The Megyn Kelly Show - Jason Riley on Critical Race Theory, Policing in America, and Thomas Sowell's Honest Intellectualism | Ep. 115

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of "Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell," to talk about the rise in murders in America, media narratives about police, the truth about police and Black Americans, charter schools and teachers' unions, Critical Race Theory and slavery, Obama and the GOP's focus on culture wars, welfare reform, Thomas Sowell's honest intellectualism, what Riley would do if he became president in 2024, the minimum wage and affirmative action, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, one of my favorite, favorite people to read, Jason Reilly. This guy's super brilliant and he's super honest and he doesn't care if you don't like it. My kind of person. He's a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's author of the new book Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell, the brilliant Thomas Sowell.

And he happens to have authored one of my favorite books when it comes to race and police and culture, a book called Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. And that is just a massive truth bomb that he promoted on, among other places, the Kelly File a few years ago that I read and have reread since many times. And I think you're going to love that as well.

So we're going to get into all of that with Jason. And we're going to kick it off with a good discussion on this surge in murders in not just our major cities, but in our suburbs now too, and whether the plan to defund police is likely to help that. So Jason, in one minute, first this. Jason, how are you? I'm good. How are you, Megan? I'm good. I am thrilled to have you. I'm such a fan, as you know. You're brilliant and really excited to talk to you. Well, thank you. And in a future episode, it needs to be you and Naomi.

Okay. Sounds good to me. Can we start with the crime rate? Because I've seen that you've been writing about it. And, you know, as a fellow New Yorker, I worry about it here, but it's not just our city. According to latest stats, there's been a 30% increase in homicides, the greatest of all crimes. Some people defend this by saying, oh, no, no, you're like, other crimes are down. Oh, but murders are way up. 30% increase in homicides across 34 U.S. cities year over year. Murders up 37% across 57 localities. So it's not just the big cities. And here in New York City, you pointed out in a column recently, the shootings and the homicides have risen by 97% and 44% respectively in the last year, felony assaults up by 25%.

I could go on. This is here in New York. Seven of the eight Democratic mayoral candidates are pledging to cut the police budget or prosecute fewer suspects. Great. And it's not, you know, Philly's a mess. Baltimore's a mess. All these major cities seeing homicides up across the board. Why is it happening?

And do you think this actually will cause people to reconsider this nonsense about cutting cop funds? Well, to answer the second question first, yes, I do. I think that was always something favored by sort of the wokest of the woke. I don't think it ever really resonated with everyday people. And I think the crime stats you just cited will quash that effort largely. Why is it up? I mean, why wouldn't it be up? If you look at what we've been doing in recent years in terms of these bail reform policies, not just here in New York, but throughout the country that take away discretion from judges in terms of holding suspects or releasing them on bail. We've taken away that discretion.

During COVID, we were releasing people early from prisons to avoid crowding. And then, of course, you have this defund the police rhetoric, which I think results in police not just defunding the police rhetoric, but really anti-law enforcement generally has been on the rise, particularly in the wake of George Floyd. You've seen these protests. You've seen targets put on the back of police. They are being scapegoated for all kinds of social ills. I think that causes them to pull back, to engage less with the general public, to get out of their cars less. And the result is that the criminals have the run of the place. And so I'd be shocked if crime wasn't going up, given what's been going on lately. This is a real issue, because even if you live in the suburbs, according to the

people who are studying this, and this is a quote, murder rose historically, even in the suburbs and rural areas this past year. That's not what you want. You don't want historical rise in the murder rates, suburbs, local cities, large cities, you know, across the board. And in one of your columns, you talked about what what's going on in Baltimore, where this is from something you recently wrote, they began defunding police a decade ago. Since then, nearly 3000 of Baltimore's residents have been murdered. No matter you write in March, the city's top prosecutor announced that the era of tough on crime prosecutions are tough on crime prosecutors is over and that her office would no longer pursue so-called minor offenses. This year, Baltimore's homicide rate, which is already 10 times the national average, has risen by almost 20 percent. So in the face of all these numbers, you've still got these more liberal cities, or at least run by more left-leaning politicians, right now doubling down on these crazy promises.

Right. And it's not just anecdotal evidence, Megan. There have been empirical studies done about what happens after a high-profile incident involving police and Black suspects. The media swoops in. Washington, the Justice Department launches investigations. There have been studies done on what happens in the wake of all this. What happened in Baltimore after Freddie Gray, what happened in Chicago after Laquan McDonald, what happened in Ferguson after Michael Brown, the same pattern. Police pull back. They are less aggressive, policing takes place. And crime spikes, particularly violent crime. It happens time and time again. And of course, the folks who pay the highest price are these minority communities who are most in need of effective policing. So it's not just anecdotal. It can be shown empirically. An economist named Roland Fryer at Harvard has done studies on this,

and he's not the only one who's done studies on this. What troubles me is that all of this seems to be based on a false narrative, this focus on policing. The reality is that the problem is violence that does not involve police. The violence involving police is quite rare. And I wish the media would do a better job of putting these incidents in perspective. And what's happened is that because each of these incidents gets more attention than it used to, thanks to social media, thanks to all the camera phones out there, people are under the impression that it's happening more often. But those two things aren't necessarily the same. And the data, the empirical data shows that it's happening less often. So just to put this in perspective, New York City is a police department that has been keeping detailed records on shootings going all the way back to the early 1970s on police shootings. So in 1971, police shot more than 300 people in New York City and killed 93.

You fast forward to 1991, police shootings are down to 100 and 27 people are killed. You get to 2019, police shootings are down to 34 with 10 people killed. So you're talking about roughly 85, 90% reduction in police shootings and police shooting fatalities over a roughly 50-year period. That's what the data shows. But the rhetoric out there is that we have an epidemic of cops targeting people, particularly young Black men. It is completely divorced from reality. And that is what troubles me the most. We had these protests last summer based on this belief that what happened to George Floyd is typical. Happens all the time. I walk out of the door every day worrying about something like that happening to me. No, it's not typical. It's rare, and it's

increasingly rarer. And so that's what I find so troubling about this discussion. You want to go after bad cops? Yes, let's go after bad cops. All cops are not perfect. Some of them shouldn't be cops. Maybe it should be tougher to fire some of them. Maybe we can do something about the immunity. But the idea that the major problem in these cities is policing is ridiculous. In Chicago in 2019, there were 492 homicides. 492. Three involved police, Megan. Three out of 492. I mean, that's not a policing problem, but that's what we spend all our time talking about, policing. Well, and you've pointed out that the biggest beneficiaries of the trend in reducing the numbers who are killed by murder and, you know, just overall, are are blacks, who who in

