and all of the hyper-capitalistic problems that that represents.
Just a quick little preview.
The shark is a metaphor for the coronavirus.
We'll move on.
So again, that's at patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Please go and support us.
We appreciate everything you can do.
In the meantime, Nick, we have to talk about not just the pandemic, but the fact that it is now obvious after a Vanity Fair report and exclusive that has been confirmed by multiple outlets, multiple insiders, and multiple journalistic enterprises.
That Jared Kushner, put in charge of, I believe, Israel and Palestine, the Middle East, literally everything else in the world, plus also the pandemic, created a plan to try and treat the pandemic in America and get a nationwide testing system in place, but then decided against it when he and the rest of the Trump administration realized that it was advantageous to let blue states, that's right, suffer and die with the coronavirus pandemic.
I gotta tell you, when you first start reading the article and the information, you're like, oh, this is actually that instance where we've heard about how bloated government is and how ineffectual it could be and how it's got overregulated and all this kind of stuff.
And then you say, God, if we could just have a really smart person come in there and get rid of all this stuff, cut through the red tape and whatever.
It started out a little bit like that.
He was bringing in some of these industry leaders into the pharmaceutical industry and distribution outlets and all these different kinds of things.
It kind of sounded right, but what became so scary was, and what you hear in the article, was that all of a sudden, literally in one day, they just completely pulled the plug and it was gone early and never to be replaced with anything else but what we have now, which is just dying people in blue states and red states now.
So we try really hard on this podcast to get within the mindset, no matter how horrific it is, of the people who are doing these things.
A Kushner, a Trump, all these people.
Nick, if we were in the White House, if we were in a presidential administration and a generational pandemic reared its ugly head, would we for a second even ask what the political party was in charge of the states being afflicted?
We would not.
I would not.
Do you for a second?
No.
I mean, here's the problem.
It sounds like Republicans would.
Because that's why they're always accusing the Democrats of doing the things that they would do.
Because I have common sense.
We heard this.
We heard this, you know, Barr said it and so does Trump.
This is their new thing about the voting thing.
Well, do you have any proof?
No.
I have common sense.
And it's the same thing here, where somehow in their nefariously twisted minds, they think, well, of course, that's the worst possible outcome.
They must want to do that same thing to us if we want to do it to them.
It's frightening.
Truly frightening.
Because here's the thing.
Say what you want to say about the Democratic Party.
A lot of issues, a lot of problems.
It just seems like the baseline tends to want to help people.
Right?
There you go.
And how you end up helping people is the argument there.
And that's one of the squabbles that we have with something like the Democratic Party, how they go about it and how they decide to take care of it.
With the Republican Party, we now have a definitive timeline of what went wrong with the pandemic response.
It starts with Donald Trump having no interest whatsoever in actually paying attention to his briefings.
He's actually, at the very, very beginning, more interested in how to get flavored vapes back on the shelves in stores around America.
That was his number one concern as this pandemic started.
Which, by the way, we also have to point out that he completely devastated our pandemic response and the CDC and anything that could have possibly, like, started this thing off in the right direction.
Not only does he waste time, he doesn't pay attention to it, and then his magical thinking starts swinging into gear, right?
And we've talked about this, the Norman Vincent Peale idea, the idea that, oh, well, I don't want things to be bad, so they're not going to be bad, right?
Oh, it's not, it's going to pass like a miracle in the night.
And this is, this is Trump's gamble, right?
Because he truly believes that he is the center of the universe, that the universe would never do this type of thing to him.
Eventually, the point that we are talking about right now is actually when the ship has already sailed.
America's pandemic response is already behind the eight ball at this point, right?
It's time for Kushner, which by the way, reminder, he has no expertise in any of this besides the fact that he married Donald Trump's daughter, comes in and he actually helms a response to bring up nationwide testing.
Could it have worked?
We don't know.
Maybe it wouldn't have worked, but guess what?
It would have worked more than nothing, right?
So Kushner gets told at one of these meetings, we think it will make an effective political strategy if blue states suffer through this.
And this is looking at Trump's re-election.
And again, the key word in all of this, and this isn't alarmist, this isn't being done for attention, this isn't being done for profit, it's genocide.
It is the willful denial of life-saving products and life-saving procedures and strategy in order to kill or hurt people who do not agree with you politically or philosophically.
That's not an exaggeration.
That's what we're looking at.
Well, you got to remember because Trump has also been saying stuff like, I told him to stop testing.
You know, if we have less tests, we don't have as many cases.
And we know that's true.
He never jokes.
He told us he never jokes.
You can put all these things together in the context.
And we know that that was being said.
We know they pulled the plug on funding for testing across the country so that there will be less testing.
So those two things are verified and known.
We also know, if you remember, Kushner goes on, you know, I think it was probably Fox in April, and says that the testing has been solved.
Mission accomplished.
We've gotten the whole thing done, taken care of.
Remember, he said that.
And that was all in the same timeline here, where they were dismantling this thing.
We're not going to be interested in doing what we need to do with testing, which is really going to be, aside from wearing masks, the next biggest important part about stopping this virus and what every other country that has has done.
It really is the power of positive thinking thing is really I think you're almost letting the guy have too much credit for some sort of hypothetical ideology, when really I just think it's a cynical take on politics.
Man, listen, I would almost feel better if I understood that Donald Trump was able to view the world that way.
I've talked about this before, you know, I sort of compare this to like Steve Jobs, right?
This idea of the reality distortion field that certain powerful people have, which is like, you know, to be around them, you have to always accept what it is that they believe.
And we actually saw this firsthand during this crisis.
You know, we had two experts.
We had Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx.
And both were serious people, right?
Fauci continually told Trump, listen, things are bad and this is what you need to do.
