The Dispatch Podcast - Bring Back Shaming | Roundtable

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Sarah Isgur is joined by David French and a tanned Jonah Goldberg to discuss the legacy of cancel culture, the impact President Trump’s negotiating style will have on the future of Gaza, and the sorry state of American public schools. The Agenda: —Cheap grace when forgiving people —A lot of FAFO’ing in the Middle East —Solving the public education crisis —Ending proceduralism —Pro-penny lobby: Talk to us Show Notes: —Tom Friedman's piece on Trump and Gaza Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgert. I've got Jonah Goldberg and David French. Boy, we have some topics today. I want to talk about the broader direction of cancel culture, what it means to have a two-state solution in Israel. And finally, public schools has this experiment just failed America? Oh, and not worth your time? What about those pennies? Are we getting rid of those? Is that done now? Jonah, you, you look very well right now. If you like to explain why you're looking so fresh. I don't know that I look fresh. I think I look like I've been drinking too many rum drinks. But I am in a place called Virgin Gorda and the British Virgin Islands. We do this annual trip with some friends. and it's lovely here.

And it's breezy and cool at night and good meals with good people. It's nice time. So there you go. I miss my talk. And David and I are stuck in the Nor'easter winter vortex of February. But happy Valentine's Day to you both. Oh, we're going to start with the not worth your time. All right.

Let's get into it. I want to talk about some big picture thoughts and feelings, less news of the day today, but we'll peg it to some news of the day stuff. So last week, Doge staffer Marco Ales, a former SpaceX employee, issued his resignation following the resurfacing of several comments, including but not limited to, You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity and normalize Indian hate. After he resigned, Vice President Vance wrote on X, while he disagreed with some of Ellis's posts, I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life.

Following the comments Elon Musk issued a poll on X to decide whether Elez should be reinstated. 78% of respondents voted for Elez's return to Doge. Okay, so that's what started this conversation. But the conversation I want to have with you all, starting with you, David, is we sort of had the political correctness of the 90s, the aughts, whatever, and then we go into what people have deemed canceling someone cancel culture. And in many ways, people read the 2024 election in, you know, every way that they wanted. But one of those things was the rejection of cancel culture, this idea of social opprobrium or professional consequences because

of someone's, you know, saying something that the majority doesn't agree with or doesn't like or doesn't think was phrased wisely. So my question to you, David, is how do we relearn how to draw red lines on character when cancel culture basically turned a generation against moralistic exclusion? Let's just be real honest about what J.D. Vance is doing here. This is friend-enemy distinction stuff. This isn't anti-cancel culture. You know, look, I mean, against the larger backdrop of all this, like, can't we have grace for this

so far as we know, completely unrepentant to racist. I mean, there's no evidence that this guy has fallen on a sword in any way. I mean, some of these comments are pretty darn recent. It's not like pulling up the first time he got Twitter when he was 14 or something. This is a, you know, these were very recent comments. And it's coming against the backdrop of when, you know, MAGA has been just exulting in the, what for an awful lot of people has been a traumatic removal from their jobs, from their places of residence, from their homes, as the USAID wind down has happened, and they're just yanking all these government workers back to the United States. This has been extraordinarily disruptive and difficult for an enormous number of people

who've done nothing, and MAGA exalts in that, and then this poor racist guy, well, where's our compassion? All this is friend-inemy distinction stuff. That's what this is. But to your larger point, Sarah, I think, you know, where we really went wrong was not in imposing standards on people for their speech in private settings. So, you know, it's not wrong for a company to have some standards. Where we went wrong is we began to push the imposition of standards well into what you might call good faith argument, good faith disagreement to the point where mainstream good faith speech was cancelable. And so it created this sense of almost like a reign of terror.

And I think the answer is not to go back to the other extreme, which would be no standards at all, that no kind of speech, no kind of activity can really deem you cancelable, to back to a sensible distinction. And that sensible distinction, I wrote about this several years ago, right after Roseanne show was canceled after she tweeted out some things. very late night, extremely racist comments about Valerie Jarrett, Obama's former advisor, that she later then blamed on Ambien, which then led to one of your better public statements from Ambien, which was racism is not a known side effect of Ambien.

But this was sort of the height of when do you cancel somebody, when do you not? And I was arguing that we need to make this a good faith, bad faith distinction. You know, James Daymore, this was pretty soon after James Daymore had written, a kind of a manifesto on Google had actually solicited from its employees' suggestions about how to increase diversity. And he had written something about how we can't attribute all of the disparity in programming, hiring to misogyny or sexism that there are, but there are other ways without resorting to sex discrimination, increased diversity. He offended people and was tossed out. And there's a difference between Roseanne Barr and James Daymore, we're not

