Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy strikes down affirmative action in a landmark case that was brought forward by a group of Asian-American college applicants. In the wake of this landmark ruling, author and host Steve Deese joins me to discuss the case and his thoughts on it.
00:01:25.820But I guess let's just start with what many people will probably think is the most important case, of course, which is affirmative action.
00:01:33.040Of course, we've had a regime of this for many decades.
00:01:36.520This case was specifically targeted on the idea of adjusting college admissions due to race.
00:01:43.920Harvard and I believe the University of North Carolina were both kind of named in this for Asian Americans not receiving kind of the same consideration being held back so that other minorities could be elevated due to different test scores.
00:02:01.580What's kind of your initial reaction to the fact that this case, this is something that has been so influential in the way that America's top institutions have been shaped has now been overturned?
00:02:14.400The first thing, I think you have to look at three big ideas here, all right?
00:02:19.300I think number one, anytime government grants anything to anybody on the basis of race, that is the very definition of systemic racism.
00:02:28.360And so we, you know, when I was a kid, when this was a real culture war flashpoint issue, the term reverse racism was kind of coined.
00:02:43.400I mean, you know, Rush Limbaugh used to say that this isn't civil rights, it's get evenism.
00:02:51.660And that's basically what we're talking about.
00:02:53.420I mean, my ancestors came here at the turn of the 20th century with mass European immigration from Italy and Sicily.
00:03:02.900They didn't come here for 60 years after the civil war.
00:03:07.260They were poor, came here with nothing, they owned nothing.
00:03:10.440They lived in the, when they were ethnic ghettos at the time.
00:03:13.300And so the idea that I am somehow beholden to some advantage, I'm not sure when I received that advantage, when my mom was pregnant with me at 14, maybe.
00:03:23.500When she had me at 15, was that when I got my white privilege?
00:03:26.300When we were on ADC and food stamps, is that when I got my white privilege?
00:03:30.580When I went to 11 different schools, K through 12, is that maybe when I had my white privilege?
00:03:36.280The idea that because of some sins that were committed by people who have the same melanin level as I do, you know, 70 years before my ancestors arrived on this continent.
00:03:48.240And so therefore, people that look like me now are to be granted some level of disadvantage systemically is the very definition of racism.
00:03:57.300But that kind of leads to my second point.
00:04:00.580And I think it's why, when I see you point out a lot, that no matter how many times you point out their hypocrisy, they won't be moved by it.
00:04:09.880It's about, I think it's because of what I'm going to address here in point two.
00:04:13.800And that is that ultimately, we're not debating anymore what is constitutional and unconstitutional.
00:04:20.960We are now debating what is anti-constitutional, meaning that these aren't things that reasonable people can disagree.
00:04:28.620What are the limits of the general welfare clause?
00:04:32.780And we debated those things for many, many years, going back to the great society.
00:04:38.000But starting really, I think most famously with Roe, where the Supreme Court created a right to privacy that did not exist.
00:04:45.020Those words are nowhere in the Constitution.
00:04:46.600And it's on purpose because the founders did not believe that ethics were privatized.
00:04:51.240They believed in the laws of nature and nature's God, and that the Constitution was only meant for a more religious people.
00:04:57.760So the idea of privatized ethics, thus you have a right to privacy.
00:05:01.980You can't have a right to privacy without privatized ethics, ultimately, because, hey, I'm a drug dealer, but it's in my private time.
00:05:09.620But I'm making meth, but it's in my private time.
00:05:12.860There has to be some form of ethic that we determine whether or not what you're doing with your privacy is meritorious or not.
00:05:19.740And starting with Roe, where this made-up right was essentially injected into the constitutional bloodstream, we have been having now constitutional and anti-constitutional arguments for 50 years.
00:05:31.300That what we're debating now are things that go against the intended schema of the Constitution.
00:05:37.000They are deconstructive agents purposefully, not accidentally, not well-intentioned, but they went too far.
00:05:43.500That there's one side of the argument here is on purpose, intending to deconstruct and rewrite the social compact via anti-constitutional language.
00:05:55.340And affirmative action would be an example of that.
00:05:57.220And that brings me back, and that brings me to the third point, that it seems as if, and maybe this is kind of fitting, when I was a kid, Reagan was credited with ending the Cold War.
00:06:09.180That he took a Soviet Union, and that coming out of the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of concern and paranoia.
00:06:18.400They were going to dominate, that we were a country in decline, and that he called that bluff and brought them to the brink of extinction, which inevitably happened in the couple of convening years after he left the White House.
