Boy Troubles

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The Bulwark’s weekly roundtable this discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charron syndicated columnist and policy editor to bulk work. I am joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institute, and The Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of The Niscannon Center and Damon Linker who writes the webstock newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Brooking institution’s senior fellow Richard Reeves.

We have a lot to get to this week with news about China, news about antisemitism, Kanye, Trump, etcetera. But I’d like to begin with a discussion of Richard’s new book. It is called of boys and men I welcome this book because it addresses a matter that is, I think, too often neglected. It’s something that I address somewhat in my twenty eighteen book, sex matters. He has some innovative ideas.

So thank you, Richard, for being here. First, let’s begin with laying out the problem, you you talk about the fact that when title nine was first passed it was explicitly to close a gender gap in higher education that favored males. But a lot has changed since then. Right?

Yeah. In fact, it’s gone the other way. So in nineteen seventy two, when title nine was passed, there was about a thirteen percentage point advantage for men, over women getting a four year college degree. Today, it’s about fifteen percentage points the other way around. Advanches for women, over men.

And so on that measure and on most other measures in terms of higher education, there’s a big agenda gap today than there was when title nine was passed it’s just the other way around. And I think it’s worth noting that nobody really predicted that. So in the seventies and to some extent, into the eighties when there was a lot of political capital and effort correctly going into improving educational outcomes for women and girls and especially on college campuses nobody predicted that the lines would just keep going. And so to some extent, we’re in this world that no one expected, no one planned for, and doesn’t really have the intellectual equipment for in some way. Even talking about gender inequality running the other way is difficult for people.

But I think, obviously, the numbers speak for themselves but are also seeing a growing number of title nine complaints being brought against US ecologists and universities on behalf of men. In fact, just a couple of days before recording this. The Department for Education, Office of Civil Rights, has taken a complaint against Stanford on the grounds that many of its women only programs to discriminate against men. And so it’s it’s gonna be interesting to see how some of those how some of those title nine cases play out now that they’re being used the other way around.

You point out that fifty seven percent of bachelor’s degrees now go to women as do three out of five master’s degrees and the majority of doctorates But don’t you think Richard, you know, the awareness of of this gender imbalance being in favor of women has not really dawned on most people. If you talk about gender inequality today, most people assume you mean that women have to be given more support and encouragement to come into equality with men. Right?

Right. If you say gender equality or you say gender policy, I mean, the White House has a gender policy council, but it exclusively deals with issues facing women and girls. And so those terms are still seen as synonymous. And of course, That was that’s made a lot of sense until very recent history in advanced economies and still makes sense in most of the world today. That is where most of the gender gaps do lie.

In ways of disfavor women and girls, but that’s just not true in growing number of areas in advanced economies, including the US, whereas really boys and men that are at a disadvantage. I think there is growing awareness, but it’s taking a little while. And I think that one of the reasons why it’s still perhaps not talked about as much, obviously, there’s political sensitivities here. But there isn’t an institutional architecture to actually promote these ideas, to scrape this kind of data. I’ll give you one example is that I was looking through the a report from the department for education on college enrollment.

And I saw that college enrollment rate for men had dropped seven times as much as for women in twenty twenty when the pandemic hit. So there’s seven fold difference. Mhmm. And it was in Appendix three, pay table two, whatever. And I I literally carried it around bookings and showing it to all the education people I knew saying, did you know this?

And not a single one of them knew, And those are literally the people who if anyone was gonna know, they were gonna know. But on the other hand, there was nobody whose job it was to draw that number to anyone’s attention where, of course, there are lots of organized and so do a great job of drawing gender and equalities to our attention when they’re the other way around. So there’s just an asymmetry and institutional capacity here too. Right.

Okay. Now you get into some of what you think is causing this gender imbalance, which is by the way not confined to the United States’s other advanced countries, including the country of your birth, are seeing the same kinds of patterns. So talk a little bit about what you think is contributing to this sort of

male recession as you call it. The answer to that question will slightly depend on or on which bit of the story we’re talking about, whether it’s education or employment or family life, although, of course, they’re obviously related, but in education, you quite rightly point out that actually in every OECD country now, there are more young women with a college degree than than men. And in some countries, and especially the most gender equal ones by most measures, the gap is greatest. So in Scandinavia and all all of the Nordic countries, there’s a huge gender gap. And so that leads me to think that this is more structural in nature than, you know, it’s not a quirk of the US education system or the Finnish education system.

In fact, The Finnish education system seems to produce actually pretty average results across OECD for boys is the Finnish girls who’re doing well. The Finland has huge gender gap. That’s a k twelve as well

as well

as post secondary. Why is that? Well, I actually think we have to face the fact that in many ways, the education system is more female friendly than male friendly. And those include the fact that boys develop a little bit later than girls in terms of some key skills. Including non cognitive skills and especially in adolescence, which I think is one of the reasons why you see such a huge gap in GPA, high school GPA.

Between boys and girls, but not a very big difference in standardized test scores. So it’s really just these non Wait.