your book you wrote comprise 60% of the murder victims in the Big Apple in 2012. So black people are benefit the most when we manage to reduce the murder rates. How do we do that? We need more police on the streets. But we're pushing this false narrative about police being the bad guys. So we get them off of the streets or just sitting in their cars doing nothing, which leads to a spike in the murder rate, which disproportionately affects black people. And somehow this makes, in particular, white liberals feel good about themselves. Yes, and that is another problem here, is that you have a liberal elite out there, a black and white liberal elite, that claims to be representing the interest of these low-income individuals who are most affected by violent crime, but are not. Poll after poll shows that the people who live in these communities, everyday black

and brown people who live in these communities, want more policing. They are very interested in crime control. And it is by no means a new phenomenon. I could cite you polling data going back 30 and 40 years about low-income Black residents of these communities calling for more cops, calling for longer sentences, and on and on and on. So when you go and turn on your television and listen to these talking heads call for defunding the police or say that the policing in these communities is a bigger problem than the criminals in these communities, they are not speaking for the residents of these communities. They are not. And I think it's a shame that the media continues to turn to them

to speak on behalf of the residents of these communities because they're not speaking for them. You know, we've had a lot of discussions on this show over the past nine months about cops and systemic racism and all the charges. And this is what you hear, that police are more likely to see a weapon where none exists when they look at a black person, that police are definitely more likely to rough up a black suspect, that bail disproportionately leads to poor and often black defendants sitting away, wasting away in jail pre-trial, then it affects others, you know, in particular whites who may have more economic resources. That blacks get sentenced more harshly than whites do. That the criminal justice system as a whole has systemic racism baked into it in such a way that the entire system may need to be revamped and that, you know, police officers have such an inherent bias now, whether it's based on crime stats or not, that they're treating black people in an unfair manner. Right.

So people looking at the problems of the system aren't really looking at the bottom line murder rates. They're looking at all these other little things that add up to what they call systemic racism, and they say a need for overhaul. I would just challenge them on their data and their logic. If racism explains what's happening today, why were there lower Black crime rates, lower Black arrest rates, lower Black incarceration rates back in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, when obviously there was a lot more racism and a lot more racism in our criminal justice system. It just doesn't make logical sense. In 1960, Black men were murdered at a rate of 45 per 100,000.

By 1990, that had climbed up to 140 per 100,000. I mean, was there less racism in 1960 than in 1990? Obviously not. Something else is going on here. So I would, and some of this is just outright false. I mean, the claim that Blacks commit the same crime and get longer sentences simply is not supported by the facts. If you and I commit the same crime, Megan, but I've committed it four times before, that's going to play into the sentencing. And a lot of these claims that Blacks receive

different sentencing don't take that into account. So you really do have to look at the methodology of these studies being released. And criminologists that have looked into this point out that Black crime rates were declining, declining in the 1940s and 50s. The Black homicide rate for Black men fell by 18% in the 1940s, and then by another 22% in the 1950s, all the while remaining relatively stable for whites. And this was particularly noteworthy because this is a time when blacks are moving from rural areas into urban areas, and urban areas are usually much more violent traditionally. Yet the black homicide rate was falling.

And this trend would begin to reverse itself starting in the late 60s and start to climb in the 70s and 80s and on into the early 90s. So it's climbing at a time when racism in society in general is lessening. So this whole idea of citing racism as this all purpose explanation for what's going on in terms of the Black crime rate just does not hold up to any serious scrutiny. So why? Why was the Black crime rate climbing over those decades? I think it has to do with what's happened since the 1960s in terms of the Black family. Back in the 1940s and 50s, you had much more stable Black families. Most Black kids, even into the early 60s, were raised in a home with a mother and a father.

Today, most black kids are not raised in a home with a mother and a father. And in some of these urban communities that have all this crime you were talking about, your Baltimore's and so forth, it's up to 80 or 90 percent. And the social science on the negative correlation between an absent father in the home and use of drugs, dropout, school dropouts, teen pregnancies, involvement with the criminal justice system, and on and on. All these bad outcomes are associated with absent fathers. And I think that's what you see going on in Chicago, these young Black men running around shooting each other because they have no sense of what it means to be a man, and they're acting out. And that's an absence of Black fathers in the home and in these communities raising these kids. So that, I think, is what largely explains what's been going on in recent decades. Two questions on that.

Does the absence of a married father in the home mean the father's not around, right? Because I've heard some people say just the fact that there isn't a married couple there in the home doesn't mean the dad's not around in defense of, you know, sort of the Black community, I guess, and these stats, which some people take issue with. And secondly, can we get into why it happened? You know, with the Great Society programs, the title of your book, which I love so much, Please Stop Helping Us, right? It's like, stop helping us, how liberals make it harder for blacks to succeed. And I know you take aim at some of those programs beginning in the 1960s that were meant to help the black community, but you do not believe did. So can you just start with,

are the black fathers around even though they're not married? No, no, they're not. They're not around. That's the problem. They're having kids and they're not taking care of their children. I think marriage adds stability to the upbringing of a child, obviously. But even if they were cohabitating, if the mother's cohabitating with the father and they're not married, that's still better. And in fact, that's what you often see or you see more often among Hispanics and particularly among Hispanic immigrants. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among these two groups isn't that, there's a lot of similarity there. It's pretty close. But what you see among Hispanics is that the father is there raising the child. Marriage typically comes later. So they're doing it in a different order. But you still have the child being raised by his mother and father, even if they aren't married for part of that upbringing. In the Black community, that is not what you see. And so that is the difference. So yes, marriage would be ideal, but even cohabitating parents would be better than

what you're seeing in a lot of these communities, which are single female head of households raising children. And marriage, I've often often said people who want to cite racism as an explanation for all of this stuff. In America, the black poverty rate is about a third higher than it is among whites. But among Black married couples, Megan, the poverty rate is in the single digits and has been for more than 30 years. So, you know, is Black poverty a function of racism or a function of family formation? I mean, if you're a racist, why do you care if the Black person is married or not? I'm only going to keep the single ones down. Yeah. I mean, so this breakdown of the Black nuclear family, this disintegration of the Black nuclear family that we've seen, is causing all kinds of other problems, not just violent crime. It's going to affect the education of that child, whether the child grows up with the resources the child needs in

terms of income, household income, and so forth. A lot goes wrong when the family starts to break down. And violent crime is just one manifestation of that. And so the government, the government set this off, how right things are going. I mean, it's not exactly swimmingly, but it's not like the people are dying for a return to the 1940s and fifties when it comes to, um, race relations in this country. But when it comes to government policies meant to improve the back, the black experience, you, you're, you posit that we really, we started something very dangerous and it's only gotten worse back in the 60s. Yes.

