Jonathan Zimmerman, historian and free speech advocate, traces how free speech became a liberal cornerstone—from Frederick Douglass to the gay rights movement’s use of bodybuilding magazines—but now faces backlash due to trigger warnings and self-censorship, which he argues stifle marginalized voices. He critiques NYU’s 2000s-era approach to graphic content and the Scranton cheerleader case, where schools overreach by policing speech like "Fuck school" in group chats, despite legal protections. Zimmerman warns that expanding hate speech definitions and institutional overreach risk silencing dissent, while Rogan underscores the need for education over censorship to preserve open debate. [Automatically generated summary]
There's a lot of very intelligent people that disagree with you in this current political climate, unfortunately.
I think that was exacerbated by the Trump administration and this desire to stop a lot of the QAnon stuff and the Pizzagate stuff and a lot of these conspiracy theories that people were frustrated that they were taking hold and they were like, how do we stop this?
I think one of the problems that we're dealing with in today's climate is not just that everything is hyper-politicized and people are really very passionate in debating things online, but just the nature of online discourse is so limited.
It lends itself to simple sentences, 140 or 280 symbols.
It's just not enough.
It's not enough characters to express yourself.
And then also text.
Unless you're writing a book, it's hard to get all your thoughts out.
There's some benefit in being cowardly, too, though.
This is that there are people that, for whatever reasons, maybe they're socially awkward, they don't have the courage to say things to someone's face, but maybe that person needs to hear them.
So this is the other perspective, like, in favor of talking shit.
Yeah, and you know, when I discuss the free speech question with my students, I often say, look, Anyone in this room is free to make a case for any kind of speech restriction they'd like, provided that they tell me who's going to do the restricting.
And I think he, before Trump got cut off, which I didn't agree with, I think Dorsey generally had the right idea, which is when we see something posted on Twitter that we think is wrong or horrible, Instead of muzzling it, what we're going to do is we're going to add our two cents, right?
And we're going to put a flag on it saying, by the way, we think this is bullshit, and here's why.
And look, that's a form of free speech as well, right?
Using your free speech to criticize speech that you think is abhorrent is an act of free speech.
And I think that seemed to me to be Dorsey's impulse, rather than muzzling people, adding a voice that tries to inform people about what they've seen.
Do you think that it's also a function of there's a limited amount of time when you're running an election, right?
So like you only have a few months when elections rolling around and there's this person who is like getting all these people riled up and Saying a bunch of crazy shit that may not be true and They have a choice to make like you can let it play out its natural course like the the logical and informed Response to bad speech is always better speech.
Like, how do you deal with bad speech?
You combat it with debate and more articulate, more well-thought-out, more sensible speech.
That's supposed to be so that if a person is on the sidelines and objectively looking into two arguments, they look at that one and go, well, that makes more sense.
This guy's trying to rile people up, but he's incorrect, and this is why.
And also, the other thing I'd add, though, is although I agree with the dynamic you just described, in order to pull that off, you need a certain sort of education.
It's not something that you really spend a lot of time Well, unfortunately, I mean, we give rhetorical obeisance to it, but we don't do it nearly enough.
And when you interview kids about their high school experience, and you ask them, you know, did you really engage in dialogue about substantive questions where there was real debate?
Sometimes people are just very theatrical and very loud and dynamic, or they'll touch upon, like, certain things, like...
You know, certain things that they think, like whether or not it's valid to the conversation, they'll add those things to it because there's certain social clout to those subjects.
I mean, what they do is they encourage people to mouth things they've heard from others rather than to come up with like, okay, what do I actually think about this?
And also, I mean, you know, remember, if you're in high school, you're an adolescent.
And adolescents, like we know from developmental psychology, they're very attuned to other adolescents, right?
I mean, that's what it's about.
You know, it's who's cool, who's cute, who's going out with whom, you know?
And so I think there's almost a developmental reason that you would try to sort of tailor your opinions to the people around you.
But that's not good for you, and it's definitely not good for our democracy.
I mean, one way of thinking about all this social media stuff is we're all teenagers now, and we're all doing precisely that, trying to figure out who's cool and who isn't, right?
And trying to get on the right side, and as you were saying, to mouth the right things.
I was really lucky when I was young, and we were talking about this earlier when you asked about my accent, that I moved around a lot.
And I think that was really good.
It sucked at the time, because I moved to San Francisco when I was seven, from New Jersey to San Francisco, and then Florida when I was 11, and then when I was 13 we moved to Boston.
It was a lot of moving.
And because of that I didn't develop this core group of friends that I grew up with.
You know, it was a little chaotic, but it forced me to formulate my own opinions about things.
You know, I had a very similar upbringing in different places.
I actually grew up overseas because my parents were in the Peace Corps, as I was subsequently.
And so as an elementary schooler, I lived in India and Iran, and then I lived in New York and in Washington.
But like yourself, I mean, for me, except for meeting my wife, that was the formative experience of my life, I would say, living in all those different environments as a really little kid.
Because also when you're little, you don't know how weird the shit you're doing is.
You know, it's just because you just do it.
It's so like in Bangalore, India, my parents sent me to a girl's school.
Which took a couple boys in the younger grades because it was the angle of school that was near where we lived.
And it was actually a fabulous experience, you know, to be, you know, like one of a couple boys in a whole room full of girls.
And in some ways, Iran was really an unlikely place for the Islamic Revolution.
It's a pluralist place.
I mean, it's a crossroads and it has been for 10,000 years.
And it's interesting you mention Iran because, you know, when the Pew does these like pro and anti-American surveys where they take like a sample of people in different countries and say, what do you think of America?
Except for Israel, the Iranians like us more than any country in the Middle East.
Well, I think it's because the history of the country is so pluralist.
You know, I mean, Iran, everyone conquered it, right?
It's a huge mismatch of ethnicities and historically of religions.
You know, it obviously had big Jewish populations, Baha'i populations.
Obviously, most of those people have been exiled, right?
But that's very recent history.
And let's also remember, it's a country of about 80 million people, and over half of them were born well after Khomeini.
You know, so, you know, all they know is this corrupt regime that's governed them, and they don't like it.
You know, there's a huge amount of dissent in Iran.
It's just that I think, I mean, this is a whole other rap, but I think the United States and the rest of the world haven't really figured out how to really harness that dissent.
You know, I think, you know, people pick up the newspaper and they imagine Iran as this place of kind of like Islamist ditto heads, and it is not that, not by any measure.
That's got to be so strange to have grown up there and see this gigantic shift and have these memories of what it was like previously when it was this sort of cosmopolitan center.
I went to an international school and I had friends from Hong Kong and South Africa and England, but also we can't romanticize it.
I mean, it was a dictatorship.
And, you know, in some ways I think my concerns about free speech in some ways stem from that experience as well because I can remember my parents, you know, when they would talk on the phone, they would often sort of say jokingly, hey, you know, we better not go there.
You know, when Edward Snowden had to leave the country and Glenn Greenwald, they published that story about the NSA's, all the shit that he leaked where there was this widespread surveillance on the American public.
And again, the difference is, thanks to democracy and free speech, you and I can critique that.
We may not be able to control it.
We may not be able to end it.
It's a complicated question, but nobody's going to come in the night for my family or for yours because we're criticizing the NSA. Yeah, we can critique it, but it still exists.
Well, I forget which comedian made a joke out of this.
It all started during Obama, some of the leaks about this.
And, you know, I forget who it was, but a comedian said, well, look, you know, I mean, Americans said that they wanted a president that listens to everyone.
