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Sept. 4, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
01:12:01
Illiberal Progressives
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In modern politics, particularly in the United States, the terms liberal and progressive are often used interchangeably.
These political positions are often treated as if they're synonymous, when in fact they are mutually exclusive, and I'd like to demonstrate to you why that is.
I'm going to use Wikipedia to define these terms, and where I can't use Wikipedia, I'm going to use the dictionary.
I want to use definitions that are not esoteric.
I want to use definitions that almost everyone is going to be familiar with.
Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality.
Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas and programs such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil rights, democratic societies, secular governments, and international cooperation.
Almost everything about liberalism comes from the concept of self-ownership, or individualism, and includes but is not limited to, personal liberty, equality of opportunity, rule of law, economic freedom, which includes access to free markets and laissez-faire trading, freedom of expression, which encompasses freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought, and political freedom in a democratic society.
If you do not uphold these principles, you are not a liberal.
Let us begin with the very root of liberalism, individualism.
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual.
Individualists advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence over the state or a social group, while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government.
Individualism is often contrasted with totalitarianism or collectivism.
Possibly the most important principle of individualism is personal liberty.
This is the freedom of the individual to do as he pleases, limited only by the authority of politically organized society to regulate his action to secure the public health, safety or morals, or other recognized social interests.
Put simply, it is the principle that allows someone to operate freely within society as long as they are not breaking any of its laws.
Which is why we need to talk about the Black Lives Matter movement and Bernie Sanders.
Black Lives Matter is an activist movement that began in July 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman after shooting black teenager Trayvon Martin.
It's difficult to accurately characterize disparate hashtag movements, but I think it's safe to say that the Black Lives Matter activists are all very concerned with perceived police brutality against African Americans in the United States.
Although not originally a progressive movement, the Black Lives Matter movement fit very neatly in with progressive principles and gained almost universal acceptance with progressives and is now one of the causes that they champion.
On August 8th, 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hosted a campaign rally in Seattle where he attempted to give a speech.
Thank you Seattle for being one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America!
Barely had these words come out of his mouth when Black Lives Matter activists led by this particular woman climbed onto the stage and interrupted his speech.
They demanded that Sanders relinquish his platform so that these activists could speak instead of him.
his rally during his presidential campaign or the event would be shut down.
Members of Sanders' team were understandably reluctant to do this.
But the Black Lives Matter activists won them over, like this.
We are tough.
We're gonna give you, we're gonna let you on the mic.
We are gonna give you the mic.
After commandeering Sanders' platform from him, the activists then go on to declare the crowd are racists.
And we're going to honour the memory of Michael Brown, and we're going to honour all of the Black Lives Ross this year, and we're going to honour the fact that I have to fight through all these people again!
the plan after commandeering the platform was to do a four and a half minute moment of silence or else it was going to get shut down Four and a half minute moment of silence from Mike Brown as soon as everybody is silent.
Don't shut it down, get out of my face.
So where did this leave Bernie Sanders?
Well, it left him standing on the sidelines of his own rally after it was completely co-opted by these activists for their own political purposes.
And in doing so, they completely denied his personal liberty and freedom to speak at his own event.
And this isn't even the first time this has happened to Bernie Sanders.
The same thing happened in Phoenix in July.
And the deep irony of all of this is that Bernie Sanders is a supporter of Black Lives Matter.
He has been a civil rights activist since the 60s and has marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, now progressives have to explain to everyone exactly why the Black Lives Matter movement is opposed to Bernie Sanders, the only candidate who actually gives a damn about their cause.
Progressive media has absolutely failed to explain why this is happening.
Here's Vox's reasoning for you.
So after being interrupted in Phoenix, Sanders said, I've spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights.
If you don't want me to be here, that's okay.
Note the language that Sanders is using.
He's talking about himself as an individual.
But the progressive explanation for this is entirely collectivist, and so they end up talking past each other.
White progressives can often ignore issues that disproportionately affect people of colour.
As progressives, they think of themselves as defenders of people of colour and other marginalised groups.
So when they're challenged on their anti-racist bona fides by activists of colour, they tend to react with disbelief, defensiveness, or outright hostility.
None of this is speaking to the concerns of the individuals within the crowd.
Hell, some of them even shouted out what their problems were.
How dare she call me a racist?
I won't pay me.
How dare she call me a racist?
Not how dare black people call white people racists.
We are dealing with a liberal in the crowd there.
And I think that the problem people had with these people interrupting Bernie Sanders is the same problem I have with it.
It denies him his personal liberty to speak, which they had no right to do to Bernie Sanders as an individual.
Especially not for a remote, abstract principle that has absolutely no bearing on Bernie Sanders himself.
Given that the protesters interrupting Bernie Sanders and demanding the use of his platform hadn't earned it, but were instead requisitioning it on the basis of their skin colour.
That brings us to the second liberal principle that is under attack, equality of opportunity.
Equal opportunity is the stipulation that all people should be treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices or preferences, so that important jobs should go to those most qualified, and not go persons for arbitrary or irrelevant reasons, such as circumstances of birth, upbringing, friendship ties to whoever's in power, religion, sex, ethnicity, race, caste, or involuntary personal attributes such as disability, age, gender, or sexual orientation.
Individuals should succeed or fail based on their own efforts and not extraneous circumstances.
By simply elucidating what equality of opportunity is, it becomes self-evident as to why the Black Lives Matter protesters commandeering Bernie Sanders' platform is a problem for liberals.
They didn't earn it, therefore they do not deserve it, and they certainly do not have the right to deny it to the person who did earn it based on their race.
And it's the principle of equality of opportunity that gives liberals such a problem with affirmative action and quotas.
There's not really all that much to say about this.
