Washington, D.C. is in crisis. Crime is surging, and the federal government has now stepped in. Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, Renu Mukherjee, and John Ketcham explain why Congress moved to rein in local control and what it means for public safety nationwide. Plus: Trump’s push to shake up college admissions, and AI-induced delusions.
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Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host Charles Fain Lehman, senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are John Ketcham, responsible for all things cities at the Manhattan Institute, Jesse Arm, responsible for all things external affairs. His responsibilities grow ever larger at the Manhattan Institute, and Renu Mukherjee, responsible for all things ethnic politics at the Manhattan Institute. Which may or not be external affairs. I don’t know. It’s good question whether or not either of those things constitutes external affairs.
I want to bring us right into the news of the day. As we are recording this, so I’ll disclaim for our listeners, we’re recording this as Donald Trump, I believe, is in the process of doing a press conference on it. But the administration has been moving aggressively to crack down on what they perceive as a serious violent crime problem in the District of Columbia. This was in part prompted by a vicious assault on a former DOGE employee who is known for them under the moniker Big Balls.
This has prompted renewed calls from the folks on Capitol Hill and also the White House to potentially end home rule in D.C., federalized D.C. And then also over last night, the National Guard was deployed in the district. You know, I think the GOP is looking to really make a show out of D.C. to say this is, you know, poorly governed city. This is serious failures of urban governance. I want to kick it to the group. What do we make of these developments? Does this make sense? What do we think of the politics here, what do we think of the viability of this strategy, maybe there’s some other ways they could be thinking about this. It’s a lot of questions but I’ll throw it out for discussion.
Jesse Arm: I think it’s all very good news. I’m definitely excited about it. I imagine Renu is as well as a frequent D.C. person.
Charles Fain Lehman: As D.C. residents, right.
Jesse Arm: D.C. residents. No, Washington is, it would be really a misunderstanding to look at Washington, D.C. as any other just large blue city in America. D.C. exists because the Constitution created a federal district under Congress’s executive legislation in all cases whatsoever language. That authority, I think, was partially delegated to local officials under the 1973 Home Rule Act, which we’ll, I’m sure, talk about more. John and Charles will get into the weeds with that. But Congress has always retained this power to step in, and therefore presidents have always had significant law enforcement tools at their disposal.
But in more recent years, the city’s elected leaders have used that autonomy to enact bad policies, right? Ones that have weakened violent crime or weakened penalties for violent crime, I should say. Released repeat offenders and really just presided over, I think, what could fairly be called a breakdown in public safety. And even as the numbers improve from some of their pandemic-era highs, rates of homicide, carjackings, and assault still remain far above where they were like a decade ago. So when I see President Trump issuing an order to deploy these federal agencies more aggressively, to send in the National Guard potentially, I mean, this press conference is going on right now and we’re here recording rather than watching, but I do think it’s kind of, it’s a very significant assertion of that constitutional authority more than we’ve seen in years. Critics are definitely going to argue that it’s too heavy-handed, that it’s… screech about authoritarianism, but it’s exactly what the framers envisioned in the sense that a federal capital should be run in the national interest and not some kind of fiefdom for a city council that is unaccountable to what the rest of the country wants in their capital.
If this effort works and it visibly… you see visible enforcement that makes D.C. feel safer for its residents, for its workers, and for the tourists who are coming here from all over the country and the world, I don’t think that, I think that essentially serves as a test case for whether this sort of right-of-center approach to urban governance can reverse disorder in deep blue jurisdictions all around America.
Renu Mukherjee: I do think that, to Jesse’s point, the timing here matters greatly and how quickly Trump, if he does take action, how quickly he can get things under control. Our colleague Chris Rufo had an interesting tweet yesterday where he said the way in which Trump could sort of win the media war and the war on public opinion with respect to exercise and control to get the crime down in D.C., you essentially want his narrative to beat the narrative of authoritarianism that will inevitably rise from the left. And so even if, you know, crime numbers go down, the general feeling of disorder in the city, you know, starts to recede a bit, which, you know, everybody can acknowledge that you feel unsafe walking around the city. I live in NoMa and that’s kind of, you know, what it’s like. But if Trump’s able to do this quickly and he can beat the cries of authoritarianism, I do think it would even be perceived as a success from any left-of-center Democrat.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I think Chris has made some really good points about the optics and the importance of thinking about what they’re communicating and therefore how the left can use the optics against the administration. John and I will have a piece in CJ. It will be out before this podcast comes out. But later today for us, we’ll be talking about some alternative approaches, some other levers that the administration might not be thinking of pulling. One that John dug up that I thought was fascinating is that the president actually has the power to unilaterally declare a state of emergency and seize control of the MPD for a month. To Jesse’s point, this is a very characteristic Trump move.
