In this episode, I talk about how the managerial class exploits fear to advance their own agenda, and how we can learn to deal with it in order to advance our own agenda. I discuss how a lack of self-confidence leads to a managerial class that exploits that fear and exploits it to advance its own agenda and to get us to do things we don t actually need to do. I also talk about the recent bank collapse in Silicon Valley and how this is a symptom of a broader pattern of fear that we see in the world today. I also discuss how the fear of a bank run can be harnessed to achieve our political and economic goals, and why we should be worried about it, rather than about it being caused by a domino effect from one bank to another. Finally, I discuss why we need to stop asking the question, "How can we stop a bank from going under?" as opposed to "How do we stop Russia from invading Poland?" and how that might actually be a reasonable question to ask the question: How can we actually deter Russia from doing what it wants to do in Ukraine, Afghanistan, or any other part of the world? and why it's a good thing that we don't need to worry about it. We don't have to be scared of it, we just need to be prepared to do something about it to be a little bit more than we already, and to be more prepared to act on it to prevent it and not just a little more prepared or not to react to it in order in a more effective more prepared for it or of a better tomorrow we can actually do something not less . I hope you enjoy this episode and let me know what you think of it. Tweet me about it! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How do you feel about this episode? 2:30 - How you think about it? 3:10 - What are your thoughts? 4:15 - What do you would you would like to see us do in the next one? 5:20 - What would you like to hear from me? 6:40 - Is it better? 7:15: What are you worried about the future? 8:00 9:00 | How do we move forward? 11:30 | How we can prevent a bank collapse?
Transcript
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00:00:23.000what we see in America today is the rise of a new managerial class that wields its power in part by exploiting fear.
00:00:33.000We suffer this moment of a lack of self-confidence in America, in ourselves and as a country.
00:00:40.000When you have a vacuum of self-confidence, fear fills the void.
00:00:44.000Then when you have fear preying on that vacuum of self-confidence, the managerial class can then prey on that fear to advance their own agendas.
00:00:52.000We saw it in recent days, okay, in recent weeks with the collapse, for example, of Silicon Valley Bank.
00:01:01.000Well, for years, they had actually said that Silicon Valley Bank is not a systemically important bank.
00:01:05.000It's just a weird bank in Silicon Valley that does its own business, that enters special deals with startup founders.
00:01:11.000And that's why it was one of the reasons they lobbied for exemptions from financial regulations that said that they were allowed to take risks that large banks weren't Now, I think that makes sense.
00:01:21.000But there's two sides to the bargain, which is that when that bank takes risks that cause it to fail, the bank and its depositors and its clients have to ultimately pay the price for the risks that they took.
00:01:54.000You got to understand the specific technicals of this.
00:01:56.000If you don't understand this, then you're a Luddite because you don't really understand how finance works and how there's contagion from one bank to another.
00:02:02.000Completely eliding the distinction between Silicon Valley Bank, where there's a tiny portion of total deposits that were actually insured by FDIC, compared to most banks where it's a majority of those deposits, compared to the fact that Silicon Valley Bank had the highest concentration of mortgage-backed securities and similar investments in its portfolio.
00:02:21.000The reason we need to get this bailout is that every other bank is actually going to fail.
00:02:25.000It was a disingenuous argument, but it preyed on fear.
00:02:29.000But I make that argument because it's actually part of a deeper pattern.
00:02:32.000I think it's a big part of what's going on in Ukraine, actually, totally separate issue.
00:02:38.000But this fear that if we don't stop Vladimir Putin at all cost as the United States from annexing Ukraine or any part of it, then he's going to go after Poland.
00:02:44.000as the United States from annexing Ukraine or any part of it, then he's going to go after Poland, then he's going to go after a NATO country.
00:02:51.000Then he's going to go after a NATO country.
00:02:52.000And in fairness, just like the bank run case, it's impossible to disprove.
00:02:53.000And in fairness, just like the bank run case, it's it's impossible to disprove.
00:02:56.000I'm not saying that that's a definite that that's not going to happen.
00:02:56.000I'm not saying that that's a definite that that's not going to happen.
00:02:59.000But that fear creates no limit to what we're willing to do then to stave it off, because then it becomes a technocratic issue, a technical issue here for the technocratic military class that understands the experts who understand what Russia is or isn't going to do.
00:02:59.000But that fear creates no limit to what we're willing to do then to stave it off, because then it becomes a technocratic issue, a technical issue here for the technocratic military class that understands the experts who understand what Russia is or isn't going to do.
00:03:16.000Now, that's the same expert class, mind you, that said that Ukraine was going to fall within days, the same expert class that said that Kabul would not fall for months to years that Kabul did fall within days of when the US military left.
00:03:28.000So the fact that we call them intelligence experts is itself laughable.
