[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 195th episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. My friends call me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit introducing young people to the ideas of Einrand in a day when people aren't reading very much anymore. So, including creative ways like music videos, animated videos, and graphic novels. Today we are joined by our guest, David Barnheiser. Before I even begin to introduce our guests, I want to remind all of you, whether you're watching us on Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. Use the comment section to get in the queue. Type in your questions. We'll get to as many of them as we can.
A professor of law emeritus at Cleveland State University, David Barnheiser has worked to provide education programs and legal models to minority and economically disadvantaged individuals in the greater Cleveland area. His book, Conformity Colleges, the destruction of intellectual creativity and dissent in America's universities, explores how intense and aggressive political strategists and self styled revolutionaries are using the apparatus of american educational institutions to indoctrinate a new generation of activists. David, thank you for joining us. Not from Cleveland, but I guess from Florida. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Thanks for asking.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: So, first, our audience always enjoys learning a little bit about our guests origin stories. So perhaps you could share with us a little bit about where you grew up, whether there were any early experiences or mentors that influenced your later professional trajectory. If I understand from our chat before we went live, you were an early and almost obsessive reader. Tell us about that.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Well, a lot of people don't believe it, but my sister and my cousin Donna, when I was three, taught me how to print my name. And the advantage of that was that that was the requirement to get your library card in south side of Youngstown, where I lived at the time with my grandparents. And then they walked me a block down to the library. The librarian thought it was a joke, but I printed my name out and she gave me my library card, and I got to take books out.
Don't ask me what they were. I can't remember that, but I did that. And strangely enough, I also started smoking cigarettes at age three.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: All right, so the good and the bad in a hurry to grow up.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: I didn't inhale.
The point is, all I'm saying is I lived with my grandparents, my uncles, my aunts, my mother, my sister, my cousins in Youngstown because my father was, and my mother, my father was in Germany, remained in Germany after the war, the second world war, and ran an officer's club, so I never knew him until he got back from there when I was five. And so what I grew up in, if you talk about background story, was a wonderful extended family in place, living together, and it's the strength of my life. And that's one reason I am so committed to the idea of having a family structure and having people who love you and who guide you.
I can't imagine life without that, really, very much.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: What interested you to go into law?
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Civil rights. Civil rights. I'm a civil rights lawyer. I was a legal services corporation, civil rights lawyer, advocate. Started off in Colorado Springs, sued police, all the know, and represented people who were minorities, chicano, Latino, black women, all kinds of stuff. I'm a social justice lawyer, and I guess I would say, but we didn't use these clever terms. I guess I would say I was a social justice warrior 30 years before the left, invented that term.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: And yet you were in junior high school when you discovered Ayn Rand.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, I said, I got my library card at three when I was in fourth grade, my mother and father asked me, between this, we're going to buy either a pony or an encyclopedia set. And do you want a pony or encyclopedia? And I laughed at him and said, encyclopedia. So I got a full 30 volume set of the Encyclopedia americana and the Book of Knowledge, and I just started reading it. And so that and physics. I intended to be a physicist, nuclear physicist, but I ended up.
I'm also an athlete. So I don't want it to sound like I don't have a generalized life, because I was a very good athlete and basketball player and track person and so on. But that's what I did. I don't know what else to say. I love Anne Rand. Let me add this, then.
I don't know what made me do it, but I read everything, I guess.
The cold War was going on. We had opposition like we do now.
I didn't even know the word ideology at that point, but we had opposition from something that we lived in apprehension or fear of, because there was a real threat that everybody was feeling about nuclear war, the potential for nuclear war, and now Putin in Ukraine and the USSR. And I taught in Russia also when he was first coming into power in the government. And that man's a megalomanic nutcase and a murderer, and he's quite capable of, if he gets pushed to the wall, he's quite capable of launching at least tactical nuclear weapons. And so that's the thing. In junior high school, I also read Marx's Dos hoppidl at that time because I wanted to know what the enemy was like, because the Soviets were the enemy.
