How is Trump reshaping campus conservatism amid his sweeping 2025 reforms?

Rafael Mangual, John Ketcham, Neetu Arnold, and Jesse Arm dig into Harvard’s new conservative center—launched under pressure from Trump’s higher ed funding threats, DEI eliminations, and donor outrage—and ask whether it’s genuine reform or elite window dressing. They unpack the implications for academic freedom, accreditation, and the future of free speech, dissent, and intellectual diversity on campus.

Audio Transcript

---

Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual, Senior Fellow and Contributing Editor at City Journal and your guest host for the day. And I am joined by a great panel of brilliant colleagues as always. We’ve got John Ketcham, head of all things cities at the Manhattan Institute. We’ve got Neetu Arnold, all things education at the Manhattan Institute, and we’ve got Jesse Arm, all things external affairs at the Manhattan Institute. Hope you all had a great weekend. Thank you for joining me.

John Ketcham: Thanks, Ralph.

Rafael Mangual: So we’ve got some fun topics to talk about today. And I want to start with some interesting developments in the higher ed space. Okay, interesting news over the weekend. We saw stories that Harvard University of all places is considering standing up a center on conservative scholarship. Not exactly what I expected to see out of Harvard University given its recent dealings with the Trump administration and it’s vowed to fight it. But we also saw the University of Pennsylvania recently announced that it was stripping all swimming titles from transgender swimmer Leah Thomas and indicating that it would from this point forward use biological sex to determine participation in women’s sports. That seems to be another big win for the Trump administration on university campuses. And so the question I have, and I’ll start with you, Neetu, is, I mean, do we think that what we’re seeing here is a Trump effect on university campuses? Is this something that we can thank our president for?

Neetu Arnold: Well, I think getting universities to admit that they were wrong and to rescind prior practices and even admit that conservative views are not well-represented on campus is a big deal. And so I think that is due to the Trump administration’s mounting pressure on these universities. At the same time, I would say I’m looking at this from a bigger-picture perspective. And a lot of these universities still have much deeper work to do. You know, I think an interesting trend I’m seeing right now is that a lot of universities are rallying around intellectual pluralism.

But I don’t think it’s so much that they care about intellectual diversity. I think it’s about protecting certain departments, maybe more activist departments, activist professors from further scrutiny. And that is actually the place where we need further changes, whether universities are willing to phase out certain departments or offer opportunities for university departments to change themselves, to reform themselves, because at the end of the day, if you want true intellectual inquiry, diversity and open inquiry, the campus has to be a friendly place for all viewpoints and it can’t just be a place that is promoting progressive activists.

Jesse Arm: Yeah, so Ralph asked about the Trump effect, right? I think it’s, you got to note the fact that what we’re seeing now is something that would have been almost unthinkable even a year ago. Yeah, Harvard Center on New Academic, like a new academic center focused on classically liberal ideas, Penn retroactively stripping this biological male swimmer of her titles in the women’s sport. Columbia also inching toward a federal deal. Yeah, there’s definitely a Trump effect that’s establishing change at what are America’s most ideologically-captured campuses. But I think we should also be clear that teaching great books or covering Locke or Rousseau in a civics class shouldn’t be coded as conservative to begin with, right? That’s just education. But on today’s campuses, you could read John Stuart Mill and that’d be considered a microaggression. So there’s no fixing that from the inside. Like Neetu says, you need a lifeboat. You need alternatives. And that’s what these centers are. And the Harvard idea is kind of a case in point, and this is funny. I saw Ross Douthat, I think, flagged this on Twitter. It’s not actually a conservative center, right? They’re calling it a conservative center for classically liberal ideas, which happens to be the exact vision that one of Harvard’s few notable conservative faculty members, the law school professor Adrian Vermeule, happens to reject. But that is, of course, beside the point. I think it’s really exciting, though, and yes, of course, this is a Trump effect.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, John, what about Neetu’s point that, you know, ultimately this allows, you know, conservatives to be kept in that other box, right? To never truly be integrated into campus and that the real change needs to come from within the departments where, I mean, we see these data published year after year where it’s like, you know, the ideological disposition of the professoriate, it’s like seven to one on these college and university faculties, liberal to conservative. What do you make of that? Do you think that these sorts of initiatives and concessions to the Trump administration, are they going to provide us with some lasting change or is this just kind of a temporary set of concessions aimed at appeasing the Trump administration so that the universities and colleges involved can go right back to doing what they were doing beforehand?

