The Daily Signal - #466: Segregation Is Back, and It's Coming From the Left

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

Integration used to be a major goal of the civil rights movement. But today, in many places, resegregation is the growing trend -- particularly on college campuses. A new National Association of Scholars report finds that 7 out of 10 colleges surveyed are having separate graduations for those of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds. Dion Pierre of the National Association of Scholars joins us to discuss. We also cover these stories:•President Trump is expected to tap Ken Cuccinelli for a top immigration job. •According to a new Gallup poll, 4 in 10 Americans embrace some form of socialism.•Alabama's public television network refuses to air children's TV show episode featuring same-sex wedding. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, May 22nd. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Danielle Davis. Integration used to be a major goal of the civil rights movement, but today, in many places, re-segregation is the growing trend, particularly on college campuses. Dionne Pierre recently wrote a piece for the college fix, criticizing the practice of segregated graduation ceremonies,

saying that he would never participate in one. Today, he'll join us to explain his thoughts. Plus, millennials are in the worst shape of any. generation financially, according to a new report. Kate and I, as millennials, will discuss what's gone wrong. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and please subscribe. Now on to our top news. The debt limit is expected to be reached later this year. The Hill reported that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, after a meeting with other congressional leaders and White House officials, quote, we all agree debt ceiling is going to be part of an

overall deal, but we're not discussing that right now. End quote. They are discussing a spending deal, potentially one that could last two years. Without a deal, the 2011 Budget Control Act would automatically go into effect and lead to slash spending in 2020. Well, President Trump is expected to tap Ken Cuccinelli for a top immigration job at the Department of Homeland Security. According to an unnamed source cited by CNN, Cucinelli will help steer the White House's immigration policy at Homeland security, though he won't be a quote-unquote immigration czar who operates across agencies. Cuccinelli has been a staunch backer of the president's immigration policies, even though he fought Trump at the Republican Convention in 2016.

Cucinelli served as Virginia's Attorney General before narrowly losing a governor's race back in 2013. House Judiciary Committee Chair, Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, was not pleased that former White House counsel Don McGahn didn't show up for a hearing on Tuesday. Let me be clear. This committee will hear Mr. McGahn's testimony, even if we have to go to court to secure it. We will not allow the president to prevent the American people from hearing from this witness. We will not allow the president to block congressional subpoenas, putting himself and his allies above the law. We will not allow the president to stop this investigation, and nothing in these unjustified and unjustifiable legal attacks will stop us from pressing forward with our work on behalf of the American people.

We will hold this president accountable, one way or the other. The White House had asked McGahn not to go to the hearing, and the Justice Department said Monday McGahn wasn't required to show up, despite the Democrat subpoena. Stephen Engel of the Justice Department wrote, We provide the same answer that Department of Justice has repeatedly provided for nearly five decades, Congress may not constitutionally compel the president's senior advisors to testify about their official duties.

Well, a federal judge has ruled against President Trump saying that his accounting firm must hand over his financial records, which are under subpoena from the House Oversight Committee. U.S. District Judge Amit Meta of Washington, D.C., handed down the decision and also deny the president's request to stay the ruling pending an appeal. Here's how the president responded to the ruling on Monday. Well, we disagree with that ruling. It's crazy because you look at it. This never happened to any other president. They're trying to get a redo. They're trying to get what we used to call in school a do-over. And if you look, you know, we had no collusion. We had no obstruction. We had no nothing. The Democrats were very upset with the Mueller report. As far as the financials are concerned, we think it's the wrong, it's totally the wrong decision. by obviously an Obama appointed judge. Well, the accounting firm, Mazar's LLP, has seven days to comply with the ruling.

