We Actually Have To Explain To DeSantis Why Slaves Didn't Benefit From Slavery
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman had to break down why the new curriculum in Florida that requires teachers to explain how slaves benefitted from slavery is racist, and speaking of which: Alabama refuses to follow the Supreme Court's ruling to create two districts with majority Black voters. In another example of how capitalism wreaks havoc on society, Nick and Jared discuss a New York Times article that proves (SHOCKER) that elite colleges favor the upper class.
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I am sitting in a gas station parking lot in my car.
My apologies.
America's infrastructure absolutely blows.
But guess what?
I'm excited to be here.
I'm talking with my good friend Nick Halsman.
Nick, how we doing, man?
You know, it's so funny.
I was having the same issues with the infrastructure and just like the state of our roads the other day.
It's really frustrating.
It's bad.
Frustrating is a kind way of putting it.
I think it's putting it in action.
It's allowing for empathy.
We have allowed, by the way, we're, I believe in the 50th anniversary.
of the interstate system which like has not really been taken well care of uh basically what has happened in this country is that we have created all kinds of amazing things in the mid-20th century and we've just allowed them to go to shit Nick just absolutely gone to shit it is like it's like driving through a war zone out there Oh, I agree.
And it just feels helpless because, you know, it's funny, at some point in Chicago, way back in the day, the mayor, Daley, the second Daley number two, he decided to fix a lot of the potholes and all the sidewalks and all that stuff.
And I always felt like that was a really smart idea.
Sure.
Whether or not he was doing anything with other policies.
Here were some very visual things that you can see that actually felt tangible, but I don't know if that blueprint is spread across the country or anyone else has done that since, because I gotta tell you, in LA, the state of our roads is horrible, and it's really frustrating.
There's so many things that are horrible here.
That is one of them, and it would be just an easy thing just to kind of take care of, and they don't even want to spend money on that, I guess.
I don't know.
What's incredible is that we, again, we've created all these things, Post-World War II, that are like almost wonders of the world, and instead of keeping them up, we've let them go into absolute decline.
And here's the thing, Nick.
We live in a country where we could have high-speed rail, where we could have better ways of getting around, and we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna go with the car, we're gonna go with the interstate, and we won't take care of that.
Either way, you're absolutely screwed.
But that is not what we're here to talk about.
This is not your favorite podcast about highway infrastructure.
We have to talk about what is going on in American politics right now, and I gotta tell you folks, things are getting fascinating.
You know, this is a story I think I got emailed.
You know, you always know when a story is interesting when you get them emailed and DMed to you by roughly 20 people.
And one of the things that's coming out of one of our favorite states, that's right, the state of Florida everybody, is that Florida education in its continuous unending war against woke is now going to push for educational standards that are going to portray the enslaved Enslavement of human beings chattels slavery.
That is right.
They are going to say that slavery was actually very beneficial to the enslaved.
Nick, much like having an internship, they learn some lessons.
They gain some skills.
It actually, there are both sides to this issue.
It's an incredible thing, is it not?
Oh no, oh no, don't say any of that.
Please, you're making me upset.
But, you know, it's interesting.
Would you like to hear what the retort was to the criticism of this new... because I kind of want to jump right to that.
I feel like it's interesting to hear what the right will say about this because, again, the idea that slaves would have benefited from the skills they might have learned as slaves in their later lives is Nick, I'll say this.
but would you, can I just read this real quick too? - Nick, I'll say this.
I will only listen to the retort as long as it is even handed, reasonable and will not upset me. - Well, let's find out.
I mean, this is from FoxNews.com because I happened to stumble upon that when I was doing my research.
That's my homepage, so let's go.
Okay, good.
And you're not lying.
There have been questions raised about language within a benchmark clarification of standard SS blah blah blah, which says, instruction includes how slaves develop skills, which in some instances can be applied for their personal benefit, the statement reads.
The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades which they benefited.
This is factual and well documented.
Some examples include blacksmiths like Ned Cobb, Henry Blair, Lewis Latimer, John Henry, shoemakers like James Ford and shoemakers, Paul Cuff and Betty Washington Lewis, fishing and shipping industry workers like Jupiter Hammond, John Chavis, William Whipper and Chris and Crispus Attucks, tailors like Elizabeth Keckley, James Thomas, and Marietta Carter, and teachers like Betsy Stockton and Booker T. Washington.
Because like nothing says, you know, education, there being how to learn about being an educator than being a slave.
Right, Jared?
That's literally like saying, you know, there was a good side to genocide.
A lot of real estate opened up.
Like, it's the absolute most insane thing.
And to even propose it in the first place is an absolutely indefensible thing.
I want to give people a quick little lesson.
I talked about this a little bit in The Midnight Kingdom, but if you haven't had a chance to read it yet, this is an example of what's called paternalism.
The idea here that was in the American Confederacy during the slave period, it was the idea that the enslaved, they were real simple people, Nick.
They couldn't take care of themselves.
It was almost like they had a parental obligation to take care of these poor, poor souls.
You know, to put a roof over their heads to make sure they were fed.
Not educated, mind you.
We didn't want them reading, you know, in case they like put two and two together and got out of hand.
