Voices of Freedom - Interview with Ilya Shapiro

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Universities, more than most institutions, should be places that welcome the free exchange of ideas. Critical thinking is sharpened when one’s beliefs are challenged, and new ideas and perspectives are introduced. This is especially crucial for young people as they prepare to enter an increasingly complex world. Yet today’s college environment is one in which students and faculty who hold certain viewpoints must find the courage to speak freely. In many cases when they do, they suffer the consequences. Ilya Shapiro is our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. He is not only an expert on constitutional rights but has firsthand experience of what it’s like to be a target of the cancel culture movement. Topics Discussed Cancel culture’s impact on higher education and what it’s like to experience it firsthand The drivers behind efforts to suppress free speech at universities Why university leadership should do more than adopt free speech policies The undercurrent of censorship in our institutions U.S. Supreme Court’s last term and the overall state of the court Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Before that, he was a vice president at the Cato Institute and director of Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. The pervasiveness of cancel culture and censorship on college campuses has, without question, weakened higher education's essential role in the pursuit of truth and an open inquiry. Too many to count high profile free speech incidents have underscored the severity of the issue. Tenure tracks cut short, careers upended, speakers shut down, even physically attacked. Sadly, I suppose our guest today has firsthand experience of what it's like to be at the center of one of those incidents.

As a leading authority on the Constitution, it's given him an even deeper perspective on the threats to our rights and liberties and the state of free speech in our country. Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that, a vice president at the Cato Institute and director of Cato's Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. Welcome, Ilya. It is great to have you. Good to be with you. And for those watching this, I'm having a bit of a bad hair day, so I'm wearing a University of Chicago ball cap, which I'm sure we'll get into later, is quite appropriate for our topic today.

I think it's very appropriate. Ilya, you've had a really impressive career in the law. You clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. You spent some time in private practice, served as a special advisor on rule of law issues in Iraq, and that must have been really interesting, and then went on to become vice president at Cato. Last year, you accepted a position as a Senior Lecturer and Executive Director at Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Why did that opportunity seem so particularly attractive to you at the time? Yeah, I appreciate the question. Some of my friends were asking the same thing. I'd spent almost 15 years at Cato and published a very well-received book,

Supreme Disorder. You can see that over my shoulder there about the politics of Supreme Court nominations. I had really achieved what I wanted to, what I could. I was about to turn 45. I thought, you know, should I be looking around for other different kinds of impact to be had? And an opportunity presented itself. I wasn't really looking, but I had dinner one night with Randy Barnett, a professor at Georgetown Law School. Wonderful man. Absolutely. Friend of the Bradley Foundation, to be sure.

And, you know, we finally one thing led to another. And the the chance to become executive director of his center for the Constitution at Georgetown, which is very important because as as as I would go on to learn, the rest of the law school is the center against the Constitution. And I thought, well, this is great. I can keep being a so-called public intellectual in various ways, with this time more of an emphasis on teaching and having a university platform rather than a think tank. Great. Let's try this out. This seems like a good serendipitous opportunity to have a new kind of impact. But certainly you knew that universities are hotbeds of cancel culture and attacks on free speech. No secret. Did that give you any pause at all in your thought process? So I thought at least that I was aware and wasn't naive going into where I was moving.

And in fact, even a few days before the tweet heard around the world, as it were, and the whole thing that elevated my profile in a different way, my wife and I were having dinner. And she said, you know, you're going to have to be careful in a new way, especially on social media, especially about things like race and gender. And I said, yes, honey, absolutely. That is good counsel. And yet just a few days later, I sort of stepped in it. Let's drill down on it just for a little bit. Let's go back to the time of your appointment at Georgetown and the university's Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion waged a pretty vicious campaign

against your appointment in a very, very pointed way. You've spoken publicly about the circumstances surrounding the issue and ultimately you were reinstated, but turned down the position. Had to have been a tough call or maybe not. Tell us about your thought process during that time and what changed your mind? Why the about face? Right. So just to recapitulate real quick, when I tweeted in criticizing President Biden for sticking to his campaign pledge to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. I phrased that inartfully, as one sometimes does on Twitter, or X as it's known now.