Jesse Arm: The Metropolitan Police Department, the cops in D.C., right?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you. The D.C. police department, the Metropolitan Police Department. This is a very Trump move in the sense of he is in a position to bust norms, right? There’s this sense of like, Congress should not interfere, the president should not interfere with D.C. Home Rule because that’s just not what you do. And it’s a very Trump move to be like, no, there’s a real problem here. We’re going to exercise the powers that are available to us. And then the question is just what do those powers look like? What does exercising it well look like? But I think there are real opportunities for a win here to both of your points.
Jesse Arm: Charles, sorry to cut you off again, but can you explain the home rule concept again, just because you used it in a meeting with me and I wasn’t even, you know…
Charles Fain Lehman: I want to kick it to John who will get it exactly right.
John Ketcham: Yeah, so to Jesse’s point, Congress has plenary authority over the District of Columbia because of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution. It’s called the Enclave Clause.
Charles Fain Lehman: And plenary for listeners is, so Congress has specific and delegated powers, but it has general powers. It has police powers. It has general powers of what happens in the District specifically. Sorry, John, go ahead.
John Ketcham: And the Trump move is essentially hearkening back to a historical norm where the federal government took a direct hand in the management of Washington, D.C. So for over a century, for example, the district was governed by three commissioners, all of whom were appointed by the president. There were standing committees in Congress that dealt with the day-to-day management of D.C. And effectively, D.C. has always been something that the federal government could take a greater hand in.
Now in 1973, Congress delegated a good deal of its authority to a separate local government, including a tripartite style of government. So you have the executive in the mayor’s capacity is a strong-form mayor with the ability to veto legislation. Then you have a D.C. council that is composed both of ward members who are elected in a district-style election and then also at-large council members. And then you also have a series of local courts as well over things like, you know, misdemeanor crimes and so forth. So that’s been the status quo since 1973, but as Charles mentioned, Congress could always abrogate some of these powers and in fact has done so. For example, in 1995, after a period of fiscal mismanagement, Congress passed legislation to establish a control board over D.C. and that control board had power to override local legislation. And that board was in effect until 2001 after four consecutive balanced budgets were passed with compliant audits. So Congress has been directly involved in the governing of D.C. for almost all of its history and Trump’s move represents a return to that norm.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, there’s an analogous thing. We use the same governance structure in Puerto Rico for restructuring. It’s called PROMESA. It’s the restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debt after the Puerto Rican debt crisis. And it’s very controversial on the island, but it seems to be imposing some degree of fiscal discipline. And I think this gets to the point of like, one theme that we at CJ are really interested in is, what do you do about these big blue cities that are often, you know, depriving their citizens of the fundamental right to safety and orderliness. And one answer that we’ve come back to is cities are creatures of the sovereign entity in which they exist. And that’s true in red states and it’s true in D.C., right? The city of the District Columbia exists at the pleasure of Congress. It could be abolished tomorrow by, you know, by vote and the president’s to sign whatever. And so there can be a degree of either federal or in a city like St. Louis, a city like Austin, these blue cities in red states, a degree of preemption where the red state legislatures can come in and say, actually, we don’t like how you’re failing to provide basic public services in the name of this insane ideology. We’re going to step in and provide those services.
And so I think D.C. is an interesting national test case of a strategy that we’ve seen used in other places to be able to say, no, actually, there is no legal obligation to tolerate disorder, crime, visible homelessness, public drug use, etc. in these jurisdictions. And in fact, there’s an affirmative obligation on the part of superior levels of government to solve those problems. And it’s good that they’re trying to.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, in other words, if D.C. can’t keep its own streets safe, the federal government has every right and really every obligation to do it for them. And so it’s, you know…
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. Constitutional obligation, right? Like, it inheres in Congress to solve the problem. That is their job. The fact they’ve abdicated is like a failure.
