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Aaron Sibarium is a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, where he covers higher education and institutional capture.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Aaron Sibarium discuss racial bias in medicine, affirmative action at universities, and whether “woke” is dead.
Note: the first part of this conversation was recorded on December 23, 2024, and the second part on March 14, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: There are two big debates that have been going on for the last few years that I want you to help settle for our audience. The first is that one of the criticisms, for example, of my book The Identity Trap has been that these are anecdotes about the most egregious cases of a certain kind of identitarian ideology on the left going wrong, but it's really not representative of what's happening in institutions across the country. And the second is the claim that woke is dead.
Now, one of the reasons why I wanted you to come on the podcast is that I think you've been doing really interesting reporting about how some of these ideas are playing out in institutions across America, including some leading universities like Harvard, but also hospital systems, local governments, the kind of institutions that really have a tremendous amount of influence over the lives of everyday citizens. So before we delve into detail about some of those particular cases, what's your answer?
Aaron Sibarium: Well, in the Soviet Union, you could point to any given person in the Gulag and say, well, that's just an excess. That's just one example you're pointing to. But of course, it's never one example. It's the accumulation of individual examples that together constitute a way of life or a regime or a kind of particular feature of a form of governance or of an ideology. So I think there's almost a basic like logical fallacy sometimes when people say, well, it's just that's one example. Because then someone will say, but here's another one. If I give you 20 examples and you're still saying, that's just 20 examples, at a certain point, when do examples become patterns or trends?
In terms of what those examples are, people often say, well, that's just one guy who got unfairly treated by the DEI office at Harvard, and not that many people go to Harvard anyway, so why do you care? And look, if that's all it was, sure, maybe people wouldn't care, or shouldn't care.
But A) Harvard produces a disproportionate share of the country's leaders and elites, and so the cultural norms of Harvard tend to trickle down into other institutions too. And B) it's not just at Harvard where you see some of these excesses emerging. It's also things like hospital systems or state public health agencies which rationed COVID drugs based on race. And it wasn't just like one hospital in Seattle that did that, it was the state governments of New York, Utah and Minnesota plus one of the largest hospital systems in the Midwest. No, it's not the whole country, but it’s not just one or two people who are affected. It’s millions of people subjected to a regime of racial triage. I don't think that that's a non-issue.
Mounk: I agree with you that the important thing is to point to places where some of the core institutions of our society are systematically making decisions on criteria that just deeply offend common sense, and even on reflection turn out to be really unjust. And we'll go through a number of those in this conversation, but certainly one of the ones that I highlighted in my book is the one you refer to, which is some of these decisions by health systems and hospital systems during COVID. And I relied on your reporting for some of those claims. So to those who don't know what we're referring to here, walk us through this. What does it mean to say that major hospital systems or even whole U.S. states were engaging in a form of racial triage?
Sibarium: Yeah, so in late 2021—it seems like so long ago—there was the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which at that point was by far and away the most transmissible variant that had evolved. And it was also uniquely resistant to vaccine-induced immunity. A lot of people in the winter of 2021/2022 were suddenly sick with COVID. And so states needed a way to allocate these new drugs called monoclonal antibodies. And there was also something called Paxlovid, which is an antiviral produced by Pfizer. These were very new drugs that, if you develop COVID, helped to alleviate the symptoms. If you're high risk, if you have diabetes or you're overweight or you have some lung issue, that's who you would expect would be prioritized for these drugs, which were very new. There weren't that many doses of them.
But what these states did was they came up with these numerical scoring systems that gave points to people who had diabetes or obesity or things like that, but they also gave points based on race. It literally was that anyone who was not white pretty much automatically got something like two extra points, which was the same weight as what was given to conditions like hypertension or diabetes.