And Birx, a serious person, was completely, just absolutely corrupted by this reality distortion field.
And she became just this deliverer of good news.
Who would just show up and tell Trump, Oh, everything's great.
No, this is, everything looks like it's just totally fine and working.
And what ends up happening?
Fauci gets kicked out the door and gets, you know, he becomes the target of constant abuse and Birx becomes, you know, the court jester.
And that's what you end up having.
Now the question here, and this is what I find really disturbing because all of this has been confirmed.
We're not talking about conspiracy theory stuff.
This isn't stuff that we saw on Reddit and we're now trying to pass off.
Like this has been confirmed by so many different people that this has happened.
How is this not the major headline every single day?
How are we not talking about Kushner being locked up?
Trump being locked up?
Crimes against humanity?
And here's the sad truth, and we keep trying to tell people about this on this podcast.
We're going down a slide, man.
We're going down a trajectory where, like, these types of things just become more and more accepted, and we just throw up our hands.
We're like, my God, that's horrific.
What about the next thing?
What about the next thing?
And what ends up happening in a society when these things keep piling up is we become coarser and coarser, and we're not paying attention to the horror that is right in front of us.
Independent of even, like, the horrors of what the politicians are doing that need to be investigated, it's the deaths.
The deaths in COVID are going to become everyday occurrences, and they're kind of already now.
People are just going to resign themselves to being, oh, well, this is what it is.
Now, there was a scary article I read, I think, in The Post yesterday about what it really means to get the vaccine.
Even if, even if they were able to develop this thing.
And by the way, do you know why October is some target date for them to come up with a vaccine?
Jerry, can you imagine what happens?
You know, around October, you know, that that might be their October surprise.
And so they're going to rush this thing.
It's not going to be properly vetted and tested.
But then that said, vaccines are not perfect.
And we've seen instances, you know, polio didn't work initially.
You know, in this article, you realize it took years before it had enough where we had herd immunity and you didn't have kids, you know, or your parents freaking out about their kids possibly having polio for years in the 50s.
This is the same way it's going to happen.
And vaccines cause long-term damage.
Vaccines have caused long-term damage because they weren't right.
That is what happened in the past.
And by the way, that's not sitting here telling people not to go out and get a vaccine.
We're not going to peddle pandemic-type bullshit, right?
Like, we need to believe in this thing, but when you have someone like Trump or a Kushner in charge of any of this, the doubts start to creep into your mind.
Rightfully.
Right?
You're exactly right.
They're trying to rush this thing.
And not only that, but they're still peddling hydroxychloroquine.
That's still something that they're trying to push.
It's almost like we've been doing this for a long time because how did you do that?
You knew exactly that I was going to say that because I have my conspiracy theory for you.
Are you ready for this one?
Wait, I'm real, actually just real fast because I can't move past this.
I just want to point out that I was able to pronounce it correctly, which I have not been able to do.
Just, I nailed it that time.
I'm very proud of myself and I just want a little bit of a little bit of dap there that I actually got that out in the right sequence.
I'm from Greene County, Indiana.
I'm happy with it.
Yes.
Well, it's a distinctly Republican thing to want to pat yourself on the back for the very basic word.
Wait, wait, wait.
To drink a glass of water to rally it?
Expect four more years?
Yeah.
Making it down a ramp is like, hey, a Pulitzer Prize.
It's hard.
Hydroxy, right?
They're pushing it again all of a sudden.
Out of the blue.
Why?
Now, of course we know they bought millions of doses that they were going to use months and months ago, and they're sitting on a stockpile.
But here's my thing.
Couldn't have it to a nicer guy, but Louie Gohmert gets COVID-19.
And what happens the next day after he announces it?
He starts going on the thing.
I'm taking hydroxychloroquine.
That's going to be my thing.
It's going to save me.
I'm going to survive.
I truly hope he survives.
I really do.
But part of me feels like they're looking around.
They got all these doses of hydroxychloroquine.
What are we going to do with them?
Well, someone's going to have to draw straws.
Okay, Louie, he gets the short end of the straw.
You're going to get COVID and then you're going to have to take it.
I'm serious.
That's like what they did.
To be fair, Louie Gohmert is drawing the short end of the straw in every draw of a straw that he's ever had.
Well, yeah, and actually, you know, I was talking to a class of students who were studying conspiracy theories.
Really, really smart group of people.
And immediately I got done talking with them, and the first thing I saw was Louie Gohmert blaming him for testing positive for COVID-19 because he wore a mask.
Oh, I missed that!
Yeah, so he was like, well, that's why I caught it.
It was because I was wearing a mask.
And then immediately, once he found out he had COVID, he called in all of his staff members to come into the room and then tell them that he had COVID.
And then it starts leaking out that within Gohmert's circle, people are getting berated if they wear masks, right?
And this is a party, by the way.
We talked about this a little bit last week.
Herman Cain died.
Herman Cain was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for like a few weeks.
Like he actually like, he kind of played a role in a presidential campaign for the Republican Party.
And they basically, and this sounds terrible, they turned him into like a disposable guy.
They just tossed him up and threw him out and they just didn't really talk about it anymore.
And he most definitely got sick at Trump's Tulsa rally.
I mean, that's where this thing happened.
So what you're saying is exactly right.
They are going to put all of their chips in the middle on this quote-unquote miracle cure that doesn't work that has killed people.
It's killed people!
It just remembered that it's literally killed people!
And they're gonna try and push that, and they're gonna try and push this, uh, this vaccine, which may or may not work.
Who knows if they can get it out there?
And the whole time, all they're doing is covering up the fact that this is their fault.
That they have carried out a genocide, whether willing or unwilling.
It seems like they were willing and that it was premeditated.
They've carried out a genocide.
They got out of control!
