Nice Country You Got There. Be A Shame If Something Happened To It.
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the latest with the raid at Mar A Lago and why Trump absconded with classified documents. Then, they're joined by author Will Bunch, who is a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of After The Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics - And How To Fix It.
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And I think when you couple it with... Think about last week.
In a five-day time period, we had the president's personal residence raided, we had the phone of a sitting member of Congress taken, and we had 87,000 IRS agents unleashed on the American people.
And then you think about, oh, this was so sensitive, we waited 18 months to get it.
No one believes these folks, but they see their government being turned against us.
We, the people.
We, the citizens.
And that's the frightening part.
So when President Trump says, turn down the heat, for goodness sake, they should, because turning down the heat means following the Constitution.
That's the concern here.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jared H. Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Hausman.
Nick Hausman, how you doing, buddy?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
Thanks for asking.
This is a jammed-packed show.
Later on, we're going to be welcoming Will Bunch from the Philadelphia Inquirer and talking about his great new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, which talks about how a lot of our political problems and cultural problems are caused by college.
We have a lot of things that have already hit the cutting room floor, Nick.
There's too much legal repercussions in our political environment.
Rudy Giuliani is being targeted in investigations in Georgia.
Turns out, Trump's lawyers accessed a bunch of restricted voter data, left and right.
But Nick, first things first, we've got to talk about the Espionage Act.
And we have to talk with the Ray DeMauro logo.
It never, ever ends.
Well, by the way, I don't know about you, but the Will Bunch interview just had me conjuring up the image of just John Belushi wearing the college sweatshirt, right?
That's, and I'm thinking of all that's wrong with it.
Which is a great, everyone definitely make sure to check out that when it comes up a little bit later in the pod.
But yes, the Espionage Act.
It's really, what a great title for like a movie, or a movie of the week maybe even.
Yeah, and we'll get into what that means, what's going on here.
Just for the record, the Espionage Act is kind of a shitty thing in general, which we'll get into.
But to go ahead and get everybody on the same page, again, we have to talk about the search at Mar-a-Lago of Donald Trump's absolutely gaudy, stupid resort residence, where the FBI took boxes upon boxes of material.
We also learned today that they took three of his passports, which I don't have a passport.
Three seems like too many.
One's expired, Jared.
Don't forget.
He has an expired one in there.
That's one.
The other one, though, is a diplomatic passport you get when you are working in the government.
Oh, that's great.
That's wonderful.
By the way, let me ask you this, though.
How many reasons would there be for law enforcement to legally take somebody's passport?
I think it's a little bit of a fear that somebody might vamoosh.
Just got his plane all gassed up and fixed up a little bit, maybe?
And why would Donald Trump possibly leave the country?
And there's a reason, which is, it has turned out that in his possession of Mar-a-Lago, illegally, he had in his possession nuclear secrets, signal intelligence, which is intelligence gathered from around the world.
Trump, in true Trumpian fashion, and this is coming from the, I worked on this story for a year and he just tweeted it out guy, Trump just gave it to the world, a warrant that revealed that he was being investigated, one, for obstruction, which he's always being investigated for obstruction, We'll get to that more so in a minute, but also for violating the Espionage Act and for you sports fans at home.
Each violation of that brings with it up to 10 years.
This is such a serious thing.
They're actually starting to fingerprint these documents to see who has touched them and who has come across them.
We're talking about 11 sets of documents, including four that are top secret, which, Nick, I believe that's the highest that it gets.
Yeah, well, there's the three other letters that are compartmentalized, something or other, whatever.
But yes, it's bad.
For your eyes only kind of stuff.
It's so absolutely stupid.
And just so we again are all on the same page, this is based on the Espionage Act of 1917.
We have not heard yet if that means that the former... By the way, Nick, I'm getting ready to say a sentence that is absolutely insane.
Are you ready?
That does not mean yet that a former president of the United States has been engaged in active espionage.
Uh, but this was part of the, uh, Wilson administration in 1917 around World War One.
Uh, this basically, uh, has been used left and right.
Uh, this is what Eugene B. Debs got hit with, Emma Goldman got hit with, the Rosenbergs, Ellsberg, you name it.
But it does appear as if the legal jeopardy that Donald Trump is in is, how do I put this, significant.
Oh yeah, and you know how we know that he actually did have nuclear related secrets in those vaults?
Just like you mentioned he ruined your scoop a while back, he mentioned it in the context of Obama having Nuclear Secrets.
So that, to me, basically tells me that he has them too.
He's saying, well, he also has them.
He didn't use the word also, but the idea being that, like, he was trying to already tie that in and say, like, you know, nuclear documents were taken from another predecessor.
That, to me, means that he has them as well.
So he lays his cards out on the table the entire time.
It's embarrassing.
And if he had a good lawyer, then, you know, he wouldn't be saying this stuff.
I'm sure DOJ is writing all this stuff down very carefully for their case.
Well, let's let's say this and we're going to talk in a minute about what we think is going on and how this occurred.
But let's let's make it very clear.
Donald Trump is an idiot and always has been has always telegraphed what he's doing.
I actually have this quote here, Nick.
And I gotta tell you, if I personally were being accused of violating the Espionage Act and holding on to nuclear secrets beyond my time in the White House, I probably would not post it for the world to see.
Quote, President Barack Hussein Obama, keep going with that, King, kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified.
How many of them pertain to nuclear?
Word is, lots!
I mean, number one, more or less a confession of violating the law.
Second of all, I love the Trumpian thing of people are saying.
That's always been wonderful.
It's just an absolute mind palace type situation for this guy.
But you're right, he couldn't even help but further incriminate himself and more or less admit, yeah, I kept nuclear secrets.
What are you going to do about it?
Right, and remember, the reporting could be considered iffy, I suppose, but again, the thing with this particular subject, and this goes for Merrick Garland as well, is no one's going to get out in front of something without having it completely locked down, right?
No one's going to report on potentially nuclear secrets.
If it's not, you know, they got three sources, whatever, you know, they lock down.
But we don't need all the sources anymore, because he will just tell you, What he's doing.
Again, I don't even know if it matters.
It doesn't matter to anybody that supports him, I suppose, but we have to get into the... There's so many things to get into, but we need to start talking about how they're defending this, because this is like, you know, throwing spaghetti at the wall here.
It's absolute madness, and we're gonna get into that.
First, I want to talk, Nick, and I have here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of these, trying to unravel what has happened here.
How we've come to this moment.
I have five scenarios that I think explain what has happened here and how we've arrived at this moment.
And I want to go through them.
These are in no particular order except for I would say probably ranging from as innocuous as possible.
to as insidious as possible.
Otherwise, we're not talking about possibility.
But I would love to hear from you.
And by the way, everybody listening, feel free to comment on this as well, what you think has happened here.
But Nick, I've got these five scenarios that I think one of them probably explains or a combination of them.