The very concept of a quota is in direct opposition to the concept of equality of opportunity.
The idea that people shouldn't be judged based on their race or their gender or their sexual orientation or any other arbitrary factors that would make them belong to a group.
This is of course because the very nature of quotas is anti-individualistic.
It is setting the individual into a demographic category over which they have no control and making a judgment about a person based on that instead of any merits they might have as an individual.
The issues with quotas have been long known.
Take for example this article from 1997 where a professor is complaining that his black and Mexican American students were not academically competitive with white students at the nation's top universities.
And yes, I can hear the deep inhalation from the progressives watching this video.
But before you feel compelled to open your mouths and start branding people all sorts of labels, why don't we actually look at why he said that?
His contention wasn't down to any kind of racial inferiority, but was the result primarily of cultural effects.
They have a culture that seems not to encourage achievement.
Failure is not looked upon with disgrace.
Now, I don't know whether he's right or wrong, but what we do know is that poverty doesn't exactly aid an academic career.
And that once Texas universities were banned from using race as a factor in admissions, minority enrolment at the school dropped sharply, with four black and 26 Mexican-American students from the first year law school class of 468 students down from 31 black and 42 Mexican American students the previous year.
Now this is a really thorny issue to discuss and I know that people on all sides of this issue are probably having the knee-jerk reaction to start trying to slap labels on people for even discussing it.
But let's be clear.
We are only talking about the handful of individuals who were given the benefit of affirmative action when, in reality, their grades did not warrant them having these university positions.
They are not representative of their race.
They are not representative of their gender or class.
They are only representative of themselves.
And you may well be thinking, well this is sounding like an argument in favour of affirmative action and quotas.
And hell maybe it is.
But that doesn't mean it's liberal.
Because every time you discriminate in favour of someone based on their race or their gender or whatever arbitrary reason about them, you are also discriminating against someone else based on those very same categories.
Let's take the example of Jian Li, a freshman at Yale who had filed a complaint against Princeton with the Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Education, charging that the university had rejected him because he was Asian American.
Despite perfect SAT scores, near-perfect achievement test scores, nine AP classes, and a class rank in the top 1% at Livingston High School in New Jersey, Lee says he was rejected by Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT.
Because of his race, despite all of his hard work.
And this is not some kind of isolated case.
You can make all of the arguments that you want that these things are necessary, that they have to be done, that for some reason these poor Asian guys who have worked all their lives to get to this point to apply to a top-class university are being denied because minority students, other minorities, with lesser grades are being given their positions instead.
That is not equality of opportunity.
That is not liberal.
There are many arguments against affirmative action.
And I really think that Thomas Soule, a black ex-Marxist's observations on this, are really pertinent.
And I hate to play the identity politics game, but he says that preferences primarily benefit minority applicants from middle and upper class backgrounds.
At the same time, because admissions are a zero-sum game, preferences hurt poor whites and even many Asians, who we already know meet the admission standards in disproportionate numbers.
If preferences were truly meant to remedy disadvantage, they would be given on the basis of disadvantage and not on the basis of race.
Because the basis of disadvantage is an individualistic position.
Each person's situation is different.
So those individuals who are disadvantaged and who need the help should get it, instead of collectively deciding that black people or Mexican people just can't get into universities on their own.
And given that they're not all in the same situation, that means that there are going to be black and Mexican people who received unfair advantage when they didn't need it at the expense of someone else who did need it.
But not only that, it's insulting to that individual because people won't ever really know whether they were the result of an affirmative action policy or not.
The method through which all of this is justified is something called identity politics.
It's the reason why the famous civil rights activist Senator on his presidential campaign trail can be interrupted and have his platform hijacked by a small group of young black students.
They have done nothing to earn this platform, unlike Bernie Sanders, but they felt entitled to it entirely on the basis of their race, an arbitrary classification entirely designed to remove their individuality and place them as part of some kind of collective that apparently shares a universal experience within the United States.
Even though nothing may have happened to these two young ladies as individuals, they get to claim ownership of other people's experiences based on the way they were born, which is, of course, deeply anti-individualistic.
And this kind of mindset has led to something known as the progressive stack.
i'll let these students explain it to you here i just want some people to be aware of of what's going on is that they do things by a consensus which means everyone everyone gets to to be heard and the way people speak at their general assemblies is there are facilitators that keep a stack which means a list of people who would like to speak
In New York, in New York, they use something called a progressive stat, which means if you have your name on a list and you come from a traditionally marginalized background, um, race, gender, ethnicity, um, anything that is traditionally marginalized, you get bumped up the list.
Um, so this week, um, we want to be able to hear what everyone has to say.
Also, one of the things stressed at Occupy Wall Street is the step up, step back.
This means people who have been privileged all their lives, um, mainly white men, white women, even, people who have been privileged, need to realize that they need to step up and step back if they've already said what they had to say.
This is of course the diametric opposite of equality of opportunity.
This is equality of outcome.
This is literally deciding a person's value of input, not based on what they have to say or the merit of their arguments or whether they even have anything to say at all, but instead based on arbitrary features and factors about that person and how they relate to larger groups.
The individual is irrelevant.
And finally, on the subject of identity politics and collectivism, let's talk about collective guilt.
White people need to open ourselves up to a particular type of wounding to genuinely understand and then work towards racial justice.
Because of course, in its historic and current function, whiteness wounds others on our behalf.
Now, I'm sure I don't need to tell you how illiberal it is, how anti-individualist it is, and frankly, how unjust it is for people who have not done anything wrong to be encouraged to feel guilty because of things that happened long before they were born by people they'd never even met or weren't even related to based on something as arbitrary as skin colour.
And the subject of injustice brings us nicely to the next liberal principle that is being attacked.