00:03:32.000But again, it's preying on this fear, this condition of uncertainty, this lack of self confidence that says, that's why we need to use Ukraine, fill in the blank Silicon Valley Bank, to prevent a domino effect somewhere else, as opposed to asking the question of how we stop the thing that we actually are worried about. as opposed to asking the question of how we stop Say, Russia invading Poland, where you have tens of thousands of U.S. troops sitting in Germany, maybe there's a reasonable conversation about moving some of them to Poland.
00:03:57.000That's how you might actually deter aggression in Poland, instead of saying the Internet's about Ukraine.
00:04:01.000Just like Silicon Valley Bank, by the way.
00:04:03.000If you really care about a national background, great.
00:04:05.000Shore up confidence in the rest of the banks across the country, instead of actually making the argument that it had to be Silicon Valley Bank.
00:04:37.000We said the safe thing to do is to shut down schools.
00:04:40.000Well, at least the public schools, private schools, parents could actually afford it and bring some sense in and didn't want their kids sitting at home and wasting a year.
00:05:01.000That's inequity that we're never going to correct for.
00:05:03.000That's an entire generation of educational inequity, one to two years of a difference that was supposedly about just containing a risk.
00:05:12.000And so that's why this cultural movement, it's about reviving a sense of self-confidence, conviction.
00:05:18.000When we have confidence in our convictions, then the managerial class cannot prey on our fears, whether it's in our schools, whether it's in our military, whether it's in our financial system.
00:05:28.000But we live in this moment where we lack self-confidence.
00:05:31.000And when you lack that self-confidence, that sense of conviction, both as individuals and as Americans, as a nation, that's what allows the managerial industrial complex to play their games.
00:05:43.000Once we revive that sense of self-confidence, whether it's economics, whether it's geopolitics, whether it's cultural revival, or whether it's our education, the rest becomes a lot easier.
00:05:54.000This is really a conversation and a campaign, not just about a political campaign, but a cultural campaign to restore American self-confidence itself.
00:06:03.000So I'm joined today by my friend Mark Owsley.
00:06:07.000I should say my friend, we're meeting for the first time, but I feel like we've been exchanging ideas on the internet and otherwise for a long time, who is focused, as I have been as well for the last few years, on a different kind of cancer, a cultural cancer that preys on that lack of self-confidence.
00:06:23.000And with a particular view and a vantage point into the schools and our educational system itself and understanding how we can shore up our self-confidence to resist the woke infection in our universities in our primary education system.
00:06:39.000Mark, it's good to finally see you in person.
00:06:49.000But just give me a little bit about your background, what sort of got you to be interested in these issues that I think have brought us together.
00:06:57.000And then I want to get into a little bit of meat, getting beyond just the usual, you know, I would say lambasting of woke that you and I each have done to like get into sort of the knit and grit of how we fix some of this in the educational system.
00:07:27.000I was a private schooled kid for a while.
00:07:29.000I was a public schooled kid for a while.
00:07:31.000But I've also taught in all of those institutions as well, in terms of private, public, and university level.
00:07:39.000I got into this, what I'm doing now, because of the critical turn that kind of happened in 2020 through the George Floyd riots through COVID. And I'm at the University of Oklahoma as a graduate student, a doctoral student.
00:08:23.000But what I've also had a unique experience in is seeing the administrative apparatus that unifies kind of all of these educational systems.
00:08:35.000And when the woke turn kind of started to happen very quickly in 2020, 2021, I noticed a general shift that had a lot to do with what you talk about all the time, which is the managerial class that overlords over whether it's the higher education institutions or the public or private school institutions.
00:09:05.000A lot of this is through diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, which I call divisions of ideological enforcement.
00:09:11.000They mandate – Oh, I kind of like that.
00:09:13.000Yeah, divisions of – they mandate what you have to believe so you're allowed to teach within the institutions.
00:09:21.000And this happened very fast, almost overnight, from one semester to the other during my doctoral work.
00:09:28.000I went from taking classes about Beethoven and Bach to the next class I was taking was how to inject equity and inclusion into music theory classrooms.
00:09:47.000happening because it was inherently racist to me to be classifying people by the color of their skin and saying whether people can talk or not based upon the color of their skin.
00:09:57.000So I dove into it and immediately just started pushing back.
00:10:02.000Well, because of my experience in the kind of administrative apparatus as a graduate student, but also as a fine arts administrator and those kinds of things, law, where the problem was in higher ed, and it was this kind of fusion of Title IX with the DEI office.
00:10:22.000So when you talk about equal opportunity versus equity, and these are two opposing forces.
00:10:27.000And so what that office was attempting to do was just generally take that over and impose an equity mindset on the entire university.