00:06:32.520And so that was kind of the fulfillment, that was kind of the fulfillment of the greatest generation era, of taking on totalitarian ideologies threatening the West, from Nazism to Japanese imperialism, and then to Marxism.
00:06:50.540In some respects, Trump is the successor to that, in that he has now vanquished, really, through his judicial appointments, the two hottest flash, you know, hot flash culture war issues of the boomer era, which was dealing how to deal with systemic racism with things like affirmative action and Roe and abortion.
00:07:19.000Those are, if you grew up in the 80s, those were the issues that were the most divisive culture war issues of that era, well into the 90s.
00:07:29.760And just as Reagan finished off whatever was left of the Soviet industrial complex, Trump, via his judicial appointments, has smashed the largest two chivalrous of the left's culture war in the boomer era.
00:07:45.020And so those are kind of the three big picture thoughts I would have of that ruling and what it means.
00:07:52.440It feels very difficult because, of course, this is a, for many conservatives, a very difficult thing to acknowledge.
00:07:59.940But the right has been very scared to address the Civil Rights Act or affirmative action when it becomes pointed at, I think, certain groups, very particularly, you know, white people.
00:08:11.640Like you said, when that when that bias now comes towards whites, when that racism is aimed at whites instead of other groups, all of a sudden they get very skittish about pointing that out.
00:08:20.980And so I guess kind of, you know, they felt a little better about the fact that it was also Asian Americans, of course, who were heavily biased against in this ruling.
00:08:28.460But this has got kind of a big downward consequences, right?
00:08:34.800There's the cascading possibilities for this because, of course, these rulings, you know, just as affirmative action did not only apply to colleges, these rulings could easily fall on to businesses, other organizations that now have to take into account or basically that were required by law to take into account race on all of these different issues.
00:08:57.000All of a sudden there's a possibility that that just kind of goes away or can be challenged, I should say.
00:09:04.840Now, these organizations have all kind of spoken up.
00:09:08.140We've already seen especially ones like Harvard basically say we're not really going to pay attention to this ruling, right?
00:09:15.120Because in the ruling, it says that you're still allowed to think about or kind of consider whether or not someone's race created additional difficulty for them, whether they overcame different aspects of that.
00:09:29.160And so Harvard has already basically said, well, we're just going to go to we're going to skip the test scores.
00:09:35.040We're going to go directly to essays and then we can just kind of take that into account still.
00:09:41.920Now, the ruling itself did actually say that you can't circumvent this with just a with just an essay test instead.
00:09:48.640But but but Harvard came out and directly said, actually, we are just planning to do that.
00:09:53.180So we have the ruling now, which is great.
00:09:55.860But do you think it will actually be enforced?
00:09:58.020Do you think that these organizations will actually change their behavior?
00:10:01.360I think some of that is bravado, frankly, you know, we're we're seeing this thing in pop culture right now where leftist cast members of productions are so anxious to get the social social media virtue signal out of boys and ratios.
00:10:20.460But they are like way overselling the amount of work content in their production in order to get the clickbait ratio they want.
00:10:29.420And then the rest of America is like, oh, OK, so you're insulting me.
00:10:33.460And then like and then they bomb at the box office or they bomb on a streaming platform.
00:10:37.100And it turns out you watch it like six months or a year later, you're like, yeah, I mean, there was, you know, kind of your typical liberal bromides in there.
00:10:43.320But that certainly wasn't the the woke him that I was warned about.
00:10:47.320They are just they just way oversold it for social for social media style points and street cred.
00:10:52.580And I think that's some of what you're talking about with Harvard.
00:10:55.200But I also think some of it and maybe even a lot of it are on is irrelevant because Skynet is adapting.
00:11:02.320Right. And so there was a there was a monumental affirmative action case just a few years ago involving the University of Michigan, too, with a very similar ruling.
00:11:09.880And what did we see in response to that?
00:11:13.96030, 40 years ago, if we had something like covid, the left would have tried to would have tried to use government to impose, not to declare, but to impose, enforce the kind of vaccine mandate that Joe Biden tried to get private corporations to do.
00:11:30.860Because 30, 40 years ago, private corporations were largely friends or at least co-belligerents of people like you and I.
00:11:37.280But they understood that for us to fully reward our shareholders and to reach our full profit motive potential, government is in the way of that.
00:11:47.560So we'll even donate to your silly culture war causes that maybe we don't even agree with.