Explain that. Explain that. Is that because boys have a harder time controlling their behavior in class terms? Yeah.

Well, yeah, adolescence is a period where the psychologist put it. We’re all caught between impulse control and sensation seeking. Sensation seeking is the gas and impulse control is the brake. And adolescence has appeared to wear a bit too much gas and not quite enough brake. Mhmm.

But that’s much more true of boys than girls. And most importantly, girls develop the ability to have future orientation, control impulses, organize themselves earlier than boys do, largely because they hit puberty earlier. So puberty triggers development of the prefrontal cortex, which is the bit of your brain that has you turn your chemistry homework in, to put it very vernacular to remembers you have chemistry.

Mhmm. Can I tell you a very brief personal story? Sure. I I’m the mother of three boys. I know you’re the father of three boys.

When my middle son who was typically forgetful about his schoolwork, he had a teacher who would routinely tell the girlfriends of the boys in his classes. Can you please tell so and so that the assignment is due on Thursday?

Yeah. Well, if you ever needed evidence that teachers know this stuff, and and so actually one of my one of my proposals is to start boys and school a year later than girls so that they’re they’re chronologically a year older, which means developmentally, they’ll be a bit closer And it’s interesting, you know, in the policy won’t circle, there’s a debate about that. Obviously, there are costs and benefits and what’s the evaluation. And and clearly, it would need to be evaluated carefully. But but it’s interesting.

It’s also one of those policy ideas that when you go to every single teacher and school principal, I’ve said that to, it was gone. Of course, like, well done. And so there’s this interesting disconnect between this sort of policy discourse with our regression tables and and quite rightly looking for your evaluation, every teacher goes, yes, please. Because they know that these gaps that you just highlighted in that story are real. And so if you have an education system that rewards those sorts of skills, particularly the critical ages, like the ages fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.

Those are really important years in the education system. Really critical. And they turn out to be the years when you see the biggest gaps in the development of those particular skills. And so weirdly, it took the women’s movement to take some of the ceilings off women’s educational opportunities and girls education opportunities to expose the way in which neurologically, the education system is somewhat biased. In favor of girls and against boys.

And in fact, girls were doing better than boys in GPA not as long ago as the nineteen sixties — Mhmm. — in high school. Mhmm. — but it didn’t make any sense that you couldn’t argue those good incentives. So that that suggests there’s something structural.

And the other two things I’ll just mention in almost in passing, but I think are at least as important are the need for more male teachers. The teaching profession is becoming steadily more female in its composition. Now seventy six percent female. And there is some evidence that male teachers help boys, especially in subjects like English, where they’re struggling, and which by the way, they men at least likely to teach. And I would say a significant underinvestment in vocational forms of of learning, applied forms of learning, technical high schools, apprenticeships etcetera, which everything else equal seem to seem to be much more beneficial to boys than girls and men than women, which I now see as a feature rather than a bug and actually an unintended consequence of the underinvestment in that kind of learning in the US has been too significantly disfavor of boys and men.

You have so many suggestions in

the book, lots of wisdom here about other potential policy interventions that might be appropriate. So I highly recommend people buy and read the book, boys and men. So I want to just follow-up on one thing that you mentioned in the book, but I want to hear a little bit more about. And that is you you say that we really need a big push to have men teach even at the very young, you know, ages like even preschoolers. Should have male teachers and men should be involved in that.

And then you mentioned that one of the obstacles Is parents discomfort with the idea of men being in charge of toddlers because they’re afraid of abuse? You mentioned it, but you didn’t give a solution. So I wanna hear more on that from you. Well, I

think the solution is to increase the proportion of men in those professions like earlier education such that they are not an abnormality. Once they become much more normal, then I think it’ll be less troubling for parents. I think when it’s such a small number, then it’s actually just it’s weird for parents to go, wait, what? You’re gonna have a a guy look after my three year old or four year old. And in fact, you know, my my own son has done some earlier education and and still does some of it.

And has faced some of that some of that stigma and some of that discrimination. But I think when it’s only three percent, between two and three percent of kindergarten teachers are male — Mhmm. — then inevitably they’re a real oddity. And you may also get some selection effects as to kind of who wants to go into those professions when you are going to face such such huge stigma And so I do think it’s probably just a numbers game here in the same way that when you, you know, if you go back far enough, you’ll find times when there are almost no women in certain professions such as medicine. Or engineering.

They were treated as like what’s very odd. Right? Like, what’s wrong with you? There’s something defect slightly defective about you to want to be in such a small minority. And so I do think we just need to get more in, and that’s gonna require all kinds of things.

But but whereas we’ve seen a huge effort to get more women into male dominated which I applaud and which have been quite successful. There’s been nothing on the other side. Nothing really in terms of getting more men into areas like teaching, nursing in the early years. In fact, As a share of the profession, there are twice as many women flying US military planes — Yeah.

— as

there are men teaching kindergarten. And I’m not against women flying fighter jets. Please don’t misunderstand me. I want in fact, I just want the best person at shooting down the enemy to flying our fighter jets. I don’t care what.

