The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 117 - Guns Don't Kill People; Schools Kill People ft. Max Eden

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

How did the Parkland shooter slip through the cracks of the Broward County school district? We’ll discuss with Manhattan Institute senior fellow Max Eden and then take on education policy more broadly. Finally, the news! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did the Parkland shooter officially charged today slip through the cracks of the Broward County School District? We have talked a lot about how he got his hands on a gun. We've talked very little about the policies and politicians that caused his high school to let him through the door. Lefties have long harped on the school to prison pipeline and advocated lower and lower disciplinary standards for juvenile delinquents. My guest today suggests in a recent piece for City Journal that it was precisely Broward County's effort to fight that so-called school-to-prisoning prison pipeline that may have helped the Parkland shooter evade law enforcement. He suggests in another piece that Barack Obama's policies may have made our schools less safe. We will discuss with Education Policy Scholar, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, and my old pal

Max Eden. Then we will discuss education policy more broadly because conservatives never talk about education policy because it isn't as sexy as deregulating the EPA or drilling an anwar. Ooh, baby, those are good. But conservatives sometimes ignore education policy. The left hasn't, so now they dominate the culture. We will discuss conservative approaches to education and how the Trump administration is doing.

Finally, the news and Dred Scott. I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles show. And before we get to any of that, we've got to keep the lights on in here, and we have to tell you about a wonderful sponsor of this show. And I like this because it has an Italian name. So just that alone really draws you into it. This, of course, is Da Vinci.

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They always do. They apply to everything in this life. Nevertheless, go to da Vincimeet.com slash cofefefe C-O-V-F-E-F-E for details. All right, let's get into this. Just a little context. Do you remember that interview of Sheriff Scott Israel a week or so ago where he said he was doing an amazing job,

even as he explained that he failed in every single aspect of his job and his cowardly deputies wouldn't even go into the building where the shooting was happening? In that interview, there was a largely overlooked part where Jake Tapper presses him on what new law, what new lax law enforcement policies played, what role they played in this shooting.

Here is Sheriff Israel. Were there not incidents committed by this shooter as a student, had this new policy not been in place that otherwise he would have been arrested for and not able to legally buy a gun? What you're referring to is the Promise Program, and it's giving the school, The school has the ability under certain circumstances

not to call the police, not to get the police involved on misdemeanor offenses and take care of it within the school. It's an excellent program. It's helping many, many people. What this program does is not put a person at 14, 15, 16 years old into the criminal justice system. What if he should be in the criminal justice system? What if he does something violent to a student?

What if he takes bulletin? What if he takes knives to school? What if he threatens the lives of fellow students? Then he goes to jail. That's not applicable in the promised program. But that's not what happened with the shooter. No, I know, Sheriff, I know in theory that, I know your theory that you're talking about, but the reality is different.

The Sheriff keeps using words like excellent and amazing. And I don't think those words mean what he thinks those words mean. I also love watching that clip because it reminds me of what Jake Tapper can be, what every Blue Moon, Jake Tapper does when he's not being a mean girl shilling for Democrats. He actually can be a journalist and be pretty hard hitting. So this is the context. There are these new policies that are at schools across the country, and in particular here in Broward County, that do not punish kids, do not put them into the criminal justice system,

try to let them slip through the cracks, and sometimes with tragic results. I'm joined now by Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Before that, Max was program director of the education policy studies. Department at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on early education, school choice, and federal education policy. His work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets, and now here. Clearly, he's gone on downward trajectory. Those outlets include the Encyclopedia of Education, Economics, and Finance, National

Review, Claremont Institute, U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post, that's okay, we'll forgive him for that, and the weekly standard. Before all of that, Max studied history at Yale, where he and I caused a lot of political trouble and one afternoon actually hung out with Jim Acosta. Max, thank you for being here. Max, my first question, do you remember that afternoon we hung out with Jim Acosta before he completely morphed into Ron Burgundy from Anchorman? Oh my gosh, do I ever? So just for context for your friends out there, Michael and I tried to get Mitch Daniels to run for presidents because we thought he was the one candidate who could beat Barack Obama, and I still think we

were right. I do too, yeah. I remember two things, Michael, or one thing. really, and it's how much we knew and how little we actually knew, right? You and I were sitting there thinking we knew it was going to happen next in American politics. And like we were ahead of the curve. We saw something that nobody else saw. We were wrong. We were quite wrong. We didn't see this.