00:10:39.000didn't get until actually your book Woke Inc. came out was how this was all connected to a larger economic goal, right?
00:10:49.000And how the universities were being transformed into this, into these bastions or these castles of You know, environmental social governance designed to spread like a wildfire throughout whatever state that we're in.
00:11:08.000But the University of Oklahoma is directly committed per its strategic research verticals, top down, bottom up, to the WEF's, you know, sustainable development goals.
00:11:21.000And they've committed the entire institution to branching that out throughout the state.
00:11:26.000And so it's an infiltration of this economic model, this CCP kind of derived communofascism, if you will, throughout the state.
00:11:36.000And so we talk a lot about border security, right?
00:11:42.000And the dangers of having too many illegal immigrants come into the country.
00:11:47.000But what I don't think we realize as a country is that the education system is being used to infiltrate global mindsets as kind of a thought virus, as kind of a faith, if you will, a religion throughout our educational institutions, educational institutions.
00:12:03.000And now we're seeing that in K-12 schools.
00:12:06.000We're seeing that at the university level, but it's designed to branch out.
00:12:12.000I'm on fire for this because I saw it not just destroying communities or separating communities, but individual students were being destroyed, were being used as kind of cannon fodder.
00:12:25.000I mean, I'm familiar with countless, but from your vantage point, give me an example of where you've seen that in action, rubber hitting the road.
00:12:32.000Well, in terms of the- In the education system, a student or- Oh, man.
00:12:37.000Example of students who have been stripped of their dignity or, you know, mind virus- Their identity.
00:12:47.000At the University of Oklahoma, again, I started my doctorate in 2017. So this is kind of- Okay.
00:12:54.000Early and then I am still working on it, but my classes were kind of past 2022. And so I got to see a whole crop of kids go through this process.
00:13:06.000Yes, undergrads, especially what wokeness is designed to do as a, it's a moral religion that is designed to usurp the individual identity of the student, take it away and replace it with a collective political identity.
00:13:20.000And you see this through the mental health processes that are on campus, where they're constantly pushing, well, are you okay?
00:13:28.000Are you feeling depressed and constantly pushing this down their throats?
00:13:33.000And then the political aspect of it is there's entire institutes on campus devoted to what social justice, critical social justice.
00:13:42.000And what I always say and what I learn from my education teachers, my teachers, is that peer pressure is the strongest force on the planet.
00:13:52.000And so when you have a top-down institutional mandate being spread through, whether it's the Department of Education on campus or just the DEI office or every professor that's hired through that office, students start feeling the social pressure to Yeah.
00:14:45.000You have kids that would – every class was a battlefield instead of a place to learn.
00:14:51.000And it's really akin to the Maoist kind of cultural revolution where it's – they're trained to go in as missiles and destroy – And while in that process, they're destroying themselves and their own sense of identity.
00:15:04.000A lot of people probably may or may not have an understanding of what the Maoist Cultural Revolution was.
00:15:08.000He was actually using students, right?
00:15:10.000So, I mean, this was actually Mao in the Communist Party feeling like his own Communist Party was turning against him a little bit.
00:15:20.000He's the old guy but went to the next generation and And said, actually, you can basically take the gloves off and even use violence as a means if necessary to purge even those within the Communist Party itself.
00:15:36.000And so it was interesting that he went to students, the next generation as a way to do it.
00:15:42.000And Klaus Schwab has done the same thing.
00:15:46.000The Democratic Party has really engaged in this where it's we are going to take these kids and make them believe that unless you are environmentally conscious or for equity and inclusion regardless of what the definitions of those words are, that – You are evil, so we're going to destroy the four olds, as Mao said.
00:16:07.000You know, old religion, old belief, old customs.
00:16:10.000And what better to do that than the most energetic group of people on the planet?
00:16:14.000And, you know, you equated what a wokeness is a religion, while the tithe is in the ballot box.
00:16:19.000And that's what it comes down to as well, is that, you know, we talked about the red wave that was supposed to happen in 2022. That was staved off.
00:16:29.000kids that have been taught that they either vote for these kinds of candidates or vote for this party line, or they are bad people, or they are, you know, doomed to some sort of, you know, right wing hell.
00:16:42.000And that is, but that takes an effect on the individual student.
00:16:46.000It separates families because they're taught to, you know, if your parents don't believe like you ostracize them.
00:17:43.000The reason school choice is very popular in the Republican Party amongst Republicans are because I have to say that I'm favorably disposed to school choice myself as well is that it diminishes the monopoly that the administrative class, the managerial class in K-12 education has.
00:18:03.000It says that if you give those same families the opportunity to leave their public school, then that should create more mobility, that should create actual more true diversity of options where parents will then actually have a greater incentive to understand what their kids are being taught to use that money in that should create actual more true diversity of options where parents will then actually A big part of my plan to shut down the Department of Education is to liberate the $80 billion that flows through the Department of Education and maybe even feed that to the states to be able to foster greater school choice.