Scenario number one, this resulted from carelessness.
Basically, we all know this.
Donald Trump is not a serious person.
He has surrounded himself with unserious people.
Undoubtedly, they didn't take seriously the cataloging and or the moving of documents.
This very well could have been caused by a lot of idiots doing a lot of idiotic things.
How does that strike you?
I mean, what's Murphy's Law, right?
It's most likely that is the top of the list.
He was so cavalier, and by the way, it's such a nice way to put this, cavalier, with top secret documents throughout his career as the president, that it's not surprising.
Like, he would just throw shit into boxes.
They would, after the end of the day, he would rip it up and then throw it away and they had to grab it and tape it together.
He would tell the Soviets Israeli secrets.
Tweet out Iranian images from satellites.
It was horrible and they already had to stop giving him top secret information for fear that he would just blab it out.
Remember, in the chaotic days before Joe Biden took over the White House, I have a feeling he didn't think he was going to have to leave.
So they didn't pack, and nobody wanted to mention it to him.
Uh, sir, you know, we're gonna leave here in a couple days.
You probably should start putting your clothes in some, uh, you know, suitcases.
So, I have no doubt they threw a whole bunch of shit in a whole bunch of boxes and then shipped them down to Mar-a-Lago and figured they'd work it out later.
I gotta say, as somebody who hates packing and who has procrastinated that many a times, that strikes me as being at least partially true.
I think a lot of these scenarios interlock with each other, but undoubtedly there's shit that ended up at Mar-a-Lago that shouldn't have ended up at Mar-a-Lago simply because these people didn't take seriously their responsibilities, didn't care about the laws, and flaunted them.
I think that there is At least part of this that could be broken down into carelessness.
And everything that's been coming out, I've been reading so many threads from people who've had this kind of classified clearance.
It's like any one of those papers needs to be taken back immediately after he's done looking at them.
And at some point, and this is because from the top down, this is the way he runs his stuff, this is why he should never be allowed anywhere near any kind of public office again.
No, Donald Trump never should have been allowed to take a tour of the White House.
Right, exactly.
And so as a result, like that systematically after about a year or whatever, they were trying to keep up with that, but they ended up, as it happens, you walk in shit long enough you start smelling like it, everybody there just sort of probably gave up and were like, we're just going to maybe keep them in some boxes and hope that someone else figures it out later.
Now that explains a chunk of this.
Again, we're talking about 11 sets of information.
Four of them are top secret.
That doesn't specifically explain the four top secret sets.
I'll just say that.
Fair enough.
And certainly the nuclear stuff, that should never have been out since the daylight.
And that brings me to scenario number two.
And I think that this helps explain part of it simply because, let's be completely honest, let's call this what it is, Donald Trump is a slobbering idiot.
And just as craven as it comes.
There's a possibility that some of this Was Donald Trump trying to keep these things, and I know this sounds ridiculous because it is, as mementos?
Something that he could say, oh look, at one time I was able to touch some of the most sensitive documents, some of the highest level, you know, jewels of U.S.
intelligence and defense.
There is a possibility that he just wanted to take the hotel towels with him.
You know, when I share love letters with people, I would like to keep them, right?
They're very important to me and reminds me of the moments that I've shared with other people intimately.
And so, certainly, if Kim Jong Un, you know, had sent me these letters, I would want to keep those without question, Jared.
I think so as well, and this actually goes along quite a bit with Donald Trump and the way that he approaches the world, which is this is a person who more or less sees it as his own playground.
Why wouldn't he be able to take anything with him at any time, right?
He was the President of the United States of America.
Well, you know, wait until they look into where all this money went that they raised in different packs, Jared, because we know for a fact that he thinks that that's his stuff too.
Yes, and that brings us, by the way, to scenario number three, as we start getting even more serious, which is the possibility that Donald Trump took some of this information in order to hide evidence of his crimes, his own betrayals, the things that he did as president.
Well, maybe, I'm not sure this is the right order to mention this, but you know, Kash Patel's been out there saying that it's, it's that, but he, it's all the documents they have that they're going to get the FBI with.
You know, this is like, they have blackmail in the FBI.
That's what they kept with them because if they're going to turn the tables and they, they're going to sit on this for like, I don't know, another couple of years, maybe until it ages the right way.
But, um, you know, that's a possibility, I suppose, right?
There's some stuff that would be very damning that would, that would make them look really bad.
I could put that in one of those bins.
Well, and I would go ahead and say that history also shows us that Donald Trump does this kind of stuff.
He flushes notes.
He destroys things.
He has a long, long history of destroying evidence that has been asked for in investigations left and right.
He's actually one of the most, like, well-known destroyers of evidence.
Yeah, I mean, you know, are there notes to, you know, people in Saudi Arabia?
Like, you know, hey, it's too bad what happened to Khashoggi, you know, but hey, make sure we, you know, we're sending those airplanes to you, don't worry.
Like, yeah, or, you know, the other thing everyone has been saying, though, is, oh yeah, the notes from Helsinki, right, like him and Putin's notes that he took.
I don't know, it still makes you wonder why, if that's the case, why would he keep them?
Why would he have destroyed them?
Well, and I mean, that's also part of it as well is, and this is scenario number four, which is the possibility that he's been harboring this information for clout.
And basically this ranges everywhere from taking people on tours of Mar-a-Lago, which he undoubtedly does.
I have to imagine how many people has he shown this to just opened up the door and just said, look at my boxes, look at my boxes and like that.
But on top of that, basically, Keeping a semblance of power of the presidency, so you have people left and right, whether it's the Saudis, Russians, and shit, you name it, he's a free agent.
Anybody that he could use that as some sort of leverage to keep his relationship going or to maintain financial or political ties to, whether that's keeping loans going or investments going or any of the corruption he's part of, there is a possibility that this more or less is just sort of like a MacGuffin That's been shoved over here and gives him somewhat of a semblance of power remaining from the office.
I mean, yeah, sure.
I mean, it'd be great to be able to just sort of show people.
Now, don't forget, you know, the DOJ bent over backwards to allow him to return this stuff.
And I'm still, by the way, what happens if it had come out that they got to June and they got all the documents and didn't have to go raided?
Would we still be okay with that?
Having him do that and having him delay and obfuscate and then finally give it up?
I suppose he would have.
He would have been like, alright fine, they're not going to prosecute him.
He gave all the back, I guess.
But, remember, the notion of what made it so alarming was, A, nuclear documents, I'm sure is pretty much exactly what they, when they really realized that they still had them, and then B, they had the surveillance cameras.
They had surveillance on the storeroom.
They subpoenaed them.
They got them.
They watched them.
There's some shit on there.
I'm telling you, this is going to get a lot worse in the next, you know, few weeks, and we're going to find out probably exactly what they saw on this footage, and it's going to be Cash Patel coming out naked from the... I don't know what he's gonna do.