Gender or color or orientation there. I just want to be really good at shooting things down. But interestingly, that’s partly we’re redesigning aircraft, cockpits, and ejector seats. To become more inclusive of women and their physiques, which is great because they were typically designed for men. That’s great.

We need equivalent efforts to get more men into those other professions which are female dominated. Got hit

for fifty

percent. I’m not arguing that, but I do think that any profession where you’re at two percent, you have to think there’s some strong social norms affecting that number. Right. And

there have to be just as when women were say underrepresented in engineering fields. Maybe the majority of women don’t want to be engineers, but some percentage do. So similarly with men, maybe the majority don’t want to be kindergarten teachers, but some larger percentage than two percent must want to. Right?

I mean,

I can’t remember who said this. Something along the lines of many of our problems in society stem from the inability of people to imagine an overlapping distribution. And is it a I so whoever said it, that is so true because, like, all the almost everything you talk about in this area, we’re talking about overlapping distributions. The question is how much do they overlap? Much does it matter?

And you don’t want it to affect how individuals are treated. But you should also recognize that if there are differences on average between two populations, that is going to be reflected in occupational segregation, etcetera. It’s just not gonna be at the level of three percent. Right. It might be at twenty percent.

It might be at thirty percent or or whatever it’s gonna be. And in fact, interestingly, in the most gender egalitarian countries, there are somewhat fewer women in STEM than in other countries. And so that might suggest that there’s a kind of level of equality to get to where actually the occupational structure settles to some extent aligning with real preference And that’s the point I think where you should be okay with differences. You don’t have to say everything must be fifty fifty unless evidence that we’re still unequal. I don’t think that’s realistic.

But also, I think as you just suggested, if you’re a two percent I mean, look, I’ve just got back from the U. K. And a third of British MPs are now women. And when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, it was five percent. And I can remember back in the eighties people saying, well, of course, you know, we’re not gonna have so many women in parliament.

It’s not really their thing. Women aren’t into that kind of thing. Mhmm. Well, okay. Well, we’ve now got a third.

Yeah. So that suggests that five percent is not a time to be saying that. Now it might We might not get to fifty percent, but a third is a lot more than five percent. So I’m skeptical of overweighting difference to justify very big inequality. Alright.

I cannot let you go without pursuing the one area where I was critical of your book, and that is, you know, because you do make a very important pitch about the importance of fathers, but you were less I would say enthusiastic than I am about the importance of encouraging marriage. And so I wonder if you could address that you may have read review that I wrote of your book. I

did. Thank you for that review. That was a very, very good review, and I recommend

it

to everybody listening. Well,

thank you very much. I’m glad. But at the end, I did pursue this one area of disagreement where I think, you know, you are ready to say we need to reconfigure our ideas about how old boys should be when they start school and what kinds of fields they should go into and many other aspects of our social lives and cultural approaches, but you seemed a little less willing to say that marriage is an important social institution that needs to be supported and encouraged. So I

think this is a genuine and and really fruitful disagreement. And I I really thank you for the way you framed it in in your review. My assessment is that the old glue of marriage was to a nontrivial extent the economic dependency of women on men or the division the economic division of labor to put it less, nominally. That will just gone. There are forty percent of women earned more than the average man, forty percent of bread women, so women, like, they’re doing just a transformation in the economic relationship between men and women.

And that was the point. I mean, Gloria Steinham said, the

goal here is

to make marriage a choice, not a necessity. So if you enter a world where marriage has become very voluntary, at least from an economic point of view. And that was the central goal of the postal women’s movement largely achieved. Then I think we’re in a different world in terms of the role of the institution. And I don’t think that it’s the most effective way to bind men to children.

It used to be it used to be very effective at doing that because strong division of labor. Everyone knew their role. It was quite stable. It worked pretty well for children. It was there’s a lot to be said for the traditional family unit.

Except for its incredible unfairness and inequality towards women. The the world we’re in now, I think we go for fatherhood. I think that trying to elevate the role of responsible and engaged fatherhood is the way to go. And that that’s a gap in our discourse right now because the left here, I’ll be unfair to both sides, but I just saw a bookings event today about single parents, and it was it was tough for anyone to admit the father’s mattered. As fathers as opposed to, you know, as as opposed to financial contributors.

So there’s a there’s a skepticism on the left of even admitting that fathers have a distinct an important role to play. But I would say on the right, because of the emphasis on marriage, what that means in a world where forty percent of kids are born outside marriage, most kids to non college educated parents are born outside marriage. The US has the highest single parenthood rate of of all the advanced economies that just descriptively, the focus on marriage, just lands on deaf ears in many cases. And as a matter of policy, just seems quite intractable anyway. You know, most marriage promotion policy programs haven’t been hugely effective.

I will say this though. I do think that If we can support engaged and responsible fatherhood, that will likely lead to more marriage. Because I think that’s the dynamic that’s driving marriage now. I think the reason upper middle class parents are marrying is not for the old reasons. It’s because of co parenting.