But that is, in a sense, it's encouraging self-censorship.
And that's one of the things about privacy that makes privacy so critical, is because if you cannot express yourself without fear of other people listening, then there is a component of self-censorship, which is critical in North Koreans, the regime's way of keeping people in line, is they have a form of self-censorship.
Well, look, I'll give you an example, and this came up in another book that I wrote.
There was a survey done of full-time faculty about 10 years ago, and the question was, do you agree with the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions?
And it turned out that 40% of the respondents said no.
Now, for the sake of transparency, I should tell you that I'm in the 60%.
I think affirmative action has been a net gain for the university.
It's a complicated question, but I think it's been a net win.
Nevertheless, I was upset by the 40% figure.
Not that there were people that disagreed with me.
Yeah, that's a real problem with today, guilt by association.
Yeah, there's so many complicated questions that you oftentimes feel like you have the answer to, or you have your opinion on it, and then you'll hear a very nuanced perspective from someone who takes a different stance.
And if you're open-minded, you go, oh, maybe I haven't considered that point of view.
And that's one of the real reasons why it's important that you have free speech and you have debate, because you don't want to get pigeonholed into an idea that maybe somewhere down the line you might find foolish.
But you weren't allowed to be exposed to some really good arguments to the contrary.
No, there's plenty to load and there are always new things to learn.
But I think just the larger point for me is that I think I'm more likely to learn from a conversation with somebody who actually likes Trump precisely because I don't.
If you can do that open-mindedly with people that you have opposing viewpoints...
I've gotten better at that.
That's one of the things that I've really gone out of my way to try to listen to people and try to look at things from their perspective, even if I don't agree with it.
Try to just find where they're connecting the dots.
Like, how are you doing this?
Okay, let me see how you do it.
And sometimes it's interesting.
Sometimes you can see the logical fallacies that they've fallen into and you go, oh, look at that.
Look, I think that's a great ambition, but I think that that's the exception because I think most of our media environment promotes the opposite, right?
I mean, you know, just think of what a news feed is, right?
A news feed is the events of the day curated according to your search history and your biases.
And what an awful image, like time for your two o'clock feed, right, of all the stuff that we have...
When I'm looking at things that are interesting to me, I'm looking for distractions and things that are my hobbies.
My news feed has professional billiards on it, so I'll get snooker scores or snooker from the UK. When something deep and meaningful, if I'm looking for something, if I'm researching something, then I go look for that.
I don't like that stuff in my newsfeed.
I figured out a year or two ago, I'm tired of getting freaked out.
I don't want to just pick up, like, Jesus, what is he doing now?
I don't want to do that every time I pick up my phone.
It's exhausting, and I don't think it benefits me.
But I do like to be informed.
So I, you know, subscribe to Washington Post, and I subscribe to Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and I'll go there, and I'll go on purpose to read.
is a book that he released last year that's phenomenal.
I'm just a giant fan of Matt Taibbi.
I think he's...
One of the most important journalists today because he's so honest and so open-minded and he's so well-informed.
When he goes off on a subject like he has put in the work, like when he went off on savings and loan crisis or when he went on the subprime mortgage business.
I actually interviewed him on the podcast about it.
He had to learn all that shit.
He's a journalist.
He's not a finance guy.
So he had to really understand what kind of fuckery these people were involved with and then put it in his beautiful prose so that it dances on the page as you get informed about this fucking criminal behavior that led to this gigantic financial crash that we endured.
And yet, at the same time, I mean, look, I think it's great that Substack exists, and it's great that a fellow like that is on it, but the fact that he's on it and that he's not writing for one of our major media companies, that says something troubling about this configuration.
Well, it depends on whom you ask, but the people that study eye tracking say that for whatever reason, when you're reading print, your eye goes all the way across on each line.
And on screens, it's less likely to do that.
You can't make this up.
They call it the F pattern.
When the eye trackers look at what you do on a screen, the first line you go all the way across, but then the next one, as in an F, it's a little shorter.
It's a tablet, but when you write on it, you write it in handwriting, and it can either save it in your handwriting or it puts it into print, and it looks like paper as you're writing on it, but you can have a gigabyte of information on this little tablet, so thousands of pages.
Yeah, I think it's a difficult thing for people to do to face themselves and to face what they do good and what they do bad.
One way I've found is to engage in things that don't leave any room for fuckery.
Right?
Like martial arts is one of them.
Another one is one of the reasons why I like pool is the balls don't care about your personality.
They don't care about any...
They don't care.
Like you either make the ball or you do not make the ball.
Like you either can win or you lose.
Like it's really simple in that regard.
But it's also very complex.
It's like you either execute correctly or you don't.
And so if you do things like that, like martial arts in particular is a very humbling thing.
And I think it's really good in that way that most of the people that I know that are martial artists that are at an elevated state, they're really good.
They're really friendly people.
They're humble in a lot of ways.
And one of the reasons why is because they're humbled all the time.
If, you know, the three of us were all black belts and we were training together, we'd all be cranking each other's neck every day.
Like, you'd be tapping me every day, and Jamie would be tapping me, and after a while, you're like— That's not going to happen.
You just get used to it.
You just accept the fact that someone got you, and you don't— Right.
But when you see people that have never lost, I have a friend and we had this conversation and one of the things that we were talking about was the regret of him not doing sports when he was younger.
He never learned how to lose.
He never learned how to take a loss and just not have it emotionally devastate him.
So to this day, even if he's playing a card game, it'll freak him out if he loses.
He won't say anything, but it'll really bother the shit out of him.
And some people, they don't have a lot of experience in testing themselves.
So they don't have a lot of faith in their own character and judgment under pressure.
This is not like an existential judgment of your soul.
And by the way, the more you think about that, the worse you're going to do.
So don't do it.
Don't do it.
Because it makes you think in somewhat static terms.
And I remember when my kids were growing up, like, you would often hear, oh, so-and-so is good at this, and so-and-so is good at that, so-and-so is bad at this, so-and-so is bad at that.
And they also, they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, right?
And that's not good for anyone either.
So just don't think about it.
Just do it, right?
Don't think about whether you're, quote, good at it.
You know, experiencing whatever it is, your great billiards game, you know, and you're finally able to hit that incredibly complex shot that you couldn't hit before.
Instead of, wow, I'm a great billiards player, like, or I'm not.
So I'm curious, Joe, since you were describing kind of all these moves growing up, How would you say, if somebody were to ask you, what have been the most important changes in the way you see the world since you were a younger person?
Either the political world, the social world, the environment, whatever it is.
Like, what would you, if you think, if you compare yourself to your younger self, what would you say have been the most important changes in how you think and how you see the world?
And then all the weird shit that happened to Mike in his life and the pros and cons and the failures and successes and the lies and truths and here he is.
And I remember when the Vietnam War ended, I was living in San Francisco, and I remember really clearly, because I was a little kid, and I was scared of the war.
I was really scared, because my stepfather had not got drafted.
He had gotten out of it.
They do the lottery, and he didn't get picked.
So I was very fortunate that he didn't get picked, but he was really scared of it, because he was of age at the time.
And I remember the war ended, and I remember thinking, whew!
That's great.
They finally figured out that war is bad.
Now we're never going to do war again.
That's really what I thought.
I was a little kid.
I remember thinking that.
Now, good.
I was born at a good time where they figured out no more war.
And then Desert Storm happened when I was like 21. And I remember thinking, these fucking dummies.
What's good is it makes me understand, as a father, how important the bond between parents and the children are.
It means a lot.
It means a lot to me.
