Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Kindly Inquisitors

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June 3, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:26:19

Kindly Inquisitors

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	Hey folks, sorry that this is the third attempt of me putting this video up, but I didn't know what the problem of the audio was.
	And one of my kind subscribers fixed it for me and then sent it over.
	And so hopefully the audio will be fine now.
	And also this is the last day that you can get tickets for my show in Manhattan tomorrow.
	It's going to be very good.
	For guests I have Tim Poole and Carlos Alasraki, the co-host of the Progressive Stephanie Miller podcast.
	So that should be an interesting discussion that we're going to have.
	Anyway, the link will be in the description, and I'll see you all tomorrow.
	Okay, so on your chairs, drink okay.
	Not going to work.
	Fuck you.
	No, I'm not evacuated.
	No one's evacuating.
	I want the... I want the... I want the... I want the...
	I'm going to obey the law and evacuate.
	Short of that, I'm not evacuating.
	Okay, listen up.
	This is important.
	We are going to leave until this is cleared because we're law-abiding citizens, unlike the people who did this.
	And we're going to come back the moment Sergeant Willie tells us to come clear and we're going to continue our conversation.
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah, everybody hear me.
	So when you don't have an argument against something, you pull the fire alarm.
	It doesn't even rise to intellectual cowardice.
	Okay.
	So hopefully in that hiatus, not only did folks get a little exercise, but you had a chance to look at the page 26 of a progressive style guide, which will be shaping our discussion tonight.
	So I'm going to turn to Sargon and ask him what observations do you have about page 26 of a progressive style guide?
	We're not trying.
	Is mine working?
	No.
	It's not working.
	It's a lot longer.
	Testing, testing?
	Hear me?
	Ah, we have something.
	Okay, I will actually find page 26 of the progressive style guide.
	Did everybody have a chance to see it?
	I wasn't prepared for homework either, okay?
	So, you know.
	It's not there, isn't it?
	Hero Herr.
	I have it.
	There we go.
	Right.
	Yeah, so I'm sure some of the more eagle-eyed amongst you have spotted some remarkable terms to be avoided by decolonization activists.
	This is genuinely an incredible thing that I never thought I would ever see written down because most of the time most of the people who want to protect this don't have systems of writing yet.
	Folklore.
	Folklore, magic, myth, and sorcery, as well as superstitions, you're not allowed to use those terms if they're being used to describe a belief system as being less valid.
	That's literally protecting superstition in the name of tolerance and progress.
	Isn't that amazing?
	So what's fascinating about that is, if you look at that and if you have that in front of you, if used to describe a belief system as less valid, well, guess what?
	Some belief systems are less valid than other belief systems.
	And to think otherwise is not only wrong, but you're trapping those people who hold those beliefs in a delusion, a perpetual delusion.
	Well, it's even worse than that, isn't it?
	If I can't describe someone else's belief system as less valid, then surely that must mean I believe that belief system.
	That's right.
	Because otherwise, if I can't say it's not valid, then what's my argument against it?
	And I mean, we'll go into how much worse it gets, actually.
	So I think that the mistake is for people to think that this, and maybe I'm wrong about this, I don't know, but the mistake is for people to think that this applies to people who happen to have dark skin who are trapped in dangerous beliefs,
	but none other than our own Rick Perry, the man who wanted Texas residents to pray for Rain, who's now in the Trump administration, of course, where we couldn't think of a possible better place for him.
	Rick Perry wants people to pray for RAIN, but that is a superstition.
	There's no evidence of it.
	There's no evidence.
	So it's fascinating to me that the confusion here is between an immutable characteristic of a person, skin color, or broadly considered race, or height, or ability status.
	Those are immutable characteristics of people.
	Those are not belief systems.
	You can change belief systems.
	You can go in and out, and people do all the time, in and out of belief systems.
	And this is extending that umbrella of tolerance or protection or what have you from people, from their immutable characteristics to ideas.
	And it's basically asking you to not call out a superstition for what it is, a superstition, or magic, or sorcery.
	Yeah, that's completely correct.
	And I mean, they even say in the introduction why they do this.
	And this is pretty incredible, really, when you actually think about the motivations behind doing this.
	So they begin by saying language is a key ingredient in a winning theory of change.
	Language can build bridges and change minds.
	By acknowledging the ability of language to shape and reflect reality, progressive campaigns can become more powerful vehicles for social change, inclusion, and justice.
	Now, that is a demonstration that they're using a postmodern lens, because they're not trying to establish truth or falsity or anything like that.
	They're on my end.
	Ah, maybe it's something on my end.
	I'll try not to move.
	But they're using this as a strategy.
	Now, the only people who need to engage in strategies against other people are people who are trying to win them, win them over to something, trying effectively to conquer them in some way.
	That's pretty bloody immoral, in my opinion, because the people that are being assaulted with these kind of language games have no idea that a war has been waged against them.
	They have no idea that the very basis of their thought patterns, the words they're going to use, are going to be under assault and try to have these terms manipulated in order to change their mind.
	Because as they say, it's got the ability of language to shape and reflect reality.
	Everything is about perception.
	So you've got to kind of ignore the idea that there is an objective reality and assume that everything that is is perceived by a human being and that's the only way we can understand it.
	And that's why they're concerned with effectively creating new speech.
	Because I mean, if you actually look at the list itself, I mean, it could not be more Orwellian.
	It's about a third of the original list of words you're not allowed to use have been replaced with new politically sanitized language.
	That's absolutely no different to what Orwell described in 1984.
	Yeah.
	And the idea that we need to protect people's ideas from criticism, well, not only does that, is that the opposite or antithetical to what a university should be, but we need to teach people how to have conversations with people and all ideas have to be on the table.
	And as long as you're criticizing an idea and not a mutable property of a person like skin color, for these folks to come in and change the language, that's just insidious.
	There's a certain nastiness to that.
	That's why we term this after the Jonathan Rausch book, Kindly Inquisitors.
	And that's part of the kindly book written in 92, 93 that's incredibly prescient today.
	But I want to use this concept of not attacking ideas or not enabling ideas to be subject to criticism to the other sheet that you have.
	And I want to talk about something that's on college campuses today, approximately 200 college campuses.
	Bias response teams.
	Can I quick show of hands?
	Who's heard of the bias response team?
	Okay.
	Who's ever come into contact with a biased response team?
	A few.
	Only a few.
	Only a couple, right?
	Okay.
	Okay.
	It's interesting.
	So bias response teams, and this is from Portland State University.
	If you Google Portland State University bias response team, this will come up immediately.
	Bias, what is bias?
	Bias is a state of mind.
	Now, biased response teams, you can be reported, and those reports go to our friends at the campus police department here who've truly been wonderful in my past events, and I'm very grateful for that.
	Bias response teams, you can report incidents anonymously to the bias response team, and then those are subject to investigation where you can be removed from the university, you can be thrown out.
	But let's take a look at what their definition of bias is.
	Bias is a state of mind.
	Wow, that's not even language, that's thought police.
	Oh, yeah.
	It's a state of mind.
	Well, before we go on, the thought policing aspect, that's what the language control is about.
	It's about eventually controlling exactly as the party wanted to do in 1984.
	I hate to keep coming back to this example because it feels hackney to do it, but they are literally saying you can't use certain words.
	And the reason they do that is so you can't properly express certain concepts.
	So they are literally coming for your thoughts.
	That's what they want.
	There's no end to where they're going to try and get.
	And that gets reported to the police department here.
	Those reports are then logged.
	It's a tendency or inclination that impacts our behaviors and perceptions of others either positively or negatively.
	So let's take a look.
	Now remember the theme from a progressive style guide.
	Look at the theme here.
	So covered under this, let's see, protected class, including but not limited to race, okay, color, religious ideology,
	religious ideology, national origin, it's immutable, veteran status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual expression, physical or mental ability, or, and get this, political affiliation.
	That's pretty incredible, isn't it?
	Political affiliation.
	So basically what we're saying is, who's going to volunteer to be the Nazi?
	Because they are obligated by their own rules to protect you because of your political affiliation.
	And if people say that I don't like Nazis, you can get those people in trouble.
	This is Portland State University has actually protected Nazis.
	So good job, Portland.
	Can we give them a round of applause for that?
	So let's take, we don't need to talk about ISIS and starting people's heads off with Biden's eyes or anything crazy.
	Let's just talk about a mainstream example of a young person, 18 to, say, 18 years old.