I think the glue for new marriage is co parenting. But you need both parents to feel like they’re in they’re in the parenting enterprise in order for that to work. So I think fatherhood first that could lead to more marriage, whereas a lot of my critics, I think you included mine, I would say, no, no, marriage is the only proven social institution to actually bind men into these responsibilities. And that’s been for thousands of years. So I don’t know in the end like which of our prescriptions is more utopia.

They’re both a bit utopia, but I think there’s more mileage in fatherhood than there is in marriage. Now.

Okay. Well, I appreciate that very, very thorough answer. I have more to say on this topic, but because of time constraints, Well, we have

to have another comment. In fact, this has been the most fruitful set of reactions to the book so far and is going to very strongly influence my ongoing work.

Well, that is wonderful to hear. Alright. We need to continue this conversation because there are there are aspects of this that, you know, I want to pursue, for example, just give a slight hint, which is that I think there are important differences in the way that people bond to children, that it’s with men, it’s much more dependent on the relationship they have with the mother, whereas it’s proven that women’s relationship to their children is independent of their relationship to the father. That’s just a reality of human life. In any event, as I say, this is something that we need to continue, and I would I will look forward to that.

And in the meantime, thank you for joining us, and I highly recommend the book of boys and men. Thank you so much Richard Reeves for being here. Thanks again

for having me on. I appreciate it.

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This week

has demonstrated that China’s zero COVID policy has been anything but a success, whereas it seemed in the first year of the pandemic that China had achieved this tremendous victory in keeping the number of deaths from COVID to much lower rates than the rest of the world. We now are seeing China erupt in protests across the country such as we have not seen since nineteen eighty nine. I’m going to turn to you first, Linda. It began with a fire in a town called a room key. I’m probably mispronouncing that.

As with so many other settings in China, this was one where they were under lockdown, which in China is a completely different concept from what we exaggeratedly call lockdowns in the west. Literally people were locked into their apartments and in the case of this apartment fire that killed at least ten people. We really don’t know how many the fire exits were locked because of COVID restrictions. And

therefore people couldn’t get out when the building started to burn. And yes, I think there has been a kind of different reaction we’ve seen around China. And certainly, the fire exposed it, but another sort of interesting reason that people are so angry is that they’re tuned into the World Cup and they are seeing that what they are having to live with in China is very different than the rest of the world. They’re seeing in Qatar. They’re seeing people in stadiums sitting there enjoying themselves without face masks.

Not a whole lot of concern about the raging epidemic. And I think that has made them realize that what they are dealing with in China is a kind of totalitarian reaction to the pandemic. Xizhi Ping, I think, has really made a strategic error here in the way in which he’s handled this. I mean, he’s he’s done so many things wrong. Refusing to allow imported vaccines, the MRNA vaccines that were produced an American elsewhere, which were far more effective than the ones that China itself has produced.

You know, that in and of itself has meant a higher death rate. You know, it’s easy to be sympathetic that in a country like China with so many people that you wouldn’t be talking about thousands of deaths if the variance change and we get again a much more powerful COVID strain, you could be talking about millions of death. But I think the people are fed up and you’re seeing a level of people taking to the streets and they fully understand what the rules are in terms of protests. They know they can’t say the wrong thing. So what they’re doing is holding up blank pieces of paper, saying nothing on them, but saying that nothing is also saying

everything. So New York Times columnist, Nick Christophe, relates the story about those white sheets of paper. He writes

There’s a

Soviet joke that is long circulated in China about a man who was arrested for protesting in Moscow’s red square by holding up a blank sheet paper. How can you arrest me the man objects in one version? I didn’t say anything. Everybody knows the police officer answers. What you mean to say.

And so it’s it’s interesting that they have seized on these these blank sheets of paper as this symbol. And one of the things that’s so interesting, and Damon, I’ll come to you next, is that when you read the accounts of people who are brave enough to speak to foreign journalists. They say that they weren’t sure until these protests began, that their views weren’t just their own idiosyncratic approach, but that actually they were widely shared. And they’re chanting things like we want freedom. They’re even chanting, give me liberty or give me death, which is, you know But that’s familiar.

Yeah. Sounds sounds kind of familiar. Amazing. Precisely because

China is so locked down, I’ve always feel a little bit like I don’t know what’s really going on there. Saw these stories from the last week have been heartening, but I still wish that we had more kind of synoptic coverage of the country. Tree? Like, how widespread? Is this really has there been any pushback from the regime beyond the little that we’ve heard?

It’s a little bit like, you know, there’s this this other reality on the other side of a high wall and you’re kind of up to the wall of your ear trying to, like, hear little dribs and drabs and you can hear little bits, but you don’t really know the whole picture. I mean, I would be very to get more information. And that’s the flip side of your point about how a lot of the people haven’t been trying to protest because each of them thinks they’re the only ones pissed off about the fact that they’re now living in a prison, not just the kind of metaphorical prison of living in a dictatorship. It’s a semi metaphorical prison, but, like, literally in your apartment not able to leave because of this lockdown policy. You know, it really highlights how we take for granted and free societies that we’re enmeshed in this incredibly complex civil society.

