Classified Shmasified
Arc Digital’s Nick Grossman joins the group to discuss Biden’s classified documents mess, the GOP majority’s foreign policy confusion, free speech on campuses (and in Florida) — and more.
highlight/lowlights:
Bill’s:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/12/poland-leopard-tank-company-ukraine/
Linda’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/opinion/republican-party-future.html
Damon’s:
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/contemporary-israel/12801/on-that-distant-day/
Nick’s:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-64219119
Mona’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/books/prince-harry-book-royal-family.html
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Welcome to Begg to differ the Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right on Mona Charron’s syndicated columnists and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal. Linda Chavez of the new Scan n Center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Nicholas Grossman, science professor at University of Illinois and a senior editor at Arc Digital. Welcome, one and all.
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Well, it was really looking like things were going well for president Biden. His approval rating was ticking up. Inflation was ticking down. Can in the U. S.
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Are strengthening cooperation on defense matters and Biden is getting serious about dealing with the border or at least making noises along those lines and then, wow, this week. The news that the president has himself mishandled classified information. Nick, I’m gonna start with you because this story has had a funny sort of rollout, because we heard on Monday night, that the president had inadvertently discovered some classified documents at his center at the University of Pennsylvania that he entered after his vice presidency when they discovered them, his lawyers alerted the archives, turned them over right away, etcetera. And so days go by, and then what do we find? We find, oh, there were more documents found somewhere else.
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And then, of course, hard on the heels of the revelation about that second tranche, we find that the merit Garland has appointed an independent counsel. So what do you make of the story? What do you make of the White House’s rollout of the facts? Well, it’s not good.
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Classified material are classified because they are supposed to be protected. And there’s an argument that the US government overclassifies material, but reportedly some of the things that Biden had included intelligence briefings on a variety of countries, both allies and adversaries. And that’s the sort of thing that really shouldn’t leave lying around or in some unsecured location. And I also thought when he hit with the recent one, his response was it was in his garage and, like, oh, yeah, I I locked my car there too. Was two flippants was not taken seriously enough.
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So I think it is right that the Department of Justice is looking into it and also that it is important to think of the inevitable comparison to the Trump case, and also some other ones. Hillary Clinton mishandling classified information, which former FBI director James Comey called careless within our prosecute, former CIA Director, David Petreas. Mishandling classified information when there was a clearly worse case, which is he gave stuff that he knew he was not supposed to be giving to a biographer who he was also sleeping with, which is sort of a intelligence one zero one, no no. People without classified information. That’s one way that somebody might try to get it.
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But with the Biden case, one of the most important things is that they are fully cooperating with the Department of justice and there is no indication at least as far as we know so far that any of the material was potentially exposed. And that is in sharp contrast to the Trump case where the biggest issue was that he constantly lied about it, that he claimed that he didn’t have it, that the government both showed that he had it and asked for it nicely back, and he didn’t respond to that. Then the head of US counterintelligence had to go down there and explain why, sorry, he shouldn’t have them, and that still didn’t get it back. And then they got a grand jury to give us a subpoena and then the Trump team lied about that and defied that one. And then only then did they get a search warrant to go to Mar a Lago?
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And the criminal statutes that he may have violated involve things like concealment of classified information, obstruction deliberately withholding it from the government not things that are accidental. But the Biden one certainly deserves investigation, much as the Trump one does. I really doubt the Biden one involves criminal activity. But it’s still not good.
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Damon, everything that Professor Grossman just said is absolutely right in my judgment. And yet. The fact is it is such a bad look for this president to have been guilty of something along the lines of what Trump did. Let me just to set the stage here, play a clip from sixty minutes where Biden was asked, what he made of Trump’s behavior?
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When you saw the photograph, of the top secret documents laid out on the floor at Mar a Lago. What did you think to yourself? Looking at that image? How that could possibly happen, how why anyone could be that irresponsible. And I thought, what data was in there that may compromise sources and methods by that?
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I mean, names of people who helped or etcetera. And it’s just totally irresponsible. Damon, it’s gonna be impossible
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to say yes, but in this story, isn’t it? I mean Yeah.
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I mean, I wanna actually use this as an opportunity to kind of hammer on a point
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that
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I I make periodic here on the podcast. And in my other writings when the subject turns to what’s to be done about Donald j Trump and his numerous legal troubles, whether it’s this issue about documents or issues related to his involvement with the January sixth events. And the question of whether Maricarlin should indict him. I think that we like too, and it’s in general a healthy tendency to try to separate out the law from politics. And just try to set up a sphere of our public life that is called law that is supposed to be consistently applied to all parties and across time and administrations and whoever comes into and goes out of government.
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You want these rules to be equally applied to all and decisions made about things like did person x break the law? Well, yes. If so, then he or she must be charged. And if not, then he or she must be free to go. Obviously, that’s very important.
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It’s very close to the core of what the rule of law means. And then we have politics where everything is sort of gray and fudged and is kind of acknowledged enter into absolutely everything. And Trump was a great master of trying to fudge that difference in part so that he could get away with as much as possible. But it remains true that the decision of a prosecutor of whether or not to prosecute person x for crime or alleged crime y is in part a judgment call. And when the person is a major figure in our public life, the judgment call cannot help but bleed into political considerations.