So that really drove what I was doing.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Fascinating. Now, a child weaned on encyclopedia, grew up to write conformity colleges. Not encyclopedic in length, but certainly very well researched and a historical scope of what has brought us to our present moment. And Jeffrey Tucker, a friend and frequent guest on this show, wrote the introduction to your book, conformity colleges talk a bit about how universities handle things like remote learning vaccine and mask mandates, and even academic freedom among their own faculty from a perspective of the forces you describe in your book.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Well, let's go back to academic freedom. I mean, there's almost no academic freedom in universities at this point because they're using an orwellian approach of language manipulation. The center of the movement, the strategy, is to control language. And so if you make people comply with your concept of language about what is a proper thing to say or a humane thing to say, I will not use the pronouns they do at this point, but all the multiple program pronouns I would go back to. And this could get me in trouble. But that's too bad. Go back to the three faces of Eve movie many years ago in the 1960s. In that movie, the issue was they recognized it was a psychiatric psychological disorder to have what they called split personalities. And she was treated. She had 15, but the movie itself just came out with three. But she had a real psychological disorder. What we're experiencing now isn't an effort by a coordinated group of people based on gender or race sometimes, but generally gender at this point, to control and make you accept the things they're doing that they consider to be essential to the success and the power base of their movement. If they control your language, they control your mind.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: No, it's really interesting. We talked about the fountainhead and Atlas Shrug that I know are among two of your favorites. Of course, Ein Rand wrote anthem a dozen years before George Orwell published 1984. And anthem is a dystopian book about a world in which certain words have been abolished and the word I had been abolished to force people to think in collectivist terms.
Here we are today with Majorca saying that we're no longer going to be using or tolerating the word illegal immigrant and only using the word non citizen. Again, it's an effort to control the language, to control the thought. And it brings me back to that character in 1984 by Orwell Sime, who said, don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.
In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words left with which to express it.
But going back again, specifically to Covid and to the remote learning and to the mandates, that was, at least in my lifetime, the biggest violation of civil liberties, as you were discussing earlier, was how the universities treated their students and treated them in a very non rational way, in a very fear based way, not in the students best interests.
Is there a way of understanding those policies within the context of what you describe in conformity colleges?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Absolutely. And if you've had Jeffrey Tucker on recently, I was just at the Brownstone Institute retreat a week ago up in Connecticut, and that remains one of his key focuses and mine also, in a way. But the reality is that they used the idea of panic and emergency to create fear, base of fear. And then they just assumed power.
They assumed power by the fact that everybody was so terrified. And that's why they kept running the running death toll on the newscast every night, so that people would get even more. It would never go away, even though that death toll was significantly falsified because there was a financial incentive for hospitals and doctors and big pharma to sell their medicines, to sell their services, to charge for the injection of vaccines. And then the hospitals, I think it was something like $70,000 per person who had an extra, they, they got an extra bonus if they had, and treated people with COVID But the people they took in, I mean, that's how bad it was. They wouldn't let you use the ivomectin. It was a bad.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: If I am understanding you correctly, you see that in terms of what happened on campus, more in terms of economic incentives and expanding power than they had within an intellectual.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Context, if they hadn't included the educational system and forced the very obvious people in that system, both k through twelve and universities, if they hadn't done that, it would have reduced the fear of that. Oh, then we can be together after all.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Even though the fact. Go ahead.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: I was going to say we focus on Covid a lot and the detrimental aspects of the non pharmaceutical interventions. And I don't want to give short shrift to your book. So returning to that, in your book you write about a professor friend who taught critical studies at Harvard University, my alma mater, who told you over 30 years ago that the left was waging a, quote, war of attrition rather than a frontal assault.
Let's dig in there a little bit. Why is that? And how has this been implemented over the year, this war of attrition rather than a frontal assault?
