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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss in depth the ramifications of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down college's use of race as one determining factor for admission, including how the court has been signaling for a decade that this would happen. They also talk about the Independent state legislature, the mocking of Biden's sleep apnea, and the sad dissolution of National Geographic.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCreek Podcast.
I'm Jeremy H. Saxton.
Hey, Nick Allisman.
How you doing?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I'm feeling good.
I mean, I worked out this morning with my son, and I'm sore, but you know, sore is a good feeling sometimes.
I had a coach who told me that pain is weakness leaving the body.
That guy was toxically masculine.
But it still stands.
No pain, no gain, Jared.
No pain, no gain.
Welcome to the Weekender Edition.
This is an audio version, so you can't see Nick just busting out of his shirt, just like hurting people with his massive physique.
If maybe you wanted to see that.
I used to have really, you know, listen, I was an athlete.
And so I had these visions of like getting back to that, even though I'm old now.
Well, you went ahead and you gave it up because we have to talk about RFK Jr.
working out in his jeans and taking his shirt off later, so we gotta get into all of that.
But if you want to go and look at Nick's physique in real time, next week On Thursday, July 6th at 8 p.m.
Eastern, we have heard the people calling for it.
We're going to do, yet again, one of our world-famous live tapings of The Weekender.
That's right, next Thursday, July 6th, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
That was the crowd that is not actually watching this, but you can be part of the crowd watching us tape that show next Thursday, July 6th, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
If you haven't done this before, these are good times.
These are actually really good times.
We tape the show.
We take your questions.
People get to know one another.
We love these things.
I cannot wait.
July 6th, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
We will celebrate Independence Day together, Nick.
But you have to go over to Patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to sign up to our Patreon to be part of the live show.
And the question is, why haven't you already?
That is the question.
You're listening to this.
Listen, we're watching the Supreme Court absolutely unravel the fabric of this country.
That's what we're talking about today.
We're talking about CPAP machines.
I don't know.
It's silly season.
We'll get into all that.
We also got to talk about corporate America absolutely destroying culture as well.
But go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
It keeps this show editorially independent.
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And you want to be here on Thursday, July 6th, 8 p.m.
Eastern, as we have a live taping of The Weekender.
Nick, we're taping this in the early afternoon on Thursday, June 29th.
I say that because the Supreme Court, man, the hits keep on coming.
We have a couple of cases that have been decided, but unfortunately today word has come out the Supreme Court ruled on an affirmative action enrollment admission policy case from Harvard and North Carolina.
They have ruled That these affirmative action policies are unconstitutional.
We saw this coming for a little while.
It does not necessarily spare the harm from this or the shock and the anger that comes from it.
But this is just yet another decision that the court has handed down that is absolutely despicable and reveals for everyone to see exactly who they are.
Well, you know, it's almost unfair to the one side of the bench, or sorry, on the lawyer's side who are arguing this case, because not only do they have a whole set of lawyers who try to argue that we don't need affirmative action anymore, but I'm sure that these justices had all these rich white people for years simply complaining about how their kids couldn't get into Ivy League schools anymore.
And they probably just got fed up with it.
And they're like, we don't want to hear this anymore from our friends.
So we're going to now strike down this law is basically what it feels like to me.
Well, I got a lot to say about this, not just in terms of the Supreme Court, not just in terms of the right, but also the university system.
There's a lot to think about here.
And first things first, we need to understand that higher education, although it has been framed as being leftist and liberal and full of Marxist and all that, That this is a strictly capitalist system that was created to educate the white wealthy class.
That is what it has always been.
And affirmative action came along and said, hey, you need to stop letting in all of these white men in order to keep them within the upper elite of the money class, carrying out the administrative systems and functions.
You've got to let some other people in.
You at least have to make a cursory attempt to bring other people into that class.
That doesn't mean it became leftist.
It doesn't mean it became Marxist.
It was simply trying to counteract patriarchal white supremacy.
And all of this has been about legacy admissions.
It's about trying to keep the same families, the same groups of people, the same type of people on top of the social class.
It doesn't mean that affirmative action, like, completely wiped it out.
But what has happened here is just the destruction of at least a counterbalance of a system that has been this way for centuries.
Literally centuries.
And striking this out and going after this is a very clear point, which says we are going to reinforce the white patriarchal system.
Well, before we get into the actual decision and what they reference, because it's really, really awful, and I think what's great about this show is that we will dive into the historical context to understand this is not just suddenly appearing on their desks one day and, oh, we're going to make a decision on this.
And to me, I also want to think that We're talking about the college experience and it would strike me having gone to college that the college experience is More profound when you're amongst a diverse community.
It seems like that is part of the education process.
If you only had someone, I don't know, who actually spent time on campuses and actually taught in those classrooms, can we find someone like that?
I'm looking around.
I'll put out a call.
I'll see if there's anybody who left academia who might be willing to talk on this subject.