	They're raised as an evangelical in the South.
	They come to Portland State University and they have very strong beliefs that for whatever reason they don't want gays to be married.
	A position that I've spoken out.
	I'm absolutely adamantly for gay marriage.
	Yeah, of course.
	Yeah, okay.
	How is this person going to challenge or question their beliefs if that falls under religious ideology and can be subject to the bias response team?
	Well, they can't.
	And do they not think that it's pernicious to allow the propagation of these ideas that are going to be eventually against their, I mean, against their own ideology.
	I mean, imagine if the entire university became rapidly Catholic and were strongly against gay rights and gay marriage.
	I'm not trying to judge all Catholics with the same title on the same person.
	Our host is Catholic here.
	But whichever ideology it would propagate and you wouldn't be able to address it.
	And this would be by design.
	And it would be because of extreme left tolerance.
	But I think there are a lot of things on that, just that paragraph there that really I find absolutely fascinating.
	So they say, was it?
	Yeah.
	So the bias is a state of mind tendency or inclination that impacts our behaviors and perceptions of others, either positively or negatively, based on preconceived notions.
	How could you function in reality without a preconceived notion of something?
	Surely everything you do all day, every day, when you're discriminating about which car to get into, you have a preconceived notion about what's going on.
	What do you want for breakfast?
	Exactly.
	You know, who do you say hello to in the hallway?
	You know, there is just no end to this.
	So you're asking people to suspend judgments about, and we can bracket the rest of the immutable characteristics, and we can have a conversation about that.
	But I think it's productive now to target this idea that we cannot target people's ideas.
	I mean, I can't speak for the U.K., obviously, but in this country, our most protected right is free speech.
	Our most coveted...
	Okay, so when you when you tell somebody when you tell somebody for Okay, we'll go out for drinks and shout that afterwards So when you tell people that in a university setting there are certain ideas that are off limits, that's a problem.
	Yes.
	And part of the problem is that it not only does it trap people in ways of being, but it's not what a university is about.
	We need to debate.
	We need to challenge.
	We need to argue.
	We need to explore.
	And something really ugly is happening on our campuses right now when we conflate or confuse race and idea.
	Your race is not your idea.
	Your religion is not your race.
	These are separate entities.
	And if you don't think that, then you're firmly in the camp of the ethno-nationalists who think that race and culture and ideas are just directly linked to one another.
	You know, your ideas, your beliefs are a genetic expression of your person, which I don't think is true.
	I'm sure you don't think it's true.
	It's preposterous.
	Exactly.
	It's ridiculous.
	And yet, this is effectively what they're codifying.
	And it gets worse as well, in my opinion.
	So they say that this can be directed toward an attitude, an individual or a group.
	It's like, I can't have a preconceived notion about an individual now.
	What if I know that person?
	I mean, it's such a ridiculously broad spectrum that can be captured.
	So the other thing is anything that somebody says is their religion is thus protected.
	Yes.
	So political.
	Yeah, I mean, so what do we do?
	Someone thinks that Jesus walked on water or they're talking snakes or something, and I start questioning that, and now that's subject to the biased response team.
	It could be.
	If they report it.
	Or it even says if a third party witnesses it as well.
	That's right.
	So you can be, that's the other thing.
	You can be offended by proxy.
	Yes.
	So even if somebody isn't offended, and I've had that happen.
	Don't laugh.
	We literally have that codified into our hate speech laws in the UK.
	It's as if my country is being controlled by biased response teams.
	Bloody don't have a license for that, do you?
	Where's your shouting out license?
	We are literally going to need a permit soon.
	I'm not joking.
	My country is going down the tubes.
	We're a warning, not an example.
	So part of the problem is that I would sincerely like to have a conversation, like a sincere conversation with people.
	I want to know why someone could possibly think that this is a good idea.
	I want to know why someone would think that not calling sorcery sorcery or protecting the practices of the Dobu in Papua New Guinea in terms of verbal assessment or analysis.
	I would like to know why someone thinks that's a good idea.
	And I'm being very sincere because if there's something that I'm not seeing, I really would like to know what it is.
	But the problem is that now I'm not allowed to ask people to have these conversations because as one of my colleagues says, that itself, my other colleague didn't want to join us tonight because he said that challenging or questioning the biased response team is itself a type of bias and can get you reported.
	But that's an amazing Kafka trap, isn't it?
	It is this, or we're not, you know, you can't get out of it.
	You can't even criticize us.
	But they've got you locked down in that regard.
	And when, in full disclosure, and I asked him if it was okay if I could say this beforehand, he said, why don't you get a couple of people from where we think this problem is emanating and we'll challenge them to a debate?
	I think I can say that that was the gender studies.
	I wasn't going to say it, but okay, now it's not.
	You'll notice that the stage is lacking anyone with pink hair.
	And the problem with that is, not a debate.
	I invited, it's not punching down.
	I'm not asking a random person here.
	Punching up.
	They control these universities.
	And I've asked them at the DeMore event to come.
	They didn't come.
	We asked them at the James Lindsay Helen Pluckrose event to come.
	They didn't come.
	And one of my lawyers told me, that's the plight of being me in this age.
	My lawyers are everywhere.
	One of my lawyers told me that if I ask again, that's not only is it subject to a biased response team, but it could be a Title IX violation for persistent harassment.
	So I'm trying to figure out, and I'm a sincere inquirer, I'm genuinely trying to find out why we want to protect people from certain ideas.
	And I'm being very sincere talking about that.
	He comes to me and he says, we're two white dudes up here.
	Let's invite some people to debate.
	I'm like, I can't, they'll throw me out.
	Title IX violation.
	I didn't want to get in trouble, obviously.
	So yeah, I can't believe that not one person on the gender studies faculty has the stones to just come up here and explain to us why we're wrong.
	I mean, this is their job.
	This is their entire career.
	I mean, if exactly, if we went to the science department and said, hi, right, we're a bit unsure about the validity of physics.
	Could you come and debate us on that?
	I think they might take that up.
	You know, they're going to be like, well, it's going to be an easy afternoon for me.
	But the gender studies folks won't come near us.
	Yeah, all disciplines infected by postmodernism suffer from this same malady.
	And now that more and more people are talking about this, the pressure I think is becoming on.
	But I think part of the problem is that there's a if you genuinely believe that engaging ideas is somehow a form of cognitive or psychological violence against people, then of course you won't want to have a conversation or debate with somebody.
	Because you'll think that you're engaging in a form of psychological violence.
	My own take, and I could be wrong about this, and I don't want to throw water in anybody's parade, I think they've won the culture war.
	I think they've won the culture war.
	No, no, they've won the war for the institutions.
	The culture war is right here.
	I think they have won.
	Let me rephrase that.
	They've conquered the institutions.
	They've conquered the academic institutions.
	The far left has conquered the academics.
	I mean, think of how crazy ironic it is at Culture War 2.0 that, as the young woman said in the beginning, I don't know where she went, two vocal atheist classical liberals are put on by the college Republicans.
	I mean, let that percolate for a second.
	That's crazy.
	Ten years ago, they were our primary enemies.
	Yes.
	You know, we were watching Christopher Hitchens go at these sorts of, not quite that bad, but we were watching from the other side of the sort of left-wing atheist debate.
	And now these are our allies.
	That's absolutely correct.
	That's about the progress the far left has made.
	I mean, and you were saying, like, what kind of person thinks that criticizing someone's ideas is a kind of cognitive attack on them?
	Well, the sort of people who literally think that language controls reality and therefore they should control language.
	And thank you.
	But that's literally what they think.
	And they're not going to tell you.
	I mean, you don't find this stuff emblazoned on the boards around.
	You find it somewhere on their servers, you know, in the gender studies departments, where you're never going to find it.
	And slowly but surely, they institutionalize this sort of language policing, these behavioral policings, and eventually you will find yourself trapped in a system that you have no power over, and they have total power over you.
	It's just a matter of time until the biased response team gets you.
	Absolutely.
	And here's the other thing that's just so vicious about this.
	So not only, this isn't a bug of the system.
	This isn't like some accident.
	You know, it's like, I don't know if you've ever seen those signs that says, I saw a sign a few years ago, it said, you know, no deer crossing and had D E A R in it, a picture of a moose.
	That's just an accident.
	That's just a weird thing.
	This is a feature.
	Protecting people from ideas is a feature of the system.
	And I think it's time to say no more.
	We've had enough.