They thought that they could keep it in New York and California and just sort of punish those cities and sort of like draw a contrast between Trump and those governors and instead now it's everywhere or as they said our people and that's why they're actually taking it quote-unquote seriously now because it's affecting their people.
Jared, what is it about the masks?
What is it that, what does it represent?
Why is it the mask has, and we've seen this before in the Spanish flu in 1918.
Wait, I don't want to say 1917 because Trump is making that mistake.
But we saw that back then too.
They had anti-maskers back then, believe it or not, and it delayed the ability to get through that.
But it stands for something, right?
Something about that mask so enrages the right or whoever the people are, I guess mostly the right.
And it's hard for me to really wrap my head around.
We talked about the libertarian notion in the maybe the small L libertarian and how you can't tell the government, government can't tell you what to do.
And there's like, you know, there's an instinct that a lot of people seem to have.
It's just to go against what they're being told to do.
But what do you think?
What is it about the mask that's so threatening to them?
Well, it depends on who you're talking about.
With men, it's just a sign of weakness.
You know, it's this idea.
And we're talking about a group of people in America, these insecure men.
And this is one of the reasons why Trump refuses to wear it very often, right?
Because these are people who are really, really insecure and terrified of being seen as weak.
And so as a result, you know, I don't know, they buy big giant trucks or they dress themselves like vigilantes or mercenaries or whatever.
And so that's a sign of weakness.
The other thing is that the Republican Party and the American right have fostered faux individualism, which means that they all behave in a herd mentality while believing that there are individuals who cannot be manipulated.
Yeah.
It's a really weird state of being that, and again, I said this the other day.
We're going to talk to John Orner in a little bit about higher education.
I was posting about higher education.
If aliens came down to Earth, which by the way, they might.
Who knows?
If you read the New York Times, it seems like it's inevitable at any moment.
But if aliens came to Earth and they were like, introduce us to your customs and your culture, they would just look around and they'd be like, why are all these people talking about being individuals together?
You know what I mean?
They are on the same track.
They're playing the same roles together.
Jared, promise me that we can go over They Live at one point during our Patreon.
That's number two.
You just nailed it.
That's our number two movie podcast.
I'm in.
I'm so glad that you thought about that.
Yes.
I just watched it.
But anyway, you know, and then if you haven't, the conceit is that there's these special glasses that when you look, you put them on, you can see who the aliens are, who aren't, who are not aliens.
But the idea being that everyone is just following, you know, the Let me ask you about the masks.
You know, every sign tells them to obey and all that stuff.
So anyway, but yes.
But let me ask you this one about the masks.
Do you think that, okay, so we understand that the men don't want to look like, you know, weak.
They don't want to look weak.
I want to use a word that we're not allowed to use anymore, right?
So they don't want to look weak.
Women, I suppose, don't want to wear it because they also probably have a similar chip on their shoulder, I suppose, in that sense.
I almost feel like, does it mean that by putting on the mask you are acknowledging deeply to yourself how scary the situation really is?
And I wonder if that reality is so challenging to people, they refuse to go to that far, that they can't do it.
They can't acknowledge what the reality of the situation is, and that's what putting that mask is doing.
I think there's a couple things happening with that, because one, in the modern world, we take so many chances with our lives.
You know what I mean?
Like we eat things left and right.
We live in houses.
God knows what like Wi-Fi does to us and cell phone things do to us.
And we have no, you know, power lines.
We have no idea.
So that's one thing.
But the secondary, the secondary thing that we're talking about here is game theory.
And again, I keep saying this.
The mask that I wear is to protect you.
The mask that you wear is to protect me.
But if I don't, if I'm a Trump supporter or I'm in the American right, that mask is a victory for you.
Do you know what I mean?
It means, oh, you are right about this situation and you can see it.
And all of a sudden it looks as if it's almost like yard signs, but it's on our faces, right?
And, you know, it sounds terrible, but if we could turn this into a survival thing where it's like, who's going to survive the most, red or blue, maybe we might see something change.
And we definitely have seen more masks because Trump told people to wear masks, which again, going back to that cult-like mentality.
But no, it's a game theory thing.
They don't want to give people the satisfaction of seeing them with masks on.
Okay, because they want to keep that private.
They don't want to acknowledge that and see it publicly.
But then, for the longest time, the Confederacy people with the flags and the racists who were like having to be kept quiet and couldn't let that go, they can now allow that to be shown a lot more and a lot easier.
I kind of feel like that's sort of the case.
I don't want to make it too anecdotal, but It does feel like there's a movement towards like, I want to fly my Confederate flag, I want to let people know what that stands for, the kneeling stuff.
So in some respects, on the other side, they're more than willing to expose that part of themselves.
They just don't want to show that, you know, they recognize that COVID is serious.
Maybe those two things are not related at all.
But I just find, we keep pointing this out, I think that there's a lot of torque that exists in these people.
Well, there's also something else that's going on there that I'm really glad that you brought up because a big part of not wearing the mask is about projecting a sense of self, like who you think that you are versus who you are.
And actually for anyone who has ever smoked cigarettes or known people who smoke cigarettes, like if you go back into like the 1950s, everyone decided that a good way to sell cigarettes was to sell the idea of having a death wish.
Right?
And this is like that James Dean idea, the rebel without a cause.
If I embrace dangerous things, then I'm a dangerous person, which unfortunately Americans are steeped in.
We love that stuff.
We love that shit.
We love pretending that we're not afraid of death, and not wearing a mask is one of those things.
It supposedly gives you like some sort of street cred.
Oh, maybe death is out there, but I'm not going to get it, or I'm not afraid of it, or you all are overreacting.
But The problem here, and this is again the larger part, the government's failed.
They didn't give communication, they didn't give leadership, and they sure as hell didn't take care of America when they needed to, and they have left Americans all adrift on their own for all of these Signals that are all screwed up.