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And what we are now faced with is the fact that even if and I don’t doubt, I mean, what Nick said is exactly right in a very good summary, it very well could be that in the end, it looks like Donald Trump broke several laws in what he did and Joe Biden did not. However, the decision of, say, to prosecute Trump but not to prosecute Biden, I think, I was a little concerned about this after the first discovery at the Biden office. But for now a second bunch of documents be discovered in his own garage. Just sitting there, kinda like, you know, a room in Mar a Lago, just sort of in a place where someone could just stroll in or easily break in to retrieve these things, I don’t think that it will be possible. For Merrick Garland to go forward with the prosecution of one and not the other.
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It immediately will be politicized in a way that is simply a no win situation. And in that sense, it is a lesson of the fact that as much as we try to separate law from politics, we confront the reality that in the real world that we live in, they overlap and bleed into each other. And this is a very good example of that, I think.
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Linda, I am very sympathetic to Damon’s point here. I think it’s just in the real world, it’s just impossible. To imagine that the Department of Justice could prosecute Donald Trump for the Mar a Lagerous stuff, leaving aside anything else you may be guilty of regarding January sixth. Just seems to me impossible now. Right?
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Do you agree or not? No. I beg to differ.
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Okay. Mona. So I beg to differ for one very important reason, and that is it is the policy of the Department of Justice. And one that was invoked during the Trump years that a sitting president shall not be prosecuted. Therefore, whether or not he might get some later point to be charged with violating law, I think, is perhaps, you know, you would leave that door open and that is something that the appointment of a special counsel can deal with.
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But is some lag on one of the cable shows said this is the difference between Apple’s and Orangutans. It is a huge difference. It was not just that Donald Trump was in possession. Of these documents. He apparently according to reporting that is apparently backed up with some videotape he was ordering the movement around the boxes containing these documents.
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He may in fact have personally packed some of the boxes. And there is every reason to believe that’s the case because some of what was thrown in with not just top secret. But special compartment intelligence were, you know, ridiculous things, golf balls. We’ll see that I don’t ten issues, articles of clothing, etcetera. And so, while, you know, they both may have improperly handled an been in possession.
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That is something that Biden may have to deal with. It’s some later point when he’s no longer president. But there is a humongous difference between the way in which Donald Trump, not just threw things in a box and then moved those boxes around, brought things into his office. I mean, he had within his desk items, including it appears, things like the love letters from Kim Jong un. And this is quite different.
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So the level of crimes we’re talking about here are much different. But I think the appointment of the special council’s, even if the special council were to find that there was real negligence on the part of Joe Biden. It is something that would not have to be dealt with. And I would hope that it is not gonna deter Merrick Garland from going ahead and prosecuting a case, which I think is a very strong case against Donald Trump.
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Okay, Bill Galston, I’m really perplexed by the timing of these announcements. So part of the president’s story here is that if you did something wrong, it was ignorant, and as soon as he found out about the existence of these documents. He immediately had his lawyers turned them over to the National Archives and alerted the justice department. So he did not reveal everything that he knew when he made his first announcement. He presented it to the public as he was being completely forthright and as soon as he discovered that these documents were inadvertently placed in the Penn Biden center that he alerted the Department of Justice and the archives and so forth, but now we discover that there were other documents as well as his residence.
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Mhmm. And that is kind of a classic of how not to reveal this kind of information because it doesn’t look like he’s being straightforward.
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Yeah, I
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agree with that, but I think there’s an element of this situation that everybody is overlooking.
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You
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know,
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he’s being accused of negligence in the handling of his documents in his garage. Now, the president made a point of saying that they were locked up with his corvette.
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And
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if you know how much Joe Biden loves and cares about his corvette, you will know that that is an extra level of concern and scrutiny to protect the documents, joke. But look, in all seriousness, I can think of no way of justifying either the president’s conduct or the White House’s dealing with his conduct. As I understand the situation, setting aside the question of negligence and handling the documents, they should never have been there in the first place. I know when I left the White House, I was instructed to turn everything over to the archives. And I spent time as everybody else did in my situation, boxing them all up, searching my desk to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind etcetera.
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Now, I was on the domestic side, so I don’t recall any classified documents crossing my desk But classified or unclassified, it was my responsibility to put them in one of those boxes, sealed box, and then make sure it was available for pickup by the national archives the day I left. And all of this makes me wonder, and I think it makes you wonder too, How much of this is actually going on? How regular and normal it is that people in possession of documents you know, during that period of government service that they may want to refer to for whatever reason after they leave government service are not being left at the archives. But are in fact being moved off the property one way or another. And I know that there’s a line of argument to the effect that everything is overclassified, etcetera, etcetera.
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And that may be true, but I don’t think it’s pertinent to this particular case because of the generic norms, indeed, rules about the treatment of public documents.