00:11:51.620Like Target was once one of the largest donors to marriage amendments fights in the 1990s.
00:11:57.160And so they they recognize that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if they didn't necessarily weren't simpatico with us on these cultural issues.
00:12:05.300They understood that we were fighting the same enemy.
00:12:07.400What's happened now is it is it is there's been a massive political realignment in America.
00:12:12.940It just hasn't happened within the electorate.
00:12:15.540The classes and the donor classes now that run these corporations are like, you know, we don't have to fight the government anymore.
00:12:21.300We can just join with it and get what we want out of it and become too big to fail.
00:12:25.260And TARP was kind of the first signal that this transition from the Lee Iacocca CEO of our childhood to the I'm really concerned about my diversity program.
00:12:37.860So that's where Disney will literally tank its stock.
00:12:40.560Its stock is down 50 percent in value or since 2004.
00:12:44.820It's trading at 2004 market value right now or 2014 market value right now.
00:12:50.120And yet shows no signs and doing more and more content that people don't want because they're believers now.
00:13:47.980And you've seen a handful of Republican governors like DeSantis and a few others now trying to go.
00:13:52.020After it in there, I think that's where you live is in Florida, trying to go after this within their own states to stop it from capturing the institutions on a local and statewide level.
00:14:01.820And so if one front has ended, but this enemy is systemic and it's just repackaging itself now and now it's called ESG and DEI.
00:14:09.380Do you think that this is this is something that kind of the right has to learn, that conservatives have to learn that formal victories are necessary but not sufficient?
00:14:20.140Right. You know, like you said, we we think we've got this election.
00:14:23.720We think we've got the Supreme Court ruling.
00:14:25.540We think we've got this new piece of legislation.
00:14:27.800And then even though there's been this formal victory, companies, universities, you know, they just continue the mission on there.
00:14:36.540There's like you made a good point there about DEI and ESG.
00:14:40.800These are now industries unto themselves.
00:14:42.780Right. These are bureaucracies built into this stuff.
00:14:45.840There's an entire managerial apparatus of, you know, people who are whose livelihood is built on the continuation of this regime.
00:14:54.720Correct. And and so the Supreme Court ruling can't be applied because if they did, it could collapse an entire sector of the economy, an entire part of kind of their power manufacturing apparatus.
00:15:06.400And so but but I guess the good news is that there is now the opportunity for lawfare.
00:15:12.800Right. Like you said, in California, you know, race based admissions have been illegal forever, but it still goes on because the universities just don't care.
00:15:21.700The conservatives, they're not going to see these these things change right away.
00:15:26.060They're not going to see these institutions change right away.
00:15:28.500But what they do now have is the opportunity for sustained ability to apply legal pressure to bring these things down.
00:15:35.380I think that is that is very well said.
00:15:37.640I think it is. It's important to note that, you know, what is the backdrop of the conversation here?
00:15:45.440I mean, what what's the what is the cultural context of what we are of what we are alluding to?
00:15:51.920You know, there's a great line in Mel Gibson's The Patriot.
00:15:55.380Why would I trade one tyrant two thousand miles away from two thousand tyrants for two thousand tyrants one mile away?
00:16:02.560And and what has happened is the singular figures of the racialist shakedown era, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, that if you could get around them or, you know, every time Jesse Jackson had a scandal and fathered another kid via adultery or wedlock and he had to go into hiding for six months to a year.
00:16:21.760Or every time Al Sharpton lied, which was regularly, meaning that the flaws of that agenda were largely rested on the precarious social status of the people carrying that agenda like Jackson and Sharpton.
00:16:36.540So whenever they were margin, if you could marginalize them, you could marginalize their agenda.
00:16:40.840They weren't as good at shaking down corporations and things of that nature over fake racism.
00:16:45.120What we have now, though, is the process has been democratized.
00:16:54.080I mean, even here in Iowa, where I live, when we had the Floyd, the summer of George Floyd funerals, a venerable company owned by Christian, Christian family going back many, many years, Hy-Vee grocery stores.
00:17:08.440It was almost like the Passover, except instead of lamb's blood, they put massive BLM signs over their main awning, almost as if to say, please pass over us.
00:17:16.640We have made the necessary genuflection.
00:17:19.800Do not punish us, OK, but leave our store front be.
00:17:25.240And so this this thing is this is a tumor now that is metastasized in many respects.
00:17:29.100And and that is evidence of, I think, what is the most important cultural context that is often not discussed on the right and has to be discussed, actually, in all things.