And it's good because it gave me a challenge to understand myself for who I actually am without being under the pressure of achieving an image that a father wanted me to live up to or that, you know, someone else's perspective of who I should be or how I should behave or how I should think about the world.
So it's a confusing process that happens to you when you have children, when they're babies, and then you see them grow up, and you're like, wow, this is like...
It's interesting you use the term mold because back to our earlier discussion, I think both with parenting and being a teacher, and I'm both, I think the other really hard thing is, you know, how do you also cultivate somebody's autonomy and let them be different from you?
When there's an uninspired person telling them what to do or teaching a class.
They're really tuned into it.
And there's a real lesson in that.
Because when kids have enthusiastic teachers, they love those teachers.
They want to tell you about it.
Oh, Mrs. Wilson, she's the best.
She's so much fun.
She gets there.
We all love her.
And, you know, it's like, it turns out Mrs. Wilson loves her job, right?
So when you go there, Mrs. Wilson smiles at everybody and she's like, good job!
And she high-fives kids and then everybody's like, I love that lady.
And then there's some people that just want everybody to shut up and they just get mad at you if you didn't do your homework correctly or they, you know.
Very, very, very fortunate that I ran into an amazing school and amazing teachers.
But I think for young people, learning something and getting good at it is so critical because it teaches you that you used to suck at something, but you got better at it through hard work and dedication.
Most people growing up in particular, when they're young, they have this, I mean, that's the one thing that young people struggle with, I think more than anything, is insecurity.
Something I love about teaching college students is that they're old enough to start understanding the world, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it.
And so it's really a magical time.
I think, like, 19- and 20-year-old human beings are the most interesting people on the planet.
Because they can see things, and they're often very aware of how the world is working, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it.
And so they're much more interesting than you or me, or at least than me.
Because, you know, the game is sort of up for me.
I've made my choices, I've done the things that I do, and that's kind of it.
I mean, and I think, you know, look, I went to college in the late 70s and it was a different world.
And I never once remember thinking, gee, am I going to be like a burden on my parents?
Am I going to be unable to get a job or sustain myself?
Right?
Because the United States, I mean, it had like a hegemonic role in the world that it does not have now.
And, you know, it was just a time of much more national confidence, I think.
And, you know, I have a lot of empathy for people in my daughter's generation and in my student's generation because they don't have that same kind of certitude, you know?
So I do remember kind of wondering, but I guess I didn't feel the same sense of pressure or fear.
Like, I think that because America still ruled the roost, it was easier to think, gee, it's going to work out.
Yeah, I mean, you know, look, by the time I get to a young adult, I mean, the Soviet Union is starting to implode.
I mean, this is really the twilight of the Cold War, right, is the 1980s, you know.
And, you know, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I remember listening to Radio Moscow.
Because I was in Nepal, and I had a little shortwave radio, and only two things came in, Voice of America and Radio Moscow.
And Voice of America had its issues and its own brand of propaganda, but just listening, even just the sound values of Radio Moscow, it was so hilariously poor.
Like, I just remember thinking, you know, this is not, like, we're going to win this struggle.
Because we had this distorted perception of the powers of the Soviet Union when I was in high school where we thought of them as being just like America, but over there, like in terms of their firepower and their financial means.
And also, I mean, they just didn't do a good job getting things to people, right?
I mean, David Reisman, who was one of my favorite authors ever, I mean, during the height of the Cold War, he wrote this great piece where he said, if we want to win this, all we have to do is just fly planes over Russia and just drop nylon.
Right?
Because we know that women want nylon pantyhose.
You can't get them in Russia.
And, you know, again, once they've put those on, right, they're not going to stand for it.
And I think, you know, a version of that actually happened.
Reagan was famous for that one speech that he made in front of the United Nations where he was talking about how quickly we would come together if we were faced with a threat from an alien world.
I remember that because I remember all the conspiracy theorists got so jazzed up.
Well, you know, H.L. Mencken, 100 years ago, he had this great quote where he said something like, you know, for every deep social and political problem, there's typically a solution that is simple, attractive, and wrong.
Well, I think, unfortunately, and this is where the history piece comes in, one reason that Americans tend to believe in conspiracy theories is that the government is engaged in conspiracies.
I mean, like, you know, if you're trying to put, like, LSD on Fidel Castro's Cigar, which the United States did, right?
Then let's just say there's a crying wolf problem, and it becomes easier for people to believe that the government is engaged in perfidious conspiracies after the government is engaged in a perfidious conspiracy.
It's the craziest story because Tom was a neighbor to my friend Greg Fitzsimmons in Venice and he had been working on this book literally for two decades.
What happened was he got hired to write a story for a magazine on the anniversary of the Manson murders.
And so he's writing the story, and as he's doing research to write the story, he starts realizing like, holy shit, like there's a lot more to this than I thought.
He gets deeper and deeper and deeper into it, and he finds out that the Manson thing was connected to these CIA mind control experiments that they were doing during the 1960s.
And Manson had been, for sure, sheltered along the way, released from prison every time he got arrested for something.
And they were all saying, this is above my pay grade.
We were told to release him.
And that he was involved in these—I forget what prison it was, but they were doing these LSD experiments on prisoners.
I mean, this is one of the most horrible chapters.
I mean, speaking of conspiracy theories, I mean, you mentioned hallucinogens earlier.
I mean, you know— The federal government was involved in, you know, developing and testing these substances during the Cold War.
And it was very much about the Cold War.
It's interesting you mentioned the Soviet Union because the history there is they first developed them because they thought it was going to be a truth serum.
So you capture somebody from the other side and you feed them this.
But then when they did these horrible experiments in jails and psychiatric institutes, They found out it was the opposite.
And then they started to tout it as something that we would give our agents.
So if you ever captured, you dose, and then you would just blabber and say, the eels are in my hovercraft.
So, you know, they always had—that's one of the terrible logics about the Cold War, is you could shift on a dime, right?
And you could basically make the same plea in the inverse way.
So, okay, it's not a truth serum, but now it's something that we can just use so when our agents get caught, they won't tell the truth.
Well, it was also these agents were given autonomy to run these tests and these studies and they did some wild shit.
One of them was called Operation Midnight Climax and Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA ran brothels and they would watch through two-way mirrors and they would dose these Johns up and have these poor guys just like tripping on acid and not have any idea what happened and You know, they would listen to them talk to the prostitutes.
Well, they had a Haight-Ashbury free clinic that the CIA operated for decades, and they closed it down just a couple months after this book came out.
They're like, okay, time to close up shop, boys, because this book was so detailed and Tom had spent so much time poring over all of the documents and the data and he had dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's and at the end of it you read the book and you're like, holy shit!
When it comes to free speech, What we have now is just we have words that we express and these words convey intent and thought and the way we perceive the world and we each take in the other person's words and the way they're saying them and try to go, okay, I see where you're going with this.
One of the things that weirds me out most about the future is all of these sort of symbiotic human electronic things, gadgets that are being proposed, like Neuralink, like Elon Musk's thing, where Elon told me, specifically said, you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth.
So maybe that's how we bypass all of our monkey genetics.
We get someone who's probably a fucking robot to figure out this thing where they cut a hole in your head and put this device in that has all these electrodes into your brain.
And now this monkey's playing Pong with his brain.
Well, you know, people would come by and ask for a hand.
This is what the process was, and often bring gifts.
And I'm there with the other brothers, and a guy would come and leave, and somebody would say to me, well, what did you think of him?
And the first time they asked, I said, which means, what does little sister think?
And people just cracked up, and I heard about that for two years.