And then when you have the Internet and other forms of communicative technology that we’re we’re always hyper aware of what public opinion is and as it goes up and down and the conflicts of different people and roughly how many are in different sides of issues. Whereas in in a in a totalitarian technologically totalitarian dictatorship like this, everyone’s an atom. An a t o m, you know, an isolated creature off by him or herself. And, you know, how this plays out. It’s hard to say The other thing I don’t know is how far could this possibly go in changing things there?

I’m a little skeptical if only because she has worked so hard now over many years to purge any form of liberalizers from the government, from the party just rendered even more severe in the last couple of months, at the last conference, that you know, you have to wonder, like, are there any fishers in the ruling class? Or is there anything you can imagine where the the military, some faction of the military, some other faction of the party, could break off from the circle around him and actually take the side of the protesters. That’s what you’d need to see to have this actually be come something real, not just something that surges up and then quickly dissipates but actually something that can actually truly shake things up. And that’s what I’m eager to to be looking for from now, you know, over the the coming days, weeks, and and even potentially months given how long this has already gone on. Yeah.

Based

on what we saw from the Communist Party Conference that was just concluded a few weeks ago. It looked like the people that were elevated were all loyalists to Xi

Jinping. So Right. Exactly. And the same question in Iran too, by the

way. Right.

Like we see these images and great acts of bravery and standing up to the to the regime, but and that’s great and heartening, but you have to wonder like, where are the fishers? Where are the the potential breaks in the people in charge? Where you could imagine some of them actually taking the side of those doing this and actually lead to change. That’s what you need to be looking for, I think. Bill, This

can be seen as an object lesson in why authoritarian societies are inferior to free societies with all our faults. And we certainly made our share of mistakes in handling the pandemic. When you make a mistake in an authoritarian country like China, there are no fail safe, there are no there’s no accountability, there’s very little pushback. And so, as the rest of the world is emerging from the pandemic and has a combination of natural immunity, having gone through waves of infection and all So vaccine generated immunity, those twin sources that have allowed most of us to come out of this China with its harsh lockdown approach and its refusal to use the good Western mRNA vaccines has neither. And so they have really painted themselves into a very, very bad corner.

If they if they lift the restrictions, there are gonna be a lot of deaths. If they don’t, they’re gonna continue to encourage this kind of frustration and anger on the part of their people and damage their economy. And it is It’s a real

mess. Well, I agree, Mona. She really has painted himself into a corner And one aspect of that corner is political, having eliminated all rivals. He has no one but blamed it himself. He is being targeted now, not local or regional officials so much.

Precisely because everyone can see how much power he’s gathered into his own hands. What will be an action forcing event creating the possibility of splits in the leadership let me offer a tentative answer to that question. And that is that the Chinese Communist Party for decades now has enjoyed what scholars call performance legitimacy. And that is that although the government is not authorized by the people and in a free election might not be sustained. The ability of the party over the past three decades to create an extraordinarily high rate of economic growth in social mobility and geographical mobility.

Has created a sense of, if not, satisfaction, at least acceptance in many quarters. Now precisely because of the shutdown policy, the economy is slowing down dramatically. It was already being slowed by a crackdown on real estate speculation and lending. But now ordinary Economic activities are grinding to a halt in major cities. Small business people are going crazy.

Because they have nothing to fall back on except daily activity. They can’t live with this for very long without going out of business. The economic growth rate in China in the most recent quarter was around three percent and that’s after even slower growth in the first two quarters. And this is not a problem that can be solved without a significant change. Of course, on COVID by the leadership but it would mean eating bushels and bushels and bushels of crow, and admitting that they had made a big mistake Let me segue to the blank paper protest.

Another aspect of it is that young Chinese students are being arrested for singing the National Anthem. Why is that? You may ask, well, I actually looked at the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, and let me read just three of them to you. Stand up, those who refused to be slaves, the Chinese nation is at its greatest peril. Everyone is forced to let out one last roar.

Exactly. So what what are you already supposed to do about that? Yep. No.

You have

to hand

it to these protesters. They’re incredibly clever. That’s that’s really

just really out. And, you know, and I’m trying to figure out how the Chinese authorities will sustain a policy of arresting students for singing the national anthem. I mean, it’s I guess, it’s back to the Soviet joke We know what you mean to

be safe. Yes. Oh, gosh. Well, Alright. We will continue to watch this.

We all, of course, are very mindful of the tragic conclusion of the nineteen eighty nine pro democracy protests in China. So we watch it with great trepidation and wearing us.

Alright. Let us turn

now to the Mar a Lago Nazi dinner and the response of the Republican Party. So the former president over the Thanksgiving break chose to

invite dinner.

Yay. The entertainer formerly known as Kanye West, who Trump invited despite the fact that Ye has been on an anti Semitic tear that is really kind of off the charts, wishing what he called Deathcon. I think he might have meant Deathcon, but whatever. Death con three on the Jewish people. On Thursday, we’re recording this.