	We're not going to bow to you.
	We're not going to be intellectual cowards.
	I think it's time that we have to start standing up to these people en masse because they are literally crushing a generation of people by telling them to suspend To suspend judgments about ideas.
	And if you want any hope of reason or rationality or enlightenment or whatever it is, fair right, equal, whatever your position is, you can't be pulling the fire alarm.
	You have to be engaging people in a sincere intellectual discussion and marshalling your evidence and talking to people.
	They're pulling the fire.
	We're still back talking.
	What did that do?
	It proved that you're an intellectual child.
	So don't do stuff like that.
	That's going to offend the sky god.
	I can see the reason for the bias response themes.
	Oh, that's the thing.
	You can't check, and one of the officers can correct me if I'm wrong.
	You can't check to see how many reports have been filed against you.
	Oh, yeah, it's done anonymously as well.
	So you don't even get to face your accuser.
	Title IX, you cannot face your accuser.
	If you can't face your accuser, then, I mean, how can you know whether what they're saying is even true?
	How can anyone know?
	It's going to be their word against your denial.
	But it's not like you're going to be able to, maybe if you're lucky, but it's a dangerous precedent set.
	And it goes completely against the idea of English common law on which our society is built as English speakers.
	We are supposed to face our accusers, mano-mano, effectively.
	It's not constitutional.
	It probably is.
	I'm not.
	Yeah, I was thinking that that question of the constitutionality would come up, and I'm not qualified as an attorney.
	There was a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal.
	If you Google bias response teams, it comes up, and FHIR, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, has a piece on it.
	And then the National Review has a piece on it.
	And you can read all of those about, and people do make those claims, but I'm not comfortable speaking about the constitutionality because I'm simply not a constitutional lawyer, so I'll let the constitutional lawyers decide that.
	Yeah, I don't know anything about that.
	And he certainly isn't.
	No.
	God forbid we have a written constitution.
	It's pretty incredible the way they describe the expression of bias as well.
	Bias against others can be expressed and perceived in many ways.
	It can be subtle or blatant and can include physical, spoken, or written acts of abuse.
	Okay.
	Insensitivity.
	How can I know that you believe in some crazy sky god to be sensitive about it unless I can speak to you about that problem?
	And if I really don't think I can speak to you about your belief in a storm god or whatever it is without criticizing that belief.
	So I'm probably in trouble there.
	But the next one is lack of awareness.
	So just not knowing is a bias incident.
	I mean, is there anything left outside of what is a bias incident?
	That would probably be a shorter list.
	It gets better.
	I mean, you go through a few things that you'd expect.
	Violence, harassment, intimidation, extortion, fine.
	Use of vulgarity, impolite society, fine.
	Cursing.
	Making remarks.
	I have a commentary on the thing you're doing.
	I'm afraid that's an incident of bias, sir.
	Or any other behavior that belittles, restricts, or alienates others based on preconceived notions.
	And again, they have to know the inside of your head.
	It has to all be assumed that you thought a certain thing for them to get you.
	It's insane.
	It's totally unprovable.
	And it's this idea that you want to regulate the behavior of others.
	You familiar with that story of the gender studies professor who's in the elevator?
	His gender studies professor was in the elevator, and they went to the wrong floor, and a guy made a joke about, oh, evidently has an old pedigree.
	I never heard the joke before about the lingerie.
	I never heard it before.
	But evidently, it's kind of like a thing.
	Well, instead of this individual saying, hey, you know, that's just a dicker thing to do.
	Please don't do that.
	It's, you know, it's not cool.
	And then they could have talked it out.
	What does she do?
	She attempts to adjudicate that through, she writes letters, she wants to get the guy fired, she's demanding apology.
	And good for the guy for not apologizing.
	I'm going to apologize to her for two seconds.
	You know, if I've done something wrong and I think that it's, you know, if I've sincerely thought about it, then I will apologize.
	I think we should.
	But this idea that we are incapable of then having, say, look, you said something, it was a really uncool thing to say.
	We can have that conversation.
	You don't need to write to the chair of the department.
	You don't need to call the bias response team.
	That's what adults do.
	Adults have conversations and that we don't use the expression man up anymore, but we person up, you know, we should We should be able to have those conversations with people and without fear of retribution or without fear that some some entity that's been the thing is that this is institutionalized And once something is institutionalized, it's very difficult to get it out.
	Yeah, I mean, this isn't just them saying we've really appreciated if you would not have any preconceived notions about people, despite the fact that, I mean, often people of a certain faith, like Sikhs, wear turbans.
	That's designed to give you a preconceived notion.
	It's a way of signaling to you.
	I am a Sikh, like a Jewish person with, I can't remember the name of the stalker.
	Yameka.
	These are ways of signaling to people that your preconceived notions have some validity about me.
	You know something about me by just looking at me.
	And I did that deliberately.
	It's really interesting because if there are instances, and I'm positive there are instances of discrimination, racial discrimination, we need to talk about that.
	And that's not cool.
	And if somebody does that, we need to call them out on it.
	But the way to do that is this is not the way to do that.
	You're trying to do something else.
	I just throw a quick...
	That's a bias against racism.
	Well, yeah, I am biased against racism.
	So I guess I can be reported for that.
	I don't know.
	Bias response.
	So I'll just share.
	I'm kind of in a sharing mood and I haven't even had any drinks tonight.
	But I was at the grocery store the other day with my daughter.
	And I get very sensitive when I talk about it.
	My daughter's adopted from China and she's 12.
	And the guy at the cashier had, you know, my family.
	The guy at the cashier had obviously been there for a long day.
	And he said something to her like, oh, you know, aren't you, you know, are you from Japan or something?
	I don't know why he said that.
	And, you know, my first thought was not, oh, what a racist, horrible, heinous person.
	You know, my thought was like, here's a guy, he's trying to be kind.
	You know, he's trying to be a decent person as a young girl, and that's in his worldview.
	And I talked about it afterward with my daughter, and fortunately, she has the psychological resilience.
	She wasn't traumatized by, I mean, my, where are my, where are my friends from China here?
	Where are my friends from China?
	All my friends, raise my Chinese friends, all these people, raise your hand, my Chinese friends.
	Hey!
	These are my friends from China.
	They actually do live in my house right now.
	It's astonished.
	It'd be that one woman there, her husband's a famous policeman from China.
	It's my friends from China.
	And we can't automatically assume that somebody has grotesque and malintent if they say something that rubs us the wrong way.
	We can't become so brittle that we have to rely upon an outside institution to adjudicate that dispute for us.
	If we can't do that, how are we going to catch the sinners?
	Because, I mean, what they're doing here is effectively trying to create a kind of progressive version of Sharia law.
	They want to police every aspect of your behavior to make sure it's within the orthodoxy.
	And the bias response teams are basically the progressive version of the police of vice and virtue.
	It's what they're doing.
	And what it does is it makes us lesser people.
	It makes you dependent.
	It makes us lesser people because then we think that we can't talk to somebody if there's an issue, that we have to automatically escalate it up top.
	If someone does something, look, this is not complicated.
	If somebody does something and you feel they shouldn't have said it or whatever, say, hey, you know, you said that and it was, you know, hurt my feelings or whatever.
	And then they can say anything to you.
	But that's how we behave in a civilized society.
	And to try to institutionalize that from on high to make rules, you can't govern crazy beliefs.
	There are some people who are always going to be racist.
	Like, you can't legislate that out.
	But what you can do is you can create academic environments where people talk to each other, where they're not petrified.
	You know, like I have this thing in my science and pseudoscience class where I used to examine the question, did Native Americans live in harmony with the land?
	But I can't include that anymore because Native Americans are a protected class.
	So I can't include this idea, like all of these issues and these topics are now off the table.
	And I think that we lose something fundamental in not having those conversations, in addition to just becoming brittle because we don't hear ideas that contradict our own.
	So we're trapped.
	we're trapped when we don't have dialogue.
	And I'm- It's true.
	And it's entirely to their advantage.
	I mean, they've done everything they can to restrict your ability to have dialogue.
	They've said that you can't have preconceived notions about people.
	You can't express this as bias, which everyone does all the time about everything.
	And they've even gone as far as to determine a bunch of words you can and can't use.
	I mean, could they, I mean, what are they missing?
	What step is there left for them to control?
	Automatic expulsion from the university.
	Look, so here's my take, and I'm not saying this has to be your take or your take, but there are words on there.
	I didn't know what some of those words meant.