Is U.S. census data vulnerable to Russian hacking? At least one census official is worried. Bloomberg reports that John Aboud, Chief Scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau, said he had concerns while speaking at a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta conference. He said, quote, most of the agencies of the federal government that ingest data are very concerned about interference in the process of taking the 2020 census. Well, Anup Gallup survey confirms a growing pattern of socialism gaining favor in America. According to the poll, four and ten Americans embrace some form of socialism,

while five out of ten say it would be bad for the country. And as for Democrats, 57% have a favorable view of socialism. But the implications get tricky because Gallup also reports that Americans have an evolving definition of what socialism is. Nearly one in four now associated with social equality, and only 17% associated with the traditional definition of government controlling the means of production. Also, and this is key, a majority of Americans seem to favor the free market over government in several key areas, including technological innovation, the economy overall, wages, and the distribution of wealth. On those counts, roughly two out of three Americans side with the free market. They were more likely to support government control in areas like environmental protection and protecting consumer privacy. In late 2017, First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas was the scene of a horrific mass shooting,

with 26 men and women and children being killed and others injured. Now there is a new church for the congregation, which was dedicated Sunday. Julie Workman, a nurse whose own child was hurt in the shooting and who was present herself, talked to the NBC, Austin, Texas affiliate. We're left here to tell the story of God's grace and mercy and his hand and protection that went on that day. Workman also said, The main thing that has kept my core is that the devil was not going to win.

Well, you may have heard about Arthur, the kids' cartoon show, featuring a gay wedding in a recent episode. While Alabama is pushing back, Public TV officials there have refused to air the episode. It was titled Mr. Ratburn and The Special Someone. It aired nationally on May 13th, and in it, Arthur attends a wedding between his male teacher and another man. Mike McKenzie, the director of Alabama Public Television, defended the decision to pull the episode at al.com, saying, quote, parents have trusted Alabama Public Television for more than 50 years to provide children's programs that entertain, educate, and inspire.

More importantly, although we strongly encourage parents to watch television with their children and talk about what they have learned afterwards, parents trust that their children can watch APT without their supervision. We also know that children who are younger than the target audience for Arthur also watch the program, end quote. Gosh, between this and the abortion law, maybe we should all move to Alabama. Well, next up, we'll have our interview with Dionne Pierre about the segregation in some colleges' graduation ceremonies. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda.

In the Agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. Joining us today is Dionne Pierre, a research associate at the National Association of Scholars. You recently wrote an op-ed for the college fix, which was really fascinating. I'm just going to read a portion of it now.

Quote, at the National Association of Scholars, we surveyed 173 colleges and universities across the country and found that 71%, 125 of them, have some version of an ethnically separate graduation. In fact, Harvard also has a separate Latinx graduation. Brown has its black laureate. Columbia has both black graduation and Raza graduation. These ceremonies are held in addition to the mainstream campus-wide commencements and attendance is voluntary, but they're so popular nowadays, most students take them for granted. End quote.

So tell us, what's going on? Why have these race-specific graduation ceremonies become so popular? Boy, it's really unfortunate, but one of the reasons is that colleges are increasingly ethnically balkanized, and this has been going on for some time without the public finding out about it. Has it kind of been a reverse trend? Like, since we've had integrated institutions, has there been like a resegregation over time? There has been a resegregation. The resegregation, though, began much sooner.

than most people realize. Fifteen years after Brown versus Board of Education, the first black students who entered the Ivy League in the late 60s were demanding segregated housing, segregated orientation programs, essentially what we understand to be a segregated admissions track system. And it has persisted ever since. Segregated graduation ceremonies are a relatively new form of this trend, but some of them go back 10 or 20 years.

But it's kind of the penultimate stage of neo-segregation. Students go through a diversity fly-in, a segregated orientation program like cultural connections at Yale University. Then they're involved in all kinds of identitarian stuff throughout college and the segregated graduation ceremony sort of puts the final touches on the neo-segregated college experience. Students will then after the segregated graduation ceremonies be inducted into segregated alumni groups. So you wrote that you yourself would never participate in this kind of ceremony. First off, are you a minority yourself?

And if so, why do you find this idea so offensive? Am I a minority? I'm an American. I'm an American who has both white blood, black blood, Hispanic blood, and South Asia. blood in me. I wouldn't, if people were to ask, I guess I'd say that I'm black. But I wouldn't attend one of these ceremonies, particularly because my best friend in college is white.

I wouldn't have been able to see him at graduation or sit with my friends at graduation. The idea is just so foreign to me. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly special about graduating college because you're of a particular race. I just reject that concept altogether. Well, in your piece, you also write that the word diversity, I'm quoting now, the word diversity is now invested with meanings that have nothing to do with actual diversity, end quote.