And in making that criticism of using race and sex in judicial selection, I phrased it in a way that some people took offense or claimed to take offense, and I was suspended with pay pending investigation into whether my tweet violated university policy. And that's what you're referring to. It took them four months to figure out that I actually technically had not been an employee, so I wasn't subject to university policies on anti-discrimination, et cetera. Four months. Four months, yes.

You know, especially at a law school, you'd think they could find some junior professor to apply the very clear, short policy to the even shorter tweet and come up with a decision in 10 minutes. But no, four months. And then I was reinstated, but there was this big report from the diversity office, which made it clear that if I, and this wasn't just directed at me, this was clearly a shot across the bow of all professors and staff, said something that offended somebody, then that was it. I'd be back in the Kafkaesque inquisition, as it were. And together with my wife and discussing it with Randy and my counsel, came to the conclusion that this was an untenable position. I literally could not do the job I was hired for to be both public-facing and institution-facing with the center.

And so I had to quit. And as one does, I published my resignation letter in the Wall Street Journal opinion page. And in a way, we went to control the media narrative to use the moment I had been thrust into inadvertently to shine a light on the rot in academia. Yeah, absolutely. It was a difficult decision, but one I felt I had to make. I couldn't simply live with a sword of Damocles hanging over me. And it was very obvious that, you know,

discussing, say, the Harvard UNC affirmative action case at the court this term, that clearly just saying a very straightforward attack on racial preferences and admissions would get me in trouble. I couldn't exist like that as someone talking about the Constitution. But so thus my career was redirected in a different direction, still doing constitutional law, certainly, but I'm doing a lot more talks and podcasts like this one about the illiberal takeover of legal education and academia more broadly, about which I'm also now writing a book, which will come out just under a year, I think, called Canceling Justice. Let's talk a little bit more about that. In a media interview right after the ordeal, you said, academia has become an intolerant place for anyone, not just conservatives,

but anyone who seeks the truth. What happens when students are deprived of the chance to hear different viewpoints? Yeah, something has really changed in the 20 years since I was a law student, the 25 years since I was a college student. And I don't think it's the ideological mix of either the faculty or the student body. I don't think that's changed all that much. It's more the growth in bureaucracy, the non-teaching staff at universities, and of late, the last 10, especially five years, the growth of these diversity bureaucracies, the diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI offices. What these trends have spelled for students is they're not trained to be, to critically consider arguments that are presented, to understand information that's presented to them, to be able to debate the issues of the day or the issues of history or art history or geology or whatever the subject matter might be.

And look, this is bad enough for academic disciplines, but I'm a lawyer. I'm a constitutional lawyer. I think it's especially bad in law schools because, after all, they train the future gatekeepers to our legal and political institutions. If you can't see different sides of some arguments or say that a particular perspective on interpreting whether it's the First Amendment or the Due Process Clause or the Commerce Clause, what have you, then the whole rule of law is in jeopardy. Very serious stuff. The only thing that might be more alarming is what's going on in medical schools where

it's literally life and death, and these same principles seem to be taking hold. But in legal education and law schools, I think it's even more worrisome than the illiberal takeover of an English department that students are not exposed or they fear to express opinions that are considered unpopular. These DEI departments have just become pervasive and high. It's almost an industry unto itself, isn't it? It is. There are trade groups of, you know, diversity officers as a subspecialty of human resources. In fact, it's taken over the human resources professional areas. And again, this is not about, you know, the decades old conservative lament about liberals taking over the faculty lounge. Again, very different. This is the illiberal takeover, meaning that certain ideas are too dangerous to discuss or to raise. You have to view things through various identitarian lenses,

whether that be race or gender or anything else. There's a rejection of such basic non-ideological ideas as the search for truth, as due process, as the freedom of speech. You know, you have kind of this post-liberal attack from the right, but this one from the left, certainly in academia, is much more pervasive and dangerous and forces universities to go away from their centuries-old core missions of truth-seeking and teaching the next generation. And it's gone way beyond college campuses. It's in our K-12 system. It's in workplaces all over corporate America.