Certainly other countries are telling Americans not to wear masks.
I can tell you the disinformation that I keep coming across is foreign in a lot of different cases and fascistic.
The amount of fascist groups right now that are telling people not to wear masks in order to probably destabilize the country is huge.
So when Kushner and Trump and all of these people screw up on their job or they decide not to do it or to carry out basically premeditated genocide, they leave a vacuum.
And the people who take up that vacuum are the people who do not want the best for the American people.
And they don't want to take care of people, and they don't care if people die, because it helps their bottom line and their ultimate plan.
Well said.
I think the other thing that we can mention is that the power of political governors and people who are in power, the influence of their words to a lot of people will say, well, no one tells me what to do.
But if the governor says, get out there, everything's open, you can go ahead and do about your business, they will follow that.
You know what I'm saying?
And that's what's so scary about it because they don't even understand how influenced they are by these people and when they will say outwardly that they're not.
They simply wanted to align with their core value, which is, I don't want to be cooped up anymore.
I don't care much about anybody else besides me and maybe my family.
And so I need to go out and go do all my stuff and then ultimately spread this thing.
In Texas is what we saw.
They opened up way too early.
There was not one metric that we had had, that the CDC had given out that they were even close to being near before opening up.
And you have a governor who decides to do it anyway.
And at that point, anything he says after that about, oh, we have to kind of stay back inside is all off the window.
They will not listen to that anymore.
They simply want to listen to what they want to hear.
And by the way, am I describing us, too?
Do I only listen to what I want to hear?
I don't even know anymore.
With, like, my built-in biases.
But that's what happened here, and certainly in the reality.
And, you know, that's why these things are so bad.
Like, Texas is really bad.
I mean, it's really spread.
And it's getting to kids.
And they're going to open up schools now.
It's really... That's what's heartbreaking to me when I read about this stuff.
Well, first of all, Nick, I live in Georgia and I will not have my state disrespected because we opened up way earlier than everybody else and we decided that we were just going to sacrifice everyone's lives.
Now in Texas, I mean, it was what we were like two weeks into it and they're like, This quarantine has gone on too long!
And then you had the Lieutenant Governor, who is a madman, going on Fox News and being like, I am a senior citizen and I'm willing to die for my grandkids.
And it's like, no one is asking you to die for your grandkids.
What the hell is happening here?
Meanwhile, here in Georgia, we have a similar situation where, again, we've talked about this on the podcast, our complete failure of a governor is trying to have it both ways and thus not be a leader.
He's trying to say, well, we all need to wear masks and maybe we should social distance, but I'm not going to make people do it, right?
So that sends a double sort of a message, which says, oh, we have something going on.
And on the other hand, it says, oh, it's not really that big of a deal.
And you have a vacuum.
That's the biggest problem here, is that we have a vacuum of leadership.
And not only are people dying because of the vacuum of leadership, they're dying because of a decision by the federal government to not lead and to let people die on purpose.
Which again, not to be alarmist, not to be crazy here, that is actually genocide.
But not to put as much blame I suppose on them, because listen, I live in Los Angeles.
Liberal.
You know, the governor had for a while there been being was being praised for his response.
Well, I'm driving around yesterday and there are restaurants open serving diners, not socially distanced.
These two tables are close together.
People are waiting in line to get into the restaurant to get a table completely bunched up, not a mask in sight.
Walking in the neighborhoods where I was nearby and having to run across a street with my mask on so I don't get anywhere near them.
This is across the board.
I think it's a uniquely American phenomenon that we couldn't be expected to do what you see in Asian countries or even in Europe, which would be simply to wear a mask and observe what our scientists are telling us.
It seems to me a distinctly American thing It's a storm that will not end.
I don't think this is going to end.
Especially when you can throw on the fact that all the influence you're talking about from other countries nefariously to convince us that masks are bad.
It's a storm that will not end.
I don't think this is going to end.
We're going to have this for a long time.
So this is a really traumatic moment.
And I keep having people reach out and they're like, hey, this feels insane.
And I feel insane.
Am I insane for feeling like this is an insane time?
You are absolutely not.
And if you want to understand how bad this is, here's a little exercise that people can do.
Imagine a future history book.
Right?
That touches on this moment.
Write the opening paragraph.
America was a country that couldn't decide that the pandemic was real.
And so 150,000, 200,000, they're talking about 300,000 people possibly being dead by the end of this year.
And all because we couldn't decide that a disease was real.
And you want to talk about every philosophical conundrum in the book.
We're on a train.
We recognize that disaster is ahead of us.
We can see it.
We know it.
The experts are telling us the disaster is there.
And unfortunately, we're getting ready to welcome on John Warner here in a second to talk about the looming disaster in higher education.
I know where I live.
We have, I think, 20,000 students getting ready to come into my small college town from God knows where with a lack of testing.
And why do we have to do it?
Because everything is screwed up, Nick, and we have to recognize how screwed up it is.
And we have to make changes.
We just do.
I mean, we didn't even talk about Cy Vance getting the records taxes from Trump, even.
Talking about everything is screwed up.
By the way, where was he this whole time?
Why, you know, why is he waiting till now?
I mean, imagine if that this has been happening.
How about let me ask you this as a hypothetical.
What if Trump got impeached in January?
In January?
Like if he continued?
Oh, if that would have ended up working out the original impeachment.
That's such an alternate reality.
I can't even imagine it at this point.
Because I don't know how long it would have taken to get Pence in there or whatever.
It might have only been a few days.
But I don't know.
Just imagine.
Imagine if anybody else was in the White House at that moment because it was right when this all was going down, if that changed anything.
But we're going to find out.
That is, by the way, what you just said, and again, this is why you're on the best in the business deck.