	If someone tells you, hey, look, you know, don't call me Native American, call me, I mean, that's fine, I'm cool with that.
	But if someone's running around casting spells and they say, hey, you know, this is my belief, or if they believe in the Muhammad flew to heaven on a wing, whatever they're believing, who am I not to call those beliefs off?
	Especially in my capacity as a professor.
	Who am I?
	By what authority do I suspend my judgments about those things?
	But how does your science explain how the shaman calls the lightning?
	That's still my favorite video of all time.
	But you're not, you're not addressing that would be a bias.
	You would be in trouble.
	You would have to deal with the biased response team.
	They would want restorative justice for you claiming that science couldn't be.
	Yeah, and that's almost always retributive.
	In other words, they even use the language of victim, punisher, accuser.
	It's a very punishing kind of a way instead of a, I mean, even talking about this, we have so many things to talk about.
	I was at the gym yesterday, and I was watching this video.
	Evidently, somebody called Trump's wife a C-word or something.
	I'm thinking, like, are you kidding me?
	There's like the oceans are dying, Scott Pruitt is in office, the refugees are, we have all these problems, and this is what CNN chooses to focus on.
	Like, I would love to be fake news.
	Yeah, I would love to be talking to Carl about a whole host of issues, but this is something that has just taken over.
	Millions of students are governed by this right now.
	And our educational system is in jeopardy.
	Professors don't want to talk about it.
	I know that my union is against that.
	I don't know if anybody will speak publicly against it.
	And I think that this is something, and I'm inspired by what you said.
	You know, they may have taken over the institutions temporarily, but you are the hope that we can change this stuff.
	I mean, you really, the question is, how does it change?
	Because once these things become institutionalized, they're very difficult to remove.
	Honestly, it would have to be something like civil disobedience.
	Essentially, yeah, you guys kind of are revolutionaries for being here because if you want all of this nonsense taken out of your institutions, you're going against the status quo now.
	So they're going to use all the power at their disposal to maintain their position.
	And you can get all of this information from their own literature.
	What did they call it?
	What was the term?
	The hegemony of white privilege or something.
	Oh, Robin DiAngel's white fragility.
	There was just a big billboard in Portland.
	Andy No tweeted out that, yeah, they've constructed their own literature about this.
	I don't know.
	Thinking about what the solution to this is, I really don't know.
	I wish I could come in here and offer some great solutions.
	The only things that I've come up with is we have to get the people who pay tuition to be aware of this stuff.
	They need to know the sorts of things that their children are being taught.
	And this is absolutely not a Portland state issue.
	This is a university-wide issue, public and private.
	It's at University of Utah.
	It's at Eugene.
	It's at Reed College.
	It's everywhere.
	It's a ubiquitous problem that needs to be addressed.
	So we need to get the people who pay tuition to be aware of this.
	We need to encourage professors to speak up and say, I've had enough.
	I'm not dealing with this anymore.
	I'm not going to bow.
	I know I'm not a racist, and I'm sick of you calling me a racist or a bigot or a homophobe, and I'm not going to deal with it anymore.
	That has no weight on me.
	And until people start doing that, until we have enough threshold, a tipping point of doing that, I don't see this problem going away.
	Well, I don't think it's going to.
	I mean, they've got their claws in, and they're going to do everything they can to maintain what they are.
	I mean, you're absolutely right.
	Accusation of bigotry from a social justice type holds absolutely no weight at all.
	I mean, it's just ridiculous.
	That's the natural, and this is another thing about the use of language.
	You'll notice how they never come out with a moderate statement, do they?
	Everything is the most extreme thing.
	You're a Nazi.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	Okay, where do you go from there?
	Brett Weinstein, you're a Nazi.
	A Jewish person, you're a Nazi.
	Where do you go from there?
	You know, it's got diminishing returns.
	Every time you call a small Jewish man a Nazi, another dissenter is born and the bias team has more problems on its hands.
	Ben Shapiro, you're a Nazi.
	It's ridiculous.
	And Dave Rubin, you're a Nazi.
	I guess, Jude, that's a big thing about Jews now.
	They're into being Nazis.
	I'd really love to criticize the Jews who are joining the National Socialist Party, but I can't because it's a bias issue.
	So...
	But seriously, though, getting it on the table that you want to remove this stuff is going to be the hardest thing.
	Once it's on the table, you will actually be able to use sort of popular support against this, but it will actually require student agitators, people who can organize and people who will keep the pressure on the administration to actually change.
	You've got to understand the people who put this stuff into place, they're true believers.
	They think this is the only just way that a society can be run.
	And if you think differently, then it's because of your biases.
	There's no getting away from it.
	And so it's honestly, it's going to be a tough thing.
	It's not going to be an easy mission getting this stuff out.
	And you've got to be committed.
	But since so many of you came here, I'm guessing you are.
	How many people are students at the university, by the way?
	Oh, wow.
	Holy moly.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Great.
	That's what about two-thirds of the audience.
	Wow.
	That was awesome.
	So here's what I'm thinking.
	A lot of people came out to see you tonight.
	So I'm thinking that, and we were a little delayed because of the immature behavior of someone.
	Why don't we open it up to questions?
	Sure.
	And why don't we form a line with somebody holding their Phillip will hold the mic.
	And here's what I'd ask for your questions, please.
	For your questions, no live stories.
	Simple question.
	And Carl would like to get to as many questions as you can.
	If you could please say your name before your question and just ask your question, no comments.
	And see if you can do it under 20 seconds.
	It'd be great.
	we can get through the whole line I'm sure everyone will be as quick as possible you know All right, we ready?
	Let's do it.
	Hello, my name is Chris, and I don't remember the exact source of this, but I think that someone has said that in communist regimes, cognitive dissonance is something that's enforced through state-mandated big lies, things that are not true, and everyone knows that they're not true.
	And if you claim publicly that they're not true, you'll be taken to the gulag and that that's actually a method of their control.
	Do you think that these kinds of things are a similar precursor to those kinds of actual totalitarian control mechanisms?
	In my opinion, the only reason you're not sent to a gulag for violating any of this is because they don't have the power to do that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yes.
	I don't think it's because they lack the intention.
	I think it's just they're not able to do this.
	I mean, these people want to get inside your brain, change the words you use so you think differently.
	I mean, how much more totalitarian can you get?
	This was literally Hitler's idea for Nazi Germany.
	He wanted to socialize people the way they thought.
	They want to change everything about your character, you as a person.
	There is no end to where they're going to keep going with this.
	So you have to stand up.
	Yeah, and I'd urge you to read the title of our talk tonight, the book, Kindly Inquisitors.
	It's the most important book I've read in the last quarter century.
	The Belgian love is much more terrifying than rejective.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and it's got this chilling effect.
	Yes.
	Hello.
	Robert.
	My question is more asking for comment on two responses and a premise.
	One, I think the main point they're going at for controlling language is a perception they have that any such using such language precedes a physical attack.
	Historically, making value judgments of gay people are not a successful life strategy, then would precede a lynching.
	Other point, they think they're in a life and death struggle.
	So yeah, they do need to take control on everything.
	I think that's the perception that needs to be adjusted.
	What I'm looking for comment on is, I think the entire foundation of modern philosophy has been kind of flawed with this whole concept of rights.
	Might it be possible to do away with a concept of rights and move to a status of natural state, which I think provides a better context of the natural state is the universe wants to kill you because entropy is increasing.
	Boy, I'm down on that idea.
	I'm a big fan of rights.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Like if you move to a natural state philosophy and say the natural state is the universe is going to kill you because entropy naturally increases, what are you going to do about it?
	Do you want to take that sacrifice?
	And then you apply game theory as well.
	Yeah, okay, so here's my response to that.
	I am a big believer in John Walls.
	This is also why I'm against this, because I'm a big believer that we can rationally derive our values and morals.
	I do think there's such a thing as moral facts.
	And I do think that's one of the core things we need to teach our students is not how to suspend judgments about things or not talk to people, but to listen, to be open to revise your beliefs, to tell people what, under what conditions would you revise your beliefs, and then to sincerely engage those issues.
	But we need an environment in order to do that.
	And I think that environment is constitutive of rights.
	And that can be derivable.
	Hello?
	Hi, my name is Matt.
	Hi, Matt.
	One quick comment and a question.
	A possible solution.
	There's a viral video that went out a while ago.
	The state of Georgia was dealing with this problem with Talman accusations.
