Welcome back to Ten Blocks. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is John

Herschauer. He's an associate editor of the American Conservative, a 22-22-23 Novak fellow at the Fund for

American Studies. He was formerly the William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review,

and he's the author of a long and quite brilliant piece recently for

City Journal, entitled The Last Institution. It's a story about the push by activists and the state

government to close two facilities for the intellectually and developmentally disabled in Pennsylvania over the

objections of the people actually living there and their families. It's again a really terrific

and moving story. John, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So your essay, which is heavily researched and

reported, looks at the Polk and White Haven centers in Pennsylvania, which the Commonwealth

is in the process of closing. So I wonder, you know, just to set the background for

folks who haven't read the story yet, what's,

what's been going on at the centers? Who's living there? You know, what's the state's case against

them? And where do things stand currently? Sure. So I think to understand what's happening in Polk

and White Haven now, you have to understand a little bit about the history of facilities like Polk and White Haven. People often get them confused with state hospitals for the mentally ill, but they're similar from the outside in appearance, at least. They're both situated on huge physical plants. They were built. Polk was

built in 1896. White Haven used to be a tuberculosis sanatorium but was converted to a developmental

disabilities facility in the 1950s. And at one point in its history, Pennsylvania operated

23, what were called state schools for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the prevailing idea in the late 18th, or excuse me, late 19th and early 20th centuries, was that you were going to place people at these state schools when they were children or young adults.

You were going to train them and give them some sort of vocational training and return them back to the community as adults,

hopefully with the sort of vocational skills required to support themselves in the community.

And this sounds maybe paternalistic to modern ears, but at the time it was really revolutionary,

the thought that somebody with an intellectual and developmental disability, Down syndrome,

...