The rule of law.
Now, despite what the more hysterical conservative outlets may say, I don't think progressives are actually about to overthrow the government and abandon the rule of law entirely.
But progressives have definitely campaigned against certain principles under the rule of law that a liberal should be aghast at, such as the right to a fair trial.
This is considered to be a fundamental human right by the United Nations and has been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11, which states, everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
Without presuming the innocence of the accused in a trial, there is no way that that trial can be fair.
And this goes right back to the Magna Carta.
Article 39, no free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.
Although it doesn't use the phrase presumption of innocence, this is de facto what this is saying.
Because if you don't operate a legal system that presumes the innocence of the accused, then you do not have a system that sometimes fails to punish the guilty.
You have a system that sometimes fails to punish the innocent.
Although I would have thought this was a self-evident truth.
Let's have a look at this article on the University of Sheffield's website.
Justice for survivors of rape, the presumption of innocence and burden of proof.
Now, the author of this article understands that for a law to be just, it must be fair.
It must, at the very least, punish the guilty and not the innocent.
To assume that all those accused are innocent until proven guilty provides insurance against most unjust convictions.
The burden of proof is on the complainant.
It is up to them to prove guilt rather than the defendant having to defend their innocence.
If the default position is innocence, we need not fear being convicted with little or no evidence for our crime.
You'll notice that this is talking from the individual perspective.
It is up to the accuser to prove our crime and not our burden to defend our innocence.
This is where the article should stop.
But instead, the author carries on with a rather collectivist mindset and misrepresents the issue.
In rape cases, the fear is that without the presumption of innocence, that there will be many more men punished after being falsely convicted.
That's an appeal to consequences, because that's not what the fear actually is.
The fear is that instead of presuming innocence, you are presuming guilt, and therefore implementing a fundamentally unjust system.
Regardless of what the outcomes actually are from that system, we know the system wouldn't be just.
The author even goes on to say as much in the next line.
Women would have the unjust power of being able to claim without proof that they were raped and thus destroy the lives of any man they dislike.
And then they even go on to support this by saying that false rape claims were used as an excuse for racist hate crimes.
So someone of a more fair and liberal mindset might think, well, case closed.
This is categoric.
There is absolutely no reason to presume the guilt of anyone.
But especially not in the cases of rape trials where we know that there are some individual women who use rape charges as a weapon to destroy the lives of men they don't like, or to excuse racist hate crimes.
But no, the violation of an individual's freedom and rights to a fair trial are going to be justified by the use of statistics.
There is no evidence that there are more false allegations of rape than any other crime.
You're 11 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid or comet than you are to be falsely accused of rape.
So what?
That's no reason to implement an unjust system when dealing with rape trials.
The danger of false accusations is an imagined danger.
Making it easy for survivors to convict their attackers won't result in a huge number of falsely accused men ending up in prison any more than being able to get conviction for burglary encourages the punishment of falsely accused burglars.
Men have nothing to fear from protecting survivors except that their dominance through rape culture will be lost.
What a bizarre abandonment of reason and logic.
First of all, we don't presume the guilt of someone accused of burglary.
Second of all, this kind of collectivist mindset will be of absolutely no consolation when an individual man is now being accused of rape by a woman he did not rape, and because he cannot prove he didn't do something, because it's impossible to prove a negative, he's going to go to jail for a crime he didn't commit.
To hell with what the statistics will say.
They don't accurately reflect the individual experiences of people trapped within this system.
And frankly, it is like these people didn't read Homer.
The blade itself incites to violence.
I've got no doubt that one of the reasons that false accusations of rape are so low is because we presume the innocence of the accused.
If we were to presume the guilt of the accused, I've got no doubt that they would rise.
But according to this University of Sheffield article, that means that in the particular case of rape, the state itself is a terrorist.
Don't presume that these balmy and illiberal notions are being restricted to Sheffield University.
This is becoming common practice in universities all across North America.
In short, universities are institutionalising a presumption of guilt in sexual assault cases.
This implements the doctrine developed in the 1980s and 90s by postmodernists, radical feminists, and critical legal studies scholars that inspired the ruinous campus speech codes.
That doctrine teaches that the American political order is designed to oppress the weak, that racial minorities and women, whether they realise it or not, are victims.
And that the truth, except for the first two propositions, is infinitely malleable.
Don't make the mistake in thinking that the bizarre and backwards reasoning that is being used to justify violating a person's right to a fair trial is going to remain the purview of a few kooks in academia.
Let's take for example the New Zealand Labour Party, who attempted to change New Zealand's laws on rape to presume the guilt of the accused, a change it acknowledges as a monumental shift, and look at the reasoning being used to justify it.
When you look at the volume of sexual cases and the 1% of cases that result in a conviction, there is something wrong with the way we are handling sexual violation cases.
The circumstances may well justify doing something radically different.
It is precisely the same kind of backwards reasoning that's being used in academia to do the same thing.
The violation of an individual's rights via the use of statistics.
Thankfully, this never passed in New Zealand, but this should never have even been proposed.
The presumption of innocence is the cornerstone of justice, and always has been, ever since mankind started writing laws.
The first three laws in Hammurabi's code deal with the presumption of innocence.
4,000 years ago, they knew that it was the most important thing, that if anyone ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he cannot prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.
The bearing of false accusations is the worst thing you can have enshrined in a code of law.
The next set of liberal principles that are under attack by progressives are those of economic freedom, which is simply the ability of members of a society to undertake economic direction and actions.
One approach to economic freedom comes from classical liberal and libertarian traditions, emphasizing free markets, free trade and private property under free enterprise.
And since I'm talking about liberalism, a free market is a market economy system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between vendors and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.