I would walk to other parts of the district, and people would say, oh, I heard about you.
You're the guy who asked what Bohini thinks.
And the point was that wasn't relevant to them.
That wasn't what the experience was, right?
That wasn't a relevant variable.
And, you know, I would explain to them that in my country you actually chose your own spouse.
And they would say, well, how do you do that?
And I'd say, well, you find somebody that you love, and then they would say, well, then what if you don't love them?
And then I'd say, well, there's this thing called divorce, you know?
And what I realized was that the way I thought about how all this should work was just so radically different from theirs, and not necessarily better or worse, right?
Their system had its own logic.
And it was static.
It was stable, right?
If you don't marry for love, right, you're not going to get divorced because you're out of love, right?
That wasn't the purpose of it.
The purpose was it was social, it was familial, it had to do with joining communities, you know?
And again, I didn't grow up there, so that's not what I do or what I would want to do.
But what I learned was how many different ways there are to do.
How many different ways there are to be human.
And always to resist the automatic assumption that your way is the better way.
Because we all do that too.
And by the way, I did some of that in Nepal.
I mean, you know, one of my other really enduring memories is my best student was of the so-called Kami cast, which is metalworker, which is an untouchable.
It's way down there, right?
It's not as low as a shoemaker.
And, you know, they have a caste system, right?
And at the bottom, there are people that are called untouchables because you're literally not supposed to touch them or anything.
When they were talking about the arranged marriage, and when you were saying that in your country people get to choose, what did you think about But what is their, like, how do they explain it to you in a way where it made sense?
Did they attempt to?
Or did they just say this is how it's always been?
But when the girls got married, they had to go somewhere else.
How bizarre.
Yeah.
Well, that, again, and it's ironic because, believe it or not, 20 years later, I went back to my village with my older daughter, who was a junior in high school at the time.
And the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had cut a tractor road kind of up half into the mountains.
And the first guy that I ran into, he just said, hey, where you been?
Like, I haven't seen you around.
They're like, oh, you brought your daughter.
Great.
Let's drink rice wine.
Basically, somebody had died and somebody had gotten married and somebody had a kid.
But the one thing that was really different, and this speaks to globalization, is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the United Arab Emirates to work.
And that was ironic, too, because the old story was the son stays and the girl goes, right?
A lot of the sons had gone, but they had gone outside of the country.
And that's the way so many of these economies work in that part of the world.
And in fact, I mean, that was when I started to read history because, of course, in most parts of the world, including where we are right now, historically marriage was arranged.
But, you know, I think it's worth asking ourselves the degree to which We know we're right.
And, you know, I think that at the end of the day, we don't.
All of us have opinions.
All of us have biases.
All of us have learned certain things.
But Leonard Hand, who was, you know, a famous jurist and federal court judge, one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that the spirit of liberty, which is really what we're talking about, is the spirit that is not so sure of itself.
And I've always loved that, right?
So I'm a human being.
I have biases, opinions, very strong ones.
But I think that the worst human attribute is self-certainty.
I think it's the most dangerous one, you know?
And for me, the Peace Corps was just a great way to challenge that and just say, okay, look, I'm not going to have an arranged marriage.
And by the way, I don't.
And I'm not going to marry off my daughters.
But in another part of the world, they do that.
And that's decreasingly the case, by the way, right?
And so these, you know, I mean, when we went back to Nepal, my village, it was in a remote place, so it was relatively static, but there had been many other changes.
I mean, just think of all these guys going to the UAE to work on construction sites.
Those are sad stories, because I know that some of the guys that go to that part of the world, they go with the expectation of getting paid a certain sum of money, and then they take their passport.
And then they pay them a fraction of that and they live in squalor.
So anyway, in the UAE, I would eat at this Nepali place and the same guy would serve me every night.
And I said, you know, I saw this thing in the newspaper saying that, you know, you have to get a bida that in Nepali that means a holiday, like one day a week or something like that.
And he said to me in Nepali, he said, yeah, and if I bitched about that, they'd just send me home and hire some motherfucker.
I mean, he said this to me in Nepali.
And in the UAE, one of the things I learned is that only 10% of the people are from the UAE. Isn't that amazing?
But another thing that really stuck with me, I was teaching.
I taught at NYU at the time, and we had a campus there in downtown.
Now it's outside of town.
But one of the students there told me this really disturbing story that's right on point, which is she's walking home at night, and she thinks that there's this South Asian guy that's kind of following her.
But you know how it is.
Like, you're not really sure.
He seemed a little sketchy, but you don't know.
So you sort of turn a corner and see if he turns it.
And, you know, she gets to where we had our campus, and she told the guard that she thought that this guy down the street had been following her.
And he told me that, like, the police came in 10 minutes and they took him to the airport.
Living in other cultures and recognizing that there's just different styles of living, that human beings can live in different ways, is very eye-opening.
Because we're so accustomed to the way people live here.
It's like I had Josh Rogan, the journalist, was here the other day, and he was talking about living in Japan, because he was living in Japan at one time and teaching over there.
Yeah, he taught English and he was working as a journalist there.
And he was just talking about how different the culture is.
The culture is so different than it is here.
And I was saying that my experience is over there.
It's almost like Japan seemed to me, Tokyo seemed to me, like if human beings evolved in a completely different dimension...
They're human beings, but they evolved in a totally different style of life, but very similar, where they have streets and buildings and neon, but yet they're really polite and orderly and very disciplined.
And the Greeks would hang out with mostly physicians, because that's what my wife is.
And several of them have been to the United States, and they said the most barbaric thing about the United States, they thought, was how quickly people ate.
And they said, you know, in the United States, we heard somebody say, grab a bite.
What is this grab a bite?
And they just thought it was barbaric, and it kind of is.
Oh, I mean, you know, as I was saying earlier, except for meeting Susan, my wife, I mean, living as an elementary school kid in Asia, absolutely the central event of my life, you know?
And, you know, just one minor example, but it kind of isn't.
When we lived in Iran, you know, my dad was the director of the Peace Corps, so we lived in a very, like, nice place.
We had servants and things like that because, you know, you're a Westerner living in an Asian place.
And one night, the cook, we were watching clips about the Ali-Frazier fight because this was 1969. And the cook says to me in Farsi, in which I was fluent, of course, because when you're a kid, you can learn a language in three weeks.
He says, so this guy Ali and this guy Frazier are like, they're from your country, but they don't look like you.
What's up with that?
And as an eight-year-old in Farsi, I told Mahram, the cook, that African people had been enslaved and brought to the New World.
And again, how I even said that or what sense I made of that, I have no idea.
But what an incredible privilege that I was even in that situation.
And that I had, A, that I knew that and that I was put in this position of having to explain it to this Iranian cook.
I think, if I remember correctly, Lamborghini was created because somebody was working with Ferrari and they're like, you know what, I can do this better.
I think they got annoyed at how hard it was to get a Ferrari, too.
And so they're like, I'm just going to make my own one of these fucking things.
I think that's how it started.
And, you know, they've been doing it for almost as long as Ferrari has, too.
But it's like the Italians are great for whatever reason.
They have historically been great at food and art.
Well, you know, I've seen some of that literature, and it turns out, you know, that these international happiness indexes, they kind of confirm the cliché that money really does buy you happiness.
What's the sweet spot of being a young person and having no idea whether or not you're going to have your bills paid, whether you're going to be able to take care of yourself?
What's the roadmap?
What is your future going to hold?
Versus someone who knows they get a stipend from the government, you're always going to have your health care, there's plenty of food, maybe there's a middle ground.
