May 30, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:57:50
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unidentified
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the next one. Thank you. | |
| Mm. | ||
| We got a big one for you today, one that we had to do live. | ||
| I felt we needed the live energy for this one because it's big, it's big. | ||
| And joining me, sitting across from me, is a professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Brett Weinstein. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Thanks for the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| We have got a lot to talk about, man. | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| You are in the thick of it. | ||
| I mean, you are in the thick of, in some ways, what I would say is everything that sort of I've been focusing on for these last two or two and a half years related to false cries of racism and bigotry and things that are happening with the left and the rush to judgment. | ||
| And all of these things. | ||
| And we're gonna get to all that. | ||
| We've got a couple video clips that we're gonna show about what's going on up there. | ||
| But I thought the best way we could sort of set this up is that for people that have no idea who you are, what Evergreen State is all about, all that, let's just do a little bit. | ||
| Let's just do 10 minutes or so just talking about that. | ||
| So first off, tell me a little bit about Evergreen State College, because this is a liberal arts college. | ||
| It's a public liberal arts college, which is a very unusual thing in and of itself, but that doesn't even begin to describe how unique it is. | ||
| So the most important thing is that instead of having our curriculum divided up into classes, like four credit classes as you would have in most colleges, we teach programs. | ||
| And programs are full-time for both professors and students. | ||
| So, and they can go on for two or three quarters. | ||
| And what that means is that we are able to establish very close relationships with students that allow us to understand each person in the room as an individual, and that means that we can spot individual blind spots. | ||
| We're not just delivering education from the front of the room and having people consume it. | ||
| We are, we have learning communities that really function. | ||
| It doesn't always work, but when it works, it's a marvelous thing. | ||
| Yeah, and this is a place of progressivism, right? | ||
| I mean, there's a liberal bent here, progressivism, and leftist ideas and things. | ||
| They're welcomed here. | ||
| They're more than welcomed. | ||
| It is a very left-leaning campus. | ||
| On the other hand, there are lots of students that aren't traditional age, and so there is actually a fair breadth of opinion, but the dominant opinion in the discussion, especially amongst the traditional age students, is very left-leaning. | ||
| Yeah, and before we get to all the craziness, you yourself, you're a lefty. | ||
| You liked and voted for Bernie, did you not? | ||
| I did like Bernie. | ||
| I resonated with his message. | ||
| I did not believe that if he won, things would have changed, but I certainly supported him as the best option that we had available to us, and I believed in him as a person. | ||
| I would say it's a little too simple, though, to say that I'm a liberal. | ||
| I think I'm sort of maturing out of that. | ||
| What does that mean to you? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Let's just put it this way. | ||
| Nothing about my values has changed. | ||
| They're very progressive. | ||
| My objectives and what I would like to see happen here on planet Earth are still classic liberal objectives. | ||
| But my understanding of how the world works has changed a great deal and I have been working with a number of people for several years trying to imagine a very different mechanism for making systems here on Earth function. | ||
| So I would say one of the things that What we've realized is that we need revolutionary change and we can't afford revolution. | ||
| And so figuring out how to get a governance structure to emerge that is capable of doing the job has been one of my primary hobbies, you could say. | ||
| Yeah, and it sounds particularly relevant now because we have so many people that are into revolution. | ||
| There's this idea of hashtag resistance. | ||
| People want this revolution, but maybe haven't thought out all of the things that you're sort of working on. | ||
| And in fact, I think the instinct is right. | ||
| People recognize that we are in a very serious circumstance and that the system will not self-correct. | ||
| But what they haven't realized is that the ability to transition with the traditional mechanisms of change has evaporated. | ||
| And so they're chasing false hope, in my opinion. | ||
| And it's really important that we stop doing that and that we actually utilize mechanisms that are capable of doing the job. | ||
| Yeah, from those mechanisms, let's shift to the mechanisms of biology because that is what you teach. | ||
| Just tell me a little bit about what your passions are in biology. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I'm an evolutionary biologist and I, in spite of the fact that when I hear the word theorist I want to roll my eyes, I'm an evolutionary theorist. | ||
| And what that means is that I've been building a toolkit since I was in graduate school that is the tools necessary to solve the problems that the last generation of evolutionary biologists wasn't able to solve. | ||
| So my focus in graduate school became trade-offs, places where the evolutionary adaptive force can't push in the direction of simple improvement because it has to choose between two desirable things. | ||
| And it turns out that a great many of the puzzles that we can't solve can be addressed if you look at the tensions that exist between desirable characteristics. | ||
| So I've studied Questions like why there are more species as you get towards the equator, why we grow feeble with age, why so many species have elaborate sexual displays that seem counterproductive to the job of surviving. | ||
| So that's the gist of it. | ||
| Yeah, and a lot of that stuff actually does have something to do with sort of the conversation we're about to get into about race and everything that you're dealing with right now. | ||
| Do you see some sort of connection there? | ||
| Every connection. | ||
| Every connection whatsoever? | ||
| Okay, so we'll put that aside. | ||
| So, okay, so let's dive into it now. | ||
| I just wanted to do a few minutes just so that people know that you're a legit guy, you're working at a real school, you are a real professor and all that. | ||
| I want to start with one other thing from your past before we get into the present. | ||
| You once left a Ivy League school because of racism that you saw. | ||
| I thought that would be the right place to start discussing racism because some really horrific charges are being leveled at you right now, and I thought it would be a good way to start. | ||
| So can you just tell me that story? | ||
| I can. | ||
| I'm going to shorten it quite a bit. | ||
| It's a story I don't love telling, and it's complicated. | ||
| But the gist is this. | ||