That's the important part here.
Especially when we look at the definition of laissez-faire trading, which is an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference, such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies.
The reason I bring these things up is because progressives are acting as a group on social media, who are acting like the self-appointed regulators of the free market, using massed social pressure to regulate products of which they do not personally approve.
Take for example comic books and the case of Spider-Woman's blatant sexualization where progressives took to their blogs en masse to protest the apparent sexualization of Spider-Woman's costume.
This combined with pressure on social media revealed the very progressive tip of a puritanical iceberg and the furor caused by this desire to censor caused Marvel to censor themselves.
And this is despite the fact that no laws were broken by Marvel in the process.
If they wanted to have sexualized comic book characters, they are completely free to do so.
The only arguments being made by progressives was that they simply did not like it.
And the deepest irony about all of this is that the cover wasn't even overly sexualising Spider-Woman.
It was in fact completely normal for the franchise to have these characters dressed in skin-tight latex.
But even if this wasn't the case, so what?
And it's not just Marvel that's susceptible to this kind of online pressure.
DC Comics found themselves at the wrong end of a progressive hashtag campaign with hashtag change the cover after progressives roundly decided they did not like Batgirl's alternative cover featuring her and the Joker.
Of course no laws were broken.
Of course the only reason to pull this was that progressives simply didn't like it.
And so DC capitulated.
And now comic book fans and collectors cannot purchase these for their own collections or just for their own enjoyment.
Because progressives actively campaigned to get them pulled from the market.
Which is literally what progressives did with a video game called Grand Theft Auto V. As almost 50,000 of them signed a change.org petition to get Target stores in Australia to stop selling Grand Theft Auto V, claiming that Grand Theft Auto V was a game that encouraged sexual violence against women.
Evidently without even looking into the merits of these claims, Target decided to pull Grand Theft Auto from its shelves, and Kmart followed suit just in case.
And just like with the case of Spider-Woman and Batgirl, there was nothing about Grand Theft Auto V that violated any laws.
We know that the progressive smear campaign against Grand Theft Auto V was almost all misinformation and exaggeration because games in Australia are forbidden to feature sexual violence, nor are they permitted to feature implied sexual violence that is related to incentives or rewards.
Games that do a refuse classification and the classification board gave GTA 5 an R18 plus rating.
Grand Theft Auto is for adults, but it doesn't encourage sexual violence against women, which was entirely the progressive case against it.
There was no legitimate reason to petition Target to remove it from sale.
And yes, of course Grand Theft Auto is still available for sale at other outlets, so it's not quite as big a deal as it might seem, but we are discussing the principle of the thing.
That such a big attempt to get Grand Theft Auto V pulled from Target, despite the fact there's no legitimate reason to do so, is not a liberal thing to do.
And you can imagine what the progressive reaction to a Caitlyn Jenner Halloween costume is.
Outcry, of course.
Outcry and a change.org petition with thousands and thousands of signatures on it calling for this product to be banned despite the fact that all it is is the parody of a public figure.
And if it wasn't enough that progressives want to directly regulate what products can be sold on the free market, they also want to regulate how people can advertise their products, which is what happened to Protein World's advertising campaign known as Beach Body Ready.
This was an innocuous advertising campaign for weight loss supplements, featuring an attractive woman in a bikini and the words, are you Beach Body Ready?
Cue thousands of progressive feminist activists who got wildly offended by this and created a change.org petition with over 70,000 signatures, which succeeded in getting the advert pulled.
But not only that, succeeded in making sure the ad can't reappear again in its current form.
Why?
Well, the hell if I know, because the watchdog says the adverts are just fine and are apparently not offensive by any standards that they uphold.
So any objection to this is merely progressive outrage that they don't like these adverts.
And, frankly, that is not a good enough reason to get them censored.
There is no reason that progressive hashtag campaigns or change.org petitions should be given any weight when considering these issues, as they are based entirely on moral outrage and not any actual wrongdoing.
Progressives are regulating the markets by forcing their own puritanical standards onto people who frankly do not have to accept them.
There is nothing harmful or damaging or illegal about any of these advertising campaigns, any of these products, any of these games, any of this entertainment.
And they are infringing on your rights to purchase them by getting them pulled, by preventing them from being sold on the free market.
This is completely illiberal.
Instead of purchasing them, they should just be choosing to ignore them.
We now come to freedom of expression.
And it would be remiss of me not to quote Voltaire and say, I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.
This wasn't actually something Voltaire said.
This was Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarising his philosophy.
But I'm sure if anyone had asked Voltaire, he would agree with it.
And it is on that note that I must say that in this section, I will be defending people whom I severely dislike.
People I have no choice but to defend.
Because their rights as individuals are being violated.
And to stand for my own principles, I have to put aside my personal dislike of these people.
Because as a liberal, I think that their rights as individuals are sacrosanct.
I think their personal liberties should be inviolable.
When you defend the rights of one person, then you defend the rights of every person.
And when you let the rights of one person be violated, then anyone could be next.
Because it is the principle of the thing that matters here.
So, freedom of assembly.
Freedom of assembly is an individual right or ability to come together and collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend ideas.
The right to freedom of association is recognised as a human right, a political right, and a civil liberty.
Unless, of course, you cross progressives on the internet.
Which is what happened to pickup artist Julian Blanc, who was forced to leave Australia after his visa was cancelled, after a large hashtag campaign against him.
He also ended up being banned from the UK and Singapore after, you guessed it, a massive change.org petition, where almost 160,000 people signed a petition targeting this individual because they didn't like what he had to say.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like what he has to say either.
But to characterize what he's doing as inciting sexual assault is simply dishonest.
If you wanted to be charitable, you could describe pickup artists as dating advisors.