The rationale of course was this kind of utilitarianism where people said, well, on average people of color suffer more adverse outcomes from COVID. So if we prioritize people of color, we're more likely to do more good with the limited resources that we have. The problem with that reasoning is that first of all, the bar for any kind of racially discriminatory policy in the United States is really, really high. It has to satisfy something called strict scrutiny, which in practice, none of these systems came close to satisfying. It's a very high evidentiary burden. You have to show that there is literally no other way basically to achieve the goal other than racial discrimination, which they did not have strong enough statistical evidence to show. But the other thing is that even if it's the case that, on average, people of color do suffer adverse outcomes from COVID at higher rates than white people, the question is why? And some of the reason is that people of color are just more likely to have the other conditions that went into the scoring criteria, like obesity and diabetes, in which case if you just include those conditions, you in theory will still end up disproportionately helping people of color.
The other reason I suspect you saw racial disparities is, and I don't have proof of this, but based on my own anecdotal experience seeing people of different class backgrounds navigate the medical system, including within my own family, I think that, especially if you come from maybe a more working-class background and are just not as used to the norms of medicine and doctors offices, you often don't seek treatment as aggressively. My suspicion is that the reason you were seeing some of these disparities by race is really that maybe African-Americans and Hispanics tended to be more working class. So it was not a solution, I think, that was even very well-tailored to the real problem. But in any case, the state ended up having this just blatantly discriminatory policy. And they backed off of it in most cases after I reported on it and after they received a number of legal threats, which I think just goes to show that they knew it couldn't really be defended and wouldn't hold up in court.
But that was a lot of people who were potentially stymied from getting monoclonal antibodies or Paxlovid as quickly as they might have just based on their race. And in fact, I think one of the ironies is that when I did a follow-up story about Utah's system, one of the arguments that the governor's office actually gave me was, well, we changed the system eventually because we found that it wasn't even working to get the drugs to the people we wanted to get them to. It's like, okay, so you're basically admitting that you artificially made it harder for white people to get the drugs, and it didn't even help black or Hispanic people get the drugs. Like all you did was make life harder for one group of people without helping anyone else. Totally irrational from any kind of policy standpoint.
Mounk: This speaks to two of my deep frustrations about the discourse regarding race in the United States. The first is the unwillingness to look at both race and class. I think it's true in some of the criticisms of France, which tend to be a little overstated, that the country is too reluctant to look at factors of race in certain contexts, thinking that everything can be explained through class.
But conversely in America, we, in many contexts, try to explain everything through race when a lot of the explanation, in fact, is class-based. I completely agree with your idea that obviously people who are from a less affluent class are less likely to be able to advocate for themselves effectively in the medical system and that has all kinds of bad consequences. If black and Hispanic people are disproportionately working class in America, then that will in fact lead to disparate outcomes. You don't fix that by giving priority to highly-educated black or Latino people, or to affluent black or Latino people, while not helping working-class white people. You fix that by trying to make our medical system less responsive to factors such as social class.
The second thing that's frustrating about this is just the really simplistic way in which we talk about race, in which we divide the country up implicitly (and in some of these cases explicitly) into two homogeneous blocks of whites and people of color. And we assume that all members of these non-white groups are disadvantaged and all members of a white group are advantaged. And one of the absurdities of this in the specific context of COVID is that Asian Americans, for various reasons, have from the beginning been less likely to get seriously sick from COVID. And yet in this context, they were included by many of these hospital systems and states and so on in the category of people who are in need of a special priority. (Of course, when it comes to affirmative action, suddenly Asian Americans don't count.) So this is really very arbitrary.
Since the first live Q&A was really fun, we’ll try to make this a monthly feature! So please join me for the second iteration on Monday, March 31 at 6pm Eastern. I will once again try to answer any questions you may have—whether about my writing, the current state of the world, or what might happen next. Join us on Zoom here. —Yascha
To me, a really striking episode during the pandemic was not the drugs you're talking about, but one step earlier with how the vaccines were rolled out and prioritized. This strange ideology of equity meant that the CDC knowingly chose a policy that, according to its own models, would lead to a great number of deaths, and again, I strongly suspect, also led to a great number of deaths of non-white people. If you give a vaccine to two 30-year-old black people who are in much less urgent need of it, rather than one 80-year-old black person, more black people are going to die as well, according to the statistics. So that is a really striking outcome of this way of running the system.