| So I was at Penn. | ||
| This would be, I arrived in 1987. | ||
| And my freshman year, I was in a big dorm, and although I was not rushing a fraternity and wouldn't have, one of my good friends on my hallway was rushing the ZBT fraternity. | ||
| And they were having an event, which they called a mystery event, that they advertised with a big question mark. | ||
| And my friend induced me to go to this mystery event just because I wasn't likely to get my homework done that night, so might as well. | ||
| And I went and there was, I don't know, an hour of not very interesting stuff. | ||
| People watching porn in the corner eating ice cream and odd things like that. | ||
| Is that what they were doing at fraternities back then? | ||
| Porn and ice cream? | ||
| I didn't spend a lot of time in them, but at that moment, apparently. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So, in any case, at some point, the lights dim, a disco ball I hadn't noticed starts to spin, and one of the fraternity brothers comes out and announces that he would like to introduce the audience to his friend Leon, and he wants you to tell Leon that you're going to take care of his women. | ||
| And I started to get a very sinking feeling of what was about to happen. | ||
| Women came out who were apparently prostitutes, black prostitutes. | ||
| I should say Penn is in West Philly, which is an economically depressed neighborhood, largely black, and the fraternity in question was a wealthy Jewish fraternity. | ||
| So these women come out and it becomes clear that there's going to be a striptease and I made one of the bigger mistakes of my life and I left. | ||
| I should have stayed because what unfolded next would have been easier to address had I been an eyewitness to it. | ||
| When I got back to my dorm, several hours later, my friend and another person who had been rushing the same fraternity came back into the hallway and they described the events that had happened after I left. | ||
| And they involved A situation where rushes were induced to dance with these women on tables. | ||
| No news there. | ||
| But then they had, the fraternity, had somehow thought it a good idea to purchase cucumbers and ketchup. | ||
| And they enacted what was effectively, I now understand, a ceremonial rape. | ||
| And I thought that this was such a terrible event to have taken place on a college campus, effectively sanctioned by the fact that nobody was going to say anything, that I went to the school paper and I tried to alert them to the story. | ||
| And they were very interested. | ||
| It's a very good school paper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. | ||
| And they looked into it and they called people who had been at the event and they got seven or eight different stories about what had taken place that night, including Scrabble and Parcheesi and other things like that, but nobody would confirm the story. | ||
| And so I asked them, would it be all right if I wrote an op-ed describing what I had understood the event to be? | ||
| I wrote the op-ed, and you can imagine what happened. | ||
| All hell broke loose. | ||
| And although there were actually two fraternities that did not come after me, the rest of the fraternity system went berserk. | ||
| And, you know, it was a watershed moment. | ||
| The rest of that year was a whirlwind, including death threats and other such things. | ||
| Eventually, the college was embarrassed into having to investigate the matter, and they tried the fraternity. | ||
| I was actually asked to testify, even though I hadn't seen the event in question. | ||
| And while I was sitting in the witness, the waiting room, the brothers, including the president of the fraternity, came in and started coercing witnesses. | ||
| So when it was my turn to testify, I mentioned that this had happened. | ||
| Fraternity was removed from campus for, I think, two years and it was forbidden to pledge a class. | ||
| I believe that what happened is that the National Fraternity then bought them a house and they secretly did pledge a class. | ||
| But anyway, it was quite a thing. | ||
| But by the time it was over, the ability to be at Penn and just do college work, it was not simple. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So you left Penn? | ||
| I did leave Penn. | ||
| I came back my sophomore year, but the place was poisoned for me at that point after what I had seen and how I had been treated. | ||
| Yeah, well I bring it up because I think it's a good way to preface everything we're about to talk about and I can tell you it's very clear you don't enjoy telling the story. | ||
| I don't think you're looking at yourself as you're some kind of hero or something. | ||
| You just did what you felt was right but it is interesting because that's 20, that's 30 years ago at this point and over the last 30 years you've done a lot of things that have been to fight real racism and you have a track record of it. | ||
| And I think it's important because these days when we tar and feather everybody, we seem to throw out everything they've ever done and try to catch them on one word they said wrong or one sentence out of context or any of that. | ||
| So I'm glad we got that out. | ||
| So now let's get to the present. | ||
| Okay, so Evergreen has done something called a day of absence for years now. | ||
| It sounds like it's since the 1970s. | ||
| Can you tell me what the Day of Absence is? | ||
| Because that's what got us to where we are now. | ||
| So at Evergreen it's a yearly event and it's predicated on a Douglas Turner Ward, he's a black playwright, a play that he wrote I think in 1965. | ||
| And the central conceit of the play is that the underappreciated black population of a | ||
| southern town decides to emphasize to the white population its value by not showing | ||
| up one day. | ||
| And although I haven't seen the play performed, I've read a good bit of it, and chaos erupts | ||
| because the black population is so central to the functioning of the town. | ||
| The play, I think, is typically put on with black actors in white face, which is interesting | ||
| too. | ||
| So, anyway, Evergreen decided not too long after its founding that, I think it was originally | ||
| black faculty, it's now people of color more generally, but black faculty decided that | ||
| the black population of Evergreen should ceremonially absent themselves to make the same point that | ||
| the play makes. | ||
| And this has gone on until I arrived and continued up until this year. | ||
| So something changed this year, and that's where this all begins. | ||
| So what changed this year? | ||
| So basically you had no problem with that. | ||
| I have no problem with it happening. | ||
| I don't find anything wrong with it. | ||
| I have one concern about it, which is that a college is not a town. | ||
| And so when the black population of Evergreen, or later the people of color, don't show up, the college does not grind to a halt. | ||
| So I have a concern that it doesn't quite make the point that it's supposed to make. | ||
| But I have no problem with the desire to make that point, and I have no desire with people deciding to absent themselves. | ||