The fact that there's been so little what I would call real Republican pushback of a sort of, there's been a little, but of the sort that we saw with the Tea Party in 2008, right?
Where you say, no, the state's too big.
Like, no, we don't want to provide all those services.
It seems to me that, you know, if we had what I would call a real Republican party, We would be having more of that debate.
Instead, it seems to be focused mainly on, you know, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and something that's happening at the border, you know?
Because I think that there is an interesting or there should be an interesting debate about that.
How big do we want the state to be?
How many services do we want to provide?
What are the costs and benefits of that?
I mean, to me, those are the big questions.
And I think that there are costs and benefits to that.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.
I tend to support most forms of state welfare.
But that's why I wish we had what I would call more real Republicans of the old variety.
Right?
Who are kind of making the case for smaller government, right?
And making the case for, you know, allowing, you know, more room both to rise and to fall and all of that stuff.
Yeah, the problem with bigger government is government's not good at anything.
So when they do it bigger, it's just more people being incompetent.
I mean, I'm not a fan of hiring the private sector to take over important government jobs because I think they would cut corners too and make it the most profitable instead of the most efficient.
But it's just...
There's no, like, outside...
Trump is the Republican Party right now still, it seems like.
But we're not going to have that debate if we're just, you know, focused on, you know, oh, you know, there's a caravan that's coming up from Honduras, and oy vey, and maybe George Soros is financing it.
I mean, look, the question of, like, how many immigrants should come in, and also, like, what do we do with the people that came in here illegally?
That's a real good question because there's a lot of poor people that they've been doing labor their whole life, but they want to do better for their family.
But you have to be able to provide a service that makes it valuable for you to enter into America.
It's unfortunate that the disparity between the United States and these, especially these Latin American countries, these people are coming up and literally walking.
Yeah.
It's sad that they don't have a better spot down there.
That's what's fucked up, is that they need to come up here.
And, you know, I think it's fair to say that some of their woes, if you go back in time, also have to do with some terrible decision-making activity by the United States.
That's not to say, like, we're to blame for it, right?
And so, you know, it's worth—this is where the history piece becomes really important.
You know, if you look especially at, you know, a country like Panama or a country like, you know, Nicaragua, right, or Guatemala, you know, you'll see in the past all sorts of American efforts to intervene in the politics of those countries in ways that were fundamentally disruptive to those countries, and that's real.
But meanwhile, he was getting all that coke and selling all it because they were using him to make money so they could fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas.
I mean, it was just because it was just so – it was just dramatic and rapid, right?
It was just like I realized it in one moment, you know?
But it turns out that it's also complicated.
I mean, I'm sure any sport like martial arts is too.
It becomes a head game as well.
I think actually based on what I've read about you, you would like it.
Because it turns out with tennis that unless you're very good, which I'm not and never will be, that almost every point is decided based on who concentrates more.
It really is.
And that's why, I mean, if you've ever gone to watch somebody like Nadal of Federer play, but what's amazing about it is not just their athleticism, because you can see that in any sport.
What's amazing is that there are 19,000 people around them, and they are so locked in.
It's just crazy.
And that's really what it is.
You know, it's just staying in the point and thinking about nothing else.
But, you know, it's really taught me a lot about how important focus is.
You know, I often say to my students, like, for me, that's the only really necessary condition for doing anything.
You know, like, I'm not a rocket scientist.
You know, I know what my limits are in that realm.
What I can do, what I am able to do, is focus.
And for me, that is just the absolute necessary condition for anything.
And tennis really teaches you that because, you know, if I start thinking about my grocery list or a newspaper column that I'm writing, I'm fucked, you know?
Well, there's some people that think that to concentrate on things, you're supposed to do things for a certain amount of time and take five minutes off on a regular basis that you should never just go all the way through.
But then there's other schools of thought where you just keep drinking coffee and keep pounding on those keys.
I mean, the thing about writing is you sort of, you kind of start to understand, if you've done it for a while, why the ancients all talked about, like, muses coming to them, right?
You know, if you read, you know, Homer or anybody after that, and they talk about, you know, people who are creating anything, a muse came to them.
It does feel that way sometimes, you know?
It's just, you know, suddenly you're really inspired, you have a lot to say, you can say it, and then at other times you're You're just pulling teeth.
That book, War of Art, I bought a stack of them and I would hand them out to people.
Like when they would come on the podcast, just because it was so...
And it's a small, easy read, but it's all about being a professional and this idea that if you just summon the muse and then show up at the same time every day with the intent to be creative and you're going to put in the work and you're not going to...
You know, go watch YouTube videos or Google anything.
You're going to really concentrate only on the writing itself.
And that the muse will, whether or not it's a real thing.
You know, this idea that there's some angelic, creative thing out there that bestows upon you creative gifts.
And yet, I know Peterson's Canadian, but in the United States, I think one of the most important social phenomena of the past 20 years is actually the decline in both, you know, church, synagogue, mosque attendance, and also in the number of people that say they're affiliated with, you know, with a faith.
And when you think about, if you just analyze the behavior of people on both extremes, whether it's the far left or the far right, They exhibit remarkably similar traits, like pure hatred for the other side, inability to look at the virtues of this opposing ideology, and almost treating it as if the very nature of reality is at stake.
I think there's some real benefit to religion for a lot of people, and I didn't used to think that when I was younger.
When I was younger, I was a lot more arrogant about it, and I thought it was for fools.
I was like, oh yeah, a guy came back from the dead, and he used to walk on water, whatever.
But now I look at it...
First of all, I understand what the Bible actually is now, and it's way more complicated.
You know, it's some people trying to make sense of the world thousands and thousands of years ago as interpreted through multiple languages back to England, back to English rather.
And in a way that, you know, there's a lot of these ancient languages, like if you go back to ancient Hebrew, Letters doubled as numbers.
So there was value in words, right?
Somebody told me once that the word love and the word God have the same numerical value.
So if you combine the numbers and the letters and it's like...
It wasn't as simple as when you get the interpretation to Latin or to Greek or to English, ultimately.
You're not interpreting the full meaning in these sentences, that there's some intrinsic value that's lost because the ancient Hebrew version of it was like, it just meant a different thing.
Right, and it's been transmuted through a million different histories, right?
A million different peoples, right?
And ideologies.
And in all kinds of ways, right?
I mean, heinous and wonderful.
You know, when my students tell me they don't like religion or they don't want to mix religion and politics, I'm always like, so we shouldn't have a Martin Luther King Day, right?
I mean, what do we think he was, right?
What do we think the whole civil rights movement?
Of course, you know?
But it's funny.
I once asked a group of students what King's profession was, and I got hilarious answers.
Like, a lot of people thought he was a lawyer, but my favorite one of all was policy experts.
It's like, I have a dream that one day, thanks to the earned income tax credit, you know, the poverty rate will decline 2%.
But again, I think that speaks to the kind of stigmatization of religion in certain circles in our country, especially elite circles, and this idea that it's this conservative principle or this backwards thing.
And obviously, it's been used in those ways.
But, you know, I mean, if you think about, like, movements for justice in this country, starting with abolitionism, right, going right straight through civil rights, they were all powered by religion.
Yeah, and it's empowering for so many communities to have this place where people go to worship because they've agreed upon certain kind of behavior when they go to these places and in agreeing to work hard to be a better person and to tithe some of your earnings.
There's all these different aspects of religion that I think really lends itself to empowering the bond that these people have with each other.
I mean, I'll be honest, I just don't give it a lot of thought, you know?