I think we expanded the welfare state in an effort to help in the war on poverty. We redistributed wealth. We paid women that had children out of wedlock and said, we will continue to pay you so long as we don't see the father snooping around. That put in place perverse incentives. And so that's sort of emblematic of what a lot of these great society programs did. They put in place perverse incentives in the name of helping, uh, blacks that ended up hurting, uh, blacks and, and what it, what it, and it hurt because what it did was it, it, it interfered with the sort of, um, self-development that has to take place within a group, within

a culture. Uh, and a culture. And there's no end run around that. You can't replace a father with a government check. A group has to develop a work ethic if it's going to lift itself out of poverty and keep itself out of poverty. And to the extent that you pay people not to work or the benefits you give them amount to more than they can make in the economy by getting a job, you're interfering with the development of that work ethic. And that is what a lot of these government programs, again, well-intentioned, ultimately ended up doing. And so for some groups, you'd go through some hard times, you'd temporarily go on welfare, get back on your feet and you'd move off. But for Blacks,

welfare became sort of a lure and a trap. And you saw generation after generation after generation of welfare dependent families. And that is what we're living with today. So we've had welfare reform, right? We had that under Bill Clinton. How have things changed? I think welfare reform did what it was intended to do. We saw poverty rates fall, even for single moms. And that was a good thing. A lot of it, we sort of started picking away at these reforms later on, particularly during the Great Recession under Obama with the extension of not only jobless benefits, but other cash or in-kind benefits that were given out, food stamps and so forth. The thinking back then under Obama was

this will just be temporary. But it was not temporary. States kept them in place much longer than they needed to, once again, putting in place those perverse incentives. We're kind of seeing a little bit of it today with the COVID relief, where you have employers who can't find workers because those workers are receiving supplemental jobless benefits to stay home. And they're receiving more to stay home than the job pays. And the employers can't compete with the amount of money they're receiving in benefits. That's why virtually all the red states now are rejecting the money. Yeah. And even the Biden administration, I think, is coming around to acknowledging it, which is why they announced that these extra benefits are going to end in the fall. But yeah, incentives matter.

And that's, you know, that's always been the case. Up next, if Jason Reilly were to become president in 2024, what would he do to change our country's situation, to help Black Americans in a way that might actually work as opposed to these great society programs and so on? We'll ask him in 60 seconds. So if you become president, you know, in 2024, which is my dream, what do you do to change, you know, how does government at this point help the Black family flourish? And I mean, genuinely help as opposed to stop doing things that we know don't work. Lifting the minimum wage is going to price certain groups of people out of the labor force because they become too expensive to hire. Occupational licensing, which says you have to jump through

this hoop and this hoop and this hoop to start a taxi service or to start a hair braiding shop. These aren't helpful. Holding back would be entrepreneurs who can't afford to get these licensing or don't know how to go about acquiring the right credentials in order to jump through these hoops. And then I really focus, I would really focus on education. Stop keeping these kids trapped in schools that are failing. We have education models out there that we know work particularly for low-income minorities, namely charter schools, voucher programs, tax credits, and so forth. Give these families access to these school reforms. Stop assigning them schools based on their zip code. I think education is going to be the key for a lot of these families. And unfortunately,

education is so political that you have the adults who run the system, putting their own interest ahead of the actual kids. And, and, you know, this sort of, and I'm hopeful that the COVID experience will cause people to rethink just how much power, uh, our teachers unions have over public education. We learned that they control education and by extension can control our lives if our kids can't go to school because the teachers refuse to go to work. And I'm hoping that people might rethink this power dynamic in public education. It's crazy when you look at what they're doing, right? Like they wouldn't open up the schools, the teachers unions would not listen to the science or the data. They cared only about themselves and not about the children at all. And meanwhile, this was disproportionately hurting black and brown children who, you know, oftentimes were in areas that you do something that might actually help these kids, like get your teachers back in the classroom to teach them? But they wouldn't. And on top of that, they oppose charter schools. They oppose vouchers. They want these kids to be hostage to the zip code in which they live, no matter how crappy the schools are. And then they go to the Biden administration and just say, we need more money. It's because these schools are underfunded. If you just cared about minority

children, you would provide more money to the school systems in places like Chicago and Baltimore and so on to get better teachers and better facilities, and then they would do better. The Biden administration might be the most hostile to school reform of any administration we've ever had. Um, even, uh, the Obama administration was quite sympathetic to charter schools. Uh, Biden is under pressure, um, uh, to, to put a moratorium on the creation of, of new charter schools. Uh, I don't know whether, uh, he's going to give into that pressure, but he's under a lot of heat to, to, to do that. This, this could be This could be quite bad. We could take a huge step in the wrong direction in terms of educational alternatives under

Biden because of the ascendance of these progressives and their influence in the Democratic Party. And as you said, the kids who need this the most are the low-income minority students. And of course, those are the ones, according to the polls, who are most in favor of it. So this is once again, another example of elites claiming to represent the interest of these low-income minorities when in fact, they're simply representing their own interest. Even today, you have groups like the NAACP now opposed to charter schools, even though most Blacks overwhelmingly support charter schools. And the reason NAACP is opposed, well, they take money from the teachers unions. The unions

are fund groups like the NAACP, and the NAACP is therefore reluctant to cross the teachers unions, even if it means selling out low-income Blacks. Let me ask you the basic dumb questions just so you can walk us through it. Why don't the teachers unions want charter schools? Because they're not unionized. This whole debate would go away if the charter school said, you can organize our workforce. This is all about the teachers unions wanting a monopoly on education for their members. And so that's what this is about. Most charter schools are not unionized, and that is why the teachers unions oppose them.

It's really that simple. Another dumb question, because I know you're an expert on this. How does a charter school start? Like what happens in a city like New York where you have public schooling, which in too many pockets is just terrible? How does a charter school get born and start attracting people? Well, it varies by state. Each state has set up a process by which

somebody can authorize a charter school. Sometimes it's a university system. Sometimes it's a board of education at the state level or the local level. But there are these organizing entities that are, I'm sorry, these authorization entities, and you apply to them and you say, I want to start a charter school. In many states, there's a cap on the number that can be started. So you have to get in your application. You start your school. And then there's a time limit on it.