Okay.
And it has to be somewhat recently, maybe, that we really help?
Can we find that person?
What about somebody who is still under a year out from the accident?
Yeah, that's good.
That's good.
That person might even exist.
I might be talking to him right now.
You might be talking to him presently.
So am I way off base on this notion that perhaps having a little bit more of a diverse student body is an integral part of the actual process of the education of these students?
There's so much to get into with that.
First things first, absolutely.
One of the problems in this country is that we have reached a point where we do not have enough diversity in terms of how people see the world.
We have reached a sort of fatal moment where the same wealthy and powerful people have just continually moved and cycled through, right?
We've not had enough people bringing unique perspectives in there, creating more innovation, changing things, making things better where they can.
Part of the reason is because of exactly what you're talking about.
We have not made universities and also, you know, corporations and businesses, we have not made them diverse enough in order to change with the times and improve themselves.
Eventually it starts to degenerate because it doesn't have that.
The liberal mindset has always been, and we're talking about from the Enlightenment forward, the liberal mindset has been by bringing everybody together and transcending these differences, eventually things will change for the better, right?
And part of this is that affirmative action was sort of trying to press upon the system, little by little, we can make these things happen.
It needs to be said, affirmative action was a good step.
It wasn't enough.
Right?
It was just a start to something, which a lot of people were a little bit about.
Meanwhile, the conservative idea is, no, you are letting the wrong people in, and you're letting them in for the wrong reason.
And like democracy, which the right hates as well, the idea is that those massive amounts of people who are being let in or being allowed to be part of this larger system, that they will degenerate the system.
And eventually they will cause more problems.
So this decision and what you're talking about in terms of like what a college experience should be and what, you know, these ecosystems should look like, that is the definitive battle that's happening here.
And it's not just happening on the college campus, it's happening in our economy, it's happening in our politics, it's happening in democracy writ large.
So, just to make sure I'm clear on this, this is really a thing about rich white people, right?
I mean, yeah, it's rich white people who are pissed off that they can't, I mean, I have friends who also went to Ivy League schools, you know, and now their kids are, you know, do really, really well in high school, really well, probably better than they did, and they cannot get into those schools.
And you simply, there are so many colleges in America.
That's the thing, right?
There's so many out there that it's like, okay, it's a shrug.
You'll go to another college that's equally, you know, that's equally valuable as far as what you're going to learn.
Really quickly, like my dad was a law professor at IIT Kent, downtown Chicago.
Yeah.
He taught the exact same thing that they taught at Harvard Law School in those classes.
Same curriculum.
It's just, you know, different city.
And my dad was a wonderful teacher and he, you know, lots of people went through his classes and became terrific lawyers.
So I think part of this also is this prestige thing that people get really upset about where they can't seem to get in.
I deserve to go there and I, you know, I must have, I have to.
And society now as a white person is putting me down.
That's what's so outrageously ridiculous about this argument.
I want to bring up somebody that I didn't expect to bring up in this conversation.
I want to bring up Felicity Huffman.
And for anybody who doesn't remember this, Felicity Huffman was arrested for this larger scandal of, like, bribing and cheating, trying to get their kid into, like, these higher colleges, the more pristine, right?
That entire idea, and one of the reasons that this happens, and I always try to remind people, yes, you can go ahead and say this is about white patriarchal society.
Absolutely it is.
That's the larger container, right?
But part of the issue is that as the neoliberal machine rolls on, it gets tighter and tighter.
You have to make people work harder and harder and there be more precarity.
Even the wealthy at this point are absolutely terrified that if their kid goes, and by the way, I want to bring up a couple of things here because it helps to illustrate this.
Like, let's say, for instance, that your kid goes to, I don't know, the University of Minnesota.
That's a great institution, right?
Like, that's a great place to go and get an education.
Wonderful people there to teach you, right?
Meanwhile, in the mindset of the neoliberal precarious mind, that's not enough, Nick.
Your kid's not going to go up to the very upper echelon.
They gotta go to Harvard.
They gotta go to Yale.
They have to be in those places.
As a result, what's happening is we're seeing a discarding of the things of the 20th century that as America was growing, they have to be thrown away.
They have to be tossed away.
So now we're watching this fall off because the right has wanted to do this for forever.
Not just because they stole the court, but because the social economic conditions now are going to push this idea that, no, guess what?
When you look at Harvard now, and I don't know if you saw the statement that Harvard let out, Harvard said, Well, I guess we're gonna have to comply with this.
And it's like, oh, really, Harvard?
Don't push back too hard.
What we're finding is that these institutions are more than fine with these discriminatory policies, right?
Because that's what they're imbued with, and that's how they work.
Now it's time to start getting rid of the pretense of any of those sort of like squishy sort of empathic feelings that we had in the 20th century.
Now it's coming down to the fat is in the fire.
We're not going to play around with this anymore.
The elite is going to be the quote-unquote elite.
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