Something about him and in there and taking documents out.
It's gonna be bad.
Nick, much like opening the door to the room where you keep stolen U.S.
intelligence and nuclear secrets, it's now time to get to scenario number five, which I like to call the Blagojevich.
Okay.
Sorry, I was late on that one.
Did we hear it well enough?
There we go.
And much like the former governor of Illinois who believed that he had something golden that he didn't want to give up for free.
I mean, I've got this thing and it's fucking golden.
And I'm just not giving it up for fucking nothing.
I'm not gonna do it.
Here's the thing, Nick, we have to now have a discussion.
We have to open that door.
We have to peer in and we have to discuss the possibility that the former president of the United States of America, who, by the way, is one of the biggest con men, grifters, selfish, like immoral people that we have ever seen in American culture, that he saw the ability to cash in on American
Secrets in order to enrich himself and I will get into this and the the ramifications of it I gotta tell you right now at this point in in mid-august of 2022 Nick I I would be shocked because obviously it would be one of the greatest crimes in this country's history.
Probably the greatest really and But I wouldn't be that surprised at this point.
I would be remiss if I didn't, you know, as Illinois being my home state, to explain a little bit of what that text was or that quote was, because Blagojevich was the governor.
It's Obama's fault, Jared.
You realize this, right?
It was all Obama's fault.
He did something called getting elected president.
Yes, getting elected president of the United States.
So that means he had a, you know, the Senate seat was now suddenly open.
And I have to tell you, even at the time and even now, Blagojevich did nothing that every other governor would have done.
And he just said it out loud, mistakenly on a phone call.
Of course they all want to leverage that open seat to get stuff.
Who knows?
He went to prison, he served his time, he got caught, yadda yadda.
But I was a little bit torn on that one, only because that to me is the definition of politics.
Maybe it's because I'm from Chicago and that's how we do things there, but geez.
Man, the Illinois just got very thick on this podcast.
That was a lot.
That really, really was.
Yeah, well, you know, I could do my Chicago accent if you want, but I don't know.
I'm telling you, I don't think he, you know, it didn't seem this bad, but it's bad.
And it's a nice, you know, it's a nice through line.
I like what you're doing there, Jared.
You're making it from Blagojevich right to Trump.
It makes perfect sense.
Man, I feel like you just had to give up your California driver's license.
Just using that accent, that's wonderful.
Two hours waiting in line today for my renewal of my license.
Oh, that was today?
Wow.
Well, there you go.
Well, I gotta tell you, Nick, I think there's a very real possibility that this has happened.
And I'll tell you why I think there's a real possibility here.
One, Trump's entire world is predicated on the shakiest of foundations.
It's not, you know, the Trump org is not real.
It basically has been coasting along and shambling along based on like corrupt money, Russian oligarchs, loans that come out of nowhere, corruption that has been laundered through all of his properties.
I have to imagine.
That the first moment that Donald Trump saw classified material, the very first thing that went through his brain besides, am I supposed to read all of this?
Second of all was, these things are almost literally priceless.
And I think to understand who he is and how he views the world is to understand that this is possible.
I'm having trouble picturing that scenario.
He's got these boxes, or okay, because it's a long game at that point, where he's like, I'm gonna, I'm going to take these after I lose an election and have them with me.
I mean, are you trying to describe a scenario where someone's gonna come and like, give him a suitcase of, or a briefcase of cash, and he turns over documents?
Is that what we're talking about here?
I don't, I don't think it's coming and giving him a suitcase of cash, because unfortunately, we have entire systems that are dedicated to making this stuff work.
You can just donate and launder money wherever you want.
Also, I don't know if you know this, there's like an entire universe of untrackable, like, currency out there with Bitcoin, or you name it.
It's about investing in properties, investing in real estate, which by the way, for those who don't know, real estate, particularly Donald Trump type real estate, is one of the main ways to launder money gotten through corruption and exploitation.
I don't know if it's a suitcase or if it's continuing a relationship with the Saudis or whatever it is.
I know that Russian state media and maybe they're doing this with tongue firmly planted in cheek and a wink and a nudge, but like they've even said, you know, like we've already seen this stuff, you know, obviously he has it, we've seen it.
I just think it is more possible than it isn't.
I think it's more than a flip of a coin because if he has it, I know who he is.
I know his psychology.
I have to imagine he at least considered it if he didn't act on it.
Okay, that's reasonable, although the right will just come after you for even saying that.
But okay, I can see all of that.
That does make sense.
Certainly, again, if it's nuclear secrets, that is the most valuable of all prizes there, because I'm sure Russia doesn't have the most technologically advanced weapons.
Probably not as much as we do.
And I'm sure if they could get their hands on some of these things, they could reverse engineer stuff.
I mean, yeah, okay.
So, so yeah.
I mean, the bottom, here's the thing that's, what's interesting is that, you know, they're so stuck on in their defense that, that these, these documents were declassified.
So, and by the way, it doesn't matter, the law doesn't care what the classification is.
But, their argument then goes, well, you've never sent anyone to prison for lower level documents that are not classified, so why would you do it here?
I mean, that's how bad it is for them in their argument, is that, you know, okay, so we did it, it's bad, but like, it's not so bad that you can't send us to prison for it because of some sort of weird precedent.
Well, and let's talk about this defense, and before we do, I just want to point out, what we're going to talk about is not at all organized crime boss material, Nick.
I mean, it has come out now that Trump reached out, apparently, through intermediaries to Merrick Garland, and said, quote unquote, whatever we can do to help, because the temperature has to be brought down in the country.
If it isn't, terrible things are going to happen.
Also, he said- He says, what can I do to reduce the heat, which just happens to be a synonym for the heat on a person from law enforcement.
It's so weird, Nick.
It's almost like this is a guy who has spent his entire lifetime just almost saying the thing outright, but he knows how to avoid the actual prosecution.
Yeah, it's like, that's a nice country you got there.
It'd be a shame if something happened to it.
I want to point out, by the way, this is a pretty incredible thing that Trump posted.
Um, okay.
Quote, just left a large gathering of people and all they could talk about was the complete double stranglehold that the radical left Democrats have over the DOJ and FBI.
It shouldn't be that way.
Nobody goes after BLM and Tifa or the rest, despite murder beatings and burning down large sections of cities.
A very unfair double standard.
They definitely won't attack the home of a former Democrat president, nor should they.
It is all out of control.
Great simmering anger.
Nick, he's literally at this point, and I know that we shouldn't be surprised.
He's more or less saying, hey, come after me at your expense.
I mean, that's who this person is.
Or, on the flip side, he goes, hey, if you just stop going after me, then I'll call off all the violence.
I mean, that's sort of what he's kind of saying, too, because, you know, we know there's this huge spike in threats now.
He released the documents that the DOJ left for him with the fucking FBI agents' names on them.
