The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 117 - Guns Don't Kill People; Schools Kill People ft. Max Eden

00:00:00.120 How did the Parkland shooter, officially charged today, slip through the cracks of the Broward County School District?

00:00:06.840 We have talked a lot about how he got his hands on a gun.

00:00:09.480 We've talked very little about the policies and politicians that caused his high school to let him through the door.

00:00:15.820 Lefties have long harped on the school-to-prison pipeline and advocated lower and lower disciplinary standards for juvenile delinquents.

00:00:22.760 My guest today suggests in a recent piece for City Journal that it was precisely Broward County's effort to fight that so-called school-to-prison pipeline that may have helped the Parkland shooter evade law enforcement.

00:00:33.880 He suggests in another piece that Barack Obama's policies may have made our schools less safe.

00:00:39.100 We will discuss with education policy scholar, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, and my old pal Max Eden.

00:00:44.540 Then we will discuss education policy more broadly, because conservatives never talk about education policy because it isn't as sexy as deregulating the EPA or drilling an ANWR.

00:00:55.140 Ooh, baby, those are good.

00:00:56.400 But conservatives sometimes ignore education policy.

00:00:59.380 The left hasn't, so now they dominate the culture.

00:01:01.900 We will discuss conservative approaches to education and how the Trump administration is doing.

00:01:06.600 Finally, the news and Dred Scott.

00:01:08.680 I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:14.540 And before we get to any of that, we have got, we got to keep the lights on in here, and we have to tell you about a wonderful sponsor of this show.

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00:04:11.260 All right, let's get into this.

00:04:12.920 Just a little context.

00:04:14.200 Do you remember that interview of Sheriff Scott Israel a week or so ago where he said he was doing an amazing job,

00:04:20.420 even as he explained that he failed in every single aspect of his job and his cowardly deputies wouldn't even go into the building where the shooting was happening?

00:04:26.600 In that interview, there was a largely overlooked part where Jake Tapper presses him on what new law,

00:04:34.440 what new lax law enforcement policies played, what role they played in this shooting.

00:04:40.040 Here is Sheriff Israel.

00:04:41.940 Were there not incidents committed by this shooter as a student had this new policy not been in place

00:04:47.920 that otherwise he would have been arrested for and not able to legally buy a gun?

00:04:52.420 What you're referring to is the PROMISE program, and it's giving the school, the school has the ability under certain circumstances

00:05:04.780 not to call the police, not to get the police involved on misdemeanor offenses and take care of it within the school.

00:05:12.740 It's an excellent program.

00:05:15.220 It's helping many, many people.

00:05:16.840 What this program does is not put a person at 14, 15, 16 years old into the criminal justice system.

00:05:24.000 What if he should be in the criminal justice system?

00:05:25.820 What if he does something violent to a student?

00:05:27.820 What if he takes bullets to school?

00:05:29.720 What if he takes knives to school?

00:05:31.320 What if he threatens the lives of fellow students?

00:05:34.460 Then he goes to jail.

00:05:35.780 That's not applicable in the PROMISE program.

00:05:37.720 But that's not what happened with the shooter.

00:05:40.360 No, I know, Sheriff.

00:05:41.600 I know in theory that, I know your theory that you're talking about, but the reality is different.

00:05:45.840 The sheriff keeps using words like excellent and amazing, and I don't think those words mean what he thinks those words mean.

00:05:53.860 I also love watching that clip because it reminds me of what Jake Tapper can be, what every blue moon Jake Tapper does when he's not being a mean girl shilling for Democrats. 0.56

00:06:01.880 He actually can be a journalist and be pretty hard-hitting.

00:06:04.060 So this is the context.

00:06:05.920 There are these new policies that are at schools across the country, and in particular here in Broward County, that do not punish kids, do not put them into the criminal justice system, try to let them slip through the cracks, and sometimes with tragic results.

00:06:20.320 I'm joined now by Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

00:06:23.820 Before that, Max was program director of the Education Policy Studies Department at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on early education, school choice, and federal education policy.

00:06:34.500 His work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets, and now here.

00:06:38.340 Clearly, he's gone on a downward trajectory.

00:06:39.980 Those outlets include the Encyclopedia of Education, Economics, and Finance, National Review, Claremont Institute, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, that's okay, we'll forgive him for that, and The Weekly Standard.

00:06:50.740 Before all of that, Max studied history at Yale, where he and I caused a lot of political trouble, and one afternoon actually hung out with Jim Acosta.

00:06:58.620 Max, thank you for being here.

00:07:00.420 Max, my first question, do you remember that afternoon we hung out with Jim Acosta before he completely morphed into Ron Burgundy from Anchorman?

00:07:08.200 Oh my gosh, do I ever.

00:07:09.360 So just for context for your friends out there, Michael and I tried to get Mitch Daniels to run for president, because we thought he was the one candidate who could beat Barack Obama, and I still think we were right.

00:07:21.740 I do too, yeah.

00:07:23.000 I remember two things, Michael, or one thing, really, and it's how much we knew and how little we actually knew, right?

00:07:29.740 You and I were sitting there thinking we knew what was going to happen next in American politics, and we were ahead of the curve, we saw something that nobody else saw.

