The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 305: Charles C W Cooke Took an Oath

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

When he's not writing his National Review column or rooting-on the Jaguars, Charlie Cooke is loving the Constitution he swore an oath to and loathing the proposed student loan transfer scheme he did not.  

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Tell me. When he was referring to the Premier League in England, he called it soccer and not football. That's right. Well, maybe he was just being polite. Maybe he just knew the audience of the way I heard it. You know, if they're football fans and soccer fans, then in their minds, they're imagining two very different sports and they're not conflating one with the other. Yeah, he's an American football fan as well. So he's a fan of the Jaguars, I believe.

Charlie is a heck of a writer. If you read the National Review from time to time, you might have seen his stuff. He writes for other people as well and other places as well. And the reason I wanted to have him on today was, well, there were a lot of reasons, actually. One, he was returning the favor. I did his podcast a few months ago, and he promised to come on, and I was delighted. And two, I don't know of anybody who has taken a harder or more persuasive line on the insanity of, forgiving student loans, except maybe me.

Because there you go. I just use words like insanity because I think it's crazy. I think what's about to happen and what many, many people in our country and our government are pushing for is a kind of madness that's rooted in something profoundly and deeply unfair. And I've done my best over the years to articulate why I believe that and why I think the student loan forgiveness program as proposed is anephma to work ethic scholarships and the thing we try and celebrate at micro works. But on a macro level, nobody's done a better job than Charles C.W. Cook in explaining why this idea is not only morally repellent, but why it's fundamentally illegal. And I just really like where he's coming from on this topic. And I wanted to give him a chance to spell that out. But of course,

Chuck, as these conversations are want to do, the topic varied a little bit. It got sporty a bit. First of all, I just want to say that he would push back against you using the word student loan forgiveness. He likes to call it transference because we can't forgive the loan. You know, that money's been paid. The services have been rendered. Yeah, and I didn't make this point when we were getting into it. But I disagree.

I do think you can forgive the. business of borrowing money, you can't afford to pay back. I forgive you, you know, but it doesn't mean I'm going to forget. Yeah. And it doesn't mean we're going to pretend the money isn't there. A student loan is a loan that you take in exchange for a degree. And that degree is now in your possession. You paid for it. And now there's a lot of talk about why you should get your money back. And the money, that would come back in your direction, would come for many millions of people who either paid off their debt or didn't go to college. And so we have ourselves the basis for a conversation.

And to our more attentive listeners who are wondering what that whining is in the background, no, it's not Chuck. It's a leaf blower in Chuck Zipko that has once again come back to haunt this podcast. The leaf blower stays in, Mike. The leaf blower stays in. And so does Charles C.W. Cook. conversation as happens from time to time goes on a bit longer than I intended, but you're really going to like this guy. You're going to like the way he talks, you know. He really, he really sounds to me as though he's a man who went to Oxford and graduated with honors, which he did. Indeed he did. He's a smart fellow, and I like him, and you will too. And I love

the fact that the oath he took, he takes seriously to this day. More on that, right, after this. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work

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Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com, k-n-o-b-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the nobleman come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. You can't hear you because there's a delay of some sort, yeah. It's always something. Seconds ago, Charles paid Charles a very fine compliment, though we never do the same thing twice on this podcast.

Chuck, I'm going to ask you to repeat that, please, because studies show our guests really, really do appreciate the shameless sucking up whenever possible. I'd like to give it a good go. I was just telling Charles C.W. Cook, and I just love saying your whole name for whatever reason, that you are my favorite kind of American, and that is the kind who comes from somewhere else,

comes to this country, appreciates it, loves it, and I wish that there were more native-born Americans who appreciated as much as you do. Yes. Yes. This experiment, you know. Exactly. Well, yeah, thank you.

I was saying that I actually voluntarily took an oath to the U.S. Constitution. And as a result, I've sort of committed myself, which I'm pleased about. I'm not trying to get out of it. But, you know, someone said to me recently, why do you like the Constitution so much? And I can answer that question if you like. I do. I'm past the point now at which I have a choice.

I'm married to the U.S. Constitution. I put my right hand up and said the words. So I have to uphold it, even if I don't want to, which I do. You know, it's funny. I mean, we can be glib, and we often are, you know, about raising your hand and taking a pledge, making a pledge, agreeing to a thing. you know, I run a modest little foundation

and we have a thing called a sweat pledge and I get a lot of guff for it but growing up in the Boy Scouts and in some other organizations, there was a time it just felt to me anyway where those kinds of oaths were a very serious thing and it is interesting to hear a grown man

talk about it in those terms. When were you sworn in? And what was that experience like for you? It was five years ago, just over five years ago. It was in North Florida, where I live. There were, I think, 28 of us. I was the only Brit.

And I wondered if that would mean I got to go first because I thought it was possible that... Well, no, not because I'm special, but because I thought if they do... It's a special relationship, Charles. No, but I thought if they do England, I have some chance of E being first. And if they don't do England,

they might do Great Britain, and then I have some chance. But they chose United Kingdom. So I was actually last. Oh, wow. I had to wait through the whole thing. And the thing that was so great about it was that there were very few repeat countries. So I think there were maybe 25 different countries represented there.

So we were all at the front. The guy who swore us in had actually been an immigrant himself. He was in the same club. And then my wife and some of my friends and extended family were at the back. And I think they looked at it with a little more of amusement than the rest of us did. We were all extremely earnest. You know that song that got big during the Gulf, the first Gulf War? Lee Greenwood.

Proud to be an American. So they play that at the ceremonies. And they do it unironically. And they do it with the original video from 1991 or whatever it was. And they show the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty and the Rocky and the Rocky Mountains. And I think some Americans think this is a corny song, but none of the people who are becoming Americans did at all. I mean, we're all sitting there transfixed. Tears rolling down our eyes.

And I thought, this is so great because no one here has been poisoned by irony. They really mean it. You know, it's so funny you put it that way. One of the first questions that I wanted to ask you, and in fact I will, is this weird relationship between earnestness and irony, especially with regard to what it does. to our ability to persuade, you know, but also in our capacity to be entertained. Like there was such a time, and I think we all lived through it, where irony was so clearly for sale. And programs like The Daily Show were on the tip of that spear.

And then, you know, events, dear boy, events, right? And suddenly there's this retrenchment to, it's not quite earnest, and it's not quite nostalgia. It's a kind of vert schmaltz, right? That's just this unapologetic connection to a thing that is nakedly true. And you're not the first person

to describe the swearing in that way. I had a buddy who talked about it really in terms of, you know, I had heard about the melting pot, the Great American melting pot forever. But until you go through a swearing-in ceremony with other people from different parts of the world, you don't really get it.

No. I think that is true. Sorry, you were going to say, Chuck. Well, I was going to say that I'm amazed to hear that your ceremony only had 28 people. I've been to two. One was for our buddy Rico, Mike, who's been on this podcast from Canada, and another is a friend of mine from Argentina. And both times, it was at the L.A. Convention Center, and it was thousands of people. And I cried both times just because I'm one of those natural-born Americans who really does love this country. And of course, Rico, Rico cries at card tricks. So he was crying as well.