But it was this idea that these were subhumans that needed to be taken care of by their white slave masters.
In other words, white supremacy is built on a foundation of believing that you're actually helping people.
You're actually teaching them skills.
You're actually making sure that their lives are better than they would be, you know, if they were back in Africa, or if they were with their families, or if they had freedom.
This is only a new iteration of it, and it is as insidious as it sounds.
Oh, and especially if they weren't being tortured and maimed and killed in the middle.
And sexually assaulted.
Yep, absolutely.
Yeah, so it really is disgusting.
And, you know, we've talked about this before and how, and by the way, this isn't in a vacuum.
If you were to examine, and Jared, I know you have the teaching standards in the South, particularly.
I think that's the point.
in general, I think you'd find decades upon decades of this type of thing happening where they try to soften the effects of slavery and what slavery meant so as not to, I suppose, make white people feel bad about it when, in fact, I make white people feel bad about it when, in fact, I think that's the I think we all should feel bad about it so we don't fucking do it again.
Yeah, we should probably learn from slavery and genocide and exploitation and all of these awful things.
And you're absolutely right about the South.
One of the reasons why that the education systems are so abysmal is because it's an intentionality.
It's actually making sure that nobody can take a look at the way things are.
And it's not a coincidence that these deviations From what it's like in the North and the West and the East and all that, it's no coincidence that they happen to take place in things like, again, slavery during the antebellum period, the civil rights period in which people were murdered and beaten and oppressed, and all of these sort of ways that the South has manifested white supremacy as much, if not more, than these other places.
I will also say while we're on this subject, I lived in Georgia for a decade, and I have to tell you, Very early on, I want to say it was only a few months of getting there, like, I noticed that these are the conversations that are always happening.
It's not just a caricature.
There are lots of conversations about not just the War of Northern Aggression and how, you know, the South was actually just a lost cause.
It was a beautiful time.
It was also a conversation about how, you know, Black people, they like to complain about what happened during slavery, but A lot of them actually had it better than they have it now.
It's a narrative that perpetuates, and not only is it keeping people from feeling guilty, it's keeping any type of progress and any type of addressing of this inequality, which is intentional, from ever being addressed.
It is a strategy, and what's happening right now is that strategy is being advanced.
Well, think about what that's also saying, because they're acknowledging that it's not really great now for black people in the South, right?
That's right.
That's right.
They have no intention of ever having any kind of policies that might alleviate these things that the government can, primarily because I think a lot of people on that side don't believe the government should ever do that.
Well, Nick, real fast, I just want to touch on something because you nailed it.
The mindset that takes place, and a reminder that ideology is just a story that covers up what you want or where things are happening.
In all of this racism, white supremacy, the basic idea is, you know what, it's not that I believe that white people are actually better than other people, but that's the story that goes ahead and makes sure that I'm taken care of, or my family's taken care of, or a particular political power system is taken care of.
But here's the thing, Nick.
The story that we're talking about here, the idea that black people, while they were enslaved, they learned special skills that they needed white people to look after them.
It still is perpetuated today.
That's why they say, you know, we really don't need welfare the way that it is.
Because if you give them that money, they'll simply spend it on terrible things.
I mean, this is, you know, we've talked about in the past, like this idea of welfare queens.
That fantasy, that myth, that conspiracy theory is based on the idea that these people are not at the level of others.
And because they're not at the level of others, you should have a political or an economic system that keeps them lower.
That way, don't worry that white people will go ahead and make sure that they're okay, but do not trust them with the money or the goods or the resources themselves.
I mean, that is perfectly said.
And I have a quote for you.
I'm going to let you guess who said it.
Quote, no one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race.
In Florida, we will not let that far left look agenda take over our schools and workplaces.
There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.
All right.
Would you need a you need a multiple choice or do you want to just tell me?
I'm actually shocked that he didn't say the word woke about six more times.
You know, it's like a Teddy Ruxpid, man.
It's like a cassette that you put in the back of him, and it's just like, woke, woke, woke.
And by the way, DeSantis isn't running away from this.
DeSantis is absolutely doubled down.
It's not a coincidence either that as his campaign absolutely falls apart and disintegrates, that the people around him and his own instincts are telling him, go ahead, double, triple, quadruple down on this stuff.
So he's going ahead.
He's defending slavery.
You know, his accounts at this point are just full of right-wing edgelord and neo-Nazi and Nazi iconography.
Like, this is a person who is not going to learn from their own political mistakes and setbacks.
They're going to double, triple, and quadruple down.
And Nick, I'm telling you, this is such a bold embrace of white supremacy as a political ideology, and it's tough to watch.
Well, and forgive me because I didn't point out when that quote was said, but it's important because I wanted to bring these two things together.
What was going on with the Department of Education in Florida and how they want to have these new standards.
And DeSantis, because DeSantis is kind of trying to wiggle away from having any connection to this.
However, what I read to you was from over a year ago because he was the one, basically the architect of this woke indoctrination, you know, don't say woke or don't go woke bill, whatever, right?
So clearly he's got it on his mind.
Clearly he's overseeing these things.
But listen to this.
I have a little soundbite.