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Nick, I’m
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going to come back to you Look, one of the aspects of the story is from the point of view of Republicans and conservatives, trying to look at this through their eyes a little bit. The existence of Trump and his completely outrageous and obviously, criminal behavior, it makes it more difficult. But look, since this story broke, I have seen references as we just did on this podcast to the fact that, you know, we kind of over classified things in this country or, you know, innocent mistakes happen. These things do happen or, you know, the the you know, I was listening to NPR. They they went through the millions of differences between this kind of thing and what Trump did and so forth.
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And people are gonna hear that, and they’re gonna say, when it was Trump who was accused of mishandling classifieding from me, nobody talked about problem of overclassification and nobody said, well, these things tend to happen. It was, you know, throw them in jail. Even though I bowed to no one in my contempt for Trump, I know that he invites that sort of thing. At the same time, I do think this time it’s gonna be awfully difficult to overcome the presumption that this initiates the case against Trump on the Mar a Lago documents. It’s supports the idea that everybody does it.
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Even though, Linda says it’s apples and orangutans, I don’t think most people are gonna see it that way. What do you think, Nick?
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I’m guessing the public reaction? Probably not. In part, because you have to get into the weeds of it though, I I think that part’s hard to say. And in part because we don’t know what would have happened with Trump if he had handled this like other previous officials had, where when they went to him quietly and asked her it back if he had given it back or even when they got to subpoena and asked her it back if he had given it back. And so in addition to, I know, Damon mentioned, both that there’s politics and rule of law, and there is also national security.
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And so with Trump’s case, We know that Mar a Lago has been infiltrated by people the US is accused of being Chinese spy so that some even made it past a secret service and other protection with things like thumb drives and hard drives and then later got prosecuted and reported. And we know that there were so many documents there of, in some cases, such high classification levels that judges couldn’t even review them without getting special permission from the government. So there was something serious and the most important thing was that the government was able to get it back and close off that information security risk. I’m sure that no matter what happens, if Trump does get prosecuted for this, that his defenders try to blur the distinction between what he did and what Biden did or what others did. And it definitely complicates at least this one though, at least I could say speaking for me personally with the classified material, I was most concerned that it wasn’t out there possibly being looked at stolen, sold, who knows what?
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Whereas with Trump’s efforts to try to overthrow the election in twenty twenty, were things like conspiring to the front State of Georgia or conspiring to for the United States, that when it comes to prosecution, I think is the more serious one, the one that rule of law almost can’t hide from.
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Yes. I think that’s an excellent point and that’s frankly something that I was going to stress, which is I actually think that the whole idea of prosecuting Trump for his handling of the documents would have been a sideline and really isn’t the most important. I mean, it was very, very bad that he did what he did. I don’t want to deny that. But the really huge criminal thing that he did was attempting to subvert an election, attempting to steal an election and and impede the peaceful transfer of power.
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And if he is prosecuted, that should be the thing that he’s prosecuted for in some fashion. The other stuff feels like it would seem petty by comparison. I don’t know. So maybe it’s just as well that it now seems to me anyway that it’s not gonna go in that direction, but we
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Alright. Let us now turn to our newly chosen speaker of the house after fifteen votes. So we’ve got Kevin McCarthy, and he did two things. I’m gonna start with you, Linda. He did two things right off of that.
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First, he posed for a selfie with margery Taylor Green, grinning. So she is now a leading figure in the Republican Party, no longer an outcast, no longer a fringe figure. She’s now right next to the speaker of the
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house. And the
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second thing that he did was thank Donald Trump. So what do you anticipate this will mean for the Democrats in the future, for the Republican Party’s future, for the upcoming important votes on the debt limit, we talked a little bit about this last week, but I wonder if you have some more reflections. Well, first of all,
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if you’re asking what this does for the Democrats. I think they should be jumping for joy. Yeah. And by the way, it wasn’t just the selfie with Marjorie too. Green.
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It was she was like Velcro on the man all throughout the various fifteen votes. I mean, they hardly seem to have any breathing space between them and maybe we should talk to missus McCarthy. So I, you know, look, if he wants to throw in his fate with Marjorie Taylor Green, more power to him. And if he wants to have Donald Trump wrapped around his neck again. That’s his choice.
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I don’t think it’s gonna be good for him. For the Republican Party and for Republicans being able to retain control of the house in the next election. So a lot is going to depend on what happens. And certainly, the debt ceiling is going to be a major issue. So It’s too early to tell.
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I don’t think we’re gonna see a lot good coming out of this new house majority, but there are certain issues on which I’m certainly more aligned with the Republicans. And so, you know, I’m hoping that at least there’ll be some
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movement. Okay, Linda. I’m gonna challenge you on this. Okay? No.
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Because, you know, you and I have both been conservative for decades. Okay? Mhmm. What is it on the list of things that this Republican congress has made a priority that you like cutting points. I
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didn’t say I made a priority. I
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bet. Alright. But But like what? What do you think they’re gonna do that you’re gonna like? I’m just curious.
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Sorry if I
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was on
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combative. I just can’t see anything that’s on their agenda that’s
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conservative. Well, you know, I have problems with some of the woke agenda. As you know, I’m still very conservative on issues having to do with race preferences, there are, you know, some oversight of Department of Education that I wouldn’t mind seeing happen their office for civil rights, I think, goes way too far. Okay. Okay.