How representative are these policies of broader efforts in medicine?
Sibarium: The problem is that this stuff isn't always written down. It can sometimes happen in committee meetings, closed door sessions, places where there's no paper trail. And I think the one that I've reported on pretty extensively is in medical school admissions. There is still, I think, a ton of affirmative action. And look, people can debate the philosophical case for affirmative action. But the Supreme Court has said it's illegal. It's definitely not legal. And in many states like California, it was illegal well before the Supreme Court decision. But one of the stories I reported in 2024 is about UCLA Medical School and how all these whistleblowers came forward to allege that the dean of admissions at the medical school was systematically basically discriminating based on race, allowing minority applicants in—that is, mainly black and Hispanic applicants—with test scores that would have instantly disqualified them had they been white or Asian.
Now, at the same time that was happening, you started to see a big increase in the number of students at UCLA Medical School who were failing standardized tests of medical competence. There's a lot of debate about whether you can actually attribute that increase in failure rates to affirmative action, because at the same time that they started allegedly doing this crazy affirmative action, they also revamped their curriculum to involve less time for classes before people started their clerkship rotations. And as part of the new curriculum, they also took class time away from fundamentals like anatomy and chemistry to do an entire class on structural racism. Which also meant that they had less time to learn the fundamentals before they got into their clerkships. So it might be that the increase in failure rates had more to do with their curricular redesign than with affirmative action.
The class on structural racism was literally teaching them that it was fatphobic to treat obesity as a health condition. Just things that are impossible to parody. When I first saw the curriculum, I was like, this sounds like a Babylon Bee article. I can't believe this is real. But it was. Anyway, you really see two things that I think are gonna affect medical competence going forward. One is that there are a lot of racial preferences in medicine, frankly more than in other fields. And then there's also this kind of relentless focus on structural racism, health equity, and how racism affects health. And obviously there are ways in which the legacy of discrimination might affect health. And if you were studying that in a rigorous way in your third year of medical school, after you've learned the basics—okay, that's fine. That's a reasonable thing to include. And certainly talking about how social factors can influence an individual's health is a legitimate topic. But these courses take up an increasing amount of time in medical school and it's hard to convey how crazy they are.
Mounk: These kinds of practices really don't look seriously at the systemic consequences of their actions. One of the deep injustices to doctors who are black or Hispanic is that if it is widely known that there are overt or covert forms of affirmative action and admissions to medical schools, many patients may start to think that they have reasonable grounds to prefer being treated by a doctor who doesn't fit that demographic. And that, of course, is a deep injustice to the many black and Hispanic doctors who were not selected on the basis of these legal practices and who are excellent physicians.
I want to speak for a moment to the larger question of affirmative action. Now, I've argued in the past that I'm not a burn the system down kind of a guy, but when it comes to the system of American university admissions, I really think we should just torch the whole thing to the ground. That includes the way in which affirmative action was practiced until the Supreme Court decision. It also includes preferences for the kids of rich donors, or for athletes, or the idea that we need to find somebody who plays the second violin in the university orchestra. I think just the whole thing from start to finish is a bizarre corrupt construct that is very hard to understand for people in Western Europe or East Asia. They wouldn't tolerate this strange Kafkaesque system of preferences and deep preferences for various people.
But irrespective of that normative view, as you pointed out, the important thing to note is that there was a big Supreme Court ruling recently that rendered many other practices that were legal or semi-legal until then illegal. And it's a situation in which many universities filed amicus briefs to the Supreme Court saying, if you overturn the legal basis for affirmative action, the number of minority students is going to plummet because there's just no way that we can sustain a large number of admits from these various racial groups without engaging in these proactive preferences. Which, by the way, says something rather dubious about these universities’ views of the abilities of members of those demographic groups, but we'll leave that aside.