What I care about is the world, the world as I can see it, the world as I can know it.
And, you know, for me, what's really important about Judaism is the charge that it gives you to try to change that world.
I know this isn't everybody's interpretation of Judaism, but it's mine.
So at Passover, you know, what do you say?
You say, remember that you were a slave in Egypt.
Right?
And so that experience, that experience of being a pariah, which has been so central to the Jewish experience, what that does is that enjoins you to ask, okay, who's the pariah now?
Right?
It might not be you now, but it's going to be somebody else.
And your job as a Jew, whoever it is, your job as a Jew is to seek them out, reach out to them, try to understand them.
My archaeologist friends have told me...
That, speaking of Passover, there's actually no real archaeological evidence that Jews were enslaved en masse in Egypt.
Like that there was a mass population transfer.
Like, I grew up thinking that that actually happened.
Okay, the stuff with the parting of the Red Sea, okay, there you get into the faith realm.
But I thought as a matter of history, right, that that had happened.
Like, I mean, you know, You have to look at shards of pottery and you have to look at other things.
And apparently they found there was some trade, as you might guess, because there were so many different populations that are both in conflict and in movement and all that, right?
But, like, I remember somebody told me that Jews, like, built the pyramids.
You know, there's still, even if that quote didn't happen and the Red Sea didn't part, to me, you know, just the historic experience that Jews have had, you know, and especially their experience as being the pariah, as being the outgroom and fighting back against that.
And asserting themselves.
You know, that's what I take away from it.
And especially my duty as a Jew to try to make things a little less fucked up, especially for whoever is a slave now.
And by the way, I'm not saying that's how other Jews see it or should.
But for me, it's an example of the power of religion.
I think we definitely do, and I think we definitely do benefit from that community gathering place where people agree to worship together.
Because even, again, like Pressfield called upon the muse, even if you don't, even if the muse isn't real, if you treat it like it's real, and if you have a place where everybody gets together and they all agree, like, we're going to be better people because of the Lord, and the Lord watches us, and the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and just think about...
All the real positive aspects of some of the religious tenets.
But at the same time, I mean, the historic ironies are so great because, you know, Republican Mormons in Utah, they're like the most Republican people on earth.
And yet, of course, the Republican Party pursued Brigham Young all the way into the Great Salt Basin.
I mean, you think that's really where they wanted to go?
You think they're like, oh, this seems like a really habitable place.
That was as far as the army, which was led by the Republican Party, was willing to pursue them.
You know, the line was that the Mormons, it wasn't just, of course, that they were, you know, they were bigamists or Satanists or whatever, you know, they oppressed women.
I like slavery oppressed African-Americans.
I mean, that was one of the arguments.
You know, and the Mormons aren't dumb.
Once they create a territory, of course, they enfranchise women before anybody.
And they're like, oh, we're the people?
Like, we're the people that oppress women?
Like, do they vote back in Massachusetts?
They don't.
That's pretty interesting.
You know, I mean, back to the Book of the Mormon.
I mean, what I think is fascinating how the LDS, you know, establishment handled that.
What they did, which I thought was super smart, was they were like, let's not beat them, let's join them.
So you go to Broadway and you get your little playbill, and I'm sure you've seen this, like on the second page, there's an ad from the Mormon Church, from LDS, and they're like, okay, you've seen the play, now look at the real thing.
Like back when it didn't matter if you lived in Mexico or the United States because everybody was on horseback, they were like, listen, we'll just go down here and we can have 50 wives.
You know about the guy who spent all the money to sequence the genome of Native Americans because he wanted to find out if they were the lost tribe of Israel, because that's in the Book of Mormon?
And look, you know, a lot of it is bizarre, but it's also fascinating, right?
And it's funny, on the Jewish-Mormon thing, I mean, the other controversy that's come up in the past couple years, you know how the Mormons can sort of make anybody Mormon, like including well after they're dead.
Listen, it works for a lot of them, and they're very nice people, but it does leave them vulnerable.
I have a friend, and she left the Mormon church as an adult, and she found herself very susceptible to sort of like...
Healers and yogi type people and she goes, I think what it is is I was so accustomed to just believing in things that didn't necessarily make sense but allowing them to like, oh, okay.
She's so gullible.
But it was interesting seeing her as an adult trying to make sense of it as to what it was that was leading her to be so susceptible.
Yes, and I think for the Mormons, especially, as you were saying, because it's so American and so new, I think there are a lot of tensions between, let's just say, the believers and the historians, right?
Because, you know, once you start studying history of anything, it gets complicated, and it's not like what you thought.
And, you know, the Mormons were involved in, we think, several massacres of other human beings, including this place called Mountain Meadows.
And it's been very hard for people in the Mormon church, for some of the believers, to accept that.
So there's always going to be a tension between faith and history.
I mean, we went to Iceland a couple years ago, our family, and somebody there told us that as best we can tell, Iceland is the only place that was never colonized, in the sense that when the Vikings got there, There was literally no one there.
And then, by the way, after that, it became like a whole Game of Thrones shit, which is why Game of Thrones is filmed there.
I mean, there was a million conquerors after that, you know.
But when the first Vikings came there, there was nobody there.
And apparently, that's sweet genre.
Like, that's its own animal.
So think about that.
Every other place that people move to, there are other human beings there.
And that means they clash.
It's not the only thing they do.
They also mix.
But they clash.
And one team dominates the other one in some way.
That is the story of history.
And so once you start digging, you find that nobody's hands are clean.
Right?
You know, everyone was involved in some kind of act of conquest or domination, almost.
Right?
So, you know, one of the things that we now do in many elite campuses is, at the beginning of any event, we'll say, now let's remember that we're on Lenape land, right?
Or Choctaw land.
You've probably heard these, these sort of new Native American affirmations.
And look, I'm a historian.
I think it's great that people learn more about the Lenape's or the Choctaws.
But I'm also a little bit troubled by this ritual because it does seem to imply that, like, the Lenapees were just there from time immemorial living in some Edenic place instead of, like, conquering whoever it was that was there before the Lenapees.
And, of course, that's the native story.
They conquered each other.
They made tribes.
They made empires.
One team ruled, sometimes killed the other.
And again, I think there should be much more awareness of Native American history, and I think those affirmations are fine, but it would also be useful for us to think about, again, who was there before that team.
I'm fascinated by Native American history and I'm fascinated by how long they must have been living here in that manner before white people showed up and then white people show up and within a few years everyone's dead.
I'm listening to this book on tape about Cortez and a lot of the Spanish explorers making it to Native America, or North America, rather, and one of the things they talk about is the Mayan Empire.
They have this detailed account of Mayans, and I was thinking, oh, they probably died off from disease, too.
I mean, that's probably what killed off the Mayan Empire, because they don't really know.
They're really not sure what happened to the Mayans.
If the Spaniards are describing their encounters with the Maya, for sure they gave them diseases, right?
They fucking killed everybody else.
I mean, their disease just swept through the Native Americans and there was millions and millions and millions of them all across the country.
Imagine this one, like Chichen Itza.
Imagine this one small area with this incredible civilization that had We evolved over who knows how long, built these amazing structures, and then gone.
Well, how about, what was the temple that they built?
I never can pronounce this correctly, but there was a temple that they, an Aztec temple that they built where at the completion of it, they had a ritual sacrifice where they killed something like 80,000 slaves.
And it's, you know, I mean, this is where things get interesting and complicated and political, right?
I mean, look, you know, the story that we told for most of our history in this country was that colonialism was a beneficent thing, right?