Doxing them, basically.
Yeah, he's dealing in the way he's always dealt with, and it's right out of Kingpin.
Not the movie Kingpin.
The character Kingpin in Daredevil.
Yes, that whole universe.
So let's go through these excuses, Nick, because I got to tell you, This has just been like shotgun.
You know what I mean?
It's just like firing off and seeing, I guess, what quote unquote sticks, even though none of it has.
We talked about this a little bit last week.
It starts off with the obvious one, which is the witch hunt, right?
This is a total witch hunt.
There's nothing going on here.
Immediately says, well, guess what?
Obama did it, which is an incredible thing.
By the way, they're not hammering Hillary enough, but you know why they're not?
It's because all of their soundbites from then would make them look so foolish now.
They demanded she'd be locked up for something similar to what she did, is what he did, sort of, in some weird way.
Kind of, not really, but nonetheless, they're not hammering it up with the Hillary comparisons.
Have you noticed that?
Yeah, I have.
And it's funny, it's almost like they feel like that has sort of lost its, you know, Car Blanc, like there's no power left in it because they've tried everything.
I mean, listen to this, Nick.
This is incredible.
This was a statement from Trump's team, which I want to break this down rhetorically.
It's amazing.
They said that because these documents were present at Mar-a-Lago means they couldn't have been classified.
And for those keeping track at home, that's Richard Nixon saying, if the president does it, it can't be illegal, which is the mindset, as we can all relate to.
Everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time.
American presidents are no different.
President Trump, in order to prepare for work the next day, often took documents, including classified documents, from the Oval Office to the residence.
Do you believe that for a second that Donald Trump ever carried a briefing or a dossier away from the Oval Office?
Do you believe that?
The phrase, in order to prepare for work the next day, is doing so much work here.
Have we all forgotten that he would spend about eight hours a day rage live tweeting Fox News, you know, and then sitting in the dining room with, you know, that's all he was doing.
You know, Daniel Dale, I think, would use to release the daily presidential schedule every day, and there was like, there would never be anything on it.
What was it?
Executive time.
Remember that?
They would have like three hours of executive time.
Pick the people who briefed him.
And by the way, they had to brief him on shit like what we're talking about now.
In order to get him to pay attention, they had to put his name in every paragraph in larger letters to ensure that he kept paying attention.
This guy has never done his homework.
Not once in his entire life.
He wasn't taking things home.
They didn't end up just in his papers.
What a load of horseshit.
So that also brings us into the dumbest excuse in all of this, which tells you, by the way, and I think that we both know this and the people listening know this.
Republicans know that he broke the law.
Republicans know that this was absolutely a legally necessary search and seizure.
The Republicans know this is a losing hand.
Even Fox News is starting to move away from him.
They're going to use the outrage in order to foment anger, which, you know, we've already seen a shooting outside of an FBI headquarters.
But they know this is wrong.
And now the only excuse they have, Nick, the only way I can describe it is weak sauce.
Here's Kash Patel.
And this is a key fact that most Americans are missing.
President Trump, as a sitting president, is a unilateral authority for declassification.
He can literally stand over a set of documents and say, these are now declassified.
And that is- Oof.
Isn't that great?
It reminds me of something, actually.
Oh, is there the next one?
It reminds me of something.
I declare Bankruptcy!
It's the dumbest thing in a long line of dumb things.
If that's the best that they've got, Nick.
It's almost like the transubstantiation of the wafer and the wine.
The president can just stand over it and do it and it's done.
It's declassified.
Right, which is also kind of nonsense because by the way if that's the case then Joe Biden, you know, while he was in the bathroom one morning could just sort of like reclassify it in his brain and then poof it'd be reclassified again, right?
So that's all he has to say.
It's so ridiculous.
But let's not take our eye off the prize here.
It doesn't matter if it's classified or not.
These materials were stolen and they need to be returned.
They gave them, they bent over backwards in January, February, June and they still wouldn't give them all back.
So this is an interesting brew that they've been mixing up here in the pot.
Because we know he doesn't read these things.
He doesn't have the mental acuity to understand what these briefings are.
They kind of stopped giving him the Presidential Daily Brief at some point.
Can we say something real fast?
And this goes to what you're saying.
I don't know about you, Nick.
If I got elected president, and by the way, do not elect me president, it would be a giant mistake.
Okay.
You don't want it.
But if I were, I would be so excited to read this stuff, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
Like, you've just been given the keys to the vault.
Like, you at least don't, maybe, you know, if you try and tell anybody about it, like...
But, like, you would want that.
This is a guy who didn't want to be President of the United States except for to ride around in the car and wave at people.
This is a guy who has no intellectual curiosity whatsoever, no interest in the job or anything that goes along with it.
The idea that this guy is declassifying things or he works too hard and that's why these mistakes are made, it is just the worst bullshit imaginable.
Yeah, and that's what's going to happen if they ever got to a criminal courtroom.
It would be laughed out of the place.
That's the thing, he's never gotten that far.
No one's ever gotten him into that situation.
It is embarrassing that this is what they've come to and it just reeks of how guilty he is with this stuff.
It's frightening.
It really is.
I mean, you know, it's kind of funny.
We've joked in the past that, like, you can defend Trump in court and say, Your Honor, my client is an idiot.
You can't say, Your Honor, my client is Donald Trump and he was just way too invested in his job.
That doesn't work.
But I got more seasoning in this pot because I forgot about this.
There's a couple of very contemporaneously reported and no one's pushed back on this.
There is reporting that people saw Trump himself He's never packed a box in his life!
these documents.
And I'm willing to accept that as fact because no one's ever pushed back on that.
And this is way back in months and months ago, this report that came out.
He never, he's never packed a box in his life.
He's never packed a box in his life.
So let's, let's take this for what it is.
Let's pretend he really was.
He's never packed a box in a lunchbox.
Right.
So all of a sudden, out of the blue, he literally, and he's secretly doing this.
He won't let anyone else see this.
So, let's just say that's true.
Okay, now he does know that he's got documents.
You know what?
Maybe you've just convinced me, without even saying anything, that he has, his intention was always to try and get something from this, from other countries.
Or, you know what I mean?
Maybe that has to be the only answer, if he was doing something he had never ever done before, which would be like, you know, a menial task, like packing up papers.
Well, I'll say this and to put a put a bow on it, you know, just because I can't.
I can't not add to this conflagration more than we already have, but like, you know, what I'm going to be looking for in the next few weeks or next couple of months, are certain names going to pop up in terms of Mar-a-Lago?
Who possibly could have been around?
You're Steve Bannon's.
One in particular, I'd be really interested to hear about.
Will Eric Prince show up in this conversation?
I mean, listen, when you move into this new territory where the presidents of the United States of America possibly could be like carrying out these types of crimes, like when you enter that new frontier, like, I mean, literally all bets are off.