[00:14:04] Speaker B: I will begin with saying I did write a book on strategy and Sunzu's 3000 year old book. He's a brilliant strategist, chinese strategist. 3000 years ago, he wrote the art of War. In the art of war, he outlines exactly the ideas of a war of attrition, which is one where you undermine the foundations and pillars of the enemy without the enemy even knowing. And in this case, they used to some degree the need to be equitable and equal with which I'm committed. But then they took the language of that again, of being fair, of opening up the system to people who were barred from it before, and that meant women, because it had been a white old boy system, universities had been. I'm not going to deny that when I went into Harvard and helped set up their clinical program, their clinical law program, and got a master's of law degree, I and many other civil rights lawyers went into law teaching to advance the ideas of social justice.
So that's the tension you feel, because now I look at it, and over a 2030 year period, they used the social justice mantra and the fairness and the nondiscrimination and racial equality mantra to place faculty members who were not really committed to education.
We went in and I went in. I did not force my ideology or my belief systems on students that to me would be contemptible. I'd be willing to say something about it if they ask, but that's it. I did not put flags in the classroom. I did not force them to do anything. If they tried to kiss up to me on something like that, if they looked into my background, I just tell them to stop doing it. It's not appropriate for a serious intellectual activity.
But what happened is some of us went into it with an honest teaching and social justice commitment. Others went into it with an absolute desire to take over the system in the interest of excessive focus on gender and race and minority status. And they fulfilled. It isn't just the faculty. They fulfilled increasingly over a 30 year period through that system of shaming and guilt that you hadn't done this before.
They filled the administrative ranks and they filled the faculty ranks to a significant extent. When I say filled, it isn't necessarily a majority, but it's a bunch of really nasty, organized, vicious people who are willing to destroy anybody's career and have, who does not go along with their game. And so that's the impact on universities.
That is the impact on universities.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: We're going to get to.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Let me add one thing, because you put it in some notes that I saw about the lessening of the tenure track element. That was part of it, too. Part of that's financial, because the financial base of universities is declining with increasing rapidity. But a significant part of that is that it's harder to get rid of a tenured professor. And that professor, the whole function of tenure, even though it doesn't work particularly well, the whole function was to protect intellectual freedom, and it has done some of that, but it has lost its glow on that, too. But what happened is that universities, under these administrators and woke faculty members started shifting to short term contracts. Over half of the courses in universities now are being taught by people on shorter term contracts or adjuncts. Over half. I don't just mean law schools, I mean the entire university.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Right.
So let's take a few steps back. Given our focus on philosophy at the Atlas Society, I'm particularly interested in how postmodernism might have paved the way for the social justice orthodoxy that now reigns supreme throughout academia. You explore the influence of Herbert Mercusa at length. I'd love if you could talk about how his ideas may have helped to usher in a new campus culture in which those on the liberal left felt justified in using repression, any means necessary to shut down their ideological adversaries. So specifically, regarding Marcusa, postmodern critical theorists and the link and the steps that got us to where we are today.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah, the essence for. I'll take Marcusa and Jacques Derrida. Okay, great on that. Because Derrida, it's deconstruction.
And that's part of the idea of the war of attrition.
If you call into question the foundation ideals, beliefs of any place, any movement, and then challenge them against their actual performance, we are all sinners. We are all flawed. None of us make it all the way to serving our ideals. So what they did with Derrida and with Makusa is to say, these are illegitimate regimes. What you have now are discriminate. They profess, and this is what they use against the US all the time. You profess all these ideals of justice, of fairness, of equality and the like, but look at all your history.
And it's like they use the reality of our history as a guilt and shaming. Guilt and shaming are central to the critique of the woke and the crits and the european deconstructionist, postmodernist. And the fact that they then opened up the system by saying, there is no truth, which you talk about objectivism. They take the position which I always hated. There is no truth. And I take the position. I can't prove one way another unless I shoot you and does the bullet kill you or not? I guess we could predict there's a truth there, but otherwise, what you can do is say a system, a nation, any system, even if you cannot prove the kinds of things that are involved in truth or ideological belief or something, you have to believe in something, and it has to be something good. And you have to be willing to accept your inadequacies and your failure to achieve the ideals and then strive for those ideals. And that is the beauty of America with all of our flaws. Because I've worked in, been in 35 countries, I have no misconceptions about what other nations are like. And my God, I may like to vacation in one, but I would not like to work in any of those other. Well, I have. I was a visiting professor in London for three different times, and with the University of London, Westminster University, and in Russia and so on. So I know something about how systems work.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: So, speaking of your time teaching at the University of Westminster in London, you lived near the British Museum and would sometimes wander over there to visualize Karl Marx bent over his books while seeking to decipher political reality.