We didn't see Trump. We certainly didn't see Jim Acosta becoming. Most of all. Which begs the question, were we blind? Was he always Ron Burgundy? Was he really then? or did he become different? I don't know, Michael.

I do sort of think it was the seeds were always there because people said, well, was he a crazy liberal or a lefty? I don't think it was that. I think he just one morning he woke up and looked in the mirror and he's been in love ever since. They're just jilted lovers, he and his mirror. Let's get into it. Let's start with what everybody is talking about,

which is this high school shooting in Florida. What responsibility does the Broward County School District bear for letting this shooter slip through the cracks? Yeah, so a little bit later on in that clip that you showed part of, Sheriff Israel says, you know, you can't blame my department for malfeasance, from misfeasance, because we didn't do anything wrong if we weren't told about it. But the purpose of the policy that Broward County schools put in place in partnership with the police department was to not tell him those things. It was we think that because students who get in trouble often go on to drop out of high school

or get into worse trouble later, it must be because they're being punished, not because they're behaving poorly. So the idea is let's try to, as much as we can, not suspend, not expel, not refer to law enforcement, really serious things. And Sheriff Runcie, he says these dozen offenses, including fighting, including drugs,

we're not going to do anything with the police with them anymore. And, hey, our arrest rates went down, our entire hero. Well, not necessarily. there's a reason why we want police records, and that's so that when somebody like this applies for a gun, the FBI is called, that record shows up. But this policy was explicitly designed to not let those things show up.

So when we're asking, there were so many warning flags, how were all these warning flags missed? Well, the policy was to try to not notice them, to try to not process them. We can get into specific details, but that's the overarching thing that Broward did, and it's a tragic result, but it's amazing to me that this isn't,

it's amazing to me that this isn't being talked about in these terms because you see obviously there were what 30 some odd, 45 calls to the local police, the FBI was notified, and everybody turned a blind eye. And the simple explanation here is that was the policy. The policy was to turn a blind eye. And I've never understood when people shriek about how many Americans are in prison or have criminal records and, oh, the number is so high. That just means America is great.

good at locking up our criminals, right? That just means that we're good at tracking people who break the law. I'm very glad that we lock up our criminals. I would rather our criminals be in prison than here where they can bother me and when I walk down the street, I have to worry or something. Fox Butterfield had that famous headline in the New York Times in 2004. The headline was more inmates despite drop in crime. So, hmm, I don't know if it's despite or maybe there's some relation there. In another piece, not just on Broward County, you say that Broward, you say that Barack Obama's administration made schools more dangerous. How did this happen at a federal level?

Yeah, so, you know, we can take Runcie, Broward County Superintendent Runcie's word for it. He joked that it looked like the Obama administration took his policies and made it into federal policy, right? So the idea of try to not suspend, to not expel, to not issue arrests for potentially serious things because we think that they're harmful. to get these numbers down. Broward was a first mover in that,

but shortly thereafter, the Obama administration issued a dear colleague letter, very much like the Title IX, dear colleague letter that your viewers are probably a little bit more familiar with, saying to school districts, even if your rules are totally fair, even if you administer them totally fairly, we might come after you and investigate you

for unlawful discrimination if students of different races break them at different rates. So that threat was universal, and the Department of Education investigated, hundreds of school districts across the country, major statistics, L.A. included, and forced them to change these policies, force them to try to aggressively lower these rates. Now, two really bad things happen when this happens, right? If the adults in the room are looking over the shoulder