Jesse Arm: Right. So putting the Puerto Rican debt crisis aside, I’m taking your word for it and John’s words for it that this is legal, the president has this authority. I just think it’s kind of amazing that we have to wait for like a Republican like Donald Trump to come in and get the job done here, right? You get Democratic presidents, you get Barack Obamas of the world who talk all day about how they’re concerned about the inner cities or what have you, but D.C., you know, continues as a cesspool under these guys. And D.C. is a particularly problematic place. I recently moved from Manhattan to D.C. and I just think it’s kind of amazing because you walk around Manhattan in New York and it’s like there’s disorder everywhere. You could encounter some kind of crazy person or petty crime or someone jumping the turnstile on the subway. It could happen anywhere.
In D.C., it’s so siloed. You hang out in Northwest D.C., you hang out around Georgetown, you could go blocks and blocks without ever encountering a homeless person. But you go to Southeast or wherever, you go where the source of these problems are, and it’s like stepping into a different world. And politicians don’t hang out there.
Charles Fain Lehman: And it’s entirely voluntary.
Yeah, so like there’s an assessment from a couple of years ago, I forget the exact fraction, but it’s something like 60 percent of violent crime in the District of Columbia is attributable to a thousand people. And the district like authorized the study and they were like, we need to give these people wraparound services, we need to provide them with stuff, we need to make sure… And like, you need to put those people in prison forever. Like that’s what you need to do. And the fact that the city won’t do it is insane.
And it is a clear failure, to your point, it is a clear failure that Congress hasn’t done it up to this point. I hope that the administration in its priority setting goes, okay, these are the targets. We know who they are. We know what the problem is. We’re going to indict these guys and put them away in 30 days and crime will collapse.
Jesse Arm: I mean correct me if I’m wrong Charles, but there are gangs operating even outside of the District of Columbia that have figured out this system exactly and are gamifying it. So they’re saying, okay, we’re sending in a minor because they’re going to get kid glove treatment and we can send this minor in exactly two or three times before they actually put real grip on the wrist and then we send in a new minor to send in.
Charles Fain Lehman: The standard operating procedure, yeah.
My favorite example of this, and this is a little in the weeds, but D.C. residents will appreciate this. Have you ever seen somebody doing like 80 down Pennsylvania Avenue? Like driving insanely fast on, I don’t know, Renu, have you experienced this or Jesse?
Renu Mukherjee: I have and even just, just sort of anywhere like I live in Northeast and I mean I see all the time exactly.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. Like drag racing, essentially. The reason for that is that the D.C. police department is prohibited from chasing, full stop. They can’t do it. It’s not allowed.
Jesse Arm: Cops can’t chase? Explain that to me.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes. I mean, you are not allowed to. If somebody is driving recklessly over the speed limit, if I’m doing 95 in a 30 zone, the D.C. cops who are in their cars cannot accelerate to try to catch up to me.
And the reason for this is that it’s thought to be unsafe, that it leads to crashes. But the reality, the result is that you have people driving with impunity at incredibly unsafe speeds, running into people, dying in their cars, dying and killing other people in their cars. And this is just totally a choice. Like the city decided that this is what policy was going to be. And, you know, this returns to the point about like, you could just have a federal control board that comes in and is like, that’s not the rule anymore. We’re going to get rid of that. That’s no longer permitted. We’re not going to, we’re going to get rid of the chase ban. D.C. would be massively safer because you no longer have this sort of policy commitment to making it unsafe, which is the status quo.
Jesse Arm: I mean, as ridiculous as it sounds though, like this is how far left logic operates. You have problems with people getting shot, so you say to the police, no more guns. It’s just like applying the wrong strategy to the wrong target, and then surprise, surprise, you get the wrong policy outcome.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right, precisely.
We should turn away from this to other topics of great administration success. Before we do that, I want to leave us by asking, do we think that this is going to end up being a model for the rest of the country? In two or three years’ time, do we think we’re going to see other states like Utah, Texas, Missouri following this model? Are we optimistic about it, or do we think that perhaps this could go wrong? Renu, I’ll kick it to you to start.
Renu Mukherjee: I think to my earlier point, if Trump is able to do this very swiftly, I think that it could be used in other states by red state governors, like you said, Ohio, Florida, Texas, et cetera. And I really hope that they do.