I mean, he took the proverbial shit in the Oval Office and left it sitting there in the carpet.
There's no other way to put it, and I don't know if you're ever going to get that smell out of there.
Well, and again, just to put a finer point on it, this is what happens when corruption and greed and hyper-capitalism reaches its end point, or at least its new evolutionary stage.
You get to the point where old ideas of duty, honor, patriotism, loyalty, Those things go out the window and you suddenly say, again with Blagojevich, I've got this thing.
I'm not going to give it away for free.
That mindset...
I mean, it's infected the presidency before, but this level is really, really disturbing.
Well, we're going to talk about this in the next one, I think, about the real dangers we're going through with the local election boards and even governorships being taken over by election deniers.
But a thought hit me.
I'll leave this, we'll leave it here as a cliffhanger, perhaps, is, is it not democracy if people elect election deniers?
Right?
If that's what the people want, that's what they get because they elected, and then that affects the entire country because these governors could change the election.
But you know what I mean?
That's interesting.
Is this really the way, you know, is this democracy functioning?
Man, I don't like that point.
Okay, we're going to move on now, and we're going to go talk to Will Bunch from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of After the Ivory Tower Falls, How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics, and How to Fix It.
All right, everybody.
For the second time, one of our best guests that we've had, Will Bunch, who is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of the new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix It, an issue near and dear to my heart.
I can't wait to have this conversation.
Will Bunch, welcome to the podcast.
Yeah, Jared.
Hey, Nick.
How's it going, guys?
So I am so excited to have this conversation because, Will, and I think we agree on this, I really, truly believe that higher education, who gets to enjoy it, who gets the spoils of it, and who doesn't, I think it's one of the biggest issues in American politics, and we don't really frame it that way.
I was so happy to find out that you were writing this book.
Can you just go ahead and give the audience a little bit of an idea of what you got into in this book and why you thought it was such an issue to tackle?
Yeah, you know, I couldn't I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, that's essentially why I wrote this book, you know, is I mean, you know, my main, main focus in writing as a columnist is covering politics and It's been clear for a number of years, but especially, you know, I think the last five years or six years since Trump was elected president in 2016, that the real fault line in American politics is college attainment.
And the thing is, you know, you read, you know, you read the political analysts in the big papers and, you know, they'll mention this and they'll say, you know, you'll see stories saying the real fault line in American politics now is in class.
It's not income, but it's educational attainment.
And what I always found frustrating is nobody really answered the question of why.
Why would that be the thing that would divide people?
And so, I mean, ultimately that's the question I tried to answer in this book, to try and understand why this is the fault line in America.
And I think, like you said, I mean, it boils down to, you know, you know, I mean, college became a big thing in this country right after World War Two with the GI Bill, you know, followed almost immediately by the baby boom and during a prosperous time, the idea that college now really was the vehicle for the American dream, that if you, you know, that if you wanted to
Live a better life than your parents, which was kind of the original American dream.
Now the only way to do that was getting a college degree.
But ever since that time, I think there have been two questions that have hung over higher education, which is, what is college for and who pays for it?
Whose financial responsibility is this?
You know, is it a public good?
You know, like we, you know, nobody in America is serious, well, other than John Birchotypes, but most serious people in America don't question that K-12 education is a public good.
And yet, somehow, we went from a situation where higher education was close, close to being a public good, you know, in those post-war years, You know, I mean, tuition, there was no tuition in some schools like University of California, and in other schools, most other public universities were ridiculously affordable.
You know, so we went from that situation to what we have now, which is just a privatized boondoggle, where, you know, families are told that, you know, it's not even a matter of your kids doing better than you necessarily, but if you want your kids to do as well as you've done, If you want your kids to stay in the middle class, they're going to have to get a college diploma.
And the only way to get it is through this system where, you know, attending four years of college is probably more than you've been able to save up.
So, you know, you're going to have to borrow the money to make the difference.
And yeah, it's like capitalism.
Hey, it's an investment, right?
Where, you know, you're investing in yourself by taking out this, you know, you're leveraging You're leveraging yourself, your future earnings, by taking out this loan.
But earlier generations didn't have to confront that.
They may be boomers for the most part.
My generation, for the most part, didn't go out into the world with college loans undercutting their income.
And of course, as we've seen, as college just becomes more and more unaffordable every year, the loans get bigger, the monthly payments get bigger.
And since the economic upheavals of 2008, the guarantee of getting that job that's gonna be sufficient to pay those loans back hasn't always been there for millennials or now people in Gen Z coming along.
And this, when you talk about the college loan crisis, you're just talking about what the people who were able to get access to college go through.
And remember, despite all the gains in college during all these decades, still only 37% of the American adult population has a bachelor's degree.
which means that 63% don't have a bachelor's degree.
And, but, you know, as we've defined, as we define college as the American Green, but then we also define college as a meritocracy that, you know, It's a great opportunity, it's open to everybody, but how far you go in that system depends on your own merit, which is the story we tell ourselves.
It's really not like that exactly, but this is the story.
But when you buy into that story, then you're telling the 63% of the people without diplomas they're merit deficient in some ways, right?
That they are somehow lacking in work in some way, that they weren't able to have the gumption or the energy or the drive to figure out how to get that department.
And it's a huge source of resentment for people who are in the working class.
You know, the thing that fascinates me about the book itself and the idea of college over enough time is that, you know, what you mentioned earlier is the immigrant experience is you want your kids to have a better life than you did.
What did you discover about tracing generation after generation of going to college and having it be affordable in the beginning to where we are now?
Is it sustainable?
Does that even exist anymore?
Are people, you know, I know a lot of people who probably pulled themselves up by their bootstraps immigrant-wise and had Big businesses made a lot of money.
Their kids can't get there in the climate that it is now.
So I wonder what you discovered out of that ideology and that notion of how does that affect the kids who are going to college now?
Well, you know, a couple things.
I think if you go all the way back and you look at the GI Bill, which was this huge boost for returning veterans, most of whom for middle class people who might not have had an opportunity to go to college.
You know, this was in the 1940s when the number of adults who had a college degree in the 1940s was only 5%.
So this unexpected opportunity that people had to go to college to maybe prepare themselves for a career where they would be working with their mind instead of their hands.
One thing I found in researching the book is you look at that generation and Some people gave back to their communities, whether it was starting the local Little League or working with disadvantaged people.
It's kind of this virtuous cycle.
The fact that society gave them an opportunity I mean, these people seriously thought that they owed something back to society.
And that's not the situation we have now.
You know, people have to look out for themselves, you know, because that's how a privatized system works.
you know, you're responsible for getting ahead.
And, you know, when your focus becomes paying back that debt so you can finally start adulthood, you know, so you can finally go out and buy a house, so you can finally get married and feel like you have enough money to live the kind of lifestyle that you want to live, you're not so you can finally get married and feel like you have enough money to live the kind of lifestyle You're focused on your own needs, you know.