at the statistics rather than the students, the kids know the rules have changed. And if they know that the line is farther away, if they know that there is no line, they'll behave differently. It's human nature. You respond to rules. That's not something that our friends and the left seem to understand. They see all rules as oppression. That's their prerogative. Not really how the world works. That's one problem. The other problem is that things get swept under the rug. So how did it all get swept under the rug before? I can show you side by side the policies before, after, how it would have been handled differently by the books. But what I also see when I read things, when I talk to teachers, when I read and I have teacher comments, they say that to get these

numbers down, principals tell them don't report these incidents, we'll rip up the papers that you're reporting, we'll just simply hide them from the school district. In Washington, D.C., they reduce suspensions by 40% in two years. Sounds pretty damn good. Know how they did it? They just didn't tell the district about it anymore. They sent the kid home. They told teachers, don't let them back into the school, and they just never reported it. So between telling kids that there are no consequences for actions and then not telling the people up the chain of command what's actually going on in the schools, that's a recipe for danger. This reminds me a lot of gun control, where with gun control, these mass shootings always seem to

take place in so-called gun-free zones in states with a lot of gun control anyway, and then they say, well, the answer to that, of course, is we need more gun control. Same here. There's this tragic shooting that takes place in a county like Broward County, which is leading the way in sweeping these kind of warning signs under the rug, and what's the answer going to be? We need more feds sticking their nose in. We need more policy tinkering. How do we change the narrative on that? How do we say, you know, maybe we should try a new course? Yeah, I mean, so it's easy to see how that's the narrative, right, for a couple of reasons.

That's obviously what the media wants to go with because it's what they believe, it's what they can use to bash the people that they don't like. it's entirely expected that that's where they want to have the majority of the focus, where they don't want to have the focus, is on a policy that they might be sympathetic to, that they might not want to look under the hood on. And conservatives do ourselves no favors in education policy, which we can get to later, by just kind of accepting the frame of the debate that's set by the left, right?

Like if the left says that the problem is too many guns, or guns, guns, guns, guns, only guns, then what you have the president say is, well, we need more guns. There's no real denial of the question or trying to shift the focus to another place. So let me offer an alternative emphasis, when the conservatives can't really get their minds around. I hope that they will be able to over the next couple of years. It's not really about more guns, less guns. I mean, that plays a role. That's fine. The real question is, how did the adults in the room not do the right thing here? What was it that was influencing their judgment? Because

given what we've read about him, any responsible, normal, sane, loving teacher, loving principle would have referred to this kid to the cops out of love. And the reason they didn't do it was out of fear because these policies come from the top down. They're told, do this. You know, this is the opposite side of zero tolerance. The left has honestly very, very legitimate critiques of zero tolerance. All of a sudden, there's Columbine, we're scared. Anything and everything can be turned over to the cops. It went way too far in that direction because we didn't just trust teachers and principals to do what they think is right. We set up these top-town incentives that made them act insanely. And then in response to that, we do it right back the other way. So conservatives on

education accept all the frames of our friends on the left and then just try to argue within it when they really shouldn't, you know, let the left beg the question like that. I say this all the time. I say in their premises, the left is so good at this, their premises avoid the debate altogether and they push us into a corner. We need to reject those premises. And by the way, speaking of love here, speaking of compassion, it seems to me nothing compassionate or fair or loving about treating these kids differently, about saying, well, you know, we've got to get the statistic on this racial group down.

So we're not going to process you. We have a criminal justice system to apply the law fairly to everybody. And yet now all of the emphasis coming out of universities, out of education policy, out of criminal justice policy, is, oh, we need to informally process. Let's treat some people a little differently than other people. How in the end could that produce a just society? How in the end could that produce safe outcomes for schools? So just last night I was talking to a gentleman by the name of Aaron Benner, who was a teacher. in St. Paul. And what he has said repeatedly publicly into me is there's this mass social

experiment whereby we've decided to hold African American students to lower standards. The soft bigotry of low expectations, right? As the Bush administration called it. Exactly. We think that by letting things slide, that we wouldn't let slide for white kids, that somehow that's going to help them. It's very interesting. The liberal mind is, and this is very interesting, right? Because 10 years ago, it used to, the idea was, and it's an idea that you and I are sympathetic to, I think I am certainly,

that in urban cities there are broken families, there's poverty, there's chaos, the school needs to be a place where there are no excuses, where there's order, where they can kind of learn values that their community might not necessarily be able to give them. That's what it was until about four years ago when kind of downstream of Black Lives Matter, The narrative became kind of any discipline is punishment.