It is not limited to colleges. Would you agree? Absolutely. Yeah, this is, you know, it used to be, oh, these crazy ideas. Exactly. Once students graduate, they enter the real world and they'll see that it doesn't work that way. Well, in the real world, it has worked that way in all sorts of ways. And again, in the legal profession, where partners of highly successful partners, leading lawyers are forced to exit their law firms because of representing unpopular clients. It used to be after winning Supreme

Court cases, indeed, I'm referencing Paul Clement having to leave Kirkland. A member of the Bradley Board of Directors. Exactly. And a former Solicitor General. I mean, again, one of the Bradley Board of Directors. Exactly. And a former solicitor general. I mean, again, one of the, you know, top, very, very top lawyers in the country. If he's not safe, then what does that mean for the lowly associate or kind of just work at a partner at a firm who are indeed sometimes afraid of the associates in terms of not being able to do certain kind of work or express an opinion offhand. A very chilled environment, reminiscent, you know, people always make these comparisons to Nazi Germany or similar things. There are some resonance here to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The old truths are now thrown out, and we have new truths, and professors or the old established elders are mocked to be replaced with the new learnings, as it were. Again, this is hyperbole.

Nobody is being sent to the gulag or anything like that. But across different swaths of society, this illiberal trend where even, you know, 60s boomer liberals are afraid is something that's deeply disturbing. And again, I have to emphasize that at law schools, it's particularly dangerous because these are the folks who are going to be on the bench. These are the folks running our top institutions, general counsel's offices at Fortune 500 companies, state legislatures, Congress, the list goes on. You also said in an interview that it's all well and good to adopt free speech policies, but it's not enough if university administrators aren't willing to stand up to those who demand

censorship. Now, there was a time when progressives were ardent defenders of free speech, and that's just not the case. That script is flipped. What's your take on what happened there? What changed philosophically and tactically when it comes to the left on free speech? Yeah, it really is strange. In the 60s, the Warren court First Amendment cases, it was hippies or Vietnam protesters who were bringing cases and complaining about censorship from the right and banning books that were, you know, we have this faux debate about banning books now, but really censoring stuff. And the vanguard of the First Amendment was free speech was provided generally by the left or civil libertarians more broadly. And now that has

flipped. And I think it's because of conceptions, especially among younger generations, that hate speech is not protected, that words are literally harmful, but sometimes violence is not, apparently, as they say, speech is violence, but violence is not. And the idea that only right-wing extremists hide behind the First Amendment to oppress various classes, where I don't think that's quite right. But you're right, especially on campuses. It is conservative and libertarian groups that are defending free speech, and those kind of classical liberal conceptions are being attacked on the left. Let's move on from Georgetown. What's happened to you since then? Well, I'm at the Manhattan Institute. I'll get that in a moment. But you talked about, you asked about previously the policies aren't enough. And that's how you started your question. That's absolutely right. Because Georgetown, for example, has a very good policy on paper. It's modeled on the University of Chicago principles, the gold standard for preserving free expression on campus. In fact, there's this Chicago Golden Trifecta, the Principles on Free Speech, the Shill Report on Non-Ideological Hiring,

and the Calvin Report on Institutional Neutrality over Political Controversies. Universities that adopt these principles, this trifecta, or at least the free expression policies, you can't do better than that in terms of establishing your policies. But as I saw at Georgetown, as many other faculty and students see, sometimes the leadership, deans, provosts, presidents are too weak. And they say, oh, there's these great values in tension, speech and diversity or inclusion. I mean, I think that's not actually true, but there's a lot of spinelessness going on among university leaders. It's not the case that these deans are themselves woke radicals or social justice warriors, but they see it as squeaky wheel getting the grease, and it's the path of least resistance to just placate these radical illiberals. That's why

the ultimate remedy has to be external pressure, not just, oh, you need to have these kind of very good policies. And I would argue we need more people like Mitch Daniels running universities around the country who are not coming out of traditional academic backgrounds that bring a different perspective to leadership and management. Yeah, I was very impressed with what Mitch Daniels did, specifically at Purdue. Tuition has stayed the same. The bureaucracy levels have not increased like at peer institutions. Yes, we can go on and on about basic university governance that has little to do with, you know, ideological perspectives. That's absolutely right. Exactly. Back to what I'm doing. Yeah. So