It's not an open-ended authorization. You have a certain period of time, and then it has to be renewed. And that's how you're held accountable. If you're failing the kids, if your kids are not doing well on tests, if their attendance is poor, if there are problems with the charter school, your charter won't be renewed. And that's the difference between the charter system and the traditional public school system, which can just continue to fail generation after generation after generation of students. And that school will never close. And the unions will do nothing about closing it because even if a school is failing children, it's still providing good paying jobs for adults.

So that school is going to stay open. So what about my observation here in New York at the charter schools tend to have a lot of very high performing minority students in them and they're a godsend. And you have families who are very, very engaged parents who are very into their kids' education, who, you know, they're very grateful that their kids are in these charter schools. But is it, does it tend to be a more minority population in the charter schools? Is that just a New York City thing? No, it's not. It's not.

That is the case in many charter schools around the country, that minorities tend to attend them. And many of these schools set up in minority communities to provide those communities with an alternative to their traditional public school, which in many cases is doing a poor job. And then, of course, the charter school gets attacked for being segregated, racially segregated. It sets up a school in a Black community. Black people come, and then the accusation is, oh, this is segregated schooling. So they can't win. But yes,

they do. And it gives the lie to the claim that, well, two things it addresses when you look at the racial makeup of these schools. It becomes clear that black kids don't need to be sitting next to white kids to learn. And these schools are overwhelmingly minority. And in many cases, the ones in New York City, particularly, are outperforming the liliest white suburbs on standardized tests. And yet we spend all of our time discussing whether schools are racially balanced enough. And aesthetically, that might be what you want to see, but whether it is a priority for learning, I think that that is determined demonstrably false based on what charter schools are doing. with talking white or acting white, which can be associated with good grades and proper English and so on. And you take a look at this study out of Shaker Heights, Ohio in the late 90s by John Ogbu, professor of anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, talked about the black-white achievement gap and took a hard look at how in this nice suburb, there was still a stigma against

getting good grades amongst a lot of the black students because that was associated with white behavior. So to me, you look at these black charter schools or predominantly minority charter schools where that's not an issue. These are black students who are gunners. They want great grades and their parents want great grades and they're being well supported. And you point out, you know, in that part of your book, that parental involvement is huge to black or white parental involvement in staying on your kids. That'll help a lot. So you've got that in these charters. You would think any sane person. And I know I mean, I don't who knows whether Biden's truly ideologically driven at this point. I hesitate to say, but you'd think somebody like Biden would

say, why on earth would I want to stifle that? Right, but Biden is a politician, just like Obama was a politician. Barack Obama spent eight years in office trying to shut down the DC voucher program. And you go, why? It's popular among blacks. It's getting good results. Graduation rates are much higher

in the DC voucher program schools than in DC schools in general. Why would he do this? Just explain what that did. What did the DC voucher program schools than in D.C. schools in general. Why would you do this? Just explain what that did. What did the D.C. voucher program do? Oh, it's a federal program that was set up under George W. Bush. It provides vouchers for low-income kids in Washington, D.C., to attend private schools. And the unions, of course, hate it, again, because many of these private schools are not unionized.

And so they wanted to shut down the program. And they give a lot of money to Barack Obama, and he was carrying water for them. So he, too, called for shutting down the program. So politicians are putting – we can't assume that the interest of the politician aligns with the interest of kids. The politician is looking out for his own interest. And if you're a Democratic politician, you can't ignore the teachers unions. They are an integral part of getting you elected and reelected and supporting your causes while in office. You just can't ignore them. They're too powerful. And that's what happened with Biden and Obama. It's not like the public schools are

going to go out of business, though. You know, so what are they like? I see they're a little worried about some competition. These are these are tend to be great schools which people want to go to. And but like what they'll say is, oh, it's not fair to the students who are left behind, you know, that the loss of resources, the loss of tax dollars, the loss of other students who, you know, might be uplifting and might challenge them. I don't like that. They have a lock on the market. If you're a publicing, taking the best students. The problem with that argument, Megan, is that charter schools use a lottery to admit students. You're admitted by chance. And, of course, far more people, just like with any lottery, far more people apply to the lottery than are admitted. So most of these motivated kids in the traditional public schools that want to go to charters don't get in. So the traditional public schools have the vast majority of motivated kids in our public school system because they can't all go to the charter

schools. So the question becomes, what do the traditional public schools do with all these motivated kids? And they're failing them. It's the schools. It's the schools. It's not the kids. And this idea that, oh, charters get the results because they're creaming the best kids. No, most of those best kids are still in traditional public schools because there aren't enough charter schools to come. The wait list for charter schools in New York City is something like 50,000 kids long. Nationwide, it's around a half million. So there aren't enough charter schools to take all these highly motivated kids that the traditional public schools claim that they're losing to charters. You know, in the same way that we

talked about with the police, they defund the police to the detriment of the Black community. It's not what Black people want. It certainly doesn't help them because they tend to be the murder victims when these murder rates go up at a disproportionate level. And in the same way that that dynamic exists, and you've got this problem with the schools, like hurting black kids in the name of helping black kids when it comes to, oh, no charters and the school, we have to be deferential to the teachers unions. That's what's happening now, in, no, no charters and the school, we have to be deferential to the teachers unions. That's what's happening now, in my view, with critical race theory, right? Like we're going to we're going to racialize everything in an effort to promote diversity

and equity and inclusion. But really, every day they're driving wedges between students of different races in schools that I that did not exist. There's no question that the kids were getting along. They weren't looking at race. And these teachers, these so-called well-meaning teachers have decided, let me help you. Let me help you be more inclusive and promote more equity by pointing out which one of you is the oppressor, which one of you is the oppressed, which one of you has no natural advantages, has mountains that you cannot overcome without the help of mighty whitey. And it's, that's why it's so damaging, right? It's like, again, the quote

help, which is nothing but nothing. This is another, an example of, of, uh, elites, uh, pushing something on behalf of, uh, uh, of the black masses, so to speak, to use a dated term, a critical race theory really amounts to a sort of fancy argument for racial preferences. That's all it really is. It started in the legal community, academic legal community back in the 70s. It was black academics making an argument for racial preferences for themselves, for themselves. This is about self interest of black elites. That's what this has always been about. And, you know, to the extent that it stayed on college campuses, not too many people were worried about it. But now, as you say,

it's seeped off. Now it's crept off campus. It's in our diversity training at work. And now it's in our elementary schools via the 1619 Project. And I find it as disturbing, if not more so, than you. This idea that you can put slavery at the center of America's founding. It's just so nonsensical. I mean, slavery might be the least remarkable thing about American history. Slavery existed for thousands of years before any Europeans came to the Americas. It's existed all over the world, down through history, and just about every society that we know of. It still exists today in places like Sudan

and parts of Nigeria. Again, slavery might be the least remarkable thing about American history. What's remarkable about American history is emancipation, not slavery. And then this idea that these folks, these critical race theorists would try and put slavery at the center of America's founding and somehow depict America as uniquely evil because of its slave past. It's just nonsense. And that is what we're teaching our kids. And suggest we've made little to no progress. Well, you have to. You have to pretend that everything, all of these disparities that we see today are a direct result of slavery and Jim Crow.

