This is It Could Happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.

Last week, I was working on an essay about how the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Department of Education.

Now, very quickly, that project expanded to being about how Elon Musk is actually trying to internally coup the federal government and become the CEO of the United States.

That article is now published on chatterzone.subtack.com and is also the previous episode of this podcast.

But during my research, I talked with law professor

Derek Black about the Department of Education, the state of disunion in the country, and if we

still have a democracy. Already, some of the things we talked about have begun to happen,

like Republicans introducing legislation to expand executive power,

while Trump and Musk flirt with denying the authority of the courts.

But I decided to publish the full interview because I believe his perspective is still helpful,

and the conversational format alters the way we process information compared to me just

reading a kind of depressing essay

for 40 minutes. So without further ado, here is the interview.

I'm Derek Black. I'm a professor of law at the University of South Carolina. My area focuses on

education, law, and policy, and really sort of how that relates to democracy, but I teach constitutional law and courses like that.

Author of a couple books, Schoolhouse Burning, Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy,

and then more recently, Dangerous Learning, the South's Long War on Black Literacy.

Let's start by discussing what's going on at the Department of Education right now.

And maybe let's actually start a little bit further back.

Attacks on the Department of Education are not new.

Reagan famously kind of pioneered the rights focus on this.

But it's been something they've struggled to deal sizable blows against,

...