| Right, so you have what could be an academic concern if there was supposed to be a test that day or some other thing, but not a concern about the specifics of the premise of what these people are doing. | ||
| Right, I find nothing wrong with it. | ||
| Okay, and this has gone on, as you said, since the 70s, you've been part of this for a long time, no problem. | ||
| What changed this year? | ||
| So this year, the organizers, I understand now from reading the school paper, that the organizers in response to Trump's election decided to reverse the order of things. | ||
| So the organizers are people of color, at least overwhelmingly. | ||
| The school paper reports them as simply people of color. | ||
| They decided to reverse the order and have white people not show up to campus and I thought about that. | ||
| When I first heard it I thought I must have misunderstood what was being said. | ||
| It's possible that my reaction is different than it might be because I'm Jewish and alarm bells go off when I'm told I'm not supposed to be | ||
| somewhere. | ||
| In any case, I thought I had misheard it and I put it aside and then there were | ||
| several emails, so it was announced at a faculty meeting, and then there were | ||
| several emails inviting people to commit, to participate, | ||
| but no clarification that that was the structure. | ||
|
unidentified
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Was it an ask or a tell? | |
| Let's be very careful about this. | ||
| There was no implication that white people would not be allowed on campus. | ||
| There was, however, the implication that when this finally was described, the implication was that white allies would be off campus. | ||
| And therefore, there was the implication that if you were white and you showed up on campus, that you were therefore not an ally. | ||
| And that is the thing that pushed me to respond. | ||
| I did not like the implication that by the very act of being there, I was not allying with people of color. | ||
| That is not my understanding. | ||
| Right, okay, so there's this meeting, this is discussed. | ||
| You then realize that what you had sort of feared was happening here was happening here. | ||
| You then wrote a letter. | ||
| Now, we're gonna put the letter up, but I want you just to paraphrase it. | ||
| I was gonna have you read the whole thing, but I think that may be a bit much, but we'll also post links to it down below, and it's out there on Twitter and everywhere else. | ||
| Can you give me the thrust of what your letter, who was your letter to, and what was the thrust of the letter? | ||
| I sent the letter to the all faculty and staff distribution list, which does contain a fair number of students. | ||
| I think there are a few hundred students who have a staff position of some kind or other and so are on the list. | ||
| So I sent it to that list knowing that it would go to those people. | ||
| Not expecting it to be public, but I was very clear, and I think I wrote very carefully, and what I said was that there is all the difference in the world between a population absenting themselves from a shared space and a population telling another population to go away. | ||
| And my point was that speech has to be free on a college campus and that everybody has to be free to be there. | ||
| I thought that the point was so clear that it couldn't really be missed. | ||
| And I was shocked at how... | ||
| Far off the mark the response was. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| There was an overwhelming reaction in public saying that I was effectively attacking people of color. | ||
| Privately, there was a good bit of support, but this has now become a pattern on our campus where, especially surrounding any issue that at least nominally has a pro-equity side, that there is There's a nuanced understanding that can only be discussed sotto voce, and then there is the public response which embraces this one side, giving the impression of consensus. | ||
| But only if you're the person that people are quietly approaching do you know that there is no consensus. | ||
| There's wide disagreement. | ||
| Right, okay, so there's a couple things we should just clean up there. | ||
| So to be clear, they were not telling specifically white students that they couldn't come, but as you said, the idea of then a white student showing up In fact, this white student would have been seen as the enemy. | ||
| It's possible they wouldn't have even known they would have shown up to campus and been seen as a bad guy or a racist or a bigot or a white supremacist or any of that stuff. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| But you mentioned that when it got public. | ||
| So you said that the letter went to all staff? | ||
| All staff and faculty. | ||
| All staff and faculty. | ||
| And there are some students on that, and that's how it got to the college paper, correct? | ||
| Yeah, the college paper picked up on it from there. | ||
| I do want to say that the question of whether or not it was or how okay it was for white people to be on campus was accidentally tested during the event. | ||
| So when the day of absence arrived, a friend of mine, a faculty member, actually somebody who's been with the college almost since its founding, a Greek woman, Misunderstood the intention, and she thought that the intention was for the opening ceremony of the Day of Absence to include people from all races, which would make sense to me, and that then people would go off-campus, and there were 200 spaces in an off-campus venue for particular events. | ||
| But those 200 spaces were not the limit of why people leave the campus. | ||
| So anyway, my friend went with her students to the opening ceremony of the Day of Absence, and it was held in the Longhouse, which is an indigenous structure that we're very proud of, rightly, on our campus. | ||
| And she went in and apparently was approached by one of the organizers of Day of Absence and told that while she could decide to stay, that really this event was not for people of her skin tone. | ||
| And she decided on that basis to leave. | ||
| And as she left, apparently, an indigenous woman who is affiliated with the Longhouse, in dismay, apparently turned to her and said, the Longhouse is a place of welcome. | ||
| Dismayed that she was being turned away. | ||
| And then she talked to her students, the faculty member talked to her students, and they had felt very uncomfortable the way they were being looked at. | ||
| So, there is nothing There was no requirement that any particular person be any particular place, but there was extreme coercion. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the other indigenous person there that says that this is a place of welcoming because there is a sense amongst those of us that talk about what's happening on college campuses right now that the inmates run the asylum and unfortunately we know that the loudest, and we're going to show some videos of some of the people, that the loudest people get the most attention and it seems like it's everyone but a lot of it also is just a culture now of fear where someone like this, there's probably many other people | ||
| like this, but they're just afraid to say, no, no, no, we know you're an ally, we know you're not a | ||
| racist, or whatever it is, you are welcome here to show solidarity with us. | ||