And you have to ignore everything that has gone on since the end of Jim Crow. You have to ignore the progress that Blacks were making during Jim Crow. I mentioned the crime decline among Blacks during that period, but Blacks were entering the skilled professions in the 1940s and 50s. They were becoming doctors and lawyers and scientists and architects and accountants and teachers at unprecedented rates during the 1940s and 50s. They were increasing

their years of schooling, both in absolute terms and relative to whites. Their incomes were climbing faster than white incomes in the 1940s and 50s. You have to ignore all of that history if you're a critical race theorist, because all the disparities we see today are a direct result of slavery and Jim Crow. And if you point out that Blacks were making faster progress during Jim Crow than they were in the post-60s period, it sort of upends all of your claims about this direct link between slavery and Black underperformance today. So yeah, it takes quite a leap of faith and logic to push this theory, but it's nonsense. And I was okay with the nonsense as long as it was at some seminar at Oberlin.

But now that it's gonna be in our K-12 system, public school system, I hope people wake up to this and push back at it pretty hard. Your wife, who is equally brilliant, she writes for a variety of places. She's an AEI fellow, American Enterprise Institute, and she writes for Newsweek, among other places, Naomi Schaefer Riley. And she wrote a piece last September talking about how your kids, she's white, you're black, so it's mixed race kids. You guys are, you have them at Rye Country Day School, which is

very good school. They had like two years ago, I think they had eight students go to Harvard. I mean, this is a very, very good elite school, private school up in Westchester. And she was writing about how you're, I think you have a son and a daughter. Yes. Okay. And do you have three kids? We have three. I have two daughters and a son. Okay. She was saying, okay, suddenly we get presented with diversity, equity, inclusion everywhere. And she said our kids were immediately offered the chance to join a variety of clubs, including a diversity club, a students of color club, girls of color club, in which older girls will mentor the younger ones. Parents received numerous emails about these clubs, and our kids were invited on a number of occasions to join,

including by their teachers. They did not, she said. And she said, aside from politics, we found ourselves underwhelmed by some of the academic rigor of this particular school, notwithstanding its reputation. The students were reading few books, writing assignments that were rare.

My daughter spent some portion of math class each week on meditation exercises. And when we asked at my daughter's request whether she couldn't be challenged more in English or receive some extra work in math that would allow her to move into a higher group the following year, she says we were met with blank stares. The teachers and administrators expressed concerns such assignments might cause too much stress, damage her self-esteem, or upset her life balance, our meeting with the math teacher ended with her encouraging our daughter to attend her regular gatherings for girls of color. Face, I mean, like I'm slapping my forehead, Jason. Everything, everything has to go back to skin color. Yeah, these schools, they're social justice boot camps, Megan. They're not primarily interested in reading and math, which is odd for, you know, most eighth graders in America can't read or do math at grade level.

Don't you think we should be focused on correcting that before we turn them into social justice warriors at the age of 10? I mean, I just, in terms of priorities, I'd be willing to cut a deal with the social justice folks and say, when, you know, 70% of grade school kids can read and do math at grade level, we can have a discussion about enhancing the curriculum in ways that you think might be productive. But just get us to 70%. Right. It seems reasonable. Friends of friends moved their kids from these New York City private schools down to Florida during the pandemic and put them in public school. And they were horrified at how behind they were because they're spending 40% of their time on diversity, equity, and inclusion in math class,

as opposed to adding, subtracting, and multiplying fraction. Fractions, they got down to a more red state and found out they were not cutting it because those kids are not focused on all of this divisive nonsense. And all of this diversity inclusion stuff, it's just fancy language for teaching these kids to blame all of their problems on other people. And I don't know that that has a good history of turning people into productive citizens. That is not what we want to instill in our children. Even the language we use today about, we don't talk about self-betterment and pulling yourself up and those types of things. We talk, you know, privilege, advantaged, disadvantaged. It's almost a passive language that we use, that people have no agency. What happens to them is inevitable due to systemic this or societal this.

I find even the language being used disturbing. But that's what these kids are being taught. They're not being taught how to think. They're being taught what to think. They're being taught that anyone who disagrees with them shouldn't be challenged, but should be silenced. And that is not what education should be about. And that's been a problem on our college campuses for a long time. And it's disturbing to see it trickling down into our K through 12 system. Yeah. I mean, at least when they waited till college, they might have the chance of developing how to think prior to getting there. Now it's all indoctrination. And not a week goes by now, thankfully, that you don't see another parent or teacher find the courage to come out against this insanity in a public forum. This week, it was Dana Stangle Plow from Dwight

Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey, very nice suburb just across the George Washington Bridge from New York City. And she came out, this was released by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism Fair. They published her video. And here's just a clip of what this teacher said after leaving. Today, I am resigning from a job that I love. My name is Dana Stangle Plough. I became an English teacher at Dwight Englewood School seven years ago because as a parent, I loved how the school both nurtured and challenged my own children. But over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that

is damaging to our students' intellectual and emotional growth, an ideology that requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of either an oppressor or oppressed group. This theoretical framework pervades every division of Dwight Englewood as the singular way of seeing the world. As a result, students now arrive in my classroom accepting ideology simply as fact. I've seen up close how this hinders their ability to read, write, and think. They've become obsessed with power hierarchies. I teach students who recoil from a poem because it was written by a man. I teach students who approach texts in search of the oppressor, who see

iniquities in texts that have nothing to do with power. This ideology limits students' ability to observe and engage with the full fabric of human experience in our literature. In my professional opinion as an educator, the school is failing to encourage healthy habits of mind essential for growth, such as intellectual curiosity, humility, honesty, reason, and the capacity to consider multiple perspectives and weigh competing ideas. I've heard from students who want to ask a question but stop out of fear. I've

heard from students who don't participate in discussions for fear of being ostracized. One student didn't want to develop her personal essay about an experience she had in another country because she was worried that it might mean she was, without even realizing it, racist. And her fear, she actually stopped herself from thinking. The very definition of self-censorship. I mean, we've heard this. They recoil from texts because written by a man, right? You can't teach history.