I thought that was just a precious anecdote. You concluded that Marxism's fatal flaw was that he let his utopian theories blind him to objective facts about human nature. And of course, in objectivism, the morality, the ethics of rational self interest, is based about the objective facts about human nature, about what we need to survive, about how we need to use our reason. So talk a little bit about this fatal flaw of Marxism as being blind to human nature.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Well, at the base of it, given the fact that you're going to dismantle the existing system, you're going to honor the proletariat, all the people in the country, you're going to guide them a little bit, and then they're going to spontaneously emerge into you don't even, disintegration of the state, they can govern themselves. Okay, sounds good, sounds good.
But people are not that way. Think about everybody, you know, think about the fact that some people, and this is where I would disagree with Aynran to some degree, and I mentioned to you earlier, I think you need to have a healthy community.
You need to have people who are developing themselves, just like Aristotle said, developing themselves to the highest level they can. And the outcome of that, which is why when you're talking about Rand, the outcome of that is the strengthening of the entire community, not because it is a collective, but because it's a community where people, by being the best they can be, in fact, create the best.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: I mean, I think this idea of rand as promoting atomistic individualism is a bit of a simplification. I mean, in Atlas Shrugged, Gault's gulch was about an idealized, almost utopian community. And the very fact that objectivism is about individualism first and foremost.
The fact that individuals are all different, and as having strengths and weaknesses and values, and our dearest values, many times are those that we love, people in our family, people who are friends.
But that said, I think that's why we are open objectivists here at the Atlas Society, because I think a lot of these ideas can be misunderstood and maybe need elaboration.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: And you know way more about it than I do. On that particular. On Rand's philosophy, I know a little bit, but you know way more than I do. But I would difference between a community, which I believe in, which is aimed at facilitating the greatest development of the people, which we're doing a very poor job at, and we're all getting dumber and dumber. But you look at that. But the difference between that as an ideal of a community and the collectivism that's now going on, which is intended to stifle the ideal of development and somehow create a monster that tells everybody else what to do. By the way, that is exactly what Aristotle warned about as the ultimate fatal flaw of democracy.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: We're not a democracy here at the Atlas Society asks, but we do have our audience. Who I'm going to get in trouble with if I don't take a look at their questions. We've got some excellent questions here, particularly a lot of people that are interested in your legal career and your past work on law and legal reform.
Candice Moreno, on Facebook in particular, asks, do you think legal education has changed over the past few decades? Some argue that the legal profession has become corrupted by critical legal theory. David, what are your thoughts on to.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: I hope I'm not going to offend your audience, but I think critical legal theory is bullshit.
They tried to recruit me into it when I got out of Harvard and I started teaching, and people I knew and liked called me and started talking all about social justice and all that, and they went through it, and then I said, what is this really all about? And they said, well, it's marxist and socialist. And I said, I don't do that, but there's no question to me what its roots, because critical race theory emerged from what was done by a group of people at Harvard Law School that then over the next eight or ten years in the 1970s, morphed over and expanded from critical legal studies to critical race theory that spread throughout the university.
That's part of the timing. It really got its feet in terms of the possibility of power through the 70s, consolidated that through the, took over really over the last 30 years, and then back to the issue of law school. Do I think that it has been corrupted by wokism and critical race theory? Absolutely.
My law school set up DEi program. I like the guy who's doing it.