the same thing. And so we just obliterated good faith, bad faith in favor of agree, disagree. And if you agreed with me, you were safe and you disagreed, you were not safe. And I feel like there's an easy way to come back from the current brink we're at, which is either we're hyper intolerant or we're at a point where nothing matters what anyone says. And those can't be the two polls. Obviously, I agree with the last thing that David just said. And Jonah, this obviously feels like it's a microcosm for so many other things. I mean, executive power, right? Instead of reigning in executive power, let's just also abuse executive power or prosecutions. Well, they lawfaired against us instead of ending lawfare, will lawfare against them or just not

prosecute our friends or drop, you know, things against them. So I guess, Jonah, my question to you is, okay, ideal world. How are we supposed to hold people accountable? Because I kind of walked into, let's say, the 2020s thinking that actually what our society had messed up was the end of shame, that shame is an important societal value. And I don't just mean about language. In fact, I think language is one of the least important ways we use shame, as we've seen. But I guess I don't know how we bring back shame when all I see is it being used poorly. First of all, I just want to say, like, this whole, like, you couldn't pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity thing. You could pay me to marry anybody that I didn't want to marry.

That's the thing that bothers me about that line. It's just like, you know, like, they could be a similarly pseudo intellectual demi-Jew from the Upper West. of Manhattan just like me, and I'm like, if I don't want to marry them, there's not really a price I'm going to take for doing it. Anyway, yeah, this sort of is downs, and I agree entirely with David about the bad faith nature of this. I mean, I still go back to the time where I got into a Twitter fight with Donald Trump when he was a candidate, and I made fun of him for being up all night tweeting at me like a 13-year-old girl, and he was outraged by my sexism and said that National Review had to fire me and that Fox had to fire me because it was

so outrageous and disrespectful to women that I would compare, that I would belittle 13-year-old girls or teenage girls. That's cancel culture. That's what he was trying to do, right? And that's what these guys try to do all the time when it's someone from the other team. They'll use the nearest weapon to hand to destroy them. They won't show grace for them. But more broadly, you know, Irving Crystal once said the core insight of neo-conservative

was that it was using social science to prove that most of the things your grandmother told you were right. Of course, there was a role for shame and stigma in society. It is, it has an, you know, it is an evolutionary adaptation. It is something that is inherent

in human nature. And the trick is not to say that stigmatizing people is wrong or that shaming people is wrong. The question of right or wrong depends on what behavior or actions you're shaming and which ones you're not. I think we kind of just lost equilibrium on this stuff, right?

We veered from so far to the left, so far to the right, everything's so tribal that no one wants to have uniform standards for anything. It's, you know, standards for my team are different than the standards for your team stuff. And we find that, you know, as you talk about the executive privilege stuff and our executive authority stuff, I think it's just down the board. You look at things that right-wingerers were calling, literally calling Joe Biden a tyrant, a dictator, lawless, whatever. And when Trump does pretty much the same stuff, or at least equivalent stuff, it's all, you know, finger-snapping, you go, Donald, it's awesome, right? And there is, you know, we say this all the time around here, but, you know, behind every double standard is a single unconfessed standard. and the single standard is we're right and the other side is always wrong.

And I just, I find it really, really tedious. So, David, to your point that I think some of these comments were as recently as about six months ago, right? September of 2024, if I'm remembering that correctly. And this person's about, he's 24, 25 years old. And at the same time, though, when I see that someone's Harvard admissions were revoked

because someone sent Harvard the text messages that that person was exchanging with them, you know, when they were, yeah, 14, 15 years old, but they're still only 17 or 18 years old. I find that horrible and that we're raising kids to have a zero risk life because everything they say or if they think something wrong or express some idea incorrectly, that none of that's allowed. And so how, when is that line supposed to be,

and I take your point on like not repentant, But let me set up the scenario here. The comments are all the same. They're all from the same time period. But now he comes out and says, I didn't mean that. I was being provocative. It was stupid. You know, I don't regret saying things incorrectly, if that makes sense.

Like, I'm allowed to, like, mess around with bad ideas. I don't actually believe the things you think I believe about that. What would you say that? I would say that's a grown man who knew what he was doing and is trying to say job. Now, if actual repentance would be if you had apologized for this before your job was on the line and then had a demonstrated record of better behavior. I really do think that we are infantilizing these 20-something-year-olds. I mean, fair enough. We are. But is it because, like, he's not going into the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. Does it matter? Is it because the comments

are racist? Is it because, like, are there certain comments that? it would be okay, even if you find them not likable. You know what I'm saying? Right. What I'm saying is if you're a 20-something man and you're seeking a job in the federal government, you're going to have constitutional, every federal employee has constitutional responsibilities. And, you know, the bottom line is, Sarah, there's no defense of this.