| Well, there is a tremendous amount of structure inside the larger coalition of people of color. | ||
| So within that there are relationships that are not transparent to the outside. | ||
| And every so often one gets a glimpse. | ||
| And so there is a tension between, I think, a very aggressive vision on the one side and a much more traditional vision of equity on the other. | ||
| But the tension is not visible and because it's not visible There's this sense that this is a two-sided issue. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so we're gonna show two videos here, because there really are two reactions. | ||
| Well, there's several reactions happening here at once, but in terms of what's happening on campus, there's the student reaction and the academic reaction. | ||
| And they're sort of connected, but they also come from very different places. | ||
| So we're gonna start with the student reaction. | ||
| This is you, I think you're standing outside your office? | ||
| No, this is outside my classroom. | ||
| This is outside your classroom, okay. | ||
| Yeah, the students came to my classroom and started chanting. | ||
| I had divided my class up to have several discussions and one of my students in one of those discussions alerted me that there were people outside the door chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Bret Weinstein's got to go. | ||
| That doesn't happen every day. | ||
| So I walked out to them, opened the door, they Clearly knew exactly who I was. | ||
| And I said, what's up? | ||
| And they told me I should resign. | ||
| And I said, would you like to talk about this? | ||
| And they said yes. | ||
| And I said, OK, let's go to the fourth floor. | ||
| I got students on one, two, and three. | ||
| They said, no, then we're going to one, two, and three. | ||
| Came into the building, disrupted really the whole building, not just my class. | ||
| And then they confronted me with several of my students right there in front of the classroom that we were assigned for that day. | ||
| Okay, so let's leave it right there. | ||
| We're gonna play the video. | ||
| And just to be clear, this was the first moment that you realized this thing had escalated, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay, all right, so let's play this one. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, it is. | |
| Debate means you are trying to win. | ||
| Dialectic means you are using disagreement to discover what is true. | ||
| I am not interested in debate. | ||
| I am interested only in dialectic, which does mean I listen to you and you listen to me. | ||
| You don't care what terms you want to speak on. | ||
| This is not about you. | ||
| We are not speaking on terms of white privilege. | ||
| This is not a discussion. | ||
| You have lost that one. | ||
| I am talking about terms that serve the truth. | ||
| Those are the topics. | ||
| You said some racist shit. | ||
| I did not. | ||
| I did not. | ||
| Do I think that black students in sciences are targeted here? | ||
| Do I think they're targeted anywhere? | ||
| Do you think that black students in sciences are targeted? | ||
| Do I think that black students in sciences are targeted here? | ||
| Do I think they're targeted anywhere? | ||
| Speak to what you know and speak to the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay, I do not believe that students of color are targeted in the sciences here. | |
| Why? | ||
| But maybe I misunderstand what you mean by targeted. | ||
| Targeted by racism. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| We are going to be using you to corrupt and use you to faggot us. | ||
| So wait a second. | ||
| What? | ||
| I'm talking here. | ||
| To me, targeted means something different than what I just heard you define it as. | ||
| I do not believe that anybody on our faculty with intent specially targets... Fuck what you gotta say! | ||
| ...public protest! | ||
| Was that not targeting people of color? | ||
| I didn't hear you at the beginning. | ||
| Your protest a day of acid? | ||
| Your presence taken as a protest, if you will? | ||
| May I answer that question? | ||
| Okay, wait a second. | ||
| First of all, first of all, Day of Absence has been here longer than I have. | ||
| I have never protested it until the idea until until they make you wipe your white paper you don't | ||
| care about it we're your white students all the fucking time! | ||
| Hey! Get out of protest! Keep your fucking ass in! | ||
| No. First of all, I didn't say... Would you like to hear the answer or not? No! No! Okay. You're fucking useless, | ||
| No. | ||
| you're not learning anything! No, chill. Chill. Listen. | ||
| You're useless! | ||
| Get the fuck out! | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Do you understand? | ||
| History could pivot in this hallway right now. | ||
| Please, please. | ||
| Listen, do you understand? | ||
| History could pivot in this hallway right now if we were honest. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| Listen to me. | ||
| You're acting. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| History could pivot. | ||
| History could pivot in the direction of the values that you are standing here for. | ||
| Yeah, resign! | ||
| What? | ||
| Resign! | ||
| If I owe an apology, I will deliver it. | ||
| We're just old. | ||
| We are telling you. | ||
| We're old. | ||
| We're old. | ||
| Hey, hey. | ||
| Hey, hey. | ||
| Ho, ho. | ||
| Brett White needs to go. | ||
| Hey, hey. | ||
| Ho, ho. | ||
| Brett White needs to go. | ||
| Hey, hey. | ||
| Ho, ho. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brett White needs to go. | |
| Hey, hey. | ||
| Ho, ho. | ||
| Brett White needs to go. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So there's more of that video. | ||
| Again, we'll put the link to that down below as well if people wanna watch the full piece. | ||
| I guess the first part would be, you woke up that morning, put on your clothes as you normally do, probably had a cup of coffee, went to work. | ||
| Well, you can see by how I was dressed that I was not expecting to end up on YouTube, so. | ||
| You're right, you're teaching in shorts, okay? | ||
| I biked in that way. | ||
| Okay, you biked to work in shorts. | ||
| I mean, you were just having a regular day. | ||
| You had sent an email, I mean, I welcome everyone to read this thing. | ||
| It should be very clear just by listening to you at this point. | ||
| There is nothing racist in this email. | ||
| You are actually fighting racism in this email. | ||
| Then this happens. | ||
| Just purely, what does that feel like? | ||
| That moment where you realize that something has just shifted. | ||
| What does that actually feel like? | ||
| That's a really interesting question. | ||
| I will say that the experience in college all those years ago prepared me for this in one way. | ||
| I think I learned back then that one should not be afraid to polarize and that in fact If you're not polarizing, you may be too timid in what you're doing, and that the really important thing to pay attention to is that you are polarizing in the correct way. | ||
| That is to say, you want the people that you respect to line up with you. | ||