John Ketcham: So I can speak to my experience as a Harvard Law School alum. And I see this as essentially analogous to the Federalist Society in the law school, where the Federalist Society brings together conservative-minded legal academia and conservative students to propel students’ careers in prestigious clerkships, in law firm placements, and so on. And I think Harvard is a good place for this sort of center, because many people know it as an institution uniformly on the hard left.

But based on my experience, I don’t think that holds across the entire university. Harvard College, the undergraduate institution, certainly, by and large, that is of the far left. But Harvard Law School was a place where conservatives were not necessarily demonized. The current prevost, John Manning, was formerly dean of the law school during my time there. He’s a conservative legal scholar and I think he’s uniquely well positioned to help the school navigate these times. Harvard needs to fill prestigious clerkships in the law school in order to maintain its rankings. So I found it amenable to at least tolerating conservatives because the Federalist Society would basically take care of clerkship placements and Harvard would get the credit for it. So there was a pragmatic tolerance of those students in part because of enlightened self-interest at Harvard. And I think that that kind of spirit will hold in this new conservative center. And the faculty that engage in this center will also engage in other aspects of university life. So I don’t necessarily see it as cordoning off conservatives in their own space. I do think that, like in the law school, it will have some impact in classrooms and in the wider university life.

Jesse Arm: I just don’t, why are we even calling this a conservative center? It’s not a conservative center, it’s a corrective back to the mean, what universities used to be very recently. Like, you know, I get it. Harvard, you weren’t in a concentration camp when you were in Harvard Law School, John, so what? It’s like, you still got to straighten things out at these institutions.

Neetu Arnold: Maybe tell Harvard that.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, I mean, I hear you. This is not exactly what everyone’s idea of a conservative center would necessarily look like. But for a campus like Harvard University, at least given what we’ve seen in the news, this is certainly a move to the right that I think a lot of people wouldn’t have expected.

Jesse Arm: I’ll tell you what, Ralph, give me money for a conservative center at the University of Michigan. We’ll have Kid Rock teaching a class on how to train your car and fire a gun. That’ll be my conservative center.

John Ketcham: But what a center does is it brings together a critical mass of students who are conservative by disposition and faculty likewise. And that is powerful because the Federal Society was the single biggest student group on campus, at least when I was there. And conservative students accounted for only about, let’s say, 10 or 15 percent of the student body. But every single conservative student went to the Federal Society, joined it, and participated in it. So there was a critical mass of conservative-minded students that were able to push back against the progressive students who otherwise would have just dominated them. So in bringing students and faculty together in that regard, I do think it will serve an important purpose.

Neetu Arnold: But I think the intention of why this center is being established does matter. You know, just keep in mind that Harvard did say they were thinking about having a conservative center, sorry, Jesse for using that term, having a conservative center for years, and they’re bringing it up now. And so the question is, does Harvard view this conservative center as part of larger efforts to increase intellectual diversity, or is it simply to appease political critics? Because I think if it’s about larger efforts to increase increased viewpoint diversity, then I think it’ll be easier for conservative viewpoints to engage with the rest of campus and not just being siloed off. But if it’s about appeasing the Trump administration, I kind of see Harvard becoming complacent down the road and saying, well, look, we have intellectual diversity. Look at our conservative campus. We don’t have to do any more work. And so that... To me, it’s right now unclear exactly what Harvard’s motives are and whether it will be able, if it really is about intellectual diversity, whether they can maintain that momentum.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, mean, look, call me a cynic, but I think there’s likely something to the following, which is that Harvard’s been under a lot of pressure from its donor base to do something to at least appear to be more hospitable toward anyone who is to the right of Mao. And a lot of people pulled their funding, particularly after the way that we saw these Ivy League university presidents handle themselves before Congress post-October 7th. And I think that’s been felt on these colleges’ and universities’ campuses. so part of what think Harvard’s doing here is trying to send a signal to its donor base to say, hey, we’re listening to the criticisms. We’re doing something.

The question is, is that something enough to change anything in any meaningful way? I’m not sure that it is. Jesse doesn’t seem to be convinced that it’s even a conservative center.