00:07:36.920 We were wrong.

00:07:39.500 We were quite wrong.

00:07:40.800 We didn't see this.

00:07:41.940 We didn't see Trump.

00:07:43.040 We certainly didn't see Jim Acosta becoming...

00:07:46.380 Most of all.

00:07:47.600 Which begs the question, were we blind?

00:07:50.880 Was he always Ron Burgundy?

00:07:53.420 Was he really then, or did he become different?

00:07:55.620 I don't know, Michael.

00:07:56.260 I sort of think, I do sort of think it was the seeds were always there, because people said, well, was he a crazy liberal or a lefty?

00:08:03.220 I don't think it was that.

00:08:04.480 I think he just, one morning, he woke up and looked in the mirror, and he's been in love ever since.

00:08:09.460 They're just jilted lovers, he and his mirror.

00:08:12.080 Let's get into it.

00:08:13.560 Let's start with what everybody is talking about, which is this high school shooting in Florida.

00:08:18.220 What responsibility does the Broward County School District bear for letting this shooter slip through the cracks?

00:08:23.920 Yeah, so a little bit later on in that clip that you showed part of, Sheriff Israel says, you know, you can't blame my department for malfeasance, for misfeasance, because we didn't do anything wrong if we weren't told about it.

00:08:37.960 But the purpose of the policy that Broward County Schools put in place in partnership with the police department was to not tell him those things.

00:08:45.060 It was, we think that because students who get in trouble often go on to drop out of high school or get into worse trouble later, it must be because they're being punished, not because they're behaving poorly.

00:08:58.520 So the idea is, let's try to, as much as we can, not suspend, not expel, not refer to law enforcement, really serious things.

00:09:08.320 And Sheriff Runcie, he says these dozen offenses, including fighting, including drugs, we're not going to do anything with the police with them anymore.

00:09:17.560 And hey, our arrest rates went down.

00:09:19.800 Aren't I a hero?

00:09:21.520 Well, not necessarily.

00:09:22.920 There's a reason why we want police records, and that's so that when somebody like this applies for a gun, when the FBI is called, that record shows up.

00:09:32.420 But this policy was explicitly designed to not let those things show up.

00:09:35.840 So when we're asking, there were so many warning flags, how were all these warning flags missed?

00:09:41.440 Well, the policy was to try to not notice them, to try to not process them.

00:09:46.660 We can get into specific details, but that's the overarching thing that Broward did.

00:09:51.400 And it's a tragic result, but it's out.

00:09:55.440 It's amazing to me that this isn't being talked about in these terms, because you see, obviously, there were, what, 30-some-odd, 45 calls to the local police.

00:10:06.120 The FBI was notified.

00:10:07.460 And everybody turned a blind eye.

00:10:09.420 And the simple explanation here is that was the policy.

00:10:12.140 The policy was to turn a blind eye.

00:10:14.060 And I've never understood when people shriek about how many Americans are in prison or have criminal records, and, oh, the number is so high.

00:10:21.420 That just means America is good at locking up our criminals, right?

00:10:24.180 That just means that we're good at tracking people who break the law.

00:10:27.660 I'm very glad that we lock up our criminals.

00:10:29.800 I would rather our criminals be in prison than here, where they can bother me, and where I, when I walk down the street, I have to worry or something.

00:10:36.440 Fox Butterfield had that famous headline in The New York Times in 2004.

00:10:40.900 The headline was, more inmates despite drop-in crime.

00:10:44.880 So, hmm, I don't know if it's despite or maybe there's some relation there.

00:10:48.540 In another piece, not just on Broward County, you say that Barack Obama's administration made schools more dangerous.

00:10:56.140 How did this happen at a federal level?

00:10:57.480 Yeah, so, you know, we can take Broward County Superintendent Runcie's word for it.

00:11:04.880 He joked that it looked like the Obama administration took his policies and made it into federal policy, right?

00:11:12.480 Wow.

00:11:12.820 So the idea of try to not suspend, to not expel, to not issue arrests for potentially serious things because we think that they're harmful, we want to get these numbers down.

00:11:23.820 Broward was a first mover in that, but shortly thereafter, the Obama administration issued a Dear Colleague letter, very much like the Title IX Dear Colleague letter that your viewers are probably a little bit more familiar with, saying to school districts,

00:11:35.180 even if your rules are totally fair, even if you administer them totally fairly, we might come after you and investigate you for unlawful discrimination if students of different races break them at different rates.

00:11:46.940 So that threat was universal, and the Department of Education investigated hundreds of school districts across the country, major districts, L.A. included, and forced them to change these policies, forced them to try to aggressively lower these rates.

00:12:02.760 Now, two really bad things happen when this happens, right?

00:12:05.160 If the adults in the room are looking over the shoulder at the statistics rather than the students, the kids know the rules have changed, and if they know that the line is farther away, if they know that there is no line, they'll behave differently.

00:12:18.840 It's human nature.

00:12:19.760 You respond to rules.

00:12:21.500 That's not something that our friends on the left seem to understand.

00:12:23.860 They see all rules as oppression.

00:12:25.560 That's their prerogative.