my friends at the Manhattan Institute based in New York, obviously, although I'm not, I'm still in my redoubt in Falls Church, Virginia. I like to joke that I head up the elite Falls Church office of MI. I've long had a good relationship with them. And the thinking was, as I started at Georgetown, that I Jim, we need to deepen and quicken this relationship that we had been talking about. Raihan Salam, the president, and Alana Golant, the executive VP, within 36 hours came up with an offer for me. And away we went. I'm gratified to them for that. And I think it's, you know, so far so good. 13 months in, a mutually beneficial relationship. They had not had a constitutional scholar. They wanted more of a national focus and they wanted to establish and

build an amicus brief program. And I slide in very neatly into all of those. It's been terrific. And I spent a lot of my time writing this book on the illiberal takeover of legal education, which is now in the editing process, and otherwise speaking about these issues that you and I are now discussing. But otherwise, bread and butter constitutional things, whether Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness or affirmative action or federal power issues, free speech issues, just all sorts of things that are at the Supreme Court or constitutional issues in public debate. The indictment of former President Trump and lots of other things that have legal dimensions. I straddle the legal, political, academic and media worlds. And I feel very fortunate to be able to be in that kind of position where sometimes I'm wearing a scholar's hat. Sometimes I'm a pundit. Sometimes I'm a journalist. Sometimes I'm a practicing lawyer figuring out these technicalities. It's a good

way, I think, to have impact on the world. And MI is leaning into this culture war 3.0, if you will, in a way that's refreshing to me. That's a great platform to be working from, no question about that. Let's talk about Supreme Court and the recent term that just wrapped up. Without question, it was highly charged. There's been a lot of scrutiny, not just on decisions, and I think it's scary, on members themselves. These attacks were seen on conservative justices. How would you assess the term just ended? Well, as the kids would say, the statistics belie the vibe. If you recall, before the last couple of days of the term, the narrative was, wow, this court is all over the place. It's not necessarily conservative. What are they doing?

Gorsuch is agreeing with Jackson more than he's agreeing with Roberts, all of these weird things. Well, as the term ended, the last couple of days provided a lot of wins above the fold, conservative name brand victories on affirmative action and the executive student loan forgiveness and the website designer who didn't want to create a website for a same-sex wedding, all these high-profile things. But overall, you would not say that statistically that this is an extreme right-wing court, or as President Biden said, that it was abnormal. For one thing, in those high-profile politically salient issues that I mentioned,

the American public is in agreement. And so maybe the American public is abnormal. I don't know. I don't think so. But, you know, taking away elite or Twitter opinion, these are not controversial rulings that the court made. Certainly different than a year ago when they overturned Roe v. Wade. That was a different sort of story. The statistics were a little different then as well. But this term, I mean, the so-called liberals, the progressives, the left of the court were in the majority more than Alito and Thomas were, for example. And John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh agreed more with everyone than they did with

Clarence Thomas, for example. And there's lots of these statistics that show that the court, you know, despite the five or six cases that get all the headlines, really is working. All the justices are working to do their best to decide these difficult issues. attacks on its so-called legitimacy are just sour grapes and disagreements from the left, and especially the elite legal left, with what the court is doing. Were there any opinions that surprised you? The Dormant Commerce Clause case, National Pork Producers, was a 5-4 decision that allowed California's agricultural regulations about the amount of space that a breeding sow needs to have and other related issues that even though California doesn't have a lot of pork producers, effectively regulates the national market. It was a splintered decision. It was fractured. I think it was unfortunate from

public policy perspective, but even legally speaking, this is probably the one of only two things that I've ever disagreed with Justice Gorsuch on. But anyway, that's kind of getting into some weeds, even though it's a big, important case, somewhat of a surprise, and heterodox coalition of justices as well. This was not a right-wing, left-wing, or even pragmatist versus principled sort of divide. But aside from that, my biggest surprise and certainly my biggest disappointment was that Justice Kagan did not join the majority in the student loan forgiveness case. That was a 6-3 decision that the president could not, with the stroke of a pen, wipe away student loans, effectively leaving no limits, not just on federal

power, but on executive power. Very disappointing. I thought Kagan was not as radical as her colleagues, but at least there, just sweeping powers. I don't know whether she would have done that had the president been a Republican. Forever, people have trusted the Supreme Court, and now we're seeing some numbers and some polling that suggests that public trust in the Supreme Court is declining. Can that trust be restored? And do you think some of these personal attacks on Justice Thomas and others are playing a role in that erosion of public trust,