But I loved every second of it. And my favorite part was there was a part where the audience is there in the back. And then they leave for whatever reason. And I don't know what happens behind closed doors. You know, there's a secret blood handshake or something. I don't know. But as people came out one by one, there were several. who were wearing the uniform of the United States Army,

Marine Corps, Navy, or whatever, and the crowd, and there was a giant crowd. There were hundreds of us, and we would cheer loudly and just clap for them the entire way as they left. It was beautiful, just beautiful. Yeah, well, I thought a few months later that I'd missed a trick,

because as you say, it was a small ceremony. Behind me, you'll see there's a Jacksonville Jaguars towel that I got at the post-season games I went to this year. And five years ago, I went to a game and they swore people in on the field at the game. A whole bunch of them. I thought, well, I wish I'd have known about that. I'd have tried to sign up.

I'd have tried to sign up for that. But actually, there was something nice about this sort of intimate ceremony, even though it was in a soulless government building. It was pretty moving. So back to the earnest versus irony thing as a writer. That's really what I wanted to ask you. What am I interrupting right now? Because in my mind, you were right in the middle of another column.

You had to walk away from it in order to have this conversation because you seem to be writing all of the time. Yeah, yeah. I write a lot, especially if I'm cross about something. I write quickly and repeatedly. That's my muse. There's something about writing that can be really cathartic. occasionally you wake up and you think well i better write something today but usually something

irritates me and then i start bashing out the words and before i realize it i finish i think that the question of irony is an interesting one because i see irony as a tool among many other tools you know irony sarcasm these are important weapons within any writer or debaters arsonor you would not Are they? Really? You would not want a country in which there was no sense of irony or sarcasm. You couldn't have Shakespeare without irony. The problem is, as with any tool, is when it's overused or when it becomes a crutch or when it becomes unacceptable to talk without it. And this is what bothers me, especially when it comes to, say, evaluations of the use. United States or of the Western world or of how we all live is when people feel that it is somehow more sophisticated to be cynical or ironic or sarcastic than it is to genuinely appreciate the things that you've been given. And I think that's crazy. There's nothing sophisticated about rejecting the world that we inherited. There's nothing sophisticated about being ungrateful. There's nothing

sophisticated about refusing to appreciate beauty or hard work or love. And that's when I get off the train. And you mentioned John Stewart. I think that's where John Stewart took it too far. There's nothing wrong with criticizing politicians or making fun of politicians. We live in a free country. We should do that. But when you can't see any good or you're unwilling to acknowledge any good, that's when you take it too far. And the big problem with it is not just that you end up with a cynical society, but you actually forget what it is that's good about America, and that makes it harder to keep it. It's the cognitive dissonance, though, sometimes, I think, between the earnest and the ironical, where you have a stadium full of people who are quite possibly singing along

with Lee Greenwood, you know, before a football game. And then you have a cohort that takes a knee. And then you might even have another cohort who's burning the flag or urinating on it or something else. And we somehow have to process all of that. I mean, it's a lot to ask of people, right? And so much of what you write about and so much of what I've read in the National Review, to me anyway, feels like an attempt to kind of bridge all of these things, you know, to acknowledge that a couple things can be possible at the same time. indeed more than a couple, right, in many, many cases.

It just seems to me that our capacity to process that duality has become kind of skinny. Yeah, well, there's a paradox there, isn't there, in that we love America for the freedoms that it protects and the opportunities that it gives us. And sometimes people use those freedoms and opportunities in ways that we disdain. And they even use them to attack the freedoms themselves. I mean, you can stand up in the United States and say, without prosecution, I think we should repeal the First Amendment. I mean, you wouldn't want it any other way, because otherwise the First Amendment would be meaningless.

But if you allow that to be translated into political action, well, then actually that person can no longer make the case that they were making to get there. So that's sort of one of the paradoxes. But where it gets hugely problematic, as I said, is when people forget why it is that they're able to dissent and rebel in the first place. And that is because relative to most other countries and pretty much every country that's ever existed in human history, we just have an unprecedented level of freedom and also of prosperity in which to enjoy it. It's funny. It's like that's the very first thing we said. you get the right to say whatever you want,

whenever you feel like it about whatever. But the second thing we said was, you might want to have a gun. Because, you know, free speech isn't free, obviously, and there are consequences to all sorts of things going on right now. The most recent thing you wrote that I read that I wanted to ask you about, and I'm just kind of hopscotching around here, is the Tucker Carlson stuff that's going on right now

on January 6th, right? And just this idea, you know, more cognitive dissonance, more images that don't seem to rhyme with the earlier images that we were shown. And, oh, God, so many well-intended, like-minded people all of a sudden, you know, it's like the old parable with the blind guy and the elephant, you know, somebody's holding on to the tusk and the other one's holding on to the tail. And they're each having a totally different experience with regard to the same animal. And there's a lot of attention for.

focused on this thing right now. And I was really interested with both you and Noah wrote about it. I think probably this morning or maybe 10 minutes ago, you're probably blogging in real time. You're probably typing something right now with your right hand that I can't see. You can't see the hands. I think there's a lot of parts of this story and they get subsumed into our partisan positions and then all the edges get shaved off. So, and I think, three things at the same time. The first one is that January 6th was a disgrace. I said earlier I took an oath to the Constitution. I take that very seriously. We have elections in the United States and we have or should have a peaceful transfer of power and you just cannot smash up the capital

try and interfere with the congressional ratification of the results. You can't rewrite the 12th Amendment, the electoral count act to get what you want. A lot of elections go the wrong way from my perspective, but that's just part of being an American is accepting that. So I think the whole thing was a disgrace. The second thing I think is that, of course, that is a separate question from individuals and what those individuals may or may not have done. So we can say as a broad principle, and we should, that it was a riot. We can say that it was unacceptable. What we can't do is take that contention and then say, as a result, anyone who was in the vicinity is, guilty or anyone who has been accused on television or even in a court should be presumed to have

done what they're accused of. That's un-American. So insofar as Tucker Carson is pointing out, well, this didn't happen the way it was described or this person seems not to have been involved or this door seems to have been open. I think that's fine. I don't think it changes the overall narrative, which was his claim, but I think it's fine. And the third thing I think is that the January 6th committee, which met and was televised, was a disaster. You know, I've been saying this for two years. This was a partisan political disaster. It was made worse by President Biden, who has tried repeatedly to tie what happened on January 6th to all manner of ideas that were normal in American politics long before January 6th. One of them, for example, is being pro-life. Now, I understand

people disagree on this profoundly, and I respect that. Some people are pro-life. Some people are pro-choice. Most people are actually a bit of both. But it's simply not true, as Joe Biden said in a speech a few months ago, that being pro-life is somehow being an insurrectionist or, you know, being the sort of person who would smash up Congress. It's just nonsense. So, you know, I think we had a bad committee. We have a lot of good questions about how individuals behaved and they should be looked at. Overall, though, this was a really shameful day and I wouldn't want to see it rewritten or swept under the rug? I think you landed on a thing that most reasonable people would find themselves in violent

agreement with, right? It's just that isn't it odd in such a completely predictable way the way things get so quickly stretched into an extreme? January 6th was a terrible day. I was on the phone with Chuck. We were watching it and we were each just like, it made us heart sick to see what we saw. And it is anathma to suggest that we didn't see what we saw. I understand there's a great deal of other stuff that happened that we didn't see. But the point is, how long did it take

before people started comparing that day to Pearl Harbor? Right. And 9-11. How quickly one side sought to take that admittedly, very bad day. And I feel like tried to associate it or make it something that it actually wasn't. And so now it's a tennis match, right? The other side has to go, wait a minute, it was nothing like 9-11. In fact, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as you think. And then the other side's heads explode. And then pretty soon, the same two blind dudes are hanging on to Apakoderm wondering why they're not having the same experience from different ends. Do do do do do do do do Dumb