He appeared on the Alex Jones show and Damon, I’m gonna go to you first. Talking before we began recording, and you said this is the first time you you’ve ever seen Alex Jones be the voice of reason. With any

Yeah. In full wars, the location of of, you know, reason discourse but not really. I mean, like, as we’ve been recording, I’ve been following what’s continued to happen and it it it hasn’t been pretty including from Alex Jones’s side of it. It’s it’s really just an appalling display. Hard to even summarize, but it did include Kanye saying things like oh, we gotta stop saying so many bad things about Nazis.

They some good things. I like Hitler. I mean, it’s it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve never witnessed a self emolation quite like this in public life. Already, there were polls showing Kanye with like, seventy four percent disapproval ratings and, like, that’s not gonna change from this thing goodness.

And

it’s totally normal of Damon that he appeared on the program wearing a black mask. Like, completely obscured Yeah. Like,

a black scheme mask. Completely obscured. It looked like a terrorist from, like, die hard or something like and he he spent a couple of minutes mocking Benjamin Netanyahu Yahoo with a voice that sounded like Elmo from Sesame Street, which isn’t even funny if you were looking for that kind of edgy humor. It was just you just sort of sit there with Slack jawed, like wondering why is there no one in this world who will keep this guy from destroying himself with his eruptions of idiocy. Well, and a former president of the United States

thought that was a fine person to invite to

Yes. However, listen to this. As of about an hour before we taped to The very well known now tweet from the House Judiciary Committee from about a month or so ago

You know,

that says Kanye Elon Trump. It was actually from October sixth. That was finally deleted. Wow. Surely.

So

ladies and gentlemen,

we have

we have finally

Kirkman that the GOP draws the line at I like Hitler. That’s the we’ve we’ve finally reached bottom, everyone. Yeah. It’s only up from here. Yeah.

So, I

mean, I don’t know what else to say about any of this other than you know, it it’s a little bit like the old Marx adage of, like, the first time as tragedy, second as farce. Like, we’re this is the farce. This is this is Donald Trump with his his dinner guests and then, like, doing is truth social, little statement, tweety things, on truth social, like being ultra, you know, you know, Trumpian contrite, half apologizing, making it seem like it was no big deal, inviting these people to sit and dine with the former president and then the circle around Trump, everyone in a panic mode about how they didn’t keep, you know, these people from coming in to visit with Trump. But of course, Trump won’t let anyone manage him. And meanwhile, we’re, I guess, what now?

Ten days or so into the Trump twenty twenty four campaign. It’s gonna be a really long two years, everybody.

Linda Michel Goldberg had a column about the modern anti Semitism, and and she made this point. She said, when she was a kid or younger, anti semites were on the fringe, and they were people. They’re, of course, they were out there, but they were not powerful. They were not mainstream. And now we have a former president in the United States, no less, but also, you know, other sort of big figures like Kanye who’s an important cultural figure, like Elon Musk who dabbles in antisemitism.

And and certainly, you know, he he tweeted out the Pepe, the frog image, not not one of the most anti Semitic ones that are out there, but he’s literate enough on the on these means of Twitter to understand that Pepe the frog is associated with the alt right and with antisemitism. Dave Chappell, you know, choosing this moment to talk how many Jews there are in Hollywood and make that, you know, his Saturday Night Live, Skit, Kyrie Irving, a famous basketball player engaging in kind of vial anti semitic conspiracies. So I wouldn’t think about her statement that it is it’s different now because of all of these powerful figures who are who are spouting this kind of poison. And, Gail, I think she’s awfully young because she seems not to

have noticed father Kofflin who was a very powerful figure in American who was a raving anti semite. Henry Ford who was a powerful figure and an anti semite. We we have had anti semites in powerful positions before. And anti Semitism, I think, was not that unfamiliar to the establishment. I mean, I think that you know, anti Semitism was much more prevalent among the upper class than it would be found today.

So I don’t know that it is worse, you know, in the sense that it’s been with us at all time. I think what has changed is that we’ve come to recognize and be willing to speak out about anti Semitism. And so someone like a Trump who ignores the toxicity of anti Semitism. And, you know, you you sort of wonder, I mean, this is a man who is Jewish grandchildren whose daughter is a convert to Judaism of senate laws, obviously, Jewish. And yet a lot was made of Nick Fuentes’ presence there as if that was the real problem.

But the fact is, Kanye West was invited. Kanye West has had a load of trouble with his anti Semitic remarks and behavior. And Trump Shirley knew that, and yet he was willing to have him come and and dine at Mar a Lago. And Nick Fuentes he brought along because apparently Nick Fuentes is involved in Kanye West’s own presidential bid. In fact, the only word of condemnation we saw out of Donald Trump initially was that he thought it was a really bad idea for Kanye West to run for president, and Kanye actually had the temerity to suggest that Trump joined the Kanye.

The YA team has the vice presidential. Choice on that team. So look, it is worrisome. I guess I would only quibble with throwing Dave Chappell into this group because I think he is always edgy with his comedy. I listened to the whole routine.

