David J. Bier and Alex Nowrasteh
“Sorry to all you people at the Cato Institute or wherever else—I don’t owe you an explanation for this. I just prefer this.” That was book publisher Jonathan Keeperman explaining to Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo why Keeperman’s “desire to preserve homogeneity is just fine.” The podcast clip has been viewed nearly 3 million times on X alone.
The podcast episode was entitled the “Indian Question,” and is Keeperman and Rufo’s hour-long quasi-defense of Texas Republican Bo French’s viral tweet expressing outrage at students celebrating a University of Texas football win merely because they were of Indian ethnicity. It’s worth noticing that respected figures on the political right will defend those types of tweets, but to us it’s also noteworthy that Keeperman chose the Cato Institute as his stand-in for all those who demand reasons for his views.
Keeperman and Rufo were not previously discussing Cato scholarship. So why did he fake apologize to Cato of all groups before saying he didn’t need any reasons to advocate centrally planning the country’s demographics?
The answer is that Cato stands for reason. Our scholars defend our principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace with rational arguments. The Cato Institute has built its reputation over the last half century on sober empirical research, Enlightenment values, and the libertarian ideas that inspired the founding of the United States of America. Rather than dismiss as bigoted all the immigration critics’ complaints, we calmly analyze the data on crime, fiscal costs, terrorism, disease, assimilation, politics, housing, littering, and much else.
Even President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have thought highly enough of the quality of our work to cite it, though they disagreed with our preferred policies. Keeperman’s “my feelings don’t care about your facts” prebuttal sabotages any intellectual and fact-based response grounded in reason.
Cato also stands for the moral principle that people should be treated as individuals, not representatives of racial, ethnic, or other groups. As soon as you adopt this libertarian and classical liberal principle, it requires reasons—explanations—to justify government hostility toward someone. It is not enough to reference their demographics or your aesthetic judgment of their appearance. This moral universe is incompatible with a collectivist racial essentialism of the kind on display in French’s tweet and defended by Keeperman and Rufo.
Keeperman and Rufo acknowledge that even based on their group-level analysis, Indian Americans are economically successful and socially assimilated in every measurable way. That’s what necessitated Keeperman’s response: “I just prefer this.”
Of course, Keeperman is free to prefer whatever he wants. He should have complete freedom to associate or dissociate with whomever he wants. But we should not want to live in a world in which people’s emotional whims—their feelings—govern policy. Our Constitution was intended to limit government to protect our diverse interests from those who would impose their individual preferences, even aesthetic preferences, on others.
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison labeled “the first object of government” the protection of “the diversity in the faculties of men.” But he warned that:
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.
What could possibly be a more frivolous distinction than the way someone looks or their ancestor’s birthplaces? Madison’s solution to the threat of “mutual animosities” would also be unwelcome to Keeperman and Rufo: a big, diverse country. “Take in a greater variety of parties and interests [and] you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens,” he wrote.
Keeperman’s comment highlights how Cato has become synonymous with a reproach to the irrational identitarianism that now typifies large parts of the political spectrum. As this brand of feelings-over-fact politics exposes itself as a dismal failure, we can only hope that in time, we can move from fake apologies to additional real ones and a policy debate shorn of racial and ethnic infatuations.