00:17:42.140I think this is the most important thing to discuss beyond just the obvious theological nature of what we are dealing with.
00:17:54.260And that is the main cause of what we become as a people and then and and the the rival religion that has sprouted up from the spirit of the age to replace the old Judeo Christian one in a but in a in a natural in a non supernatural sense.
00:18:09.140The most important thing to remember when you look at anything happening in the country on any contested issue is you have to remember the social compact is broken.
00:18:38.160What it means in a declaration when we talk about law, the government by the consent of the governed, the Constitution will now quantify that there will be bills of bill of rights granted to into citizens to that will that will complement the inalienable rights that each of us have just by virtue of being born and made in the image of God.
00:18:57.940And then there are the enumerated powers that government.
00:19:00.760These are the only the things that government can do and it can do no more.
00:19:03.640And for government to come up with more powers that that are not yet enumerated, there's an extraordinary appeal process constitutionally in order for those provisions to be to be codified years later.
00:19:20.060We live in a period of time now where and this has been going on since Roe as well.
00:19:25.120The left openly does things it knows or suspects are illegal and just dares you to go find a federal judge somewhere that will strike it down or a legislature somewhere that will.
00:19:34.360Render it via nullification, null and void.
00:19:39.320That's not that's not a political disagreement.
00:19:45.960We're not even that's not that's like we're not even neighbors anymore.
00:19:48.900We're just living next to each other coincidentally under the same landmass.
00:19:52.580And the reason why that is important is and I will confess that until the last few years, I held off on it fully embracing this, even though I suspected it for many years.
00:20:09.400We cannot cavalierly say things like this.
00:20:11.560To say things like this for rhetorical flourish is irresponsible, because if it's true, then then we're in a we're in a very dire historical moment.
00:20:22.100And and it's only because I've come to the conclusion after the last few years that we are that I didn't want to I didn't want I wanted to err on the side of being late to that realization and too early because of what it would mean.
00:20:33.140But now that it's the evidence is clear after the last few years that the social compact is broken, meaning we are we are living with people who don't just merely politically disagree with us.
00:20:43.600They have no interest in tolerating us or our viewpoints.
00:20:48.240And they are they're trying to undermine them.
00:20:55.360Oh, no, I was just going to say, I think that that is ultimately the danger of thinking that contract law can kind of hold the country together.
00:21:06.900I think I think that Christians and this is a Christian country, you know, at its very founding.
00:21:12.100They but in many ways, they allowed the the faith in God and kind of the cohesion of a culture and a people to be replaced with the idea that a document itself could kind of supplant it.
00:21:27.200And so America was no longer a people.
00:21:45.200Then then it simply became something that people could dicker about until one side got its way and its power.
00:21:51.340And this is why we've seen two entirely different types of culture, two entirely different sets of values emerge simultaneously inside and under this document.
00:22:02.720Because the document just because becomes something to get redefined and moved out of the way for the new religion or the new culture, the new value set to subsume the old man.
00:22:13.280You just eloquently itemized what what a broken social compact means.
00:22:18.000I mean, you don't quote laws that men with guns, you don't you don't stand in front of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers and screamed out, shall not murder.
00:22:27.440I think of your state, again, of Florida, we learned in this last midterm election that 40 percent of your state, there is there is no performance level of normalcy, success, security that a Republican could perform that would get them to vote for them.
00:22:51.340That was that was quantified in this last election.
00:22:53.840I mean, your governor basically did a bunch of stuff people like me have only been blogging and doing talk shows about for 30 years.
00:23:00.360He did a lot of those things and your state benefited greatly from it.
00:23:03.720And still 40 percent of your state thought, I'll take the Marxism.
00:23:07.460That means that they are that 40 percent of Floridians.
00:23:11.620Same thing happened in my home state of Iowa.
00:23:13.180We had a very similar governor in Kim Reynolds.
00:23:15.480She's just not doesn't have quite the personality and does it quietly.
00:23:19.220And I was not the battlefield that Florida is.
00:23:21.180But she also moved our state the furthest right it's ever been.
00:23:24.260She got about 60 percent of the vote, too.
00:23:26.600And that means about 40 percent outside of like a Mississippi, Alabama, where being red state is ingrained in the water table in places that are contested.
00:23:38.920The baseline is 40 percent of the people who show up to vote are affirmatively for Marxism.
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00:24:17.420Or they are so affirmatively for the immorality that the Marxists will permit that they will vote for them in order to get the immorality they want, even if it undoes everything else about society that they also want.
00:24:29.580That's a very dangerous place to be when 40 percent of the electorate in the third largest state in the country says there is no unemployment rate.
00:24:37.280There is no openness during a pandemic.
00:24:49.020We don't want our children protected but exposed.
00:24:50.480And when we get to this point that we're at now, then elections are really only about one thing.
00:24:58.200They used to be about and they were intended to be about each side or before the Civil War, there were multiple sides.
00:25:06.740Since we had the two-party system after Reconstruction, prior to Reconstruction, every party had its own vision for what was the right way to adjudicate, live out, protect the laws of nature and nature's God, the pursuit of happiness and what that meant.
00:25:21.560All right. What has happened in our era now, though, is that's not the argument anymore.
00:25:27.600Elections are now about the acquisition and wielding of power.
00:25:34.360Power to punish your enemies before they punish you and the power to protect people from the people's enemies before they get power and use it to punish them.
00:25:42.880It's not about making the trains run on time, not about the economy, not about any of that.
00:26:30.380And what happened in that war, and it's depicted very well in the Patriot, is in the end, the side that most has the resolve in the rightness of its own cause,
00:30:16.080They know that they are not beholden to those things.
00:30:18.780Now, I think there are mechanical reasons that they get to do that that we don't.
00:30:22.200And that's something that the right has to understand as well.
00:30:24.600There are all these different informal or there are these victories at different levels that have to be one for you to have those options.
00:30:32.780But the Supreme Court, you know, having these kind of rulings does give you some of those options.
00:30:37.380And that's certainly the case with affirmative action.
00:30:40.080You do get a new way to fight that back there for sure.
00:30:42.900But I wanted to get to these other two big rulings that I think are important.
00:30:47.600The next one, speaking of nature and nature's God, is, of course, the religious freedom ruling here.
00:30:54.560Now, originally with the famous cake baking case, the Supreme Court kind of handed down a very narrow ruling.
00:31:00.480It didn't really set aside the ability of Christians to not engage in certain types of commerce if it violated their religious beliefs.
00:31:10.880This one with the website and kind of the gay marriage asking for website design, this one was a little more specific.
00:31:19.000It still is only because this is a creative thing.
00:31:23.080It's not a general ability to refuse service or to really have freedom of association.
00:31:27.680But at least it is specifically, you know, speaking to the fact that Christians do have the right to decide to not use their creative capacities in ways that would violate their religious conviction.
00:31:40.780I think it was good that you cited the precedence here.
00:31:43.620The Hobby Lobby case was the initial win.
00:31:46.340And that was over Obamacare and the abortion stipulation there.
00:31:50.420Did you have to fund abortion via Obamacare and Hobby Lobby?
00:31:54.500And at the time, I actually thought the court was going to rule against us because it had already ruled in the original gay marriage decision, Windsor.
00:32:02.960And I could just not I just couldn't see Anthony Kennedy, who views himself as the.
00:32:08.840The great homosexual, you know, emancipator of America, I couldn't see him.
00:32:14.220He would have to know that if he ruled for Hobby Lobby, then when when when the inevitable challenges to religious liberty come up in response to redefining marriage, he's going to have to rule the same way.
00:32:29.040The the the master the the masterpiece cake shop case that you referenced there was very narrow.
00:32:34.040In fact, in the ruling itself, Anthony Kennedy actually wrote his his separate concurrent majority opinion.
00:32:41.740Where he clearly tried to he was clearly trying to limit the precedent.
00:32:45.260And in there, he wrote that as long as you could that you you could do this, if you could prove it was for any reason other than religious animus.
00:32:53.660Like he couldn't think of any reason you would keep going to poor Jack's cake shop in Denver, because it's clearly not the only cake shop in Denver.
00:33:00.980He couldn't think of a reason why you would keep going to Jack's cake shop except to specifically target him, to specifically make an example out of him.
00:33:09.460But Kennedy said, as long as you can do that in a way where it's not as obvious, then OK, it's fine.
00:33:27.080So in this case, the court did make a much more blanket statement that you can, as a general rule, not be compelled to use your abilities, talents, intellectual property, proprietary methods, et cetera, that are unique to you to market messages and causes that you morally find inappropriate.
00:33:48.300And this is, again, something that if the social compact wasn't broken.
00:33:53.880Another way of putting that is, if we could actually be the kinds of people libertarians fantasize we could be, but isn't actual reality when you look at human nature, doesn't really work that way, you know, then this would be obvious.
00:34:09.680Because you would just flip the script or you would say, OK, well, would we tell a black caterer that they had to go cater the white nationalist meeting?
00:34:35.820But no one's even saying this about Muslims.
00:34:38.400I mean, our former colleague here at the Blaze, Stephen Crowder, did a bit about eight years ago after Windsor, where he went to Detroit, to Dearborn, which is the most Islamic centric, Muslim centric sector of America demographically.
00:34:54.880And he kept walking into Muslim bakeries trying to get them to bake them a gay cake and they wouldn't do it.
00:34:58.800OK, and so it's really just can we find Christians and make them bow the knee to what you like to call the total state?
00:35:06.560Because if the social compact wasn't broken, we would already recognize, you know, it ain't no fun when the rabbits got the gun.
00:35:12.800Do we want to make the gay cake baker?
00:35:15.240Do we want to make him do a, you know, a Romans one cake, a Ten Commandments cake?
00:35:21.520We would automatically assume that it has to go both ways.
00:35:39.240And it was always going to go from why do you care what two people that love each other do in the privacy of their own bedroom to you will be made to care.
00:35:50.400And I think something I've seen you say a lot, which is everything that the old religious right leaders of the 80s got parodied and panned for saying has actually happened and worse.
00:36:04.440Like you said, this the illusion, you know, the the the the kind of the shield that's held out in front is, oh, this is going to be even handed.
00:36:25.700And it's the you know, whether it's Christianity, whether it's a European heritage being denied the ability to go to something like Harvard, these the victims are continually targeted specifically for the fact that they're connected to the American tradition, the American social compact, what has made America kind of what it is.
00:36:45.620And so they're not going after Muslims for this, even though they know they have exactly the same or even a more maybe even a more staunch objection to this.
00:36:56.760They don't care because they're part of the coalition that's voting to dismantle these things, or at least they think they're they are numerically.
00:37:04.240I believe they are at this point and Christians are not.
00:37:06.980And so it's about punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends.
00:37:10.360And so, you know, you turn a blind eye to those that might vote for you in other situations.
00:37:15.060And you, you know, turn the eye of Sauron directly on those who are kind of against your coalition.
00:37:21.800But like you said, I think it is good, obviously, that this ruling does exist.
00:37:26.340It's another another case in which you I'm sure you'll continue to see this harassment in many ways, like you said, with the with the cake, the the is it master?
00:37:37.780I'm sorry, I forgot the name of the masterpiece.
00:37:39.780The masterpiece. Yes, we see that the kind of the process is the punishment, right?
00:37:45.160Even when they know they're not going to get the ruling that they want, continually forcing this poor guy into this situation allows them to punish him.
00:37:53.980But either they don't care about the actual ruling at the end of the day, they care about the punishment of forcing them through this.
00:37:59.280But now there is that legal precedent that, again, allows the reciprocal ability of conservatives if they have kind of the you know, if they can grow the spine to push back on these lawfare cases and say, OK, well, we can bring similar cases now against different organizations now that we have those precedents.
00:38:15.920But there's one more that I want to talk about with you before we get to I want to talk to you about July 4th here, too, in just a second, because I think you have an interesting perspective on kind of where the country is that I wanted to pick your brain about it.
00:38:26.660But the last case that that was kind of important over this week was or last week was the the rejection of Biden's attempt to pay off student loan debt to forgive student loan debt.
00:38:39.960Of course, we know there is no forgiving student loan debt. It doesn't magically disappear. It just means someone else pays for it.
00:38:45.840Now, I'm I'm of I know that this is a good win for conservatives and for the right in general, because basically this was one big attempt at a big client class payoff. Right.
00:38:59.080Yeah, they know that colleges are progressive seminaries. They know that they're designed to spread their worldview while getting, you know, students deeply into debt and lots of usury to make sure that they can't start families.
00:39:11.840They can't afford homes. They spend all this money, you know, acquiring a credential to get locked into a corporation that's going to hate them and their values.
00:39:20.600So so in many ways, this is a big win for the right. But at the same time, I do want to say that the college system in and of itself is a horrible thing right now.
00:39:31.460The kind of debt we're putting kids into to, again, force them to go through this horrendous brainwashing and then get, you know, terrible jobs that they're going to get replaced out of in a few years.
00:39:41.840Once the next batch of HB1 visas comes through, like that is a predatory system.
00:39:46.660And so in many ways, I do feel for a lot of people who were felt like they were forced to go through a predatory system with a bunch of values they hate to incur debt that they didn't want to get.
00:39:57.320So, like, I do think they are in many ways victims of a system designed to destroy them.
00:40:02.640But obviously what the left was trying to do is not rescue these people from that system.
00:40:22.080I mean, the left has lost married people and especially married whites in almost every presidential election ever, you know, in the last 50 years, including the ones they've won.
00:40:35.100And so, on the other hand, they almost always win among college-aged voters, at least those who managed to show up.
00:40:44.160And so this was a clear attempt at a demographic redistribution scheme, who are primarily the people that are going to be adamant about actually paying back their student loans.
00:40:55.860A lot of them will probably be married, responsible, probably not voting for me.
00:41:00.900And the people that either don't want to pay them back or can't are the people that are voting for me.
00:41:08.300You know, the only time I've seen Republicans accurately do this was in Trump's return the favor was Trump's tax cuts.
00:41:17.980Remember how they were complaining about the people that lived in the blue states, the high?
00:41:23.520Now, you know, Texas can have some high property taxes, too, but a lot of the high property tax states are blue states.
00:41:29.080And so they were really pissed off that they weren't going to get to write off their state income tax deduction anymore with the Trump tax cuts.
00:41:37.940But, you know, the Trump administration's position basically wasn't the Republicans.
00:41:40.900I'm glad this is like the only time I've ever seen them do something like this.
00:41:43.720Well, you guys don't vote for us anyway.
00:43:12.380Well, then we'll be happy to pay these off.
00:43:14.580Hopefully by that point, you've salted the earth and the buildings are raised to the ground.
00:43:17.740But either way, you know, we have to like conservatives have to get okay with this idea that we have to radically change the way credentialing is done in the United States.
00:43:29.760I know you went to, you know, we went to college and we have college football teams and alma maters and have fond memories of these things.
00:43:39.100This system is destroying young people.
00:43:41.320It's destroying the ability of people to have homes, to have families, to have the ability to start out with and have, you know, do the kind of things that will make them more conservative and, by the way, happier and healthier.
00:43:54.240And, you know, putting people in this level of debt is just strictly immoral.
00:43:59.560And we just have to find a way, you know, alternative examinations, you know, force businesses to actually bear the cost of recruiting and training.
00:44:11.320You know, their employees again, rather than just putting it on the state and taxpayers like this has to be a shift of mentality for conservatives.
00:44:20.580And so this is a this is a victory, obviously, like you said, this would have been a direct redistribution, a payoff, a big patronage scheme for for Biden.
00:44:29.740And so his defeat here also, you know, with the fact that they're just they were just exploiting kind of the administrative state and their ability to manipulate some program and rewrite the law like he's like he was afforded kind of some kind of kingship.
00:44:44.260But, you know, beyond that, like it is a win, but I don't think that lets the right off the hook of understanding like this is not a problem that's going away.
00:44:53.940And if you don't rethink higher education and the way we credential people in the United States, you will complain you will continue to let your opponents train your children and put them into debt and destroy them and destroy their ability to have a family.
00:45:05.240Well, just so they can have some, you know, college degree on their wall.
00:46:30.440And some of my listeners might be surprised because they're not used to hearing it from somebody who who kind of has the level of notoriety you have in a more mainstream conservative setting.
00:46:39.680But correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you said we, you know, we don't need to save this nation.
00:51:38.020It's – you know, I grew up as a talk radio conservative.
00:51:40.240You know, I grew up with – you know, as the son of a military officer.
00:51:46.180It's very difficult to look at things this way.
00:51:49.220I guess this would be my thought, right, personally, is it's important to care about our heritage, right?
00:51:57.740It's important to care about something that is ours as a people and a nation.
00:52:04.260And that means, I think, separating the nation from the empire.
00:52:08.740And that means that we have to celebrate something very specific, which is who we are and who we were and hopefully who God will make us, right?
00:52:19.560But separating ourselves from the regime now, separating us from the identity of those who are trying to wear this country like a skin suit and instead embracing our family, our faith.
00:52:32.340Perhaps a focus on the local and the state, right, of the brave men and women, the people who are still carrying on life in places, you know, where they are attempting to protect kind of what they hold dear.
00:52:46.780And so I'm not ready to give up on July 4th yet, but I do think you are absolutely right to say that it comes with very mixed feelings.
00:52:56.420And I think many of us on the right, many of us who are, you know, who may be conservative have to have to rethink how how we approach this, because it is it is increasingly something where those in power are telling us we're no longer welcome.
00:53:11.180We're no longer this is no longer our country now. Now we're the we're aliens here, but that's not the case at the end of the day.
00:53:19.320This this is our nation. This is our land. You know, this this is these these are our families.
00:53:24.020And I think it is it is still critical to find a way to celebrate them, even if that means finding new ways to kind of honor that ones that that aren't so directly connected to to kind of those that are now taking over this country and forcing it down a very terrible path.
00:53:41.580Well, yeah, but sorry, guys, I know that wasn't the most uplifting one at the end there, but I just thought it was really important.
00:53:48.040Like I said, I had heard I had heard you say that before, and I thought that was very interesting.
00:53:52.280And so I did want to get your your thoughts on this because it's a very, very difficult holiday, I think, now for some.
00:53:58.400But but one that I think still holds an important piece of who we are, even if America is something different at the end of this, we'll still be connected to that heritage.
00:54:08.020And I think that that's really important. Well, Steve, of course, everybody should be checking out the Steve Day show.
00:54:14.900Steve's got a great book, The Rise of the Fourth Reich, talking about everything that happened with a pandemic.
00:54:21.740You should, of course, be checking those things out. But Steve, before we go check out the questions of the people, is there anything else people should be looking at?
00:54:30.020Our movie nefarious. I'm wearing the shirts today. I actually intend to do that.
00:54:34.080I just grabbed the first T-shirt I had in my drawer and it was this one, ironically.
00:54:37.660But it's in streaming right now. It is doing very, very well.
00:55:02.340And he is going to run into real evil, real demonic evil, his own sort of dark Yoda, if you will, who's going to show him the true origins of all the worst ideas he's ever had.
00:55:16.460And it's going by the end of this movie.
00:56:26.020To capital would have in many ways have found, you know, some of the degeneracy that has now become a key part of the progressive movement.
00:56:33.880A problem, though, to be fair, I do think sometimes people overstate this.
00:56:38.440You know, Ingalls was talking about the need of to dismantle the family, you know, and so I wouldn't let the Marxists off too easy here with with being disgusted with the progressives.
00:56:49.680But in many ways, I think you're right that that's true.
00:56:52.120I think the problem that Marx has is when you reject the nature of God and the nature of man, you're just even if you're right about some things later on, it'll be from the wrong premise and the wrong.
00:57:06.600And so his ideology that he espoused is impossible because of the spiritual condition of man.
00:57:14.420All right. If we were if and ironically, someone who viewed history through the lens of a struggle between the powerful and the powerless, thinking that at some point when the powerless became powerful, that they would create some kind of utopia and not become the very essence of it ain't no fun when the rabbits got the gun.
00:57:32.980That, again, that again is a misreading of human nature. And the reality is, if ultimately, if you do view history as a struggle between the powerful and the powerless, then what today's progressives have done is a more honest fulfillment of what Marx prophesied than even Marx prophesied himself.
00:57:50.820They aligned with power to get the power they needed to no longer be powerless.
00:57:55.220That is the human condition. And that that that that's really the history of our species short of the 247 years history of this country and a generation or two of the Old Testament Israel before its spiritual rebellion.
00:58:07.640That is largely the history of our species governing one another and ourselves on this earth.
00:58:14.140Yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever valid criticisms he may have had, like you said, that rejection of human nature just, of course, absolutely dooms the prod the project of and and basically just turned it into something that allowed people to try to to reconstruct natural hierarchies, invert natural hierarchies in a way that just destroys everything from families to religion to society itself.
00:58:37.520And we're certainly feeling the the reverberate reverberation of that.
00:58:41.780He must have forgot all the guillotines at the at the French Revolution after the French Revolution.
00:58:47.220He forgot or have been really excited about them either.
00:58:49.740That's very well said. There you go. I feel you. Yeah.
00:58:54.260All right, guys. Well, we're going to go ahead and start wrapping this up.
00:58:58.440I want to thank everybody who came by. And of course, I want to thank Steve, an excellent guest.
00:59:03.380Of course, like I said, make sure you check out his show, his book, the movie, all really great.
00:59:08.660Steve, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure talking with you.
00:59:11.140You bet, man. You're a very smart dude. You're one of the few people in this business.
00:59:15.600I actually quote affirmatively. So thank you.
00:59:18.780I thought it was great when we brought you on board and glad you're a part of the team.