It's a really interesting thought there. I'd like you to just expound on that. Yes. diversity in our mind would mean that people are mixing, that students of different races are coming together and having conversation, studying together, going to the same parties. But diversity, as it's practiced on college campuses, actually means race nationalism.

I hate to be so forward about it. But when you hear someone say that a segregated house promotes diversity on campus, they're just lying to you. I'm not even sure that college administrators and students are genuinely thinking that these programs create diversity. They just say that it does because it gets people to stop asking questions about what these programs are for. If you were to look at the description of a segregated house, it would say something like, oh, this is to celebrate the African diaspora. If you were to look at a description of a segregated commencement ceremony, it would say this is for the celebration of black students, black excellence. If you were to look through some of the newspaper archives of college newspapers and brief yourself on the actual statements, black students, made in the debates over these programs, you would see that they wanted these programs for the

purpose of self-segregation. They wanted these programs so that they could promote a form of race nationalism that became popular in Black America in the 60s. Diversity has become this kind of first resort argument that everyone uses when there was some kind of special program made for minority students. And very simply, the universities are gaslighting the public. So you also wrote that activist students and college administrators are trying to cultivate group consciousness among racial minorities? What did you mean by that? Group consciousness is the way that minority college students and college administrators get unsuspecting freshmen to see themselves locked in a struggle.

for the fate of the country with white Americans. The idea is that you're supposed to believe that whites hate you, they dislike you, they don't respect your accomplishments, they're going to microaggress you. Whites today, they would say, have the same disdain for people of color that they did in, say, 1756. And what that does is encourage students to, self-segregate with other black students or Latino students or even Asian students, it's not just

black students. So for instance, cultural connections, which is Yale's segregated orientation program, it's for minority students, non-white minority students. And when students go there, they are introduced to all of the aspects of neo-segregation at Yale. So they get a tour of the black cultural center or Latino cultural center. Black students go off to the African-American Studies Department. Latino students go off to some kind of meeting with a few Hispanic professors that might be on campus. They are also introduced to ethnic clubs.

Yale has the Black Student Alliance. So this is how this works. Jacob Blecker, I think, that's how you pronounce his name, wrote an article way back in 2002. about cultural connections called cultural engineering. And he attended cultural connection and observed that minority students attend this program for distinctly political purposes. And that purpose is getting minority students to see themselves collectively as an interest group on campus that has all of these segregated services that has a special channel to people in the

university to discuss racial matters. That's what these programs do. Group consciousness is all about turning minority students against the country, against whites, and to devote their studies and potentially the rest of their lives to reshaping the country into some kind of post-American world. Yeah, so as you just explained, I mean, a lot of this seems geared toward preserving ethnic identity. And I wonder, do you think that they may be concerned or have a fear that if they do integrate fully into the majority, that they will lose their unique ethnic identity or be obliterated in that sense? And if so, how would you respond to that?

I would say that this is the very dilemma that white Americans faced when blacks advocated civil rights and integration. in the 19th century, in the 20th century, this is a sacrifice that people must be willing to make and have to make if we are going to have a unified society and a unified culture. Now, this gets very difficult and complicated when it comes to the question of black Americans. when I was interviewing a student at Wesleyan University, she told me, very frankly, that there was a part of her which envied whites who are able to say, for example, that they trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower.

This, in her mind, made her less American. So there's a desire on the part of many black Americans and African immigrants who become black Americans to create a new identity. And it's a product of American culture. It is Western, despite what they might say. But it gets very, very difficult for black Americans. But these are the same questions someone like Henry Cabot Lodge had in the late 19th century when he was opposing immigration from southern Europe. You know, will the culture change, will be, will things be unrecognizable in 30 or 40 years?

And ultimately, people made a decision that we would have to find a way to accommodate each other and to create a space in which, you know, Irish people can be respected, Scottish people, people, Italians. It is important that blacks have a degree of identity because they, for the most part, black Americans are the descendants of slaves who had the traces of their indigenous cultures taken away from them. This affects people, and I can understand that. If you are a descendant of Anglo-Americans, you can, if you choose to look back because I don't think Americans look back so much,

but if you choose to look back, you can say to yourself, you know, I am a descendant of Adam Smith, Lord Aftan, you know, if you're French, you can look on French history, the revolution, the polian, well, those aren't exactly highlights of French history, but, you know, the point remains, if you're Russian, You have Tolstoy, you have Turgenev.