Effectively the male equivalent of women who teach other women how to meet and marry rich men and who give seminars in order to do so.
Personally, I find these techniques to be rather sad and distasteful, no matter who's using them.
But this is simply my opinion.
I have no right to force it on anyone else, nor do I have any right to attempt to restrict the freedom of assembly of any of these people based on it.
And again, as much as I dislike these people, what happens to Roosh V in Canada, I find far worse.
If you're not aware, Rouch V is another pickup artist with a small following online.
Here's a small example of some of his work.
For the longest time, I wanted to do a post on how to approach girls that are ordering a drink at the bar.
And the reason I couldn't do that is because through words it's hard to explain.
So what I did is I went to the toy store and I bought some dolls.
And through these dolls and with the camera, I want to show you a couple things that I do that increase the chance that when I try to start a conversation, the girl is going to be open to me.
It's exactly as it sounds.
Many times I am in the club and I can't really find a good spot.
Maybe, you know, sometimes when the bar is extremely crowded, you can just post up because then people are constantly going to be asking you to move, they want to get a drink, and that kills you.
That kills the vibe.
So what I do instead is kind of hide, actually.
I swear I'm not making this up.
I find a spot, maybe a wall, and I hide there, or I stand in a place where people don't really see me.
And then when I see an opportunity of a girl that I want to talk to at the bar, I emerge from my hiding spot, stand behind her, and then as soon as she gets that drink and turn around, she's going to see me and I'm going to try to start a conversation with her.
And that pretty much sums up Roosh's career.
It's sleazy and sad, but it's not sexual assault.
And it certainly doesn't deserve a petition with 46,000 signatures on it and a hashtag campaign deny Roosh V.
And Rouche is a rapist to try and prevent him from being able to enter Canada lawfully, where he intends to go and give a dating seminar.
Rouche was able to get into Canada, despite the petition calling for his ban, but he was accosted by progressive activists, and this is how they treated him.
Oh, yeah.
You're enjoying your time in my cheek!
How dare you fucking talk to Canada!
Stay away, stay away, stay away.
This guy thinks he should rape your pictures!
This is fucking Mrs. Raiders!
Get the fuck out of the fuck out of here!
You piece of shit!
You're not welcome from this show!
Fucking stomp!
Get the fuck out of here!
I know these people are.
Yeah.
Relax!
You guys are talking about this as well, right?
He never said that!
He never said that!
Show me!
What the fuck?
SHOW ME THE ARTICLE!
JUST SHOW ME THE ARTICLE!
Personally, I find this progressive lynch mob mentality horrific.
It's absolutely disgusting that a man not breaking any laws can be forced out of a pub where he's completely free to be and chased back to his hotel by said mob with them claiming that he has no right to even visit the country and for them to think that they are morally in the right.
And it doesn't stop there.
They are petitioning Amazon to stop selling his books purely because they do not like what he says.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like what he says either.
But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be able to say it.
In no circumstances should 160,000 people who might think of themselves as liberals get together to target one individual purely on the basis that they don't like what he says.
The justification for this is that two women who have read up about Rouch V and his views on rape, women and dating have ended up being physically sick.
That is not a justification to stop him from selling his books.
All that is a justification for are these women not to read them.
This doesn't simply end with pickup artists being targeted and even if it did that wouldn't make it right.
But this sort of treatment is being rolled out to celebrities such as Tyler the Creator who's been banned from entering Australia and the UK because some people have taken offense to lyrics he wrote in 2009.
Naturally this is not a good reason to have him banned from any country.
Nobody should be allowed to infringe on his freedom of movement and freedom of assembly and yet they are.
This is disturbingly illiberal when a hate mob on the internet can get a change.org petition to get someone an individual banned from a country because they don't like who that person is and what they do.
This is insane.
As far as I can tell, nothing that these progressive mobs online ever say or do is in any way reflective of actual harm that comes to people.
It's always a potential harm of a greater, larger collective.
And this is always assumed, it's never proven.
But we can see the tangible impact these mobs have on the lives of individuals.
The next liberal principle that is being repeatedly violated is the freedom of the press, which is the freedom of communication and expression through mediums including various electronic media and published materials.
While such freedom mostly implies the absence of interference from an overreaching state, its preservation may be sought through constitutional or other legal protections.
This is, of course, an archaic definition that needs to be updated to include freedom from social pressure.
Take for example page 3, which is a colloquial expression in Britain for the third page of the Sun newspaper, which famously and has, I think, since the 70s featured an attractive topless model whose picture is posted alongside a vapid, uncontroversial, usually semi-political statement.
It's been going on for decades and is completely and utterly harmless.
Of course, there was a hashtag NoMorePage3.
Of course, it got almost 250,000 signatures from feminists and progressives and presumably anti-bear-breast activists who wanted to ask David Dinsmore, the editor of The Sun, very nicely to remove them.
Not for any good reason, simply because they don't like them.
Left-wing outlets were the first to point out that this is just self-serving censorship and has absolutely no place in a free society.
And it certainly goes against the feminist campaign hashtag free the nipple, in which feminists argue that women's nipples shouldn't be censored.
Unbelievably, David Cameron was on the liberal side of this argument, even as he is busy regulating online pornography.
But I guess a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Of course, The Sun on Page 3 is just a silly instance of this happening.
There are far more important examples of progressives attempting to censor the freedom of the press.
I think the most important one, and the one that draws this into the most stark contrast with liberalism, is the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
I'm sure you're familiar with it, but in January 2015, two Islamist gunmen attacked a satirical newspaper in Paris for printing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad, along with various kinds of jokes.
They murdered 12 people over these cartoons and injured, I think it was 11 more.