00:18:33.000And the thought is that that combined with transparency of the curriculum should give parents the ability to hold their schools more accountable than they're able to today for a lot of things, including failures of those schools, but including the orthodoxy foisted on students, the racial and gender ideology but including the orthodoxy foisted on students, the racial and gender ideology foisted on these students in So that's the normal logic.
00:18:57.000I first of all, I think it's important that we identify and define school choice because it seems to have a lot of different translations.
00:19:07.000Some say, well, your ability to move from one school to the Where I find...
00:19:17.000Hesitation in this situation is when you start saying that you can free kids from government influence by attaching government money to them and injecting them into a private institution.
00:19:29.000Because as you said, a large part of what we're dealing with are public-private partnerships.
00:19:36.000Well, it seems to be, to me, creating, when you're talking about ESAs, so if you define school choice as ESAs, which is education savings accounts, right?
00:19:45.000You're taking government money, you're attaching it directly to the child, which means you're putting a price tag on them.
00:19:50.000And that, to me, makes me nervous already, because...
00:19:55.000Usually some kind of government string, right?
00:19:58.000Whether or not – whether it's just as simple as you can spend it here, you can't spend it here, right?
00:20:02.000And that has the danger of expanding outward as time goes on.
00:20:09.000And the other part of it is the corporate influence.
00:20:12.000One thing that I've experienced as a private school administrator and my work in private school is that It's the university model.
00:20:21.000If you inject state dollars into a private institution, it is the university model.
00:20:25.000And there are, as you said, captured market incentives, right, to push organizations woke.
00:20:32.000Well, that is not going to stop at the water's edge of education.
00:20:38.000Actually, I think there's an actual data incentive for Apple, Google, Amazon to start influencing private schools through – it can be as simple as a capital campaign, right?
00:20:50.000If a school wants to raise the money to build a new building or wants to get a loan to build a new building, what do they have to have?
00:21:02.000Well, if Apple, Google, and Amazon start influencing the schools, They're going to have a direct effect on what those schools teach because with the iPads, with the Chromebooks comes a certain curriculum, comes a data mining situation.
00:21:22.000And so what I've always said about school choice is, first of all, we have to make it woke-proof.
00:21:28.000We have to – order of operations is important.
00:21:30.000And so like you said, if you want – Defunding the Department of Education is imperative if we're going to be using ESAs.
00:21:39.000Because with ESAs comes Title I, right?
00:21:42.000And if you have students that are now in a lower economic area, moving from a public school that is not good, right, into a private school that is good, and they take their kind of Title I money with them, then comes Title I strings, right?
00:21:56.000So you kind of have this merger of state and corporate power that align under an ideology many times that will price other smaller parochial faith-based schools out of the market over time.
00:22:12.000And so you end up getting kind of a Walmartification.
00:22:14.000Can you talk a little bit more about the pricing out mechanism just so we understand exactly what you mean?
00:22:47.000So you had the GI Bill before that, right?
00:22:49.000And the GI Bill that came out of Vietnam and things like that, where the government saw a good impact on society by sending former soldiers...
00:23:03.000To college to become professionals, right?
00:23:06.000And the Pell Grant was designed, though, to go right after lower income individuals.
00:23:13.000That's what the Pell Grant is for, right?
00:23:15.000So we're talking about now creating equity, right?
00:23:18.000Where it's almost an outgrowth of affirmative action.
00:23:45.000And so, what I'm fearful that will happen with private schools is that if you now take a $9,000 ESA... The school I taught at was $25,000 a year, right?
00:24:42.000Or, but that's not most of the private schools in the country.
00:24:46.000Most private schools actually compete based upon amenities, just like colleges do, right?
00:24:53.000Come to this college, you get a dorm room, it looks like an apartment, we'll feed you, we'll give you all of your medical care for free, we'll have mental health, you can, you know, it's a one-stop shop, it's its own community, right?
00:25:06.000And this is where it goes, the market incentive actually...
00:25:13.000It pushes private schools to adopt that model.
00:25:17.000And have you ever heard of WISC or Whole Child, Whole Community Schools?
00:25:24.000Okay, you should dig into this because the WISC model— Whole Child, Whole Community Schools.
00:25:28.000Yeah, it's WSCC, so Whole School, Whole Child, Whole Community.
00:25:33.000And this is being implemented through ESSER, through different Department of Education grants all over the country, but California is really leading the way.
00:25:44.000And basically what it is is to say, okay, we're going to take your school and we're going to turn it into the university model and we're going to give you all of your medical information.
00:25:57.000So we're going to have your doctors, you're going to have all your, uh, mental health, uh, professionals here.