00:12:26.880 Not really how the world works.

00:12:28.040 That's one problem.

00:12:28.720 The other problem is that things get swept under the rug.

00:12:31.360 So how did it all get swept under the rug before?

00:12:36.380 I can show you side by side the policies before or after, how it would have been handled differently by the books.

00:12:41.680 But what I also see when I read things, when I talk to teachers, when I read not as teacher comments, they say that to get these numbers down, principals tell them, don't report these incidents.

00:12:52.000 We'll rip up the papers that you're reporting.

00:12:54.100 We'll just simply hide them from the school district.

00:12:56.860 In Washington, D.C., they reduce suspensions by 40 percent in two years.

00:13:01.240 Sounds pretty damn good.

00:13:02.900 Know how they did it?

00:13:04.260 They just didn't tell the district about it anymore.

00:13:07.620 They sent the kid home.

00:13:08.700 They told teachers, don't let them back into the school.

00:13:10.680 And they just never reported it.

00:13:12.580 So between telling kids that there are no consequences for actions and then not telling the people of the chain of command what's actually going on in the schools, that's a recipe for danger.

00:13:22.260 This reminds me a lot of gun control, where with gun control, these mass shootings always seem to take place in so-called gun-free zones, in states with a lot of gun control anyway.

00:13:33.860 And then they say, well, the answer to that, of course, is we need more gun control.

00:13:37.220 Same here.

00:13:37.680 There's this tragic shooting that takes place in a county like Broward County, which is leading the way in sweeping these kind of warning signs under the rug.

00:13:46.240 And what's the answer going to be?

00:13:47.500 We need more feds sticking their nose in. 1.00

00:13:49.480 We need more policy tinkering.

00:13:53.260 How do we change the narrative on that?

00:13:55.160 How do we say, you know, maybe we should try a new course?

00:13:58.800 Yeah, I mean, so it's easy to see how that's the narrative, right, for a couple of reasons.

00:14:03.620 That's obviously what the media wants to go with because it's what they believe.

00:14:07.440 It's what they can use to bash the people they don't like.

00:14:10.340 It's entirely expected that that's where they want to have the majority of the focus.

00:14:14.160 Where they don't want to have the focus is on a policy that they might be sympathetic to, that they might not want to look under the hood on.

00:14:20.900 And conservatives do ourselves no favors in education policy, which we can get to later, by just kind of accepting the frame of the debate that's set by the left, right?

00:14:32.300 Like, if the left says that the problem is too many guns or, you know, guns, guns, guns, only guns, then what you have the president say is, well, we need more guns.

00:14:45.620 There's no real, like, denial of the question or trying to shift the focus to another place.

00:14:50.420 So let me offer an alternative emphasis, one that conservatives can't really get their minds around.

00:14:56.820 I hope that they will be able to over the next couple of years.

00:14:59.860 It's not really about more guns, less guns.

00:15:03.140 I mean, that plays a role.

00:15:04.340 That's fine.

00:15:05.380 The real question is, how did the adults in the room not do the right thing here?

00:15:11.920 What was it that was influencing their judgment?

00:15:14.920 Because given what we've read about him, any responsible, normal, sane, loving teacher, loving principal would have referred to this kid to the cops out of love.

00:15:24.880 And the reason they didn't do it was out of fear.

00:15:28.220 Because these policies come from the top down.

00:15:30.920 They're told, do this.

00:15:32.040 You know, this is the opposite side of zero tolerance.

00:15:34.060 It's the left has, honestly, very, very legitimate critiques of zero tolerance.

00:15:38.740 All of a sudden, there's Columbine.

00:15:40.600 We're scared.

00:15:42.300 Anything and everything can be turned over to the cops.

00:15:44.420 It went way too far in that direction because we didn't just trust teachers and principals to do what they think is right.

00:15:51.560 We set up these top down incentives that made them act insanely.

00:15:54.780 And then, in response to that, we do it right back the other way.

00:15:58.500 So, conservatives on education accept all the frames of our friends on the left and then just try to argue within it when they really shouldn't, you know, let the left beg the question like that.

00:16:10.320 I say this all the time.

00:16:11.760 I say in their premises, the left is so good at this, their premises avoid the debate altogether and they push us into a corner.

00:16:18.660 We need to reject those premises.

00:16:20.120 And, by the way, speaking of love here, speaking of compassion, it seems to me nothing compassionate or fair or loving about treating these kids differently, about saying, well, you know, we've got to get the statistic on this racial group down, so we're not going to process you.

00:16:38.540 We have a criminal justice system to apply the law fairly to everybody.

00:16:42.160 And yet, now, all of the emphasis coming out of universities, out of education policy, out of criminal justice policy is, oh, we need to informally process.

00:16:51.100 Let's treat some people a little differently than other people.

00:16:54.500 How, in the end, could that produce a just society?

00:16:57.600 How, in the end, could that produce safe outcomes for schools?

00:17:00.440 So, just last night, I was talking to a gentleman by the name of Aaron Benner, who was a teacher in St. Paul, and what he has said repeatedly publicly and to me is, there's this mass social experiment whereby we've decided to hold African-American students to lower standards.