Blacks want their Aristotle, they're Plato. And you saw a desire for that in the 60s when people were creating all of these, you know, new and weird academic programs, which intended to create a black epistemology. You saw blacks dropping their Anglo-derivative names for ones that affected Levantine origin. Now, the other side of that is that in creating a new black identity, loud black voices within the community began to reject what we would call middle class norms, what Amy Wax got in trouble for calling Berchua values. And so, neo-segregation doesn't just put black students and white students. at odds with each other. It also teaches black students

that the formula for success used by Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and other minority groups in the country is wrong, is based in racist ideology, et cetera. So what I would say to a

black student who says that is that they have to really go back and study the 60s very closely so that they can discern when things kind of went off the rail. And things went off the rail when guys like Stokely Carmichael

and Huey Newton came to prominence telling black Americans to reject Christianity, traditional values, capitalism, and the like. And the effect it's had can be observed the last 50, 60 years. You look at what are the effects of telling black students, maybe from the time they're in elementary school not to read so-called white books.

Only something like 24% of black students in the country are proficient in reading. And this persists despite the fact that something like 75% of black students graduate high school anyway, but they can't read at a high school level. And what happens is these students then, they get to college, they're put in a remedial program, and then they're sent to all of these sort of black nationalist stuff, it's just a mess. It's just a totally unworkable situation. So it's, yeah.

Well, I was just going to say you've brought up, obviously, a lot of the problems, and we started this by discussing the racially segregated graduations that are cropping up. But what do you think, I mean, we keep hearing about racial tensions in the media, and it seems like if anything, they're on the rise in recent years. What do you think the answer is here? How do we get along better as a country? Boy, you know, I'd like to say that Dr. King was the last founding father. He has to be rediscovered. That's really the only solution. One of them, well, at least one of them, the most important one for sure.

Dr. King really was able to get people to understand that, I think, maybe even slightly better than Lincoln, that our destiny is a country. depends on us working past these things. Black Americans, more than any other minority group in the country, have to keep to the liberal tradition that he espoused, you know, before he was assassinated in 68. Because if black Americans say, well, you know what, we want race nationalism, we want segregation, then it just opens the floodgates.

every other minority group will agree to that because it's our nature to be tribal, to want to be around so-called people like us. But in order to sustain the American project, that instinct has to be overcome. I don't really have easy solutions for that, but I think that we could go a long way by rejecting the idea. of that whiteness equals wealth and privilege and status. Not every white person lives like the Bush's vacationing at Kenny Bunkport on the weekends. Definitely. I wish I lived that life. The white underclass and the black underclass probably, you know, have always had much in common culturally. It's very much the case now. You look at the rise of out of wedlock birth rates and the white underclass, and you get frightened. At least I get frightened as a person who studied

Black American history in the 20th century. When people begin to lose themselves culturally, when they begin to destroy the foundation of what keeps society, stable, they begin to turn to unscrupulous leaders, demagogues. And in Black America, people began to turn to guys like Malcolm X. When did that happen? Right around the time the Black out of wedlock birth rate began ticking upwards, right around the time churches began reporting that black men were just missing. They didn't know where they were, they were unemployed. They wanted guys who gave, and the result was that blacks wanted someone who gave them a narrative of what they were, a great people that has since, you know, lost its way and which needs to now find itself again

in a transcendent narrative that gives them some kind of special place in the world. Donald Trump's election in 2016 reminded me a little bit of how black Americans, the conditions in which black America were headed in the 60s produced. Trump, as we know, played to identity politics enough that it could raise eyebrows, not enough that it could derail his campaign. But if you look at the people who wanted to vote for him where they were, you go to those towns. They're not what they were 40 or 50 years ago.