This is not I was 15 and now they're crushing my life when I'm 17 trying to get into Harvard. this is he's a 20-something-year-old man we need to stop infantilizing people this is the kind of stuff that he was an officer in the United States military would create real consequences for him and nobody would bat an eye okay nobody would bat an eye

they would think this is exactly right he has zero entitlement to this job there are many many 20-something-year-old conservative men who've not done this look say you're sorry and be sorry and be sorry for a while, and then you can come back. But this sort of idea that I get to do whatever I want to do, and then when I'm under fire for it, I get to either not apologize at all

and then sort of create this, you know, rely on the friend enemy distinction, or issue this sort of quick apology, bygones, guys. That's what we would call in Christian circles, cheap grace, Sarah, cheap grace. And so say you're sorry and be. And be sorry. And be. You're sorry. And be sorry, and then come back in a bit. Take a moment and come back in a bit. But let's not infanelize this guy. Okay, Jonah, next topic. Almost a month, we've had this ceasefire agreement

between Israel and Hamas, and yet it feels every day like it's getting more and more tenuous. Hamas has refused to release any more hostages until they have received more humanitarian aid, and Israel has promised to resume fighting if the remaining hostages are not released. Netanyahu did not clarify in his statement on Tuesday whether he was referring to all the hostages

or those due to be released on Saturday, per the ceasefire agreement. Trump's approach to the conflict has been Trumpian, let's say. He had a press conference from the Oval Office this week, and he said, quote, if all of the hostages aren't returned by Saturday at 12 o'clock, I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. And of course, looming over all of this is Trump's proposed redevelopment of Gaza, wherein he moves two million Palestinians into neighboring countries. Jonah, we talked about whether this was a reset, the Middle East intractability, or whether, in fact, it was just a very unhelpful fishing with dynamite, as you said, a phrase that I've now borrowed for the last week. Thank you for that, by the way.

where are we on this a week later better worse you know if this ceasefire deal breaks apart what have we learned and what's your overall take before david i want to talk to you about the um the column by your co-worker thomas friedman so um just as a level setting thing i think it's important just to point out that like the idea that hamas as an entity deserves some sort of rationalizing some sort of sticking to the rules and fair play and all that kind of stuff is utter garbage right like if trump goes back on his word that may be bad because it makes it impossible to get hostages out it may have all sorts of dire consequences but unfairness to Hamas is like literally not a thing right they are evil villains they only put on their uniforms apparently to

drag out and torment hostages in exchanges, and then they take them off to pretend they're civilians when they're murdering people. And so I only care about this in terms of what's good for the United States, what's good for getting the hostages out, and, you know, ultimately, what's good for either ending Hamas or making Israel strong enough to deal with Hamas down the road. And that said, I don't, I don't know really what's going on. I, there's part of me that suspects that one of the reasons why Hamas called off releasing more hostages is the amount of condemnation that came when they saw that the, the hostages that they had left basically looked like Auschwitz victims. And they were emaciated and sick and all that. And they're like,

holy crap, we got to, you know, give these guys some food and get them more presentable or we're going to get in a lot more trouble when they see what's left of these guys, which is a terrifying thought, but I think there's something to that, to a certain degree. Look, I mean, David knows this stuff as well or better than I do, but like, it has been talked about for very long time that the Palestinians are really just basically Arabs from Jordan and Egypt, and that there is not a, there is. There is not a thing called Palestinian. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that.

Nations can form pretty quickly, national identities can form pretty quickly. But it has been in this argument for a very long time that, you know, there's plenty of places for Palestinians to go. It's called countries like Jordan and Egypt. And the problem that Jordan and Egypt have is that, look, Palestinians, I'm not talking about the average citizen, but as a political force, are really destabilizing to our regimes too. And, you know, Yasser Arafat pulled all sorts of stuff with the Jordanians and nearly cost the nearly led to the toppling of the Jordanian regime a long time ago. One of the few things

that the Middle East really doesn't lack for other than oil is long memories. And so you cannot tell these people, oh, it'll be fine, just take all these people. It's a particularly weird thing for Donald Trump who thinks that refugees and migrant populations destroy nations to tell pretty fragile political systems, oh, absorb millions of refugees that don't want to be in your country and that you don't want and it'll all be fine. So I think this is something that is not well thought through. But again, if it's a negotiating tactic to get the Jordanians and the Egyptians to agree to something else to forestall that, which is how the Egyptians and the Jordanians are responding, as they're saying, we'll do all these other things, but we can't do

this. Then maybe it's fine. I don't know. But it's a mess. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance, can be serious.

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, David, I want to read you a segment of Thomas Friedman's column. What's most frightening about Trump's Gaza ravings? As you know, Thomas Friedman is a more left-wing columnist for the New York Times. but I found this interesting. Does Trump have any point? Well, yes. He is right that Hamas is a sick, twisted organization whose slaughter of some 1,200 people on October 7th, and kidnapping of some

250 more triggered the merciless Israeli attacks on Hamas, hiding underground in Gaza without regard to Gaza and civilians. Hamas used its Palestinian neighbors as human sacrifices with the goal of delegitimizing Israel across the globe. For many young people who get their news, only from TikTok videos, it worked, though it could not have been a more cynical strategy. Trump is also right that Gaza is now a hellhole as a result. And Trump is right that the Palestinian refugee problem has been kept alive way too long by cynics in the Arab world and Israel and incompetent Palestinian leaders. That's kind of an interesting admission about the refugee problem being kept alive too long.