That was developed to basically civilized savages, right?
And that was flawed in a million different ways, and it's great that we've corrected it.
But, right, again, we shouldn't congratulate ourselves too quickly or imagine that we've got it right when we just reverse things and say, oh, you know, Columbus and everybody who came after them were just, you know, horrible, evil enslavers, and everybody that they encountered was some sort of innocent victim.
You know, that actually patronizes the people they encountered, I think, you know, who had their own complex societies with their own divisions, and yes, often their own brutalities.
And so we should be able to find a way to critique what the conquistadors did and the way they overran these societies without nostalgizing or romanticizing what their societies were.
Here it says, defeated soldiers were not killed on the battlefield, but captured and returned to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice.
The Aztec raiders were convinced that the end of the world was nigh and butchered thousands to appease the gods.
This was a culture obsessed with death.
They believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing.
When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated, and I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong, because I probably am, It was consecrated in 1487. The Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.
They had these rituals, these ancient rituals in Greece that all of these scholars would go and participate in, and they wrote about them in these very romantic ways, and people were trying to figure out what the hell was...
How do you say it?
Eleusinian.
That's it.
So I did say it right.
Yeah.
It's right here.
It says this sanctuary in ancient Greece, the most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece.
And he proved by not just examining the contents of these, a lot of their wine and their beer.
So different forms, which is very similar to LSD. So they would add this stuff to their wine, and then they would have these incredible...
Ceremonial rituals and during these ceremonies they would learn things and then they were Discouraged from doing these things by the Roman Emperor and so they would they would then move their ceremonies he found them was in Spain I think,
I forget, but he tracked the exact same ritualistic and the same depictions of gods and the same pottery with the same psychedelic laced compounds that you could get.
They could get evidence of it and the molecules are still intact.
But just the fact that ancient Greece was, I mean, it was the original source of democracy, right?
The original source of so much information that if you go to all the ancient wise people that we respect and revere, how many of them participated in this ritual in ancient Greece?
And it's really interesting because it was such a hub of thought.
Yes.
And such a hub of innovation in terms of societal structure and the way we treated people.
Oh, and I mean, obviously, one of the ways that they maintained democracy was by enslaving certain people to do the shit work, which was a model, actually, that people like Jefferson invoked quite literally.
They said, this is how the Greeks were able to make democracy, is they solve the problem of who's going to do the shit work.
Well, that's the reason that Cigney Wilkinson, the cartoonist, and I wrote the book, is we wanted to look backwards to remind, really, our younger readers that, you know, Frederick Douglass and Suthi B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, they were all free speech zealots.
Do you think it's what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, that it's more convenient and there's such a temptation to just silence people that you disagree with?
That they've ignored the reality of discourse and that it's so important to work out who's right and it actually strengthens your position on things.
It doesn't harm your position and it actually brings more people to your side than it does push them away.
But if you want to persuade them, bullying is not a good system.
No.
But, you know, it's interesting.
You mentioned discourse, and we want to stamp out things that we think are harmful.
I mean, I think that that's something else really important that's changed, I think, maybe in the past two decades, is...
You know, what I call a kind of psychologizing of politics, whereby if you say something I disagree with, it's not just that I disagree with it or I think it's wrong for the following reasons.
And he'd go like, N-word, N-word, N-word, and then he'd say the S-word, and he'd say all these other things.
And he'd say, look, you know, if we just keep doing that enough, then the end of the riff was he said, like, no little black kid will come home crying from school because a white boy called him the N-word.
And a cul-de-sac is really what it is, I think, in the sense that it interrupts discussion.
You know, when I give this rap to my students about how problematic this whole, like, psychological frame is, they'll often say, like, you're denying our feelings.
And I say, no.
It's the opposite, actually.
I would never deny your feelings, and it's precisely the undeniability of your feelings that makes this such a poor venue for discussion.
Like, I can't tell you how you're feeling or how you should feel, right?
But what I can tell you is that when your feeling becomes a trump card, right?
We're not going to be able to communicate anymore.
And, you know, I don't go out of my way to offend people, but I know that because I'm a journalist and a historian, right, that sometimes I'm going to write or say things that will offend people.
I think that comes with the territory, you know?
And I think if what we decide is that we're never going to offend each other, we're actually never going to learn from each other.
And look, you know, I mean, there's a story that begins our little book that is right on point involving Mary Beth Tinker, who was the 13-year-old who wore the armband to Warren Harding Middle School in Des Moines in 1965. Armband?
Yeah, a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.
And she was sent home.
And that later became the court case, Tinker v.
Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court said that Neither students nor teachers shed their free expression rights at the schoolhouse gate.
So she's a great symbol of, there she is, with her black armband.
Well, Mary Beth Tinker isn't that much older than I am.
Anyway, she's become a friend and she came up to my class at Penn.
And she did her presentation.
By the way, she still has the armband, and she, like, puts it on students.
And, of course, I'm a historian.
I'm like, shouldn't that be in the National Archives?
Like, you're just carrying it around?
Like, do you also have a copy of the Declaration of Independence in your purse, you know?
But it's great, actually.
I mean, it's a great teaching tool, and Mary Beth is absolutely fabulous.
So she tells her story about getting sent home and, you know, eventually getting the ACLU to represent her and You know, becoming what she is, which is this kind of great symbol and also voice for free speech.
And the students take it in and they say, look, you know, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight, right?
You were fighting the war in Vietnam.
This Milo Yiannopoulos clown, like this Ann Coulter jokester, like this Ben Shapiro hoaxer, they just hurt people.
Why should we allow them to speak?
And she had a very, I think, important and pointed response.
She said, listen, at my middle school, there were kids who had fathers and brothers and uncles.
They were fighting and some of them dying in Southeast Asia.
You don't think they were hurt?
By this snot-nosed kid wearing this symbol saying that their loved one was risking their life for a lie?
You don't think that hurt them?
If that's what you think, you're not thinking.
Of course it hurt them.
So once that becomes your barometer, your measure of what's going to be allowed as speech, forget Mary Beth Tinker.
Forget anything, because words do hurt, right?
That, in part, was the point, right?
That was the point of the symbol, right?
Again, I'm not saying that Mary Beth intended to hurt anybody, because I can assure you that she didn't.
But what I'm saying is it effectively hurt people, right?
Because speech, especially challenging speech, does.
And the students, they took this in and they said, look, you know, free speech, it's just about who has power and who doesn't.
And the people with power, they love to talk about free speech because they've got power.
And Mary Beth Tinker is like, hold on, wait a minute.
I was a 13-year-old girl.
Speech was the only power I had.
And that's really our point here, right?
Is that, you know, when you start to restrict it in whatever way, formally and informally, right, even with the best of intentions, It's people without power, ultimately, that are going to suffer.
You know, it's people at the bottom that are going to get hurt, right?
Because they need speech more than anybody else.
Before the 1960s, students had no speech rights that the courts or the Constitution was willing to recognize.
So, you know, if a student said something in school that the teacher didn't like, they could just send them home.
You know?
And it's because of Mary Beth Tinker and the other kids who protested that now it's not like that, right?
And of course, we can debate the degree to which this should be allowed and should you be able to wear a Confederate flag on your t-shirt or, you know, an anti-abortion symbol.
And these are all important things to talk about.
But even the reason we're talking about them is because Mary Beth Tinker, who was 13, I think we need to hold on to free speech is...
We live in an unequal society like all societies are.
And we live in a society with all sorts of unfairness, all sorts of injustice like all societies have.
All right?
And if you want to do anything about that, you've got to let everyone talk.