People are on opioids. There's no job. and they're angry. And I think the last 50 years of what the last called diversity and inclusion has occurred to their detriment. I think that what students need now more than ever is to understand just how difficult it is to sustain a multiracial society. and the last thing this country needs are teachers telling 18-year-olds that they are locked in a war with another racial group. And someone needs to step in and transmit a degree of self-awareness to these students because I'm not sure that they realize how their race nationalist ideology is being.

perceived by the public. This is going to take the country to a very dark place if this kind of thinking leaks out into the broader polity. Well, Dion, I really appreciate your article at the College Fix, and thanks for joining us by phone to share your thoughts. Thank you. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to Scotus 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Millennials are not in good shape. That's the takeaway from a new Wall Street Journal report that says

millennials are approaching middle age in the worst financial shape of any living generation behind them. Quote, hobbled by the financial crisis and recession that struck as they began their working life, Americans born between 1981 and 1996 have failed to match every other generation of young adults born since the Great Depression. They have less wealth, less property, lower marriage rates, and fewer children, according to new data that compare generations at similar ages, end quote. And this comes in spite of the fact that millennials have the highest education rate of any past generation. The report cites Ms. Brown, a compliance officer in Chicago, who says, quote, myself, a lot of my peers still feel like we're playing catch-up in the game of life, end quote.

So, Jared, you, I, Kate, we're all millennials here. why is our generation falling behind? Well, I think, first of all, the idea that the millennials have it the worst ever. It's a very millennial mentality, for one. It's kind of funny. It reminds me of that that time writer maybe a few months ago who said that our generation has never known prosperity, which is just not true. I mean, our generation has known an incredible amount of prosperity in a time where the United States in particular was obviously a Supreme World Power, very prosperous. But I think there's definitely some truth to the idea that millennials are behind in issues like a property ownership, which certainly the baby boomers in earlier generations maybe valued more highly.

Certainly we have been buried by student loan debt, which is a serious issue where we have these student loans. Of course, we have a lot of politicians who say everybody needs to go to college. We fund the student loans. And of course, a lot of millennials haven't been able to find a good job after they've gone through years and years of schooling. and it's more difficult for them to pay for those loans. They have a lot of expenses. And to a certain extent, it's because to a certain extent a short-term thinking on the part of many millennials. But, of course, we live in times with the difficult job market.

We had the 2007 recession, which definitely set us back. And to a certain extent, too, I think we haven't seen the full fruit of what millennials are capable of as well. I mean, that the oldest millennials now are around 38 years old. A lot of them are kind of hitting their peak money-making years. This might change a little bit in the future as a lot of millennials kind of develop into their careers. That's true. At this point, you know, baby boomers were stoned out at Woodstock. So they did make a comeback.

I'm not sure if that's totally accurate. But, no, I mean, I think it's interesting. I think, you know, yeah, you can say that millennials are not as bad off as some news reports would suggest. But at the same time, there have been some real things. I mean, actually, I don't know when you graduate a college year, but I graduate in 2009, right in the middle. middle of the worst recession. And I remember being really... You didn't get a shovel-ready job? I ended up, I did get a job, but I applied to 30 places and only heard back from one, and that included internships. And I remember reading the news, like my spring semester senior year

and being like, oh my gosh, I have a liberal arts degree. I am so screwed right now. And I mean, it worked out, but at the same time, you know, I don't think when I was going to... to college, I probably thought as seriously about careers. I don't have student debt, thanks to my parents getting an inheritance, but I didn't take that question, frankly, nearly as seriously as I should have. And I don't think a lot of people in our generation really realized how extreme the college debt they were being asked to take on was. I mean, there was sort of this idea that we had college debt, but then you look at the numbers now and people, you know, it's so much higher than it used to be. And I don't think our generation really understood that when they were taking the responsibility, that it was disproportionately higher.

Yeah, to a certain extent, it seems like a lot of the boomers in particular push their kids to, of course, go to college, get a degree. That's what you need to have financial success in this world. And for that generation, I think it very much made sense. But I think we've had some issues where, yeah, some degrees have been kind of watered down. A lot of students get degrees that don't actually lead to any skills that will lead them to a job. job in the near-term future. And then when you're looking at these student loans and you're looking at the bloat of the American university system, I think there's a tremendous amount of bloat there. We talk about bailing the system out. But remember, that gets bailed out on the