And this was done solely because the satirists at Charlie Hebdo had decided to exercise their freedom of the press and freedom of expression to criticize Islam.
After the massacre, untold thousands of people took to the streets of Paris in order to show solidarity with those people who lost loved ones at Charlie Hebdo, and in order to show solidarity for Charlie Hebdo's freedom of speech.
And they used the phrase Jusui Charlie, or I am Charlie, to do it.
There were three groups of people who did not support Jusui Charlie.
And I'm not saying that objections from these groups were necessarily universal, and of course I'm sure these people absolutely deplored the attacks on Charlie Hebdo.
But prominent members of these groups all found themselves ranged together, speaking out in favour of censorship of the press.
These groups were Muslims, Catholics, and progressives, who rallied together under the hashtag Je nesui pas Chalie, which means I am not Charlie.
This made for very strange bedfellows, as Catholics, Muslims, and progressives disagree on almost every other issue.
As you might expect, progressives then took to their blogs and newspaper articles to tell everyone just why they were wrong for supporting the freedom of the press.
It was implied that Charlie Hebdo had brought this on themselves, and that the cartoons were hate speech, and that freedom of speech always has limits.
They argued that it was wrong to gratuitously wound the religious feelings of Muslims, and argued that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were most assuredly not a legitimate form of free expression.
And they justified this by pulling new definitions of the term freedom of expression out of their asses.
Claiming that the cartoons clearly fail the free speech test, as they had no real redeeming social, cultural, or artistic merit, and were obviously intended to offend and insult.
As such, they are not free speech, but are indeed hate speech, which should never be allowed in any civilized nation.
This was, of course, total horseshit, and I would advise progressives to just come to terms with the fact that you are not in favour of freedom of expression, instead of trying to, in an Orwellian fashion, redefine it to suit your terms.
Supporters of the Jeunes Sui Pas Charlie campaign used the following argument against free speech, proving that they either are completely in favour of redefining words to suit their agenda, or they have absolutely no idea what free speech means.
Charlie Hebdo's freedom of speech was never violated, because freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
So let's have a look at freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is the right to communicate one's opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship.
It includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas regardless of the medium used.
So yes, freedom of speech is actually freedom from political consequences of speaking one's mind.
And like everything else mentioned in this video, this is a core principle of liberalism that progressives are falling over themselves to abolish.
Take for example when France decided to censor Twitter.
Progressives were so openly and bafflingly in favour of censorship that Glenn Greenwald wrote an article not only decrying censorship, but asking with bemusement, why are journalists advocating for censorship?
Before getting to the merits of all this, I must say, I simply do not understand how someone who decides to become a journalist then devotes his energy to urging that the government be empowered to ban and criminalize certain ideas and imprison those who express them.
Of all the people who would want the state empowered to criminalise ideas, wouldn't you think that people who enter journalism would be the last ones advocating that?
And of course you would think that.
But that's the thing with authoritarians.
They always imagine they will be the ones calling the shots.
I've written many, many times about the odiousness and dangers of empowering the state to criminalise ideas, including the progressive version of that quest, especially in Europe and Canada, but also less so in the US.
But there is a glaring omission in Farrago's column that I do want to highlight, because it underscores one key point.
As always, it is overwhelming hubris and self-love that drives this desire for state suppression of ideas.
And he is completely correct.
It is the notion that the people trying to censor know better than everyone else and they can't possibly be wrong.
And in the case of progressives, it means anyone criticising their ideas is taking part in hate speech and harassment and must be stopped at all costs.
Take for instance a recent debate between the liberals Sam Harris and Bill Maher against the progressive Ben Affleck.
Harris and Ma both argued in favour of being able to criticise Islam, because it is a religion and an ideology, and bad ideas must be criticised.
Affleck got noticeably emotionally disturbed at the idea, and frankly, looked as though he was having a very emotional reaction to this, before attempting to shut down the conversation by declaring it racist and gross.
Affleck reacted furiously to claims by Ma that Islam manifested as the only religion that acts like the Mafia, which would fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.
As blunt as this is, as we can see from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, this is not a mischaracterisation of extremist Islam.
And you can't say that extremist Islam is not a part of Islam.
Affleck went on to say that it's like saying, oh you shifty Jew, your argument is, you know, black people, they shoot each other.
Of course, this is absolute nonsense.
Affleck doesn't even try to defend any of Islam's precepts in his apparent rebuttal of what they've said.
He's just gone to a collectivist position.
You're saying all Muslims are bad.
Well, they're not saying anything like that.
They're saying that Islam needs to be critiqued, if it can ever improve.
It is in no way a judgment on Muslims, but Affleck has attempted to obfuscate the terms of the discussion, and is attempting to win the debate without winning the argument, by using collectivist tactics, by saying that Harris and Ma are simply just prejudiced against all Muslims, as if they don't have any legitimate criticisms of Islam.
It's this kind of appeal to hate speech and harassment that is entirely behind the Christy Blatchford case, which is a Twitter harassment trial that could have enormous fallout for free speech, at least in Canada.
This is the first case in Canada where alleged criminal harassment via Twitter has gone to trial.
The accused is a man called Gregory Alan Elliott, as a graphic artist and father of four who lost his job shortly after the arrest, which was well publicised online, and if convicted could go to jail for six months.
So you can see that his employer already just presumed his guilt.
But the worst part about this case is that it's not even alleged that he sexually harassed or threatened them.
As far as I can tell, he's done nothing wrong.
The only thing that he is alleged to have done wrong is to disagree with the two young feminists and political activists.
Now the chances are this will be thrown out of court, but firstly it should never have got to court.
And secondly, a very interesting twist has entered this case.