This is his reaction when a reporter actually asked him about this, which is great because, you know, rarely does it ever happen where they finally ask him in the right context what this is supposed to mean in terms of how they want to teach slavery.
Here's his answer.
I didn't do it and I wasn't involved in it, but I think what they're doing is I think that they're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.
You know people, you've listened to people, you've been able to understand how they, based on their voice and their tone and what they're saying and their vocabulary, we can get a little insight into what's really going on here without having to be a detective.
I don't know, man, for him to say, oh, well, I don't know anything about it, but, you know, maybe it's, you know, this was done on Friday.
So this is before the other, the report came out, the response came out.
So it's like, yeah, maybe they're going to be talking about, I don't know, something very specific like blacksmithing.
Like this motherfucker knew exactly what they were doing.
They passed it in front of his desk before they wrote it down and passed it in the legislature.
Man, it is.
He's a detestable person, isn't he?
Yeah.
He really is, and it's just, I hate this having it both ways, you know, all kinds of different angles at this stuff.
Like, he had that ready-made.
I don't know about you, how many times a day do you think about being a Blackstone?
You know what I mean?
How many times a day do you think about, like, blacksmithery?
I don't even know if that's actually a term.
He was just ready to go with it.
He knew exactly what he was doing, and this has been rehearsed, and he's ready to go with it.
I mean, he's very proud of what this project is doing, and Well, here's the problem with that is if you think that's rehearsed, then whoever is preparing him is terrible at this.
Terrible.
Because that's not an answer that you, you know, that was definitely not an answer you would be rehearsed with to say.
Well, but it is when you're a Republican.
I mean, that's the thing.
They don't have any tests to go past.
And I think DeSantis has shown that.
Again, we've talked about this ad nauseum.
And look at his campaign, by the way.
He is burning money at a record pace.
I mean, right now, him and Vivek are about neck and neck in second place.
If you would have told me that a couple of months ago, I would have told you you were crazy.
But this is a guy who's going to remain the governor of Florida, who very well in the near future might become the next senator from Florida.
Like, this is a person who has no fear whatsoever of anybody actually saying that he's racist, and it's sticking.
Why?
Because it's a point of pride.
Because what these people are presenting to the Republican Party and what the Republican Party in its base absolutely love, they're glad that this stuff's out there now.
They're glad, as you have said for forever, that the mask is off.
That's all that they want.
They want to go ahead and embrace this stuff and not feel bad about it.
And so they don't have to offer an excuse.
All they have to do is offer some bullshit little side thing and hope that the reporter goes away, which they will.
You know, uh, this made me look a little carefully into his campaign because it turns out all the spending, like he's got, you know, uh, DeSantis has a little predilection for, uh, flying on private planes.
It seems like a theme, uh, over there on the Republican side.
Right.
Um, so they're burning through, I mean, it's ungodly amounts of money, you know, a million dollars on, uh, on a, uh, on a dinner or on a gathering here and, and all these different planes.
But, um, it turns out that like the campaign manager and reminds you, this is a national campaign, right?
This is for president.
Last that I checked, I'm not sure.
They hired somebody named Janera Peck, who is a family friend of theirs, who has never managed a campaign at any level before.
What idiot would ever do anything like this, unless it's a complete grift?
They never intended to win, they just wanted to spend a lot of money, fly nicely, and have a bunch of nice dinners.
But like, how would you ever have said, I'm an upstart campaigner going against the really popular, I guess we'll call Trump an incumbent, right?
I guess that's what he is.
And you're going to use a rookie campaign manager who clearly doesn't have any control over what's going on anyway?
I mean, that speaks more than anything else.
You know, I've been on the road a little bit.
I've been thinking a lot about DeSantis and what's happened here because this is a really impressive failure so far.
And one of the things that's, I think, happening is I think that they literally bought into the story about DeSantis that he was so competent That it literally didn't matter what they said, what they did, who's in charge of this, who's in charge of that, that he was going to become the heir apparent to Trump and everybody would simply accept that.
And I gotta tell you something, Nick.
I think what has happened here is I think that the DeSantis team made a real error in reading the Republican Party.
And, you know, they're in with the online right, these neo-Nazi Greuper people, they're in with, like, the Claremont people, all those people.
I mean, it is like this cyclical thing with all of them, this feedback circle going back and forth.
But meanwhile, they lost out on, like, the emotional connection with Trump.
Do you know what I mean?
They missed out on the fact that Trump represents, to his base, something deeper than just a politician.
I posted about this the other day.
He's like an abusive father to them.
And as a result, it has turned into this really abusive relationship that I don't think that they're able to get away from, and DeSantis hasn't been able to offer anything alternative to that.
You can't argue facts, you can't argue logic, you can't speak quote-unquote reason, even though DeSantis isn't talking reason, but they haven't been interested in even making a case.
And you're right, they're just flying around burning money like it's going out of style.
Yeah, and it's the culture war stuff.
I mean, they're never getting the policy.
And so in this article about political they discussed how you know that the the video that we discussed a couple weeks ago with Peaky Blinders in there all sorts of that the most homoerotic But also in the same time, uh, there's a term for that, that kind of content, but that was made internally and they decided to like, let it leak out from someone else.