I read the description of what was being done and I couldn't stand it. It's just like somebody trying to get into your brain and telling you you're a biased racist if you're white and you must be biased on is. There is no basis in Brett Stevens of the New York Times, who is a reasonably conservative writer, if you can conceive of that, on the Times. He said it's a theory in search of evidence and that it hasn't found it. All they did was call something a theory.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Right?
[00:29:00] Speaker B: All right.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: Tamara Rollins on Twitter x asks Professor Barnheiser, do you think academia can be redeemed as a place of open dialogue and research?
Any reasons for optimism, or do we now need know? Go and try a different model?
[00:29:22] Speaker B: I think that the answer to know, I don't know whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden's going to be elected in the fall. And I really, even though I know a lot about the law schools and the university efforts, I don't think anybody knows. I could cite the University of Austin, the new one you said you interviewed, and his effort is superb. The people he has working with him, I have great respect for them.
Hillsdale College in Michigan, Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Some others are trying.
Florida had to, University of Florida just fired or terminated their DEI funding and relieved that. And Texas is heading in that way, and I think Oklahoma is too. But universities are very good at finessing and slipping what they will consider to be vague rules and just creating other avenues to doing the same thing. So I wouldn't trust that either.
But it certainly can't be saved. The universities, by and large, as a whole, they can't be saved unless through funding deficits. A lot of people are removed, including administrators and the DEI system discontinued. And real, I mean, it's not bad to talk to. Consider the impact of racial discrimination and gender discrimination on people who have no ability otherwise to handle it.
I'm not against that. I'm against bureaucratic systems that are deliberately looking to magnify their own power at the cost to the university and don't give a damn.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: Well, I mean, we were talking about Harvard earlier and given its endowment, I'm ashamed.
Mean, the size of several GDP, right. I'm not optimistic. Know even Bill Ackman and King Griffin threatening to withdraw their funding. Now, you mentioned the upcoming election and then again, also your legal work. Have a lot of questions here about lawfare.
I like numbers. Thoughts on the various cases against Donald Trump. Is this law fair? Using the legal system to kind of manipulate natural democratic politics? Scott, also on YouTube, thoughts on legal reforms to propose to stop at least the appearance of a double standard in prosecutions?
[00:32:26] Speaker B: Well, I think it's disgusting. I mean, I hate it.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Reforms.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: And I wrote a book about what kind of reforms. What's that?
[00:32:35] Speaker A: What reforms might you propose?
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Unless the reforms will not occur in what are referred to as primarily blue states.
The only things where you're getting external reaction because the universities basically are not going to change what they do. They're under the control of the people that we've been talking about. They're not going to change.
Somebody comment? I saw a comment somewhere today. Universities should, or government should stay out of universities. They should if the universities were faithful to their mission of intellectual freedom, research, teaching, teaching kids how to think, teaching kids of a useful skill, teaching them the knowledge that ties us together across generations.
If the universities were doing that in an honest way rather than a claim that my experience gives me the wisdom that if they were doing that, then you could work around that. But the universities will not change as they are.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: On Twitter X, we have Johnny Sakai, who is a young man probably getting a little depressed by the tenor of our less than optimistic conversation.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Depression.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: So he asks, what advice would you give to young people interested in going into academia?
What advice would you give to young people interested in going into academia?
[00:34:21] Speaker B: University.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: Don't go.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: University. Academia.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Okay.
What advice would I give them? You might have just given it.
If you're going to start a university, talk to some people. And I hadn't even thought of this, but the charter schools, the people in the teachers unions in the k through twelve, they hate charter schools, they hate alternative models, the accrediting agencies, same way. They don't want to do it. They don't want to take funding away from the existing systems that are doing what we're talking about. But.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: I think he's talking about someone who's going in to pursue? He's going to become a grad student, then he's going to become a teaching assistant. Then he's going to want to be a professor of philosophy or professor of whatever, or young people that are just starting out on their academic career. What advice would you tell them? One question we frequently get asked from the young people involved with the Atlas society. Should I just kind of parrot the party line and say what I know the professor needs to hear in order to get a good grade, or should I stand up for my beliefs?