That is a devastating campaign piece of rhetoric against Republicans.
They kept Trump in office and they enabled this thing to happen.
And the very fact that the Democratic Party isn't just absolutely slathering airwaves with that message is incredible.
No, that's a really different alternate reality.
And I'm sure we will see that.
I mean, if someone's listening to this right now, I'm sure.
But you are right.
And not even as a political thing.
It just is a fact, you know, because Trump has driven this so much that if we just had somebody else and, you know, I do what I find funny, though, with the whole Cy Vance thing is that You know, the Trump administration is trying to throw out this case saying, oh, it's a phishing expedition, they're just harassing us or whatever.
And he was forced to come out and say in public, in front of the court, that no, no, no, this is not even just about the illegal hush payments that they made.
This is about extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump organization, of which has been already documented.
We had the New York Times at a... Did they win the Pulitzer for that?
for their reporting with the Mary Trump's records. - Oh no, that was a, they won for Russia.
But that, and by the way, that was another one of those things that should have been the major headline for weeks upon weeks upon weeks, and it just turned into something that it was like, well, I guess that's how it is.
Awful. - By the way, really quickly, you know what we're supposed to have gotten yesterday?
The big news was that yesterday was the official two week ending of this, In two weeks we're going to present you with a Republican health care plan.
Yeah, how did that look?
I didn't get a chance to see that.
Was it really in-depth?
It's blinding.
It's blinding in its absence of any kind of physical paper that has words on it describing anything like that.
I'm shocked.
Wait, are you saying it was like the wall or the draining of the swamp or infrastructure week or literally everything Trump has ever promised?
Did you see the video of the wall being blown over in the little storm?
I watched it a couple times, yes, I did.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man.
It's really appropriate.
It was almost like on the nose.
It's too on the nose.
You couldn't put that in the movie about it because people would be like, you know, that's just that's just too cliche.
But yeah, his literal wall is brand new, beautiful wall.
He built literally just blew over and it wasn't even like a category to, you know, hurricane or anything like that.
What a what a situation we're in.
And you know, we're going to jump from a completely incompetent president, a genocide that is largely going unnoticed, to now just an absolute disaster in the making.
Stick around, everyone.
We're going to be back with John Warner in just a few seconds.
Hey everybody, we are back with John Warner, who is a writer, researcher, speaker, and former college instructor.
His most recent books are Why They Can't Write, Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay, and Other Necessities, and The Writer's Practice, Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.
Both really, really good books.
He's a weekly columnist for the Chicago Tribune and contributing blogger to Inside Higher Ed.
His next book is Sustainable, Resilient, and Free, The Future of Public Higher Education, out this October from Belt Publishing and currently available for pre-order.
John, I am a college professor.
I am in the belly of the beast.
As we were talking about it before we started recording, I'm really glad that you are out there speaking truth to power in a system that is It's really screwed up, man.
And I thought that you could start out possibly by giving like a little bit of a thesis statement of what, to people who aren't in higher ed, maybe give a little bit of an introduction of what is so monumentally screwed up right now, and this disaster that we're starting to look at.
Yeah, so with higher ed, it's like a lot of other things we're witnessing right now, that the pandemic has more revealed the fault lines, and revealed and then ripped them open.
Rather than creating them to begin with.
Higher education was on, particularly public higher education, was on an unsustainable path long before the pandemic came.
If you look at things like 70% of graduates graduate with debt, that debt averages $30,000.
If you look at the fact that, as I was in my career, a majority of college faculty labor off the tenure track, sometimes for as little as like $1,500 per semester long class and need public assistance in order to teach college.
These are not sustainable practices.
This is already evidence that the institutions themselves are not fulfilling their mission of enhancing the economic, social, human potential of the members of the community, which is how I view higher education.
And what we're seeing now is the end of a system that, I trace it back to 1983, the beginnings of the U.S.
News & World Report rankings, where we started to believe that the best way for colleges to achieve excellence was for them to compete with each other.
Colleges are now, in the words of the chancellor, Carol Christ, of University of California, Berkeley, colleges are in the fundamental business of enrolling students for tuition dollars.
And as long as that is the case, it creates perverse incentives around how colleges behave that are fundamentally inconsistent with the mission of teaching and learning and education.
And this has been going on for a long time.
It's all part of sort of the shift in the narrative of American success That originated with the Reagan revolution, right?
The competition, deregulation, private interests somehow will make us better, safer, healthier, all that kind of stuff.
Can we swear on this podcast?
Sure.
Do it.
All that is bullshit.
And we're seeing all of that come home to roost at this moment as our health care system collapses, as our public health system has been hollowed out and clearly not up to the task.
As our educational system cannot respond to this at either the K-12 or higher education level.
And, you know, I feel like I was well prepared to write this next book because I've been sort of shouting this stuff for the last seven or eight years.
But now is the time where we can renew it.
We can take steps to put this system, this vital part of our American infrastructure, which is how I see our public institutions, we can put it on a path that is, as I say in the book, sustainable and resilient.
I'm glad you brought the rankings because I know, you know, everybody who's starting to apply will open up that rankings and look and decide where they want to go.
It's supposed to be, you know, I suppose, ranking like who is best at educating and all the ideals of college.
But is it fair to say that really the two keys that go into that report are partying and sports?
Well, I mean, the U.S.
News & World Report These rankings are not reflective of anything that happens inside a college in terms of teaching and learning.
It has no relationship to it.
At best, they have some measures that may be proxies for the atmosphere under which you're learning things like faculty-student ratio and that kind of stuff.
But the primary thing that the U.S. News and World Report rankings measure is who gets admitted and how rich the university is.
A huge part of the rankings, in fact, at the origin of the rankings, 100 percent of the rankings were based on this reputational survey that they sent out to other college presidents and provosts and administrators and said, who are the good colleges?