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The constant comparisons to 9-11 are absolutely ridiculous. The comparisons to Pearl Harbor are even more ridiculous. The idea that it was in any way, redolent of the civil war is preposterous. And even some of the more hysterical claims that we've seen from members of Congress who said we were one hour away from a successful insurrection. I mean, we don't have a system in this country

where if you get to sit in the Senate chamber for an hour, you get to be in charge. It's just such a weird way of looking at it. And, yeah, it should be absolutely possible to condemn everyone who did that and to condemn those who lied about the election who helped inspire it without pretending that the United States

was at any point ever close to losing its system of government. Of course it wasn't. Yeah. The thing that scares me, honestly, and all of this is that I, like we ought to be living in a time where the average American is encouraged to be as skeptical as possible about damn near everything, prudent, but skeptical. Not cynical in the

ironical way, but skeptical. But I also feel like the minute somebody expresses a level of skepticism about anything, the pushback, and sometimes I see this in the pages of the National Review, I see it pretty much everywhere. If you're skeptical about the claims that the world's going to end in 12 years, you're a climate denier. If you're skeptical about the fact that January 6th is on par with 9-11 or Pearl Harbor, you're an insurrectionist denier. And so it's hard for me to know what to say in terms of a bromide regarding skepticism when it seems to be met so forcefully as a knee-jerk in virtually. every occasion I can think of.

Yeah, I think in general we all ought to calm down with the analogies. I mean, this is a tick we have. I don't say this in any way to underplay the inflation rate, which is a real problem. I don't say this in any way to underplay the problems at the border or the extraordinary number of fentanyl deaths or high interest rates that are making it difficult for people to buy homes, real problems that we have. But we have never had it so good as a general matter. We live in a time of great peace, and there are threats to that piece that we need to address. We live in a time of enormous prosperity. We live in an era of mass communication.

It's just a silly little example. Not only can I talk to my parents, as we are now, on a screen, which no immigrants could do until a few years ago, but I can sit and watch English Premier League soccer at the same time as my dad, and we can text about it as if I live down the road. While you're writing tomorrow's column. Exactly. Sure, you could, but why would you watch that soccer thing?

I already established my bona fides with football, right? Yes, that's true. I've got both. I've got both. And I think that the tendency that we have to say everything is the worst or that anything that happens is the biggest crisis since is just a bad, bad cultural habit. Whether it's comparing things to Nazi Germany, which is a constant tick, everything is Nazi Germany or saying that we're 10 years away from the world ending. Everything being a crisis is not good for us. And I think we're actually starting to see some real tangible downsides when you look at how younger people especially feel on the internet.

Everything seems to depress them. And, well, it would depress me too if I believed it. Now, in spite of what you've said about the dangers of overstating a thing, and we talked about this briefly when you were kind enough to have me on your podcast. And I said, I want to have you on this one to take a deeper dive. but you didn't pull any punches with the student loan forgiveness plan. God, I love that word, forgiveness. In fact, I listened to your most recent rant, and I thought, well, you know what?

This is a great example of Charlie sitting down to write something because he's pissed off. And, you know, I mean, you know people read your stuff, right? I hope so. Because when you said it before, it was funny. I say the same thing about writing. It's kind of therapeutic and it compresses time and I do it because I like it and I sometimes forget people actually read it. But I don't know of anybody who's taken a harder line against the idea that we ought to forgive these loans. With the possible exception of me, you.

You've been consistent on it and I'd really like to hear you distill it not only from the standpoint of its moral issue, right, but legally. How are we this close to seeing the executive do something that's going to open the door for future executives to do virtually anything? Well, I'll start with the moral and then I'll come on to the legal. The idea in my estimation is revolting. And I've been writing about this area for a long time. I haven't been writing about student loan. They say forgiveness. They really mean transference because you can't forgive the debt.

money's been spent. The people who received it have got it into their bank accounts and they've given it to the colleges and they've received the product that the colleges sell and they've benefited from it. So we're not forgiving anything. We're transferring liability for that debt away from the people who used the products to many people who didn't. That idea was really not popular or even proposed until a couple of years ago. This is a new. phenomenon. But five, six, seven years ago, I was writing about this fetishization of college that you and I talked about on my podcast, this idea that there's something wrong with you if you didn't go and that the government's failed you if it didn't enable you going to college. And it's not

because I hate college. I don't. I really liked college. But there was a sort of moral judgment. Yeah, I went to Oxford. Yeah. I really liked it. But, you know, I was graduated and everything, right? I graduated. Yeah. But look, I was. the first person, or the first man, I should say, in my family to go. And the upshot of that is that I know a lot of people who didn't go. And what bothered me about the way we started talking about this six or seven years ago was there was an implicit moral judgment of the people who didn't go. And I also started to see it creep into legislation where you would have all of these jobs that really did not require a degree for any reason that suddenly required a degree. And, you know, my dad, who,

who actually did eventually go to college in his 60s, just because he wanted to learn some history. My dad would say, well, I'm cutting back on work and I want to volunteer my time. And this is a guy who had been in the Air Force, who'd run a business, who'd worked in various other industries. And they would say to him, do you have a degree? And he would say, no.

And they'd say, well, we can't use your time. That he's trying to volunteer. And I thought, well, that's the direct upshot. And to me, you know, this student loan question is going to make that an awful lot worse. There's two big problems with it before we get to the legal part, I think. The first one is that it doesn't actually make whatever problem they're trying to solve better. It's not a reform. They're not changing the way college degrees work.

They're not making it cheaper. They're not removing administrators. They're not even helping the guy who takes out a student loan two days after this is done. This is sort of a one-time, like. strike on the people who currently have student debt of a certain portion of it for no obvious reason at a point in history in which they've got two or three years worth of repayment relief because of COVID, that they're in a better position than people who didn't go to college. They're earning more. They have better job prospects. They have better health outcomes

without making any of the changes to the system. So even if you like the system, I can't see the argument for it. And then you've got this distinction being drawn for no. obvious cause between people who go to college and spend money and borrow money to do so and people who don't go to college but who still have to spend money or borrow money to get there. I mean, I live in North Florida and you see everywhere people who work with their hands, roofers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, HVAT guys. Now, these guys, they had to train some of them, some of them were just taken on or they apprenticeships. The guy who owns the business has loans. You know, he has a fleet of F-150s or

of vans. He has to buy the materials that they use. He has to pay his staff, even if times aren't great and the business is in trouble. Why not write off those loans? That guy was just as affected by COVID, probably more, actually, than many students. This has not even been suggested. People would laugh if you said it in Washington, D.C. And I don't understand why except for that we like students more, that we think if you go to college, you're a better person, you're more worthwhile, you've somehow got skills that we need.