You know, to me it's fascinating that this privatized system came out, developed as part of a backlash to the era of protests on campus because, you know, when you think about it, you know, when you're ready to pay off a debt, you know, you're going to when you're ready to pay off a debt, you know, you're going to be more reluctant to go out and protest because you're worried you might lose your job and then how are you going to pay
It's really a system that encourages conformity, people not to rebel.
I mean, people can do better, You know, it's funny.
I wonder about that with my kids, and it turned out my kids...
You know, really, to do what they wanted to do in life, both of them had to get master's degrees, which is... So, on one level, they did do better than me, because I only had a bachelor's degree.
But, you know, it was a lot of work and a lot of money to get to that point.
It was a struggle.
And a lot of families, you know, face these same struggles.
And it's not, you know, it's not joyous, you know.
There was a certain amount of joy about, you know, being the first person in your family to go to college.
As opposed to a feeling that's more akin to like desperation of how do I at least clean the same ladder, the same step of the ladder that my family is on.
So I think that's how things have changed.
Yeah, I want to talk about the resentment that has been the fallout from that.
You know, I come from a place where in order for me to go out and get my degree and my master's degree, I had to go ahead and assume tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt.
That, by the way, I had to become like a really well-selling author and have multiple careers to even begin wrestling with.
And there was something I try and communicate this and I think I'd like to hear what you have to say about it.
When I was a kid and when I was preparing to go to college, my family, a very, very working class, poor family, were very excited for me to go to college.
They were, you know, they constantly talked about being able to climb that ladder, being able to go to college and do all of this.
And then the resentment set in years later when, of course, you start to look at ballooning prices.
You start looking at this massive, massive debt.
And there was a real sour grapes thing that happened.
And all of a sudden, my family that was working class started to embrace things like, you know, they started calling themselves rednecks.
They started, you know, getting involved in gun culture.
All of a sudden you look up and there are Trump signs everywhere and you start having this sort of back and forth tension between quote-unquote elites and quote-unquote real America.
I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how this modern landscape has been shaped by that because if you look at the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party, a large part of that yawning gap Is the difference between people who went to college and people who did not?
There are cultural issues, but they're really predicated on top of these economic issues, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, I mean, I mean, that's the biggest fault line that we have right now in politics.
You know, the Democrats becoming the party of college educated elites.
And, you know, what's interesting, and there's been a lot of political analysis about this in the last couple of years, is as Republicans became the party of the white working class, primarily, now, what about working class Latinos, for example?
Do they side with, you know, the Democratic Party that they traditionally have an allegiance to?
Or do they say, if this is the party of the college educated, it's not really for me anymore.
And you are certainly seeing some erosion among Latinos in particular, and some other ethnic groups to a lesser extent, in that working class demographic.
So absolutely, this resentment is a driver.
That whole thing about how your family was so excited about you getting into college and the opportunity, that's definitely changed.
A couple things I'd note.
One is, it's funny, just as my book was coming out, I was curious, every August there are a few books about college today that come out.
And this year, The other books that are, quote, competing but not really against mine are books from the far right.
And one of them is by the notorious provocateur Charlie Kirk, and it's called College Scam.
And there's another book that's doing pretty well that's just called simply Don't Go to College.
And this is the new attitude.
A researcher did an in-depth study in 2016 After the election, you know, trying to drill down into some of the factors that caused Trump to win.
And one thing that he found was that the number one determinant of Trump voters was something that he called economic fatalism, which is this idea that, you know, that the college, the whole college scene wasn't for them anymore.
The college was, quote, A risky gamble, I think, was the term that he used, that it was just best to be avoided.
But unfortunately, that's fine, I guess.
Nobody has to go to college.
But it does seem among these same working classes, there's a lot of despair that's caused by the results of not having a college education, both the actual economic results, the difficulties in the job market, and also just the More emotional, you know, feeling of whether they have less work because they don't have a college degree.
One thing I talk about a lot in the book is the rise of this term, deaths of despair, by these two Princeton economists, Case and Deaton, who studied just really shockingly astronomical rise in Suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths among people primarily in the white working class.
And the most recent research that came out a couple years ago found that these deaths of despair are happening younger and younger.
And they were clear in their research that the number one determinant, again, of this was not having a college degree.
And, you know, so, I mean, to my mind, you know, when we talk about all the problems of higher education in this country, I mean, of course we focus on student debt and, you know, multiservitives focus on what's being taught in the classroom, but we focus on those things, but, you know, we're not focusing on the third of young people who never set foot on a college campus, who are really kind of going off the grid at age 18.
You know, the group that, you know, when you see a mass shooting, the perpetrator tends to be from this group.
You know, the group that's, you know, losing people to opioids or suicides in their 20s.
And, you know, you can't solve the college problem without solving the non-college problem.
I'm kind of curious as far as, you know, when you go like, you're evoking sort of like going to the college football games and having that allegiance to your alma mater, even past college.
So a couple different things.
One, as you just referenced some of the issues we're seeing with the despair, what do you think is going on in college that alleviates some of those issues?
And then I suppose also I'm kind of curious is does this allegiance that we're devoting and developing in this crucial time of our lives as college students, does that somehow inform the way cheering for the Republicans and Democrats is become a game now where we have to dunk on people whenever someone's got to lose in this equation?
Yeah, you know, I think I think if you're seeing if you're seeing Statistics showing that Democrats are now the party of college-educated people.
It raises a real question, which is, is there something about going to college that makes you become a Democrat or makes you become more liberal?
And to some degree, yes, I would say so.
You know, when you go to a college nowadays, you're going to be around A more diverse group of people.
Not just racially diverse, although certainly that, but just people from different parts of the country, different parts of the world.
You're going to be going to school with Muslims and going to school with people from South Asia.
And remember, the idea behind liberal education, which was so heavily promoted after World War II, part of it was to promote tolerance and international understanding.
That's what's supposed to happen.
And, you know, now to the right, obviously, this has all gone too far, you know, that it's gone over the edge when you're, you know, the way that LGBTQ rights are, or, you know, the way, you know, they get crazy over pronouns or something.
But I think there's no question, you know, I mean, the idea, one of the ideas of higher to promote critical thinking.
And, you know, I think when you look at the fact that, sure, we're a society that's plagued by conspiracy theories right now.
But, you know, the worst conspiracy theories like Humanon, which is probably the worst and the most ridiculous, or competing perhaps with Donald Trump's big lie about election fraud, the
These conspiracy theories are circulating among the Republican Party, which is the party of not-college-educated people, which is, um, uh, we're exposed to, you know, a place where they can develop critical thinking, you know, I mean, and this is so important, I mean, why, why is America failing on climate, or until this week, you know, hopefully we're turning the corner, but why for so long has America failed on climate change?