| Now I do find something troubling in this circumstance, because there are a great many people who I think, in the end, if they actually knew what I do stand for, Would be aligned with me and at the moment they think they're on the other side because they haven't looked carefully at the the policy issues in question, but it feels | ||
| Surreal. | ||
| And in fact, that interchange that you saw was very tense, but it got far worse very quickly. | ||
| By the end of the day, it was anarchy on our campus. | ||
| People were, including me, were literally being stalked and hunted. | ||
| And it's a very frightening feeling. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can even tell by your body language. | ||
| You touch your head a couple of times, there's almost like an exasperation of just like, I cannot believe this is real, sort of. | ||
| And yet it makes sense that it's real, because this monster has been growing for a long time. | ||
| It has, and it's been simmering on our campus for a full year. | ||
| So before the day of absence letter, there has been a movement afoot to increase equity on our campus. | ||
| I don't want to drag us too far into a discussion of the particulars, but the definition of equity has never even been settled on. | ||
| There has been zero opportunity to discuss the proposals that have been advanced, and so the proposals are very clearly about equality. | ||
| of outcome, which I can't support because I know my history, and not about equality of opportunity, which I do support, and yet most of the people involved in the discussion either haven't spotted or haven't said that they even recognize the difference. | ||
| And even saying that, that you are for equality of opportunity, even that, to a certain amount of people that are sort of caught in this line of thinking, that somehow has a racial undertone to them. | ||
| Even though what you're saying is you want equality of opportunity for everybody, so everyone's on the same playing field. | ||
| Right, and I will say that I don't know, I think we don't know, but I strongly suspect, having studied human history quite carefully and done a lot of traveling and lived in different parts of the world, I strongly suspect that most of the differences in access to well-being that human beings have could be democratized. | ||
| That the simple fact of having equality of opportunity would solve this problem, which I'm not saying reaching equality of opportunity is easy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But if you did it, I suspect that many of the differences that we see between racial groups and their performance would evaporate. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So, okay, so you're being screamed at, they want you to resign, they want you to be fired, they want you to apologize. | ||
| There's plenty more in that video that we didn't show. | ||
| Were there any voices there that were... I know that there were a couple people that were your students that were there that are still standing with you right now, but was anyone that was on the attacking side, was anyone saying, well, maybe we misunderstood you or maybe we were confused? | ||
| Or was it just, again, that the mob is always led by the loudest voices, so either they're afraid to speak or maybe they don't exist? | ||
| Well, we should come back to the question of why when people look at that video they see so many white students. | ||
| That's confusing to people. | ||
| But for the moment let me just answer what you've asked. | ||
| The pace of progress isn't what people expect. | ||
| I did not expect to have tremendous progress. | ||
| I was not responding to them as I did with the thought that they were going to turn around in that instant. | ||
| But I did think it might plant a seed and that they would come around over the course of days or hours. | ||
| interactions that didn't line up with the narrative that they've been sold | ||
| that they would be forced to think consciously about what explains the fact | ||
| that this person that we've been told is a vile transparent racist doesn't sound | ||
| like one. | ||
| And you know I think when I watch that video, which I don't love doing, | ||
| but when I watch that video I see hints of that. | ||
| And then I had interactions later in the day where I also saw hints of it. | ||
| But there is also this overwhelming gravity coming from the argument that describes itself as pro-equity that erases progress. | ||
| So even when you partially reach somebody, they get reeled back in so quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right, so let's get to the part that you mentioned, which is why are there so many white students? | ||
| And in some respects, in some of the other videos that are out there, they actually seem more outraged than the students of color. | ||
| Well, I think I know the answer to the question. | ||
| The answer to the question is that there is a syllogism within the movement at the moment that suggests that because civilization is understood to have been built on the backs of dark-skinned people, and that they were not remunerated for this work that white people are indebted and that therefore when people of color ask for something that white people should provide it. | ||
| And what that has led to is a situation where you have basically what I take to be white anarchists that are acting on behalf of a movement of people of color. | ||
| There's a danger in this that I'll share with you. | ||
| There's a meeting later, I don't know if we're going to see a clip, but there's a meeting later in which things become extremely heated in a room that at that moment had only one available exit and hundreds of people enraged at me calling for my head, calling for the head of the chief of police, etc. | ||
| Their reaction is very dramatic. | ||
| I don't, I did not feel in that moment and I actually never felt endangered by people of color. | ||
| I don't think that they would have physically harmed me, but they were speaking in a manner that that seemed logical. | ||
| And I'm not sure that the white anarchists that are doing their bidding are clear on where the boundary is. | ||
| So, um, I'm, I'm concerned that there might be, uh, violence of an almost accidental nature here where people think they're doing what they're being asked because they owe and it results in somebody getting very seriously hurt. | ||
| Yeah, when you say white anarchists, do you think that these kids, in this case, that they're actual anarchists? | ||
| Like, they're anarchists for anarchist's sake? | ||
| Or that they actually think that they're an important piece of the puzzle to this? | ||
| Or is this just virtue signaling at its highest order? | ||
| I know you're not a psychologist, but just from the interactions that you're experiencing. | ||
| I'm not, but the thing about being close with so many students is that I have a much better window on the thinking amongst different groups on campus than I might otherwise. | ||
| I think most of the anarchists are actually earnest. | ||
| Anarchy to them is not an excuse for thuggery, although sometimes it goes that direction. | ||
| They have an honest belief I almost have some sympathy for how they got here. | ||
| They're young enough that they haven't seen any functional governance in their lifetime. | ||