And I think this is nonsense. And again, it's not because I dislike college, although I have some criticisms of the way colleges have begun to behave and many courses that they teach, but it's not because I dislike college. It's because I value other things too. And, you know, if you send this message to people that we are going to take money

from the plumber, the electrician, the carpenter, the HVAC guys, and give it to college students purely because they went to college, you're not only sending the message that you too should go to college instead of being a plumber, which if you actually look at supply and demand in those areas is insane, but you're telling people your government likes the college student, and he doesn't care about you. So it's not that I want the government to start sending checks to carpenters or plumbers. I don't. It's that I want them to do it to neither.

or if you absolutely have to, as we did with PPP to both. But don't place one over the other. On the legal question, I would have given the answer I just gave you if you had asked me, why is Congress considering forgiving student loans? But it is worse than that. Congress did not consider forgiving transferring student loans. They haven't done it. They've assiduously decided not to do it over and over again.

They're not the votes for it. It just would not pass. We don't have the money. they don't have the number of legislators they need. It's not going through. And in America, when the legislative branch at the federal or state level doesn't do something, nothing happens. That's how the system is set up.

Read Article 1. Literally the first words of Article 1, all legislative power, it sets, are invested in a legislative branch. Joe Biden, when he came in, wanted to do this, and he got his lawyers to scour the statute books to find some law that had the words. forgiveness in it, couldn't find it. So they settled for a statute that says wave. This statute is the 2003 Heroes Act. This law was passed, I think, unanimously in the House of Representatives shortly after 9-11. And the aim of it was to prevent people who had volunteered to serve their country in a war or a national emergency or people who were in emergency zones, sort of people who are

helping, you know, recover after a hurricane or what you will. The idea was to make it easier for them to continue their education if that's what they were doing so that they wouldn't be put in a difficult administrative or financial position because they had decided to serve America or serve Americans. Biden has taken this law. He's taken, you know, provision D of subsection aid in it, which is really a cleaning up mechanism to make sure that. that those who are in the situation I just described are cared for. And he said, every student in America counts. Every student in America is alone.

This is lunacy. No one thinks this. No one had ever said this before. Nancy Pelosi explicitly in 2021 said that the law did not do that, that the president could not do this on his own. The Department of Education, which is being used to do this, said in a memo in early 2021, that there is no authority to cancel or forget.

give or waive student loans. Biden knows this, and he's done it anyway. And you know what worries me about this, Mike, aside from the policy, is that if he gets away with this, which will be on a technicality if he does, because no court is going to look at the merits of it and decide he has the authority. If he gets away with this because the plaintiffs in the case lack what's called standing, which is a direct harm, if he gets away with it on those grounds, then the next 20 years of American politics are going to involve presidents, Republican and Democrat,

seeing what they can do that they know Congress has not passed that no one can complain about in the courts. And once you've done that, you've essentially abolished separation of powers in the American Constitution, which is a massive disaster for our government. And it doesn't matter if you like the student loan plan or, you know, take another example that I would, you know, be more likely to favor in theory, which is abolishing all income taxes, right? I mean, I'd love that, but if the next Republican president said, I have decided for one year not to collect income taxes based on this esoteric reading of an emergency power that I found from a law that was passed after 9-11, and yeah, I know it's illegal, but you can't touch me because no one has standing to sue,

I wouldn't support that. I would be utterly appalled by it because the president took an oath to uphold the constitution and the law, and he'd be violating it. It'd be tough, though. It'd be tough not to have a small, tasteful, quiet parade at the prospect of not paying any income tax for a year. Right? But again, we're just confronted with the same old thing. You know, a short-term dopamine hit for a long-term addiction or something much, much worse. That's an excellent summation, by the way, and I'm not sure what to feel more outraged about.

But I think it really does come back. You know, it's funny. Why is it always an F1-15? in this example. Well, it's the most popular truck, right? I'm not allowed to say that because I did about 300 commercials for Ford once upon a time. But it always makes me laugh. It's never the Dodge Ram.

It's never the GMC. It's never the Denali, right? But it is emblematic of a tool. And that tool, that work truck, that diesel truck in all likelihood, the 350 really is what, you know, I think they're more outstanding loans on those work. trucks than any other necessary tool required to build the very universities that are at the very center of this conversation. And the fact that we are not able to look at a degree as a tool, but rather an investment, right? But somehow this truck is subordinate to that in some way. Just comparing the

the creditation or the credential to the tool, they're both tools. Yeah. And they're both really important if you want to work in your chosen field. So, you know, that's where my outrage always lands. It's just the basic fundamental thumb on the scale of saying this tool matters hugely and this one not at all. Yeah, and think about the, you mentioned cognitive dissonance earlier. Think about the cognitive dissonance that is necessary to make the case that those who are in favor of this policy are making.

Because you cannot have it both ways. If college is such a wonderful consumer product that all who borrow money and spend it on college come out better off, if their prospects are improved, then there really is no case for giving them other people's money. If college is a scam that leaves people in debt without the capacity to pay it off and doesn't provide what it is advertised as providing, then subsidizing it to the tune of $400 billion without making any reforms is absolutely preposterous. Where's the FTC? If that's the argument, then you're really talking about a flawed, dangerous product that's out there for sale. not just for sale, but being affirmatively marketed in the most persuasive ways possible.

That's to me where it really gets insidious. I know how to sell an F-150. I know how to sell the tool. It's feature, its benefit, and some snazzy music and some handsome actors, and boom, you have a commercial. But the way we're selling college is very, very different. You know, we're turning the screws of guilt in parents. We're applying unthinkable pressure to a kid's peer group and cohorts, the pressure to borrow money that they have no hope of ever repaying. You've got the guidance counselors involved turning a slightly different screw, and all the avenues are converging.

It's not just a commercial. It's a sensibility. It's a cause of action, right? And it's been drip, drip, drip for 50 years. And this to me is the tipping point. And this is why I get a little hyperbolic with it as well. I think you're absolutely right. I can't think of a bigger issue right now.

Just from a back to the moral thing, the legal is out of my lane. But just morally, if we do this morally, what in the world are we going to do next? I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running. a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American

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If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a... a chance on a foreign ranch get good ranchers now yeah in pursuit of a bad policy this administration has created a constitutional crisis is the way that i put it and sometimes people's eyebrows go up when i say that or they do a double take because that is a dramatic way of saying and i know earlier i said that we should be careful of hyperbole but i don't normally say things like that you know it's not as if everything that happens is met with that sort of catastrophizing. This one, I think, would represent a crossing of the Rubicon. And I think it would unleash some really unpleasant undercurrents in our politics. Legally, I've made my case. I think we'll see 20 years of the undermining of separation of

powers. But culturally, I think when you start to tell people and you act on it as well, that we need to borrow $400 billion that we don't have in the name of the general public to funnel it to a small subsection of American citizens who are for whatever reason deemed to be worthy while people who are in similar situations in other fields are not then you are opening the door to a sort of winner takes all fractious politics that we aren't going to enjoy very much. And I think the people who are championing this would instinctively

understand it if the shoe was on the other foot. And if a president of a different political viewpoint said, I am going to take $400 billion and hand it out to construction workers, then the

very people who are now endorsing this idea would quite rightly ask why. Why construction workers? And they'd be right to ask that, and they'd be right to feel as if their government was handing out special favors and making moral judgments. Well, that's what it's doing here. Well, I agree. But at least there would be a plausible answer to why construction workers, right?