This is not about values and norms. It's about power. It's about oppression. And once you go down that road, it's very, very difficult to get out of. But once you're there, if that's what you're presenting to children, that we have to hold you to a lower behavioral standard because we're oppressing you, that is what builds a school-to-prison pipeline. Oh, and what else could people conclude from that?

They'll say either, you know, you look at your teacher and you say, oh, this is an oppressive environment. And so there's that conclusion. Or you say, what, I'm not good enough. I'm not as good as that person. So I need to be handicapped. I need to be treated with some kind of policy handicap because I'm naturally more criminal or something.

It's so insanely bigoted. And yet, this is all we've heard ever since Black Lives Matter. Now, speaking of not accepting their premises and giving our own premises, as a matter of federal policy. Conservatives don't pay any attention to it on education. What does conservative education reform in the bullet points, in the broad overview, what does it look like? So we don't know well enough. I can tell you what it should be, but I can tell you that conservatives don't actually know their own principles on this. They think, they got very caught up in this accountability movement, right? like we need to test, we need to measure, we need to, you know, intervene where the tests and the

measurements say we should intervene. And you see how it makes sense from a kind of business perspective, very Jeb Bushy, very Chamber of Commerce. But it's also just central left. Very low energy, you might say. Very low energy, right. It's technocratic. It's we can pull levers from central offices and somehow improve the lives of students. And because we hate the unions and the union hates us, that means that we're conservative. That's not, that's not, I'm hoping that we're getting out of that. And I'm hoping that DeVos is going to help us get out of that. We can talk about that in a second. Because the real conservative premise, right, is Hayek, is Burke, is the inability of

distant bureaucrats to actually regulate affairs correctly, is the utter centrality of letting small groups form their own cultures and inculcate their own values with the freedom and flexibility to do so. And so what conservatives should be arguing for at every level is in a way what teachers unions should be arguing for as well, although they're not for other reasons, which is just how do we give more freedom and flexibility to teachers? What is it that's getting in their way? What is it that we have done to schools for our own social engineering purposes that's actually preventing strong culture, from forming. That should be the conservative line. I'm hoping over the next few years it will be, but it hasn't been for the past 15 years. It's funny because we should have total common ground with the teachers unions. We don't because they're just left-wing government thugs,

but we should have common cause on this. More freedom. More freedom, more fun, more education. It's a liberal education for a reason, right? It's supposed to be the free experience of education. And speaking of education freedom, charter schools are some of the only tickets out of poverty for poor black people living in the inner cities, among other groups, but disproportionately racial minorities benefit here. Why does the NAACP oppose charter schools? Yeah. I put two reasons out there. One reason is that they have a fair degree of connections with teachers unions. There's Jews collecting things going back and forth. There are financial interests that play. So teachers' unions are broadly anti-charter because it's a threat to their monopoly,

and that means people that they can influence a project that's done. The other thing is kind of what I was saying earlier in offshoot of it is it's this kind of inversion in the way that folks in the left view education, view life, view culture. It used to be that these no excuses charter schools were seen as the way to transmit bourgeois values to students who had broken home backgrounds. But it has since become another tool of oppression. And if you view, and there are ways in which I'm sympathetic to the case too. And this is where we're kind of small-sea conservatives and teachers unions and the constituents of the people. NACP, if not the NWACP themselves, could come into line, is that, you know, maybe there is a

problem in charter schools. I've certainly argued this, that they're too top down, that they're two by the books, that they don't really empower the communities, which they were intended to do. So it's a twofold problem. What I'm less sympathetic to, when I'm more sympathetic to you, I'm less sympathetic to the notion these schools are actually harming these kids. This is not what the test scores show. That's not the way the outcomes show.

I'm more sympathetic to the notion that charter schooling was supposed to be a means of decentralization, choice, empowerment, and it's quite frequently ended up being something that an outside group comes and just layers something else on a group of people that they don't really know, understand how a connection to. Right. And in terms of instilling those values of a former role of the school, now, of course, the culture has lost faith in its own values. It's cracked its own premises. And so you end up with moral chaos. for lack of a better term. Now, those lefty kids in Parkland, whom CNN has been prostituting for the past several weeks, just walked out on Education Department Secretary Betsy DeVos for whatever reason.

Who knows? This brings up a question. I don't really care about the protest or the walkout or whatever. What I do care about is, how is Betsy DeVos doing? She's doing all right. You know, she was off to a hard start,

to say the least. You couldn't ask for a worse way to get through your nomination process. She hit every major interest group, right? She hit the teachers' unions. She hit the disabilities lobby because she didn't quite know what the law was or didn't seem to know what the law was.

And maybe most importantly, she hit the memeocracy, right? It became a social media thing, and that hobbled her right out of the gates. I really like, I'm sorry to interrupt. I love the word memeocracy. I think I'm going to re-register from a Republican to a memeocrat. But please go on.

Please, please do. I think that is the conservative future, but we can discuss that later. So she started toppled in the public sphere, and quite frankly, she started without experience and without experience hands around her. My old boss, Rick Hess, would sometimes, it's not a joke because it's true, say that the center of the education reform world is two standard deviations to the left of America. right so even the people who are kind of on the right of the movement Trump really really really icky to them didn't want to do it

staffing problems within the White House didn't help either so she hasn't gotten that many good people around her and she had a very steep learning curve to go through that being said I think she's coming around to it I think that she is getting closer and closer to articulating a legitimate and powerful conservative vision of the way that schools should go I'm not sure she's there yet. But certainly philosophically, out of anybody they could have picked, I'm most sympathetic to what I understand her opinions to be. I think they're the most principled of the set that Trump was considering.

And I have some confidence that as time goes on, she'll do the right thing. She hasn't done anything on discipline yet, I think broadly because of fear of media backlash. And she still hasn't quite articulated some of the philosophical points or used the bully pulpit the way that I prefer. but I see progress and I see promise for more. When is the higher education bubble going to burst? Our own dear alma mater has totally imploded over the last few years. Lots of other colleges are having riots and hollowed out curricula, and tuition is more expensive than ever.

Am I going to have to sell my organs to send my kids to college? Yes. I don't think it's... Fair enough. It's free market. I don't think it's going to burst, Michael. A lot of it's just signaling, right? It's not actually about efficiently transmitting.

A lot of it is not about efficiently transmitting particular skills that will be directly useful to the workforce. It's about you and I went to Yale. And the fact that we went to Yale versus a place that's not Yale is what makes a lot of difference. Right. Social networks, old boys club, brand name, sure. Resumet line, that's not going anywhere. And unfortunately, Republicans are not up to the task of doing what they should on this. It's like how much more could we ask college campuses to antagonize everything about America and still have, and yet still have Republicans in the House, Republicans in the Senate, not really rein in their funding at all, right?

Right. Like, why is higher-right costs out of line? This is a huge debate. Has been a huge debate. I could get into the academic particulars, but fundamentally, if you're a major institution and you're looking at indebted, indefinite blank checks, you're going to plan around those. It's amazing how that economic principle works. If you get a lot more money just coming in out of the sky, you might start raising your budgets a little bit more.

You might. And the Republican Congress has shown no willingness to significantly turn the spigot, right? Because they're scared of the media criticism and you're hurting students. And, you know, some tough love might be in order, some real limitations of the financial aid instruments would be in order, but I don't have a great deal of confidence to the Republican Party to do that, and so I don't have a great deal of confidence that college will be more affordable for your kids. So you can deal with one kidney. That's fine. Yeah, I can live with that. Even one lung, although I smoke a lot of Stogeys, I probably need both of them. On the broader point before I have to let you go, conservatives are accused of being

anti-intellectual, usually by people who wouldn't know Socrates if he hit them on the head with the Chalice of Hemlock, the right points out that the real anti-intellectuals are the lefties who are running the universities and taking Shakespeare out of English department syllabi. For conservatives who don't just want to read Howard Zinn or memorize the ever-expanding list of invented gender pronouns, mine, by the way, are Mallord. How do you recommend that they educate themselves and their children? You know, Mike, I don't know that we ever talked about this, but I had a little existential crisis first semester sophomore year because I was taking Spanish, I was taking constitutional law, I was taking intellectual history since Nietzsche, and like constitutional law

was kind of a joke, there has been no intellectual history since Nietzsche. So what do I, what do I have? I had Ancient Creek history with Donald Kagan, right? I had Plutarch, I had Thucydides, I had Aristotle, I had a vision of the good, a vision that there was a good, a vision that virtue existed and that vision was what kind of tantalized me to explore more thoughts and questions. So I think, you know, again, like conservatives seed the premise of the left. Even when we talk about this stuff, we talk about it as like reacting to these campus crybaby. We don't even know these kids anymore, Michael. The kids yelling at those professors, they weren't talking about. They've changed. We react to them rather than put forward, no, virtue exists, the good

exists, they're outside history, they're in our nature, they're designed by our creator, and it is our duty to be the most human that we can be to study the best that's ever been written and said. That's right. It's a great point. And virtue exists. If we just say that, there's a good book, you know, a really great entry point into all of this thought by Alistair Macinty called After Virtue.

Yeah, that's, yeah, reasons and reasons to vote for Democrats is the other one. You read those two books. You'll have a good entry into the history of Western intellectual thought. Max, I got to let you go. We've got to get off of Facebook and YouTube if they weren't already censoring us. Thank you for being here. We'll have to catch up next time I'm in your town. Please do.

All right, see, Bell. Sorry, guys. We have so much news to talk about. I'm going to fly through it. We've got to go through the Texas primaries, and I want to make one point on Dred Scott. But before we do any of that, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook. I said goodbye to YouTube a long time ago. It was tearful.

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Forget all that. None of that matters, obviously. Who cares? What we really care about are the leftist steers tumblers. This is some important stuff, folks. When we start blaming Barack Obama's education policies for making schools less safe, they are going to cry like they haven't cried since November. Make sure you get this. It's FDA approved to hold your hot or cold, salty, delicious leftist steers. Go to DailyWire.com.

We'll be right back with all the news. Very quickly. The Texas primaries were today. I couldn't sign off without talking about this. This was too delicious. This was too... Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm. So, so good.

Democrats told us yesterday for the past few weeks there was going to be an overwhelming Democrat turnout. You're going to see more Democrats turn out than Republicans. We've got the blue wave coming. You're going to be like Morgan Freeman

in that movie. No, no. They said that early voting, voter registrations had Democrat numbers up over 100%. And Republicans just 10%. Oh no, Morgan Freeman and Deep Impact. No.

President Trump, your reaction. Well put, very well put, President Trump. They have been telling us about the big blue wave in Texas for years. Abortion Barbie promised that she was going to turn Texas blue. They're trying to give amnesty to 3.6 million likely Democrat voters to turn Texas blue. That's right. That's right. GOP turnout was over 50% higher than Democrat turnout. Sad.

Over 50% higher. In the gubernatorial primary, Republicans broke their own record. for the highest turnout in history. Republicans cast just about 1.5 million votes yesterday. Democrats, just a little over a million, sad. Absolutely dreadful turnout for Democrats. In 2002, Democrats had a great year that cast more ballots in those races than Republicans.

This year, 50% down, sad. For the Senate race, Ted Cruz's Senate seat, Cruz picked up 85% of the GOP vote. His next closest competitor was Mary Miller, who picked up 6%. Looking pretty good for Ted Cruz. On the Democrat side, the leading content.

the person who was going to trounce Ted Cruz, the appropriately named Beto O'Rourke, grabbed just 62% of the Democrat primary vote, nowhere near what Democrats were hoping. Maybe it's beta, Beta O'Rourke, who knows, that an Asbury mean. Democrats wanted to smack down George P. Bush, land commissioner in Texas. Just didn't happen. Politico dejectedly reports that Bush cruised to victory. By the way, despite his last name, George P. Bush embraced President Cofefe, because despite the constant negative press,

Donald Trump remains popular, and it worked, it helped him. Another takeaway from this, great news. I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter because we're out fundraising Democrats too, but the money didn't really matter that much. Three Democrats who led the way in fundraising throughout 2017, they didn't even reach the runoffs in top-tier congressional races.

Ed Meyer, a former Obama State Department official, he led all of his opponents in fundraising. He ended up in fourth place. Womp-want. I'd also like to, so this is all good. By the way, the GOP should remain terrified. All of history is telling us that we're going to get clobbered in November, but one good aspect of this Republican conservative exuberance

is I think we're paying attention. I think we actually might turn out to vote, but you've got to do it if you want to win. And if we win, man, we're going to need to make like a triple, a gallon-sized leftist-tier's tumbler just to stay safe. One final point I'd like to make, it's a quasi-historical point on the stay in history. Yesterday was the 161st anniversary of the Dred Scott decision.

The Dred Scott decision is regularly consistent. considered one of the worst decisions in American Supreme Court history. It basically declared that black people can never become citizens if they have any slave ancestors. Slave or free, they just cannot become citizens. It undid the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thus permitting slavery in all federal territories. Chief Justice Roger Taney declared blacks, quote, an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior.

that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, no rights, including constitutional rights. Taney actually went on. He knew that citizenship, even for free blacks, quote, would give to persons of the Negro race who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the Union the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went, endangering the peace and safety of the state.

There's a lot more in there, but that's part of it. Obviously, this isn't ever reported that Dred Scott was in no small part to keep blacks from owning guns. But people criticized this. It was the worst Supreme Court decision ever. Obviously, Taney made the wrong decision. But I actually love the Dred Scott decision. This is going to preclude me ever from running for office just that one sentence. But I love it precisely because it's so clear.

Roger Taney, even though he reached, I suppose, the wrong conclusion, Roger Taney recognized very clearly and rather logically the central conflict in American slavery, the internal nonsense of American slavery, which is this. If the language of the Declaration of Independence is correct, then human dignity, the human dignity that is described in the Declaration depends upon natural rights, natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. natural rights are not something you earn. There's something that are natural, innate, that are born into you.

And so, the question of free blacks becoming citizens is impossible because there are only two questions here. Really only one question. Do blacks have natural rights or do they not have natural rights? If they do have natural rights, then slavery is an intolerable, horrific evil. There's no argument for it. If blacks do not have natural rights, then even if they become free,

even if they leave slavery, they could never become American citizens. The American project is based on this notion, this enlightenment notion of natural rights. So if they don't have the natural rights, what does it even mean for them to become free? They certainly can't become American citizens. And that tainee decision puts that logical problem

into stark relief. And then within eight years, 600,000 Americans would give their lives to resolve that conflict, and they resolved it in the former. They resolved it to say that blacks do have natural rights, and therefore, slavery is an intolerable evil. But I really do appreciate the Dred Scott decision for making a way, doing away with all of the sophistry that comes along with, well, they're not free here, but they can become free, and this kind of black can be free, but not this one, and blah, blah, blah, no, it's a question. Does our creator endow us with certain unalienable rights, or does he not? That's the central question of the American experiment, and that's a central question of American citizenship. So good stuff. I'm glad it's a good thing that there were eight years that resolved that question on the right side.

But good on Justice Taney for putting the question into relief. That's our show. Make sure to get your mailback questions in. We have a good show tomorrow. We have a special guest also. Get your mailback questions in, and I might consider answering them. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. I'll see you then. Executive producer Jeremy Boring. Senior producer Jonathan Hay.

Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua O'Vera. Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.