Now what happened is that once the Supreme Court passed down its decision, a few institutions duly did significantly reduce the number of students from those racial groups. So for example, there was recently a story that shows that Harvard Law School now has a significantly lower number of black and Hispanic admits. But many other peer institutions, both at the professional school level—so in law schools and medical schools and so on—but also at the college level, do not seem to have changed the racial composition of the entering classes at all, in some cases even expanding those black and Hispanic groups. Either they were lying to the Supreme Court when they were filing those amicus briefs saying that the inevitable result of the ruling would be plummeting numbers, or, as seems more likely to me, we're in a weird moment in which some institutions, sometimes some schools within the same institution, are obeying the Supreme Court ruling, even though most of the members of these institutions may disagree with it on normative grounds, which is a reasonable thing to do. But others are clearly defying it, saying, how many tanks does the Supreme Court have? We're going to keep doing whatever we want. Help us understand this odd landscape of admissions as it's emerged over the course of the last year or so.
Sibarium: I think you've basically characterized it correctly. One caveat is that the schools vary in how they report their data, and in particular whether they disclose the racial breakdown of, say, international students. So, you saw it in a few places that on the surface didn't see big changes in the racial composition of their classes: in the fine print they said that the number of international students went way up or tripled, and then they didn’t disclose the racial breakdown of the international kids. So it's theoretically possible that in fact the racial composition changed a little more than the schools admitted, but they used this kind of gerrymandering with the international kids, or they used various kinds of novel interpretations of what an international student is, to kind of mask the drop. I don't know if that's true. That was a hypothesis I saw voiced in the wake of the decision and I haven't really seen it fully explored, so I don't think we totally know. But generally, yeah, my sense is that the swings in some places were traumatic enough and the swings in others were modest enough that it's just clear that the practices vary between the schools somehow. They're not all doing the same thing. They're not all responding to the ruling in the same way. It is also possible in theory that a few of them managed to maintain diversity by just lowering standards across the board, which I don't love because I would like these places to have high standards.
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Candidly, I do think that to the extent elite schools like Harvard and Yale are valuable, a lot of the value comes from getting the top, not just 1%, but like 0.1% of American IQs together in a room. And when you just lower the standards and say, well, we'll accept a random lottery of people who have a 1400 SAT rather than a 1500 SAT or a 1550 SAT, I actually do think that that probably will on the margins make some difference to the intellectual climate of these places. And I would note too that publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic are writing stories about how kids coming into these universities can't seem to read books and can't write as well as they used to and across a broad range of competencies, but especially in the humanities and I think in math and science, just seem notably less well-prepared than they were a few decades ago and even maybe as recently as 10, 20 years ago.
Perhaps some of that has to do with COVID and other things, but I do think that there will be a temptation among schools to lower standards for everyone, and that's gonna compound the kind of gradual evisceration of standards at the Ivy Leagues that I think we've been seeing for a long time, which I don't welcome.
Mounk: How do you think this is going to keep playing out? Are there going to be lawsuits against these institutions? Will the Trump administration take action to punish those schools?
Sibarium: I do have the sense that there's sufficient energy in the Republican coalition behind going after the universities and there will be litigation of some sort. And even if it's not directly about admissions, I just think that the knowledge that Sauron’s eye is on them will probably have some deterrent effects and make them at least limit the extent of race discrimination. One thing I will say about the litigation is that, in practice, what's going to be difficult is that a lot of these schools are going to say that the reason they are still achieving these kind of racially balanced classes is that they're using race blind proxies like socioeconomics or whatever that just so happen to lead to the exact same racial outcome. And yeah, I think people are amply justified in being skeptical of that. My assumption is that they're in practice going to use things like the opportunity index or zip codes to just racially engineer their classes by other means.