| And so they have a sort of sense that government is synonymous with this predatory entity and that tearing it down has to be a step in the right direction. | ||
| And so, anyway, I think that, you know, they have a sort of deep idea about what world might be if only they could get governance out of the way, and they've missed one thing, and it's fatal to their understanding, or it would be if they knew it, which is scale. | ||
| What they're talking about is possible in a small group, and you can't scale it up to hundreds or thousands or millions. | ||
| So, anyway, they are They are thinking about an alternative and they've noticed very much what's wrong and they haven't understood, in my opinion, as much about what could possibly replace it. | ||
| Yeah, so the other interesting piece of this on the student side is the reaction from some of your students, because you've had some students, white, Brown, black, etc. | ||
| You've had a bunch of students defend you, some publicly and some that are getting heat for that. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I should say my wife also teaches at Evergreen and we have a huge number of students from the 15 years that we've taught there that we stay in contact with. | ||
| And so we have actually tremendous support and there's a wide diversity of people in that group. | ||
| I have lost a couple of students to this movement. | ||
| I know of a couple of people who have gone to the other side. | ||
| I'm not happy that they went, but that it's only a few is heartening. | ||
| Because the penalty, especially for students of color, the penalty for being out of step with the conventional wisdom here is immense. | ||
| In the video, I don't know if people noticed it, but there's a woman standing to my left and she's actually in tears. | ||
| And then later on in the meeting that was so dangerous later in the day, she actually spoke up and spoke on my behalf to this room that was shouting for my head as I'm receiving text messages from students elsewhere in the room telling me there's talk that I won't be allowed to leave. | ||
| She stands up in this room. | ||
| There was literally talk of you being kidnapped or something. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, there's been some crazy stuff here. | ||
| There was talk of my being kidnapped. | ||
| I got a text message from another student who told me that she overheard a conversation that people should keep mace hidden. | ||
| So this was a very dangerous situation. | ||
| But anyway, this student of color stood up, spoke on my behalf, was shouted down, and then a woman came over to her. | ||
| It looked like she was assigned to come over to her and explain to my student why her understanding of me was wrong. | ||
| So somebody who doesn't know me, who's never met me, was assigned to explain to her why her experience of me in my classroom was incorrect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so let's move to the academic side of this, because if people think what they just saw was sort of bananas from the student side, the academic side has not been any better. | ||
| So first, we're going to show a video of another professor. | ||
| Her name is... Naima Lowe. | ||
| Naima Lowe. | ||
| And let's just throw to that, and then we'll explain after. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, we're only showing a tiny, a tiny portion of that, the TriCaster metaphor. | |
| You're gonna have to make your own ass. | ||
| So don't put your foot in it. | ||
| Oop, I think, all right, we're only showing a tiny, a tiny portion of that, the TriCaster MitoFree. | ||
| Can you just sort of explain what's going on there? | ||
| Yeah, Naima in that clip is, and the clip goes on for a fair piece, | ||
| but she's dressing down two other faculty members who are there and telling them that effectively, | ||
| they need, if my understanding of the clip is right, she's telling them effectively that they either need | ||
| to go in and make themselves answerable to this mob that's been ruling the campus at that point, | ||
| Or go home. | ||
| That those are their only two choices. | ||
| And she says that, you know, they are the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now she has no authority to do this. | ||
| She has no right. | ||
| I mean, she can say whatever she wants to them, but I mean, they have their jobs and they're allowed to express themselves however they want. | ||
| So just sort of that in itself, it's encroaching on someone else's freedom of expression. | ||
| It's preposterous and I should say that the same faculty member has accused me of racism once very directly in a faculty meeting and then implicitly in another faculty meeting she said that the negative reaction to the equity proposal that had been advanced was a racist backlash. | ||
| In this faculty meeting when she said that, with the president of the college and the provost sitting right there, I said, you know, somebody at some point should check on the question of whether or not I actually am a racist. | ||
| I think you might be very surprised. | ||
| I was then told by the chair of the faculty that this was not the place to defend myself, and I said, that's fine. | ||
| Where is the place to defend myself? | ||
| So that's fascinating. | ||
| and said, you shouldn't expect a venue in which to defend yourself. | ||
| The president and provost sat perfectly silently through this interaction. | ||
| So that's fascinating. | ||
| That's fascinating because I think for those of us that are not in the world of academia, | ||
| it's hard for us to really understand just the sort of, the little microcosm that goes on there, | ||
| this little ecosystem that exists and the rules that it plays by | ||
| and the outside pressures related to donors and everything else that a school has to deal with. | ||
| And even public schools, you know, that they're all dealing with these different things. | ||
| Okay, we've dealt with the students, we've dealt with the academic side, but the administrative side doesn't sound like they've been very responsive here, and in some ways they've almost been culpable of the atmosphere that's going on. | ||
| Well, I have to speculate a little bit. | ||
| I'm not an administrator, and so I can't see inside that world very directly. | ||
| But I have spent a good deal of time in discussion with administrators, numerous deans. | ||
| I've spoken at length with both the provost and the president. | ||
| The president, I should point out, is new. | ||
| He came two years ago, and in my opinion, what is taking place at Evergreen looks very much like it is student-motivated, but it is actually primarily motivated by a partnership between Naima and the president. | ||
| And that has resulted in students, I believe, doing tremendous damage, not only to a college that might be one of their greatest assets in getting ahead in the world, but also to the values that were so hard won in the civil rights movement. | ||
| This does not make the movement look reasonable or good, and I'm very afraid that they are undoing progress that had already been won. | ||