And I think a lot of the rejection of science in this country starts with several decades of rejecting college among one political party.
So at some point, it's just not that they think college is bad, but they think that what comes out of college, which is research and science, is bad.
And it creates a cycle.
All of a sudden, scientists, and we all know scientists by nature, tend not to be the most political people in the world historically.
I use exceptions obviously, but a lot of scientists are non-political.
But today, to be a scientist is kind of a political act, and that's why you saw things like the March for Science during the Trump years.
Because it becomes this cycle where if people on the right are going to be attacking scientists, that's only going to drive scientists more to the left, right?
And that's how political differences become a chasm, a grand canyon, which is what we have now.
Yeah, and on that note, I've been in academia now for 16 years, and there's been this myth that it's a leftist institution.
We're on campus, Nick, and we're just sharing our pronouns and just, you know, burning American flags left and right.
But the truth is that it's not at all a leftist institution.
In fact, you're learning how to go out into the capitalist world, work in an office.
I mean, to be honest, a lot of the tolerance that you're being taught is how to interact with teammates and people out in a professional environment.
This idea that it's a leftist environment is an invention of a lot of really, really right wing or libertarian people who have attacked the institution, scientists, experts, you name it, for years in order to hide what they've done.
And, you know, everybody from tobacco executives to fossil fuel companies, you name it.
And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the fights that have resulted as a part of this.
You bring up Scott Walker, who, you know, a lot of us think about is just this sort of like really, really lame, watered down, milk toast, a presidential candidate for the GOP who just got rolled over.
But in fact, somebody like Walker did incredible damage to higher education and played a massive role in all this.
I was hoping you could talk about this attack and how the Republican Party has gone after this in the last few years.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, you know, I mean, this has really built slowly over a couple decades because initially what you saw was just less support from Republicans for funding, you know, higher education, which, you know, played a key part in the tuition rise which, you know, played a key part in the tuition rise of the last 30 or 40 And And what's really changed
since around 2010, you know, the era, that big wave election, the era of the Tea Party, which was when Scott Walker got elected governor of Wisconsin, is you've seen governors and other top Republicans on the state level really move to exert more day-to-day is you've seen governors and other top Republicans on the state level really move to exert And obviously, they have a fantastic lever for this, which is, generally speaking, They appoint university trustees.
In fact, it's funny, in North Carolina, which is another battleground state where they're constantly fighting over academic issues, and in that state, you know, they went crazy and elected a Democratic governor, right?
Roy Cooper.
And the legislature, immediately before Cooper could take office, switched control of the trustees to the legislature.
So, in fact, I think one of the campus newspapers in North Carolina did a survey last year, and 17 of the 24 trustees they looked at were Republicans.
Six they couldn't figure out what their party identification was.
I think one was a Democrat.
So some of the areas that have come under greater attack, certainly tenure, because they want to be able to hire professors who they think are too liberal or are critical of Republican policies.
Down in Florida, Ron DeSantis, who's made a big deal about lots of stuff with higher education, has even gone after accreditation and wants to make it harder for universities to get accredited.
In North Carolina, you had trustees moving to shut down three research centers at the universities.
And these centers looked into poverty, environmental issues.
The poverty center was run by somebody who was also a part-time newspaper columnist to use this columnist to criticize the Republican Party.
And so they retaliated by closing these states' center down.
In North Carolina is where you saw the big controversy over Nicole Hannah-Jones, the author of the 1619 Project, who got hired as chair of the journalism department with the promise of tenure.
And all of a sudden, trustees stepped in and said, "Not so fast." And they did offer her tenure in the end, but by then she was so soured by the experience, she'd taken a job at Howard University.
And so, you know, really, it's become a battleground, you know, Rhonda Sanders is, I think, taking some of this to the next level with trying to crack down on what could be taught about race in classrooms.
I mean, obviously we're seeing this in the lower grades in K through 12, but we're also seeing this in college.
He also pushed through this survey, right, where people's, about political diversity, you know, that he wants to know people's political views to see if there's a diversity of ideas problem at these campuses, which really just an accident, that he wants to know people's political views to see if there's a diversity of And that's where we're at.
And, you know, I think Republicans have really reached the conclusion that their future as a movement hinges on education.
That if education continued the way it was, you know, younger people would be moving more towards tolerance and diversity.
You know, we saw within a generation how acceptance of gay marriage, for example, just skyrocketed.
And this was beginning to happen in other areas.
I think the George Floyd protest marches were a huge trigger.
I think conservatives were appalled by the size and the scope of those marches.
And they felt that the impetus of that was coming out of classrooms.
And they feel it's a matter of survival for them.
You know, that's why they're trying to ban anti-racism teaching, they're trying to ban books in school libraries.
It's really the battleground right now and it's only going to get more intense in the next year or two, I think.
I'm kind of curious, if you take a macro look at universities and their roles in the United States over enough time, you come across sort of very specific touchstones that would cause major shifts in the policy of the schools and the experience of the students.
I'm wondering, do any of those sort of stand out to you as you're thinking about your book and as it's coming out now?
Certain ones that you thought, oh, I didn't even realize that this was a major event that really shifted a lot of ways they do things.
Well, not necessarily.
I would say, you know, I mean, to me, like a real aha moment was the realization that those George Floyd protests in 2020, I mean, they were nothing like any other kind of racial protest before.
I mean, you know, on the right, you know, this was just a continuation of, you know, the long hot summers of the 1960s in Chicago, I mean, in Detroit and Newark.
And this was nothing like that.
In fact, the The George Floyd protests were a rebellion of the college-educated.
A University of Michigan sociologist whose specialty is researching protests did the most in-depth survey of who was going to these marches.
And she found that at some of the big marches in D.C.
and New York and elsewhere, 82% of the people protesting had college degrees.
And we're seeing, certainly, large white participation in these protests.
Even the black protesters, the majority of them have college degrees, more than three times the rate of the black population attending college.
So I think that's what really sealed the link for Republicans, that this is what we're going to have to deal with if we don't clamp down on education and what our kids are learning.
Well, one last question before we have to let you go.
I'd be an absolute failure of an interviewer if I didn't hit on the last part of this subtitle.
How do we fix it?
What do we do?
Well, first of all, you know, let's turn the battleship around.
I mean, it's not easy, but, you know, if you just start by the philosophy of going back to where we were at in the 40s, 50s, and 60s of thinking, how can we make this a public good?
How can we, what can we do as a society, as a government in supposedly the richest country in the world, you know, we make this a priority so that most of the burden is not falling on families and people are not having to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to do this, that we agree that society benefits from education
It benefits from having a better educated workforce, in that sense, and it benefits, in terms of civics, from having better educated voters and participants in society.
So it starts, I think, with turning that battleship around.
And if we can do that, maybe we'll find more support for some of these proposals by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Camilla Jayapal that would look at things like taxing financial transactions or taxing wealth and using that money to Make public university education free or low-cost.