I didn’t think it was anti Semitic. What he does and the way in which he takes aim and sort of takes the point beyond what others are willing to do in a lot of sensitive areas. Yeah. He did that by saying we shouldn’t notice, you know, how many Jews there are in Hollywood, etcetera. I don’t think it was motivated in any way by anti Semitism, so that would be my only quibble.

Bill, there

it is a s astounding that the Republican Party is having so much trouble with this. They lost their spines so long ago on all Trump related matters, that only now that he is losing politically are some of them finding the courage to say things about his complete moral unfitness. By the way, I would leave Mitt Romney as put him in a special category because he always does say the right thing. And for example, about this, he said there is no bottom to the degree to which he’s willing to degrade himself. And the country for that matter, having dinner with those people was just susting.

He said, I voted to remove Trump from office twice and so on. So that’s great. He also say, I don’t think he should be president of the United States. I don’t think he should be the nominee of our party and I certainly don’t want him hanging over our party like a gargoyle. I thought that was well phrased.

On the other hand, Mitch McConnell didn’t phrase it in terms of morality. He made a statement that was kind of like a handicapper. He said anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view in my judgment are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States. Really, is that the best you can do, Mitch McConnell? That’s your analysis of the situation?

I don’t know, Bill. What

do you

have to

say about all this? The modern Republican Party has has forced me to define gratitude down, and I am now grateful for very small favor. I do think that the reaction of leading figures in the Republican Party has been observably better than at previous times in the past. And I think that’s important whatever is motivating it. But if in politics, I demanded that people not only do the right thing, but do it for the right reason.

I wouldn’t find it very easy to build alliances. So I think that the better part of wisdom is to praise people who are finding it within themselves now to indicate some discomfort and doubts. However, these doubts are phrased. And to encourage more people within the Republican Party to overcome their fear I say this for the following reason that connects up with the antisemitism discussion. I seem to be in a phase now where I’m quoting one of my favorite plays, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar a lot.

And the quote that I wanna focus on today is a well known one that reads the evil that men do lives after them. And the good

is often turd with their bones. Been turd with

their bones. Right. Now, you know, setting aside the question of what good Donald Trump did. The evil that he did is likely to have a persistent presence in America. Politics.

And one of the worst things in my judgment that he has done is to make the unsailable, sayable. You know, to break down the limits on the expression of detestable views. And some people have taken the views that that it’s well, it’s better to have these things out in daylight. To which I reply, there is a real advantage to repressing these views, and that is that their public statement does not encourage other people to adopt them or to believe that it is appropriate to say them. I think these sorts of limits, whatever the internal condition of men souls are really important.

And by destroying these limits, Trump has let a number of very evil genies out of a number of bottles and getting them back into those bottles is not going to be easy. Yep. Well said, I am worried that this current wave of antisemitism, which regrettably is not confined to one portion of political spectrum could turn into something pretty ugly. Now,

obviously,

as listeners may know or may have guessed, I I speak as an aging Jew who grew up in a country assuming that in the United States. Anyway, these phenomena were part of the past disappearing in the rearview mirror and not to be seen again through the windshield. And I’m really beginning to wonder whether that’s true. Just one other thing. My wife and I were reading the newspapers together as we always do every morning.

And this morning, you know, I took note of the fact you know, that justifying his dinner with Yay. Donald Trump said, Well, he’s always said such nice things about me. Right? And I commented to my wife, boy, that’s a really simple psychology and she corrected me immediately. She said, no.

It’s infantile psychology. Yep. It’s pure

solipsism. He has no external guide about good or evil. It’s just what have you said about me. Honestly, he could have had dinner with Hitler. If Hitler had said, you’re brilliant, he would have said, I have no problem with the guy.

I don’t know what else he might be doing. Right? That’s that’s his psychology and it’s it’s he’s a very disordered human being. And I

just want

to put a an exclamation point on your point bill about the importance of taboos. Every society has taboos Some are healthy, some are not the ones against prejudice and hatred toward minorities. Those are excellent taboos, and we overturn them at our peril.

With that, let us now

turn to our final segment, our highlight or low light of the week, and I’m gonna start this week with the mini mini mini mode, Damon Linker. Okay. Well, this

week, I wanna point to a couple of opinion columns by friend of the podcast, Megan McConnell from the Washington Post. These showed up actually on back to back days, November twenty ninth and thirtieth. I read both of them. And after the second one, I thought, wow, Meghan’s on a good role here. I just appreciate pundits who diverge from kind of conventional wisdom in one direction or the other and just sort of set out on a path of figuring out what they think.

And Meghan does that. In both of these, the first one is titled, no conservative commentators aren’t responsible for mass shootings. This responding to the fact that a lamentably in this country, we have a lot of mass shootings and we had a lot over the last ten days or so. And the tendency of people especially on social media and, you know, I guess, on cable news as well to you know, whenever a mass shooting happens and there is any plausible connection with the of the shooter with some kind of fringe right wing. Position or views or people, a lot of people very quickly lead to the conclusion that, oh, the the right got this person to do it.