| So I think that's an interesting segue because as I mentioned at the top, I mean, I've sort of been talking about this concept that's happening on the left for a long time and that they'll come and eat their own and that these accusations of racism and bigotry and everything else, they've become so over the top, so the boy who cried wolf, that it's almost impossible now To figure out when a real racist exists versus someone that in your case is actually fighting racism. | ||
| So for you as someone that, as you said on Tucker's show on Fox News, I am deeply progressive. | ||
| That's what you said. | ||
| This must be doubly, even if you were to remove yourself from the equation, this must be doubly painful because you're watching a movement that you deeply care about cannibalize itself. | ||
| Yes, and I will say there's one odd thing I wasn't expecting here, which is... So I feel like the only thing that makes this not a literal witch hunt is that... | ||
| There aren't literal witches. | ||
| Right, you're not a witch. | ||
| But this is very much that mindset that has unfolded here. | ||
| But in this case, there are actually three witches being demonized on our campus, and I'm one of them. | ||
| The chief of police, Stacey Brown, is another. | ||
| And Andrea Siebert, who is our grievance officer. | ||
| They've been demonized for other reasons. | ||
| And the fascinating thing is that in each of these cases, the individual being demonized is not just not guilty of what they are accused of, but the inverse of it. | ||
| And it is shocking. | ||
| If it was just me, it would be lost in the noise. | ||
| But to see it repeated three times is remarkable. | ||
| Yeah, so real quick, you mentioned, was it the chief of police? | ||
| Chief of police. | ||
| Her name is? | ||
| Stacey Brown. | ||
| Stacey Brown. | ||
| So Amira, can we throw this image up? | ||
| So there was an image that, at the later meeting that you were talking about, they had her come, first they didn't want her to come, the students didn't want her to come armed, is that correct? | ||
| And then they didn't want her to come in a police uniform, correct? | ||
| Well, it's worse than that. | ||
| So in police circles, being disarmed by somebody carries a special meaning. | ||
| It's a shameful thing to happen. | ||
| And so the protesters demanded that she show up in uniform without her weapon. | ||
| She said no. | ||
| And the administration had asked her to do it. | ||
| And then the compromise was that she would show up in plainclothes to this very dangerous meeting on the fourth floor. | ||
| But what you need to know, I didn't know her until she came to check after the protest in the morning, she came to check on my safety. | ||
| And we met then and we've talked quite a bit as I've asked her each day, is it safe for me to come on campus? | ||
| She'll say, no, it's not safe to come on campus. | ||
| The administration has stood down the police force. | ||
| We can't protect you. | ||
| Anyway, I think that has now changed. | ||
| But in talking to her, she is the ideal person for the position to address the question of biased policing or police brutality. | ||
| She's an Evergreen graduate herself. | ||
| Actually, her desire is to address bad policing. | ||
| She sees it as a terrible offense and she wants to fix the problem. | ||
| And the protesters Again, I think this is probably coming mostly from the anarchists, who have the idea, they in fact have an acronym, ACAB, All Cops Are Bad. | ||
| They're trying to taunt her into a confrontation that will look good for them. | ||
| They're literally, they will oink at her when she enters a space, and so anyway, she's Professional in the extreme, and so this isn't working. | ||
| It's taking a toll on her, but she's not reacting to it, but it seems that there's a desire to have a confrontation. | ||
| Did you get the... Yeah, I think... Did we throw the image up there? | ||
| If we haven't thrown it up, we'll get it up, and if not, we'll put it... Oh, there we go. | ||
| So that's the image that was being circulated of The police officer, the chief of police, who came plain-clothed to acquiesce to these demands, and now she's being treated, you know, this is sort of this concept of, you know, like when there's a, you know, Majin Noir, who's trying to reform Islam, will be called a porch monkey or something horrible, or, you know, an Uncle Tom when they'll talk to my friend Larry Elder and people, you know, so this concept, in a way, that's prejudice, that's prejudging them based, you want them to behave a certain way just by how they look and not by what they think. | ||
| Well, I've started to wonder about the question about why it's not just random accusations, it's accusations that are the inverse of the person in question. | ||
| And the best I got so far is that what causes you to end up in the crosshairs is some value that you hold deeply enough that you're willing to stand up for it. | ||
| And so, in order to shut down people who will Endure harm over a value. | ||
| You have to level a deeply stigmatizing accusation. | ||
| And so there's a way in which it is exactly the people who are least deserving of those labels that have to be silenced. | ||
| You have to work the hardest to silence them. | ||
| And so they break out the big guns and this results in this inversion of the truth. | ||
| So that being said, I think that there's a lot of people who could have, a lot of professors out there that could have been in the exact situation that you found yourself in, that probably would agree with the ideas that you're discussing, that would shrivel under this. | ||
| Shrivel under this absolute, that would just see, would have seen your initial reaction immediately in that mob, said, you know what, I'm sorry, I misunderstood it. | ||
| I'll just continue whatever. | ||
| And ultimately, you'll just be chipped away at for the rest of your career until you just will say nothing. | ||
| You are doing completely the reverse, the fact that you're sitting with me right now, you just did Tucker Carlson, you're gonna do Joe Rogan on Friday. | ||
| I mean, you are taking this thing and staring it straight in the eye and saying, I'm not gonna do this. | ||
| Where do you think that comes from within you? | ||
| Because that's what people are asking me, people ask me that all the time for themselves. | ||
| They wanna get in the fight and they don't know what to do or they're afraid of what the repercussions will be, whatever their jobs are, their families, but you're going, no, I'm gonna do this. | ||
| There are two things, and one of them isn't so easy to bootstrap. | ||
| It happens that my parents and my grandparents did an A-plus job raising me in a way that left, I believe, no trace of racism. | ||
| That's not to say I don't have ignorance of what it's like to be black or Indian or Latino. | ||
| Of course, I do. | ||
| I also have ignorance of what it's like to be an astronaut or be six feet tall or any of those things. | ||
| But there's no part of me that doesn't care or is biased in this way, I think. | ||
| And so, what I have is a lifetime of experiences that say this particular epithet doesn't apply to me. | ||
| And that means that when they come after me with it, It doesn't hurt. | ||
| I'm angry that somebody would accuse me of these things and I'm frankly shocked that my institution would allow these accusations to be leveled and do nothing about it. | ||