A letter has been given to the judge anonymously, parts of which the judge read out aloud in court, by a person who claimed to be a former acquaintance of the three complainants and alleges that they conspired in my presence to fabricate a criminal harassments complaint against Elliot.
What these activists were doing is using anti-hate speech and anti-harassment laws against people who did nothing more than disagree with them, and as this column puts it, is charged essentially with being unpleasant.
And it is for such a trifle that these progressive activists will go out of their way to try and censor the man.
And despite the fact that we know that hate speech laws are rather easily abused, half of all Democrats in America support a ban on hate speech, which we already know is a phrase whose definition is very malleable and subject to change depending on who has the loudest voice in the conversation.
Thankfully, I'm not the only person who's noticed that censorship must be resisted wherever it's found, particularly at universities.
Recently, feminist Jermaine Greer joined an open letter to universities to stand against censorship, saying that you do not have to agree with the views that are being silenced to find these tactics illiberal and undemocratic.
Universities have a particular responsibility to resist this kind of bullying.
We call on universities and other organizations to stand up to attempts at intimidation and affirm their support for the basic principles of democratic political exchange.
However, universities have a much worse problem than censorship.
Universities have a problem with freedom of thought.
Freedom of thought is the freedom of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint or thought independent of others' viewpoints.
And universities have this problem because they have become so very progressive.
This bigotry against other forms of thought manifests itself in many ways, such as over bans that are mostly white, over statues and art that remind people of sexual assault, to comedians not being able to allow to perform because of the comedian's view on decriminalizing prostitution, to the point where many comedians won't perform at universities, and Jerry Seinfeld is speaking out against it.
And that's all just artistic expression.
God forbid you have to discuss something important at university.
Modern progressive students are demanding to have these things shut down because the very mention of these ideas can be triggering.
And instead of encountering and dealing with ideas and challenges that they might have to overcome, students instead are creating safe spaces for themselves at their universities.
These have been termed by the spectator as Stepford students, because today's students want the right to be comfortable.
The author was due to take part in a debate about abortion at Christchurch, Oxford, when a mob of furious feministic Oxford students threatened to shut down the debate that they claimed would threaten the mental safety of other students.
The college capitulated to the censors on the basis that the debate now raised security and welfare issues, effectively meaning that the students need to be guarded against any idea that may prick their souls or challenge their prejudices,
with one of the students actually boasting about her role in shutting down debate, wearing her intolerance like a badge of honor in an independent article where she argued that the idea that in a free society absolutely everything should be open to debate has a detrimental effect on marginalized groups, which, frankly, I find to be possibly the most terrifying thing I have ever read.
And I'm sure the first thing you noticed was that it was a collectivist reason.
The individual's right to freedom of speech and freedom of thought was irrelevant.
This is being justified using something called a no-platform policy, which as I understand it, is a standard policy for the National Union of Students, as far as I can tell, countrywide.
The no-platform policy is as simple as it is terrifying.
Number one, not to allow any individual who is known to hold prejudiced views to speak at union events.
Number two, not to allow any individual who is known to hold prejudiced views to distribute any written material or recorded material in the union which expresses those views.
Number three, unless individual already has a public platform, no elected officer of the union will speak on a platform with an individual who is known to hold prejudiced views.
I'm sure you can already see what the problem is here.
Who determines what views are prejudiced?
As we have seen, the no platform policy isn't simply being reserved for violent fascists.
It is being used to censor and silence debate.
And not even debate, just people as innocuous as comedians are being censored using this policy.
And I agree that no platform is always a bad idea, even for fascists.
Because the instant you accept that some views are too controversial to be publicly aired, you set in motion a censorious dynamic that is really hard to rein in.
As soon as you decide something is worth censoring, then potentially anything can be worth censoring.
But I think there's an even worse point to this.
It's that bad ideas need to be challenged.
Because if they go unchallenged, they fester and become malignant.
And they pass from one easily influenced mind to the next without anyone calling them out.
Which is exactly what has happened to progressivism in universities.
So, my dear liberals, if you ever have the chance to publicly debate a progressive, bring them to the table.
We must make their views aired.
This is why the conservative religious right in America had lost the debate.
They thought they could bring their ideas to the table and win on the merits of their ideas, and they were wrong.
People like Dawkins and Hitchens destroyed them.
This is what you as a liberal have to do.
And I think that this is why progressives avoid debate.
And at the end of all of these arguments, if my words haven't swayed you in one bit, I will happily cede the floor to the late, great Christopher Hitchens.
This is why censorship is wrong.
I'll be very daring and summarise all three of these great gentlemen of the great tradition of especially English liberty in one go.
What they say is, it's not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard.
It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen and to hear.
And every time you silence somebody, you make yourself a prisoner of your own action because you deny yourself the right to hear something.
In other words, your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.
Indeed, as John Stuart Mill said, if all in society were agreed on the truth and beauty and value of one proposition, all except one person, it would be most important.
In fact, it would become even more important that that one heretic be heard because we would still benefit from his perhaps outrageous or appalling view.
And make no mistake, it is progressivism that is behind the lack of free speech and free ideas on university campuses.
And it very much is the left that is trying to shut down free speech.
It's trying to end debate.
As the spectator points out here, from Islam in Israel to global warming and gay marriage, progressivism has become the sickness in the left.
Let me show you on a political compass what I mean.
And yes, this will be very rough and ready.
I'm not going to go into too much detail.
So in the top right quadrant, you've got your religious conservatives.
And the further right and further up you get, the more extreme the elements become, until you reach the very authoritarian and very right-wing neocons of the Bush administration.
In the bottom right, you've got people like Ron Paul and the Tea Party, until you go far enough down and to the right, until you reach the anarcho-capitalists and anti-statists in, well, in every way.
But we're not dealing with these people at all.