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And so, you know, so I’m I’m I’m willing to see that. You know, I I obviously am a perennial optimist to think that anything could happen on immigration. But McCarthy’s from California, He represents an area that I think does have some farming interests. There are lots of Republicans who represent districts where they have agricultural meatpacking or other kinds of districts that are very, very short of labor right now. So you’re never going to see the kind of immigration reform I would like comprehensive, but maybe there’ll be a little bit of movement there.
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My biggest worry, frankly, is is informed policy and and I am very worried of their new polling data out showing that a slight majority for Republicans now don’t want to see the United States spending more money in Ukraine, and that worries me more than anything.
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Right? Damon wrote
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about that this week, and I wanna turn to him on that subject You know, it’s one of the things that Matt Yates tweeted in his fight to stop McCarthy from becoming speaker, he said, biggest losers, Zelensky, biggest winner, US taxpayers. By the way, he represents a district that has a lot of defense spending in it, even since Pensacola, Florida. But, you know, that is a divide within the Republican caucus now that is worrying. Right?
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Yeah, it is. But it’s not clear to me exactly what ends up happening simply because the party is really deeply divided on this, and you’ll see that as soon as attention turns to the senate, where the Republicans there tend to be much more of kind of still in the Reagan night camp, more kind of muscular
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internationalists.
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And, you know, you think back to when President Zelensky paid his visit and gave his very powerful speech in Congress I mean, there were some Republicans who are enthusiastic for what he was saying. So the party’s divided. You have Trumpist types who I think, you know, are sort of all over the map on, like, what cause or issue they care about. But then some of them are really against funding Ukraine’s battle at all and would like to pull back. And they might be gaining the upper hand.
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But again, you have the residual reganites around, and then you you also have very hawkish, realist types who often prefer to focus on China more these days that would be people like Tom Cotton in the Senate again who maybe prefer us to spend a little bit more of our time focusing on China and less on Europe. But again, what all this adds up to is a whole mountain of disarray and lack of clarity about what the party stands foreign foreign policy. And actually, I I wanna give a quick shout out to my former colleague from the week Bonnie Christian, spelled with a k, had an interesting op ed in The Times this week in which It actually came out the same day as my substack post that he referred to talking very much along the same lines about these issues and the divisions on the right And she went one step further to actually say, you know, it really is the person who becomes the nominee. On the right in twenty twenty four. And then if that person wins who might settle these disputes, if it’s to Santos, say, he’s gonna have, I think, a tremendous amount of leeway to really decide, you know, what direction is my administration going to go?
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This is course, assuming he wins, which would be less than optimal for me in all kinds of ways, and I have no idea where he would come down on these foreign policy issues, but he will have an incredible freehand given that the party is now really all over the map from quasi pure isolationists on one hand to extremely hawkish aggressive internationalists on the other and then everything in between.
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And then,
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I guess, my last point would be just to circle back to the Ukraine business and what we’re gonna see when it comes to approving funding for the battle there. I have to believe that there will be enough waivers in the House that the overwhelming support you’re gonna see from Democrats they’ll be able to reach some kind of deal where the true majority in the chamber will prevail and improve funding. But, you know, the fact that the Republicans control the majority and therefore decide what the rules are and when the vote takes place is gonna make it a bit of a gauntlet for the administration and trying to get that approved. Let’s help the Sainer mines in the Senate end up calling over and raining them in and persuading them to be a little bit less reckless.
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Well,
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Bill Galston, if the Sainer members of the Senate want to call over, the people they may get on the phone are gonna be members of the Freedom caucus because they are well represented on the all important rules committee that determines what comes to the floor and how it comes to the floor and whether amendments permitted and so forth. So it gives an outsized amount of influence to the weirder and crazier part of the Republican caucus. But I I wanna lobby a big fat softball bill because one of the things that as somebody who was a conservative for many years and still thinks of myself as being responsible about certain things like deficits and debt. It’s really hard to swallow when I see these Republicans. Now suddenly being born again, dead hawks, Suddenly, they’re all talking about the deficit again.
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And during Donald Trump’s tenure, when they had all three branches, the national debt grew by seven point eight trillion dollars or forty percent increase. A majority of that was COVID spending, but not all the three point three trillion of that was pre pandemic. So I don’t know. I have a lot of So take that as you will, Bill. Go ahead.
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Hit it out of the ballpark.
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It’s somehow more infrequently when you ask me questions. You also answered them. Sorry. Very bad word of mine. Very much depribs me of every weapon in my armory.
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But on the one hand, yes, I agree with you. And it is rank hypocrisy. On the other hand, Houston, we have a problem. And as a country, we’ve normalized a level of deficit spending that I believe is unsustainable.
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Now
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I know this is a message that has been chanted for many decades and somehow it is still sustainable, quote unquote, But there comes a point at which the burden of the national debt on the federal budget and on the country becomes noticeably harder to bear. I think we’re very close to that. And so the hypocritical motive of the new majority in the house may be less significant than the debate that their actions will launch. I think it’s an overdue debate. I have no idea how it’s going to come out.