	And what happened was somebody on the university funding board of the state of Georgia looked at court cases, looked at cases of the university, and said, we don't care what the Obama administration's policy is on this.
	You don't unplug this.
	We'll cut your funding.
	So you can always short-circuit the university administration and go to the funding departments to the state if the state might be susceptible to that.
	And the question I had, I'm getting kind of, I don't know, blackpill this year, I would say, on liberalism entirely.
	I'm seeing like we had this liberal idea of the 90s, everything was okay.
	But now I see like society is splitting into two camps.
	You have like economic, like libertarianism going one direction.
	You have like social liberalism going the other direction.
	Liberalism seems to be like subdividing into principles, splitting into two different camps.
	And I'm wondering if this is inevitable, where this went wrong.
	Maybe a future video series for Sargon, I'd love to watch it.
	Or if you could make a quick comment on it.
	Good question.
	Jesus.
	I should have expected heavy work.
	I don't know.
	It probably isn't.
	It probably is inevitable.
	I don't know.
	I think I'll have to give that one a bit more thought, to be honest.
	I don't have a ready answer, I'm afraid.
	Sorry.
	What about something?
	No.
	I'm really sorry, ma'am.
	We'll talk about it afterwards.
	We'll go to the pub afterwards and we'll talk you through.
	I'm sorry I don't have an answer for that.
	Okay, let's keep this moving.
	Can we please keep all the questions and comments to like 15 seconds or less so we can get through everybody?
	Yeah, and I just want to say one more thing about that.
	That was actually a great answer.
	He didn't pretend to know something he didn't know.
	He didn't sit there and bullshit you guys.
	He'd waste your time.
	He said, you know what?
	I got to think about that.
	That's an awesome answer.
	Thank you.
	I love how I got a round of applause for not knowing something.
	I'm really sorry.
	It's a great question, though.
	Well, it's a big question.
	It is.
	I can't just give you an off-the-cuff because it's also the kind of culture that we want to create.
	When someone doesn't know the answer, they say, I don't know, without fear of recrimination or shame.
	I will.
	Good.
	So I've been lurking on your channel for about six years, but it's gotten to the point where lurking is no longer enough.
	What can I do as an individual to help society back on track?
	Like, how do I change my sphere to start the team reaction?
	What actions do I take?
	Right.
	So it depends on what you're comfortable with and what your social circles are like, really.
	If you are surrounded by people who you know are far-lefty, pro-bias report types, then you're going to get a hell of a reaction when you start sharing sort of like one of my videos or Dave Cullen or Stephen Crowder or something like that.
	They're going to start screaming at you over your Facebook feed.
	I mean, there's obviously the direct engagement with obviously watching, sharing, liking content, donating money to whoever your favorite creators are.
	But talking to people, you'd be surprised how many people who, just going around Portland, how many people I've had to speak to, and during the course of the conversation, they've asked me, what do you do?
	And I said, I'm here to do this.
	And then suddenly we've started getting into a conversation about why I'm here, what the problem with social justice is, what is going on in universities.
	And these people are actually interested.
	It's just that very few people engage in that way.
	And they're afraid to engage.
	Absolutely.
	But a lot of people are just not aware that there is a conversation to be had.
	And often they've got something really interesting to say.
	As long as you're not confrontational and aggressive.
	And you treat them as if you're not trying to delegitimize their entire worldview, then they're a lot more receptive to this sort of thing.
	Obviously, don't be annoying.
	Don't pester people.
	If they say, I'm not interested in that, then just change the subject.
	Yeah, and listen, really listen to what people have to say.
	And address them on their own terms as well.
	Don't try and use it as a way of making yourself feel clever or anything like that.
	The fact that you're here, I'm going to assume you're moderately confident and intelligent.
	You don't need to do that.
	But on social media, definitely sharing things.
	Impressions matter.
	If someone's scrolling through their timeline and they see that two of their friends have shared a particular piece or a video, and they might have just dismissed it going, I'm not interested in what Milo Yiannopoulos has done or whatever.
	If they keep seeing it, they're going to start thinking, okay, maybe there is something to this.
	Why is everyone doing this?
	They're going to start getting engaged in these conversations.
	Because ultimately, unless you're actually getting their brains working, getting them focused on what you're doing, you'll never change anyone's mind.
	It'll just go past them and they'll never think about it again.
	So you've just got to be active, really.
	Cool.
	All right.
	Epistemology.
	Street epistemology.
	Yep.
	Hi, guys.
	My name is Axel.
	So, Sargon, you said that they won the university war.
	What do you think they're going after next?
	What's their government stuff?
	Government.
	Oh, my God.
	They're going to come for anything legislative that they can get.
	So the worldview of the social justice warriors is entirely based around groups of power.
	And they view the world, the entire world, and all of human history as groups of people that are identifiable and in competition with other groups.
	They don't care about reason, obviously.
	They don't care about discourse.
	They don't care about the methods by which things change.
	They just know that things change.
	And they tend to take the position of sovereign power when they're performing their analysis.
	And so they want to have, this is why they're such institutionalists.
	Have you ever noticed that they're such brown-noses?
	They will sit there, they will suck up, they will work their way through the hierarchy.
	And once they get to the top, that's it.
	You're in the iron fist.
	The velvet glove comes off.
	And they start pulling firearms.
	And they send bias teams out and things like this.
	They're going for the very top.
	They want to be able to structure all of society according to their whim from the top down.
	Yeah, I'm going to add one thing to that.
	Having dealt with these folks very extensively now, they have a way of engaging you that's so sacrificing.
	It's so artificially sweet and pleasant.
	But underneath it, it's just pure viciousness.
	Malice.
	Malice, raw malice.
	Resentment.
	That's it.
	Resent.
	And you're absolutely right.
	They absolutely have an affectation.
	You could hear this very clearly in the conversation Lindsay Shepard recorded in, I can't remember the name of her university now.
	You could hear it.
	Wilfred Laurie.
	Look, Wilfred Lawyer, yeah.
	You could hear it in the tone.
	They had to say a certain kind of word to make sure they were being polite.
	But just the sort of undertone of it was – They're kindly inquisitors.
	Absolutely.
	It was venomous.
	She was a sinner and she knew it and they knew it and they were going to get her.
	Yeah, and their religion.
	They have a new religion.
	The fall of the Abrahamic traditions went.
	Intersectionality.
	All of this is a manifestation of the new religion.
	Sargon, when is your next petition?
	Good question.
	I don't know what I'd be petitioning.
	Thank you.
	Next.
	Howdy.
	My name is Sasha.
	My question is one I've actually asked Sargon before.
	Oh.
	In the process of debate, how do we avoid charisma taking over and defeating a legitimate perspective idea because somebody is just that good at arguing and shutting someone else down?
	Good question.
	Really?
	I'm not even sure there's an answer to that.
	I mean, this is a problem that's been in existence since debate was first recorded.
	So if we're still struggling with it now, I'm guessing there isn't just a common sense answer.
	But I mean, debates are always public spectacles.
	Everyone knows that.
	Everyone knows that you're going there to put two sides to the test and effectively it's like two champions warring.
	It's long-formed discourse where minds of thinker really changed.
	And I think that's why, I honestly think that's why podcasts are becoming a huge medium at the moment.
	People are happy to spend, you know, when they're on the treadmill for an hour or something, to sit there with their earbuds in and actually listen to a conversation and see the back and forth rather than an explosive fiery debate on a stage.
	As funny as that might be, I don't think it's changing any minds.
	I honestly consider, you know, I'm sure you remember the whole thing with Mike and Jim where Mike wouldn't engage.
	And, you know, honestly, Mike's comments were his debate.
	So I agree.
	If you can't do it publicly, you can just do it remotely and it's still debate.
	All right, thanks for your question.
	Next.
	Hi. I just asked for, yeah.
	Hey, you're the chap that I was talking about just a minute ago.
	Glad you turned up, man.
	Glad you came to Portland.
	Interesting.
	It's the YouTube comment section came into real life.
	Basically, right?
	That's exactly it.
	On that, though, I'm curious about the advice you'd give your followers, the actual word, for how to approach debate on the internet when you don't face a person, you don't have that humanity stopping you from just saying something vulgar.
	Is there any aspect of time you should reintroduce before you retaliate with a comment?
	Just how would you approach debate, which is a live in-person thing, but to a technological media?
	Yeah, it's even worse in comment sections, because it's someone you don't know.