You can't celebrate Beethoven. You certainly can't celebrate the founding fathers because they're the wrong gender and the wrong skin color and didn't behave perfectly according to 2021 standards. But it's so much deeper and more problematic than that. It is. And I think we need to reach a point where voices like that aren't just trickling out every other day or so. We need tens of thousands of voices like that. There really needs to be a massive pushback. And I've been waiting for the dam to break. And I'm kind of surprised that it hasn't already. What she was saying, countless people are thinking, but afraid to say. I mean, it's sort of like the 1619 Project stuff.

You had a few historians come out, you know, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Gordon Wood, a few others. But this should have been every credible historian in America should have denounced this project. And they're afraid. They've been cowed. Nicole Hannah-Jones. I mean, there have been countless books written about America's founding, Megan. None of them by Nicole Hannah-Jones. And yet she is going to lead a project to rewrite American history. And the most prominent historians in America are just going to sit silently by because they are afraid of her Twitter feed. This is ridiculous. And so I think we need,

you know, 10,000 more voices like this woman out there. And I'm waiting for people to come forward because I know that she speaks for a lot of people who are afraid to speak up themselves. That's right. But, you know, our show the messaging is um you sit there and be quiet but it's not my job to educate you so it's like yeah okay yeah it's it's and that's part of the other rewriting of history going on with um with the 1619 project stuff ignoring the role that whites played in the civil rights movement in the anti-slavery movement. I, for one, am quite happy that they didn't shut up back then because their voices were quite helpful in changing the course and direction of this country. Up next, Jason has now literally written the book on Thomas Sowell,

one of the greatest thinkers of our time. I mean, certainly in modern day America in the last hundred years. So why isn't he a household name? There are some sad but real reasons for it, and we'll talk about it. But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the MK Show called Thanks But No Thanks. In this case, we are saying thanks but no thanks to anti-racist dinner parties. How'd you like to pay $5,000 to learn just how racist you really are? If you would, then race to dinner might be the thing for you. There is an incredible recent piece in The Cut that details this organization run by two activists, Regina Jackson and Syra Rao. See, they gather together eight white women at one of the women's houses for a dinner party. Oh, sounds nice. Dinner party. That's fun. Well, at this dinner party,

the hosts, Jackson and Rao, will facilitate a discussion about race over dinner. You know, that's not going to go well. So what exactly does it entail? Well, they will press their guests on the most racist thing they have done recently. If the guests cannot come up with something, they will be told that, quote, not knowing is classic white behavior. At a recent dinner party in January, Jackson and Rao say they were asked, do you see any difference between us and the people that stormed the Capitol? To which the hosts of this dinner party replied, no. For this self-flagellation, the dinner party will cost

you $5,000. That is double from where they started just a couple of years ago. They also have gotten a book deal out of this for a book titled White Women. Everything you already know about your own racism and how to do better. It includes giving them a bunch of money. Rich white women paying thousands of dollars to be told just how racist these two gals think they are? Thanks, but no thanks. I think people are ashamed. They're being sort of reminded of their white guilt. And so they feel like saying anything just confirms, as Robin DiAngelo would their white fragility, their, their racial bias, their, their inherent bias, right?

Even if I don't know it's there, it's there, trust me, it's there. And, and it's somehow positioning yourself as being not an ally to black people, which is the last thing you want, right? Like your, your instincts are to be supportive and helpful and open-minded to problems. And, and now the messaging is it's almost unsolvable. Any pushback at all makes you part of the problem, even on crazy stuff like, you know, it's not OK to to say the country was founded to preserve slavery. That's that is a historical. We know that. But even pushing back against Nicole Hannah-Jones makes you sound like a racist.

When she got her position at UNC, the story was, but she was denied tenure. It's like, no, she got a five-year paid position, notwithstanding the fact that she spews a factual, non-factual nonsense. That's a huge victory for her. The story's not that she didn't get tenure. It's that who's hiring her to teach history since she doesn't seem to understand it. I just wrote a book about an economist named Thomas Sowell. And one of the reasons I wanted to write the book and felt that he deserved more attention is because he is something that is increasingly rare these days, which is an honest intellectual, someone who is not cowed by the social media hordes and the Nicole Hannah-Jones types and hasn't been over his 50-plus year career as a public intellectual. He is someone who has followed the facts where they lead, told the truth even when it was politically incorrect, even when it was unpopular. And that's what there is a dearth of today. You should not distinguish yourself as

an intellectual simply by being straightforward and honest. And yet that's how he's done it, because there are so many others out there who are more interested in being popular, more interested in being politically correct. And Saul has put truth above popularity. And this is a perfect example of why we need more intellectuals out there like him to push back at this nonsense. He's amazingly brilliant. It's amazing to me that he's still on this earth, that we still have him. You know, access to Thomas Sowell is still possible, and I would love to have it at some point.

But yeah, you've just written the book Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell, accompanied by an hour long documentary, which I recommend to everybody. And it's narrated by you. And you've got different interviews with different people talking about his influence and how he became who he became. He is the example in bootstrap, you know, non victimhood. I'm going to let facts, reason and logic dictate my decisions. And you talk in the book and in the documentary about how this guy had zero advantages he had in his upbringing. But yet he wound up at the University of Chicago. He started off as a Marxist.

He actually remained a Marxist after studying under Milton Friedman at University of Chicago. But once he got immersed in the federal government, the Department of Labor, and opened his mind to fact and logic and what data was telling him, he was cured of his Marxism and really has spent the rest of his days trying to just be factual with people, even if it didn't curry him any favor, which it didn't with these so-called elites. Yes, that's an excellent summary of Sowell's career. He's someone who was born with a lot of disadvantages. During the Great Depression in the Jim Crow South, he was orphaned as a child,

raised by a distant relative who moved the family to Harlem when he was nine years old. And that's where he was raised. But he dropped out of high school. He had a pretty tumultuous home life. He never graduated from high school. Left home at the age of 17, joined the Marines, then sort of started to turn his life around. And thanks to the GI Bill, he was able to afford to go to college. But he got quite a late start. He didn't even graduate with an undergraduate degree until he was 28 years old. He didn't write his first book until he was 40. And you think about how productive he's been. It's remarkable how late a start he got. But he's always said, I had to take advantage of

the opportunities that were there. And that's what I tried to do. And that is what he's encouraged other people to do, to take advantage of the opportunities. And of course, there are far more opportunities for blacks, for minorities today than when Tom Sowell was growing up. And the idea that kids today are being taught to blame their problems on other people instead of taking advantage of the opportunities they have is just shameful. Well, and one of the things he takes aim at is the minimum wage, saying, oh, yeah, sure, OK, minimum wage. We're going to lift people up.

We're going to pay them a, quote, living wage. And then, oh, wait, they may lose their jobs completely. The jobs may go away altogether. You don't hear that from people like Biden who are pushing that now. And on affirmative action, same thing. Yeah. The minimum wage issue is what began to turn Sol away from his socialism and his Marxism. When he was working in government for the Department of Labor in the early 1960s. He was studying the minimum wages effects in Puerto Rico and noticed the harm the employment, it was damage it was doing to employment. So yes, if you have a job and the minimum wages goes up, you'll get a raise,

provided you keep that job and keep the same number of hours you were working before. But how many other people don't get hired because the minimum wage now makes them too expensive to hire? How many people lose their job because the minimum wages made them too expensive to employ? So there are trade-offs, is Tom's argument. And what he took away from that experience is that government policies don't always have the intended effect. And that those policies can continue indefinitely, even if they're doing great harm, because the government has its own agenda. And Sol began to reevaluate the benevolence of government in general, not just on minimum wage, but on a whole host of issues. And you're right about affirmative action. He's studied this empirically and in depth for decades, and not only here in the U.S., but around the world, he studied the issue. And, you know,

we have now about four decades of experience with affirmative action. And we have some natural experiments that went on out there. Like at the University of California, back in the mid-90s, they ended race-based admissions in the University of California system. And after that ended, Black graduation rates went up. Adjusted Soul had predicted they would. And not only up overall, but up in the more difficult disciplines of math and science and engineering. Okay, and now there it is. That because he argued students who get into these elite schools thanks to affirmative action often wind up, quote, mismatched. We have a soundbite about him talking about MIT. The average black student at MIT is in the bottom 10 percent of MIT students in math, but he is in the top 90 percent of all

American students in math. Something like one fourth of all the black students going to MIT do not graduate. You're talking about a pool of people whom you are artificially turning into failures by mismatching them with the school. He predicted this. He said that this program that had been put in place to increase the ranks of the black middle class had in practice resulted in fewer black professionals than we would have had in the absence of the policy. So, you know, he called this a long time ago, and he's been right about affirmative action, about any number of issues that he's studied. And so I wanted to write the book to sort of give Sol his due. I think it's shameful that people like Ta-Nehisi Coates or Ibram Kendi are better known than Thomas Sowell, even though he's written

circles around folks like that, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, and so forth. Maybe circles around all of them put together. But he's not as well known as they are, and he should be. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to do the documentary and the book. And Sol's writings are not only more broad-based in terms of the topics he's covered over the decades, the rigor and depth of his thinking on so many issues far surpasses those other individuals I just named. And so I think he is a voice that needs to be part of the conversation when we're talking about inequality and social justice and all the rest, because he has been thinking and writing about these issues for a long time.

So why is that? Because I'll tell you, I had an argument with somebody, a white guy, about Thomas Sowell. And I was saying, why isn't he taught in every university in America? This is one of the most profound, brilliant thinkers we have alive today. And his response was, because his ideas are outdated. He's old school. The guy's pushing 100. I don't know what he's, 94, whatever he is. And the Ibram X. Kendys of the world are more relevant, more modern, and sort of have a better finger on the pulse of where we are in 2021. You should have asked him which particular ideas of Tom's are supposedly outdated. I'd be curious to know what he had in mind. But the reason that Sol isn't better known, I believe, is because,

well, to use today's parlance, he was canceled. He was canceled a long time ago when he began writing about these racial controversies. In your audience, you know, Tom is an economist by training, and economic history is his real discipline. Tom studied people like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo and the sort of classical liberal economist. And that was his main discipline when he started out as an academic in the 1960s. And that is what he taught, a history of economic thought and the history of ideas. Tom only started writing about racial controversies in the 1970s. And that's when he got in trouble with black elites and the civil rights movement leadership that pushed back at what he was saying and effectively went to the media and said, this is not someone who should be taken

seriously. He does not speak for Black people. And they canceled him. These elites, white and Black, are the ones that largely control the media. They control academia. They decide who wins the intellectual prizes and awards and so forth. And Sol has refused to play footsie with them. And I think it's cost him in terms of prestige and notoriety. But again, he has not been interested in playing those games. He's been far more interested. And again, just doing the research, following the data where it leads, and reporting the findings, even when they're unpopular. It's reminding me of something. I think you wrote this in your book about you were taking issue with President Obama, then President Obama praising Jay-Z and Lil Wayne

and Lil Wayne was imprisoned on gun and drug charges while Obama was praising him. Why not take a moment to praise Thomas Sowell? Why not hold up somebody like that for people to emulate or whose ideas they should consider as opposed to somebody who's sitting in prison on gun charges at the moment you decide to highlight him? Why did George Floyd get a state funeral? I mean, this idea that the black thug is the authentic black is a problem we've had for decades, Megan. And it's put out there by Blacks and whites alike.

And so, yes, rappers who have made millions of dollars talking about degrading women and degrading other Black people, homophobic, sexist, racist, anti-Semitic remarks are celebrated. Celebrated. Glorifying violence, sex, celebrated. The president brags about them having their music on his phone. I mean, it's really screwed up. It's really, really screwed up. And not only that, kids see this, kids see this. What kind of example is Obama setting there?

That's why, I mean, there are plenty of Black people, musicians that he could be praising, you know, that don't go there. And yet he chooses to glorify thuggery. Big finish next. Don't go away. Obama's been all over the board on race issues. Sometimes he tries to act like the great healer. And then he has this pernicious tendency to stoke the flames in his sort of measured delivery, you know, so it's like doesn't sound so incendiary like a Trump, but he does stoke the flames. And he was sort of dumping all over people's concerns about critical race theory in an interview he just gave.

I think we've got that. Listen. You would think with all the public policy debates that are taking place right now that, you know, the Republican Party would be engaged in a significant debate about how are we going to deal with the economy and what are we going to do about climate change and what are we going to do about climate change? And what are we going to do about, lo and behold, the single most important issue to them apparently right now is critical race theory. Who knew that that was the threat to our republic? What do you make of that? Well, I myself have wondered why the Republican Party has decided to place more emphasis on the culture war than on economics. And I don't know if this is a post-Trump reprioritization of what the party is interested in, but the Dr. Seuss stuff, yes, the critical race theory stuff, I think that's a serious issue

and you can walk and chew gum at the same time. But yeah, where are the attacks on the spending? I mean, Biden is talking about, Megan, World War II level spending. We're not at war, let alone a world war. That's a good point, though. Your point is that the man's got a point. I think Obama does have a point if that's what he was getting at. I mean, if he's if he's grouping in critical race theory as part of the culture war and the

Republicans want to focus on these cultural issues and he's calling him out and saying, you know, why aren't you focused on the economy? Yes, I do think. I do think he has a point. And again, you can do both. But here, it's a matter of emphasis. And I wonder if this is going to be the course that the party takes between now and the midterms and then going on to to the next presidential election. I think the Republicans feel they've sacrificed their ability to really object to the spending, given that they sat in their hands when Trump was doing it, when he was the drunken sailor. I agree. And of course, some of us said so at the time, but we won't go there.

But but yes, you're right. They might they may feel they just don't have the credibility to do it or or they feel that the that many of these new voters that Trump brought into the Republican Party care more about the culture stuff than the economic stuff. That could be the other the other calculation. Well, and no one right now wants to look like they're on the side of the so-called elites right so it's like and we've been sort of told by the media and the left that spending spending spending that's what helps people who are more working class and if you object that's your elitism speaking right your life must be pretty good if you have an objection to any of this and i think that's been effective in silencing objections to spending. And you have this group of conservatives who are pushing a bigger role for the government in this area, that calling for family leave, baby bonds, universal basic income. You now have conservative groups pushing this, using the tax code in a way that traditionally conservatives have thought the

tax code should not be used. And so it could be a legitimate change in thinking for right-of-center folks who play in the space that they've decided going forward, the Republican Party is going to start accommodating this sort of thinking. My argument would be that if you're a voter who is interested in increasing the child tax credit, the Democrats are always going to raise it higher than the Republicans are. So you might as well go vote for the Democrats. In other words, if Republicans want to play in the sandbox, they're not they're not going to outdo the Democrats at what the Democrats have been doing for a very long time. So, you know, I don't I don't know where this leads the Republican Party, if they think they can they can they can they can play this game with Democrats. But there but there are serious Republicans and serious conservatives that are that are moving in this direction. Yeah, I mean, I think they think it's modernizing the Republican Party, you know, to sort of shed the George W. Bush. Well, he was a spender, too, but sort of this older,

stifling feeling around the GOP. And Trump was so popular with his spending. You know, he looked more like a populist and not like a conservative when it came to that, that people think this is the way forward. But, you know, you've got three kids. I've got three kids. I worry. I still worry. You know, I had my mom was born in 1941 and came up at a time when you didn't spend more than you earned. And being in debt was considered a very bad thing. And I still have a hangover from that myself, you know, and I don't believe these new economic philosophies, you would know better than I, but that we can we can get away with this and never have to pay the piper. Yeah, yeah, I think I think you're right. I don't I don't I don't think we can we can get away with it. But what you can get, you know, you can get away with things

politically, you can't get away with economically. And the politicians don't much care about that. They're worried more about re-election. To me, the lesson to take away from the Trump presidency is the economic growth that we had. Growing the economy has to continue to be the goal. It has to be the centerpiece, I think, of Republican economic policy growth. And Trump showed all the good that can come of that. He brought in these minority voters that no one was expecting him to be able to do because of his rhetoric on these issues. Yet he increased the votes among Hispanics, among Black men in particular, among Asians. He got more votes from Asians than any Republican nominee since George W. Bush in 2000. This is the same guy that was running around saying China virus. And it didn't matter

because these folks were responding to the Trump economy pre-COVID. And that needs to be the focus. And to the extent that tax hikes and regulations and complicated tax codes and so forth hurt growth, I think they're going to hurt the Republican cause. So I think the lesson from Trump is grow the economy and the votes will come. And that should be the takeaway. Not adopt the economic policies of the left. I don't think that's the, or some variation of them. I don't think that's the way forward.

And Biden's pushing to undo all those things, all those growth pushers right now, right? All the regulations, their line is still that the Republicans don't want dirty water and dirty air. The regulation should come back from everything on culture issues and economic issues that the taxes should go up. All the things that sort of got the economy fired up and rolling are being rolled back now at a time when we intentionally stifled our economy and letting you know, letting it letting it unleash more in the wake of the covid restrictions seems to make the most sense. But that's not where we're going. Biden seems to be adopting the progressive position that opposition to Donald Trump equals support for the entire progressive agenda. And on climate, on taxes, on regulations, on Iran, on foreign policy, if people didn't like Trump, it means they will support

a tax on fossil fuels. And I think that's a pretty risky position. I don't think that's what voters were him to do. But he's acting like he's FDR and was elected in a landslide and has huge majorities in the House and Senate. That's the kind of agenda he's putting out there. He thinks he has that kind of mandate. And I think that the Democrats are in real danger of overreach here if they continue down this road. What's the one thing that the audience should watch when it comes to the Biden economy and the measures he's pushing? I mean, he doesn't look like he's going to get his spending bills through. The infrastructure thing is struggling right now. The domestic agenda seems like it's a nonstarter.

He just he threw out these huge proposals. It turns out he can't get everything through on reconciliation. He's going to have to get at least his own party and some Republicans. So he's struggling. He's he's sort of went from on a roll to treading water. But what's the one thing people should really watch to that concerns you that he's pushing? I think if they change the filibuster rule, it will open the floodgates to the entire progressive agenda. And that's what I'm watching. I'm still watching Manchin and Sinema and these more moderate Democrats that are holding the line now. But the pressure on them will not only continue, I think, I think it'll build.

And I don't know how long they'll be able to hold off. But if they ditch the filibuster and just have a simple majority, push everything through with a vote from Kamala Harris, breaking the tie, that to me is what to keep an eye out for. Yeah. Then we become a parliament. Then we look like Great Britain, where you just have a majority rule and they get to push through their agenda. Yeah. And it just totally undermines the way the Senate has worked for decades.

Jason, I have so much more. I want to go through every chapter of all of your books. So can we do this again? Sure, sure. But thank you for having me on. I enjoyed it. Well, I have a feeling our next show on Wednesday is going to be the most downloaded show ever. And that is because it is about UFOs. I'm not going to lie. At first I was like, eh, I don't know. Well, suffice it to say, we just taped it and it's hot fire. It's a hot, hot show.

We all loved it. I think it might be all of our favorite or at least top three. Don't miss it. Is something out there? And who, if anyone, is behind it? Go ahead and subscribe to the show now so you don't miss it. Download five stars and a nice review if, is behind it. Go ahead and subscribe to the show now so you don't miss it.

Download five stars and a nice review if you feel so inclined. We'll talk to you on Wednesday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.