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But at some point, as was the case about a decade ago, The two parties are going to have to butt heads and then come to some sort of agreement on a sustainable fiscal course for the next five or ten years. This is a game for very high stakes. I have my own views on what a sensible discussion of that issue would look like and what a sensible resolution of it. Would be, but we have to do something. Because the idea of trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and I’m quite confident that The new CBO estimates when they come out will show that just as a recent report from the committee on responsible federal budget did.
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You don’t have to make extravagant assumptions about long term and short term interest rates over the next five to ten years to know that substantial portions of the non interest part of the budget could be squeezed out.
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All of which
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is a long way of saying that There’s a distinction always in politics as in life between motives and results. That said, I will repeat what I said last week. It would be the height of your responsibility to bring down the global economy in an unresolved controversy over the debt ceiling. And I’ve been spending a lot of time talking with business people over the past week. And they are united in saying that although for politicians getting a difficult problem resolved at
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the very
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last minute, maybe all well and good as long as they get it resolved. From an economic standpoint, it is not the same and allowing this situation to get close to the brink before some resolution is pulled out of some petitions hat. Would be in itself deeply irresponsible, and I agree with
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them. Nick, as
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a matter of political science, the leadership of the Republican Party seems to have settled on a theory that the important thing here is to satisfy their base and not to worry too much about alienating moderates or swing voters. That seems to be the lesson of of the last couple of weeks. What do you make of that? I mean, arguably, you know, the voters punish the Republicans for seeming to radical in the twenty twenty two midterms and the spectacle of the last week or so with this fight over the speakership underlines that nope, this party still is radical. Is that a mistake?
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Or what do you think?
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It depends on what they’re trying to do. So for winning general elections, it seems like a mistake. And in particular, with this last and where with the midterms where we saw a decent amount of tickets splitting showing that Republican voters at least as critical mass of them don’t wanna go over candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona or Hersha Walker in Georgia or Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, but we’ll still vote for candidates like Brian Kemp, Governor of Georgia. And so they are turning off people by this.
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But instead, if they’re primarily concerned about primary elections and about how they will come across in conservative media, then they need to go along more with the radicals. So many of the representatives, if they’re thinking of just reelection, that first, they have to get through a primary. And The big thing that you absolutely cannot do for a Republican primary is work with the Democrats or be very critical of Trump and Republican that’s what did in some representatives like this Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. And many current reps think that if they do this, they’ll get yelled out by the Mongoing. They’ll get negative press by Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and other conservative media, and that this will then and their career before they even get to a general election.
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So in a way they’re somewhat stuck because the party on Ukraine and probably on the debt ceiling as well, there is a majority in the House of Representatives, a bipartisan majority that would continue funding Ukraine and would raise the debt ceiling as a clean debt ceiling, then perhaps negotiate spending you know, maybe make spending cuts during normal budget negotiations, but not using the debt ceiling as like a hostage taking mechanism to do it. And yet because the Republican caucus is holding together is if we notice even this with the Kevin McCarthy fight of As much as they were having difficulty coming up with consensus about a speaker, the one thing that was not even under consideration totally off the table was working with a few threats to have that go along. So it had to be just internal to the party. And as long as they stick with that, they are in some of the agreements to make McCarthy speaker did this. But they are effectively seeding power to a minority within the majority within the House of Representatives.
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So they’re trying to govern from one faction of one party, of one house, of one branch of government. And that can’t possibly work, but what it can potentially do is muck things up as long as there are too many moderate centrist or at least, you know, say, closer to the center Republicans who would have swing districts that they would have to compete in, but would have to get through a Republican primary to do that first.
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Howard Bauchner: Right, which
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brings us back to the topic that we discussed on a previous bank to differ, namely the need to get away from partisan primaries in general.
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So, Catherine
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Gail, I hope you’re listening.
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So let’s turn now to
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an example of what drives people crazy about woke ideology. Okay? So there’s a little school called Hamlin University in Minnesota, and an adjunct professor of art there has lost her job. For showing a fourteenth century Persian painting of the prophet Mohammed, she alerted them this point happen if they didn’t wanna watch and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, she was fired and there were editorials in the undergraduate newspaper saying that, you know, while they were in favor of having conversations out in the open, they would quote, not participate in conversations where a person must defend their lived experience and trauma as topics of discussion or debate.
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So Damon, what’s your reaction to this? Are we making too much of it, or is it really a
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problem? Well, it’s
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certainly a problem. I don’t know if it warrants quite the coverage that it’s received. I mean, it is a big country. There are a lot of universities, a lot of professors, a lot of students and administrators. I always wonder when this happens, how wide spread, this kind of thing really is.
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I mean, stories like this do percolate up into the national media fairly regularly. And in this case,
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The discussion of
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it was really jumpstarted by an excellent New York Times piece about it. It was very careful, but also kind of subtly critical of what was going on at the school. For me, the thing that always troubles me is within the last few days, The president of the school has issued a long statement in which she sounds very defensive and tries to. Justify the decision. She also claims that the person was not, in fact, fired, but simply didn’t have her contract renewed and as an adjunct that’s something that’s always kind of on the table or something.