And then, and then remember DeZan has then retweeted it and like shared it as if it was sort of officially theirs.
That's a mistake that shouldn't have ever happened.
And then now did you hear what he just did recently with Bud Light?
Have you, have you heard the most recent news?
Have you heard this one?
Have you heard this one?
Yeah.
It's this new war on Bud Light, which I got to tell you, the number one threat to American security right now.
That's right, everybody.
Bud Light.
Listen to this.
We do have these.
We do have these shares.
We believe that when you take your eye off the ball like that, you're not following your fiduciary duty to do the best you can for your shareholders.
So we're going to be launching an inquiry about Bud Light and InBev, and it could be something that leads to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida Pension Fund, because at the end of the day, there's got to be penalties For when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people.
Ooh, this is going to be an interesting conversation, Jared.
I got to tell you something that just clicked into place with me listening to that, Nick, which is this.
I think another fundamental understanding of the Trump supporter is the idea that they're more interested in actually doing things than not doing things.
And feeling like they're doing things.
You know what I mean?
Like, the majority of what Trump says he's going to do, he doesn't end up doing.
It just feels good that he's saying it.
DeSantis keeps picking these fights with Bud Light, with Disney, and then people are like, okay, you're doing this.
Like, what ended up happening?
And he's like, well, not much.
That doesn't really help.
It doesn't really do anything for anybody.
Well, you know, it's just like, you know, when Trump wanted Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden when he was impeached for that call, he never intended for them to actually have the investigation.
He just wanted it to be announced.
They just want to announce these things.
Now, here's the thing that no one is going to get, at least on the right, is that think about what DeSantis is proposing.
He feels that the Bud Light's advertising arm did this terrible thing.
They're woke, yada, yada.
So he wants the government to step in and control how these companies run their business.
Right?
That's basically how they can run their advertising.
That doesn't sound like capitalism to me.
What does that sound like to you, Jared?
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over a rousing rendition of the Soviet play.
Yes!
Where is the Soviet National Anthem when you need it?
This is fucking communism that they're now proposing.
This is how full circle we've come.
Now they want communism when it's against their perceived religious moral values.
But that's what the new right is about.
And it's the weird thing that we're having to start to wrap our heads around, which is the Republican Party, which has been sold to us as small government for forever, which was absolute bullshit from the very beginning.
Yeah, it's always been nonsense.
They've always wanted to use the government to their own ends.
But now, the new right that DeSantis is in bed with, they literally have looked at communism and Marxism and taken some notes in the margins.
They don't want to redistribute money and goods and resources to everybody.
They want to redistribute it to who they care about, who their friends are, who their allies are, and they want to use the power of government in that regard.
But they are literally co-opting communist ideology and tactics in order to push right-wing ideas.
It is weird, is what it is.
And we can call it communism.
We can also dip our toe into the fascism trail on this one, which then folds nicely and neatly into what you had actually discussed a little earlier when you were talking about slavery and how it's dealt with in terms of geography.
Because, you know, it's fair to say that the state of Alabama is no friend of the breakdown, unfortunately.
Although I'm sure there's people in Alabama who are wonderful people.
I know some people in Alabama who are very fine people.
I'll just say that.
I'm going to say I feel terrible for them, and I know that they have to live in a place where the headline is, we'll just read this, is Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second black congressional district in defiance of the Supreme Court.
So they're still doing this shit, and I wonder what John Roberts is finally going to say now that he unleashed all of this on himself.
You know, I can't wait until the Supreme Court's troops march on down, you know, to make sure this thing takes place.
No, it's really cool, isn't it?
How, like, you can either pay attention or not pay attention to the Supreme Court.
It's just a fascinating thing that, you know, it's a completely arbitrary construct.
But it so happens that if you're not paying attention to it because of, I don't know, race relations or upholding white supremacy through democratic processes, it's weird how you can just sort of ignore what they've said and what they've handed down.
And really, there's not a whole hell of a lot anyone can do about it save for, I don't know, if John F. Kennedy rises from the grave and, you know, forces the South to integrate.
That's pretty much the only thing at this point that's going to get that done.
Remember, John Roberts was the chief architect of repealing enough of the Voting Rights Act where the federal government had less oversight into things like this.
But, kudos to bringing up a very strong lawsuit against the state to make sure that they do at least have two congressional districts that are majority black people.
Like that, based on the demographics of Alabama, that's the least they should be having.
The least!
Yes, and yet here's the GOP-controlled legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where black voters make up voting age majorities or something quite close to it.
But on Friday, they approved a new map with just one majority black seat and a second district that is approximately 40% black.
So this is completely pissing in their face on this one.
It never should have even been to this point.
Alabama should never have been free to do these things on their own.
They should have always had federal oversight for at least another 100 years, in my mind at least.
Well, I just want to remind everybody that Reconstruction was completely incomplete and was undermined from the very beginning, and what ended up happening was that there was a two-party solution.
The duopoly basically decided to go ahead and make sure that, you know, the South was readmitted and basically we had a whole country, and we weren't really going to deal with racism anymore.