Who else is great?
That was the first iteration of U.S.
News & World Report, a methodology that is like It would be like Yelp.
Yelp, instead of surveying people who had dined in the restaurant, we're surveying people who had talked to somebody who had dined in the restaurant.
It's like one level removed.
That is still a third, maybe it's 25%, but I think it's 30% of the rankings.
And everything else is really just a reflection of institutional wealth, of how you can attract the richest students, the students from the most advantageous backgrounds,
And the reality is a majority, a vast majority of the post-secondary institutions in the country, and I'm including community colleges here, which are often left out of the conversation of post-secondary education because so much attention is paid towards the elite schools and rankings and this sort of stuff.
But the vast majority of public higher education institutions are classified as non-selective.
Doesn't mean they're open, all perfectly open like community colleges who will enroll anybody who qualifies, who's graduated from high school.
But they are non-selective, meaning they admit 80% or more of their applicants.
So the idea that we are going to determine how good a school is by ranking them against these instruments of prestige just doesn't make any sense for a system that needs to serve hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously.
So all these resources go into improving prestige, competing on prestige, and none of that stuff ultimately translates to the quality of the education students receive once they're at the institution.
It's all a waste of time, resources, energy, and it's created these incredible inefficiencies that make college Fundamentally more costly than it needs to be.
It's a load of bullshit is what it is all the way around.
And the thing is when you're talking about it and nothing you just said was factually inaccurate whatsoever.
It was a damning indictment of it.
We're not talking about hotel franchises.
We're not talking about where to get brunch.
Higher education is supposed to be the lifeblood of a society.
It's supposed to be the thing that maintains democracy.
It's supposed to be the thing that leads to innovation and out-of-the-box thinking and leads to vibrant cultures.
And I'm so glad you brought up the Reagan Revolution, because this idea that everything is served better through a hyper-capitalistic lens, it juices all of the humanity out of it.
It ladens people like myself with debt for the rest of their lives, and leads to institutions that really have no resemblance of what they were supposed to be in the first place.
And I think right now, with the pandemic, we're seeing all that stuff come to a head.
And this disaster that we're seeing, not just in the fact that people are going to get infected and people are going to die, but it's unstable.
This stuff is not going to continue, correct?
Yeah, the go-to phrase I like to use and do use often in the book and on the blog is, education is infrastructure.
K-12 education is infrastructure.
Higher education is infrastructure.
This is something we need for all the reasons you mentioned, right?
As part of a democracy and for innovation and research and this kind of stuff.
But even consider the place of higher education institutions as employers, as cultural hubs, as centers of activity around which things happen.
We should be Thinking of them much more like people still, the public library is still one of the few things that most people will believe is the kind of public good and public infrastructure that isn't a road or a bridge or police or fire.
But higher education absolutely should be looked at it through that lens.
And what we're seeing in this kind of meltdown, where students are being brought to campus to protect the revenue model of the institutions, is a betrayal of an institution that is supposed to be oriented around a broad public good.
The idea that we would have colleges meet in person under circumstances that will exacerbate a global pandemic, which is unchecked in the United States, and cause additional death, suffering, what looks to be now in many cases long-term disability, is wrong.
It's wrong.
It's inconsistent with the mission we claim for higher education, particularly public higher education.
And that we have gone down the road where institutions must engage in this kind of, you know, sort of infection kabuki theater to make us pretend as though we're going to be okay, like we're going to have a spit shield in front of every professor, and we're going to be distanced and all this kind of stuff.
It just is mind-boggling, except it was utterly predictable.
I predicted it back in April when the initial shutdown set.
I said we'd better start planning for an online fall so we can have the best possible distanced experience after this period of emergency distance learning in the spring.
Some schools did it, and I think some schools are going to do it as successfully as we could imagine.
Lots of them are now in the practice of either trying to open or at the last, relatively last minute, saying we're delaying face-to-face instruction.
And this kind of constant scramble is not conducive to a sustainable, resilient institution.
It's the opposite of it, as a matter of fact.
You know, I think the subtext here is that the reason why a lot of the colleges wanted to have on-campus learning was because they couldn't have a football season without it.
And for whatever reason, I'm not clear, it's not clear to me why those two things had to be tied together.
We now, I'm in the sports world, so we hear a lot of, well, Jerry's laughing, but we, a lot of people, they're training, they're on campus.
A lot of the sports teams are already there doing this intermixing and not doing, you can't do social distancing with sports teams.
So I'm kind of curious, you know, it seems like has that kind of waned a little bit as we've gotten a little bit closer now that we're in August?
Or is that still like a focus for some of these colleges?
I think, you know, that's a really interesting question.
And it's a question that I think it depends a lot on the school.
I think if you're looking at a Power Five conference, they are highly invested in pulling off some semblance of a football season, even if there aren't fans in the stands.
And I think a lot of that quite obviously has to do with revenue.
But again, I'm skeptical.
Just before I came on, I saw that Northwestern University had suspended their workouts because of a positive test.
Clemson University had had something like 25 positive tests in the summer.
There's sort of no doubt that there's going to be, you know, a death is unlikely, but disability is highly likely among some of these student athletes.
I've been encouraged by what the Pac-12 athletes did, I think that was just yesterday, in terms of saying, hey, these are the conditions under which we're going to play, recognizing their leverage, as far as that goes.
But I do think, I think a football season weighs heavily on a lot of these schools' minds.
I think one of the reasons you saw Notre Dame's president come out early, one of the earliest Heads of a university in the country come out and say, we're going to meet face to face was to protect Notre Dame's football season.
He had all kinds of rationales for why students needed to be face to face, but none of them really held any water.
So, you know, I think it really illustrates the way that higher education institutions could go on and on.