Now, I I sometimes leap to that conclusion because I am often disturbed by rhetoric on the right, and I do think that it can have a cumulative corsening effect on civil society and it’s that can be dangerous. But it is also true that this is at best a very subtle process and not something that we should just leap up and make it seem as if, you know, the guy who shot up the LGBTQ club out in Colorado was somehow like, you know, taking direct orders from Tucker Carlson as much as I I despise Tucker Carlson. And I think Meghan, I think rightly, follows a very sensible, reasonable position on this in her column. And then the next day she wrote, has Elon Musk succeeded by luck or does he know what he’s doing? And this one isn’t a strong defense of Musk in the somewhat shambolic rollout of his version of Twitter over the last month or so.

But it does sort of try once again to kind of go between the extremes of either seeing him as some kind of great hero of free speech or capitalism on the one side or as a kind of evil demon who’s destroying Twitter and, you know, basically degrading social media and our information space and just looks at his career, his successes, his his kind of risky behavior and decision making down through the years and and basically says that, you know, either it’s likely that things will write themselves at Twitter because he’s not an idiot, or he’s the luckiest guy who’s ever lived. Because he’s managed to become the richest man on the planet in part by, well, not starting many companies, but Also, you know, having such a big role in both Tesla and SpaceX. And you don’t do that usually unless you’re, you know, really smart and know what you’re doing in business and how to manage people. And if that isn’t true, then he succeeded in these things because it’s like you won the powerball ten times. So again, it’s not like I’m saying you have to agree with everything that I can says in these columns, but as punditry, these were very, very good.

Thank you for

that. Okay. Linda Chavez.

Well,

I want to point as my highlight of the week to a video that was an opinion video posted on the New York Times op ed page this week. And was called the text messages from desperate Africans left behind show this to the American people. This was a compilation of various former people who had worked or fought in Afghanistan, Americans, who were being inundated by texts from those that we left behind. But it ends with something that I think is very important and timely. And that is a call for passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which has languished.

It is not yet been passed and they’re really only a couple of weeks now left in this Congress to get it done. Amy Klobuchar has been one of the prime authors of that legislation, but it is being opposed rather strongly by Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Who is worried that the people who we admitted after our leaving Afghanistan were not properly vetted. He’s wrong. They were in fact strenuously vetted despite all of the chaos of the way in which they left.

But unless this Afghan adjustment act is passed. It does not give a path to permanent status to those that we’ve led in, and we’re coming up on the two year mark where something’s got to be done or these people are going to be in great peril. So I commend this video on the New York Times op ed page, it is heartbreaking both in terms of what it says about what’s happening to the f cans, but also what it says about our veterans and how deeply deeply, wedded they are. To this cause and to the moderate leave no man behind. Thank you.

Bill

Galston,

Not for the first time, a tip of the hat to the Vladimir Zelensky. I love the way he stays on offense. You know, not only on the battlefield, but also in diplomacy. He raised once again the urgency of creating a reasonably fast track to NATO membership for Ukraine. And I know a lot of people are really worried about this possibility.

I’d ask them to ask themselves a question. If Ukraine had been a member of NATO, would this invasion have ever recurred? I think that question answers itself. And so to people who say that membership in NATO for Ukraine would be a provocation. I would say two things.

First of all, Mister Putin needed no provocation to invade Ukraine. And secondly, that at this point, the protection of a NATO guarantee for Ukraine is the best way of ensuring that once this terrible war ends, it will not happen again. Thank

you for that. I will put in the show notes a piece by my colleague, Kathy Young, that she wrote a few months back, demolishing this whole idea that the expansion of NATO is responsible for Putin’s conduct, and it’s just a devastating rebuttal, so I will find that. Alright. I want to draw attention to a piece that appeared on the NBC see news website. I am a great believer in recycling.

I’m very environmentally conscious. I even compost, which is a big pain in the neck, because you have to order special bags that are compostable and put all your clippings in it, your food stuffs, and it’s messy and it creates flies and, you know, but I do it because I I think it’s important and I don’t like waste and it’s great. They put it in the ground, yeah, makes things grow. It’s great. But sometimes we believe that we are being virtuous when sometimes the actual on the ground reality is maybe not so great.

So this NBC News story is about recycling and it is about how Palo Alto, a very progressive town, wanted to find out where their recycling was going. And unfortunately, what they found is that forty percent of it went to recycling centers in the United States, which follow all these environmental rules and regulations and or great for the environment, but sixty percent of it is just shipped overseas to places like Southeast Asia where there are no rules. And where a lot of it winds up either in landfill or just out in the open where it seeps into the Maycon river and then into the ocean. That’s thought to be a source of a lot of the plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean. So these things are complicated.

You know, one answer would be, well, not to send recycling abroad and just to do it at home, but that would increase costs and consumers would have to pay more. All by way of saying that it’s just important to keep your eyes open and bear in mind that there are sometimes unintended consequences even if things that we think we’re doing for the good. And sometimes it gets complicated. Alright, with that, I want to thank everyone I already thank Richard Reeves for joining us. I wanna thank all of our regulars, also our producer, Kay Cooper, and our sound engineer, Jason Brown, and course, our faithful listeners and we will return next week as every week.

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