I had to, by the way, to Ulysses S. Grant, who was one of the few people who actually cared about this shit, And it's one of the reasons that he lost his political capital because people got tired of paying for it.
But while we're on this subject, Nick, I just want to point out, we need to remember, not just with the Supreme Court, but not just with Alabama, but throughout the country, that our legal framework has been created in order to maintain white economic superiority.
And what has happened in Alabama?
You're exactly right.
The fact that there has to be a law that there are at least two districts that work like that is insane.
And this democratic power in the South has completely been held down intentionally for, I mean, generations now, and the Supreme Court, a reminder, only struck it down after a long, long time and a lot of battles.
This is an incomplete thing.
John Roberts and the Supreme Court are full of shit.
It is, again, an incomplete reconstruction, and we're still dealing with the fallout from a thing that took place nearly two centuries ago.
Yeah, I just did a really quick Google search.
I was curious why it's Alabama all the time.
And if you look at it, I found a quick chart from 1860, which shows the population of the free population versus the slave population.
And Alabama comes in fourth in percentage of slaves.
So you understand and then the number one would be South Carolina, number two, Mississippi, number three, Louisiana, and number four, Alabama.
And so you really get a sense of understanding why this was so important to them.
I mean, it was it was I would imagine that the correlation between percentage of slaves and like their GDP and like how much money they were able to make off of that is what we know are directly related.
And so, you know, you're taking away all this free labor that they were completely taking advantage of for 150 years.
And this is why they're so upset about this.
And this is why they don't want to have Black people voting.
You know, and correct me if I'm wrong, Jared, when Black people were allowed to vote right after the Civil War, they did, right?
Yep.
They did.
And not only did they vote, they won elections.
And I want to point out in something that you touched on very, very briefly, I'm glad you mentioned that South Carolina was the highest in that.
And it's almost like that was an economic factor in why they were the first state to secede.
And when you take a look at how all of these things work, it is about maintaining an order that was supposedly shut down, not just by the Civil War, but by the Supreme Court in one of its rare liberal bents.
And I gotta tell you, like, this is something that has to be taken care of.
And the fact that Alabama is just thumbing their nose at this ruling tells you everything you need to know about the fact that this stuff is not actually taken care of yet.
Do you think that there's a connection between, like, so you know how an art form gets kind of really cool and popular, and then they come in and they just, they bastardize it and they make it all, you know, terrible?
Poppy!
They make it all poppy for general consumption, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, and it's like they exploit it and they have to, all these different things.
I just, by the way, I just saw the Barbie movie, but we'll talk about that on Thursday.
But I always feel like it's, you know, in 1492 or whatever, you know, as people came to this new world to create something better, right?
And then in the same way, capitalism kind of comes in and is like, no, no, no, no, we're not, we're going to make, we're going to exploit all this stuff as worse as any country has ever done in the face of the earth and the history of the planet.
And that's sort of what it felt like, right?
This is all about money, ultimately.
In reality, right?
I mean, you know, once it comes about money, then it's easy to explain away why, oh, black people actually were, you know, they benefited from slavery.
Like that seems to me that the big force here pushing and making it palatable to people.
Well, and again, going back to the idea of ideology.
So if you're a person, if you're an enslaver, or let's say, for instance, you're just a blatant white supremacist, The reason that you want to believe that stuff is because you don't want to believe that it's purely an economic or a political choice, right?
To think to yourself, I'm a bad person who is doing this awful thing to this person, that doesn't jive.
Only if you're a psychopath and you don't care about right and wrong is that ever actually a possibility that you're being held.
Otherwise, you tell these stories to yourselves.
And so one of the things that's happening here, you know, with Alabama like absolutely ignoring the Supreme Court ruling, this is a bunch of people who are benefiting from white supremacy and they make up a story, right?
It's activist judges or, you know, I'm sure they probably think that John Roberts and Kavanaugh are agents of the deep state, right?
Whatever story it is that makes it possible to maintain your own version of yourself as the hero of a story, particularly when you're holding people down, That has taken place all along.
Whether or not you're sitting on a plantation making sure that your enslaved population is kept in shackles and you're breeding them as if they're subhuman, or if you're in Alabama making sure that people aren't going to cast votes that count, what you are doing is engaging in blatant oppression that you have to cover up and put a salve on in order to make sure that you yourself don't feel the guilt Or the trauma of feeling like, oh my god, this is something that I'm actually doing and I'm actually standing by.
And as a result, there's never any progress.
Yeah, no progress.
People do not get better treatment at that point.
And it's almost like all these things, all these institutions that we thought were set up as this great experiment and it was going to end up being, you know, find equality.
And listen, I'm not going to deny that there have been moments of that where people have been able to break out of the caste system and not be subject to being a slave their entire lives.
However, we now need to shift the same ideology to what's happening in colleges.
And by the way, Nick, I just want to point out that it's a smaller version of the larger thing.
And you're exactly right, because when you scale up and down, it's the exact same thing.
It's turtles all the way down, man.
And a college is going to look exactly like this because the college is actually going to go ahead and be a window into power in the real world.
So you're absolutely right.
We have to examine that.
Yeah.