You could point to all the data that comes out of the BLS. you could point to virtually every construction company that exists today, from small to large, and you would find that every single one of them has gone as far as they can go without hiring more people. And then you would learn that their ability to hire those people has been unbelievably hampered. And it's not by money. You know, it's by availability. It's by will. It's not just a skills gap.

It's a will gap. And so you would at least be able to retrench and say, look, there's not a lot of data that says what we're really suffering from at the moment in terms of the employment market is a lack of college graduates. But you could make the case that says we have a dearth of trained, enthusiastic people who are willing to work in the skilled trades. It's undeniable. So, yeah, I mean, if you're going to be in the business of picking winners and losers, you know, which is really what this is, right, then at least you'd be able to look around and say, all right, we've got real shortages in this area. What can we do?

Yeah. But I don't know. I don't think you can do it in the other direction. Well, no, I just push back a little bit, though, and say, I agree with what you just said, but I think it's important for my analogy that what the president, the hypothetical president's doing in this hypothetical situation is to say, we are giving money to construction workers. Because what you're describing is the prospect. of the United States deciding to address deficiencies

and construction workers being one of the groups that, as the result of that, gets benefits. What you would want to do, if you wanted a government policy in this area, is to say, we are going to subsidize where we have shortfalls of skills. But you do that without fear or favor. And if that ends up with a disproportionately high amount of money going to welders or doctors, for that matter, then that's fine. But the aim is,

you know, we're going to categorically try to fix this skills gap. My objection here is that the Biden administration, which doesn't have the power, but forget that, the Biden administration has said, we're going to forgive student loans. That's the policy. It's not we are going to send money to people whose professions require them to have taken out loans and they're struggling to, to pay them off. That's not what's happening here. There are people in this policy who earn $250,000 a year who are going to get $10,000 or $20,000 knocked off their student loan bill if they still have one. And to analogize the analogy, it's the difference between saying we want to do something for poor people and then saying maybe that in the way that it's implemented

implicates more men than women or women than men or whites and blacks or blacks and whites or whatever and saying we're going to give money to men, right? You know, this is what I object to. If you have an anti-poverty program and you apply it perfectly evenly and you just say anyone who says earns under $20,000 a year, they get this benefit, the fact that that is not going to yield

the exact same number of people in Mississippi as New York or the same number of people who are doctors than are welders or the same number of men than women or the same number of people with kids than without, is immaterial. It's besides the point. you're saying is anyone who qualifies they get this program, you're not saying, we've decided to hand out money to this group we like. And this is what really bothers me about the student loan thing,

is it starts with the presumption that we need to give a bunch of money to people who have student loans, even if they make quarter of a million dollars a year. This is crazy. It doesn't solve the problem either, because the real problem is that college is too expensive. This is not going to make college any less expensive. In fact, just the opposite. If colleges know that the American government is there to just dole out money for people to go there, there's no incentive to compete and say, we'll lower our tuition if you come here. How do we get them to lower the tuition then, Charles? I mean, because I know that you know this, but I think it's worth saying out loud. I don't believe anything in the history of Western civilization that is of value has become more exponentially

expensive over a shorter period of time than a four-year degree. Not health care, not real estate, not energy, nothing. So like the cost of a four-year degree is it's more expensive to be a welder too, to be fair. But exponentially, it's not even close. So it's just galling. We didn't even talk about endowments, but, you know, Harvard's sitting on 40 billion, or maybe at Stanford, I can't remember which is which. I mean, billions and billions and billions of dollars are sitting there, and the cost of tuition does nothing but skyrocket. And, you know, you can't blame a parent for being pissed off about that. Yeah, I mean, the joke now with Harvard, with its $40 billion endowment, as you say, is that it's a hedge fund with a university attached. That is an extraordinary

amount of money. If it were a hedge fund, I think I'm right in saying it would be the third largest in the United States. The problem, of course, is that when you guarantee access to anything, then you remove the incentives for those who provide it to lower their prices. I mean, there are some secondary problems here, the massive increase in the number of administrators in universities, the tendency of universities to try to attract students by building incredible facilities. Some of the dormitories now, I mean, you know, I went to university in buildings that was four or five hundred years old and they were very pretty, but you wouldn't want to live in them for the quality of life. You look at some of these universities now and they just have this absolutely incredible halls full of luxury rooms and swimming pools and rooftop cafes and so on. And the reason for that is that if you do two things in concert, you're basically guaranteed students.

One is if you tell people they have to go to university, that's the marketing you talked about, and make most jobs contingent upon a university degree, then you're going to get the demand side from students. And if you then guarantee that even if the people in question don't have the money, that they will be able to borrow it, then you're telling those students that they can go whatever the cost-benefit analysis that they would make in a free market is. and you're telling the university is that they can charge whatever they want because the government is committed to funding the students in the name of social justice.

And, you know, I can just, I can't think of a worse thing to add on to that than cutting the loans at the expense of everyone else. Because it's not the biggest problem. But, you know, Chuck, you said it makes it worse. Of course it makes it worse. If you're on the fence right now, should I go? I don't want to have $50,000 in debt.

But you suddenly see the prospect of $20,000 of that debt getting taken away, magically disappearing, while your parents live in a huge house and have great jobs. Sure. Why wouldn't you take out the loan? Even if you aren't included in this round, wouldn't you just assume that in the future there'll be another amnesty? And if you're a college and you're thinking of hiring some more people,

maybe building another wing, well, you know, you didn't have. to deal with the fact that student loans have got bigger and bigger and bigger. You just got the government incentivizing them to grow even larger. It's the worst thing we could do. The absolute worst. Isn't it interesting, though, the way education and employment, I mean, obviously they're linked, clearly,

but the way that colleges have evolved vis-a-vis Oxford to Harvard in terms of amenities and the way the workplaces have evolved that most often recruit from those Ivy leagues. Well, you look at a Facebook or a Twitter or any number of Silicon Valley destinations today. They don't look like the work that we grow up with, right?

I mean, there's a kish bar. There's sushi. There's a meditation room. I mean, these things have become tropes and they're easy to poke fun at, but Twitter and TikTok are filled with videos of people working in these very, very aspirational high-tech companies. And in many cases, they're not suitably impressed by the incredible amenity package that greets them.

And I'm just now realizing, in part, it's because they've been prepped. That's literally what the college, part of the college prep process is we're going to put you in a Ritz-type setting. You are going to live. It's not the student union I grew up with. with a, you know, a coffee machine and a couple of card tables. We had a ping pong table. That was it. And a ping pong table, right?

No, man, this is like, God, it's just full on. So anyhow, just one more example of how Wade leads on to way. And what that does to the expectation of somebody entering the workforce who's coming out of that mechanism. You know, you can't really blame them. No, although the big difference is that if Twitter or Facebook want to build these campuses and employ all sorts of people who don't do very much work. They're private company and they're wasting some VC's money and it will eventually go bang.

And in fact, it's starting to go bang because the venture capital firms are looking at this and saying, you're wasting a bunch of money. We're seeing that this sort of cutbacks in Silicon Valley as a result of it. Money is a lot less cheap than it was. I think when interest rates are at one or two percent, then you are perhaps more likely to indulge that sort of culture. But now that we're up to, what are it, four, five percent, you know, I read this morning it's going to jump another half percent and then go even higher after that.

Well, then the market starts to intrude and reality brings all of that crashing down. But that can't happen at the moment in the student loan market because the student loan system was nationalized. So it's inoculated against the private interest rate hikes that we are seeing hit Silicon Valley. And there's no right to work at Facebook. So you don't have politicians who are going to stand up and say, it is a disgrace that the deputy deputy DEI director at Twitter no longer has his daily massage, right? There's no constituency for that that he has any control over. Whereas at colleges, I mean, I'm being facetious, but I mean, that is sort of the attitude is that it's a disgrace if anyone has to sacrifice anything to go. Right. Right. Sidebar, apropos of nothing, but nothing appears to be tethered to things the way that they used to be.

I was delving into my own personal economy yesterday trying to make sense of these interest rates and what to do. And, you know, the 10-year T-bill right now, the 10-year T-bill right now, the 10-year, year T bill. So you give the money and you agree to leave it alone for 10 years and they guarantee you 4% a year per year over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, here in California, for reasons I don't quite understand, a six-month treasury bill, which is tax-free, or at least free of California tax, is paying 5.13% for a six-month obligation. So here you got the government saying, we'll give you 4% a year over 10 years if you promised to stick it out for a decade. And California is saying, we'll give you over 5% for six months. So, I mean, it used to be the other way around. I'm not sure

if there's a question in here other than to say that if you're searching for logic, whether it's an interest rates or the Ivy League, good luck. Yeah, and I'm not an economist, but I read this morning that there is no point in history at which the two-year treasuries have had a higher rate than the 10-year treasuries and we haven't had a recession. Apparently one leads inexorably to the other and I think that's a bad sign.

What I would say, just to contextualize this whole student loan debate, because I'm sure some people will think, you know, I'm mean. But the federal government doesn't have any money left, It can print money and borrow it, and it can get away with that up to a certain point because the US is the world's reserve currency. But we are already every year spending more than we take in. The plan going forward is to spend more than we take in. Even the Conservative Party is planning to spend more than it takes in and is unwilling to touch the drivers of our deficits and therefore our debt.

We have $31 trillion worth of debt. and instead of saying at some point in the last 10, 20, 30 years, you know, these low interest rates don't historically tend to last forever. Whatever the cause of it is, at some point they're going to go up. We have proceeded as if the low interest rate, low unemployment environments that we've got used to will just go on forever for some reason and that they won't therefore lead to more debt. when interest rates go up. And what we're now seeing is that you just can't end history. So the fact that we're having this debate about spending $400 billion by executive fiat

in that context, I think is its own level of insanity, is its own issue. We're not having this debate in 1998 when the federal government was running a surplus or about to, when we had mass prosperity, you know, prosperity, where we had, if we hadn't screwed it up, the prospect of actually eliminating the federal debt by the end of the next decade, we're having it now when we already are in a crisis. It's like the guy who looks at his finances

and says, well, over time, I'm going redder and redder and redder and redder. I can't pay my mortgage. I'll go buy a Porsche. I mean, just obviously no. Obviously, even if it was a good idea. No. So what you're describing is actually baffling to me just as an observer because I don't,

even if you think transferring student loans is a perfect idea, how could we be having this argument now? How? As long as we're on college, this is a bit of a hard transition. But did you read that thing or hear a couple days ago? I think it was on the morning wire, the kid at Georgetown. I don't know what he's ultimately going to do, but he was suspended for showing up at a campus gathering and asking some very, very specific, respectful questions about the mask policies and the

COVID policies. And he was basically banished. He's come back, he's got a lawyer, very well-spoken guy. I'm going to try and get him on this podcast. But I was just curious if you, if you had seen any of that, only because all of it happened at a time when Georgetown brought people back with incredibly limited access, and some of them were still remote learning and so forth, but they never adjusted their tuition, right? They never, ever stopped collecting the full boat. The Zoom class cost the same. That's right.

Do you remember his name, Chuck, the student? Yeah, William Spruence, I believe. Spruence, right. Do you see any of that, Charles? Yeah. So just as an aside, the Zoom point you make is indicative. of the problem we have with credentials because what it says

is that the payments to Georgetown or Yale or Harvard or any great university are ultimately for the piece of paper and not the experience. And that's rational. I don't criticize anyone who was told two years ago, yeah, I know you thought you'd have a real fun experience on campus.

We're closing for two years. Do you want to stay in? Who said yes? Because it is actually really good to have that piece of. a paper that says you went to Oxford or Yale or Harvard or wherever. It does open doors and far more than it should. And so the Zoom thing in a sense exposed some of this credentialism for what it was. I mean, on the specific story, this is a story of mass panic now and partisan habit

forming that I find really peculiar. I'm not a scientist and at the beginning of COVID, I was really, honestly, I was open-minded. My usual skepticism, were on display. You give government power, it doesn't give it back. But I didn't know that this wasn't a true mass killer. I didn't know that this wasn't going to wipe out half the world's population. And so when people started to say, maybe wear masks, I didn't set my hair on fire. And when people said, let's put plastic barriers up in the supermarket and social distance.

and even the first few days of the lockdowns, I mean, maybe we were going to see the Walking Dead and we'd see zombies roaming the streets. I didn't know that. The fact that we're still hewing to some of those early instincts in colleges, I just think is really odd and speaks to the way in which this has become a tribal partisan issue where you want to take certain behavior

in order to show that you're not of the other side, that you're not one of those people. So to suspend a guy, because he asked about the policy is, I mean, if you said that to me a year and a half ago, I'd have thought it was a joke. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure,

but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA.

And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills, There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how easy it is to get involved.

Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mike. That's skillsusa.org. slash Mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S. Skills, USA. I feel like there's a slow emergence. It takes time, but I mischaracterized it earlier when I talked about earnestness versus irony. It's really skepticism versus certainty. We're so long uncertainty. So here's a kid in college where you ought to be being trained to question damn near everything, including authority, by the way, right? And just asking honest questions about the policies that just simply weren't making sense. And those questions posed just some really inconvenient moments. And skepticism went out the window. Certainty ruled the day. And he was, you know,

finished, really. So that to me is the recurring theme of our conversation. And the headlines, whether it's Tucker Carlson's latest show, whether it's your latest column. You can find it everywhere, especially if you start looking for it, and especially around the student loan issue. Certainty versus skepticism. It's certainly very dangerous when people take an abstract idea and they glue it to something that they care about and they pretend that any criticism of them or their position is a criticism of the abstract idea. So, for example, with COVID, a particular approach to COVID was tied to the idea of science.

In journalism, certain people who write for certain newspapers have decided that they are the press. And to criticize them is to criticize the press. You can see this a little bit on the right side of the political spectrum when it comes to, say, foreign policy, that if you disagree with this incursion or this war, that you are therefore unpatriotic, or you're criticizing America rather than something that is being done within a political process. That's where our arguments, I think, get sort of dangerous and irrational. And COVID exposed this in a way that I would have scarcely believed before I'd ever heard the term, COVID, this notion that if you disagreed with a given state or

grocery chain or federal government policy that you were opposed to science? This is a really scary way of looking at the world. It's a totalitarian way of looking at the world, actually. Well, I mean, it's certainly impossible to be genuinely curious and genuinely certain at the same time. I see curiosity and skepticism as brother and sister. And you might as well throw humility in there as well. I mean, it's very easy to be humble if you're curious. It's very hard to be humble if you're certain.

And I was just telling Chuck the other day, I narrate this show called How the Universe Works. Not that we know. It's one of the greatest ironic titles of all time. We still don't know. I've been doing it for 10 years. But I don't know if you read about this, but they found a little red dot.

The James Webb Telescope about four days ago, 13.1 billion miles away from here, meaning about 700 million miles away from the Big Bang. And this red dot is a galaxy, about a third of the size of the Milky Way, with as many stars, right? 100 billion stars in this galaxy. There's not supposed to be any galaxy anywhere.

that close to where the Big Bang happened. It's so mind-numbingly, shockingly new, and it's such a problem for the expanding universe and so many theories that, I mean, I think I sort of kind of understand, but I still haven't heard. I'm not sure where Neil deGrasse Tyson and all the usual guys are trying to sum this up. They can't.

What is that thing doing there? So in a moment, all of that certainty, and I'm saying this as the narrator of the show because I sound, Charles, I sound exactly the same when I'm right as I do when I'm wrong, right? And I know I'm not alone. So, I mean, if we can't be humble about the fact

that we don't know much more about the universe today than we did 10 years ago, then why in the world would we think we know much more about, God, damn near anything? Yeah, that's exactly right. There's also that science can give us data, but what we do with it is often a subjective question. So we learned relatively quickly how lethal COVID was.

Thankfully, it became less lethal over time as the virus was attenuated. And that told us the information that we needed to make moral judgments, but it didn't tell us what those moral judgments should be. And so you ended up in this odd situation where, and thankfully this didn't happen to me, but for example, someone's father or mother was grievously ill and they were in hospital. And the children were not allowed to go and visit the parents and that this was justified in the name of, in quotation marks, science. But actually, science didn't tell the hospital that they had to be. to adopt that policy. That was a judgment call.

In the same way as science didn't tell New York that it needed to lock down for longer than Florida did or the federal government in the United States that it needed a mask mandate on planes longer than the British government instituted a mask mandate. The same data was being used by all of those people. They just had different risk analyses. And I see this in our politics a lot.

the pretense that we can find the right answer by knowing what the input mechanisms are. And we can't. Hopefully, we can agree most of the time on what those input mechanisms are. We can agree on the size of the economy. We could agree on how many states there are. We can agree how the constitution works, although apparently not. but we can't from that pretend that our views are correct because I might have a different risk calculation than other people and in fact I do. And that's one of the reason that I'm a conservative

or a classical liberal or whatever you want to put it is I have a fairly high risk tolerance. I would say that I think it was the conservative manifesto that you wrote. The conservatarian manifesto. Conservatarian. That's the word, right? I didn't read it cover to cover, but I read enough of it to get it, right?

Finally, there's a label for somebody who is fiscally conservative, but maybe not so much socially. Right. You think you're going to live to see that warmly embraced in the lexicon by the Great Unwashed? Well, it is an ugly word. So in some sense, it's better than libiservative, but I sort of, in some sense, I hope, I hope not. We don't start using it. I mean, I do think some of the things I wrote about in that book have actually come to pass. For example, one of the predictions I made that was written in 2014, released in 2015,

was that gay marriage would pretty much fade away as an issue per se, but we would see lots of arguments, and I think I'm pleased that we do, about conscience rights that flow from this. I do think we'll see some of it. But, you know, the point of that book as well was to say, I introduced this at the beginning, that you just can't lay out all of the facts with someone who is reasonable

and expect them to come to the same conclusions that you do because they are a different person and they have a different worldview. It's usually not the case that the reason people disagree on politics is that they have a different set of facts than you do, the internet's making that worse, I accept. It's usually that they process that information differently.

And I just really have been bothered in recent years. COVID was one example of it, but it's not just that, by this idea that, well, we all know the right answer, but some of us just don't want to approach it. I've said delivery. Some of us just don't want to acknowledge that answer. I've been bothered by the idea that if you disagree with someone, and it must be because you don't know the relevant facts.

You know, I've been bothered by the idea that people who have a different approach to life are reckless or, you know, if you like, or are boring to look at it in the other way. It's just the point of this book was not to argue that I don't have any political views. I have very strong political views. And it's not to argue that there's no such thing as truth because the opposite of that is true.

But it is to argue that we live in a country full of a lot of very different people and that this is good. and that the purpose of the government, absent basic civil rights and the sort of elementary rules that we should all be able to agree on, is to facilitate those people living in freedom in ways that might differ from their neighbors or might differ from other states. And that America is divided, yes, but that it has in its constitutional order the tools to fix this, not by seeing which side can win and conquer everyone, but by allowing the states to be different from one another, accepting we have eccentrics among us who aren't going to conform to the norms, and saying, you know what, that's fine.

I mean, in a sense, that is the book, Mike. The book was an extended pie-in to the federal system that the American constitutional order allows. When Donald Trump was elected president, there was a video that went around the internet, went viral, especially among conservatives, of these people in a prestigious university quad performing a primal scream.

And of course, I thought this was funny and pathetic and I sent it to all my friends and I said, look at these losers. But, you know, it's also quite sad because we've created a system in which the election of a given president upsets people so much that they feel as if their way of life,

whether that's, you know, hippies or whether that's the most sort of religious button-down person you could find is under threat. And it shouldn't be like that. We should be able to say, all right, well, I don't particularly like who the president is, but I live here, or I go to this church, or I do this job, and it should be largely unaffected by it.

And so the book was an attempt to encourage the restoration of that. The thing about that image, and I can see her face. I can see, I mean, it's seared in my retina forever. I can see her head tilting back. I can see her taking the deep breath and then that primal scream. It echoes like a splinter in my mind to this day. But I'll tell you the thing about it, and it's not very charitable to me, but you kind of glossed over it. I enjoyed it.

Sure. I enjoyed watching her meltdown, to my shame, right? Scheidenfreude. What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it's German? And I know, I know many, many millions took glee in her tantrum, because that's how I processed it.

She's having a tantrum. But of course, the other side, all of the other sides will take that same delight in whatever exhibition of angst we might be able to conjure up. But yeah, I was struck by that. I'll never forget it. But your book also was part of the reason I gave an answer to the farmer's almond. that. Chuck, you remember when they called me? It was like 10 years ago. Sure. They'd do these stupid things. They're like, yeah, we get a bunch of people are going to fill in this sentence. The strongest or the finest quality of America is blank and the weakest

quality is blank. I didn't have a ton of time, but I had just gone through your book. And what came out was our strongest, most important quality was tolerance. Right. And, and, and, And our most dangerous slash weakest quality was acceptance. And I knew what I was getting at, but I spent a lot of time trying to explain what I meant to people who were deeply offended because, let's face it, nobody today wants to be tolerated. We all want to be accepted.

But in truth, we can't accept everything and stand for anything, but we can tolerate an awful lot of things. And so somewhere in between those words, Let's review. Irony and earnestness, skepticism, and certainty, tolerance and acceptance. If you'd be so kind as to land the plane with something wise and prescient regarding tolerance and acceptance, I'd be forever grateful. Well, I couldn't agree with you more when you say that people cannot demand acceptance, but they should demand tolerance. If you think about the most basic fights that we have had as

human beings historically. Take, say, the wars between Christians and Muslims. The solution to that was tolerance. It can never be acceptance because you have cosmic claims in play. Christians believe fundamentally different things than Muslims and their worldviews are ultimately irreconcilable. If you say to a Christian, you have to accept what a Muslim believes, or to a Muslim, you have to accept what a Christian believe, they're going to say to you, quite rightly, I can't. I cannot do that. I will not do that. Torre, yeah. That is the foundation of the modern world.

And that distinction, which you ably drew, has been elided. That is the source, I think, of our political anger at the moment. Is this demand for acceptance where tolerance ought to be enough? When people ask, why is America different? One of the many reasons I give is the existence The mere existence of the Amish, you think about it. That's terrific. We have these people who have essentially opted out of the modern world.

And in most cases, the American government at the federal and state levels has acquiesced. The American government has said, you know what? If you want to go live over there and do your thing, if you want to eschew certain modern conveniences, If you want, in many cases, to opt out of the laws or the tax code, then that's fine. You do you. But I think it's true. This is a beautiful thing. We actually need more of that, not less.

We shouldn't regard this as some anachronism or exception. We should have more groups that we treat in that way, not accept because that requires endorsement. That actually is a conscience claim. If you say to someone, you have to approve of. what I'm doing. You are making a claim on their conscience. But accept, leave them alone. Fine with me. And I think we have the tools to do it already. And if you go back to the founding, the reason that our federal system was put into place and the reason we have the First Amendment as well was that it just

was not obvious to the founders that this disparate collection of colonies with different backstories and people and aims could live under the same constitutional order. And you had Quakers, in Pennsylvania. You had Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. You had slaveholders in the South. Now, I'm very glad that we got rid of that, but the Constitution did not get rid of that. And in fact, it tried for, I think, good reasons to make allowances for it in the early days, because the question was not, were we going to have slavery or the Constitution? If we had tried to abolish slavery in the initial phase, then we would have had no Constitution. And I'm glad we had the Constitution because the Constitution helped us get rid of slavery. But what a great point,

Again, we don't have a time machine, but the conversation around should we tolerate slavery versus should we accept slavery versus should we do neither? Feels very different, right? Now, drag it forward into a more modern topic. Should we tolerate abortion? Should we accept abortion? Or should we do neither? That starts to feel a little different. And then maybe go with, okay, should we tolerate people who are of a mind?

that they were born into the wrong gender, into the wrong body. I think most people that I know today would shake their head. Yeah, I'll tolerate that. But put them in a corner and ask them if they'll accept it. And they'll say, no, actually, no, I don't accept it as truth, but I'll tolerate it as your choice. And it just gets so squishy and especially over time. And I just wondered, Charles, really, you know, 150 years from now.

what our great, great, greats are going to look back at us and just, and just shake their heads in wonder at the certainty that we had over the climate or eating meat or abortion. I mean, whose statues are we going to pull down 150 years hence? Yeah, there are going to be statues that are pulled down. I don't think I have to worry about it because they won't build one for me, so they can't pull it down. but the reality is that the tolerant approach really does apply over time as well.

Not that we should tolerate evils and slavery was a great evil, but that we should understand how normal people living their normal lives interacted with the status quo that they really had no power to change. I think about this sort of the average person, say, living in Tennessee or Georgia in the Civil War. I mean, if you were brought up in that era, the things that you were told as a child and taught would have given you a conception of African Americans that was completely wrong, but not really through your own fault. And I just think we ought to be more aware that people are the product of their upbringings and their time and that we are as well, as you say. And I hope that we don't do anything that is as evil as slavery, but we might. We might.

And look, and that's the exact kind of humility that I was referring to before. Like the idea that we're capable, not of becoming our own individual Hitler's, but of becoming our own good Germans, right? I mean, it's a very different and far easier thing just to stand by and watch a thing. And it's also really easy to limit the examples of that into these great cataclysmic, global events, but to bring it back to my lane, since I've been totally disrespectful of your time, student debt. Just how hard a line should we take? Final thoughts, you know, what do you think can be done, if anything? What can the average person do who gives a damn to try and keep this thing

from coming to pass? Well, what can we do? What should we do? I think we should fight it like hell. politically and culturally and in the courts. If the court, for whatever reason, comes to a decision that I don't like, I'm not going to call for it to be abolished or burned down or packed. I think we have this incredible system that should be respected and that change should be made within it. And besides, I took an oath to it, as I've said. But if it is struck down,

then we have to keep working hard to make sure that it's not passed through the Congress. And the way you do that is you make it clear to Congress that it would be unpopular. But more broadly, and hopefully with a more long-lasting effect, you have to start making it clear to your neighbours why it's a problem that we have got ourselves into this position in the first place. And I think that's more of a cultural matter than, it is a political matter ultimately because that involves, and this is where you and I agree so violently, that involves admiring people who are not college students and who don't have

college debt. It means running your businesses and charitable organizations and whatever else in a way that does not require people to have college degrees who don't need college degrees. or at least if you're going to require a college degree to require other certifications that show stamina and talent, you know, military service, work in a charity, you know, frankly, being a parent. There are all sorts of things that can convey a commitment and a, you know, habit forming. I don't think that's going to happen overnight, but I do think, for all the reasons we talked about on my podcast, I do think that has to happen. Did I ask you this?

We talk about this on the podcast. I've certainly written about it. The question of have you ever sat and watched somebody who is exceptional with their hands? Oh, yeah. You know, not got them a coffee and then gone and sat in your office all day, but actually watched and admired what they do. And until we get that cultural shift, then we're not going to get out of this mess. 20 years of dirty jobs was watching, filming, talking about it. and going right up to the edge of a lecture which nobody wants or a sermon, which is even worse.

But just assuming that the evidence will demand some kind of verdict and putting better examples out there certainly is part of it. Look, man, you talk funny, but you say wise things, and you're a great American. And I really appreciate you being so generous with your time. You're obviously all over the National Review. I don't know how many columns you've written during this conversation, but I'm sure you're it'll be great. Your book was amazing. The word I can't say, conservatarian manifesto. That's the one. That's the one. It's a few years old, but pick it up. Anything else you want to

plug before we say ad due? Just the podcast that I do, the Charles C.W. Cook podcast, which is available everywhere. Thank you. It's good. And one thing I want to plug for you is for people to go to your website, which is Charles CW.cook.com and sign up for your newsletter. or your articles, you know, you write some good stuff. And what did you say before, Charles, just a couple of minutes ago, we have cosmic something in play. Cosmic stakes, blame, game? I can't remember now.

I was too busy writing that column. You were too busy writing the column while you were talking. Anyway, I thought it would be a good title for our conversation, but there are only about 600 more to choose from. So your work is done. friend. Thank you again for your time. I really do appreciate it. Keep doing what you're doing because it's a you're a jagged little pill. You piss some people off and I truly enjoy watching it happen. Keep doing it. All right. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure. If you dig the podcast that we do,

won't you leave a quick five-star review? I really hate to ask much more of you. But please subscribe. Oh, please subscribe. Oh, please subscribe. For we need a five little lousy star. Tell us what you like and who you are, then share us with your friends down at the bar. And then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe, and then subscribe. and then subscribe and then subscribe Wait, this is a soda?

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