[00:35:44] Speaker B: If you stand up in this system, for your beliefs in this system, you might as well transfer, go elsewhere.
I'm not saying it's hopeless, but it's not something that's going to be changed overnight. It would take a concerted effort, just like you're saying about the Atlas Society. And over time, recognizing the reality of the situation, understanding people don't read books much anymore in that way, and developing new methods of it. That's the kind of thing that you have to be honest about the inner forces of what you're seeking to combat. And all I can say is, at this point, I mean, I'd give up on, except for the lingering prestige value, I would tell somebody, never go to an Ivy League institution again, look and see and do some research. Because schools are now starting to say we're open to people. We're more open to people as students.
And I'm right on this. If they have increasingly see the tenure track positions of long term academia are disappearing, it means they may notre somebody. When somebody retires, they could get two or three or four adjuncts or five or six for what they pay one tenured faculty member. Probably more than that, actually. So you have to be realistic when I talk about that, you have to be realistic about that. The best you could probably hope for in most cases is a term contract.
By that I mean you can get a three to five year renewable contract, but there's no ultimate job security in that. And what's happening now, there are a lot of people with that, and they get screened by the woke hiring people and they are put through hoops to prove that they are woke and that they are consistent with that. So that's a no go in that. So even there, unless you are, I would say this to most people, unless you are gay, lesbian, trans, minority, whether it's native american, whether it's black, whether it's latino, forget it.
[00:38:12] Speaker A: If you're asian, not asian, not asian.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: If you're white, yes. So if you're white.
The ods are so stacked against you, it's amazing.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: All right. On Instagram, Isaac Wren asks, in writing this book, did you do any research into what's been happening in high school and elementary classrooms?
[00:38:39] Speaker B: Okay. This book I published about two years ago, calling defending K through twelve education against the new racism. This book is, no more excuses, parents defending K through twelve education.
This book covers a lot of that, which is called Uncanceling America, which is really a major layout of all the institutions that are under attack. And it's not just the educational ones. It's journalism, it's corporate, it's government. It's all over the place. It's non governmental organizations. So the answer to that question is yes, in detail. And it's a mess. It's a mess. K through twelve education, and particularly there are different. But the major urban areas in the United States, the schools and the politicians, many of them minority, and the teachers unions, are betraying the minority kids to such a degree that they're destroying their futures. They're destroying the futures of the young people who would have a chance, and they're not even educating them. The absenteeism rates in these schools, in a lot of places like New York or Chicago, they're 25 30% as a rule. So the kids aren't even going to class when they go to class. They're disruptive. They listen on their phones. The teachers are getting attacked. The test scores are dropping like crazy.
It's just so mind boggling. People have to understand that in a lot of these areas that we're talking.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: About.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: They'Re big money slush fund pits for the ones in control of these systems, on the school boards, the administrators and the politicians. What they can do is get sweetheart contracts for millions and millions of dollars for their buddies. And a lot of them, times not even bid, no bid contracts. The whole system is so fouled up and corrupted that unless we deal with that, we are in deep trouble. But we're in deep, deep trouble.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: So a couple weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Helen Smith. She's the author of men on strike, why men are boycotting marriage, fatherhood, and the american dream. Is the repressive atmosphere and policies you describe in your book making life on campus even more difficult for male students and faculty compared to their female counterparts. What is it like for a male, sophomore, junior, senior on college campuses these days?
[00:41:35] Speaker B: On college campuses?
[00:41:37] Speaker A: Yes, on college campuses. First of all, they're in the minority now, right?
Yeah.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: The k through twelve system.
[00:41:47] Speaker A: College campuses.
[00:41:50] Speaker B: I know they have problems, the ADHD issue, the attention deficit disorder issue, drugging up and using drugs on active young males and teaching them that they best be quiet. A lot of times that has had an impact. And there are a lot of studies that have indicated that that sort of ripples up through the whole system. The military give another one military going, woke on giving critical race theory training or mandatory to their recruits.