Charles Fain Lehman: John?
John Ketcham: Some of this is going to depend on whether Congress can act because essentially the powers that the federal government have over D.C. are not concentrated exclusively in the president. Congress, for example, can veto D.C. local legislation through a joint resolution of disapproval, which is only a majority vote. It’s not subject to the filibuster.
So for those kinds of things where you can have a majority, sure, Congress will be able to be effective and whatever the president can do, such as to commandeer the MPD for a month to make a statement, I think that would be effective and potentially a model for states to use in recalcitrant blue cities in red states particularly. But for the issues where Congress has to legislate, it’s obviously going to be a harder fight with the 60-vote threshold. And so the range of possibilities is going to be limited by political considerations in D.C. that may not exist in state houses.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse?
Jesse Arm: I think we’re just getting started. And I think this is actually going to be one of the most lasting elements of Trump’s record and success and legacy is if they can turn around Washington, D.C. and really clean up these streets, particularly in the southeast part of the District. This could be a really exciting part of the Trump legacy. And I’m all for it. I’m excited for Liberation Day Part 2, probably even more than I was for Liberation Day Part 1.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’m a little more excited about this Liberation Day, all things considered. No, I think that’s probably right, and you know, this gets to the just like the Trump attitude of you can, as the Silicon Valley guys say, you can just do things. Right? That’s been the like Trump idea from the beginning. They keep pulling out these crazy, you know… You can just close the border. You can just deport people. You can just change the tariff rate. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you can. You can…
Jesse Arm: And we so rarely get glimpses of right-of-center things happening in deep blue cities that the downstream effects of this could impact the New York City mayoral election, could impact like all kinds of blue city dynamics around the country because so rarely do we get a glimpse of like what it looks like for Donald Trump to put his finger on the scale of urban politics in one of the most Democratic cities in America.
Charles Fain Lehman: If only. This is my point. There’s one guy who could be mayor of New York at the same time as being president. On that topic, I want take us out from that to talking about another administration action that we’re all very excited about. Last week, the administration issued an executive order. The Secretary of Education issued some current guidance, blah, blah. The sort of big takeaway is that coming very soon, universities across the United States are going to have to disclose a great deal more information about who they admit, about the racial and gender balance of who they admit, and the big effect is, you know, we’re through two years out and change from the decision that banned affirmative action in higher education admissions. There is, I think, and Renu, you’ve written about this for City Journal, a fair amount of evidence that colleges are just ignoring that conclusion, that they are actively breaking the law. We’re going to a good piece out from John Sailer tomorrow about other work that the Department of Justice is doing to curtail higher education law breaking.
And it seems like basically the administration is saying, you need to show us that you are in fact following federal civil rights law if you don’t want the same focus on you that we’ve given to Harvard and Columbia and all the rest of them. So I want to throw this out to people. And the core question here is just like, this is a fairly technical shift. We’re talking about IPEDS. It’s a data resource from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Why is this going to affect average Americans? Why should our listeners who maybe have kids who are thinking about going to college, why should they be invested in this development? And Renu, this has been a lot of your work. I want to get your thoughts on this in particular, but I want the other folks’ thoughts as well.
Renu Mukherjee: So I think first and foremost, our listeners and all American families out there, particularly with college age, high school age children should care about this is because it’s going to make higher education admissions in the U.S. extremely transparent. It’s sort of shocking that prior to the memorandum issued by Trump to Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon last Thursday, universities that received federal funds weren’t required to disclose to the federal government and publicly what the differences in, for example, GPA or standardized test scores were by race.
They’ve been able to get away with this for quite some time, really, since the Supreme Court first said in the Bakke case in 1978 that you can consider race in higher education admissions. And so this truly is the way in which colorblind admissions, merit-based admissions is going to be enforced. Basically, the Trump administration has done what no other presidential administration, including Republicans, has done since Bakke, which is this is the way in which you’re going to be able to ensure both to the federal government, state governments, but also just to everyday Americans that preferences are not being given on the basis of race. Students from certain racial backgrounds aren’t going to be penalized because both the Trump administration and, you know, any of us here on this podcast, any of the listeners are soon going to be able to go to the National Center for Education Statistics website and look at, for example, what the mean GPA and SAT scores are by racial group at Harvard, at Cornell, at Columbia, at Brown, et cetera. And so this is, perhaps maybe it won’t come across in some of the mainstream media reporting, but I really do think that this is perhaps the biggest win for color blindness in higher education thus far. And huge kudos to the Trump administration for pushing this over the finish line.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I mean, we should get into a little bit why a little bit this is necessary too. It’s that for years, elite universities have operated under what they call this holistic admissions process. But in reality, that means you don’t just weight grades and test scores. Sure, essays, extracurriculars, recommendations, and other subjective factors. And in theory, all that sounds perfectly reasonable. But in practice, it’s the vehicle by which you can knock the Asian kids for being Asian, right? Or you can knock the white kids for being white. It’s how you obscure, like how race factors into the admissions process. And this data that Renu talking about, once it all comes out, that’s going to make this stuff apparent. So you had the Supreme Court decision in SFFA, Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, and you got a decision that says, yes, it’s definitively illegal to give explicit racial preferences in the admissions process. But there’s no way to really show that without the underlying data.
So now you’ve got this executive order that says you got to make the data available and that’s a total game changer. It means these colleges and universities are going to have to provide every little granular bit of the factors on which they consider. Sure, the hard stuff, the SAT and ACT scores, the GPAs, broken down by race like how Renu said. But once all of that stuff is public and everybody can go through it, you are going to see such damning evidence of ongoing discrimination, I believe. It’s just going to be this major transparency win. Yeah, of course, giving students and parents and journalists and lawmakers all the tools to hold these institutions accountable. But I think even more than that, it’s just going to be another nail in the coffin for the fraudulent, horrific activity that higher, these higher education institutions in America have been engaged in for a very long time. And a lot of credit is due to this administration and specifically its domestic policy council for driving home this outcome. It really, I mean, you know, I feel like I’m cheerleading this administration a lot on this platform, but this time they really, really….
Charles Fain Lehman: We’re very happy with this one. No, I mean, think the, and to Renu’s point, it’s not just, I mean, it is about, you know, people can go and see how is, what is it going to look like? What are my admissions chances? And they can see which schools are discriminating on the basis of race. And think this is enormously affecting to Americans.
If you are the parent of an Asian child or white child who’s thinking of going to Harvard or Yale, a real component of your calculus is how do I get past the pervasive racial discrimination? That’s just been like accepted as true, but now you can highlight it. Then, you know, the other value here is data is a weapon. Data is a hammer. The Department of Justice can go after they can look at these racial disparities. This, the way, you know, I think I think that we’ve seen some criticism of this online that I want to make sure we talk about, which is, you know, should we really just be taking, and this is in my mind a fair argument, should we really just be taking racial disparities as evidence of racism? This is, you know, this is an argument that we on the right have made against the doctrine of disparate impact for a long time, the idea that racial disparity is prima facie evidence of racism, the Ibram Kendi idea. And I think there’s a way to frame this as isn’t the Trump administration doing the same thing, but in reverse? I’m not, you know, I’m not, I’m not sure that’s… I think it’s probably not, or not necessarily, but I’m curious, you how do people respond to those critics? How do people respond to that argument?
John Ketcham: I would just add that I agree that this is a major step in the right direction and a win for the administration, but SFFA wasn’t only important for its holding, it was also important because it opened up a whole new world that most people had only seen as a black box. The discovery process in SFFA was enormously valuable in showing how administrations actually go about bringing in students in places like Harvard, UNC, and so forth. And so now the Trump administration is saying, look, I am going to open this up as a matter of good government and transparency.
Charles, to your point, I think a lot of this is going to have to get litigated in terms of what is invidious, race-based admissions processes, like what falls outside of the bounds of acceptability and what doesn’t. You know, I could see factors like income being fine. I could see other factors like geography, if you’re really targeting people from specific neighborhoods that are highly segregated. That might not be fine. And a lot of this is going to depend on the fact-specific nature of these cases that get brought, how they resolve in the various federal circuits and then ultimately if there are conflicts between the circuits the Supreme Court trying to resolve that dispute.
Renu Mukherjee: I agree with John. I think a lot of this, you know, the data that’s going to come out is going to have to be coupled with a few things. Some that will come out, of course, in discovery and some that are just obvious. So the main work around that various university presidents of highly selective schools made clear truly 30 minutes after the decision came out. So I was with John in the office. We read the decision together when it was dropped. And then 20 minutes later, you know, he came back into my little like my office and was like, Renu, look at this message I just got from the president of Harvard in which he basically said he was going to continue to grant racial preferences through essays. So these are things that are very blatantly out in the open. I just finished a CJ piece right before we started the podcast in which I include the essay prompts from Johns Hopkins University. And they openly said in 2023 and 2024, tell us about an aspect of your identity. And then in parentheses, they wrote race and ethnicity. So a lot is going to come out in the discovery process, perhaps emails, text messages, but also presumably plaintiffs will be able to point to things like Johns Hopkins’ essay questions and say, well, they clearly were… or an email from the president of Harvard University to the entire community saying they clearly want to continue discriminating on the basis of race.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think about, there’s this great clip that our colleague Chris Ruffo dug up of Erwin Chemerinsky, who’s the Dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s Law School. I think he still is. It was like a, it was a private session for folks in law school in which he said quite openly, we’re going to keep doing affirmative action. I will deny it if I’m asked outside of this room, but we’re going to keep doing affirmative action. It’s like, okay, so you’re going to, you’ve just admitted that you’re going to engage in massive resistance. You’re going to break the law in order to keep discriminating on the basis of race.
Yeah, and to Renu’s point, one of the answers is if all you can get is statistical oddities, okay, that may not be grounds to prosecute, but these people do leave a lot of breadcrumbs in their willingness to be racists. So I think we’ll get more than that.
Jesse Arm: That’s an important piece of this, right? So you asked about how we think about other sets of racial data and that disparities aren’t necessarily indicative of racism. Okay, so we have these, all of these people in the higher education industrial complex, especially with respect to elite universities, are still telling us that they believe racial discrimination in the university admissions process is a very good thing. We don’t have police chiefs around the country going, oh no, actually we would like to shoot way more black people. And unfortunately the law says we can’t, but we’re really, really eager to do it. Now look, are there some racist cops in this country still? Yeah, absolutely. But I think, I believe cops when they tell us they want to get those numbers down and they don’t want to be shooting people disproportionately from other races, or really shooting very many people at all. I think they just prefer everybody commit fewer crimes. But that’s the difference, right? And the higher education elite progressive universe, they believe this form of racial discrimination is good. They want to do more of it. They don’t care if the SAT scores or the GPAs are lower because diversity is the end goal unto itself. And that’s what the Trump administration is fighting. The Trump administration is saying, no, we believe merit is the end goal unto itself and you need to be assessing these people who you’re going to welcome into your private institutions on the basis of merit.
And by the way, you know what? If we were living in a different universe where all of these laws on the books that made racial discrimination illegal on a kind of de jure basis didn’t exist, then maybe we’d be having a different conversation. But these people are being bludgeoned by the tools that they passed for themselves.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right. And I think critically are being bludgeoned with the tools that don’t say the things that they have subsequently been interpreted to say. You go read the Civil Rights Act. It’s a very broad, colorblind law. That’s what it is. The administration, again, this is a procedural point. For a long time, there was sort of a minority view, one view on the right was we need to capitulate to the sort of civil rights consensus of the 1980s and 1990s, the sort of post-CRA idea of like, you know, race consciousness and affirmative action and we sort of complained about it, and then there’s a minority view that was just like we need to uproot the civil rights state altogether.
And what the administration has done, building off of a number of thinkers’ work, is go, no, actually if we just enforce the law as written, the colorblindness is in there and so we’re going to use civil rights law to attain what we understand non-discrimination to actually look like, which is, in my view, what a large majority of Americans believe non-discrimination looks like. This is a winning issue for the administration because this is how Americans think about racial discrimination. They think that selecting students on the basis of race is racist, and that’s bad.
John Ketcham: See, I agree with you, Charles. The other side is going to say, though, that colleges have an interest in creating a diverse student body of various kinds, diversity in experience, of income, et cetera, and that what gets…
Charles Fain Lehman: They lost! They lost that argument! Sorry.
John Ketcham: Well, but they’ll say that they still want to curate a particular student experience and that that should be within their ability. Now, what gets measured gets managed. And they’re going to say, look, we are going to be focusing on test scores, on GPAs, and these quantitative metrics. And in effect, that is a not-so-subtle nudge to get us to focus almost entirely, if not entirely, on those measures rather than the softer measures that we think we should be able to use in selecting a student body. So that’s just going to be the other side’s case. And I wonder if we could respond to that.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of agreement within our coalition on this particular matter, but like this application and this set of like using the other side’s instruments that they’ve left lying around to bludgeon them with, we have healthy disagreement on it too. I mean, we’ve been referencing Chris Rufo a lot, but like he had a big debate with our colleague, Ilya Shapiro around the, or they just had a, you know, not a big debate, but disagreement around the anti-Semitism awareness act, right? Like, should you use this same theory of the case for bludgeoning anti-Semites on the hard political left, right? Should you put a definition of anti-Semitism into law and then use civil rights law to go after people who are engaged in targeted harassment of Jewish people? You know, all of this stuff, but because we’ve passed some bad laws, and even more so than that, had some bad Supreme Court decisions in the past around this set of topics, it makes for all kinds of interesting debates today.
Charles Fain Lehman: I also think that you have to ground it. And this is the thing the administration, I think, has to essentially learn. You have to ground this in the moral content of the argument, right? Like, I gave a talk. I was on a panel at the University Chicago. And somebody came up in the question period and was like, what do you make of these recent developments in affirmative action? She was clearly very upset about them. I was like, OK. Well, so what happened is that the thing you support is wrong. It’s immoral. Like, the grounds of the argument is that they want to do racism, and we don’t. We are against it. And they are for it.
And so, you know, I think the… all of the sort of nitpicky little, well, we want to select like this. We want to select like that. We want to have this. You want to gerrymander the racial composition of your class. That’s wrong. It’s immoral. Americans agree that it’s immoral. And if you can hammer on that point, it is, it is very, it is very hard to rebut it because they know that it’s a loser. They know it’s a loser in 2025, but actually it’s been a loser for a really long time. And like lawmakers have just not caught up.
Renu Mukherjee: That’s also where the strength of the Right really lies in pointing out the reason one of… It’s immoral regardless, but the way in which I think you can break through to Democrats and this is wrong. Racism is immoral against regardless of whether the primary victim is an Asian or an African American or a Latino or someone who’s Italian, et cetera. But at the end of the day, for example, you know, me and our colleague, Michael Hartney at the Manhattan Institute have done a survey in which we’ve asked, you know, Americans, we’ve asked Democrats, you know, do you support this policy when you know that the primary victim is like an Asian teenager? And super majorities of Democrats become quite uncomfortable with it. Again, Republicans oppose discrimination whether the primary victim in higher education admissions is a white or an Asian. But I think this is how we can really get through to those on the left, which is to point out, and it’s not just in the context of higher education admissions, but also with exam school admissions. Every year the New York Times will release some sort of reporting about how those admitted to the specialized high schools in New York City are, you know, there’s only like six or so black students and they often say that this is segregated. What they don’t say is, no, it’s not segregated. You have many, you have a majority of students who are from various Asian origin groups. The schools are in fact quite diverse. And so the way we can like sort of, you know… Many in our coalition are already on the same page as us, but to get those, to get to those particularly on the center left, to really stress the point, like this is, you know, this is truly, this is genuine systemic racism against students of Asian origin. That’s what this is, both in higher education, both in high schools, et cetera, and gifted and talented programs. And I think as much as the administration can stress that, it’s going to get through to even those that might disagree with us on other issues.
Charles Fain Lehman: Jesse, last thought then we should move on.
Jesse Arm: So much of this ultimately comes down to the fact that Donald Trump just understands populism and does it really well. This is an issue that there are broad swaths of people find inherently immoral and bad. It polls like you’ve never seen before, and yet there is this institutional, elite, intense debate back and forth in places like Cambridge and Washington, D.C. It’s ridiculous.
Donald Trump looks at it and says, racial discrimination is illegal and we should do something about it because all of these institutions are openly telling us they are engaged in it. So they’re going after it ruthlessly like many other previous Republicans administrations should have pushed on a lot harder. Like is the story on so many other metrics. Populism isn’t what some D.C. think tank guy who stylizes himself a populist tells you it is. It’s what a lot of people want to see happen. And the president is now making good on realizing that.
John Ketcham: And we might see some of the downstream consequences of this victory on things like the SHSAT that Renu mentioned. You know, the majority low-income kids that go to those schools, they are one of the most powerful launching pads into successful careers that New York City offers. Very popular among East Asian parents. But Zohran Mamdani recently backtracked from his previous comments opposing the SHSAT. And so…
Jesse Arm: John, we almost made it through a whole podcast without mentioning Zohran Mamdani.
Charles Fain Lehman: I do want to say we have a great piece from Danyela Souza Egorov on the site last week that I recommend about the SHSAT and the claims that it’s racist. Check that out. Before we roll on to our closer, I want to ask people, zero to a thousand, how many universities are going to end up prosecuted as a result of this decision and or entered consent decrees? Renu, what’s your order of magnitude?
Renu Mukherjee: All of them that receive federal funding.
Charles Fain Lehman: Great, cool, okay, it’s all of the above. It’s like several thousand. John?
John Ketcham: I think you just have to sue a few of them and then everyone else will fall in line and get the message. So I feel like I’m one dollar on Price is Right.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay. Jesse?
Jesse Arm: I don’t know. I guess, yeah, they’re probably all doing it, but you’re only going to sue a few of them. The worst actors in this case are the most elite ones, the ones with the best reputation, so to speak. I put up air quotes there for people who aren’t watching us, who are only listening to us. The best reputation slash the worst reputations, those will be the targets here as well.
Charles Fain Lehman: I will not be happy until we have replaced Harvard with Trump University, Cambridge. This has long been my dream, and I hope we’re going to get there very soon. All right, before we go, I want to take us to a weird story that I enjoyed over the weekend. There’s a great recent piece in the New York Times about a Toronto man who spent a month delusionally convinced by ChatGPT that he had discovered a new kind of math. This story really has everything. It has AI making people psychotic. He’s a stoner, so of course that was involved, although he denies it, but of course that was involved. And it has sort of the rising threat of AI-associated psychosis. So we talk about AI, it’s sort of a big cultural story. I think it’s more interesting than a cultural story. And I’m curious, what do people make of this phenomenon? What do you think about sort of AI-induced cultural weirdness? How concerned are you about this? A little bit? A lot? Somewhere in between? John, I feel like you’re on my page about this.
John Ketcham: Well, for most of human history we thought that there was only one type of geometry, Euclidean flat geometry. And then in the 19th century, Gauss and Bolyai realized that there were different types of geometry. There’s spherical, there’s hyperbolic, and they all have different axioms. So if ChatGPT is able to bring out these new paradigms… Like mental health and genius have never really been friendly with each other, but I think that there might be some promising new paradigms that you actually…
Jesse Arm: I think he might have been onto something. Math seems kind of fake to me.
Charles Fain Lehman: Great, good, okay. We have two who are leaning into the delusion right now.
Renu Mukherjee: My initial view is the opposite. It sort of makes me uneasy primarily because in using ChatGPT for my own research purposes, you have to… It’s helpful in, I guess, fleshing out ideas, but it also adds a great deal of work in the sense that you have to check everything. The amount of just hallucinations it’s done when I’ve asked it, even some basic questions is a bit concerning. So I think… for those purposes, it’s stressful. Also just something I’m quite concerned about is all the articles and how both men and women have convinced themselves that ChatGPT is a legitimate romantic partner. That’s a whole…
Charles Fain Lehman: Somebody got engaged to ChatGPT recently. There was this on Reddit. It was great. Yeah. Yeah.
Renu Mukherjee: Yeah. So that can’t be good for our society. That just that cannot.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, this is the… I think it only gets weirder from here. Hallucination machines combined with people of questionable intelligence seems like a bad combination in my view. Although also like, you know, I think the former Uber founder has convinced himself he’s discovered the outer edges of physics with ChatGPT, which seems unlikely to me, but maybe I’m wrong.
All right, that was about all the time that we have. Thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, even if you haven’t, don’t forget to like, subscribe, click the button, hit the other button, YouTube, Spotify, all the other platforms where you get our content. Don’t forget to leave us comments and questions down below. We got a number of good ones on the Douglas Murray episode. Some of them were rude about me. Most of them were nice about Douglas, so I’ll take it. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
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