What we're dealing with is entirely left-wing.
In the top left corner, we have the progressives.
And the further left and the further up you go on this scale, you eventually reach communism and fascism.
And finally, is the bottom left, where the actual liberals are, along with people like Noam Chomsky.
These are people who are individualistic and yet still concerned about society at large.
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, the aim of classical liberalism was to make the poor richer, not the rich poorer.
And the thing is, this isn't a million miles away from what the progressives are trying to achieve.
I don't think they have any compunction in making the rich poorer, but they certainly do want to improve the lot of the poor.
And so this is why I think the left in general gets termed liberal, but this is really inaccurate terminology.
Because the difference between them is as clear as night and day.
As we've seen all throughout this video, the difference is collectivism versus individualism.
It's not necessarily the ends, it's more about the means.
Which is why you end up in a progressive outlet like Vox with an article entitled, I'm a Liberal Professor and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.
Because as I'm sure you've worked out, he's not talking about liberal students.
He's talking about progressive students.
In the article, the teacher tells us about the prevailing groupthink amongst the students.
As mentioned earlier, their desire not to be upset.
And he's actually actively modified his classroom materials to suit them.
Because if he doesn't, they go and take action against him.
And it's this kind of attitude towards groupthink and defense and ideas that some people might not like that has yours truly on a tool called Free Reddit Check as a potentially offensive term.
Because apparently now liberals traffic in dangerous ideas.
While we're on the subject of universities, let's talk about political freedom, although this doesn't just apply to universities.
Political freedom has been described as a relationship free of oppression or coercion, the absence of disabling conditions for an individual and the fulfilment of enabling conditions, or the absence of life conditions of compulsion, e.g. economic compulsion, in a society.
Although political freedom is often interpreted negatively as a freedom from unreasonable external constraints on action, it can also refer to the positive exercise of rights, capacities and possibilities for action, and the exercise of social or group rights.
The concept can also include freedom from internal constraints on political action or speech, e.g. social conformity, consistency or inauthentic behaviour.
The concept of political freedom is closely connected with the concepts of civil liberties and human rights, which in democratic societies are usually afforded legal protection from the state.
As you may have guessed, universities restricting people's freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of thought leads to a very, very narrow range of political beliefs on university campuses.
Even as far back as 2005, 72% of those teaching at American universities consider themselves liberal, meaning left-wing, whereas 15% were conservative and right-wing.
And this was 10 years ago.
As with the anonymous professor who wrote in Vox, there are many conservative professors who find themselves bullied by their own students.
For no other reason than holding the wrong political views.
And don't think for a second this doesn't apply to other students.
They of course can be guilty of wrongthink as well.
And the thing is, it's not just the students.
Although this article says liberal professors, this is very clearly progressive professors who admit they'd discriminate against conservatives in hiring and advancement.
This is a peer-reviewed study that says this.
Where these progressive professors would simply agree that yes, they would openly discriminate against conservative colleagues, which is such a blatant violation of the principle of political freedom that I refuse to believe these professors were at all liberal.
And so it is being noticed, especially in very progressive countries like Canada, that conservatives in universities are very much marginalised.
They are very much the minority.
But nobody cares because, frankly, progressives have decided that right-wing values and ideals are not only wrong, they are immoral, and only immoral people hold them.
And so the term right-wing has become similar to the term racist and misogynist.
It has become a pejorative with which to dismiss a person's entire argument without addressing it.
Don't get me wrong, there are conservatives in academia who claim that it's not as bad as all that, but I rather think it depends on where you teach.
I suspect a university in Texas is probably a lot more accepting of conservatives than, say, a university in Canada.
But it doesn't alter the point that such extreme political bigotry is not liberal.
And finally, this brings us to democracy.
The very method by which political freedom is attained, and by which the individual can assert some form of control over the state.
Of course, progressives are questioning this as well.
Now, I'm not saying that democracy shouldn't be questioned.
It absolutely should.
But I don't think that it should just be done away with because it's not progressive.
And again, like all things progressive, this idea comes from collectivist roots.
They look at the results, what everyone has voted on and decided, and find that the results are very rarely as progressive as they would like.
Which of course leads them to question, well, maybe democracy isn't good for progressives.
Thankfully, this is a meme that is in its infancy, and I couldn't really find very much information on it.
But it does seem to be an idea that progressives are tentatively floating in progressive circles to see how it will be received, and I've not seen a great deal of pushback against it yet.
So I'm not saying that anything will come of this or anything like that, but just be aware that there are progressive arguments against democracy.
And like I said at the beginning of this section, democracy is how the individual exerts their will on the state, which is why it is such a fundamental principle of liberalism.
Don't get me wrong, if a method for political organization came along that emphasized individual rights over the state even more, I'm sure liberals would adopt it.
But frankly, I can't imagine what that would look like.
As I said at the beginning of this video, almost every liberal principle is under attack.
The very concept of individualism, personal liberty, equality of opportunity, rule of law, economic freedom, free markets, laissez-faire trading, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, political freedom, and even democracy are being fundamentally threatened by this hyper-collectivist, hyper-authoritarian, anti-liberal,
progressive ideology.
And the worst part about it is that they have used liberalism as a Trojan horse.
They have come along and said, hey, yeah, we're liberal.
We're liberal and progressive.
We're left-wing, we're just like you, we want the same things, we're just like you.
And they're not.
Their goals might be the same, but their methods are so utterly illiberal that they are alien to the liberal frame of mind.
And why?
What are their reasons?
All of them boil down to we prefer it this way.
Well, you know what?
That's not a good enough reason.
That is not a good enough reason to violate almost every principle I hold sacred.
If that's the way you prefer it, the answer is no.
And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
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