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But in in general, the rationale that she provides for this is a kind of exaggerated distortion of John Stewart Mills doctrine of harm and that one should always avoid harm. And this is a kind of liberal principle, but originally it was put forth as having to do with physical harm and it’s now translated over into a kind of protection from emotional pain, which is of course this
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is
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a problem for a number of reasons, one of which is that standards of what counts as harm in that sense is completely subject and there’s no way ahead of the game to kind of prejudge what one person will find harmful versus another and it’s not clear why the subjective judgment of a particularly sensitive person should set the bar for everybody else who might have a little bit of a thicker skin. But then there’s also the problem that it feels to me at least like we should be raising citizens to go out into the world, to look at the world themselves to go to a university and get an education and be exposed to a wide variety of things. And what you end up with as consequence of making harm and harm avoidance, the highest consideration in these matters is that you end up. Basically reinforcing a tendency toward young people thinking that they should go through life kind of protecting themselves from exposure to anything that challenges them. And that’s a really bad thing.
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For the creation of citizens, for I think the creation of well rounded human beings, even aside from citizenship. So that’s the main thing that when I read, you know, whatever the latest story like this is always like, oh, come on. Can’t we get this right? And it sounds like, you know, as you summarized it, Mona, the way the instructor set this up, already was displaying all kinds of precautionary things to make sure she didn’t get in trouble for it and yet it blew up in her face anyway. And I just end up rolling my eyes and thinking, this is not good to have a culture where everyone is walking around kind of trying to avoid and then ending up sampling over trip wires over these kind of harm fixation issues.
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So I don’t know. It just sort of leaves me slightly depressed, I guess.
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So, Linda, first of all, number art historians and religious experts and others have pointed out that it is not the universal view within Islam that you cannot show images of the prophet that there’s a lot of controversy about that and that in fact many Muslims don’t agree with that. And one of the points that professor was trying to make in this display was that things have changed over time and that at the time this was considered very pious. And now it’s no longer considered biased, things change. But there’s an element, don’t you think, when people use offense, in this way to get someone fired for something like this. That’s a form of bullying in and of itself.
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Wouldn’t you say?
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Yes, I certainly would. And you know what is so interesting though about this story and all of these kinds of stories is the way in which those on the sort of extreme end of the wokeness phenomena end up meeting with those who are in the anti category because, of course, this kind of censorship we’re talking about where this professor lost your job over it. That’s one kind of story. But as Kathy Young pointed out in her excellent piece in the Bulwark, she pointed out the phenomena that occurs among the anti woke element as well. I mean, there are all these people, they are more often active at the secondary school level and even the elementary school level, but they’re out there trying to ban Books by Eli Weisel and the diary of Ant Frank, you know, just to name two authors of very first rate literary significance along with trying to ban other books that they consider graphic or that raise issues having to do with sexuality or identity, etcetera.
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And it’s as if these folks don’t even realize that they’re all on the same team. This idea, you know, that we should be censoring in, censoring in education, and particularly at the college level. College is where you’re supposed to be exposed to ideas that may make you uncomfortable. You’re supposed to be learning about new things and things that you may not have encountered in your sheltered upbringing. And once we begin doing that, I think we really devalue education and we make education more which is a phenomenal guess of propagandizing and perpetuating certain beliefs.
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And so I am disheartened by these stories whether they occur everywhere. I don’t know. But I am feeling they occur more often than not. And I will tell you reading that story having been an adjunct professor at a university here in the Washington DC area in teaching a course. I thought to myself, Xi.
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You know, I could easily have had a student. We were reading American Democrat and I can assure you there were lots of things in these novels that somebody could have taken offense at. What if somebody had filed a complaint against me? You know that I probably wouldn’t have that stop me, but a lot of particularly young professors just starting off in their career they’re not gonna want to take that chance, and so they’re gonna self censor — Exactly. — or
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somebody who’s got a mortgage and a family and, you know, that sort
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of thing. Yeah.
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They’re gonna want they’re gonna be
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careful. Bill
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Galston, the man that many people think is the most likely after Donald Trump, to be the nominee of the Republican Party, has shepherded through the stop woke act in Florida. That’s, of course, Ron DeSantis. And it makes unlawful any teaching that, quote, a person by virtue of his or her race color sex or national origin there’s personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions in which the person played no part, etcetera, etcetera. Now, that is so broadly written that it could inhibit all kinds of teacher. I mean, I can imagine, you know, to kill a mockingbird could be banned from schools on the grounds that it’s gonna make white children feel a sense of guilt about things they had no pardon?
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I couldn’t agree more,
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Mona. I spent thirty years of my life, teaching in universities. I got out at the age of sixty And I’m beginning to think that our god out in the getting was good. I
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absolutely
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associate myself with Linda’s remark as I look back on the classes that I taught. I taught all sorts
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of things that
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by today’s standards would have been considered offensive or quote unquote harmful to the tender feelings of some students in my classes. As to how rare this is, I may just have the wrong kind of friends, but several of my friends have been called on the carpet. For teaching, quote unquote, offenses that I
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didn’t regard
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as being close to offenses at all by any reasonable standard, which gets me to my hobby course. What we’re talking about here are university and college officials and administrators. Presidents, but also deans of students, etcetera, who have forgotten about what higher education is supposed to be and what a university is supposed to be if they ever
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knew. This
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would not be happening. If presidents and HR directors and deans of students were defending the ideal of the university. As I’ve always understood it, as my graduate school, alma mater, the University of Chicago, has defended it, indeed and with an explicit policy that I wish for universal policy throughout colleges and universities in the country.