That's the only way.
The only way to make anything better, to right anything wrong, to right any wrong, is to maintain our free speech.
Well, look, I mean, again, I think with the best of intentions, I don't like to question people's motives.
And I think the people on the deplatforming side, I think they believe what they believe for good reasons, right?
They want to protect certain populations at the school, especially minorities, from some pretty offensive and awful speech.
And I understand that.
And I respect it to a degree.
That is, I respect their goal.
But, you know, well, where to start?
I mean, A, like, who's going to be so offensive that our minority students can't hear him or her?
Who's going to make that call?
B, are you sure the minority students are going to be offended?
How do you know that?
C, aren't you condescending to them just a little if you assume that they can't handle this?
All right?
And D, even if it is offensive to them, how do you know they'll benefit by being insulated from it?
Like, can we find, like, a cognitive psychologist or, you know, anybody who does, like...
Behavior therapy, to tell us that the way to help somebody who is afraid or threatened by something is to insulate them from it, that's not how it works.
That makes things worse.
So, I mean, I know I'm throwing out a lot there, but I think there are many different objections to this.
And again, I want to be totally clear, like, I'm not questioning that the deplatforming people want to help.
When I was in high school, Barney Frank came to our school and debated some conservative guy with an American flag on his lapel and I think I was probably like 14 or 15 years old and they brought us into this auditorium and Barney Frank just demolished this guy.
He was so, so much more clever and interesting and, you know, just made really good points.
And it was cool to watch because I got to see one guy's perspective that seemed to me to be...
What's a good way to put it?
It seemed like he was bullshitting.
But he was bullshitting in a weird, like, he was pretending the world is different than it is, and he was going to trick us kids in this way of saying it that was very, like, almost Hollywood movie-esque.
And Barney Frank just dismantled him.
And I remember sitting there going, wow, this is interesting, like, listening to these...
Like, this guy had his chance, and this guy has his chance.
And this guy's got better, more well-formed thoughts.
He's more articulate.
He's more clever.
And I like that guy better.
And it's like, that's what you need to see.
And this idea that everything needs to be an echo chamber is fucking crazy.
Because then you leave out...
The possibility of these moments where someone does get dismantled.
And this is what we said earlier.
The answer to bad speech is not deplatforming.
It's better speech.
So you don't need to take a guy like Milo out of the ecosphere.
You need to have someone debate him who's fucking good.
And you gotta go, hey man, we got a heavy hitter on this side.
We gotta bring somebody in that really knows their shit.
Ben Shapiro has made a career of trouncing people that were not as verbally skilled as him.
If you go and look at his YouTube page, He's fantastic at pointing out logical fallacies and a lot of these, like, really simple, utopian ideas that a lot of these kids bring to him.
And he points it out, and he's got a very fast way of talking, and you can't compete with him.
He's very articulate.
And when he does that, these kids just get battered.
I mean, there's, like, dozens and dozens of videos of him doing that.
Yeah, he could have been elsewhere in the Boston area.
Anyway, Frank's a fascinating figure, important figure in the history of the Democratic Party, but also in the history of gay rights, right?
Because one of the first out national figures.
Well, I think the gay rights story is really important to this discussion, and here's why.
It won't surprise you that because being gay and gay activity was illegal, gay publications were illegal, too.
And they were widely censored across this country.
And the Supreme Court actually intervened in the 1950s and said that, like, some of these bodybuilding magazines that were popular among especially gay men were protected.
You could do them, right?
That was the trigger of the gay rights movement in this country.
And so that's a really good example, it seems to me, right, of why speech is so important because, you know, you take it away and then people who are stigmatized and people who are oppressed, right, they won't be able to connect.
They won't be able to do the things that they need to do to change this world.
Yeah, I think kids and all of us would be way better off if there was open and free debate and if they didn't pull fire alarms when people that they don't agree with started talking.
And it just seems so strange to me that that's controversial to say.
In 2021, it seems like there's a missing chunk of progress.
With this adoption of safe spaces and trigger warnings and all this shit that everybody thinks is just a part of the program now.
And, you know, I would say, actually, I think the worst outcome is the one that we can't really measure, which is just kind of the sort of the spirit of self-censorship that attaches to all this.
I mean, when you actually try to look at it and you see how many trigger warnings literally there have been, there haven't been that many.
It's just that what you're creating is, again, a spirit of censorship.
But, you know, to the point of trigger warnings, I mean, when I taught at NYU, I taught a very big, big lecture, big sweaty lecture class about the culture wars in American history, including many things we're talking about.
And we did a unit about pornography and pornography censorship and regulation and all that.
And as part of that unit, I showed a film actually by an NYU colleague called The Price of Pleasure, which is an anti-porn movie.
And one of the ways it tries to make its argument is like by including some awful, violent, misogynist clips.
And what I would do before I showed that movie is I would just describe in clinical detail what these clips were.
And look, for all – and I would say to the students – Was that unusual back then, though, to have that kind of – like when did that kind of porn become normal?
Yeah, yeah, or maybe even later than that because not everyone had, people didn't have as much access to the internet.
I mean, anyway, to the point of triggers, I mean, I would tell the students what it was in and I would say, like, I'm going to show the movie during these times, like, if you don't want to see that, you don't have to come to that, right?
And for all practical purposes, that was a trigger warning, right?
And I think in some instances that's legitimate.
The problem is, of course, is we get this concept creep where we now drag it over everything.
So people, I mean, there was an incident a few years ago where, like, kids demanded trigger warnings for bloody movie scenes in a course about horror movies.
Well, look, I mean, you know, as an educator and as a parent, I'm troubled by the fact that lots of young men in this country are getting their sexual education from porn.
I'm troubled by that, and I'm glad it didn't exist when I was a kid.
I mean, to me, the interesting question isn't why 16-year-old boys watch porn.
It's why they don't do it, like, 24-7.
I mean, I think if it existed when I was a 16-year-old boy, I think I would have been very tempted to do that.
And I think it would have fucked me up in a whole number of ways.
But that's not a good argument for getting rid of it.
That's an argument for trying to promote a different kind of sexual education.
Right?
Porn is sex ed.
It's just bad sex ed.
You know, it's a way of socializing people, especially young men, to a certain kind of understanding of what sex is or should be.
And I think a lot of it is a very narrow and flawed understanding.
But the answer to that is not, okay, let's get rid of all the porn, right?
The answer to that is for institutions, especially educational institutions, to put forth a different model.
And I guess my plea would be, let's have that discussion, right?
Let's have a free speech discussion about free speech, right?
That is free and unbridled, where the person who's making the plea for having all the porn be allowed is automatically vilified as a misogynist or a woman hater.
Although surely some of the consumers of that product are exactly that.
Let's actually have that discussion.
So, I mean, in some ways this goes back to Mary Beth Tinker because, you know, when the court ruled that she could wear this armband, the court did not say, you can say whatever the fuck you want in school at any time.
Because that would be mayhem, right?
You can't do it.
What they said is, if the school wants to restrict the speech, It has to show that there was a threat of material and substantial disruption to learning.
And by the way, in that particular case, in a school district of 18,000, seven kids wore armbands to school.
And actually, you know, the school organizations, like the principal's organizations and the superintendent's organization, also the Biden's Department of Education, they rallied around the school.
They submitted briefs to allow the school to do this, and their argument is, look, there's all this terrible bullying going on on the net, which is true.
There's sometimes awful racist shit.
We've got to be able to sanction that.
And I think the response, the right response to that is, look, we have anti-harassment laws.