backs of a lot of hardworking people who may not have had the chance to go to college, but now have to pay the taxes to bail out these people who had the chance to go to college. That's not it. That will certainly hamper, you know, our generation and future ones. I think I think it's more of rethinking how we've done some of these things. I mean, America's gone through so many economic transitions. I mean, think of what, you know, my grandparents faced during the Great Depression. I mean, that's, I mean, that's a real hardship. Then they had to fight a world war in the middle of that thing. So, you know, we have the war against climate change. We do have the war against climate change and plastic straws and all these very serious things

that threaten our existence on this earth. But for sure, I mean, I think we sometimes lack a little perspective when it comes to some of the things that our grandparents and earlier generations face, and that includes every generation. So I don't think, I think Americans are resourceful people. I think the fact that millennials are a little behind the curb, maybe some of their behaviors will change. And I think Americans will figure this out. There may be some pain in the process, but we're a dynamic society. It's certainly compared to others. I think that long-term economic payoff will be there for Americans. Yeah, I think we just got to address the question of higher and this idea that everyone has to go to college in order to be a respectable citizen

and in order to make a living, it's just not true. I mean, there's a lot of professions that are under, there's a labor shortage in some, like, you know, being a welder or something, you make a lot of money doing that. And, you know, this idea that this careerist bias, I think, that we have, that everyone just has to go through the same funnel is just not true. It's not helping. It's actually hurting students because they get a bunch of debt. like you were saying, Kate, it worked out for you, but a lot of other folks with liberal arts

degrees, it's not working out. I think we have to look at the incentive structure there because right now government is subsidizing education, which drives up tuition prices, which drives up debt for students. And the debt is affecting not just their financial situation, but that affects their personal life decisions. Like they're delaying marriage and not having kids largely because of debt. So I think it really is, it's kind of a perfect example of how public policy can have like a negative skewing effect, you know. Yeah. I did. And I think adding to that worry is this recent poll by Gallup that now four and ten Americans embrace the idea that socialism is better for our country. And that's

highly skewed towards millennials and younger generation, even though we have in many sense a lot of prosperity, people see these few disfunctions and say, well, maybe the government can can step in and fix all of these problems. We'll have something like democratic socialism that'll, you know, pay all my loans and make everything free for me and my generation that'll fix things. To me, it was notable. I had a chance to interview Ricardo Pita, who's a former heritage intern who grew up in Venezuela, who said, hey, you know, we had some bad things going on in Venezuela. It wasn't all terrible. We thought socialism was going to bail us out, but it wasn't worth the risk. It ended up causing more harm in the long run and making things more of a catastrophe than the alternatives. And I think

that that's the worry right now is that there are a lot of young people who think that socialism and they maybe don't have a great understanding of history. They don't understand how socialism has destroyed the lives of so many people. And it looked like such a great alternative to the struggles they were currently going through. And I think that is a serious challenge for our time. I think that's why so many people are embracing this idea that will ultimately just lead to worse things. The struggles that we have now will all be exacerbated and will create all new ones and tyranny. Well, I think one of the things that struck me reading the article was how many conservative policies could maybe help these situations. You know, of course, Lindsay Burke at

the Heritage Foundation, along with others, has documented that increasing financial aid to students actually drives up college costs as well from a common sense perspective. You know, there's options like community college, like in state college. There's so many ways, if you you do feel like you need a degree to get one far more affordably than, I mean, there was one couple in this story who had nearly 400,000 in college debt. You know, there's also the questioning thing of, you know, no offense to Daniel here who's getting a master's, but in general, how many people actually need higher ed past getting a bachelor? I'll let you defend yourself later. But the other thing is like, you know, housing, that was an interesting one for the dimension. Well, conservatives have a lot

of solutions. They would like there to be less regulation. They would like there to be more areas that are allowed to be built denser, which would allow for housing to go down in some of these areas. And it's just sort of a shame that, you know, not surprisingly, I guess, due to the media's message that people are thinking the only way to solve this is through socialism or big government. I mean, there are answers here. We don't have to live this way. Yeah, we're really doubling down on the problems that that led us to this point, which I think, you know, a lot of people don't see that, I think, in their lives, but I think that's definitely the case, Kate. I'll just say in defense of myself, my master's in theology is going to pay big bucks down the

line. So let's leave it there. Thanks guys for coming on and closing out the segment. Thank you very much. And thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud. And please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.