	Often they're not even using their name.
	So it's just a representation of a person whose feelings you don't care about, obviously.
	And a lot of the time you're watching a video or commenting on an article where it's a particularly heated subject, and people say whatever the hell they like.
	And it's not conducive to debate.
	It's not going to be changing anyone's mind.
	If you're lucky, you can find an honest interlocutor if you're lucky.
	But it's very rare that you do this.
	But the comment threads that are actually, I think comment threads are actually really undervalued when it comes to dialogue on the internet.
	Because if you actually spend your time well formatting, and this is important when you're having a comment debate, well format your argument in response to theirs, and if they're smart, they'll do the same to you.
	Then I think that something like that is that actually has the potential to change minds.
	It's just you can never measure it.
	You don't know how many people have read this and have thought about it.
	But the fact that people do do it, I think, must mean there must be some value there, even if it's just for themselves.
	But honestly, debate on the internet is very, yeah, cancer is a way of putting it.
	It's very rarely as productive as it is in person between two people who have actual honest intentions in having a conversation.
	Good to see you.
	Thanks for coming.
	Yeah, thanks for coming, man.
	I didn't think you were going to.
	Hey, Reed, systemologist from LA.
	Awesome.
	Good to see you.
	I'd like to get your thoughts on the mixing of two ideas from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.
	Wonderful book.
	And Kindly Inquisitors by John Lausanne.
	Okay.
	So you know about the moral matrix from The Righteous Mind.
	There's harm and fairness.
	And there's the humanitarian threat from Kindly Inquisitors, which is about harm, pretty much.
	How can we argue that the liberal principle is a better way of dealing with preventing harm and fairness of these types of groups that are oppressive?
	Do you want to go?
	I haven't read kindly inquisitors.
	Oh, so my take on that, two things.
	If you don't think that your moral beliefs are rationally derivable, then you really have to think that they're products of culture.
	So they have to be arbitrary.
	Now, certainly there's some extent that our moral beliefs are arbitrary.
	One of the things to me, what being a classical liberal means, is that you, and why I think that dialogue is so important, is that we can figure out, and I mentioned John Ross before, we can figure out that there really are better ways to treat each other.
	Like, we can rationally drive kindness as a value.
	The problem is that we have predispositions.
	When I was at Kilroy, Clay Rutledge, the psychologist, told me that his research uncovered that about 50% of the people have very strong predispositions for supernatural beliefs.
	And one of the ways we know that is we know that through identical twins separated at birth.
	It's how the way that we test IQs, it's just a great way to test things.
	The problem is that we have propensities to certain things, and how do we know that the propensities that we have towards justice or fairness or egalitarians and treating people kindly, how do we know that those aren't products of our brain states as opposed to being rationally derivable?
	How am I doing so far?
	Excellent.
	I would argue that the way that you know that is through some kind of Socratic dialogue, engaging people in a conversation, listening to their answers, and it's called the alinkus, coming up with a counterexample, coming back with a counterexample.
	And I think that if you do that, it's like a gold sieve.
	And you have this sieve and you're shaking it, but instead of dropping gold, you're dropping moral propositions.
	You're dropping sentences about morality.
	And a conversation is a way for two people to Have those sieves in which they not pit, but in which they challenge and engage each other's beliefs.
	And that's the other reason that it's so important is that those beliefs are malleable.
	Those beliefs are subject to your experiences.
	And when you need those to change, it's right here in college.
	So all of this stuff we've talked about prevents reason from being emancipatory.
	It prevents any kind of emancipation.
	So we really can derive principles of why we should treat each other fairly.
	Hello, both of you.
	My name is Landon.
	I drove up down here from Seattle, so thank you for coming.
	One of the things that separates, I guess, at its very root, Western civilization from other civilizations is that we figured out the importance of dialogue and reason.
	It doesn't lead to violence.
	It doesn't lead to physicality.
	So my question is: when, as someone who believes in that at its court, which I do, how are you supposed to establish the beginning of a debate with somebody who rejects that idea altogether?
	Where even is the starting point?
	How are you supposed to initiate a dialogue with people who think that by the very act of you trying to initiate a dialogue that you are trying to dominate them?
	How do you even begin?
	It's very frustrating.
	Yeah, that is a great question.
	So could I take it or you?
	Yeah, no, you go ahead.
	So that's what my next book is about.
	I just got a book deal from DeCapo Press, and it's how to have, thanks.
	It's how to have impossible conversations.
	And I just want to unpack this because I think it's so important.
	So I would have loved to have those conversations here at this university or basically at any university.
	So basically, I was going to find somebody who was anti-gun, who thought literally no guns to society.
	Police should have guns, no one.
	And another someone from the NRA who thinks literally everybody should have a gun.
	And I was going to have conversations with them live on stage for an hour or two with QA in two successive weeks.
	But then I thought to myself, like, I don't want to deal with people pulling the fire alarms.
	Like, I want to have an actual conversation.
	It doesn't do anybody any good to pull the fire alarm.
	So I'm going to do these in local libraries to help my friend Sylvia and the local CFI branch and some of my students who are here.
	Not going to tweet it out, not going to advertise it.
	And the first, I would suggest a few things.
	The first thing is if you really feel you can't have a conversation with someone, if you feel it's unsafe, you have to leave.
	But if you feel you're in that context, the first thing you have to do is to figure out someone's epistemology.
	In other words, figure out why someone believes what they believe.
	And you can use this thing called Rap Reports Rules.
	And Dan Dennett has a wonderful thing.
	You basically, before you give any criticism at all, make sure you understand what they're saying.
	So you really have to listen.
	And people have written books about that.
	The other thing is, I used to do this in the end of my conversations when I was more involved in atheism, but now I do it within the first three or four minutes.
	Like once I really think I understand someone's position, I will ask them the following question.
	Under what conditions would you be willing to change your belief?
	It's called the defeasibility condition.
	And they'll tell me the defeasibility.
	Now, they could say any one of a number of things to you.
	They could say, well, there are no conditions under which I change my belief.
	To which the response to that is, is your belief formed on the basis of evidence?
	Now, if they say yes, then by definition, formulating your beliefs on the basis of evidence must mean that there's other evidence that could come in that would cause you to revise that belief.
	So I would suggest to you the first thing you do is listen, use Rap Reports rules, understand what their principles are, offer them questions of defeasibility.
	And if they mirror that and say, well, what are your defeasibility conditions?
	Don't have this back and forth.
	Just answer the question.
	What would it take for you to believe in God?
	Answer the question.
	What would it take for you that everybody should own a gun to answer the question?
	What would it take for you to build a wall, answer the question, and the Mexican border?
	That's a great start.
	Cool?
	Thanks.
	Hi there, guys.
	My name's Ike.
	Thanks.
	I've been studying Japanese culture and economy because I'm hoping to become an international business major later on in my career.
	And I've been trying to see if I can pinpoint any way to use Japan's economic system, which is more capitalist, last I checked, to be able to debate people online and in person on why capitalism can be a functional system, albeit still have a few flaws.
	Not that I want to focus on the flaws, but rather focus on the strengths, because nevertheless, it is a solid example to where I feel like if I can't pinpoint them to get them to say what kind of socialist country has failed, I can show them a capitalist country that is doing very well or at least is very stable, at least in a modern era.
	Okay, so the first problem you have whenever you debate any kind of socialist is, from the position of being a capitalist, is that you're not debating on the same terms.
	Capitalism is an amoral system.
	It's a toolkit.
	It allows you to do things.
	Socialism has a moral direction.
	And this is what Stephen Hicks talks about often.
	It's essentially a religion at this point.
	It doesn't matter how many times socialism fails, because they will find an excuse to reinforce their beliefs that they don't have to change and that capitalism did this, the evil art enemy.
	So you're really going to have a hard time persuading them through anything other than what will effectively boil down to a moral argument.
	I hate to advise Ayn Rand, but unfortunately, Ayn Rand actually has some good points on this.
	There's an essay she did.
	I can't remember the name of it off the top, but I'll find it and put it on my Facebook page so you can find it.
	But describing that if you think about capitalism as the actions that you're taking, someone who is wealthy through business or something like that, through their own dealings, A, not only do they benefit other people, but they're specifically acting within the bounds of the law.
	This is universally accepted within our societies that they're following the rules and they're doing what they should do and they're making a profit for themselves and they're obviously serving a service product to someone else.
	You could probably form that as a moral argument towards a socialist, but they're going to sit there and complain that inequality is a problem.