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I find
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it hard to contain my outrage at this entire tendency. You have to choose. You can either have this Tripwire sensibility, or you can have serious college and university education. You cannot have both. Nicholas Grossman, I’m
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going to give you the final word here. You are still in academia. Do you think this is a problem? Do you think it’s been exaggerated in the media? Or what’s your sense of it?
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I
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mean, yes to both of those — Okay. — that there are instances where it’s a problem and also the scale of the problem has been exaggerated. So just to give a a bit of a statement, you know, for the students that I’ve interacted with and now at Illinois, I was at Iowa before that, Maryland before that. That are overwhelmingly inquisitive and, you know, relatively open minded and, you know, not say, sensorious and I talk about a lot of controversial topics in various classes. I I teach about drone strikes, and it’s for Palestine, and they do a class called politics on the Internet, where we talk about among other things, social justice, and cancel culture, and free speech, and all the rest of it.
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And I found them very receptive. Of course, that’s just my anecdote though there are also most of the case of that, there’s a big problem are also based on anecdotes. So that said, I think the example that we were talking about earlier with a picture of Mohammed is a good example of and I agree with Bill here that the primary problem is with administrators not standing up for these principles. So that if a student complains, that is their right. That’s also free speech.
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I’m not gonna tell them to shut up. But if they complain about it, and then as in this case, where The teacher not only was showing a topically relevant work of art, but also told the students in advance in case they would make any of them uncomfortable. And gave students who did think it would make them uncomfortable and opt out where they wouldn’t suffer any damage to their grade or anything, and still student complain, and that then the proper thing from an administrator is to explain that the professor handled it fine, and this is a part of an education. And since this one in particular got not only with the excessive protection from harm idea, but also ran into things of freedom of religion. That’s what they were asking the university to do was to defer to Islamic rules about blasphemy.
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And a university does not have to follow some religious rules about blasphemy. You know, I think it’s probably a safe bet that I have, for example, taken the lord’s name and vain sometime in a classroom. And I don’t think that I shouldn’t be allowed to. A lot of the more fundamentalist Christian efforts at censorship, especially of say gay material, revolves around the argument of my religion says this is wrong, and that would be a good argument for a religious college not doing it. But it is not at all a good argument for a state university to keep it away.
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And so ultimately, while I do think this is a problem and it’s a cultural issue, one that I would like to see administrators in particular pushback on more, show more of a spine. A bigger problem is when it comes from the state, when you have state government doing it because they have real power. They have things like the ability to appoint people to school boards. As Rhonda Santos has done with bringing in some out of state ideologues to do ideological enforcement. People like Christopher Ruffo, who is quite open about what his goal is.
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In influencing the University of Florida system and others is to shape it into a right wing culture where ideology and that he’s proud of this and for somebody like DeSantis, to bring in somebody like Ruffo, to try to pass something like that stop woke act, which a judge called positively dystopian that involves funding cuts, threats to jobs, threats to pass other laws, to use law enforcement there is so much more state power, so there is much more state potential for censorship. And I think it’s important to see these both of these problems, but also recognize up because the one from government officials is stronger than that is the more concerning one. Right. Although they do feed
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on one another. Right? Very much so. Yes. Yes.
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Very much. Alright. Well, thank you for that. And let us now turn to our final segment to highlight or low light of the week, and let’s start with Bill
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Galston. Oh,
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this is an easy one for me.
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For me, the
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highlight of the week was the government of Poland publicly declaring that it would be at the hand of a coalition. Sending at least a company and maybe multiple companies of leopard tanks to Ukraine. This is a big breakthrough in more ways than one because the German chancellor and leopards, of course, are manufactured in Germany has stated that Germany will not be the first to do so. Somebody else takes the lead, my European scholar informants tell me that it will be much easier for the German government to follow in their wake. About how
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many tanks would that be?
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Well, it depends
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on
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whether you’re talking about one company of tanks, which would be fourteen or multiple companies. Which is what the polls are trying to catalyze as the head of this
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coalition. Ah, okay. Excellent. Thank you. Okay, Linda Chavez.
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That was really good
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news. Thanks all for that. I’m going to point to an article that was written this week. It is a regular column that appears in the New times called the conversation, and this conversation was between David Brooks and Brett Stevens, both of them friends at this program, and the article was called The Party’s Over for Us. Where do we go now?
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And of course, both Brett and David, broke with the Republican party each of them at separate times and over separate things. And they were talking about the future of a new conservative part. Not necessarily the GOP as it is currently constituted. And and it was kind of a philosophical disagreement between the two on how we got where we are, but also where we ought to go with David Brooks weighing in saying the conservative party must become a multi racial working class party. And Brett Stevens arguing no, the party should be a party of risers.