And frankly, the propaganda against Israel sort of being recognized, although to say that it was cynical to use civilians as human sacrifices, I don't think cynical would have been the word I used. You know, war crime, et cetera, maybe a better word. But I'll take cynical. That's better than nothing. I mean, raw evil can also be cynical, but it doesn't capture the flavor of it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's necessary but not sufficient to describing it. And then he says basically, but this riffing doesn't help. But does it a little bit? I mean, the fact that we're even having this conversation seems like it's because yep, Trump proposes totally new thing and it makes people have to talk about the bigger picture. We were going to be talking about the bigger picture no matter what.

I mean, look, I think what we are dealing with here, let's back up a minute. Here is the way wars like this usually end. So the way this usually goes is if you have an attack on a foreign country from a hostile power, and we'll call Hamas isn't a nation state, but it's a hostile power. The country defending itself responds, defeats the hostile power,

occupies the land the hostile power had controlled, transitions it into friendlier control, and either leaves or maintains some sort of presence to ensure peace for a medium to long-term future. That option, Israel has taken off the table. It does not want to occupy Gaza in the way that you would normally see an end to this conflict. So that immediately places, and we understand why. And the reason why

is because, as we've seen, Hamas is a deranged homicidal death cult. Nobody wants to be co-located with Hamas. Nobody wants to be around Hamas. It is homicidal. It is pure evil. It is utterly deranged. And so Israel doesn't want to occupy Gaza after the fighting is over, but the problem then comes, who does? And it's definitely not Egypt. It's definitely not Jordan, a multinational Arab force. They do not want to be policing a Hamas den. The United States doesn't want to. That's why Trump is saying, well, somebody needs to move everybody forcibly out of there, which is a crime against humanity. It's a, it's a grave breach of international law, if that were to occur. And so what we have is a situation where Hamas is so horrific, so hard,

homicidal, so deranged that even a weakened Hamas, even one that has been stripped of the vast majority of its military power, nobody wants to deal with over the long term. And so how you cut that knot is that's the question going forward. And the way Israel had done it for years and years and years, was this process that, to use a name that was sort of bandied about, this process of what they called, what was called mowing the lawn. When Hamas got too aggressive and too powerful, they would clip its wings a bit and wait. And they thought that this was sustainable. And it turned out not to be sustainable. Hamas broke free, massacred Israeli civilians. And so the question really is, who will actually govern, who will actually govern Gaza and keep Hamas suppressed.

And it's not going to be us. Is it going to be Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia? Do we even want that? These guys are horrific. Have we seen in Yemen, these guys are absolutely horrific when it comes to any ability to engage in counterinsurgency warfare. but the original problem here is that nobody wants to govern that place while Hamas exists and nobody is willing to engage in the very long-term military slash occupational effort to

annihilate Hamas. And so I don't know that Trump's berserk comment really moves the needle one way or the other because nobody thinks we're going to do it. And we're still with the exact same dilemma. Who is going to govern this place? Does it get us off the two-state solution problem, though, Jonah, where everyone's just trying to make a two-state solution work, and that's really the only thing on the table? Like, that's not the only thing on the table now. But is it on the table? Like, is it occupying, America occupying Gaza and turning it into the Mediterranean Riviera is not on the table. I agree that that's also not on the table. But I feel like before everyone had to come to the table going, we're trying to get to a two-state solution. Now you get to

come to the table saying what are we trying to get to yeah so i mean i think it could go either way right on the one hand i mean this is a point i was making last week is like proposing dislocating relocating two million people off their land for the rest of their lives or even for a period of time right america taking sovereign ownership of gaza whack ado as that idea might sound it does all of a sudden, brace people for the fact that, like, this two-state solution process is not the only possible way events can go, right? I mean, and I think for some people, it might make the two-state solution thing seem less likely, but for other people, it might say, crap, given the other options that are out there, we should maybe figure out something that

involves more than endless meetings in hotel conference rooms around clever cheese to actually make this happen. And look, I mean, I have no problem with the idea of a two-state solution as long as Palestinians don't want that to be a temporary until they get their one-state solution, which is, you know, freeing, you know, purging Israelis from the river to the sea. And one good sign of that kind of good faith that would be required to make a two-state solution work would be to get them to stop chanting from the river to the sea, Israel will be free. You judge movements at minimum by what they say they believe it. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's still a fishing with dynamite kind of thing.

He's going to see what shakes out or what floats to the surface, and he'll grab some things and claim victory. And but the idea that he has a plan that it's all going to work out and, you know, this step and that step and this step and ta-da, we've done it. I don't think there's anything like that going on. One thing I just want to put out there is I don't think we've fully begun. We're so America-centered. We're so centered on the words that our president says that.