	Well, if you're a socialist, you think inequality is a problem.
	If you're a capitalist, you think poverty is a problem.
	And then you can demonstrate how the rising tide is lifting all boats worldwide, in fact.
	But honestly, when it gets down to the fundamentals of it, it's very hard to persuade a die-hard socialist because it's being held like a religious belief.
	And they will effectively dismiss any parts of reality that conflict with that.
	So don't worry about body counts.
	Don't worry about how many times socialism fails.
	They do not care.
	This time they've got it.
	Trust them.
	I'll add two things to that.
	I just finished Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West.
	I can't recommend it highly enough.
	A fantastic book.
	And then I would ask really intelligent, thoughtful people, one book.
	It's the best book you have.
	You ask four or five people, and then I just read those books of people who think that they're why socialism or communism, why it's good.
	And I'd sincerely listen to and think about those arguments.
	That's what I do.
	All right, thank you.
	Thank you.
	Good luck.
	Good luck in your studies, Ike.
	Gentlemen, I'm Paul Cornelius from Berkeley, California.
	I appreciate both your work.
	Thanks for giving me an excuse for coming up.
	Thanks for coming.
	Speculative question.
	Why do you suppose that neoliberalism seems so willing to placate and please an ideology that really is the height of capitalism, an ideology, a heterodox Marxist ideology, like social justice and critical theory?
	Thank you.
	Okay.
	Anyone take that?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Why would it care?
	They can't possibly defeat it.
	They rely on it in every way.
	And they buy into it.
	I mean, like, you've seen the anarchist masks that are being mass produced in factories in China.
	That they will go out and willingly buy for $10 or whatever.
	And it's like, you can't beat neoliberalism.
	They've got no function for it.
	Sorry, did you want to?
	No, no.
	So here's my take.
	Here's my take on that, Paul.
	There are a few words that whenever I see them, they just scream bullshit to me.
	When I hear neoliberalism, it's like kind of a phrase that Foucault used to like to use the word, but he didn't really know what the economic systems.
	And so he just, it's a kind of a placeholder term that makes me very suspicious of what those arguments are.
	Hegemonic masculinity is another one.
	I can use another word.
	I can say modern Western Catholic.
	Okay, so give me the sentence again real quick.
	Modern Western global capitalism.
	Is what?
	Finish the sentence.
	Okay, but give me the sentence.
	Give me the question.
	The question would be, why does Western capital, particularly elites such as Hillary Clinton, the French president, seem to be very willing to play ball with people that are heterodox Marxists in their orientation?
	That's what critical theory is.
	Absolutely, but it's because they can just package it back to them.
	It's going to take on whatever form is pleasing to the consumer.
	And if they're, and they are, dumb enough to buy it, and dumb enough to support the system they claim they hate so much, they have no method of destroying this system.
	That's why they constantly talk about revolution.
	But when it comes to it, they're sat there in Starbucks with their lattes and their iPads and they're scrolling through their timelines.
	They don't care.
	They're never going to change anything.
	Let's see if we can do this.
	Let's see if we can, if it's okay, we'll try to do rapid questions.
	Let's see if we can just do rapid questions.
	So if you ask your questions, it will try to respond as quick to be coherent still.
	Okay.
	Thanks for coming out tonight.
	My name is Laith.
	My question is, what do you think about the level of brilliant deviousness of the people that are enacting these things when you look at how did it start?
	Like, how did the hate speech start?
	It started with Nazis.
	If you go back to World War II with the Nazis and the gray shirts and how they did everything, they started dividing and conquering.
	And now they've taken that very turn and made that the core of what everything else springs from.
	So if you even say the word, I'm not a, I personally am not racist or anything, but I see from a nomenclature point of view how they're literally finding something which did it before in history and they're repeating it.
	Sorry, what was the question?
	I got caught up in the level of deviousness.
	The level of deviousness.
	To think that these people are dumb.
	They're really, really smart.
	It's diabolical.
	I don't know about it.
	It's diabolical.
	I mean, in a diabolical way.
	They're smart and they're really messed up.
	No, no, they are.
	They're just really cunning, and they think in different ways than you do, and they're trying to...
	Okay, so, okay, look.
	They have a kind of cunning in that they've manufactured their own knowledge.
	They publish in their own bogus journals.
	And Jordan Peterson's famous saying, 80% of papers in the humanities either get it cited none or one time.
	And you can Google that.
	That statistic comes from the literature.
	So they've manufactured their own line of knowledge that's not tethered to reality.
	They then use that to institutionalize these utterly insane ideas.
	And they have mechanisms in their literature like Alison Bailey or Privilege Preserving Epistemic Pushback or White Fragility.
	They have mechanisms in the literature to keep these things in place.
	And if I can say one thing to kind of raise, this is a very complex issue.
	It's taken me years to think about.
	But what people out of the academy don't see is that they're training students, they look at this as an indoctrination mill.
	And they're training students to think a certain way and have their own epistemology, their way of viewing the world.
	They're requiring these bodies of completely bogus literature.
	And not all of it, maybe like 2% is decent, but the overwhelming majority is just utter garbage, totally untethered to reality.
	And when those people get out, they become leaders in the community.
	So that's where they spread this idea of microaggressions, trigger warnings, space.
	All of that stuff starts in the academy.
	All of it.
	Okay, so can I disagree with you?
	Right, sure.
	I actually think they're utterly diabolical, because what you're describing is a mission towards truth.
	You're interested in finding something that's factually true.
	But they're not interested in that.
	They don't give a damn about that.
	What they're interested in is victory, right?
	Everything about this is a strategy.
	Right.
	Yeah, no, that's right.
	No, no, I agree.
	I agree.
	You're not addressing them on their own terms.
	Because on their own terms, they are absolutely genius.
	I mean, imagine what the flat earthers are going to have to do to get a flat earth bias response team, right?
	Like instituting that into hundreds of universities across this country.
	Imagine just how long it would take them, how unbelievably convoluted their theories would have to be.
	And yet, the postmodernists have done it.
	Like, the first time I was introduced to John Peterson was on that TVO debate.
	And the guy opposite him was literally like, I'm going to have to just start by saying that gender isn't real, biological sex isn't real, and we'll go from there.
	No, we fucking won't.
	Okay?
	Like, I mean, I could hardly believe the brass balls on that little soy boy.
	But this is the point.
	These people are literally so clever, they have actually made it so that they are sat on a panel and you're treating them as if they are a legitimate source of dialogue and they might have something to tell you because of how good their strategies are.
	Yeah, I'll give them the good strategy and I'll give them that once they get in power and universities, they hire people like themselves.
	Oh, yeah.
	And don't be deceived by this whole talk about diversity.
	It's just a code.
	Diversity by definition means no ideological diversity.
	It means ideological conformity.
	That's what they really mean.
	So they hire people who are like themselves.
	They manufacture lines of literature.
	They're completely bogus.
	I will admit that that's a very good strategy.
	I mean, they've been extraordinarily effective.
	Amazing.
	They've been extraordinarily effective.
	Given the tools that they had to work with.
	If they were really smart, though, don't you think they would have come on stage with us tonight?
	No, because they're not gods, you know, they want control over absolutely everything.
	And coming on stage here, this is just a loss for them because they know that they are intellectually bankrupt.
	And I would sit here and explain to them in detail about the strategy behind the postmodern sort of thing.
	Right.
	And the reason that they, sorry, I know I said, but the reason that they wouldn't come up on stage is, and if you think I'm wrong, if there's a mistake in my reasoning, you let me know.
	In the presidential debates, when you're winning, you don't debate something.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	They don't come up here to debate us because they're winning in the academy.
	Yes, this is absolutely true.
	They would only stand to lose on this stage.
	Even if they won, they could still be perceived as punching down.
	You know, who are we?
	We're just two randoms.
	They say that you're a bigot and not worth debating.
	They absolutely do.
	They already do.
	Yeah, that's how they get out of it.
	And that means that they don't.
	That's the worst.
	I mean, there's no doubt that there are conversations going on right now looking at the size of this audience and them saying, right, this can't happen again.
	There will be people in their administration saying this will not happen again.
	And they will do everything they can to scupper you doing this in the future.
	So you have to make sure you don't give them a reason to do that.
	Make sure you stick within the rules and make sure you get what you want.
	Because this is a defeat for them.
	This is a defeat.
	This room is a defeat.