00:26:02.000And if you, if your kid needs a checkup, you don't have to take into the doctor.
00:26:06.000You can just, you know, bring them over to the, to the school office, set an appointment and do it right there.
00:26:12.000But what comes with this is this whole, this whole, I just blanked, but the sex education ring that's now morphed into gender inclusion and transitions and hormone therapies is a but the sex education ring that's now morphed into gender inclusion and transitions and hormone therapies is
00:26:34.000Well, going back to private schools, this has a danger of merging if you accept students that are Title I eligible.
00:26:43.000And they will use WISC as a model, as a market incentive to compete with the larger, more expensive schools, right?
00:26:50.000And raise the rates or whatever it may be.
00:26:52.000And so, just like you've said over and over again, the danger here is that the market is captured.
00:27:00.000This is a corporate system that subscribes to this ESG, DEI, CRT kind of ideology, and little by slowly over time, just like they've done with our universities, will use their money, their influence, to push those schools in that direction without parents having the oversight that they might have in a public school situation.
00:27:24.000And I just want to be very clear about this.
00:29:21.000It comes full circle with respect to certain sacred cows you can't touch.
00:29:24.000It's climate cult on the other side or affirmative action.
00:29:28.000But there are certain untouchables on our side too actually.
00:29:33.000This has become one of them, actually.
00:29:35.000And one of the major problems with it is if you explore the roots of ESA specifically.
00:29:44.000You can trace it back in its current inception to two Marxist Berkeley professors at UC Berkeley, law professors, who designed this system in order to, quote, create equity.
00:30:01.000And so it's kind of a redistribution of wealth.
00:30:04.000And that's what makes me nervous about it, too, is that you're taking, say, if you have a mom, and this is actually a real story, you have a mom that has 12 kids.
00:30:15.000I think it's $9,000 per kid, that's $96,000 a year that's going to that family.
00:30:22.000And that money is far beyond what they pay in taxes.
00:30:26.000And I understand wanting to help them.
00:30:30.000That is a massive redistribution of wealth from people who don't even have kids at all, right?
00:30:35.000And then they're taking that and the government's saying, yeah, but you can spend the money here and not here, you know, and mandating where it can be spent.
00:31:05.000But now we have this kind of antithesis of a reaction with a predetermined solution which is, hey, here's this 50-year-old program, school choice ESA specifically, that will fix your problem for you without you having to do any hard work.
00:31:39.000Order of operations is important here.
00:31:41.000And I've said this over and over and over again is that if you want ESAs, if you want school choice, there has to be – first of all, you have to remove the strings of the government first, which is the public – part of the public-private partnership.
00:31:56.000You have to remove those and so dismantle – What are the strings that exist today?
00:32:01.000Well, there's another program called ESSA, which is Every Student Succeeds Act, which is kind of this blanket.
00:32:09.000It's the largest thing the Department of Education puts out.
00:32:11.000And it's so generally defined in what it can give money for.
00:32:18.000That it has no real benchmarks for what it's actually supposed to do.
00:32:23.000So schools just take that money and, you know, the data they provide to prove whatever they're doing is basically, oh, look, we've done social-emotional learning.
00:32:31.000We're doing behavioral health initiatives to help students.
00:32:36.000It very rarely seems to be education-focused in terms of math, reading, science, all of these aspects of real education and more focused towards a You know, conditioning of kids to act a certain way, whether it's politically or, you know, in public.
00:32:55.000And so there's ESSA. So ESSA, this educational...
00:33:01.000Yeah, it's Every Student Succeeds Act.
00:33:12.000There are, I think, 74 different grants that you can get through ESSA. And if you look, one of the main criticisms of the Department of Education is that it doesn't monitor what the money does.
00:33:24.000The data that it gets, first of all, you're getting tons of data, and although they have way too many employees already, they don't seem to be able to parse it out.
00:33:35.000Let's send all this money into the schools that we know have this kind of ideological bent, and this was all done through the Obama administration, you know, Race to the Top, all of those things, Common Core, that kind of push, and let them create these bastions of basically government parenting of the child.
00:34:00.000So it has public health components to it.
00:34:04.000It has some educational outcomes attached to it.
00:34:08.000But basically what it is is a giant government check that mandates, in order to get the government check, you have to basically climb through a bunch of DEI hoops to get there.
00:34:19.000Because one of Obama's main pushes, and now Biden's, is the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:34:27.000What that includes, as I'm sure you've talked about with others, is gender ideology and what we had talked about at the beginning when it comes to Just the political bend towards things.
00:34:42.000And then there's Title I. Title I is a grant program for underprivileged kids that gives schools money to help those underprivileged kids achieve better outcomes.