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Small business owners and the like. And I found myself very much on Brett Stevens’ wavelength. And it’s not simply because he said something very nice about me at the end of the
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call. I didn’t reach the end. I’d sort of had to stop reading in the middle today because I was preparing for this podcast. But so I didn’t know that he mentions you, but that all credit to him for doing so. Alright.
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Nicholas Christmann.
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Mine is
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Brazil, and I’d call it a mostly low light with maybe a silver lining of highlight on it. On January eighth, we saw supporters of the former president Bolsonaro, riot and attack the Brazilian Congress, some presidential offices in the Supreme Court and ransacked the place and watching it as an American, there were unfortunate and hard to miss aspects that reminded me of January sixth. And it was a unfortunate reminder that this used to be the sort of thing the US could say was, oh, you know, that that’s over there in those less functional countries or if that’s third world thing. That’s not our problem. And here, it was to look at it and say, oh, oh, that that looks like us.
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That that looks a lot like us. Where I think it is silver lining is that it didn’t work. It was also kind of weird in that the presidential transition, the of power had already happened in Brazil. So at least with the United States in January six, people were trying to keep Trump in power to try to prevent the transition of power. Whereas in Brazil, it seemed like maybe they thought they might have been able to spark a military coup, but mostly that they were kind of throwing a fit and destroying a lot of property and attacking the government just because they were upset about the election results.
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But it looks like not only did it fail, but that the Brazilian government is responding pretty strongly. And so hopefully, this could have been a moment of democratic backsliding for Brazil But while it does mean that there are continued threats to Brazilian democracy that this is something that just like in the United States, it is not over but it was something that Brazil’s democracy survived and can hopefully get stronger as a result.
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Excellent.
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By the way, it’s worth just remembering that two of Trump’s people were very much behind this piece of insurrection in Brazil. Steve Bannon and Steve Miller. You could say that I’m also pretty darn
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grateful that the US president at the time was Joe Biden who had been sending diplomats and military personnel and intelligence and economic personnel to urge the Brazilians to follow whatever the election turned out to be. And the military did. And I think that is a lot better than having a president who is amplifying the lies about fraud in Brazil and whose people, including Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Junior, among others, were at this time encouraging it and presumably if Trump were in power, would have been encouraging it also. Amen.
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Damon Linker?
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Well, my
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choice today is a combination of it’s a highlight because it’s a very good essay. Pointing too, but it’s a low light because the subject of it is kind of gloomy. But this is an essay in the Jewish review of books by Israeli translator and author, hello, Halcon titled, on that distant day. Now, regular listeners to the podcast know that on a couple of occasions over the last few months, I’ve expressed concern and a kind of troubled affect about the results of the last Israeli election and what it portends for the future of the country as prime minister Benjamin
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Netanyahu’s
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Likud Party has joined in a coalition with some very far right parties and there are people now from those parties in charge of government ministries, including ones that oversee Arab Israeli citizens and also Palestinians in the by territories. And so far, tensions are high, but nothing has gone out of control yet. But if there is some violence either on the streets of Israeli cities or let alone, god forbid, terrorist attacks start taking place in the West Bank that could change and with those very polarizing far right figures in the government over seeing things like the police and some of the forces in the occupied areas. It could get really ugly. So How can longtime Zionist who used to sort of look down on and dismiss people who worried about the settlement project and policies in the West Bank and said that this was not something people should be overly concerned with.
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Has now reevaluated and is in a state of despair, and it’s a very thoughtful, very kind of, soulful look at these issues. By man who’s been around on the scene looking at them for the bulk of a long life. So if you’re interested in these issues and worried about the state of things in Israel, I highly recommend the peace. Oh,
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that’s interesting. Thank you. Well, I guess mine is a low light. It is the omnipresence of Harry and Meghan, all over everywhere. I mean, I loved watching the crown.
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Very interesting. Good entertainment, fiction, of course, mostly, but okay. But the real life version Apparently Harry and Meghan gave up their titles so that they could get out of the gilded cage or something. I don’t know. And now they wanted tell us every little detail about their life and their relationship and their whining complaints about being second in line for the throne and therefore a spare, you know, the air and the spare, etcetera.
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I mean, I find this utterly, utterly uninteresting and annoying that it’s getting so much attention and so I’m being very surly about it. But I bring this all up by way of calling attention to a headline which unfortunately I cannot find the origin of It might have been from The Economist. But anyway, it was about Harry’s new book and the headline was Harry blares his
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soul. Alright. With that, I
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want to thank our guest, Nicholas Grossman. I want to thank our panel and our producer, Katie Cooper, our sound engineer, Joe Armstrong, of course, our Wonder full listeners and we will return next week as every week. Former
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Navy SEAL Sean Ryan shares real stories from real people, from all walks of life. On the Sean Ryan show, wealth strategist, Rob Loon If you could solve a problem in this world, better than anyone else, you’re gonna make a lot of money. And that’s really where the business is ultimate goal is whether it’s your business or a manufacturer train business, it’s about solving a problem and making a bigger impact in people’s lives than anyone else on scale. I mean, I’ve been trying to scale my business, but I can’t find somebody conduct these interviews. Yeah.
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