And I have a chapter in the book on how we have to divorce Big time sports, Power Five football and basketball from higher education institutions.
I love college sports.
I'm totally into it.
I went to college at the University of Illinois.
1988, my freshman year, was the greatest team in the history of the NCAA basketball that did not win a title, the Flying Illini.
Lowell Hamilton.
Nick Anderson.
Nick Anderson, Kenny Battle, Marcus Liberty.
These were, you know, these were great, great players.
Great, great team.
We can, you know, my solution is to essentially create for-profit sports developmental leagues That then license the logo and stadium from the university.
It's only a plus for the university.
Revenue flows in.
Players can get paid.
Revenues can go up for these sports because they're no longer tied to the fig leaf of being amateur and this kind of stuff.
Just let it be what it is, which is the world's biggest and most lucrative professional developmental sports league.
You know, far bigger than the NBA's Developmental League, far bigger than the minor leagues for baseball, far bigger than minor leagues for hockey.
I think I did the math.
I think it would be the third largest sport.
It's larger than the NHL.
It may even be larger than Major League Baseball in terms of revenue.
It would instantly, it's already a major sport.
Just let it be, let it be what it is, and let's get universities out of the business of sports.
Let 'em be universities. - So we spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about this sort of corporate mentality that places the bottom line over the safety and wellbeing and decent lives of human beings.
In all of this big business that you're talking about with colleges, I can't help but wonder is there a group of people who control universities who might have a corporate type of mindset or?
I don't know.
Is it faculty members who are making these decisions or is there like a breed of let's say administrators who run colleges like businesses that maybe you'd like to talk about and how they have run this entire industry into the ground?
So you know this this is it's funny because I was actually working on the chapter that talks about this today and I want to be Generally kind to administrators and the fact that I don't think they get into the business into the business.
I don't think they get into higher education to become sort of corporate business types.
I think we have a system that many would think requires this mindset and then others sort of take to once they're immersed in it.
But I really think the problem is systemic, right?
This pursuit of revenue drives the operations of colleges, which requires a kind of corporate thinking.
Which creates this idea of students as customers, which I think is antithetical to a lot of what we would try to do when we educate them.
But what I think does happen for administrators, and I think this is true of faculty as well, is they get wrapped up in this concept that I was recently introduced to called vocational awe, A-W-E, vocational awe, where we come to believe this thing we are doing is so important Educating students.
That we are willing to accept any degradation to ourselves, to our institution, to our mission, in order to preserve that ultra-important mission.
So an administrator who has nothing against contingent faculty or adjunct faculty, who thinks it's a bad idea, who knows it's a bad idea, you'll find very few administrators that defend the practice of having part-time, a majority part-time faculty, Justify it like, well, otherwise the classes couldn't meet.
So this is a necessity.
And when you allow that mentality to go on for 20, 25, 30 years, we reach the state we're in now, which is where operations, the university must operate, we must enroll students, we must collect their tuition, and we have to have face-to-face class because that's how we determine whether or not we're worth
Paying for operations, we work from what I what I call operations on down, as opposed to pedagogy, what I see as mission on up.
And so a lot of ways I feel for administrators who are trapped by these bad incentives, who are trapped by this terrible system.
I do think many things would change under the vision I have for the future of public higher education.
And that would mean fewer administrators would mean college presidents don't make a million dollars a year.
But I don't think they're per se—they're not an enemy, a nefarious enemy.
They are trapped by circumstances.
They just happen to have all of the power in the equation, including over-tenured faculty who over the years have had less and less say in shared governance.
I would just throw out real fast that one of the things that the pandemic has made very clear in higher education is that a lot of these administrators are also subject to political battles between red and blue legislatures that either vilify educators and hold their money hostage and make them meet revenue goals and enrollment goals, And so a lot of it, again, is that top-down, Reagan-esque sort of corporate idea.
We will cut your budget unless you meet face-to-face, right?
Right.
I have a series at my Inside Higher Ed blog.
The titles are Colleges as Political Playthings, where I'll write about legislatures simply manipulating schools because they can in things like the presidential search, where the University of South Carolina Had a president installed at the whim of the legislature against all the wishes of everybody else.
Or years ago when I was full time teaching at College of Charleston and Fun Home, the graphic novel or graphic memoir, was chosen as our common book.
We were stripped of $150,000 in funds, essentially the funds used for the Common Book program, by the South Carolina State Legislature in retaliation for a line drawing of two women having oral sex, which is in the book.
They did not like the lesbian themes of Fun Home.
So these are the learned Helplessness among administrators to state legislatures is well come by, right?
They come by it honestly, because even as the percentage of the budget contributed by the state to these institutions has declined, in many cases to 10% or below, and in South Carolina's institutions, it's right around 10-12%, even any cut to that is a disaster.
Any reduction in revenue is a disaster.
And the legislature could do all kinds of other terrible things to them.
So, yeah, it's all part of this terrible system that we're asked to operate within.
Well, let me ask you this, because you guys might not be aware, but there's a running joke that's been going on for probably like a century when a guy gets into Harvard, let's say, and they'll say, oh, well, how many wings did your father have to pay for to get you in this place?
And then it turns out that this is actually a real thing and we really shouldn't be laughing about this.
So my question I suppose is, is this going to affect the prestige of these kind of higher institutions?
And then also, is it really just limited to a few like Hollywood elites that were doing this one year?
Yeah, so a big part of the shift that I would love to see us do is to begin to literally ignore elite private colleges and universities.
Literally ignore them.
Like, we never hear about Harvard and Yale and Amherst and Williams again.
God bless them all.
They're great schools.
I would have killed to get into one, go to one, or teach at one.
But they are a vanishingly small portion of the higher education landscape, and they're private, tabooed, and unfocused on public higher education.