And so a new study came out, which is interesting because as a piggyback to the affirmative action striking it down by Supreme Court, the New York Times came up with an article that said, Study of elite college admissions data suggests being very rich is its own qualification.
And part of the problem I have with a lot of this is that we're wringing our hands over, you know, a couple of colleges, right?
It's 12 or 13 out of the thousands that are in America.
But what we find out is that it really is important, especially if we're looking at this with the gaze of money and how much you can make.
And of course, we're much happier when you make more money, right, Jared?
Isn't that how the story goes?
That's why all the wealthy people are incredibly happy and they're not inflicting their sadness on the rest of us right now.
Well, let me give you the first of the top line here as a quote.
A large new study released Monday shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes.
They tended to have higher SAT scores and finally honed resumes and applied at a higher rate.
They were overrepresented even after accounting for those things.
For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1% were What?
34% more likely to be admitted than the average applicant.
And those from the top 0.1% were more than twice as likely to get in, top 0.1% of income based on their parents' tax returns, of which they had access to, which is a rare thing to be able to do, but they were able to combine all those things.
And look at this.
It's not just the IVs.
They also look at Stanford, Duke, MIT, and the University of Chicago.
MIT is not in the Ivy League?
I thought they were.
Anyway.
No, they're not, but they're adjacent.
You're talking about the upper crust of American universities.
And then, in effect, the study shows these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1% whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year.
Well, I'll tell you a couple things, and I want to set the table because this is important stuff for us to talk about.
When we were talking about affirmative action, you were talking about, oh, some universities are going to figure out a way to go ahead and take in diversity into account.
That is true to the vast majority of universities.
State universities, some of the higher universities, they absolutely do want diversity, and they want to make, you know, I talked about last time, I think I used the University of Minnesota as an example.
They absolutely want to do that, and they will not fall in line with what the Supreme Court has said.
But the upper crust, and by the way, the people who go to the regular universities like that, they're absolutely joining the professional managerial class.
They're absolutely making a decent living.
They're having decent lives.
But when you talk about the elite universities, the Ivies and the ones that you've mentioned, these are gatekeepers.
And they always have been, and they are not interested in affirmative action.
They're not interested in diversity.
What they're interested in is continuing what they've been doing all along and what universities have been doing since they first started, which is reproducing the ruling class.
And so here's the thing.
It starts not only with wealth, being able to pay for tutors, being able to pay for the right type of hobbies, the right type of athletic extracurricular activities, You know, the rich are buying college advisors.
They're buying people to teach their kid how to get into the best schools.
And on top of that, Nick, I got a little bit of bad news for you.
Are you ready?
If you are wealthy and you're powerful, chances are that you have a lot of access to people who are not going to just write letters of recommendation on behalf of Bobby or Susie, but you might be a legacy as well.
Your parents might have gone to that institution or they might know someone who went to that institution because they run in the same circles.
They're self-perpetuating.
Sure.
And that is what the major universities want.
And this study, I mean, it puts a face on something that we've all known was happening.
But to see it in such stark contrast is pretty amazing.
Yeah.
And for what it's worth in this article, they did say public flagship universities were much more equitable.
At places like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia, applicants with high income parents were no more likely to be admitted than lower income applicants with comparable scores.
So, you are right.
We do see that in almost every other, you know, school, I imagine, across the country, who are applying, but that is the issue here, is that it's, again, a microcosm, or it's just more of the same pattern that we keep seeing.
Here's my question, though, is, So, you know, over the years, a lot of the IVs have become more diverse.
I think that's true, you know, certainly compared to like the 30s and the 20s and before, right?
So, in theory, legacies should also, as enough time goes by, reflect that as well.
But I wonder if that, if what you think, would that really end up being reflected in legacies, if that's the case?
I mean, if that is the case, I mean, you gotta take into consideration the declining birth rate.
I mean, there's a real possibility that it would be basically a pretty Static through line because that's the thing is these universities were only sticking with affirmative standards.
That's it.
They had no interest to go for, you know, any further than that, save for a few very, very specific types of people that they were going after.
But otherwise, no, they've been very interested.
And again, I don't I don't think if you ask these people outright, you know, are you interested in carrying out a white supremacist, capitalistic, you know, ruling class?
I don't think that they would understand they were doing that or think they were doing that but that is absolutely what they've done and what they've shown through their actions.
And you know part of our this podcast is talking about you know the ruling class or the people that control America and that's why it's another interesting thing why we focus so much on the Ivy League schools and these other kind of schools that are in that same form because in the article it says less than 1% of American college students attend at the 12 elite colleges but That group plays an outsized role in American society.
12% of Fortune 500 CEOs are Chief Executives, and a quarter of U.S.
Senators attended those schools.
So did 13% of the top 0.1% of earners.
I mean, it's staggering what that seems to imply that if you get into one of these Ivy League schools, what you can then are maybe allowed to do versus other schools that are not Ivy League.
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the right thing, which is why things have gotten so crazy in terms of, you know, parents throwing out money, bribing people.
It's the opportunity not just to be wealthy, but to be exceptionally wealthy.
It's not just to be powerful, it's to be exceptionally powerful.
I mean, you know, people go out and they become doctors from all kinds of institutions.