I mean, that's what they've been doing. And it's so bizarre. It's amazing because that's one of the reasons I'm convinced that their enrollment, their enlistment, every part of the military is seriously understaffed in terms of their recruiting because nobody wants to go in, in that kind of a situation. But I say that because that's the same kind of situation you have in the universities. If you're in a class and you have an insatiable mind or just a curious mind, you can't talk unless you're talking about the dominant mantra, the dominant ideology unless you're doing that. You look in the book, in this book and you'll see the examples, I put a lot of examples of that kind of behavior by the teachers in those systems and not just by the teachers. There are a lot of, I would call them fanatical students in the universities who terrorize the students who don't agree with them. And so there's a game playing of why you don't want to be outed as being something you actually doesn't agree with or has contrary ideas to the dominant ideology that's being voiced. And it may sound bizarre, but I'm not making any of this up. That's how bad it is.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: Brian Rollins on X asks, where can we find your older books? Are they on Amazon?
[00:43:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: Okay. Are they on audible?
[00:44:02] Speaker B: Yes. Well, I don't know.
I don't know if this one is, but I priced it at $13, the 600 page on canceling America. I deliberately priced it on that because I wanted people to make it easy. Buy my artificial intelligence contagion book that clarity Press published in 2019 and really is considered prescient in that sense about job loss and about privacy invasion, about the big corporations, the big information corporations and their behavior, what government will do. It's available on Amazon. Yes.
One of these two is, one is backlisted, but I know I just sent one to somebody.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Ok, we'll put those links in the chat across the platforms.
You reference the work of Greg Lukianov and Jonathan Height, who in their landmark book the Coddling of the American Mind advance the idea that overprotective parenting has contributed to a campus climate in which students prioritize safety over free expression.
Others take issue with this line of arguing, asserting that campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon, but an ideological one. Where do you stand on this? How much of this is, as Lukianov and hate argue, students coming to campus with this epidemic of mental health and neuroses demanding safe spaces? And how much of it know top down as opposed to bottom up?
[00:45:57] Speaker B: I think it has to be seen as both.
Realistically, I think there's really a lot of deficient parenting in our system. No question about that.
[00:46:10] Speaker A: Well, I think what they were saying, not that it's deficient parenting, but it's too much parenting, right?
[00:46:16] Speaker B: That it's helicopter parent and that kids.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: Are not having unsupervised time, they're not being given the freedom to go out, make mistakes and learn resilience, and are showing up with a much more immature level stage of development.
[00:46:37] Speaker B: I believe that is absolutely true.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: So kind of a perfect storm.
In chapter seven of your book, the degradation of merit and ability, you write, quote, as China, India, Brazil and other nations aggressively pursue their own well being, us leaders have better think in competitive terms rather than acting as if we are in full control of the future. How is the decline of our educational institutions impacting our ability to compete internationally?
[00:47:10] Speaker B: Well, see, the funny thing is we're actually training in the technical areas. We're training 300 and some thousand chinese students from China, basically a year, in America's universities.
They pay attention, they take the hard courses, they find the secrets.
It's been shown that America's STEM is supposed to be science, technology, engineering, mathematics, supposed to be the future of development and jobs and economic power and everything.
And it's been shown time and again now that american students are dropping out of STEM systems at a very significant rate because it's too hard. It's too hard. They don't understand it because they're coming from educational systems down below the k through twelve and the like. They're coming through ones. They just made mathematics into a racist activity. And that you have to change that. People don't even understand it. And they have to be able to have mathematics, which is vital to being able to do anything technical. You have to understand it. And it has to be a shared thing, not your own version of mathematics, your shared thing that they can understand and compare notes and compare methods and so forth. Have to.
And we're showing that in mathematics and other areas, reading mathematics, that are the base of people from k through twelve who are going up into the universities and are, again, not getting adequately taught because so many of their courses are sociological rather than something that really would be hard. But the sociological in the sense that the theses of the sociology can be manipulated to fit a political frame of reference of the kind that the particular teacher wants to have. And guess what that frame of reference is in the modern university in America? It is the.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: All right, we're coming up on the top of the hour, so we got to be selective here. I'm going to take two more questions and then we're going to wrap it up. Zachary Cervantes on Montrose, beautiful name on Facebook, asks, do you think online learning, aka distance learning, is beneficial or harmful for childhood educational development?