The problem is that, A) that can be hard to prove if there's not a paper trail. And then B) the argument that a lot of us might be tempted to make is, yeah, of course you say that it's a neutral policy and that you're not discriminating, but given how recently you were discriminating and given everything we know, give me a break. Of course you're doing this to racially discriminate.
Mounk: Every president of a major university in the country is on record as saying—perhaps not every single one, but more or less every single one—that they think affirmative action is really important and the Supreme Court outcome was wrong. And so it would be very hard for universities to avoid explicitly putting in writing the intention to preserve some form of affirmative action. Now there are two different areas here. One area is undergraduate admissions, which is mostly done by admissions departments with the dean of admissions who has been in the game professionally for a long time, and a set of younger staff members who may sometimes be a little bit less seasoned and may make bigger mistakes in what they commit to paper. But I could imagine some amount of tight message discipline in those contexts.
Then there's other contexts in the university where rank and file academics are deeply involved in decisions to both admit and to hire for PhD programs, for example. Certainly faculty hiring is one of the areas where, from various anecdotal things I have heard, there are many, many, many, many different stories of people just very explicitly saying, we're not going to hire a white guy for this job. And I cannot imagine that all associate professors of comparative literature in the country are either savvy enough or motivated enough to avoid legal scrutiny on that.
Sibarium: Yeah, I think that is right. I think with faculty hiring, it'll be pretty easy. I wouldn't be surprised if at least some courts kind of say, if you're doing this much overt discrimination in faculty hiring, and we don't see any appreciable change in the composition of your class, we're going to assume that you're not complying with the law. I do think that some of the savvier universities might be able to avoid that, but we'll see. The other question, though, is how long do professors, the rank and file, maintain this zealous commitment to racial preferences? Because if they maintain it for decades, then within I think five years they're going to just figure out how to avoid making stupid statements on paper and they might continue to do it and just get better and better at discriminating stealthily. It could also be that the change in the law will affect culture, and what was once a bedrock commitment of a lot of liberal university professors will just kind of cease to be in the face of new legal pressures and new cultural norms. I hesitate to put too much hope in that theory because I do think this stuff is pretty dug in: this idea that diversity has these nebulous pedagogical benefits, racial diversity has these nebulous pedagogical benefits, and so on. I think there is a more optimistic scenario in which cultural change happens pretty rapidly. And I do think you see a bit of that now after Trump's election, where it does seem like more people than ever are just willing to say things like, yeah, some of this woke stuff, it's crazy. So I don't know. I can see it going in different directions.
Mounk: I think when universities started to engage in forms of affirmative action, the normative case for it was put much more coherently: that this country had slavery for many centuries and this had very long-standing effects on the black population in particular, and that therefore there would be something terribly wrong about having some of those elite institutions in the country only having one or two percent of its student body being black. And what we should do is explicitly favor descendants of slavery in order to help empower them and raise them up so that in future generations these disparities would go away.
Now what happened is that the Supreme Court said, no, that is not an acceptable rationale, but here's a different rationale—which has to do with diversity in a very strange way, because the ruling in my reading basically says it's acceptable to want to admit some more black people because having racial diversity is positive for the learning experience. So, implicitly for the benefit of the white students at the class, you should have a certain number of black students around. And as you're saying, rather than recognizing in the long run that this imposes a weird normative structure on the argument, many people started uncritically to really believe that. They started to believe their own rhetoric and say, the arguments that we have to make in order to circumvent restrictions on the Supreme Court are really the core moral basis of what we care about.