But just to put it in perspective for your listeners, the entire Ivy League is about the same size as Ohio State in terms of the number of students.
All of the Northeast Small College Athletic Conference, which is Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, etc., that's half of Michigan State.
All of those schools combined.
They literally do not matter if we are concerned with a system of higher education, post-secondary education, that provides economic opportunities and opportunities for development to anybody who seeks it out.
So we need to ignore those.
They also drive a huge portion of the culture war political bullshit that surrounds higher education with whatever is going on there.
You don't hear about No, don't get me wrong.
Most of these things are blown up from nothing into something for explicit culture war reasons that have nothing to do with reality.
But you don't hear about this stuff happening at community colleges, because they don't have time for those sorts of things to happen, because they're too busy teaching and learning and trying to improve their lives.
So if we could ignore those, if we could get back to where State institutions primarily educate the people from the state because they're supported primarily by the state, in my vision, in partnership with the federal government, where the University of Alabama is a minority Alabamian institution, like 45% of students in Alabama are from Alabama.
Alabama takes in 250 students from the state of Illinois every year.
That is madness.
Illinois, my home state, is filled with quality public higher education institutions, has more than enough capacity for the students of Illinois, and could, if they had the resources to keep them home, would keep them home.
So we'd get back to where like a flagship university is like 90, 85, 90% in-state students.
There's some out of state, but not a lot.
It's supported with state money in concert with federal money, so they're tuition free.
And states would then be incentive to actually support their institutions of higher education, because they're going to keep their citizens home, and they're going to educate them, and they're going to be more likely to stay.
Instead, we have this terrible interstate competition among highly similar institutions.
I've taught at both Virginia Tech and Clemson.
And there's not a dime's worth of differences between those places in terms of the education you can receive.
They're essentially identical, and they're both excellent.
This is not me saying that you should go there.
But students from South Carolina are rejected from Clemson and accepted to Virginia Tech, and students from Virginia are rejected at Virginia Tech and accepted at Clemson solely for the reason because they bring increased revenue with them once they cross state lines.
That is a horrible, horrible system that's exploitive of students and is not It's not serving them well.
It's not serving anybody well, to be honest.
I don't know, John.
You're making too much common sense here.
We're very grateful to have had John Warner, a weekly columnist for Chicago Tribune and contributing blogger to Inside Higher Ed.
His next book is Sustainable, Resilient, Free!
The Future of Public Higher Education, out this October from Bell Publishing, available for pre-order.
I'm going to pick that up today.
I think that is just an incredibly important book, and we thank you so much.
Where can the good people find you?
They can find me on Twitter at BibliOracle.
They can pick up the next book at beltpublishing.com.
Pre-orders are great because they're a small, independent, Midwestern publisher who's made a lot of books I love, which is why I'm doing the book with them, and they could use every last pre-order.
So, Twitter at BibliOracle and any of those books.
Awesome.
Thank you for your work, Ben.
Hey, my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everyone, that was John Warner joining us.
As a member of academia, it's so good to talk to people who recognize the absolute disaster that we are racing toward right now, particularly with in-person classes starting up in a couple of weeks, particularly in order to serve the bottom line.
Yeah, really good, frank conversation, I thought.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we continue to expose the matrix here and how there's a lot of different venues and different environments that need to get cleaned up if we're going to continue to progress as a society.
Yeah, and I hope that people who might not necessarily be in academia or have kids in academia or even live in a college town, I hope that you heard this interview because I think academia is a really good microcosm of what's wrong in this country.
And we have so many avenues that are working like that.
That sort of corporate profit mindset has infected particularly since Ronald Reagan.
Yeah.
And so we definitely see that, I think, really leading to some pretty terrible consequences right now.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
We've been churning this civilization out for a couple hundred years now, and it's interesting to figure out where we're going to go, right?
I mean, we're getting to somewhere.
If it's a crossroads, if it's the end of the road, I don't know.
But, you know... Is that your way of transitioning out of a podcast?
We've been in a civilization for a while.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
I think that's what I'm saying here.
I, uh, that's so funny that you say that.
I've been studying right now sort of like Cold War contingency plans and like all of these people talking about the destruction of society and then being like, eh, maybe we had a good run.
And now you have one conversation about higher ed and you're like, eh, maybe we're done.
I don't know, man.
I'm just looking for what's like the symbol of where you shove the big piece of wood into the wheel and it stops and then, you know, whatever, you muck up the work.
We need something like that to happen and change everything.
I think that's... I will say... It's Joe Biden, right?
I will say, to end this thing on a note of hope, I think it's really important that we're starting to recognize that these systems don't work.
You know what I mean?
Because when we're in high tide, when it feels like America's doing well or whatever, and people are making money, we can ignore this stuff.
Higher Ed didn't just get this way in the past couple of months.
Politics didn't just get this way in the past couple of years.
It's been churning.
These problems have been taking place.
And that's one of the reasons we thank you for joining this podcast.
We try really, really hard to give a little bit of historical context, a little bit more of a nuanced idea of how we got to these places and what we're doing.
So again, if you want to support this podcast, and we're so appreciative of everyone that has, to be completely frank and just a little bit emotional, heart on my sleeve, You, the listener, have built us up to this point.
You just absolutely have.
And we are just so overwhelmed and grateful for all the support.
And if you want to continue on this journey and help us out, do some extra podcast again.
At the end of this week, we're going to have a bonus podcast where we're talking about Jaws as a metaphor for the coronavirus.
To get those extra episodes, to get the coverage of the convention and debates and election night, which I don't know how you feel about it.
I want to broadcast live on election night and just sort of experience it, the horror together, you know, and be there for each other.
Are you in for that?
Absolutely.
I'm in.
Okay, all right.
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