I don't think we fully absorbed the impact of Israel's military victories, that the Israel's military victories are ultimately far more consequential than anything that Trump is saying in this political, in this particular moment. And historians will look back at what happened after October 7th, and absolutely they will judge the outcome of the war by the medium term, long term response to Gaza. But also, let's not forget that Israel's core enemies, the enemies that Israel was most concerned about, have been humiliated, neutered, annihilated. The balance of power in the Middle East has changed dramatically in the last year in Israel's favor. And I think that is the paradigm breaker. Trump's comments are a, you know, might be a paradigm shaker. But in many ways,

it's Israel's military victories that have absolutely changed the facts on the ground. And, you know, one of the things that Hamas wanted to do is it wanted to trigger this kind of broader conflict because it would thought it would go differently than it did. And it went very poorly, very poorly for everyone confronting Israel. And I think to the extent we break the paradigm here, to the extent that things are shaken up, Israel's military victory, after, by the way, it's worst humiliation. and most consequential defeat, but Israel's military victory that followed that,

I think, is a, we're still not grasping how significant it is. There's a lot of F-A-F-O in the world right now. A lot of F-Oing, I would say. Right, right. Okay, here's my final provocative question to the two of you. Is our experiment with public schools,

like, is it time to call it, is it just a total failure? So I want to read you all some stuff. Results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, record low shares of U.S. students scoring at basic or above basic levels of reading. 67% of eighth graders scored at basic or better reading levels in 2024, which is the lowest number reported since the assessment began in 1992. Math scores falling.

They peaked in 2013 after several decades of an upward trend and continue to decline. Test scores, public opinion have made it clear that there's a serious problem with the public school system, 51% of U.S. adults believe that the public K-12 education system is going in the wrong direction. 69% of those respondents think that schools have failed to spend enough time on core academic subjects like reading math, science, civics, and history.

The decline of public schools is also demonstrated in the adult population. In 2017, 19% of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest level of literacy. In 2023, that number jumped to 28%. That is more than a quarter of, of U.S. adults that basically do not have reading proficiency. At the same time, it's not like the schools are inculcating some American tradition of character, David, of a de Tocquevillian American spirit of stoicism of the American character,

the founders. So I guess here's my thing. If we're not actually teaching, civics well and somehow hedonism has, you know, taken over American culture, whether because of or in spite of public education, it's still not doing its job then. So character formation, civics, not working. And then it's also not doing the basic thing of teaching reading. And we're spending more money every year per student as those numbers continue to go down. I guess if this were anything else, we would say, this has been an abject failure. Let's stop doing the thing that is increasingly failing children. Well, I recognize the question's provocative

because we're not going to be able to tear it down or replace with anything that is going to reach 50 million or so public school students. Well, not on this podcast. Right, right. But let's just, I think that you're hitting at something that I think is not just a public school issue.

It is one of the reasons why we've had a decline of trust in institutions. more broadly, is that we have been asking institutions to be something other than or in addition to the thing that they were created for for a long time. And when you begin to ask institutions that have particular purpose to keep adding purposes, then you're going to increase the chances that they're not going to be good at some of them. At the height of the woke wars, it wasn't enough to say, be a bank. You also had to be an engine of social change. It wasn't. enough to be a car manufacturer. You also have to be an engine of social change. So everything was

adding additional job descriptions. You're building ball bearings and you're an institution of an engine of social change. Well, what is the public schools have suffered from this for a while to greater or lesser degrees. But really over the last few years, we begin to see an enormous amount of unrest in both directions over, let's pull this institution that has our kids for eight hours a day for most of the year. Let's pull this institution not just into the job of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but let's pull it into our ideological enterprise. And when you do that, you're going to degrade its core function. You know, eight hours is a fixed pie of time. And when you start to add additional things into the eight hours or when you divert people from their

core focus in that eight hours, you're just not going to be as good. You're just not. And so I don't want to overstate this because I know that some of the politicization and additional kinds of optional curricula are, it's often exaggerated how extensive that is. So this is not every school district, but I do think the public schools as a general rule have suffered sort of in spades from this malady, which is, whatever your core job is, we're going to add stuff that isn't your core job. And we're just going to keep adding it and we're going to keep adding it. And then what you're not doing your core job well? How did that happen? And I think that we're kind of in this cycle with a number of institutions. Jonah just kind of feels to me if we, you know, through the magic

wand that David's right doesn't exist, waved the magic wand, shut down every public school tomorrow and had free schools that were not public schools. And those. some of those free schools like, you know, advertised, we're going to make sure your kid can read and do math before they leave. The end, I would think that school would be incredibly popular.

But that's not an option for parents right now unless you have the money to go to a private school. And many of the private schools do basically advertise that at this point. Why aren't we even having a conversation about this? I mean, I guess this goes back to this idea that complaining about wokeism

or these other things is a luxury. complaint, if you will, because we're not starving, we're not in an existential war with a foreign country. So I guess though I'm confused, it would seem like our children's education, both basic and civic, shouldn't be a luxury good. And yet nobody's really complaining about this right now. It didn't rank in the top 10 in the campaign. I agree with David about the stay-in-your-lane problem. I think that's a real thing. I don't think that that's like the major part of the story for public schools. I think it's one of these overdetermined phenomena kind of thing.