It seems to me that now what's going to happen is that the restrictions from the Supreme Court have shifted. One of the really bad aspects of the Supreme Court ruling to me is the fact that it says that it's of course fine to take into account personal statements and any testimony to personal disadvantage that people put in the personal statements. So basically, now, if you're applying to one of these universities and you're black or you're Hispanic, you've basically been mandated by the Supreme Court—if you want to maximize the chance of admission—to tell a sob story about how your race has affected your life, whether or not that happens to be true in your particular case. So I think the practices of how universities justify some form of affirmative action are going to shift in the ways you outline. We don't know exactly the ways that they're going to, but clearly they're going to try and find circumventions. So I think what we'll have is just another shift in exactly how this underlying commitment is expressed and justified rather than it moving away.
I'd love to hear your response.
Sibarium: I think that is a possibility, but let me offer some reasons to think that may not happen. So, first of all, I've been struck by how muted the reaction to Trump's victory in 2024 has been relative to the reaction in 2016, both on campus and off. You're not seeing the same kind of rhetoric about his victory being illegitimate, in part because he won the popular vote. You're not seeing massive protests in the same way. Now granted, look, I mean, this could change. But at least thus far, it does seem to me that he has been normalized for better or worse, and that has had certain salutary cultural effects. There's a bit less of a deranged reaction to him. And I really have not heard stories about campuses going over the top in the way they did in 2016. So that's one thing I'll say. The other thing I'll say is that although I do think there was a core of faculty who maybe agreed on the merits that things went just too, and who embraced institutional neutrality for principled reasons, I actually think a lot of the changes you're citing were motivated in part kind of by an anticipation that Trump might win—and in a broader sense that regardless of what happened in the election, Republicans were kind of taking a hands-off approach to universities.
And I think one of the things that really changed the school's thinking on this, and which coincided with these rafts of statements embracing institutional neutrality, was the October 7 fallout and the war in Gaza. Part of what happened was just the universities were embarrassed because they'd been issuing statements about George Floyd and Ukraine. And then they were like, both sides, who can say? And that just looked bad.
A lot of people who have this aversion to politicians doing anything about the universities seem to have this idealized conception of faculty deliberating and reforming themselves on the model of a liberal democracy. It's like they imagine Rawls's fake account of political reason and then import it to the university and say, that's how universities work. That is not how universities work. As anyone who's spent time in one can tell you, they are not models of Rawlsian public reason and the capacity for continuous reason-based reform. That doesn't mean that any particular thing that Trump might do is good. You can still critique various attempts to influence universities from the outside.
I think you're probably right about what happened. I worry that some people will hear what you said and conclude, the universities are totally capable of reforming themselves. There's no problem. Well, not really.
The second point I would make is that although I support institutional neutrality on its own, it's really a very modest reform because even if at the individual department level the faculty refrain from issuing institutional statements, if like 99% of the faculty is progressive, it's just not going to change the character of the school all that much. It'll change some things on the margins for there to not be the institutional statement endorsing George Floyd. But if you know that all your professors think that, even if they don't issue a statement saying it, it's kind of like, well, all right.
I think that some of the more meaningful reforms that have come in red states are the civic centers, which have been set up at places like UNC and the University of Florida, to be like a home for faculty who want to study great books. And they've been framed as kind of conservative bastions, although when you look at who they hire and practice with, I would say it's really more like scholars who want to study dead white guys and do that kind of political theory. The people they're hiring, I think, are actually a lot less ideological than maybe some of the media coverage would suggest. Having an entire center kind of serves as a bit of a cultural counterweight to mainstream academic progressivism. I think that's a pretty good way of maintaining a bit of balance and just forcing a bit of ideological diversity on the schools without preventing people from being left wing.
My read of the broader trajectory of higher education over the past year or two years is that most of the positive things we've seen have been because there's some kind of pressure, often motivated in some way by a perception that these universities have a real problem with either intellectual diversity or a real kind of moral problem that forces them to take action. I harp on this because, although I do think it's important for universities to have some degree of autonomy—and I don't want the government dictating what an individual professor can teach in class—I have to say, there are very few other huge taxpayer funded billion-dollar institutions in American life where we say the government can't have any role in regulating this.