00:17:19.260 The soft bigotry of low expectations, right, as the Bush administration called it.

00:17:23.200 Exactly. We think that by letting things slide, that we wouldn't let slide for white kids, that somehow that's going to help them. 1.00

00:17:34.560 The liberal mind on this is very interesting, right, because 10 years ago, the idea was, and it's an idea that you and I are sympathetic to, I think I am, certainly, that in urban cities, there are broken families, there's poverty, there's chaos.

00:17:51.140 The school needs to be a place where there are no excuses, where there's order, where they can kind of learn values that their community might not necessarily be able to give them.

00:18:00.360 That's what it was until about four years ago, when kind of downstream of Black Lives Matter, the narrative became kind of any discipline is punishment.

00:18:10.760 This is not about values and norms.

00:18:13.320 It's about power.

00:18:14.700 It's about oppression.

00:18:15.680 And once you go down that road, it's very, very difficult to get out of.

00:18:20.840 But once you're there, if that's what you're presenting to children, that we have to hold you to a lower behavioral standard because we're oppressing you, that is what builds the school-to-prison pipeline.

00:18:31.860 Oh, and what else could people conclude from that?

00:18:35.020 They'll say either, you know, you look at your teacher and you say, oh, this is an oppressive environment, and so there's that conclusion.

00:18:43.400 Or you say, what, I'm not good enough?

00:18:45.200 I'm not as good as that person, so I need to be handicapped? 0.95

00:18:48.340 I need to be treated with some kind of policy handicap because I'm naturally more criminal or something?

00:18:54.860 It's so insanely bigoted.

00:18:57.200 And yet this is all we've heard ever since Black Lives Matter.

00:18:59.820 Now, speaking of not accepting their premises and giving our own premises, as a matter of federal policy, conservatives don't pay any attention to it on education.

00:19:08.240 What does conservative education reform in the bullet points, in the broad overview, what does it look like?

00:19:15.140 So we don't know well enough.

00:19:17.900 I can tell you what it should be, but I can tell you that conservatives don't actually know their own principles on this.

00:19:23.700 They think, they got very caught up in this accountability movement, right?

00:19:28.040 Like, we need to test, we need to measure, we need to, we need to, you know, intervene where the tests and the measurements say we should intervene.

00:19:37.320 And you see how it makes sense from a kind of business perspective, very Jeb Bushy, very Chamber of Commerce.

00:19:43.360 But it's also just central.

00:19:45.680 Very low energy, you might say.

00:19:47.400 Very low energy, right.

00:19:48.840 It's, it's, it's, it's technocratic.

00:19:50.560 It's, it's, we can pull levers from central offices and somehow improve the lives of students.

00:19:58.460 And because we hate the unions and the union hates us, that means that we're conservative.

00:20:02.320 That's not, that's not, I'm hoping that we're getting out of that.

00:20:06.160 And I'm hoping that DeVos is going to help us get out of that.

00:20:08.400 We can talk about that in a second.

00:20:09.280 Because the real conservative premise, right, is, is Hayek, is Burke, is the inability of, of distant bureaucrats to actually regulate affairs correctly, is the utter centrality of letting small groups form their own cultures and inculcate their own values with the freedom and flexibility to do so.

00:20:30.360 And so what conservatives should be arguing for at every level is, in a way, what, what teachers unions should be arguing for as well, although they're not for other reasons, which is just, how do we give more freedom and flexibility to teachers?

00:20:45.060 What is it that's getting in their way?

00:20:46.660 What is it that we have done to schools for our own social engineering purposes that's actually preventing strong cultures from forming?

00:20:55.460 Right.

00:20:55.640 That should be the conservatives, that should be the conservative line.

00:20:58.240 And I'm hoping over the next few years it will be, but it hasn't been for the past 15 years.

00:21:02.320 It's funny because we should have total common ground with the teachers unions.

00:21:06.140 We don't because they're just left-wing government thugs.

00:21:11.060 But we should have common cause on this.

00:21:13.540 More freedom.

00:21:14.400 More freedom, more fun, more education.

00:21:16.840 It's liberal education for a reason, right?

00:21:18.820 It's supposed to be the free experience of education.

00:21:21.680 And speaking of education freedom, charter schools are some of the only tickets out of poverty for poor black people living in the inner cities, among other groups, but disproportionately racial minorities benefit here.

00:21:34.480 Why does the NAACP oppose charter schools?

00:21:38.760 Yeah.

00:21:39.760 I put two reasons out there.

00:21:42.400 One reason is that they have a fair degree of connections with teachers unions.

00:21:51.120 There's Jews collecting things going back and forth.

00:21:55.080 There are financial interests at play.

00:21:57.640 So teachers unions are broadly anti-charter because it's a threat to their monopoly.

00:22:03.540 And that means people that they can influence will probably take that stand.

00:22:08.240 The other thing is kind of what I was saying earlier, an offshoot of it, is it's this kind of inversion in the way that folks in the left view education, view life, view culture.

00:22:19.560 It used to be that these no-excuses charter schools were seen as the way to transmit bourgeois values to students who had broken home backgrounds.

00:22:30.560 But it has since become another tool of oppression.