00:34:57.000But the Department of Education doesn't seem to be able to map whether those outcomes are actually happening or not.
00:35:03.000And so you get this kind of endless pursuit of educational equity.
00:35:08.000That's never designed to be achieved, but always designed to soak up money.
00:35:12.000And that's what's built the large managerial class in public schools.
00:35:16.000You know, you make an interesting contrarian point, which is simply using that money, but decentralizing it, but with still the sum of the same government strings attached.
00:35:27.000And again, what are those strings, would you say?
00:35:30.000But it's not going to solve the problem.
00:36:19.000So if you have a private school, this is a private entity.
00:36:23.000It's going to be really difficult legally to say, oh, the private school can't partner with this private entity.
00:36:30.000But what you see, one interesting fact, is all of these union workers for the public schools, the public school unions, shifting over and starting to work for NAIS. Oh, interesting.
00:37:40.000Well, because with that stamp of approval...
00:37:43.000Parents look at the nice, shiny stamp and say, oh, this school's more likely to get my kid into Harvard.
00:37:49.000And here becomes the other part, is that Harvard is pushing wokeness, just like we saw at Stanford, for example.
00:37:54.000They're pushing this ideology so much that NAIS adopts it because that's how they make their money.
00:38:00.000It's saying, if your school's NAIS certified, you're more likely to get the kids that go to your school into Harvard, into Stanford, into these colleges.
00:38:10.000Is there any evidence that NAIS... That certification or NAIS itself does impose the so-called woke agenda within the schools that it certifies.
00:38:29.000When you go through an accreditation process, it's not something you just get and then keep, right?
00:38:35.000So if you get approved and you're accepted by NIS, you usually have a year probationary period.
00:38:41.000They come in and go through every single aspect of your school, whether it's fine arts, it's math, it's science, it's social studies, it's social programs, it's equity, diversity, inclusion.
00:38:52.000And in order to maintain that accreditation, you have to abide by their accreditation standards.
00:39:00.000It's kind of a teacher's union on steroids because they don't just influence the specific teachers in a school like the way a union does.
00:39:12.000They influence the actual administration of that school, right?
00:39:18.000Yeah, it's almost less transparent, right?
00:39:23.000Oh, it's way less transparent because parents have no FOIA ability.
00:39:27.000They have no ability to go in and say, what are you teaching?
00:39:30.000Is it true that in many of these educational savings accounts, so ESAs or let's say ESSA provided grants in what we call school choice, That there's a limit to say that you can only use it for an NAIS accredited school.
00:40:45.000NIAS already provides accreditation for over 80% of the schools through its subsidiaries.
00:40:53.000And so the market, again, is pushed towards accepting that kind of accreditation, and they're not the only ones.
00:41:00.000But I've yet to see, I think there's one or two accreditation bodies that don't explicitly push kind of the woke agenda or the sustainable development goal agenda.
00:41:43.000They brought in this person who was the first to bring in DEI. Almost immediately, it's like they turned on the faucets for anonymous donors.
00:41:53.000$80 million here, $100 million here coming from anonymous donors.
00:41:57.000And then you see the university really start pushing this woke agenda or this woke capitalist agenda, the stakeholder capitalism agenda, throughout the university with a design to spread.
00:42:10.000Not only is the university system getting almost a billion dollars of state funding, but it's getting an untold amount of dollars from private companies and private organizations that don't hold Oklahoma values.
00:42:25.000It's a merger of state and corporate power and a state and corporate influence that I think is really not on a Republican radar right now.
00:42:36.000If I can boil it down to, order of operations is important.
00:42:40.000School choice as a concept is good because if we have a free market and parents aren't incentivized by who's got the coffee shop, who's got the doctor's office, who's got the good sports program, and more by, okay, are they actually being taught what they're supposed to be taught?
00:43:02.000But if we don't eliminate some of these strings first, it's a trap.
00:43:06.000Because if – It actually is the perfect way to decentralize and believe that you solved the problem while in fact creating 90% of the same problem but without any accountability or transparency.
00:43:38.000You hear there's videos of Klaus Schwab talking about this and the reason for that is to remove the government oversight while still getting the government money.
00:43:59.000And what school choice or a private school that receives public money is able to do is if they sign a contract with Google and they get Chrome pads.
00:44:09.000Google's going to include in that contract the ability to mine the data from the students that use their technology for everything.
00:45:03.000ARPA. ARPA. Which was the COVID relief money.
00:45:08.000So, for example, Oklahoma got $1.7 billion in ARPA money that they used on everything from behavioral health industrial complex to, you know, water tables and things like that.
00:45:19.000But what schools got out of that was the longer they extended it, Right?
00:45:24.000The more they were able to justify their need for federal government money—now here's the part that most people don't understand or don't know about—is that ARPA doesn't come all at once.