First of all, I mean, just off the top of my head, you got this generation that is growing up just using screens. And we, you know, when it's very telling that when people in Silicon Valley don't let their own kids use their products, that they know something about the real problems generated by these things, right? So that's one environment that's really bad. Another one is that this is a problem of success. A hundred years ago, a Sarah Isger of her age could be a nurse or a teacher.

And so you had an enormous number of wildly, cognitively overqualified people going into teaching. And they were committed to it. And now the Sarah Isger's can be doctors and lawyers and whatever. And I think that the, I'm not saying that everyone who teaches is stupid or anything like that. I'm just saying that the talent pool has been wildly diluted. I also think that teachers unions are a force for evil, but, and that you could have, but at the same time, I have lots of friends who have kids or are big champions of charter schools, homeschooling, classical academies, you know, all of those things are great.

But there's a bit of a correlation causation problem there. if you're the kind of parent who's willing to go extra far to make sure your kids are properly educated, they're probably going to get well educated wherever they go, right? Because the parents are just going to make sure their kids do their homework. The parents are going to make sure that their kids are responsible and they're going to be conscientious about it. And so you're talking about

a sampling problem that it gets a little difficult. That said, it seems obvious to me that some competition would be very beneficial and breaking up public school monopolies for education of schools and getting some virtuous competition where different schools have different ways of teaching, where parents have options, would be good. But I think it is such a huge and intractable problem about the quality of our public schools. And one of the things in defense of the public school people is the parents who are actively engaged and really care about their kids, they pull them out of those schools. The kids who are left have parents who are not particularly engaged in their lives don't really care about putting political pressure on the schools to get better. And so you get this vicious cycle kind of thing.

So I'm very tempted at the idea of blowing up these systems. I just don't think we, I'm fine with getting rid of the Department of Education. wouldn't want a one-size-fits-all blow it all up across the whole country approach. Like, let Massachusetts do one thing and let Illinois do another and let New York do another and then let everybody say, okay, they did it right, they did it wrong, and learn from it. But it took a long time to get into this mess and it's going to take a long time to get out. David, why isn't this a political issue that is as high on the list as health care is, which is still very high on the, when you ask voters, what is the top issue that you're voting on?

health care is still up there, even though it's not the thing we talk about every day. Why isn't education? Well, it dominates local political discussions more than other issues necessarily do. Although I will say local- Which book banning team you're on? Do you want to ban to kill a mockingbird or do you want to ban Tango makes three? I'm pretty bored with that school educational conversation. Well, and that's what I was going to say is that the local conversation has changed from,

do we have enough middle schools in Williamson County? Are we paying our teachers enough to where's the critical race theory? And that's the nationalization of the culture war has been brought into the local school boards to the point where for a time period in say 21, 22, 23, it was difficult in many, many parts of the country to have a school board meeting that actually focused on, say, math education, or facilities expansion or other infrastructure things in favor of this never-ending fight of the national culture war

that was often completely irrelevant to the locality. And so I do think that education was a huge local issue, but it was misdirected into the national culture war, which contributes to the problem. Because if you're trying to yank a school, which you perceive as being woke, and instead of yanking,

let's suppose there's validity to the complaint. It has gone off the rails in its sort of social engineering and you want to

yank it away from that. Let's presume that happened. They were yanking it back to the opposite direction of social engineering often,

not back to the sort of the median of we're focusing on our core academic disciplines. But I agree with Jonah

that a lot of this stuff is overdetermined in the sense that, You know, kids who come from stable to parent families who are doing pretty well financially tend to do well, public school and private school. Kids who come from much more vulnerable family situations tend to not do as well, public school or private school. But at the same time,

we can do better or worse. And if we're coming down from highs that we had in 2011, 2012, family formation was bad in 2011, 2012, and we were still doing better than we're doing now. So there is something that has changed that I think that is unrelated to that huge underlying issue of a family structure and sort of the state at which a student goes to school and what life is like at home. I will say just on the political question, just real quickly, like I think one of the reasons why you see this is that you need a certain slice of elites, maybe not one percenters, but the upper middle class to feel the pinch of a political.

issue to get it translated into media in ways that it otherwise wouldn't. And people of some affluence have school choice of some kind or another, right? Either they're sending their kids to a parochial school or private school, or by virtue of the fact that they're buying a house in a specific school district, they're sending their kids to a public school where like 20, 25% of the value of the home is actually captured by the value of the quality of the school district. And so they're more satisfied with the choices for their kids. And as you move down the socioeconomic ladder, I think where the problems are much more acute, it's difficult to break into the national conversation for those people because they're more working class.