Now, that doesn't mean that politicians should come in and restructure them from the ground up, but it does mean that I think it's totally fair to say to Harvard, you don't have a natural right to all of this largesse that you've been getting from us. And you guys have to shape up a little bit on the free speech issues and the anti-discrimination stuff, and maybe if you're going to be this influential, in fact, yeah, it would be nice if you hired a few more conservatives. I think those are pretty reasonable asks considering how much we're already giving these places.
Mounk: I think the devil is in the details here. For sure, for Congress to say, is there a level of university endowment that is so large that we should think about whether it should in fact be tax exempt and should we possibly tie its tax exemption to various conditions which ensure that these universities do, in fact, use that huge amount of tax-payer money to serve the public good?—that certainly is legitimate in itself.
It is legitimate, particularly for state legislatures, to say, hey, our public universities aren't adequately preparing their students for civic life because they're too ideologically skewed and they just don't offer classes anymore on the American Revolution, on the thought of the American founders, and perhaps we should fund new schools at these universities that actually pursue those civic objectives. I think that's perfectly legitimate as well.
But some of the laws that Ron DeSantis passed in Florida, and there are emulators of them in other places, do, I think, go far beyond that. So there was a law that I believe was struck down by various courts relatively quickly, but that really meant to limit the teaching of critical race theory in universities, for example. I'm somebody who's critical of critical race theory, who has criticized that in core parts of my book. But one of the standard classes I've been teaching over the last years may be illegal at the University of Florida under that legislation. Again, it's been struck down. So I think today I would be able to teach it at this university, because as part of informing my students about these ideas and having them come to their own conclusions, I assign both core texts in the tradition of critical race theory and critiques of it. Having state legislators interfere with that kind of pedagogical enterprise, I think, is just deeply misguided.
Sibarium: I totally agree that the devil's in the details, and I agree with you that that Florida law was bad. One thing you didn't mention is that some Republicans in the name of economic efficiency have been going after tenure protections, which I think is a terrible idea because tenure is one of the best tools that we have to protect the academic freedom of dissident professors. So I very much don't agree with them on that.
I think this is a good example of something that frustrates me about the whole debate over university reform, which is that I totally agree that that law is bad, you should not be restricting the teaching of critical race theory in university classrooms. At the same time, it was incredibly foreseeable that that would be struck down because it's obviously unconstitutional. You can still teach about critical race theory in the University of Florida. And anyone who looked at it from the start could tell that that was going to be where it would end up in a year. It was very clear that, in Florida, this idea that there would be no teaching whatsoever about the history of race or racism or even the academic theories in Florida—it's bad that they tried to do that, but it's also very obvious that we're not going to succeed because it was just flagrantly unconstitutional.
If we didn't have this kind of well-developed First Amendment jurisprudence, it would have been a more serious threat to free speech, but because we do, anytime a political coalition tries to regulate an area of public life for the first time, there's going to be excesses and overreaches. And so I think that's kind of what you saw at the start of the critical race theory push. It doesn't mean that there aren’t excesses and overreaches or that you shouldn't call them out. It's just that that's kind of to be expected. It's not really fair, I think, to say just because there's an excess, that means that it's totally illegitimate in principle for states to exercise any regulatory authority.
I would note that the equilibrium we ended up at in Florida was basically that law got struck down, but the University of Florida now has this civic center where kids can now go and learn about Plato. It ended up basically in a good place. I agree with you—terrible law, but let's just keep some perspective. That's my response.
Mounk: A win for Plato.
Sibarium: This is where I think, though, here's another issue with these debates about where the real threat to free speech comes from. So when Ron DeSantis passed a different law, the whole mainstream media was up in arms. They called it the Don't Say Gay Bill. I think there's a big philosophical difference between regulating what's taught in K through 12 and universities. Academic freedom is not really a concept that applies to the third grade classroom in any case. Yeah, anytime DeSantis or another like-minded Republican governor has done something like that over the past four years, you've seen stories in The New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, all of them were about the negative effects of the law. You see opinion columns saying this is a terrible threat to free speech. Like anyone who reads mainstream media, any liberal or centrist or just a person who's not living under a rock will know about the existence of these things and have heard the case that they're bad.
What you probably aren't going to know about are how those accesses can be translated into a kind of shadowy bureaucratic policies that operate under the radar and don't get a lot of media attention, but can be really quite Orwellian and scary and I think are laying the groundwork for something potentially very dark. And so one thing that I think a lot of people don't know is that these bias reporting systems on college campuses that let students report each other anonymously and without verification for anything that could be described as biased in any way have now metastatized to state and municipal governments. There are at least about a dozen of these things, including in, I think it's something like eight states that I've found, that let citizens, residents of states report so-called bias incidents. These are not hate crimes. There's hate crime hotlines okay, like a hotline to report a hate crime and get support, that seems reasonable.
But these systems explicitly say that they also welcome reports of First Amendment-protected speech. And although they can't punish people for engaging in the speech, or so they say, and although many—although not all—of them say that they don't keep a list of names reported to the hotline, fundamentally there is now an apparatus in a lot of blue states that allows people to engage in the kind of anonymous snitching behavior that we associate with countries like China and the Soviet Union. The states will protest, whoa, whoa. I mean, we're just collecting data to help us better predict where hate crimes will occur because, after all, bias incidents can lead to hate crimes. It's a kind of almost a woke version of broken windows where microaggressions or whatever somehow predict your propensity to engage in like race-based homicide or some such thing. And if this sounds crazy to you, I would say go read the documents that I've uncovered and linked to in this story.
They just say all this explicitly. But of course no one knows about this because it's in these long documents published by, say, Connecticut's hate crimes advisory council or by the Oregon Department of Justice that no one really reads. Only local media covers them. If they cover them, it's always covered in a very sympathetic way without any kind of adversarial. And as a result, a lot of people just don't know that they could in theory be reported for wrongthink, basically, in the States.
I don't want to exaggerate—the First Amendment exists. No one's getting thrown in jail or being fined for saying something, quote unquote, racist or offensive. But I think that that kind of bureaucratic policing of speech, and this kind of weaselly, we're just doing it for data purposes, is really common and really insidious, and it's just not talked about in the mainstream media.
To me, I think that also goes to just a broader issue with the debates about Trump, where I tend to share probably many of your concerns about this guy—I know you don't like him, you don't like his character, you worry about his effect on democratic norms, all that. Without getting into a huge debate about Trump, I would just say that all of that can be true. And it can also be true that the press is going to be a pretty powerful check on the worst things Trump would want to do. And at the very least, people will probably know about those things as a result of The New York Times, in a way that I'm just not sure they will know about some of the kind of equivalent excesses on the left. And the bias reporting system thing, like the race-based triage thing, is a good example where this is not just a matter of someone saying something stupid on Twitter or on a college campus or a really anti-Semitic protest even at Yale or whatever. This is a matter of the state involving itself in the quotidian interactions of citizens and attempting to, if not regulate them, certainly surveil essentially wrong-think and ideological dissent.
A more covered example of that one that's maybe more familiar to people is this whole disinformation racket where you have, ostensibly non-government agencies like the Stanford Internet Observatory working with the federal government to censor pre-Elon Twitter, telling them to take down posts. This is stuff that actually does affect the public sphere, actually has real policy implications, and the people who reported the Twitter Files—it wasn't The New York Times. The New York Times has the resources that if it wanted to—well before Elon bought Twitter—they could have found some of this stuff out through their contacts at these tech companies and the federal government. But they just didn't display much curiosity. I don't want to understate just how uncurious a lot of the press can be about the excesses of the left. That is really a big reason why I worry about those excesses because I don't think that there's enough adversarial scrutiny.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Aaron discuss the Trump administration pushback on DEI, and what this means for academic freedom. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