| But I never for a moment thought that in the end this would cause people to believe it, even if they believed it for this last year. | ||
| All it takes is stories from my past and it becomes very apparent that this is just, it's a false charge. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's why I wanted you to illuminate that earlier story, because this isn't something that magically appeared. | ||
| You've had a track record of standing up for the right things. | ||
| I would be remiss if we didn't mention, I had asked you, we had spoke on the phone about a week ago when we were trying to see if we could arrange for this. | ||
| And I asked you, I said, well, do you have tenure? | ||
| Because, you know, what level are you really putting yourself out there? | ||
| Evergreen doesn't have tenure specifically, but can you just explain what they have? | ||
| Because that also is an interesting piece to where your future will be. | ||
| Yeah, we have something, the founders basically re-envisioned all of the parts of the academy that they thought were deformed and they built alternatives to them. | ||
| So we have something called conversion. | ||
| I started as a visiting professor, so not even a regular professor, I started as a visiting professor. | ||
| I've now got, I've been converted, so I'm not impossible to fire, but it's very difficult. | ||
| It's never been used before, right? | ||
| To fire someone, as far as you know? | ||
| As far as I know, I can't say for sure that that's true, but I don't think so. | ||
| You will note, and I think people who are looking at this story and scratching their head wondering what to believe, ought to think carefully about the fact that I have not been censured, I haven't been suspended, I haven't been fired. | ||
| I believe the administration would love to do something just to appease the people who are calling for my head. | ||
| And the fact that they haven't done it says something about the fact that there's no reason to do so. | ||
| Could it also be a little bit of timing, though? | ||
| Because the semester's about to end. | ||
| Maybe they're just trying to not... They're not doing anything brave, obviously. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| by backing you, by publicly defending you, they're not doing what should be the right thing, | ||
| but that there may be just waiting, semester ends, summer rolls around, | ||
| people get distracted, and that the whole thing will just blow over, | ||
| which again, would go to that chip factor that I'm talking about, | ||
| that it slowly will be chipped away by doing nothing, but it could be a little bit of timing here, right? | ||
| Could be, and I wouldn't put it past them. | ||
| On the other hand, again, the image from the outside is deceptive, | ||
| and I have lots of contacts from people and the administration who are friendly to me. | ||
| The provost has called privately to talk about the situation. | ||
| So I believe the president would like to eliminate me because he is running the college in a | ||
| way that's very embarrassing and he would like to keep it quiet and I've been left with | ||
| no choice. | ||
| I've repeatedly tried to take care of this internal to the college and gotten no response. | ||
| And so finally at the point that I'm unable to teach on campus for my own safety, I have | ||
| talked to the press. | ||
| But in any case, we'll see. | ||
| I don't think they can fire me. | ||
| I don't know what they would fire me for. | ||
| And I think they will create a new problem if they do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they could just make it an untenable position to be at, that if they don't do anything or embolden the people who are going after you, Well, we're already headed there because the fact that the administration has not taken a stand and saying you can't accuse people of racism without evidence or something along those lines has resulted in my faculty colleagues | ||
| turning on me. Now I still have a good many friends who are quietly supportive and tell me so, but | ||
| publicly speaking I'm being challenged in ever stronger terms and so | ||
| it's not going to be a very pleasant place for me to teach come fall. So that private support, | ||
| do you find it infuriating in a weird way? | ||
| I've had a few people who have been in positions like you where they've publicly been called racist when it's not the case. | ||
| My friend, Colin Moriarty, who was on here a few weeks ago, sent a tweet about, a silly, joking tweet about International Women's Day, and International Business Times wrote a headline about him being racist. | ||
| I mean, really, but, you know, bonker stuff. | ||
| And he was telling me that the people that were publicly Or the people that were privately emailing him and supporting him but wouldn't do anything publicly. | ||
| That was more angering than some of the other responses. | ||
| Are you feeling a little of that? | ||
| Like you're putting your ass on the line and why are people only quietly, you know, as if they're giving you like some little, you know, they're giving you some scraps. | ||
| You know, I don't. | ||
| And the reason that I don't feel that, you know, I've thought about it and I've thought, is this cowardice? | ||
| But the stuff that is coming back at me is so industrial strength that I can easily understand | ||
| somebody who cannot bring themselves to risk having to end their career in shame of a false | ||
| stigma of racism when, I mean, that's almost the worst thing you can call somebody. | ||
| So you know, it would be, strategically it would be the right thing to do to say, yes, | ||
| they're being cowards and they should stand up. | ||
| And there is a part of me that would welcome it if they stood up. | ||
| But I certainly understand why they feel like they just don't know what they will say in | ||
| response to the charge. | ||
| And so they're quiet. | ||
| What angers me are the people who say nothing, or worse, the ones who have embraced power | ||
| and done that with the thought that they know who's going to win the battle and therefore | ||
| their bread is buttered on a particular side. | ||
| So, for example, we've gotten to a situation where Naima, who you saw shouting epithets at other faculty members, when she speaks in a faculty meeting and alleges that there is intense racism on our campus that needs to be addressed, the next thing that happens, this happens over email too, is she is reflexively thanked by multiple people, even though what she's saying is, in many cases, vile. | ||
| So just the thanking of the real racist is so troubling. | ||
| And just for the record, I want to throw up one other thing. | ||
| She tweeted out, Naima tweeted out basically a threat to your wife. | ||
| Your wife Heather is a professor on campus also. | ||
| And this is really a direct threat that she put up, or will put it up. | ||
| And It's this sort of, I mean, oh Lord, could some white women at Evergreen come and collect Heather Haying's racist ass? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I mean, that really is a threat. | ||
| Someone do something. | ||
| This woman is on campus. | ||
| Someone do something. | ||
| This is a member of the faculty. | ||
| They haven't even countered that from the administration, have they? | ||
| