April 15, 2024 • 35 mins
In this episode, Ilya Shapiro discusses his experience resigning from Georgetown University and the impact it had on his career. He reflects on the challenges of cancel culture and the divisions in society. Shapiro also shares his thoughts on living in an ideological majority and the online segregation of communities. He emphasizes the importance of personal happiness and finding contentment in life. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday & Thursday. Contact Karol at karolmarkowiczshow@gmail.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
Mondays are the worst days for airing podcasts. I only
found this out after I chose Mondays and Thursdays as
the days my podcast would be on. But I've kept
it on Mondays because this is a show about life
and about making your life better. And I see every
(00:27):
Monday as a mini New Year's Day where you can
start over, try harder, be better. I started this year
pledging to read more fiction because it keeps me from
doom scrolling as much, and it helps me sleep better
and all of it, really and I did it for
like six weeks, really into like the middle of February.
I read a lot of fiction, and then work got busy.
(00:50):
Life got busy, and I kept carrying my fiction book
around on flights to the beach to bed at night,
but not actually read. So here I am on Monday,
in the middle of April, starting my New Year's resolution again.
I'm going to pledge to read a fiction book a
month through the end of the year. That's not some
(01:11):
wild goal. I should be able to meet it. I mean,
I keep pledging to go to the gym, but that
hasn't happened yet, So baby steps. People. If you have
fiction book suggestions, send them my way. And if you're
interested in restarting the new year's resolution that you maybe
fell off from doing, I'd love to hear about it
at Carol Maarkowitz Show at gmail dot com or hit
(01:31):
me up on Twitter x, whatever you want to call it.
The best tip on how to improve your life is
to take the steps you already know will improve your
life and actually do them. So let's do this coming
up next and interview with Ilia Shapiro. Join us after
the break.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Ilia Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Director of
Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. He was previously executive
director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
His upcoming book, out September tenth, is called Lawless, The
(02:10):
Miseducation of America's Elites, and is available for pre order now.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Hi, Alia, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
It'd be with you. But I thought you said in
the show notes that you sent me that that we
were going to be doing this in Russian.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Y Paruski yam.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
And actually and actually, now that you're in Florida, babolon
and espanols.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
No, no, no, let's not get crazy.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I took four years of high school Spanish, and it
turns out I don't know anything like I thought i'd.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Be ready for a Florida experience.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I mean, it's not like we're, you know, in a
full on Spanish speaking country and no I don't know anything.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
It turns out.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
Well, you know, you know, we can get into this.
You and I of course recently went to Israel, where
the rule is you need to know two of three
of Hebrew, English and Russian, and so we've got that
covered well. Similarly, I think I think in Florida are
certain parts I think you need two of three of English,
Spanish and Russian.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
So that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
I did actually amazing in Israel, like my I took.
So I went to Hebrew school from first grade through
eighth grade, and it turns out that I retained which
really says a lot about you know, the earlier you
learn a language, the better. Because I could totally hang
in Israel, and I kept giving credit to my Israeli husband.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I'd be like, oh, you know, yeah, I'm married to Israeli.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
He didn't teach me anything, like it's not from him,
it's from my early schooling.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Well, you know, yeah, I grew up speaking Russia at
home but didn't have any Hebrews. Why I still don't
speak I only speak easy languages, like I'm not about
to pick up Arabic or Chinese. But I do all
the romance once because they're all variations on a theme.
Because I went to a high school that had first
couple years a lot and then you know, building up
the French and Spanish and spending time there. Right, But
I'm going to Hungary in a couple of weeks. But
(03:58):
you know that's not related to anything like a regular
all American as if I was, you know, only spoke
one language. It's a little when I.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Was in So on the way to Israel, I stopped
in Warsaw for the day, So Poland, and my mom
was like, do not speak Russian there? They do not
like Russians. I'm like, yes, I heard, I heard.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
But although I heard a.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Lot of people speaking Russian and Ukrainian that was like
really common in the short.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
What was amusing about that little stop off for you
was of course, you know, your last name is Polish
and your first name is a Polish man's name. So
do you have any any just just giggles from the
hotel check in or what else happened?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
They were like, your Carol Mark Woods. I guess I
am Carol Mark Woods. Yeah it was, you know, my
parents accidentally gave me a Polish man's name, which was
the name, of course, of John Paul, Pope John Paul
his real name. He messed up all my Google results.
Used to be you could google just my first name
and get me. But then after he passed, you know,
(04:54):
he became number one Carol.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Wait, so you're saying that you were more famous. You
were more famous Carol for the Pope died.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
I just think a lot of people didn't call him
Carol on the internet, you know, and then when he died,
everybody was like they used his you know, given name
in the obituaries whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It like fully messed me up. And there's also now no.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
No, what I'm getting from this is Carol thinks she's
more famous than the Pope. Okay, got it. I'm running
with it.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Briefly, Briefly I was more famous than the Pope. And
now there's a a Latin American singer also named Carol
with a K, and she totally messes up my results.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
But you know, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Ilia?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
Right? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Isn't there another Ilia? There is? Ilia?
Speaker 4 (05:36):
I mean there are many alias as you know, Ilia
for boys in our world.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Isn't there another Ilia in our world?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Ilia?
Speaker 4 (05:44):
There's another law professor Ilia Sliman. Yes, right, yeah, he's
the smart one. I'm the funny one. That's the division
of labor. Also, we're nothing like the handsome one.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
The hand.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Well, we can also do, you know, short and tall
and all this, but the the the you totally broke
my train of thought. It left the station and got derailed.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
H lats civilias you know.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Players, but the anyway, all right, let's go back.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
We'll come back to your hilarious jokes since.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
You're funnier hilarious. Yes, yes, well, Actually, how I make
my living is that I occupy that thin sliver and
the then diagress. There's a lot of people who know
more about constitutional law than I do, a hell of
a lot of people who are funnier than I am.
But I occupy that thin sliver where those overlap. It's
a living Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
I mean that's the way to go about it.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I think, you know, you represent that that tiny little
gaza strip.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Okay, you can say that. I couldn't possibly comment.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Anything goes on on the Carol Markowitz Show.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
So you and I were in Israel. It was a
great time, a.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Sad time, a difficult time. It was a lot of
things intense, right, But I think that that's what Israel is, right.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It's it's like they have a lot going on, good
and bad all the time.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Like I hadn't been since two thousand and seven, so
it's you know, different country, even even without October seventh.
I wouldn't say that it's always intense. I mean these
are you know, real people, living real lives, having you know,
normal ups and downs, and apparently happier than almost anybody
in the world. Well that makes sense, yeah, and with
a higher birth rate than anybody else in the industrialized world.
(07:29):
So they're doing something right. And even though they're you know,
smaller than New Jersey and with enemies armed to the
teeth around everywhere. It's it's an internal divisions that sometimes
make the divisions with its external enemies seem like you know,
powderpuff football. So there's just a society of contrast such
(07:49):
richness in such a small place. I you know, I
enjoyed it tremendously and I'm still processing it still, haven't.
You know. I posted on my sub stack Shapiro's gavel
while I was there, kind of various kinds of impressions.
I still haven't written my piece, you know, what I
learned about, what I learned from in my trip to
Israel that I'm going to write for the City Journal.
(08:10):
Just just remarkable stuff, but whether geopolitically or sociologically or
or anything. And just the way that we were able
to be based in a nice hotel in Tel Aviv
and go to the farthest north, you know, ten feet
from the Lebanese border, and down south you know, less
than half a mile or so from Gaza and the
massacre sites and all that, and then still, you know,
(08:30):
return home for happy hour for the hotel. Just right,
just amazing.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I feel like that's kind of always been my feeling
on Israel.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It's so it's got just so much going on, and
it is a real place.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
It's super a real place, which I think gets lost
in all the news of it because you see it
as this, you know, historic country, and when you walk
around Jerusalem, you do feel like you're like in a
story book or you're, you know, maybe possibly the most
famous story book of all time, the Bible. I think
that you feel that, you know, sense of history there.
(09:06):
But then you're in Tel Aviv and you're at like
the hottest restaurant and you're eating this unbelievable innovative food.
It was just it's a country of contradictions. I think
that that gets used a lot. And I really felt
that this time more than on previous visits because we
got to see so many different facets of it. But
(09:26):
you know, like I definitely I've been thinking about it
so much.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
When I landed.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
I don't know if the guy said this to you,
but like when I landed last time I was there
was twenty eleven, and the guy, the border you know,
agent in Israel is like, why has it been so long?
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Like why haven't you been back?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
And I, you know, I started telling him like, no,
I had a wedding. We were supposed to come in
twenty twenty, we were supposed to come last year.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
It didn't work at whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
He doesn't really care but the sense of like, why
have you been away so long?
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Was I had an interesting exchange with the with the
customs agent as well. She said, you know what you
what are you here for? And I said, well, it's
like a media influencer's tour. And she kind of smiled
and nodded because a lot of people are going through
and that sort of thing. And she said, oh, so
where are you going And I said, well, everywhere, you know,
to the north, to the south Jerusalem, and she's like, oh, well,
(10:18):
we're up north and I'm like, I'm not sure. Do
you want to see my tenerary And she's like, no, no, no,
I just want you to be safe because there's fingers
out there. And remember that was the day that we
had to put on helmets and flat jackets and there
was eight missiles that morning and there was touch and
go whether we could make it there. So she was,
you know, just just caring about the media influencers safety. Nice.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, yeah, there's so much of that.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I just feel like it's very homey and it's a
really great country. I think, you know, whether you're Jewish
or not, I think visiting Israel is really an amazing trip.
And I highly recommend people listening make that trip. You know,
it seems like it's so dangerous, but it's really not.
When you're there, you feel complete safety, complete security.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
And it's anywhere you go, whatever kind of whatever kind
of tour group you you go with. Uh, you know,
the the army briefs them and they're not going to
take you to places, you know, like we had to
change our plans in Jerusalem because of the biggest red
alert in decades over the first Friday at Ramadan since
since uh, since October. So so I mean it's it's uh,
you're probably in more danger, you know, getting in a
(11:20):
car and driving around d C. Than the Israel.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
So, you know, you've had an exciting couple of years.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
You were very Chinese curse may you live in interesting times.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
You have lived in interesting times. You were very famously canceled.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
They tried to cancel me. You cancel me, I cancel you.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, they can't cancel ilia. Okay, they tried to cancel you.
But you know, one of the themes on this show
is like that some of your hardest times can obviously
lead to some of your best times.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
And you do seem like you won.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
You're thriving and you're doing amazing. But what was it
like in the moment, like did you feel did you
feel like you would recover?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Did you feel like you'd come back stronger than ever?
Or were there dark times?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Well?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Do you want to tell us about it a little bit,
like just you know, just in passing.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
It doesn't have to be the.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah, yeah, no. I sketched this out on my on
my substack Shapiro's gabble, come subscribe free or paid or whatever.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Uh, and the man pay the man do it right,
that's right, And in more detail in my book that
that you graciously plugged at the at the outset Lawless.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
It's coming out in September. So I had this when
when Justice Bryer retired. I was doing media all day
because that's what I do, that's my area of expertise.
I had written a book about Supreme Court politics and traditional nominations. Uh,
and I was getting more and more upset about President
Biden keeping to his campaign pledge to appoint a black woman,
(12:49):
that is, to restrict his candidates by race and sex.
And so after you know, doing all this stuff all day,
and I was in Austin, Texas at a friend's Celebritory dinner.
Came back to my hotel and you know, not a
best practice. Doom scrolling late at night in your hotel room,
getting more and more upset on Twitter, and I fired
(13:10):
off a hot take saying that you know, if I
were a Democratic president, I would pick U. And I
chose the chief Judge of the d C Circuit, very
prestigious court, very smart man, Sreese Ri Navas and great,
great judge was a contender for previous vacancies. But this time,
because of the hierarchy of intersectionality, he's excluded, even though
he's an Indian American and an immigrant checks off lots
(13:32):
of boxes, but not these ones.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So I said, had promised that it would be a
black woman.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
That's right, that's right, Yeah, that's right. And I said, so,
you know, he's just qualified, so we will we will
end up with a lesser black woman. It's really those
three works. You know, I met less qualified. You know,
by by basic operation of logic, I'm saying this person
is the best. Everyone else in the entire universe is
worse or less or less qualified.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Whatever.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Anyway, So I fired that off, went to sleep, woke
up the next morning, checked my Twitter feed and all
I had broken loose and people were trying to get
me fired. Mind you, because I was moving to Georgetown.
I had been at CATO for nearly fifteen years. The
CATO is leading libertarian thing tank. If I had still
just been at CATO, you know, you know, people to
(14:15):
know more right wing nonsense whatever, blah blah. But because
I was trying to intrude on a progressive bastion Georgetown
Law School, people trying to get me canceled and fired
and all the rest of it. And so began my
four days of hell. It was really the most unpleasant
period of my life, other than when my mom died
when I was in college. I said, it's the second
(14:36):
most unpleasant period of my life. You know. I couldn't sleep,
the gastro intestinal issues, My wife was upset. My kids
could tell that mommy and Daddy weren't weren't happy. You know.
It felt like everything I had worked towards in my
entire life, the sacrifices that my parents had made, and
coming over from the Soviet Union, everything was crumbling because
(14:58):
of a badly worded tweet. And luckily I have a
big enough network of pr professionals and crisis management and
media personalities that could platform me and my story that
I survived those first four days, at which point the Dean,
(15:19):
who is you know, no profile encouraged throughout this whole thing,
decided that I would indeed be on board it because
it was four days later that I was supposed to
start with the new jobs as a director of the
Center for the Constitution, which is an important center at
George Town, as we've learned, because the rest of the
law school is the Center against the Constitution. So I
was onboarded, but immediately suspended, placed on administrative leave with pay.
(15:43):
The reason why they kept paying me was so I
would have less of a lawsuit later on. And so
began after the four days of hell, what I referred
to us four months of purgatory. Initially I was taking
it seriously. I was prepping with my lawyer, you know,
the interview with the DEI on and HR and all
this stuff. But then it became clear that it was
just such a farce, and as time went on, I
(16:07):
went back to commenting on the court and commenting on
judicial politics and all the rest of it. And it
took them more than four months to figure out whether
my tweet violated policies on harassment and discrimination, and ultimately,
a junior associate at the high paid law firm Wilmer
Hale that they hired to advise them on this, how
many millions of dollars they expended on this is really funny,
(16:33):
discovered that I was not yet an employee when I tweeted,
and so it wasn't covered by these policies, And so
I celebrated that technical victory. But then I read the
longer report from the DEI office, which Georgetown is called
the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action Idea,
and it became clear that it would be untenable for
(16:54):
me to stay, not just me, but anybody who they wrote,
anybody who says or write something that offends someone what
would effectively be creating a hostile educational environment. So I
could do the job that I was hired to do,
and as one does, I probably did my best lawyering
of my life and putting together this resignation letter and
(17:17):
then published it in the Wall Street Journal opinion page,
and then the next day announced as one does, and
asked my move to the Manhattan Institute on Nelson Show
on Fox. So that was, yes, an interesting period in
my life.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Did you feel fully victorious like doing that? I must
have felt so good.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You know, they went through four months, they tried to
kill you, they didn't and and it must have felt
amazing to say, now I don't want to be with
you now.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
I'm not exactly this is what I'm saying. I mean,
I feel a little sheepish in front of the rest
of Georgetown's faculty and staff because they started implementing extra
diversity trainings because of me, so they have to do it.
I'll deal with all this crap. But no, I felt
I felt free for the first time. Again. Nothing was
(18:15):
as bad as those first four days, but I just
felt free and liberated, and especially since I had the
job offer in hand. The Riihan Salaam, the president of
m I, and Alana Golan, who was the executive VP,
over the course of a weekend put together an offer
for me, which was very comforting because because even though
(18:36):
theoretically I knew I would have job opportunities and whatnot,
it was nice when I was resigning to actually have
the next thing in place, absolutely family safety and all
the rest of it. But yeah, for the first time
in over four months, I was in control of the
media cycle, and Georgetown could not respond because they're a
big institution. They can't move that nimbly, and they didn't
(18:58):
have a they didn't have a coordinated mess and so
I was doing all of these you know, radio and
TV and whatever for two weeks right at the end
of the Supreme Court term, when I was also commenting
on the big explosive cases in twenty twenty two, and
then I went on a vacation with my family. So
it was felt liberating. In fact, that first day, the
day I resigned, that evening, I went to a reception
(19:21):
at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Museum in DC,
which everyone should check out when you come to these
great museum, and they had these name tags made up,
and of course, mindset Georgetown is when I'd registered, so
I crossed that out and I wrote in Freeman.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Amazing, it was great.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 4 (19:44):
It depends how you define those terms. I mean, people
ask whether having gone through all of that and two
years later, you know, having a book deal, being elevated
in type speeches, I'm invited to give or this media influencers,
trip to Israel and opportunities that I wouldn't necessarily I
had before, even if I was respected in my field.
Was it all worth it? And I'll say this, I'm
(20:06):
definitely better off in terms of you know, career profession brand.
You know, does that end justify the means that those
those four days of hell? I'm not sure how to
answer that. That's kind of a question for a I'm
not a psychologist, you know, I can tell a man
from a woman without being a biologist. But to answer
(20:26):
that question, I think I need I don't know, but
I definitely am career wise, you know, better off. And
I'm sort of bulletproof with respect to cancel culture. It's like,
what you're gonna try to cancel me again? Like, I
don't care. I'm at age forty six. I've achieved the
d GAF part of my of my life. So that's amazing.
That's great.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, So does the whole cancelation thing, or the attempted
cancelation does it make you I don't know, does it
make you worry about societal you know, pressures.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Not everybody can be Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Not everyone could stand something like that. Would you say
that that's one of our largest challenges, you know, as
a culture.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
You know, I've gotten awards for for that experience. And
it's funny. All I did was like nothing like not
for four months and then I quit, and that's it.
It's kind of a low bar. It's a low bar
for showing courage these days. I guess, uh, you know,
not like the stuff going on in Israel, as I'm
lifting up the dog tag for the for the hostages
(21:28):
that we got.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
What would you say is our largest cultural issue our society?
Speaker 4 (21:34):
It's related, It's related to that. It's kind of the
divisions that we have in our country despite the wealth
and technological advancement and the fact that we are living
more comfortably than you know, any society in history. I mean,
(21:54):
regardless of what percentile of socioeconomic advancement in this country
you are, it's better than any time in any society
in history. Nevertheless, we're tremendously divided. And I don't just
mean kind of what shows up at the polls, because
I don't think Americans are as polarized in that way.
As Congress is because of Jaran mandering, because the dynamics
(22:16):
of the parties and campaign finance and other things. But
we are physically separated. You know, there are many fewer
competitive jurisdictions in the country anymore. You know, Ronald Reagan
had a landslide in nineteen eighty nineteen, well, certainly eighty four,
convincing when in nineteen eighty and there were more landslide
(22:41):
counties in twenty twenty. In just that, it's it's people
are less likely to have neighbors that are that are
different from them in.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Various Is that I don't know.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
I almost like I'll look as somebody, as somebody who's
living for the very first time in a place where
I'm the majority.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
It's very I like it.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
That's liberating as well, it's not. But that's that's only part.
It's not just you know how you vote. It's it's
different than you and in all sorts. You know, you're
reading what you read, what coffee you buy, whether you
buy coffee, you know beer, Why all these different kinds
of cultural economic signifiers are more sordid than they've been.
(23:28):
But then you get the kind of the online part,
because we all live our lives so much online these days.
I remember when I was in grad school at the
London School of Economics. It took a year between college
and law school to kind of broaden my horizons and
deepen my knowledge about various things. And we read a
book when we're studying nationalism, read a book by Benedict
(23:49):
Anderson called Imagined Communities, his definition of nationalism before this
kind of current populist nationalist moment, you know, twenty five
years ago. You find a nation by who you imagine
that you're sort of a part of. Well, in the
digital world, you could be part of, you know, with
lots of people and never encounter people outside of your
(24:10):
bubble of whatever kind that might be. It doesn't have
to be politics. And so there's this long tail of
people getting sorted in various ways, and it's good in
terms of individualism, but it's not good in terms of
a sense of community or nation or or cohesion. And
(24:31):
so we we face all of that again. I'm, you know,
in most of the time on most things, like Brett
Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings, I live on the sunrise
side of the mountain beer. You know, I'm gonna I'm
gonna go a little personal on you, Carol. I am
(24:53):
a gout patient and we can talk about this medieval
disease because of Because of that, I can't drink beer anymore,
the contraindicated things. So I've got even you know, as
as you get up in age, anyway, you switch more
to wine or cocktails or whatever. But you know, I
hardly ever drink drink beer anymore. So I do. I
do like beer, but I don't drink it anymore. I
do have a koozy with with Justice Kavanaugh's face on
(25:15):
it and says I like beer. But yeah, I don't
recommend getting out. It's it's probably the most painful, non
life threatening thing that you can have, short of childbirth
or something like that. But anyway, uh so Sunrise side
of the Mountain. But for certain things, whether the state
(25:36):
of our political institutions, whether state of higher education, certainly
it's hard to be optimistic. Maybe I may be less
pessimistic than I was two years ago when when I
quit Georgetown, because things kind of after COVID that addled
so many brains were sort of normalizing in a certain way.
But there are some things that give me pause.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
That's very interesting, but because because I have gone sort
of the other way, and I you know, I love
arguing with you. We argued on a stage recently. I
love being like I disagree, Ilia, But you know, have
you ever lived anywhere it's America.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
You're free to be wrong in this that's right.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
That's right. You are free to be wrong. Ilia.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Have you ever lived anywhere where you were the majority
ideologically or that you were at least like leaning towards
somewhere that most people agreed with you. It really is dazzling.
I can't say enough about it. And it's not crazy
to want to live around people that do agree with you.
I get the online part, the segregation. I used to
(26:42):
love commenting on like feminist blogs like back in the day,
of course, until I got banned, until I got banned
from their comments section.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
So someone was wrong on the internet and you had
to fix that.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
I used to love arguing.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I used to love arguing with with with strangers on
the internet. And I never argue anymore. It is a
little depressing because I think, you know, debating, I love
all that, but you don't get that anymore. You get,
you know, drive by insults, and then I block and
then I never hear.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
From them again.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
That's yeah. Yeah. Part of these interesting times that that
I've lived is before my Georgetown experience, I ran for
school board in Falls Church City, Virginia in the fall
of twenty twenty one. False Church is a small town.
It's even called it a little city, fifteen thousand residents,
ten thousand voters, And during COVID people were really upset,
(27:36):
like they were with school boards across the country, about
COVID policy, about when the schools were closed. Here despite
a popular survey to the contrary, the school board voting
unanimously to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High.
So there's a lot of discontent and I thought, well,
(27:57):
you know who's going to step up and fix the
and not many people were, So I said, well, I
guess I have to run and broke fundraising records again,
launched my local school board campaign with a Wall Street
journal op ed as one does, and started being attacked
by the local weekly paper, who was run by a
Lindon Laruche acolyte. That's kind of an amusing local politics here.
(28:21):
Falls Church is the epitome of limousine liberal. It went
for Biden by more than Alexandria, Virginia by more than Charlottesville.
I mean just I think it was like eighty one
or eighty two percent. And yet this is the richest
town in America, not because we have billionaires, but we
don't have poor people here. It's all lawyers and lobbyists
(28:42):
and other professionals. So anyway, an interesting political dynamic. So
I had that experience, which that sucks.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
That doesn't suck, it.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
Does it does. Although, because it's so local and small,
the school board turned over, so there were four seats open.
None of the incumbents ran for reelection, which tells you something,
and seven of us ran for these four seats. The
reformers we did not win, but but the four that
(29:13):
went on were definitely better than the four that left.
And the school board is now in control. Even when
I disagree with their decisions. They're not just laying down
for the superintendent, which was the case before. He hates me,
by the way, and he knows that, you know, I
can summon you know, flying monkeys to attack him and
whenever he does something silly. But but Christain and I,
(29:36):
my wife and I we now exercise soft power behind
the scenes. I played tennis with the chairman of the
school board and checks with some of the other people.
Just they care about what the you know, they know
that there's a lot of people that just don't have
time to pay attention to it. But they know that,
you know, they want to be you know, rational and
not have been made into national news stories like our
(29:57):
neighbors in Arlington and Fairfax, right really do for all sorts.
We don't have that kind of craziness here. It's much
more small and nimble, like we can meet with our
kids principle whenever we want kind of thing. I mean,
it's it's very you know, we still it's still high quality.
It's still now you know, our kids are small so
far second grade in kindergarten. We'll see how it goes
as things go on. But and then and then we
(30:18):
have baby twins as well. So that's the other thing
that happened during this whole crazy period, we had our
cancelation babies. So anyway, it has been interesting times. Uh
and uh, and that's that's brought me here to this,
which reminds me of one of my favorite songs. I
don't know, if you're into country music, Carol.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
But country music right now? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Good? Well? Uh you know uh the artist who used
to be Hoody of Hoody and the Blowfish, Darius Rucker
is a big country star and he wrote this song
called this about you know. It's it's kind of it
sets the scene. It's raining outside. He's sitting on the
couch with his wife watching a movie or something, his
baby girl sleeping in the next room, and he he
(30:59):
thinks he gets kind of nostalgic or sentimental about all
the doors that closed in his life, the colleges that
rejected him, the girls that dumped him, all these wrong
decisions that he made, but that ultimately brought him here
to this, which was contentment. And so you know, I've
had this tumultuous period. But all of a sudden, you know,
this only child Soviet emigray uh is here. It's a
(31:24):
large family with this. You know, we joke that we're
landed gentry. We have this. It's not a McMansion. Our
neighbors have bigger house than we do. But it's like
this old house on a hill with the circular driveway
and we have a pool. And my in laws built
their house on our properties. Who have this multi generational compound.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Amazing.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
It is fit. The only thing wrong with it is
that it's not in Florida. That you know, it's great
if we.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Could figure out a way to move it to Florida.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
I think the transaction, really, the transactions costs are are
just too high. We have such a great setup. We
have an O pair now, we built a little we
knocked out in our garage and and and put up
a space for for someone to uh to live and
kind of a guest bedroom situation with a gym that
I got. So yeah, you should, you should.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
We so end here with your best tip for my
listeners on how they can improve their lives and.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Be you know, more like Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
It's all what I've learned. First of all, it depends
who's asking. If it's someone you know just graduating college
or a you know, a student, it's different. And the advice,
the wrong advice is to say, oh, just follow your
passion or something. Kids these days, kids any days, don't
really know what their passion is. Right. It's sort of
you know, or whether you're someone talking to someone mid career.
(32:44):
And I wouldn't fathom to give someone advice who's older
than me. But look, it's it's what I've learned in reading,
especially psychologists like Jonathan Height is very popular these days.
Everyone should go read what he's writing. But what agency
is so important? That is feeling like you're in control
of your life, all different aspects of your life. People
are what makes people unhappy. You know, once you kind
(33:06):
of uh satisfy the basic needs, you know, you're not
in danger of being homeless or starving or things like this.
You have you know, if your kid gets sick, you
can take them to the doctor, these basic things. After that,
it's just it's not you know, you work too much
and therefore you're unhappy or the people are unhappy when
(33:31):
they feel like they aren't in control of what they're doing.
And so my only advice is figure out a way
to both personally and professionally feel like you're the master
of your fate. You run the show that you're right.
And that doesn't necessarily mean go start your own business.
I'm not entrepreneurial in that sense. I am entrepreneurially, I
(33:55):
feel in terms of like ideas and figuring out identifying opportunities,
and you know, I thought I would, you know, going
to Georgetown I would be teaching this and I would
be writing about originalism and doing this right and God
plans and man plans and God laughs. So you just
identify opportunities and try to try to do that. But
(34:16):
I you know, I'm not going to sit here and
pretend that you ask me, you know, whether I've made it.
And I don't feel like I've figured it out necessarily,
but I'm I'm doing my best. My hardest job is
as a dad. I just took my older boys on
spring break to Arizona and California. We had a fun
and interesting time. Of course, now I feel like I
need a real vacation. But you know, just just again,
(34:41):
get to a place where you know, whether you're working
in a giant corporation, a small business for yourself or
or whatever it is, you know, starting a business with
your husband or wife or whatever it is, that's what
will make you, give you a sense of accomplishment and
mission and and all that sort of Thank.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
You so much for coming on. He is, Ilia Shapiro.
His book is Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites by
It now pre order it wherever books are sold. Thank
you so much, Ilia, Carrol watching Watchune Priatna.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcoit Show.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
Mondays are the worst days for airing podcasts. I only
found this out after I chose Mondays and Thursdays as
the days my podcast would be on. But I've kept
it on Mondays because this is a show about life
and about making your life better. And I see every
(00:27):
Monday as a mini New Year's Day where you can
start over, try harder, be better. I started this year
pledging to read more fiction because it keeps me from
doom scrolling as much, and it helps me sleep better
and all of it, really and I did it for
like six weeks, really into like the middle of February.
I read a lot of fiction, and then work got busy.
(00:50):
Life got busy, and I kept carrying my fiction book
around on flights to the beach to bed at night,
but not actually read. So here I am on Monday,
in the middle of April, starting my New Year's resolution again.
I'm going to pledge to read a fiction book a
month through the end of the year. That's not some
(01:11):
wild goal. I should be able to meet it. I mean,
I keep pledging to go to the gym, but that
hasn't happened yet, So baby steps. People. If you have
fiction book suggestions, send them my way. And if you're
interested in restarting the new year's resolution that you maybe
fell off from doing, I'd love to hear about it
at Carol Maarkowitz Show at gmail dot com or hit
(01:31):
me up on Twitter x, whatever you want to call it.
The best tip on how to improve your life is
to take the steps you already know will improve your
life and actually do them. So let's do this coming
up next and interview with Ilia Shapiro. Join us after
the break.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio. My
guest today is Ilia Shapiro, Senior Fellow and Director of
Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. He was previously executive
director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
His upcoming book, out September tenth, is called Lawless, The
(02:10):
Miseducation of America's Elites, and is available for pre order now.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Hi, Alia, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
It'd be with you. But I thought you said in
the show notes that you sent me that that we
were going to be doing this in Russian.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Y Paruski yam.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
And actually and actually, now that you're in Florida, babolon
and espanols.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
No, no, no, let's not get crazy.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I took four years of high school Spanish, and it
turns out I don't know anything like I thought i'd.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Be ready for a Florida experience.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I mean, it's not like we're, you know, in a
full on Spanish speaking country and no I don't know anything.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
It turns out.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
Well, you know, you know, we can get into this.
You and I of course recently went to Israel, where
the rule is you need to know two of three
of Hebrew, English and Russian, and so we've got that
covered well. Similarly, I think I think in Florida are
certain parts I think you need two of three of English,
Spanish and Russian.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
So that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
I did actually amazing in Israel, like my I took.
So I went to Hebrew school from first grade through
eighth grade, and it turns out that I retained which
really says a lot about you know, the earlier you
learn a language, the better. Because I could totally hang
in Israel, and I kept giving credit to my Israeli husband.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
I'd be like, oh, you know, yeah, I'm married to Israeli.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
He didn't teach me anything, like it's not from him,
it's from my early schooling.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
Well, you know, yeah, I grew up speaking Russia at
home but didn't have any Hebrews. Why I still don't
speak I only speak easy languages, like I'm not about
to pick up Arabic or Chinese. But I do all
the romance once because they're all variations on a theme.
Because I went to a high school that had first
couple years a lot and then you know, building up
the French and Spanish and spending time there. Right, But
I'm going to Hungary in a couple of weeks. But
(03:58):
you know that's not related to anything like a regular
all American as if I was, you know, only spoke
one language. It's a little when I.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Was in So on the way to Israel, I stopped
in Warsaw for the day, So Poland, and my mom
was like, do not speak Russian there? They do not
like Russians. I'm like, yes, I heard, I heard.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
But although I heard a.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Lot of people speaking Russian and Ukrainian that was like
really common in the short.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
What was amusing about that little stop off for you
was of course, you know, your last name is Polish
and your first name is a Polish man's name. So
do you have any any just just giggles from the
hotel check in or what else happened?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
They were like, your Carol Mark Woods. I guess I
am Carol Mark Woods. Yeah it was, you know, my
parents accidentally gave me a Polish man's name, which was
the name, of course, of John Paul, Pope John Paul
his real name. He messed up all my Google results.
Used to be you could google just my first name
and get me. But then after he passed, you know,
(04:54):
he became number one Carol.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
Wait, so you're saying that you were more famous. You
were more famous Carol for the Pope died.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
I just think a lot of people didn't call him
Carol on the internet, you know, and then when he died,
everybody was like they used his you know, given name
in the obituaries whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
It like fully messed me up. And there's also now no.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
No, what I'm getting from this is Carol thinks she's
more famous than the Pope. Okay, got it. I'm running
with it.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Briefly, Briefly I was more famous than the Pope. And
now there's a a Latin American singer also named Carol
with a K, and she totally messes up my results.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
But you know, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Ilia?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
Right? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Isn't there another Ilia? There is? Ilia?
Speaker 4 (05:36):
I mean there are many alias as you know, Ilia
for boys in our world.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Isn't there another Ilia in our world?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Ilia?
Speaker 4 (05:44):
There's another law professor Ilia Sliman. Yes, right, yeah, he's
the smart one. I'm the funny one. That's the division
of labor. Also, we're nothing like the handsome one.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
The hand.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Well, we can also do, you know, short and tall
and all this, but the the the you totally broke
my train of thought. It left the station and got derailed.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
H lats civilias you know.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Players, but the anyway, all right, let's go back.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
We'll come back to your hilarious jokes since.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
You're funnier hilarious. Yes, yes, well, Actually, how I make
my living is that I occupy that thin sliver and
the then diagress. There's a lot of people who know
more about constitutional law than I do, a hell of
a lot of people who are funnier than I am.
But I occupy that thin sliver where those overlap. It's
a living Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
I mean that's the way to go about it.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I think, you know, you represent that that tiny little
gaza strip.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Okay, you can say that. I couldn't possibly comment.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Anything goes on on the Carol Markowitz Show.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
So you and I were in Israel. It was a
great time, a.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Sad time, a difficult time. It was a lot of
things intense, right, But I think that that's what Israel is, right.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It's it's like they have a lot going on, good
and bad all the time.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
Like I hadn't been since two thousand and seven, so
it's you know, different country, even even without October seventh.
I wouldn't say that it's always intense. I mean these
are you know, real people, living real lives, having you know,
normal ups and downs, and apparently happier than almost anybody
in the world. Well that makes sense, yeah, and with
a higher birth rate than anybody else in the industrialized world.
(07:29):
So they're doing something right. And even though they're you know,
smaller than New Jersey and with enemies armed to the
teeth around everywhere. It's it's an internal divisions that sometimes
make the divisions with its external enemies seem like you know,
powderpuff football. So there's just a society of contrast such
(07:49):
richness in such a small place. I you know, I
enjoyed it tremendously and I'm still processing it still, haven't.
You know. I posted on my sub stack Shapiro's gavel
while I was there, kind of various kinds of impressions.
I still haven't written my piece, you know, what I
learned about, what I learned from in my trip to
Israel that I'm going to write for the City Journal.
(08:10):
Just just remarkable stuff, but whether geopolitically or sociologically or
or anything. And just the way that we were able
to be based in a nice hotel in Tel Aviv
and go to the farthest north, you know, ten feet
from the Lebanese border, and down south you know, less
than half a mile or so from Gaza and the
massacre sites and all that, and then still, you know,
(08:30):
return home for happy hour for the hotel. Just right,
just amazing.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
I feel like that's kind of always been my feeling
on Israel.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
It's so it's got just so much going on, and
it is a real place.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
It's super a real place, which I think gets lost
in all the news of it because you see it
as this, you know, historic country, and when you walk
around Jerusalem, you do feel like you're like in a
story book or you're, you know, maybe possibly the most
famous story book of all time, the Bible. I think
that you feel that, you know, sense of history there.
(09:06):
But then you're in Tel Aviv and you're at like
the hottest restaurant and you're eating this unbelievable innovative food.
It was just it's a country of contradictions. I think
that that gets used a lot. And I really felt
that this time more than on previous visits because we
got to see so many different facets of it. But
(09:26):
you know, like I definitely I've been thinking about it
so much.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
When I landed.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
I don't know if the guy said this to you,
but like when I landed last time I was there
was twenty eleven, and the guy, the border you know,
agent in Israel is like, why has it been so long?
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Like why haven't you been back?
Speaker 2 (09:45):
And I, you know, I started telling him like, no,
I had a wedding. We were supposed to come in
twenty twenty, we were supposed to come last year.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
It didn't work at whatever.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
He doesn't really care but the sense of like, why
have you been away so long?
Speaker 4 (09:57):
Was I had an interesting exchange with the with the
customs agent as well. She said, you know what you
what are you here for? And I said, well, it's
like a media influencer's tour. And she kind of smiled
and nodded because a lot of people are going through
and that sort of thing. And she said, oh, so
where are you going And I said, well, everywhere, you know,
to the north, to the south Jerusalem, and she's like, oh, well,
(10:18):
we're up north and I'm like, I'm not sure. Do
you want to see my tenerary And she's like, no, no, no,
I just want you to be safe because there's fingers
out there. And remember that was the day that we
had to put on helmets and flat jackets and there
was eight missiles that morning and there was touch and
go whether we could make it there. So she was,
you know, just just caring about the media influencers safety. Nice.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, yeah, there's so much of that.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I just feel like it's very homey and it's a
really great country. I think, you know, whether you're Jewish
or not, I think visiting Israel is really an amazing trip.
And I highly recommend people listening make that trip. You know,
it seems like it's so dangerous, but it's really not.
When you're there, you feel complete safety, complete security.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
And it's anywhere you go, whatever kind of whatever kind
of tour group you you go with. Uh, you know,
the the army briefs them and they're not going to
take you to places, you know, like we had to
change our plans in Jerusalem because of the biggest red
alert in decades over the first Friday at Ramadan since
since uh, since October. So so I mean it's it's uh,
you're probably in more danger, you know, getting in a
(11:20):
car and driving around d C. Than the Israel.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
So, you know, you've had an exciting couple of years.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
You were very Chinese curse may you live in interesting times.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
You have lived in interesting times. You were very famously canceled.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
They tried to cancel me. You cancel me, I cancel you.
Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, they can't cancel ilia. Okay, they tried to cancel you.
But you know, one of the themes on this show
is like that some of your hardest times can obviously
lead to some of your best times.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
And you do seem like you won.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
You're thriving and you're doing amazing. But what was it
like in the moment, like did you feel did you
feel like you would recover?
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Did you feel like you'd come back stronger than ever?
Or were there dark times?
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Well?
Speaker 2 (12:05):
Do you want to tell us about it a little bit,
like just you know, just in passing.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
It doesn't have to be the.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah, yeah, no. I sketched this out on my on
my substack Shapiro's gabble, come subscribe free or paid or whatever.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Uh, and the man pay the man do it right,
that's right, And in more detail in my book that
that you graciously plugged at the at the outset Lawless.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
It's coming out in September. So I had this when
when Justice Bryer retired. I was doing media all day
because that's what I do, that's my area of expertise.
I had written a book about Supreme Court politics and traditional nominations. Uh,
and I was getting more and more upset about President
Biden keeping to his campaign pledge to appoint a black woman,
(12:49):
that is, to restrict his candidates by race and sex.
And so after you know, doing all this stuff all day,
and I was in Austin, Texas at a friend's Celebritory dinner.
Came back to my hotel and you know, not a
best practice. Doom scrolling late at night in your hotel room,
getting more and more upset on Twitter, and I fired
(13:10):
off a hot take saying that you know, if I
were a Democratic president, I would pick U. And I
chose the chief Judge of the d C Circuit, very
prestigious court, very smart man, Sreese Ri Navas and great,
great judge was a contender for previous vacancies. But this time,
because of the hierarchy of intersectionality, he's excluded, even though
he's an Indian American and an immigrant checks off lots
(13:32):
of boxes, but not these ones.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So I said, had promised that it would be a
black woman.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
That's right, that's right, Yeah, that's right. And I said, so,
you know, he's just qualified, so we will we will
end up with a lesser black woman. It's really those
three works. You know, I met less qualified. You know,
by by basic operation of logic, I'm saying this person
is the best. Everyone else in the entire universe is
worse or less or less qualified.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Whatever.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Anyway, So I fired that off, went to sleep, woke
up the next morning, checked my Twitter feed and all
I had broken loose and people were trying to get
me fired. Mind you, because I was moving to Georgetown.
I had been at CATO for nearly fifteen years. The
CATO is leading libertarian thing tank. If I had still
just been at CATO, you know, you know, people to
(14:15):
know more right wing nonsense whatever, blah blah. But because
I was trying to intrude on a progressive bastion Georgetown
Law School, people trying to get me canceled and fired
and all the rest of it. And so began my
four days of hell. It was really the most unpleasant
period of my life, other than when my mom died
when I was in college. I said, it's the second
(14:36):
most unpleasant period of my life. You know. I couldn't sleep,
the gastro intestinal issues, My wife was upset. My kids
could tell that mommy and Daddy weren't weren't happy. You know.
It felt like everything I had worked towards in my
entire life, the sacrifices that my parents had made, and
coming over from the Soviet Union, everything was crumbling because
(14:58):
of a badly worded tweet. And luckily I have a
big enough network of pr professionals and crisis management and
media personalities that could platform me and my story that
I survived those first four days, at which point the Dean,
(15:19):
who is you know, no profile encouraged throughout this whole thing,
decided that I would indeed be on board it because
it was four days later that I was supposed to
start with the new jobs as a director of the
Center for the Constitution, which is an important center at
George Town, as we've learned, because the rest of the
law school is the Center against the Constitution. So I
was onboarded, but immediately suspended, placed on administrative leave with pay.
(15:43):
The reason why they kept paying me was so I
would have less of a lawsuit later on. And so
began after the four days of hell, what I referred
to us four months of purgatory. Initially I was taking
it seriously. I was prepping with my lawyer, you know,
the interview with the DEI on and HR and all
this stuff. But then it became clear that it was
just such a farce, and as time went on, I
(16:07):
went back to commenting on the court and commenting on
judicial politics and all the rest of it. And it
took them more than four months to figure out whether
my tweet violated policies on harassment and discrimination, and ultimately,
a junior associate at the high paid law firm Wilmer
Hale that they hired to advise them on this, how
many millions of dollars they expended on this is really funny,
(16:33):
discovered that I was not yet an employee when I tweeted,
and so it wasn't covered by these policies, And so
I celebrated that technical victory. But then I read the
longer report from the DEI office, which Georgetown is called
the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action Idea,
and it became clear that it would be untenable for
(16:54):
me to stay, not just me, but anybody who they wrote,
anybody who says or write something that offends someone what
would effectively be creating a hostile educational environment. So I
could do the job that I was hired to do,
and as one does, I probably did my best lawyering
of my life and putting together this resignation letter and
(17:17):
then published it in the Wall Street Journal opinion page,
and then the next day announced as one does, and
asked my move to the Manhattan Institute on Nelson Show
on Fox. So that was, yes, an interesting period in
my life.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Did you feel fully victorious like doing that? I must
have felt so good.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
You know, they went through four months, they tried to
kill you, they didn't and and it must have felt
amazing to say, now I don't want to be with
you now.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
I'm not exactly this is what I'm saying. I mean,
I feel a little sheepish in front of the rest
of Georgetown's faculty and staff because they started implementing extra
diversity trainings because of me, so they have to do it.
I'll deal with all this crap. But no, I felt
I felt free for the first time. Again. Nothing was
(18:15):
as bad as those first four days, but I just
felt free and liberated, and especially since I had the
job offer in hand. The Riihan Salaam, the president of
m I, and Alana Golan, who was the executive VP,
over the course of a weekend put together an offer
for me, which was very comforting because because even though
(18:36):
theoretically I knew I would have job opportunities and whatnot,
it was nice when I was resigning to actually have
the next thing in place, absolutely family safety and all
the rest of it. But yeah, for the first time
in over four months, I was in control of the
media cycle, and Georgetown could not respond because they're a
big institution. They can't move that nimbly, and they didn't
(18:58):
have a they didn't have a coordinated mess and so
I was doing all of these you know, radio and
TV and whatever for two weeks right at the end
of the Supreme Court term, when I was also commenting
on the big explosive cases in twenty twenty two, and
then I went on a vacation with my family. So
it was felt liberating. In fact, that first day, the
day I resigned, that evening, I went to a reception
(19:21):
at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Museum in DC,
which everyone should check out when you come to these
great museum, and they had these name tags made up,
and of course, mindset Georgetown is when I'd registered, so
I crossed that out and I wrote in Freeman.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Amazing, it was great.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Do you feel like you've made it?
Speaker 4 (19:44):
It depends how you define those terms. I mean, people
ask whether having gone through all of that and two
years later, you know, having a book deal, being elevated
in type speeches, I'm invited to give or this media influencers,
trip to Israel and opportunities that I wouldn't necessarily I
had before, even if I was respected in my field.
Was it all worth it? And I'll say this, I'm
(20:06):
definitely better off in terms of you know, career profession brand.
You know, does that end justify the means that those
those four days of hell? I'm not sure how to
answer that. That's kind of a question for a I'm
not a psychologist, you know, I can tell a man
from a woman without being a biologist. But to answer
(20:26):
that question, I think I need I don't know, but
I definitely am career wise, you know, better off. And
I'm sort of bulletproof with respect to cancel culture. It's like,
what you're gonna try to cancel me again? Like, I
don't care. I'm at age forty six. I've achieved the
d GAF part of my of my life. So that's amazing.
That's great.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, So does the whole cancelation thing, or the attempted
cancelation does it make you I don't know, does it
make you worry about societal you know, pressures.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Not everybody can be Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Not everyone could stand something like that. Would you say
that that's one of our largest challenges, you know, as
a culture.
Speaker 4 (21:08):
You know, I've gotten awards for for that experience. And
it's funny. All I did was like nothing like not
for four months and then I quit, and that's it.
It's kind of a low bar. It's a low bar
for showing courage these days. I guess, uh, you know,
not like the stuff going on in Israel, as I'm
lifting up the dog tag for the for the hostages
(21:28):
that we got.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
What would you say is our largest cultural issue our society?
Speaker 4 (21:34):
It's related, It's related to that. It's kind of the
divisions that we have in our country despite the wealth
and technological advancement and the fact that we are living
more comfortably than you know, any society in history. I mean,
(21:54):
regardless of what percentile of socioeconomic advancement in this country
you are, it's better than any time in any society
in history. Nevertheless, we're tremendously divided. And I don't just
mean kind of what shows up at the polls, because
I don't think Americans are as polarized in that way.
As Congress is because of Jaran mandering, because the dynamics
(22:16):
of the parties and campaign finance and other things. But
we are physically separated. You know, there are many fewer
competitive jurisdictions in the country anymore. You know, Ronald Reagan
had a landslide in nineteen eighty nineteen, well, certainly eighty four,
convincing when in nineteen eighty and there were more landslide
(22:41):
counties in twenty twenty. In just that, it's it's people
are less likely to have neighbors that are that are
different from them in.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Various Is that I don't know.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
I almost like I'll look as somebody, as somebody who's
living for the very first time in a place where
I'm the majority.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
It's very I like it.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
That's liberating as well, it's not. But that's that's only part.
It's not just you know how you vote. It's it's
different than you and in all sorts. You know, you're
reading what you read, what coffee you buy, whether you
buy coffee, you know beer, Why all these different kinds
of cultural economic signifiers are more sordid than they've been.
(23:28):
But then you get the kind of the online part,
because we all live our lives so much online these days.
I remember when I was in grad school at the
London School of Economics. It took a year between college
and law school to kind of broaden my horizons and
deepen my knowledge about various things. And we read a
book when we're studying nationalism, read a book by Benedict
(23:49):
Anderson called Imagined Communities, his definition of nationalism before this
kind of current populist nationalist moment, you know, twenty five
years ago. You find a nation by who you imagine
that you're sort of a part of. Well, in the
digital world, you could be part of, you know, with
lots of people and never encounter people outside of your
(24:10):
bubble of whatever kind that might be. It doesn't have
to be politics. And so there's this long tail of
people getting sorted in various ways, and it's good in
terms of individualism, but it's not good in terms of
a sense of community or nation or or cohesion. And
(24:31):
so we we face all of that again. I'm, you know,
in most of the time on most things, like Brett
Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings, I live on the sunrise
side of the mountain beer. You know, I'm gonna I'm
gonna go a little personal on you, Carol. I am
(24:53):
a gout patient and we can talk about this medieval
disease because of Because of that, I can't drink beer anymore,
the contraindicated things. So I've got even you know, as
as you get up in age, anyway, you switch more
to wine or cocktails or whatever. But you know, I
hardly ever drink drink beer anymore. So I do. I
do like beer, but I don't drink it anymore. I
do have a koozy with with Justice Kavanaugh's face on
(25:15):
it and says I like beer. But yeah, I don't
recommend getting out. It's it's probably the most painful, non
life threatening thing that you can have, short of childbirth
or something like that. But anyway, uh so Sunrise side
of the Mountain. But for certain things, whether the state
(25:36):
of our political institutions, whether state of higher education, certainly
it's hard to be optimistic. Maybe I may be less
pessimistic than I was two years ago when when I
quit Georgetown, because things kind of after COVID that addled
so many brains were sort of normalizing in a certain way.
But there are some things that give me pause.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
That's very interesting, but because because I have gone sort
of the other way, and I you know, I love
arguing with you. We argued on a stage recently. I
love being like I disagree, Ilia, But you know, have
you ever lived anywhere it's America.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
You're free to be wrong in this that's right.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
That's right. You are free to be wrong. Ilia.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Have you ever lived anywhere where you were the majority
ideologically or that you were at least like leaning towards
somewhere that most people agreed with you. It really is dazzling.
I can't say enough about it. And it's not crazy
to want to live around people that do agree with you.
I get the online part, the segregation. I used to
(26:42):
love commenting on like feminist blogs like back in the day,
of course, until I got banned, until I got banned
from their comments section.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
So someone was wrong on the internet and you had
to fix that.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
I used to love arguing.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
I used to love arguing with with with strangers on
the internet. And I never argue anymore. It is a
little depressing because I think, you know, debating, I love
all that, but you don't get that anymore. You get,
you know, drive by insults, and then I block and
then I never hear.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
From them again.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
That's yeah. Yeah. Part of these interesting times that that
I've lived is before my Georgetown experience, I ran for
school board in Falls Church City, Virginia in the fall
of twenty twenty one. False Church is a small town.
It's even called it a little city, fifteen thousand residents,
ten thousand voters, And during COVID people were really upset,
(27:36):
like they were with school boards across the country, about
COVID policy, about when the schools were closed. Here despite
a popular survey to the contrary, the school board voting
unanimously to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary and George Mason High.
So there's a lot of discontent and I thought, well,
(27:57):
you know who's going to step up and fix the
and not many people were, So I said, well, I
guess I have to run and broke fundraising records again,
launched my local school board campaign with a Wall Street
journal op ed as one does, and started being attacked
by the local weekly paper, who was run by a
Lindon Laruche acolyte. That's kind of an amusing local politics here.
(28:21):
Falls Church is the epitome of limousine liberal. It went
for Biden by more than Alexandria, Virginia by more than Charlottesville.
I mean just I think it was like eighty one
or eighty two percent. And yet this is the richest
town in America, not because we have billionaires, but we
don't have poor people here. It's all lawyers and lobbyists
(28:42):
and other professionals. So anyway, an interesting political dynamic. So
I had that experience, which that sucks.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
That doesn't suck, it.
Speaker 4 (28:53):
Does it does. Although, because it's so local and small,
the school board turned over, so there were four seats open.
None of the incumbents ran for reelection, which tells you something,
and seven of us ran for these four seats. The
reformers we did not win, but but the four that
(29:13):
went on were definitely better than the four that left.
And the school board is now in control. Even when
I disagree with their decisions. They're not just laying down
for the superintendent, which was the case before. He hates me,
by the way, and he knows that, you know, I
can summon you know, flying monkeys to attack him and
whenever he does something silly. But but Christain and I,
(29:36):
my wife and I we now exercise soft power behind
the scenes. I played tennis with the chairman of the
school board and checks with some of the other people.
Just they care about what the you know, they know
that there's a lot of people that just don't have
time to pay attention to it. But they know that,
you know, they want to be you know, rational and
not have been made into national news stories like our
(29:57):
neighbors in Arlington and Fairfax, right really do for all sorts.
We don't have that kind of craziness here. It's much
more small and nimble, like we can meet with our
kids principle whenever we want kind of thing. I mean,
it's it's very you know, we still it's still high quality.
It's still now you know, our kids are small so
far second grade in kindergarten. We'll see how it goes
as things go on. But and then and then we
(30:18):
have baby twins as well. So that's the other thing
that happened during this whole crazy period, we had our
cancelation babies. So anyway, it has been interesting times. Uh
and uh, and that's that's brought me here to this,
which reminds me of one of my favorite songs. I
don't know, if you're into country music, Carol.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
But country music right now? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Good? Well? Uh you know uh the artist who used
to be Hoody of Hoody and the Blowfish, Darius Rucker
is a big country star and he wrote this song
called this about you know. It's it's kind of it
sets the scene. It's raining outside. He's sitting on the
couch with his wife watching a movie or something, his
baby girl sleeping in the next room, and he he
(30:59):
thinks he gets kind of nostalgic or sentimental about all
the doors that closed in his life, the colleges that
rejected him, the girls that dumped him, all these wrong
decisions that he made, but that ultimately brought him here
to this, which was contentment. And so you know, I've
had this tumultuous period. But all of a sudden, you know,
this only child Soviet emigray uh is here. It's a
(31:24):
large family with this. You know, we joke that we're
landed gentry. We have this. It's not a McMansion. Our
neighbors have bigger house than we do. But it's like
this old house on a hill with the circular driveway
and we have a pool. And my in laws built
their house on our properties. Who have this multi generational compound.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Amazing.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
It is fit. The only thing wrong with it is
that it's not in Florida. That you know, it's great
if we.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Could figure out a way to move it to Florida.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
I think the transaction, really, the transactions costs are are
just too high. We have such a great setup. We
have an O pair now, we built a little we
knocked out in our garage and and and put up
a space for for someone to uh to live and
kind of a guest bedroom situation with a gym that
I got. So yeah, you should, you should.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
We so end here with your best tip for my
listeners on how they can improve their lives and.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Be you know, more like Ilia Shapiro.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
It's all what I've learned. First of all, it depends
who's asking. If it's someone you know just graduating college
or a you know, a student, it's different. And the advice,
the wrong advice is to say, oh, just follow your
passion or something. Kids these days, kids any days, don't
really know what their passion is. Right. It's sort of
you know, or whether you're someone talking to someone mid career.
(32:44):
And I wouldn't fathom to give someone advice who's older
than me. But look, it's it's what I've learned in reading,
especially psychologists like Jonathan Height is very popular these days.
Everyone should go read what he's writing. But what agency
is so important? That is feeling like you're in control
of your life, all different aspects of your life. People
are what makes people unhappy. You know, once you kind
(33:06):
of uh satisfy the basic needs, you know, you're not
in danger of being homeless or starving or things like this.
You have you know, if your kid gets sick, you
can take them to the doctor, these basic things. After that,
it's just it's not you know, you work too much
and therefore you're unhappy or the people are unhappy when
(33:31):
they feel like they aren't in control of what they're doing.
And so my only advice is figure out a way
to both personally and professionally feel like you're the master
of your fate. You run the show that you're right.
And that doesn't necessarily mean go start your own business.
I'm not entrepreneurial in that sense. I am entrepreneurially, I
(33:55):
feel in terms of like ideas and figuring out identifying opportunities,
and you know, I thought I would, you know, going
to Georgetown I would be teaching this and I would
be writing about originalism and doing this right and God
plans and man plans and God laughs. So you just
identify opportunities and try to try to do that. But
(34:16):
I you know, I'm not going to sit here and
pretend that you ask me, you know, whether I've made it.
And I don't feel like I've figured it out necessarily,
but I'm I'm doing my best. My hardest job is
as a dad. I just took my older boys on
spring break to Arizona and California. We had a fun
and interesting time. Of course, now I feel like I
need a real vacation. But you know, just just again,
(34:41):
get to a place where you know, whether you're working
in a giant corporation, a small business for yourself or
or whatever it is, you know, starting a business with
your husband or wife or whatever it is, that's what
will make you, give you a sense of accomplishment and
mission and and all that sort of Thank.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
You so much for coming on. He is, Ilia Shapiro.
His book is Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites by
It now pre order it wherever books are sold. Thank
you so much, Ilia, Carrol watching Watchune Priatna.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Thanks so much for joining us on the Carol Marcoit Show.
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