[00:49:53] Speaker B: Harmful.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: Okay, I like it. We're going to get to all of these questions. Harvey H on Instagram asks, is there a crisis of competence among college graduates entering the workforce, or is this exaggerated?
[00:50:12] Speaker B: It's not exaggerated. People who hire people have been complaining about the inadequacies of their new hires, many of whom only last a couple of weeks, either from the hire point of view or from the kids point of view. Who decides it's not the ideal job that they wanted to spend their life at?
[00:50:33] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I definitely feel that's true. The level of people's grammar, spelling, writing skills, it's definitely been degraded.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Thank you. Thinking.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: Critical thinking.
Okay. Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of Morgan Chase, made headlines this week by saying that schools should be judged less on graduation rates and more on their record of getting kids placed into jobs. He said, quote, if you look at kids, they got to be educated to get jobs. Too much focus in education has been on graduating from college. It should be on jobs. I think the school should be measured on, did the kids get out and get a good job? Is he right in this perspective?
[00:51:27] Speaker B: Let me just say monopoly money, because that's what degrees are now, because the average grade in many universities is a b plus or an a.
People who are looking at their resumes because they got good grades, simply, it doesn't matter because everybody did.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: That's true. Yeah. Actually we had, and I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the topic, a earlier guest, Isaac Morehouse, who recommends that young people don't go to college and in fact, has started some very innovative mentorship programs and apprenticeship programs, ways for kids to develop kind of a body of work and a resume that hasn't anything to do with a college degree. Because he argued that a college diploma is essentially, all it communicates is, I'm no worse than anybody else. I somehow managed to get through this college. I'm no worse than anybody else. But it's not speaking to anybody's individual accomplishments, native skills, or talents. So another guest I interviewed recently was Jonah Goldberg. He shared some advice that he received from Charles Murray, who said, if you set out to write a serious book and it doesn't change your mind on least a half a dozen issues, you were doing it wrong. Were there any ways that your mind changed or at least things that surprised you over the course of writing this book?
[00:53:04] Speaker B: Your book, Conformity colleges, the depth of the inadequacies and the betrayal of the urban schools.
I knew there were problems because I created a street law program that really did work with young black kids on the east side of Cleveland schools. And it wasn't as bad, and now they're disaster areas. So it wasn't that I hadn't thought of a lot of the things. It was that looking into them in greater depth made you realize it is a really screwed up situation.
[00:53:45] Speaker A: That's what you learned.
You learned that you're too optimistic. What you learned that you had an overly optimistic perspective.
[00:53:57] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:53:58] Speaker A: Right.
All right. Well, however, I'll say in closing, I do think that there are green shoots. I think there are reasons for optimism. I mean, these past three years have been a complete revolution.
I think the amount of children being homeschooled has increased 300 400%.
School choice legislation is sweeping the country.
People are going gault. They are voting with their feet and moving to less self sacrificial states.
And while young women, I think, are pretty overwhelmingly progressive, twice as many 12th grade boys now consider themselves conservative, libertarian as opposed to progressive. So, as I like to say, no battle is ever truly over with no hope of reprieve or reversal until we say it is. So that's why we thank you, David, for alerting us to the problem and providing some solutions on suggestions on how we turn things around.
And that's why we're on the job for all of you guys at the outlet society. So thank you, David. Thanks all of you, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this video, if you enjoy other work and programming by the Atlas Society, freedom isn't free, so please consider making a tax deductible
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Donateall new donations, even $1 $5. They'll be matched by our board of trustees. Be sure to join us next week when J. Michael Waller will be here on the Atlas Society asks to talk about his book, Big intel. How the CIA and the FBI went from Cold War heroes to deep state villains. We'll see you then.