Jesse Arm: Can we just address this point? So conservative and moderate faculty are obviously self-censoring in these left-wing academic partners, these, sorry, these left-wing academic departments, which is all of them, right, in the country, especially at these big Ivy League schools, right? So we’re giving part of the game away by describing this as a concession to the conservative movement. I mean, I think Neetu rightly identify is that like, the answer here is pluralism. The answer here is to get back to a place not where like, it’s just some sort of like 50-50 split between who’s filed, who’s registered as a Democrat and who’s registered as a Republican teaching any given class at these top schools. No. The point is to get back to a place where dissent is encouraged rather than threatened as, you know, it’s white supremacist to say you want to learn from an old dead white guy, or that his writings could afford to potentially teach America’s youth anything of value.

So look, I mean I’m not an education policy scholar like Neetu or a Harvard Law graduate like John. But I simply say I think by calling these things conservative centers rather than what they are, which is a corrective to the highly ideological, you know like… What was it called in the Soviet Union? The ideology enforcers, commissars, right? I think it’s something closer to that. And we want to, and the Trump administration is pushing for a corrective on that front.

John Ketcham: But I see this as allowing conservative faculty to get their ideas in a forum and just have them out there and then they’re known for that.

And then the consequences will be less than if they had to, let’s say, publish in an academic journal or teach these things in a classroom. think that having this center gives them some space to do this kind of more risky work. Ralph brings up a good example of someone on the Harvard Law faculty who really defies categorization, Adrian Vermeule.

Rafael Mangual: I can’t, that was Jesse, not me, but….

John Ketcham: Oh, OK.

Jesse Arm: Hard to believe I’m the one bringing up random Harvard Law professors, right? Yeah, I think his book is somewhere back there.

John Ketcham: But common-good constitutionalism is not necessarily something you can put in a neat box anywhere. But I think it’s professors like Vermeule who will get the most out of this new center and then the consequences for the university

Jesse Arm: Despite the fact that he himself rejects classical liberalism, but yes.

John Ketcham: But I think there will be a dialogue within the conservative movement, and this center will be a forum for hashing out some of these differences, regardless of the label.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, look, I think that’s right. But it also, I think, brings up an interesting question, which I think is this is a good time to transition to the secondary topic for today, which is that, you know, what even is conservatism? Right. I mean, here you have a center that’s supposed to be classically liberal in its disposition. You know, classical liberalism has a lot of important figures that loom large, even in today’s conservative movement, people like William F. Buckley and Thomas Sowell. These are thinkers who I think very rightly can be categorized in the classical liberal tradition, but conservatives seem to be having an interesting moment where they’re trying to reestablish an identity in the time of MAGA. I’m not sure that any one person even working within this movement the way that we do, could even tell us exactly what a conservative is and get more than 40 percent agreement from people who identified as right of center in a poll.

And it just makes me think about what we saw recently at the Turning Point USA conference where you had people like Tucker Carlson, Dave Smith very much identifying themselves as people who are on the right, but at the same time, spouting a very different brand of thought and politics than we would have seen, say, at a National Review conference in 1960 or that we might see at a Federalist Society conference today. So the question is, what do we think about the future of the right, not just on university campuses, but even outside those university campuses? I mean, are we, the right, going to remain the kind of fusion, traditionalism mix of the time of Reagan and Buckley, or is it going to be something else?

Jesse Arm: Well, it’s not going to remain that because it isn’t even that at this point, right? I mean, I don’t think the future of the right is the fusionism from like 30 or 40 years ago, and nor is it some of the isolationist libertarianism that you heard from the stage at the Turning Point USA conference. It doesn’t need to be either. I do take quibble with the notion that there’s nobody who could define a set of policy ideas and then point to them and say, this is what the conservative movement is for in this day and age. I think there is someone who can do that and it’s Donald Trump, the president. So the future of conservatism is going to be something new, shaped by Trump, but not exclusively reducible to him.

America first, or at least the MAGA iteration of it, of today, has grounded the right in a sort of results-oriented, common-sense ideology. Be tough on crime. Defend our border. Rebuild industry. Keep men out of women’s sports. Hit our enemies without apology. Those are all 70 to 80 percent issues. So I think Trump has used the phrase in some of his speeches previously, a “revolution of common sense.” So that is an aggressive disposition, but pushing for an ideology that is center-right at most, not so aggressive that it’s rocking the ship.

Donald Trump is pushing a, you know, common-sense policy. As campuses start to create like new centers for conservative thought, again, like, and our movement is having exciting rallies with 7,000 young people turning out at Turning Point USA. I think that all of that is a good thing for the right, but the goal should neither be, well, the goal shouldn’t be reviving an old consensus or platforming, crankery, a lot of which are also borrowed from old ideas. So it should be giving intellectual coherence to the new popular realism of incisive leaders like the president.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, I guess the question is, I mean, I look at this younger generation of people who are identifying with the MAGA movement, and I don’t see a coherent ideology. I don’t see, you know, a sort of sense of what it means to be a conservative outside of the sense that all that really means is to be anti-left or anti-woke, which is why I think you have this level of entertainment for conspiracy theories on the young right that I just never imagined seeing. I mean, you have people like Dave Smith who have their star rising by articulating these wild theories about how everyone in the country is trying to get us and keep us in a state of war rather than entertaining the possibility that it’s just a good thing to defend allies.

Jesse Arm: Ralph, Ralph, Ralph, there’s a coherent ideology associated with today’s right. Dave Smith just isn’t a part of it. Dave Smith was out there. I don’t need to. Dave Smith was out there a few days ago.

Rafael Mangual: Tell that to him. I mean, he’s identifying himself as a right-winger.

Jesse Arm: Dave Smith was out there a few days ago arguing that the president should be impeached and removed from office because of a bloodless and highly effective United States military operation that he and Tucker Carlson theorized would all but certainly cause World War III, which never amounted to anything more than exactly what Donald Trump told us it would be, which was a, you know, a discrete operation to takeout Iran’s nuclear weapons program. I just, don’t know. I think there’s plenty ideologically consistent vision for what American conservatism is in its next iteration. I just don’t think Dave Smith belongs to it in any way, or form. And the fact that Turning Point USA chose to extend an invitation to him… So be it. I mean, we’ve got people who aren’t part of our ideological coalition all…

Rafael Mangual: Not just chose to extend an invitation to him, right? But both he and Tucker Carlson spoke at that conference and both received...

Jesse Arm: Well, I mean, they invited Dave Smith to participate in a debate with Josh Hammer and he got his ass handed to him.

Rafael Mangual: Sure, but both Dave Smith and Tucker Carlson received many, moments of, know, raucous applause for some of the things that they were saying. It wasn’t like they were super poorly received in that environment. And so, I don’t know, it seems to me like there is a tension on the right between two or maybe five different brands of what it means to be a conservative. I feel that as someone in the movement. What about you, Neetu?

Neetu Arnold: I mean, I think it points to larger issues that we’re seeing across the political spectrum where a lot of younger people don’t feel like they identify with purely the right or purely the left. They have a lot of sort of views and they don’t fall into those traditional camps. I’m thinking, like, at least for a lot of people on the right who are conservatives who graduate from universities, they’ve been isolated. They’re essentially told that their views don’t matter or they’re evil. Maybe they face isolation from their own family members. And I do think that isolation, the demonization is a problem. I think that actually leads to radicalization.

And you know, I was just critical of, you know, the potential for a Harvard conservative center. But, you know, one of the benefits would be that it could connect professors with these students because I think that mentorship is important, especially in a time where you have the internet. There are all sorts of ideas. And, you know, if they appeal to something, you find a problem. You know, you don’t like the institution. Maybe they’re just speaking to you. I think those ideas on the internet can very much appeal to younger conservatives. And I think that’s where the wisdom of faculty, of people who are well-read, I think that could serve an important gap that’s currently there on the right.

John Ketcham: The way I see this is Trump is at the center of the gravitational solar system on the right. But some planets are closer to the sun than others, right? So certain policies like tariffs. Are tariffs conservative or not? Are military interventions overseas conservative or not? Legal immigration, should we have more legal immigration into the country. Is that a conservative principle or not? Some of these issues are going to need to be disputed and there should be some kind of prevailing consensus on them. I see the center like Harvard’s in trying to establish some kind of synthesis between Trumpian thought and some of the more, let’s say, establishment conservative thought that predated him. The challenge is going to be whether there’s going to be enough intellectual and viewpoint diversity even within the center at Harvard in order to contain, let’s say, the totality or the near totality of the conservative movement with its populist strains as it’s currently constituted.

Jesse Arm: Guys, the future of the conservative movement is not at Harvard. It’s important to hold these institutions accountable and push them, but we need to be honest about the fact that we on this podcast, we are the highly-educated wing of the low-education party, at least for the foreseeable future, right? And we’re not explicitly identifying with one political party or another, but when it comes to conservatives, an increasing chunk of them are those who identify with the American right are doing so despite the fact that they are, you know, less educated. They have gone to college in much fewer numbers. The left, the Democratic party, that is the future of the highly educated faction of America. And I think that is a byproduct of the fact that these universities have become ideological indoctrination centers.

So once again, to get back to that last topic, right, a corrective and a push against that is totally prudent and something that this administration I think is handling quite well. But we should be concerned about what’s happening at these TPUSA conferences, but we should not be hand-waving it off and saying, therefore, like, there’s something wrong with it. Like the TPUSA conference is a beautiful thing. You’re assembling 7,000 young people to get together and say, no, like Nietzsche says, like, we don’t want to be canceled for having different lines of thinking and thought. But you have to remind these folks, yeah, we’re here under a cohesive umbrella downstream from what a lot of President Trump has been doing in the White House. We’re not here just to agitate for the sake of agitation. And I think, you know, I wouldn’t have made some of the same speaker decisions that Charlie Kirk made with this year’s Turning Point USA conference. But I think Charlie raised a good point on a number of occasions. At least I watched during that Dave Smith and Josh Hammer debate over foreign policy. Like, you know, Charlie points out repeatedly, like, guys, there’s a fever swamp of nasty, racist, anti-Jewish hatred that is spewing from dark corners of the online right. Don’t get caught up in that. And that’s a really important message to communicate to our young folks. And you guys, know, like Buckley today is perceived as the establishment wing of the conservative movement. Fine, so be it. But in his heyday, he most certainly was not. He was the agitator. He was kind of the carnival guy bringing in a little bit of a hoopla to excite young folks and create pathways for them to enter into the American right.

Charlie and some people like that…

Rafael Mangual: He brought me into the American right.

Jesse Arm: Yeah, absolutely. But also when the time push came to shove, right? Buckley had his moment with the John Burke Society and said, no, we’re going to do some gatekeeping. We don’t have no enemies to our right. We reject racism. We reject intolerance. We reject abject nativism. So yeah, I mean, there are going to be people who have to play that role today, given the new political realities and the new political circumstances. And, you know, we have some role in that debate as well.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s interesting, know, Buckley kind of rose to fame by making an argument that you just made now, Jesse, which is that, you know, the universities were sort of bastions of left-wing indoctrination at the time, right? I mean, God and Man at Yale was published in what, 1955, where he was making a lot of these same arguments. So, you know, that raises a question too, is like, know, do we actually, is Jesse right, John and Neetu? I mean, is it true that the future of the right is not going to be anywhere near these university campuses? I mean, we haven’t been able to make a dent since Buckley warned us in 1955. Why do we expect to make a dent at any point in the near future?

John Ketcham: Look at the history of ideas on the right after the mid-fifties. We had the Chicago school that made enormous impact on world history in the lead up to the collapse of Soviet Union and then following the collapse. The world globalized. I mean, there was a period of time where there was a broad appetite for free market capitalism. Look also to what the Federalist Society was able to do in anchoring generations of law students and legal scholars in one single idea. In originalism. That changed the nation’s trajectory. It changed the entire national judiciary. So I do think that ideas are going to continue to matter. What is different this time is that social media is going to play an outsized role in being the arbiter of success. So any kind of elite institution like the new Harvard center is going to have to dialogue with the social media platforms. For better or worse, that’s the common currency today.

Neetu Arnold: But just because the majority of a political party doesn’t necessarily attend college or doesn’t benefit directly from higher education doesn’t mean that the policies and the decisions that occur at our universities don’t matter because oftentimes these are the places where your future doctors, your journalists, your teachers are being educated. And I think as we’ve seen over the past couple of years, what happens at the universities doesn’t just stay at the universities, it trickles down to the rest of society. And so that’s why I think you should still care about what’s happening in higher education and trying to make it better.

Rafael Mangual: So let’s play little game of gatekeeping for ourselves as we sort of wind down our time together. Thinking about this, you know, conservative, classical, liberal, whatever you want to call it, at Harvard University, right? If you were the president of Harvard today and were tasked with naming a person to head that project up, who are you naming? John, we’ll start with you. And tell us why. Tell us why.

John Ketcham: This is easy. Reihan Salam. Reihan Salam is the obvious choice here because he can bring together several strands of conservatism. He is so well versed across the intellectual currents in conservatism. He’s also an urbanite, so I think he can really speak to any number of experiences on the modern right. I would just fear that the Manhattan Institute would suffer a loss.

Rafael Mangual: You stole my answer, but Jesse, what about you?

Jesse Arm: I was going to say the same thing, honestly. OK, Reihan is off the board. All right, I’ll say my second favorite Harvard alum, John Ketcham.

John Ketcham: Okay, I don’t know if I’m adequately prepared or qualified for the onslaught that would follow, but Yuval Levin I think would also be a good pick.

Rafael Mangual: That’s a good one. All right, Neetu, what about you?

Neetu Arnold: I think one person that comes to mind for me is Samuel Abrams, a political science professor at Sarah Lawrence College. You know, he’s written quite a bit about benefiting from the Hoover Institution at Stanford and how it provided a great opportunity for him as a student. I think when you’re looking at someone who’s leading one of these centers, I think someone like Sam could really bridge the divide between faculty and students, know, building that mentorship role.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s right. I was also going to say our fearless leader, Reihan Salam, who is a Harvard alum and probably one of the smartest people I know who has proven out his ability to really speak to a wide range of people. I think from a mentorship aspect that you brought up, Neetu, he’d be fantastic in that kind of role. But I’m selfish and want him to stay at the Manhattan Institute, so we’re going to pull him off that particular chessboard.

If I had to go with someone else, it’s kind of hard to really think about it. I think about… I start to feel almost old in this movement because all of the people that I’ve looked up to and admired are people who are aging and not really in the game. I mean, John, you’d know this name, but Richard Epstein is a guy who heads up a similar center at NYU. Thomas Sowell, these are people that are—Shelby Steele—they’e kind of, you know, in different part of their career now. And so, yeah, I mean, I’m not quite sure who it would be outside of that. But no, I do think that we do need, you know, new blood.

Jesse Arm: They’re not all old. I mean, it is worth flagging as well that Will Inbowden, who was leading the Alexander Hamilton Center at the University of Florida and was recently announced as likely to be the next provost at the University of Texas in Austin, is an outstanding scholar and a builder within the education reform movement. And he’s not someone who’s just, you know, narrowly a right-winger conservative who’s seeking to balance the scales. He’s somebody who’s actually got a real plan for how to reform higher education from the inside, and he would, you know, he’s in an incredible, he’s gone from incredible position to incredible position in just a short number of years here. But sure if Harvard were building on this front too, but honestly Ralph the way you posed the question if I were the president of Harvard University making this decision, I would immediately replace myself with Will Inbowden as president of Harvard and then you know on the way out the door recommend Reihan for the conservative center, not the conservative center, sorry, the classically liberal one.

Rafael Mangual: You said it. All right.

John Ketcham: I’ll tell you how old I am, Ralph. I got into the conservative movement through Edmund Burke on this Bastille Day.

Rafael Mangual: Wow, you are the oldest soul I know, I think, actually in this room, and John, for me it was Buckley and Thomas Sowell were kind of the two big conservative thinkers that pulled me in, and the rest, as they say, is history. On that note, yeah, no, he’s great. You can’t get better than him.

Jesse Arm: For me, it was the great scholar Sean Hannity on every night at 9 o’clock. So that was what did the trick over here, nothing fancy.

Rafael Mangual: It’s funny, well once I realized I was kind of on the right, I started watching a lot of Fox News and I went for about five years without ever missing the Talking Points Memo with Bill O’Reilly, which I thought was one of the best monologues on TV every day. And he’s... Yeah.

Jesse Arm: Fox News is awesome. Fox News is awesome. Still is. I don’t watch it that often because I’m, you know, don’t have cable because I’m like not, you know, I’m just not old enough to do that. But whenever it’s on, it’s just like great background soundtrack. Absolutely love it. You know, pump up that, that, that, you know, that red blood IV. Red meat, red meat IV.

Rafael Mangual: Real America, real America TV. That’s right. That’s right.

All right. Well on that note, that is all the time we have. Thank you guys so much for a fantastic conversation. As always, thanks to our producer Isabella Redjai. For those of you out here listening, please do like, comment, subscribe, share. Let us know what you think. Pose a question. Shoot us an email. We love interacting with you guys. We hope you’re enjoying the show so far. Let us know what you think. Until next time.

You’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast. We’ll see you soon.

Photo: Leonid Andronov / iStock / Getty Images Plus