And these plans, to be clear, these proposals don't just stop there because we need to have free trade schools too and other types of apprenticeship or internship or other learning opportunities.
Again, for that 63% that's maybe not getting a bachelor's degree.
To get them into the system where they still have opportunities after age 18 to better themselves and advance themselves.
One other outside-the-box idea that I explore in the book is, you know, I'd really like to see the government get behind a universal gap year at age 18, because that's where we're losing our young people, and that's, you know, whether you're college-bound, you know, all the pressure to decide everything about, you know, where you're gonna go and what you're gonna major in and how much money to borrow, and a lot of bad decisions are made by 18-year-olds and their families Because of that pressure.
And all the 18-year-olds, like I said, that are just dropping off the grid if they finish high school and don't go to college.
Here's a chance to give people an extra year to not only benefit society by working on conservation or working in schools or what have you, but also to find their own aptitude better of what they really want to do.
And, I think most importantly is, you know, bring people together from different backgrounds.
You know, the military used to do this in World War II or Korea, people from all over the country who wouldn't mingle and otherwise, you know, serve in units together.
And we certainly don't want another war, but we do want the benefits of people from, you know, what we call Red America and Blue America right now, getting to know each other and realizing There's actually a lot more they have in common than focusing on the differences between people.
All right, everybody.
We've been talking with Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of the new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix It.
Will, I got to tell you, when you told me you were writing this book, I was just absolutely so excited.
I think it's crucial and you nailed it.
Just absolutely nailed it.
So congrats on that.
Where can the good people find you?
Well, you can find me at the Enquirer.
Enquirer.com.
That's where my columns Folks should sign up for my weekly newsletter, which is free.
All you have to do is go to inquire.com backslash bunch and just enter your email and you're signed up.
You get it every Tuesday.
And you know, look for the book, you know, bookshop.org or any book or any of the many sites that you can buy books or you can even listen to it on Audible or download the Kindle.
So there's lots of ways to read the book.
I hope people are going to check it out.
Thanks so much Will.
Alright everybody, that was Will Bunch again from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of After the Ivory Tower Falls.
I was really happy we were able to get Will back on and talk about this.
I still think that college and particularly who gets to go, who doesn't get to go, who gets the jobs after, who doesn't.
I think it's one of the Hidden drivers of this modern moment, like a huge, huge thing that we don't talk about enough.
I mean, I agree.
I feel like, first of all, it's bad enough when you see the scandals of all those, you know, rich Hollywood types who were paying to get their kids.
Well, there's a reason for that, right?
The wealthiest of the wealthy are still trying to game the system, absolutely.
And then, though, like, what makes me maybe more disenchanted is that I'm not sure that you're really going to learn things that you need to know going out into the real world like for instance you know are you going to learn the things like social media marketing or like that which i've been to a number of schools and ask and quiz them because that's my business now and they don't have curriculum for that you know i was an art major and even at that level like i no one taught me how to make art they just kind of had these classes we showed up we did
it was like so i even at that point i'm almost like disenchanted by the whole notion of like maybe you don't need to go to college and there's a lot better pursuits you can have if you want to be part of the capitalist society and actually make money i mean i don't know i you you were you are a professor you've been in the trenches so i don't i don't want to shit all over what you're doing i i think there is a problem and this was an aspect of it that we couldn't get into it will because obviously we had like a restriction of time but
There is a problem in terms of academia that has a hard time trying to understand how to evolve, right?
And what to do next.
And a lot of what has happened, unfortunately, is I don't even think academics have a real understanding of what college is.
To go to college, you now go, and everybody thinks it's this leftist institution.
Basically, you step foot on campus, everybody's giving you their pronouns and burning bras or whatever.
What college actually is, is it's job training.
It's teaching you how to join the capitalistic system, how to behave, how to go in, how to have the skills that corporations want you to have.
And to be honest, I think a lot of people within the academy don't always understand what they're a part of.
This is something that was hard for me, Nick, and we've talked about this a little bit off recording before.
It was a lot for me to start to understand our modern political system and to start to understand that my role in the academy was training people towards that as opposed to, I don't know, creating some sort of a leftist counter-revolution or something.
There is a lot wrong with college.
A lot wrong with college.
And if we could get to the point where you didn't have to go to college or, you know, you could go to trade schools as long as they're not being dominated by these corporations and these things.
Like if we could get to that or I don't know if we could just give people free public education, it would probably make a big difference.
But we have to get the for-profit sector out of academia.
Yeah.
And I don't want to make it sound like I'm not, I was not an artist and romantic and wanted to use college as the experience of, you know, going from being in a protected environment where your parents are, you know, controlling your lives to that next stage.
That is important to have, a safe area where you can be somewhere with like-minded individuals and learn and open your mind.
I get that.
But then at some point, there is that preparation.
You're mentioning it needs to take place.
And by the way, the elephant in the room is like athletics.
We didn't really talk about here.
We had another guest on a while back talking about that.
But that's a whole other layer, which really taints a lot of the process, too.
Well, and it's completely infected the entire thing.
And just to give like a brief little bite of history, and this might sound relevant to you, Nick, particularly for what you're getting ready to enter into.
One of the reasons why the right goes after academia the way that it does is because in the past, before the counterculture rise in the 1960s and 70s, the college was supposed to be taking the place of the absent parent, right?
You were supposed to have your kid, you raise the kid up in your environment, and then you sent them off to college.
But don't worry, they're not going to get a bunch of goofy thoughts and start questioning their parents and what's going on, you know, around them.
That changed beginning in the 60s, and then we had this brief little moment where a new revolutionary idea started coming up, and people started pushing back.
And then, Nick, immediately, the wealthy were like, no, we do not want that in college.
This now needs to be job training.
This now needs to be, again, very capitalistic-focused.
And here's the problem, it wasn't enough to simply turn into a for-profit regime, which of course, college football, college athletics is the fuel and the engine of all of this.
But now, with the reactionary right, Nick, they want to recreate the absent parent at college.
They want to create again this sort of wound that they keep their kids in throughout their entire lives so they'll never question their parents or the lives that they grew up in.
I mean, listen, it's threatening if a kid comes to you, your kid, and is smarter than you.
It's a threatening thing and I get it.
But man, the reaction, once you get beyond that and what you see from these school boards and all these things, CRT is truly frightening and is going to be the downfall of our society.
No, it's a big, big problem.
And listen, so is this Trump stuff.
But I think on Friday's episode of The Weekender, I think we're going to venture into some other territory.
Unless everything absolutely blows up in the next couple of days, which the way things are working, they will.
So we'll cover that.
We'll cover a lot of stuff.
Thank you, Will Bunch, for coming on.
That book is After the Ivory Tower Falls.
Really, really good.
If you need us before the next episode, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