00:22:36.180 And if you view – and there are ways in which I'm sympathetic to the case too.

00:22:41.940 And this is where kind of small-c conservatives and teachers unions and the constituents of the NAACP, if not the NAACP themselves, could come into line.

00:22:53.780 It's that, you know, maybe there is a problem in charter schools – I've certainly argued this – that they're too top-down, that they're too by the books, that they don't really empower the communities, which they were intended to do.

00:23:06.840 So it's a two-fold problem.

00:23:09.360 What I'm less sympathetic to, what I'm more sympathetic to, I'm less sympathetic to the notion that these schools are actually harming these kids.

00:23:15.080 This is not what the test scores show.

00:23:16.660 That's not the way the outcomes show.

00:23:18.020 So I'm more sympathetic to the notion that charter schooling was supposed to be a means of decentralization, choice, empowerment, and has quite frequently ended up being something that an outside group comes and just layers something else on a group of people that they don't really know, understand, have a connection to.

00:23:35.120 Right.

00:23:35.420 And in terms of instilling those values of a former role of the school, now, of course, the culture has lost faith in its own values.

00:23:43.600 It's cracked its own premises, and so you end up with moral chaos, for lack of a better term.

00:23:49.640 Now, those lefty kids in Parkland, whom CNN has been prostituting for the past several weeks, just walked out on Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos for whatever reason.

00:23:59.540 Who knows?

00:24:00.300 This brings up a question.

00:24:01.980 I don't really care about the protest or the walkout or whatever.

00:24:04.780 What I do care about is how is Betsy DeVos doing? 0.99

00:24:08.280 She's doing all right.

00:24:10.040 You know, she was off to a hard start, to say the least.

00:24:14.760 You couldn't ask for a worse way to get through your nomination process.

00:24:19.360 She hit every major interest group, right?

00:24:22.200 She hit the teachers' unions.

00:24:24.300 She hit the disabilities lobby because she didn't quite know what the law was or didn't seem to know what the law was.

00:24:31.260 And maybe most importantly, she hit the memocracy, right?

00:24:35.220 It became a social media thing, and that hobbled her right out of the gate.

00:24:41.360 I really like—I'm sorry to interrupt.

00:24:42.820 I love the word memocracy.

00:24:44.460 I think I'm going to re-register from a Republican to a memocrat, but please go on.

00:24:48.360 Please, please do.

00:24:50.600 I think that is the conservative future, but we can discuss that later.

00:24:55.440 So she started hobbled in the public sphere, and quite frankly, she started without experience and without experienced hands around her.

00:25:03.580 My old boss, Rick Hess, would sometimes—it's not a joke because it's true—say that the center of the education reform world is two standard deviations to the left of America, right?

00:25:15.380 So even the people who are kind of on the right of the movement, Trump really, really, really icky to them, didn't want to do it.

00:25:23.800 Staffing problems within the White House didn't help either.

00:25:26.080 So she hasn't gotten that many good people around her, and she had a very steep learning curve to go through.

00:25:31.220 That being said, I think she's coming around to it.

00:25:34.100 I think that she is getting closer and closer to articulating a legitimate and powerful conservative vision of the way that schools should go.

00:25:42.380 I'm not sure she's there yet.

00:25:44.120 But certainly philosophically, out of anybody they could have picked, I'm most sympathetic to what I understand her opinions to be.

00:25:51.340 I think they're the most principled of the set that Trump was considering, and I have some confidence that as time goes on, she'll do the right thing.

00:25:59.500 She hasn't done anything on discipline yet, I think broadly because of fear of media backlash, and she still hasn't quite articulated some of the philosophical points or used the bully pulpit the way that I would prefer.

00:26:10.420 But I see progress, and I see promise for more.

00:26:13.700 When is the higher education bubble going to burst?

00:26:15.640 Our own dear alma mater has totally imploded over the last few years.

00:26:20.260 Lots of other colleges are having riots and hollowed-out curricula, and tuition is more expensive than ever.

00:26:26.040 Am I going to have to sell my organs to send my kids to college?

00:26:29.980 Yes.

00:26:31.420 Fair enough.

00:26:32.820 It's free market.

00:26:34.140 I don't think it's going to burst, Michael.

00:26:36.820 A lot of it's just signaling, right?

00:26:39.280 It's just it's not actually about efficiently transmitting—a lot of it is not about efficiently transmitting particular skills that will be directly useful to the workforce.

00:26:48.600 It's about you and I went to Yale, and the fact that we went to Yale versus a place that's not Yale is what makes a lot of difference.

00:26:55.720 Right.

00:26:56.260 Social networks, old boys club, brand name, sure.

00:27:00.660 Resume line.

00:27:01.280 That's not going anywhere.

00:27:02.700 And unfortunately, Republicans are not up to the task of doing what they should on this.

00:27:07.840 It's like, how much more could we ask college campuses to antagonize everything about America and still have—and yet still have Republicans in the House, Republicans in the Senate not really rein in their funding at all, right?

00:27:24.820 Right.

00:27:25.000 Like, why is higher ed costs out of line?

00:27:27.440 This is a huge debate.

00:27:28.840 It has been a huge debate.

00:27:30.000 I could get into the academic particulars.

00:27:33.020 But fundamentally, if you're a major institution and you're looking at indefinite blank checks, you're going to plan around those.

00:27:41.320 It's amazing how that economic principle works.

00:27:43.620 If you get a lot more money just coming in out of the sky, you might start raising your budgets a little bit more.

00:27:49.940 You might.

00:27:50.320 And the Republican Congress has shown no willingness to significantly turn the spigot, right?

00:27:56.880 Because they're scared of the media criticism and you're hurting students.

00:28:01.740 And, you know, some tough love might be in order.

00:28:04.740 Some real limitations of financial aid instruments would be in order.

00:28:09.220 But I don't have a great deal of confidence in the Republican Party to do that.

00:28:12.200 And so I don't have a great deal of confidence that college will be more affordable for your kids.

00:28:16.040 So you can deal with one kidney.

00:28:18.360 That's fine.

00:28:19.340 Yeah, I could live with that.

00:28:20.640 Even one lung, although I smoke a lot of stogies, I probably need both of them.

00:28:25.160 On the broader point, before I have to let you go, conservatives are accused of being anti-intellectual,

00:28:31.740 usually by people who wouldn't know Socrates if he hit them on the head with the chalice of hemlock.

00:28:36.400 The right points out that the real anti-intellectuals are the lefties who are running the universities

00:28:41.180 and taking Shakespeare out of English department syllabi.

00:28:44.780 For conservatives who don't just want to read Howard Zinn or memorize the ever-expanding list

00:28:51.200 of invented gender pronouns, mine, by the way, are my lord, how do you recommend that

00:28:56.840 they educate themselves and their children?

00:28:59.040 You know, Mike, I don't know that we ever talked about this, but I had a little existential

00:29:01.840 crisis first semester sophomore year because I was taking Spanish.

00:29:06.480 I was taking constitutional law.

00:29:08.620 I was taking intellectual history since Nietzsche.

00:29:11.720 And like constitutional law was kind of a joke.

00:29:13.780 There has been no intellectual history since Nietzsche.

00:29:16.320 So what do I have?

00:29:19.300 I had ancient Greek history with Donald Kagan, right?

00:29:21.740 I had Plutarch.

00:29:22.660 I had Thucydides.

00:29:23.580 I had Aristotle.

00:29:24.560 I had a vision of the good, a vision that there was a good, a vision that virtue existed.

00:29:30.800 And that vision was what kind of tantalized me to explore more thoughts and questions.

00:29:36.000 So I think, you know, again, like conservatives seed the premise of the left.

00:29:41.320 Even when we talk about this stuff, we talk about it as like reacting to these campus crybaby.

00:29:47.940 We don't even know these kids anymore, Michael.

00:29:49.460 The kids yelling at those professors, they weren't our people.

00:29:51.940 They've changed.

00:29:52.500 We react to them rather than put forward, no.

00:29:57.880 Virtue exists.

00:29:59.040 The good exists.

00:30:00.380 They're outside history.

00:30:01.700 They're in our nature.

00:30:02.880 They're designed by our creator.

00:30:04.640 And it is our duty to be the most human that we can be to study the best that's ever been written and said.

00:30:10.680 That's right.

00:30:11.040 That's a great point.

00:30:11.880 And virtue exists.

00:30:13.060 If we just say that, there's a good book, you know, a really great entry point into all of this thought by Alistair McIntyre called After Virtue.

00:30:21.800 Yeah, that's, yeah.

00:30:22.360 And reasons to vote for Democrats is the other one.

00:30:24.420 You read those two books, you'll have a good entry into the history of Western intellectual thought.

00:30:28.400 Max, I got to let you go.

00:30:29.300 We got to get off of Facebook and YouTube if they weren't already censoring us.

00:30:32.780 Thank you for being here.

00:30:33.960 We'll have to catch up next time I'm in your town.

00:30:36.240 Please do.

00:30:36.940 All right.

00:30:37.280 See you, pal.

00:30:38.880 Sorry, guys.

00:30:39.580 We have so much news to talk about.

00:30:41.260 I'm going to fly through it.

00:30:42.480 We've got to go through the Texas primaries, and I want to make one point on Dred Scott.

00:30:45.620 But before we do any of that, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook.

00:30:49.940 I said goodbye to YouTube a long time ago.

00:30:51.840 It was tearful.

00:30:52.520 It was tough.

00:30:53.000 But we have to do it.

00:30:54.380 If you're on thedailywire.com, thank you very much.

00:30:57.260 You help us keep the lights on.

00:30:58.320 You help keep Covfefe in my cup.

00:31:00.060 If you are not a subscriber, please do it.

00:31:02.540 It will cost $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.

00:31:06.440 You'll get me.

00:31:07.020 You'll get the Andrew Klavan Show.

00:31:07.860 You'll get the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:31:09.000 You'll get the conversation.

00:31:10.280 That's coming up very soon, March 13th.

00:31:12.520 Ben Shapiro himself, 530 Eastern, 230 Pacific, featuring the one and only Ben Shapiro.

00:31:18.320 Many can watch it, but only subscribers can ask questions.

00:31:22.020 Many are called, but few are chosen.

00:31:24.060 It is a live Q&A.

00:31:25.140 You can ask Ben questions, which you will hear for everyone, which you will answer for

00:31:28.840 everyone to hear.

00:31:29.740 It will stream live on the Ben Shapiro Facebook page, the Daily Wire YouTube channel, and it

00:31:33.460 will be free for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask the questions.

00:31:36.960 And presumably, it'll only stream on YouTube as long as they don't cut us off.

00:31:40.440 To ask questions as a subscriber, log into dailywire.com, head over to the conversation

00:31:44.380 page, watch the live stream.

00:31:46.260 After that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box, where Ben will answer questions

00:31:50.280 in the order that they are posted.

00:31:52.520 Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Ben.

00:31:55.500 On Tuesday, March 13th, 530 Eastern, 230 Pacific, join the conversation.

00:32:00.340 Forget all that.

00:32:00.960 None of that matters, obviously.

00:32:02.040 Who cares?

00:32:02.480 What we really care about are the leftist tears tumblers.

00:32:04.640 This is some important stuff, folks.

00:32:06.460 When we start blaming Barack Obama's education policies for making schools less safe, they

00:32:10.780 are going to cry like they haven't cried since November.

00:32:13.360 Make sure you get this.

00:32:14.160 It's FDA approved to hold your hot or cold, salty, delicious leftist tears.

00:32:18.660 Go to dailywire.com.

00:32:19.560 We'll be right back with all the news.

00:32:32.060 Very quickly, the Texas primaries were today.

00:32:35.340 I couldn't sign off without talking about this.

00:32:37.160 This was too delicious.

00:32:38.640 This was too...

00:32:39.200 Mm.

00:32:40.100 Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm.

00:32:42.360 That's so, so good.

00:32:44.120 Democrats told us yesterday, for the past few weeks, there was going to be an overwhelming

00:32:48.460 Democrat turnout.

00:32:49.660 You're going to see more Democrats turnout than Republicans.

00:32:52.080 We've got the blue wave coming.

00:32:53.480 You're going to be like Morgan Freeman in that movie.

00:32:55.260 No, no.

00:32:56.820 They said that early voting, voter registrations had Democrat numbers up over 100% and Republicans

00:33:03.020 just 10%.

00:33:03.980 Oh, no, I'm Morgan Freeman in deep impact.

00:33:06.420 No.

00:33:07.040 President Trump, your reaction.

00:33:12.500 Well put.

00:33:13.300 Very well put, President Trump.

00:33:14.540 They have been telling us about the big blue wave in Texas for years.

00:33:17.600 Abortion Barbie promised that she was going to turn Texas blue. 1.00

00:33:21.400 They're trying to give amnesty to 3.6 million likely Democrat voters to turn Texas blue.

00:33:27.080 That's right.

00:33:27.980 That's right.

00:33:29.060 GOP turnout was over 50% higher than Democrat turnout.

00:33:32.280 Sad.

00:33:33.540 Over 50% higher.

00:33:35.620 In the gubernatorial primary, Republicans broke their own record for the highest turnout

00:33:39.420 in history.

00:33:40.320 Republicans cast just about 1.5 million votes yesterday.

00:33:43.580 Democrats, just a little over a million.

00:33:45.300 Sad.

00:33:45.600 Absolutely dreadful turnout for Democrats.

00:33:48.220 In 2002, Democrats had a great year.

00:33:50.000 They cast more ballots in those races than Republicans.

00:33:52.380 This year, 50% down.

00:33:54.020 Sad.

00:33:54.700 For the Senate race, Ted Cruz's Senate seat, Cruz picked up 85% of the GOP vote.

00:33:59.760 His next closest competitor was Mary Miller, who picked up 6%.

00:34:04.180 Looking pretty good for Ted Cruz.

00:34:05.920 On the Democrat side, the leading contender, the person who was going to trounce Ted Cruz,

00:34:11.240 the appropriately named Beto O'Rourke, grabbed just 62% of the Democrat primary vote.

00:34:17.540 Nowhere near what Democrats were hoping.

00:34:20.020 Maybe it's Beto.

00:34:20.760 Beto O'Rourke.

00:34:21.480 Who knows?

00:34:21.920 I don't know.

00:34:22.120 That's very mean.

00:34:22.700 Democrats wanted to smack down George P. Bush, land commissioner in Texas.

00:34:26.340 Just didn't happen.

00:34:27.440 Politico dejectedly reports that Bush cruised to victory.

00:34:30.960 By the way, despite his last name, George P. Bush embraced President Covfefe because

00:34:36.300 despite the constant negative press, Donald Trump remains popular.

00:34:39.460 And it worked.

00:34:40.040 It helped him.

00:34:41.340 Another takeaway from this, great news.

00:34:43.240 I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter because we're out fundraising Democrats too.

00:34:46.200 But the money didn't really matter that much.

00:34:48.640 Three Democrats who led the way in fundraising throughout 2017, they didn't even reach the

00:34:52.520 runoffs in top-tier congressional races.

00:34:54.620 Ed Meyer, a former Obama State Department official, he led all of his opponents in fundraising.

00:34:59.560 He ended up in fourth place.

00:35:01.380 Womp womp. 0.99

00:35:02.140 I'd also like to, so this is all good.

00:35:04.360 By the way, the GOP should remain terrified.

00:35:06.540 All of history is telling us that we're going to get clobbered in November.

00:35:09.800 But one good aspect of this Republican conservative exuberance is I think we're paying attention.

00:35:14.760 I think we actually might turn out to vote, but you've got to do it if you want to win.

00:35:17.980 And if we win, man, we're going to need to make like a triple, a gallon-sized leftist

00:35:22.180 tiers tumbler just to stay safe.

00:35:23.780 One final point I'd like to make, it's a quasi-historical point on the state in history.

00:35:27.160 Yesterday was the 161st anniversary of the Dred Scott decision.

00:35:32.560 The Dred Scott decision is regularly considered one of the worst decisions in American Supreme

00:35:37.960 Court history.

00:35:39.200 It basically declared that black people can never become citizens if they have any slave 0.98

00:35:44.320 ancestors, slave or free.

00:35:47.740 They just cannot become citizens.

00:35:49.760 It undid the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thus permitting slavery in all federal territories.

00:35:54.880 Chief Justice Roger Taney declared blacks, quote, an inferior order and altogether unfit

00:35:59.780 to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far

00:36:03.860 inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

00:36:08.000 No rights, including constitutional rights.

00:36:11.580 Taney actually went on.

00:36:12.880 He knew that citizenship, even for free blacks, quote, would give to persons of the Negro race

00:36:18.040 who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the Union the right to keep and carry

00:36:23.480 arms wherever they went, endangering the peace and safety of the state.

00:36:28.020 There's a lot more in there, but that's part of it.

00:36:32.740 Obviously, this isn't ever reported that Dred Scott was in no small part to keep blacks

00:36:37.380 from owning guns.

00:36:38.600 But people criticized this.

00:36:39.860 It was the worst Supreme Court decision ever.

00:36:41.140 Obviously, Taney made the wrong decision, but I actually love the Dred Scott decision.

00:36:45.360 This is going to preclude me ever from running for office, just that one sentence.

00:36:48.620 But I love it precisely because it's so clear.

00:36:52.520 Roger Taney, even though he reached, I suppose, the wrong conclusion, Roger Taney recognized

00:36:58.840 very clearly and rather logically the central conflict in American slavery, the internal nonsense

00:37:06.280 of American slavery, which is this.

00:37:08.840 If the language of the Declaration of Independence is correct, then human dignity, the human dignity

00:37:15.340 that is described in the Declaration depends upon natural rights, natural rights to life,

00:37:21.380 liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:37:23.680 Natural rights are not something you earn.

00:37:26.100 They're something that are natural, innate, that are born into you.

00:37:29.340 And so the question of free blacks becoming citizens is impossible because there are only 0.99

00:37:36.100 two questions here, really only one question.

00:37:39.540 Do blacks have natural rights or do they not have natural rights? 0.94

00:37:43.660 If they do have natural rights, then slavery is an intolerable, horrific evil.

00:37:51.340 There's no argument for it.

00:37:53.240 If blacks do not have natural rights, then even if they become free, even if they leave slavery, 0.54

00:37:58.400 they could never become American citizens.

00:38:01.400 The American project is based on this notion, this enlightenment notion of natural rights.

00:38:06.560 So if they don't have the natural rights, what does it even mean for them to become free?

00:38:11.120 They certainly can't become American citizens. 0.93

00:38:13.680 And that Taney decision puts that logical problem into stark relief.

00:38:17.820 And then within eight years, 600,000 Americans would give their lives to resolve that conflict.

00:38:23.300 And they resolved it in the former.

00:38:26.120 They resolved it to say that blacks do have natural rights and therefore slavery is an

00:38:30.260 intolerable evil.

00:38:31.520 But I really do appreciate the Dred Scott decision for making a way, doing a way with all of

00:38:37.880 the sophistry that comes along with, well, they're not free here, but they can become free.

00:38:41.800 And this kind of black can be free, but not this one and blah, blah, blah. 1.00

00:38:45.200 No, it's a question.

00:38:46.860 Does our creator endow us with certain unalienable rights or does he not?

00:38:50.320 That's the central question of the American experiment.

00:38:52.100 And that's the central question of American citizenship.

00:38:54.500 So good stuff.

00:38:55.300 I'm glad.

00:38:56.060 It's a good thing that there were eight years that resolved that question on the right side.

00:38:59.380 But good on Justice Taney for putting the question into relief.

00:39:02.960 That's our show.

00:39:03.800 Make sure to get your mailbag questions in.

00:39:05.680 We have a good show tomorrow.

00:39:06.580 We have a special guest also.

00:39:08.140 Get your mailbag questions in and I might consider answering them.

00:39:11.040 I'm Michael Knowles.

00:39:11.600 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:39:12.400 I'll see you then.

00:39:12.880 We'll see you then.

00:39:42.880 We'll see you then.

The Michael Knowles Show - March 07, 2018

Ep. 117 - Guns Don't Kill People; Schools Kill People ft. Max Eden

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