00:46:05.000And this isn't both the public and private schools.
00:46:09.000But you're saying that's the data collection on the public side, but it can be a model for what that looks like for Google entering a funding arrangement.
00:46:16.000Yeah, well, in Google, they wouldn't even need paper.
00:46:17.000They wouldn't even – I mean, if they're using those, it actually becomes easier in a private institution because there's not a duty to transparency.
00:46:30.000One of two views just to draw parsing a distinction between it and don't – I know you're not, but don't be afraid to sort of be unapologetic about which side of this you fall on.
00:46:39.000Are you making the claim, A, that is – which I'll put the weaker form claim versus the stronger form claim of this.
00:46:47.000Weaker form claim is that – This is not a panacea.
00:46:55.000There's a risk that people will think it's a panacea because there are other less transparent forces at work from corporate influence to accreditation that can be the vehicles of advancing the same ideology especially when it's not fully funded from a public perspective anyway that allow people to fill the void with strings attached to money with less accountability that we should be And sanguine,
00:47:22.000you know, about – or we should be, you know, cautious about school choice being the end-all, be-all solution just because it's a Republican talking point to believing that we're going to end wokeism.
00:47:32.000That's claim A versus claim B, which is that actually – and further, all things considered because at least in public schools, you have certain measures of accountability like electing school board members, like FOIA, Freedom of Information Act requests,
00:47:48.000etc., That we might actually be better served just reforming public schools rather than decentralizing the problem against the backdrop of a culture that has other tributaries through which to work, that that might actually even be the better system.
00:48:28.000So the use of government money… And when you have a public-private partner, there is no school choice in a public-private partnership.
00:48:34.000Because eventually what you're going to get is target school, Walmart school.
00:48:39.000You know, it's all going to become a carbon copy of the same thing, which will actually limit choice over time.
00:48:45.000Government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people.
00:48:50.000What the school choice lobby does that I think is very disingenuous is uses this moniker of government as a catch-all for evil when actually our system of government is built on federalism, right, with the primacy of local and state control over a federal control, right, at least when it comes to with the primacy of local and state control over a federal control, right, at least It's actually in the Constitution, I believe.
00:49:12.000It's Article 10, where education is a mandate powered to the states and local governments.
00:49:19.000Well, that's why I'm right on board with getting rid of the Department of Education.
00:49:24.000It's failed at every metric it's ever been designed to push.
00:50:25.000And so they had an investment in that community and in making sure that school was good, right?
00:50:30.000What poisoned that area was the influx of government money making people live off the government, not work.
00:50:37.000So it just kind of – but they had a vested interest in making that school better.
00:50:45.000So to answer your question about the two dichotomies, the two choices here, I believe that – If we embrace the thought that local control of government, because conservatives have been off the radar when it comes to their local school boards.
00:51:00.000You had the first mass exodus of conservatives from schools back when they stopped prayer in schools.
00:51:09.000And that slowly, over time, through my parents' generation, they took us out of schools because they didn't like some of the things that were being taught.
00:51:16.000Well, they removed their influence from the public school.
00:51:20.000And we abandoned that ground to the Democrats, to the woke industrial complex.
00:51:26.000And only recently, in the past four years, in the past three years, have parents actually started to be involved again and started to take back their institution.
00:51:34.000It reminds me of a parallel in the corporate and capital market world that was part of the premise for Strive, which I found.
00:51:42.000Because there's two ways to deal – As an investor with the woke capitalism problem, say the Disney problem or the Chevron problem or whatever, one is to say I'm going to divest from those companies that are woke.
00:51:56.000Well, the problem is those companies still continue to exist and somebody else fills the void and buys the shares from you at a lower price.
00:52:05.000Versus another, which is to say that you actually get a voice and a vote as a shareholder.
00:52:10.000So you're invested in – I mean the BlackRock problem with Exxon and Chevron is not that they're divesting from Exxon and Chevron.
00:52:17.000It's that they're invested in Exxon and Chevron.
00:52:19.000And they're changing the essence of what those companies actually do, which is why the right answer – an important part of the right answer has to be to bring a countervailing shareholder voice to the table so those boardrooms aren't captured.
00:52:30.000It's kind of a similar analogy here where if you just pull out of the system and then go to these private schools, those private schools are equally susceptible to non-transparent capture.
00:53:14.000She refused the money from the federal government for the district.
00:53:17.000She said, I'm not going to take your money because it comes with your strings and actually took control of that school district and pushed it in the right direction while everyone else was going the wrong direction.
00:53:29.000And so what concerns me, and so that is an example of what a First of all, the democratic process can give you because they elected her to do it and the rest of the board to do it.
00:53:41.000And it was that when she took over, she had the strength and courage to say, we don't need your $8 million.