which is a big, big problem in our country? What's notable isn't so much the overall measured level of public trust or confidence in the Supreme Court. That's only a few ticks below what it was, say, after the gay marriage ruling in 2015. The most notable thing is the split between liberals and conservatives or Republicans and Democrats has never been bigger. You know, you would think, well, things are polarized every year depending on who wins more often. And that's not necessarily the case. That's how people answer, respond to these surveys. Do I get, do I generally like what the Supreme Court is doing? But that gap is very, very big. And it just, that's just one more example of the polarized society in which we live. And it's disappointing, but there's not much that can be done about it. Fundamentally,

you know, this goes to our toxic battles over judicial nominations and Supreme Court vacancies as well. What you have is the culmination of several trends where you have a diverse or divergent theories of constitutional and statutory interpretation mapping onto parties that have never been more polarized and sorted than, you know, since the Civil War, if not ever. And so there's no way to reconcile that. I think the attacks on the so-called ethics of the court are disingenuous. I think justices are allowed to have wealthy friends, and there's no evidence or even claim of any sort of quid pro quo. I mean, there is corruption. If someone gets paid, whether with travel on private jets or vacations or anything else, it doesn't have to be cash, in exchange for voting a certain way,

that's certainly a huge problem. But I don't think anyone can plausibly allege that Justice Thomas or Alito or any of the others that have been mentioned in these stories have somehow changed their votes or their approach or even fudge them in any direction on any particular issue. So this is yet one more example of unhappiness and sour grapes with what the court is doing. And I think it's doing real damage because you, by attacking, by calling the court illegitimate, you're making it more illegitimate or less trusted. And that is extremely dangerous because that means that all we care about is might makes right. And if I can elect my autocratic or populist dictator, then that's enough. And that person shouldn't be checked by a counter-majoritarian institution like the court. And again, in these

cases this year, they weren't even acting in a counter-majoritarian way. They were just acting against the way that a lot of elites, and especially legal elites, would have preferred. You mentioned it, the process of nominating a Supreme Court justice has really become a circus. Do you think that started with the Roe v. Wade decision all those years ago? Well, thanks for that softball, because that's the focus of my last book, Supreme Disorder Judicial Nominations in the Politics of America's Highest Court. And I wrote it precisely to try to understand in the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation process, the fiasco, is something new? How do we get to this breakdown? Did this

all start with, well, was it Clarence Thomas? Was it Robert Bork? Was it Roe v. Wade? And what I found was politics has always been part of the process. I mean, George Washington had a chief justice nominee rejected by the Senate for political reasons. Politics has obviously played a different role in different ways. has changed in terms of placating internal party factions, playing the media or PR game, outside groups and all this. That's the constellation of issues have shifted. But indubitably, politics has to play a role because the president and senators are political actors. It's not like at some year, whatever year you might point to, there was a loss of grace or something like that and we all fell into the muck. No, it's always been a political process. What's new, and this started right around 1968, is the inflection point I point to, the end of LBJ, the end of the Warren court. And in fact, when Chief Justice Warren announced that he'd be

retiring and LBJ wanted to elevate Justice Abe Fortas, talk about corruption, there was a real corrupt jurist, which I wrote about for the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, and how it's different than the attacks now. And that was the first and only successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nomination. A bipartisan one at that over these ethics concerns, although Fortas never even had a majority of pledged votes. But really, Richard Nixon in 68 campaigned on the court and talking about strict construction and not having these crazy, you know, judges, unelected judges doing this thing.