	And as long as I am at this university, I will fight this pernicious ideology with everything I have.
	And I'm taking the gloves off.
	All right, next question.
	Okay.
	My name is Nathan, and I just kind of had this interesting thought over the last couple days.
	So postmodernism has, in a sense, been almost too successful in kind of corrupting all of our institutions.
	And it kind of flipped for me, John Lennon's imagine, flipped it on its head.
	So just your kind of thought on this stanza.
	Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion to.
	Imagine all the people living life in peace.
	And it just seems like so many things that are happening are counter to that.
	They can kind of undermine their own goals.
	I'm into the no religion thing.
	Well, I'm into the peace thing too, but it's not clear.
	It's unrealistic.
	Let's be honest.
	There's never going to be this idyllic world where people are living in harmony.
	It's just, it's never happened.
	It's never going to happen.
	It's a silly dream.
	We should, unfortunately, be more realistic about these things.
	Take men as they are, not how we'd like them to be.
	Yeah, and I'll add to that, the expression, we're all in this together.
	Okay, so no, we are all in this together.
	And what this is, you're here, I'm here, we're here.
	Anytime you break somebody into a smaller and smaller increment, intersectionality, anytime you look at somebody and, oh, there's a black woman, or who cares if it's a black woman?
	It's totally irrelevant to the conversation.
	You know, I do jiu-jitsu, my jujitsu bodyguard is over there, my trainer.
	And if there's a guy who's a black belt and jiu-jitsu who's gay, and I roll with him, and he destroys every time, and his wife is a machine of death.
	She destroys him every time.
	And those, the way to not look at it is through ever smaller increments that divide us.
	The way to look at this is to find in the literature it's called superordinate identities.
	Identities that bring us together.
	We are people.
	Everybody has their own shit, you know, everybody has their own, you know, says they pick up my daughter and she's had a tough day.
	Everybody's dealing with stuff.
	And the way to face that is to listen and to be kind.
	It's not to continuously break people down into ever smaller groups.
	And when we look for reasons to be offended and outraged, that doesn't do us any good.
	But you're looking at this the wrong way.
	You need to look at this from the position, you're looking at this from the position of a person on the ground who has to live with the reality of this.
	Now, imagine bringing yourself 100 miles up and you are suddenly the omnipotent bureaucrat.
	You absolutely want to break people into a lattice of different intersecting until eventually every individual person is in their own box and everyone is in control, is under control.
	Everyone, you can declare who gets what.
	You can make sure that nobody's uneven.
	You can make sure that everything is perfect and fair.
	When you deny biology, that's what you get.
	When you deny biology, that you think that you can control the outcome solely by social institutions.
	That's just not true.
	Steven Pinker utterly destroyed that in the blank slate.
	Good, thanks.
	Next.
	Hi, I'm Batko from Loft People.
	And how do you feel about Israel versus Palestine?
	Oh, my God.
	Why?
	This hasn't been controversial yet.
	Go on.
	You're the one who has to work here.
	Every phone biased response team.
	So I will be very sincere and give you my honest opinion.
	I avoid certain issues not because I don't have a gut feeling, but because I simply don't know enough about it.
	And I'm not embarrassed to tell you that.
	And I appreciate that.
	Thanks.
	I really do.
	I'm not embarrassed to tell you that.
	I think it's a very complicated problem.
	And to look to me as any sort of an opinion or expert, I just don't, I don't pretend to know things I don't know.
	I'm absolutely the wrong person to ask.
	I just don't know enough about it.
	Yeah, I'm afraid it's a can of worms that there's no point opening because activists on both sides are fully entrenched in their positions.
	They're not interested in listening.
	They're interested in attacking you if you disagree or patting you on the back if you agree.
	And I honestly don't really care enough about the issue to have looked into it in the depth that would be required for me to have a proper dialogue on the subject.
	If you ask me about gender studies or if there's a God, I guess.
	Yeah, God can't pay.
	I don't think there's any good guy or bad guy necessarily on either side.
	But just saying that is I'm going to, my inbox is going to be destroyed from people on both sides of the argument from that side.
	So real quick, I want to bring up Malice China.
	So are either of you aware of this?
	Is your mic working?
	Come close to.
	Come close to people earlier.
	So Malice China.
	Are either of you aware of the perpetual revolution as like a political tactic?
	Vaguely, but go ahead, what's the question?
	In the first paragraph of the introduction, language can shape and reflect reality.
	Progressive campaigns can become a more powerful vehicle for social change.
	What's the question?
	Can there be a danger in the speed of which there is social change?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Well, yeah, I mean, it also depends what the direction of the social change is.
	Right.
	And this is saying the progressive campaigns can be composed.
	So obviously there's.
	You mean if there's some kind of a race towards transgender rationalism, would that cause a backlash from people?
	Is that what you mean?
	Can we pursue social change too quickly?
	And if so, where would it be?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	The whole...
	The whole point, like, this is what drives me mad about Marx and Hegel.
	Hegel's got the conception that all of history is a slow build to a cataclysmic engagement that synthesizes the new state's quote.
	Not really.
	Not really in Western liberal democracies.
	Where are our revolutions if that's the case?
	We're far more Darwinian.
	And this is the point of free speech.
	So we can have it out, each individual to individual, public speaker to audience.
	We can change people's ideas.
	And slowly over time, our countries, our entire societies evolve and change in ways that we hope are better, but not always, without having to have violent revolution and tearing the streets up and burning things down.
	I mean, it seems that a backlash of radical social change is not always, but it has to be tempered.
	I think you see that with polls on immigration pew polls, especially for how people view others.
	But good, good question.
	Next.
	Hi.
	Salgan.
	Hey.
	What's your favorite dinosaur?
	Sorgan, have you even met CD?
	I'm weirdly partial to baryonics for some reason.
	I can't even explain why.
	This has got a massive claw on its finger, and I don't know why.
	As a kid, I always found that interesting.
	Next one.
	All right, next, let's go.
	Don't adjust it, just speak into it.
	Go go.
	Hello, my name is David, and I'm for free speech.
	I paid attention to your Twitter a while, and I want to know.
	Who's not my sorry?
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Sorry.
	I don't know why anyone would.
	I want to know: do you still trigger the alt-right with black cuckold porn?
	And if so, do you have any on your computer right now?
	I would never need to store it on my computer.
	It's only a Google search away.
	But yeah, it's like that kryptonite.
	It's like that kryptonite, so of course.
	But yeah, I'm not on Twitter anymore, obviously.
	But people seem to think that I was banned from Twitter for that.
	I wasn't.
	So Twitter had no stance on.
	It wasn't cuckold porn.
	It was gay cuckold porn.
	I'm not going to thank you for your question.
	I enjoyed it.
	Next up.
	Hi, my name's Andrew.
	Hey, Andrew.
	I have a question for both of you, I guess.
	So I'm a freshman here in Portland, and I have a question on how to.
	So I'm taking intro to journalism right now, and I guess I look at a lot of articles from around, you know, classics like The Guardian, you know, CNN, Vox.
	What's your question?
	Sorry, I'm rambling.
	But how can I be objective?
	Like, I see their kind of journalism, and I sort of look at it and I sort of break it down.
	But I just, how can I be an effective journal?
	How can I be an effective reporter or interviewer by being as objective as possible?
	Is there a way I can do that?
	Yeah, okay.
	You've got to start by understanding your own personal philosophy and your own biases.
	What are you in favor of?
	And you've got to practice self-discipline.
	You've got to actually understand your own position, understand their position well enough to be able to understand when you're deliberately favoring one thing, or not even deliberately, sorry, unintentionally favoring one side over another.
	You're never going to get it right.
	You're never going to get it right.
	It's going to be a constant process, but you've got to – I find the easiest thing to do is try and approach it twice from each side of the argument.
	And when you're doing whichever side, try and treat what they're saying as credible.
	Try and treat it as the most charitable interpretation.
	And then you've effectively got to synthesize what you believe to be the truth of it from what you've got.
	But it's going to be an eternal struggle to do that.
	And it's the action, the attempt to be objective is way more important than the goal.
	You'll never reach the goal, but the fact that you try will incrementally, day by day, make you better at what you do in that respect.
	There's something awesome about being sincere.
	There's something just a good way to be in the world.
	You can develop good friendships.
	You can develop good relationships, a more fulfilling life.
	And I see this stuff as the opposite of the opposite of sincerity.
	It fosters insincere people who behave in artificial ways.

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