00:53:52.000And now she's fighting with the school choice lobby because she's saying, wait a minute, we did it.
00:53:58.000Why do we need to take money out of the general pot to throw to a private school when your charter schools here are not doing as well as your public schools are?
00:54:09.000You know, and so it's, I think it's a complicated solution.
00:54:13.000I'm always open to being moved on it, but my main issue is that, like you have said over and over again, we have to actually talk about these ideas.
00:54:23.000And every time I bring this up, you know, I've had dialogue with Corey DeAngelis or Chris Rufo or people I like and respect, right, for the work that they've done.
00:54:31.000It's a full stop on a conversation when this is, you cannot quit- Trevor Burrus: Third rail on school choice.
00:54:37.000Well, you can question it if you are questioning it with the union talking points.
00:54:41.000You know, it's like if you're going to use the democratic talking points, they're ready for that all day.
00:54:46.000But as a conservative, as Unwokeable, which is my podcast, right?
00:54:50.000If I'm coming saying, well, there are woke issues here.
00:55:14.000Grateful for people like you that are willing to question any orthodoxy outside of the partisan political framework because we're not in this as partisans.
00:55:23.000Who could – I could care less for a Republican versus Democrat distinction.
00:55:27.000You care about the actual cultural challenges we face and to address them.
00:55:31.000I guess the last thought – we could go on forever, but the last thought I had for you was there's a whole range of arguments in favor of school choice that have nothing to do with the – Woke issues, right?
00:55:46.000Even the cultural issues that you and I have been talking about here relating to just improved scholastic achievement based on competition driving educational results.
00:55:57.000What's your perspective on that dimension?
00:56:00.000And do you think that the argument becomes a lot stronger then or do you not have views on this?
00:56:09.000And I go, how much of that is in play there?
00:56:12.000Because, and again, you're always going to have your Harvard's, you're going to have your Stanford's, and it goes down.
00:56:19.000But it's not really driven the academic performance to a greater extent in those universities.
00:56:25.000Actually, we were seeing kind of an influx of, hey, let us get more dollars because the government is funding it, whether it's through Pell Grants or through student loans, right?
00:56:34.000And so- I'm talking about, let's say, K through 12.
00:56:38.000Do you think that the achievement is going to just – raw achievement of our students is going to be higher in a paradigm with – I mean because I think that's actually the more powerful argument than public schools that are captured, especially for public schools to get kids out of there.
00:56:50.000I think if you pay – That I'm not – no one's going to be canceling me from the spectrum of conservative debate as part of what this presidential campaign is all about.
00:57:07.000And I'm against the invocation of silver bullets that we celebrate that somehow just because we did school choice, that's going to be a panacea to the problem of wokeness in education.
00:57:16.000You've made a persuasive case that it probably won't be.
00:57:19.000And in fact, there's downside risks that if we think it is, we'll ignore making that problem even worse.
00:57:28.000It seems to me that we're still not relating to sort of culture and woke issues, but as it relates to scholastic achievement, gonna put ourselves in a better position.
00:57:41.000It seems to me, but I'm asking you in closing to push back on this, that we would at least do better by injecting competition into public schools that are failing our kids by actually giving parents of those kids the ability to move out of them to schools that should be set up to compete on axes of scholastic achievement.
00:57:59.000Well, and I think I'm generally for parents, if you've got a bad school district here, being able to move them to a better school district here, right?
00:58:08.000Especially if the student has earned a spot.
00:58:48.000Right now, it's the Department of Education.
00:58:50.000It's the state departments of ed who are in line with the Department of Education.
00:58:55.000And if they're measuring the outcomes, it can be, well, you know, you spout off the right stuff about politics, so you're a good student or not.
00:59:03.000And so if we define what—if we correctly define what competition is— And where the competition should be, not just institution to institution, but maybe teacher to teacher, right?
00:59:16.000Or just curriculum to curriculum, or administrator to administrator, public school to public school, then I think, yes, competition breeds success.
00:59:26.000But if that market gets captured by whether it's a government entity saying this is what success is or a corporate entity doing the exact same thing with the same aligned viewpoints, that's where you get into trouble.
01:00:11.000This is why I love your voice in the discourse, man, is you're not going to be captive to anybody's orthodoxy, even if it comes from the member of which you're supposedly a tribe.
01:00:26.000It's hard at different times, but I think we're supposed to be the party of ideas.
01:00:31.000We're supposed to be a party of open debate, free speech, and talking this stuff out.
01:00:35.000And I think that's why your campaign and your candidacy is so important.
01:00:40.000And why I want to see you in that office is because I can see that your viewpoint of the way that our government was designed to run is predicated on our ability to speak out against the things that people say we can't question.
01:00:54.000No matter from which side or where it's coming.