That was when we started talking about judges in terms of judicial philosophy, not in terms of politics, qual politics, but judicial philosophy. And you started having the modern era of what became originalism with Robert Bork and Scalia, and especially the Republican Party campaigning on judges. Roe v. Wade, it's interesting, politically was significant in larger politics, obviously. But in terms of judicial selection, it really wasn't. The next nominee after Roe v. Wade was John Paul Stevens by President Ford. He wasn't even asked about Roe, even though it was a very live controversy, but it didn't come up at his confirmation hearing because it wasn't thought that that's what hearings were for. Things have changed. The

television and coincidentally, Robert Bork's nomination was the first one that was broadcast gavel to gavel on C-SPAN just because C-SPAN got the license to do that in the Senate that particular year. And we've seen kind of the tit-for-tat escalation by the parties in terms of how they approach Supreme Court and eventually lower court nominees. And there's really no way to unwind that. There's no magic bullet. There's no, oh, we'll just put back the filibuster or we'll change the rule about who asks questions or for how long at these Senate hearings or something like that. That is nibbling around the edges. That's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And the Titanic is not the nomination process. It's the ship of state. The federal government

decides so many issues. And even within, forgetting that federalism issue, separation of powers within Washington, so much is being decided by administrative agencies in the executive branch, which of course can't be unelected. They can only be sued. So that's why every June, the Supreme Court ends up deciding half a dozen of the most biggest political controversies in the country, and why there are more protests at the Supreme Court instead of at Congress, which is where we're supposed to be fighting out our political differences. So anyway, I have no easy solutions to fix this. It's just going to be a long-term unwinding of the way that it's gotten us here, meaning an enforcement of federalism and the separation of powers. Do you think the abortion debate resolves itself

ultimately, whether it's a federal solution or a state solution, but elected officials rather than nine unelected guys making the call? Well, it's in flux. And I definitely think it's healthier for each state to be setting their own policy rather than a one-size-fits-all rule for the entire country. Catholics call it subsidiarity. I think Europeans call it the same thing in EU law. But pushing down decision-making to the lowest feasible actor, that maximizes people who are happy with or see the legitimacy in their rulers. And I think we could really use more of that so that, you know, there's no reason that there has to be the same, say, whether it be abortion rules or the health care system or zoning regulations in Texas and Florida and California and Wisconsin or in the cities within those particular states. So in that way, I alluded to the cultural revolution earlier, but let a thousand flowers bloom in terms of policy.

Yes, totally agree. Ilya, last question. You and your wife recently welcomed twins. That's got to be quite the experience, I'm sure. How do we ensure that the rights of their generation are defended and protected? Yeah, they just turned nine months, boy-girl twins, not our first kids, thankfully. I think they stay quieter in their cribs because they have each other to babble to. And it's just remarkable seeing them in a way that's different than

what we had with our older boys. So we have boy-boy, boy-girl now. It's a great mix. But anyway, how can we secure their future? I'm doing my best, especially in the higher education realm, especially in trying to affect the climate of ideas. Part of why I do is what I do is for our posterity. I'm very self-interested. I'm not completely altruistic in just pursuing my career. I care about my little platoon. And my wife and I try hard, both in terms of where we decided to settle down in Falls Church, Virginia, which has some of the best public schools in the country, although we've had our controversies over COVID like most school districts did. And in terms of enriching their lives, the kids' lives

in various ways, given the resources that we have. And that's why I think that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time, because I want all kids, not just mine, to be able to have the best opportunities that's possible in this imperfect world of finite resources. It doesn't mean that everyone's going to have the same type of schooling, but I want to have as equal kind of opportunity as is possible. And we can't even imagine if we had full school choice, the types of educational opportunities that would arise. Just look at homeschooling, which blew up during the pandemic for understandable reasons, is very different than what homeschooling, which blew up during the pandemic for understandable reasons, is very different than what homeschooling was 25, 30 years ago. So many different kinds of

resources. We have friends in different parts of the country with different ideological and religious values that are taking advantage of completely heterodox homeschooling options or hybrid options of various kinds. And I think that's great. If we were allowed to take each, you know, for each kid, the pro rata amount of dollars and apply it to wherever you want, I think you'd have so many different kind of educational possibilities that literally these are Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns. It's not about arguing that this is the best way. No, it could be different things in different places for different kids. And I think that would be a great experiment and opportunity for policymaking.

Totally agree. It's an issue and a topic that the Bradley Foundation has been involved with throughout its history. The parental school choice started right here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, almost 40 years ago. And this experiment continues to this day. But there's massive opportunity right now to make a change and make a difference. Ilya Shapiro, thanks so much for your leadership, for your courage, for making a difference. We really did appreciate your time today. And as always, thanks to everyone out there listening on Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next

conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.