But we're talking about the cream of the crop.
We're talking about people who want to go out and become ambassadors.
They want to become senators.
They want to become lawyers who make the law and, you know, really move and shake things.
What happens at that level, at that Ivy League level and the Ivy League adjacent level, is basically you are getting tested and you are getting approved to be part of a actual ruling and wealth class that makes sure that this is how our government works and how it stays working.
And if you look around Congress, the Senate, the Oval Office, that's what's at play and what has always been at play.
And it's something that makes people feel itchy because it feels not just hierarchical, but it feels like it's inherited.
And I know it makes people feel itchy, but that's only because it's true.
I agree.
And I'm actually, you know, thinking about how the right will rail against these universities as being bastions of wokeness, indoctrinating their students as they stroll across the quad.
I'm just looking for a list of like, you know, all the Sanders right now who come, but I mean, you obviously have to think of guys like- Yeah, Ted Cruz.
By the way, DeSantis is Harvard.
You know, so many of these really firebrand Republican people are all from these Ivy League schools.
So it's like, again, we talked about the Supreme Court.
They love them, and they're this bastion of integrity when they get rid of Roe v. Wade.
But as soon as they try and enforce the proper election laws, all of a sudden they're corrupt.
Same thing here, right?
These schools are terrible unless they're the ones from people who went there that I like that say the things I like and now all of a sudden they're not.
It's such a whirlwind to live in that kind of headspace.
Well, and when the cameras are off, I mean, you know what they're doing.
They're all fraternizing and being like, yeah, Yale 74, Yale 78.
I mean, that's who they are.
And I love, you know, Ted Cruz who Basically looks like he got into a hunting outfit that came off the hangar just a half hour before.
Like, it's a bunch of elites who are cosplaying and pretending to be down-home regular folks.
Meanwhile, what's going on?
They have come from incredible wealth and they have been on a track since they were born.
Literally, since the moment they were conceived, they have been on a track towards wealth and power.
And it's, Nick, it's like bowling with bumpers.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's not like any of these people are, like, bowling stripes.
What's happening is they're just, basically, whatever could go wrong is completely protected, and they're on a track that they couldn't get off of if they have to.
By the way, for an example, see George Walker Bush.
Like, that's who these people are.
It is absolutely impossible for them to fail.
And meanwhile, what they're doing is they're pretending to be part of the regular working population that they have basically ruled over their entire lives.
Couldn't be more well said.
And you know, and you can watch these, there's a lot of movies that deal with these, you know, the boarding schools, the feeder schools to these places as well.
And, you know, listen, there's something I suppose noble about the fact that when you go there and they're going to regale you with tales of, you know, you're going to be the next Senator or you're going to be this person of power.
You know, you're certainly not on a track to become a job that is low paying and menial and, you know, working with your hands and all that kind of stuff.
It does make me wonder, getting back to the infrastructure we mentioned earlier in the show, those are jobs that not a lot of people really want to have, and that's sort of the function of, in my mind, of capitalism, is that it needs to force people into such dire straits that they will take those jobs.
That's the difference.
As we move along, and if there are other ways for people to make money that doesn't have to require them to be, you know, working as a janitor or a garbage man or all those different things, then all of a sudden, all the critical infrastructure that we need to have running stops working.
Well, and I want to point something out real fast, Nick.
Like, and to go ahead and make an example out of this, and then we'll scale it out.
You and I are a couple of guys who shouldn't have, like, a high-profile show about politics.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm a graduate of Indiana State.
I'm a graduate of Southern Illinois University.
You went to the University of Wisconsin.
Right?
Like, we're not supposed to be, like, people who are talking about this and have people who listen to us.
We're not supposed to be, like, chiming in on this stuff.
Instead, you're supposed to turn on, you know, the news where a few hand-picked people talk about this stuff so they don't really give up the game as it's working.
It's supposed to feel, capitalism, Like a system that is, again, it picks you based on your merits.
Oh, you know, like, I'm sorry that you're doing this shit job.
I mean, maybe you should have tried harder, or maybe something somewhere went wrong.
I don't know.
I'm really sorry.
I hope you can have the best shit job that you possibly can.
Meanwhile, the meritocracy, quotes around it because it's not real, it goes ahead and selects these same people.
And you start looking around, Nick, and exactly like you just said, you start seeing Yale, Harvard, Columbia.
You start seeing the same usual suspects, and you start wondering, okay, how did this happen?
And this study that you've talked about today, it begins the process of spotlighting what has happened here, which is the entire thing is rigged top to bottom, and it has a set of incentives to make sure that you're going to go do that job, that sucks, and you're supposed to think, hey, this is the best that I could do, this is what I deserve, obviously something went wrong, or something is wrong with me, and then, by the way, You work in a system where you buy things to try and make you feel better about that.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's a lot like water, Jared.
I'm dealing with, you know, my roof and how there's leaks.
And what you learn about it is that the water will go to the easiest path it can to take it down, right?
Now, it's not to say that that water can't get to other places that are really hard to reach, whatever, which would signify somebody who's not in that social caste and being able to become very successful as that happens.
But the easiest path tends to be things like, you know, Elon Musk is probably a really great example of that, where To succeed, had no standards of behavior to adhere to, and is just feeling upwards left and right because of his background.
Well, and by the way, I want to talk about this for just a second.
Elon Musk is absolutely the poster child for all of this.
Came from incredible amounts of privilege, made ungodly amounts of money, obviously working on PayPal.
Nick, it's not like there wasn't going to be an online payment service.
You know what I mean?
Like, that was obviously going to be necessary at some point.
It just so happened that him and his partners, they figured out how to do it.
Somebody else would have got there.
Every product always has a bunch of different competitors.
You make your money and then you go forward.
That's not to say that he doesn't deserve to have a lot of money for figuring that thing out.
But you also have to take a look at why he was in a position to do that, and what is he doing with things now.
I gotta tell you, we're recording this on Monday, what's happening with Twitter almost every single day.
Like if he hadn't been forced to buy Twitter, I think a lot of the myth of Elon Musk would have remained, but what we're seeing is we're seeing just how incompetent and also how malevolent this person is every single day.
And as a result, we're starting to understand this is not a person who deserves that much money and power and say in things.
And because of the moment that he's in, particularly where everything he does is subsidized by the American government, every tech sector is completely intertwined with the government, and also they've all lived in a 0% interest rate era, they've come to believe that they are literal gods walking amongst us.
But what we see now is they're not gods!
They suck!
They really don't know what they're doing, and that I think figuring that out is actually really scary for people, but it's a necessary thing that they're going to have to understand.
Well, let's clarify a couple of things there, because it kind of goes with what DeSantis, the myth of DeSantis being competent.
Yeah, that's right.
It also goes to the myth of Trump being a good businessman, which was never true.
Musk, you know, had this thing, Zip2, that ultimately merged.
Was that the one that merged with PayPal?
No, maybe there's one before that.
Uh, no, I think it was Zip2 gets into him.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
It was X.com, which is what's an online bank thing that got merged with PayPal.
Now, let me ask you this, Jerry, is he still part of PayPal?
No.
And there's a reason why.
They kicked his ass out of there because he was such an awful businessman.
But let's just make it clear, they're changing the name of Twitter to X right now.
X!
He likes this letter.
He simply likes the letter X. X.com was originally the banking thing he had.
Now he's suddenly going full circle and now they want to make it seem like he's a genius again because he's going to turn Twitter into a banking app as well.
Have you ever used... What's the other one we use?
Not Zelle, but you know... Whatever the question is, it's no.
It's no.
It's the other app that we all use when I want to send you money.
Venmo?
What's it?
Venmo?
Venmo.
I think it's Venmo.
Venmo will also, if you have it public, it will tell you what you spent money on, right?
You can see, oh, I just saw Jared spend 30 bucks on this.
Nobody ever has a public, and when you do, you get in trouble, because we've seen some things, you know, like Matt Gaetz getting in trouble for that.
He thinks that people are really going to want to have their banking mixed in with a social media app?
I mean, what nonsense is this?
It's terrible, and on top of that, it's just so haphazard.
That's the other thing here, is that this is, it's basically a man-child that no one's ever told no.
You know?
Save for Grimes, who left his ass and he hasn't recovered ever since.
Like, this is a person who has never, ever been told no, and as a result, every dumb idea that comes across his mind or comes across his desk It's a lot like Trump, by the way.
You go on Twitter right now, it's called X or whatever, and there are some Xs, but they're still like birds and the word Twitter, and it's just so poorly put together.
It's a lot like Trump, by the way.
And I want to point out that Musk and Donald Trump are both products of this exact same system.
You know, these are people who were born with privilege, who have basically spent their entire lives indulging whatever it is that they want themselves.
They're still miserable and unhappy because they have a hole inside of them they can't fill, and everything they do is haphazard.
Nothing's real, nothing's intentional.
They're just full of spite and anger, and they truly believe that they're geniuses.
And meanwhile, all they do is show their asses in everything that they do.
Yeah, and sort of a rigid obsessiveness, I think, to things that they can't let go of.
And that just creates horrible work environments.
And again, they've chased him off of a lot of places where he's been for a lot of the same reasons that we saw what happened with Twitter.
So, you know what, listen, maybe we'll all be proven wrong and he'll somehow turn something around, but it doesn't seem possible.
No.
Well, let's make sure we end the podcast now before we have any breaking news that Musk all of a sudden has, you know, turned Twitter around and is making all this money.
But can you please, you know, make sure that you get home safely?
That's my biggest concern right now.
I will.
And before I go, I just want everybody to remember, hey, You're listening to this podcast.
You listen to this podcast every week.
And not only do you listen on Tuesdays, but on Fridays when you got your coffee in the car, you're getting behind the wheel, you're getting ready to go to work.
You're like, man, it's Friday.
I can't wait for the weekend.
You know what I'm going to do on my way to work?
I'm going to listen to the first 15 minutes of The Weekender, the McCraig Podcast.
Why are you denying yourself pleasure in this world?
With all of the things that we're having to talk about and look at and feel awful about, why deny yourself the pleasure?
Go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, become a patron, listen to the whole show.