They're not part of elite conversations in the big cities and all that kind of stuff. And so I probably would bet it's more of an untapped opportunity for one of the parties. if they could do it right, the problem is the Democratic Party is utterly beholden to the teachers' unions. I mean, utterly beholden to the teachers' unions. And the Republican Party wants to have a different conversation about education than making these schools better. It wants to talk about blowing up the Department of Education

and getting wokeness out. And I'm not saying that those are bad positions, but it's just a different conversation. I mean, it's incredible to me, David, as you mentioned the problems or the sort of universal truth that, yes, parents and families matter. to this, but there's been dramatic changes when, in fact, the family structure has not seen the same dramatic changes. I mean, you look at the public school enrollment numbers, and that

has seen dramatic changes. It had seen this overall rise in public school enrollment heading into 2020, and then you hit 2020, and boom, there's this cliff. Yeah. And it's rebounded only slightly, nowhere near the numbers that it was at in 2019. And so, to this point that Jonah had where, yep, and if you take out all of the kids whose parents are paying attention and put them in schools that actually say they're going to teach reading and math,

so we're only left with the kids whose parents aren't paying attention, again, this is a recipe for disaster, but it's not just a recipe for disaster for those families and those kids, though it is for a lifetime. It is a recipe for disaster for the country. You cannot have a self-governing republic,

without citizens. And citizens need to be able to read. Citizens need to be able to understand their form of government so that when someone, you know, for instance, tweets that we're going to fire the 1% of judges, that they can say, hey, you know what?

Like, I learned that that's not a thing in our country. And so, you know, for all these other things that we point out that are like, republic-ending crises that we could be facing, I don't think there's any one more important than this one. And yet, again, I just feel like there's a fire in the other room and everyone sitting here squabbling over like someone cheated at Monopoly.

Well, I mean, I largely agree with that. And what we're dealing with is a situation where, you know, when the real Gulf of America, someone had a cartoon out recently, it was like the real Gulf of America was, is the gulf between the political activist class and hobbyist class and everybody else. And so the political activist and hobbyist class doesn't always decide elections, but they actually decide more than really is, they decide to a uncomfortable and dangerous degree exactly how the winning party conducts itself after an election. And so when you have a new victory, it is not the big bulk of Americans who might have come and voted because they're upset about upset about, they do believe

the border is out of control or whatever. These big picture questions there are. Or public schools are failing. And they come in and they vote on these big picture things that are affecting their lives. And then they recede back into the bushes, so to speak, like that Homer Simpson jiff, you know, with his eyes wide. He's just backs into the bushes. So they back into the bushes and they thought they delivered their mandate, like fix schools, cheaper food, and then they back away and they go back about their lives. And then the activist class are the only ones left in that sort of day-to-day in the politician's ear. And they're going to always filter this through their pet issues. They're always going to filter it. So if the mandate is fixed education and you get it

sort of from the left, well, a lot of the left activists are saying, well, you know what that means? more like DEI. And then on the right, you know what that means? More patriotic education, whatever that term means. And they quickly take their eyes off the ball, off the main thing,

because the activist class is the only people they're hearing from until the next election cycle. And I'm really convinced that this is one of the things that is creating this back and forth ebb and flow of our politics, is that we have such,

a bifurcation of political engagement in this country that neither party for a generation has solved for the main things that people are worried about. And that's why we've had four lead changes in the House in 20 years, four party control changes in the presidency in 20 years. We've had four Senate control changes in 20 years. And that is not normal in American history. And so I think, Sarah, you're hitting on a very important point, which is there are these very big things that are not, that are in a state of decay, and we're not hitting the core of those problems in favor of often the pet ideological issues of the activist class. And that exacerbates the problem rather than fixing it. Last word to you, Jonah, fix education. So Francis Fukuyama,

I had him on a lot of the week on the remnant, and he put me onto this guy, Nicholas Bagley. who's a law professor at University of Michigan. And one of his points about why we can't have nice things, right, why we can't build stuff anymore, right? It took, what, 18 months to build a Pentagon? It took 22 years to do the big dig is, because the administrative state is obsessed with proceduralism. And proceduralism is this idea that you have legitimacy,

if you check every box about the order of operations, and the fine print about everything that the government is supposed to do. And if you stick to the procedure, you're in the right. And I get it. Everyone wants to be compliant with the law, right? But I feel like this Excel helped. The problem with this is that it makes it impossible

for bureaucrats to do obviously the right thing because they have to check all the boxes about the proceduralism, right? It's sort of their, it's kind of like the bureaucrats are teaching themselves to the test, right? And they, they, and I kind of feel like, If you have one good administrator in a school district that says, yeah, I get the red tape stuff that we're supposed to be adherent to,

but we're supposed to educate kids. And I think a lot of public schools could do, could fix a lot of their problems. But you have this explosion. I meant to look up the numbers. An explosion of schools, employees who are administrators, right, bureaucrats, rather than actual teachers. Because, and this is in higher education. It's in private schools.

It's really in public schools. And that's because the proceduralism has become the real mission for a lot of these institutions. And if you just got back to some sort of dynamic leadership that was consonant with what voters and parents want, I think you could solve a lot of these things, but it would require bureaucrats, the Democratic Party, big city machines, lawyers, no offense, to like sort of throw their heads in some cold water and say, what exactly are we supposed to be doing here? and it can't be just filling in boxes on a procedural checklist. We're actually supposed to be doing more for these kids.

And that's the spirit, I think, is missing. And, David, I think that goes back to where you started, which is if you ask the schools to teach kids to read, they'll focus on teaching kids to read. But if you ask schools to teach kids to read, be the engines of social change, be a fill-in for a home life that's broken. And so fill in that stability of a two-parent household,

or poverty issues, and do all of that, you can't have multiple priorities, right? So reading is going to fall to the wayside. Okay, a little not worth your time, question mark. And I was told by the powers that be that this was a silly topic that we shouldn't do. And yet we are going to do it anyway because that's what not worth your time is about,

David and Jonah on Sunday night. Trump announced that the Treasury would cease penny production to cut costs. Pennies cost 3.7 cents to make. And obviously, with inflation, we're not really using pennies that much.

We're not even really using cash that much. Back in, I believe it was 2002, I wrote a college paper on the elimination of the penny. So it's not like this is a new idea, and I think I got that idea from a West Wing episode a couple years before that.

So like, we've had a quarter century of useless pennies running around. And yet, a pro-penny lobbying group has said that, quote, without the penny, the volume of nickels in circulation would have to rise to fill the gap in small value transactions, far from saving money, eliminating the penny shifts and amplifies the financial burdens because nickels cost 13.8 cents to produce and distribute. So is it worth our time to eliminate the penny?

Should we just eliminate the penny and the nickel? Should we eliminate cash? What am I supposed to do here if I'm a conservative? You know, David? Well, so two observations. Well, one thing is you absolutely conserve cash, absolutely. But I do not care, Sarah, and I promise you with all of your persuasive ability that you have, and you have such considerable persuasive ability, you cannot make me care.

about pennies or nickels. You might, there's a slight opening to make me care about dimes, but you cannot make me care about pennies and nickels. You just can't do it. You cannot do it. Well, don't you think we should round things

to the quarter? I think having cash and quarters would do it for me. And Jonah, you know I'm a Chesterton's fence kind of girl, but I feel like we've been looking at this fence for a long time. The fence isn't serious disrepair. We've talked about the purpose of the fence.

The fence isn't doing anything. Is this a fence we can tear down? I think we could, I used to argue against getting rid of the penny because I thought it would be inflationary, but countries that have done it, it's not really inflationary because the rounding up and rounding down tend to cancel each other out. I kind of like the penny. I would like to keep the penny for emotional reasons. I need a penny collection.

But I think there's a good argument for just basically saying all of our change is going to be worth ten times what it is right now. and let people start using change, and part because I know this will appeal to David, I would love to go back to the time where I'm walking into an inn, I take out a little leather satchel full of coins, and I pay for my meal with it.

Yes, I'm in. You just made me care, Jonah. You just made me care. If they're the size of gold de blooms, I'm totally in. Yes. But the only thing I will say in a more serious done is under no circumstances

should we get rid of cash. Like, I'm against the digital dollar, I don't want all of our, all of our economic transactions to be utterly legible to the state. Having cash is a form of guarantee. It's a, it's a bulwark of freedom that you can do certain things, including commit crimes, outside of the purview of the all-seeing eye of Soron and to bring it back to David's turf. And so, but get rid of the penny, keep the penny. Rarely have I been so torn about an issue that matters so long.

I'm so in on your new vision because I want to live in a world where I walk into a restaurant and I just pull out a small sack of coins and the mere fact that it looks like full like that there's actually a sack of, you know, like in The Witcher or something and people's eyes pop. Like that guy and they're like, of course we have a table for you. Yeah, no, they're popping the other way. When that waitress sees you with a bag full of, you know, a clear plastic bag full of slot machine looking winnings. That's when they clock out.

They're leaving the diner. Waffle House is closed. The 24-hour waffle house closes its doors when it sees you. It's going to be a felt bag like my Dungeons of Dragons dice bag from when I was in middle school. Exactly.

And it's going to be full of gold coins. And I'm just going to lightly shake it when I walk into an inn, of course, you know, with my broadsword strapped on my back. Uh-huh. And people's eyes are just going to pop. And they're going to, sir, take this seat.

They're going to kick people out of their seat to give me their seat with that in this new world, Jonah, that you're creating. And I'm here for it. That's right. All right. My proposal, I think, is very reasonable, which is quarters and cash. That's where I am right now. Get rid of everything else. Also, if you are an employee of said pro penny lobby, please email me.

I'm dying to know about your day. Just everything about your life, how you got into this. Like, who is a member of the pro penny lobby? This is fascinating to me. I assume it's a commodity play, right? I mean, like, but I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. We did have to use them in chemistry class.

You know, you do the thing where you drilled a little hole and then you use the chemical reaction to hollow out your penny. So, yeah, that's, there's metal there. All right. Thank you, listeners. This has been another episode, such as it was, of the Disney. I'm going to be able to be.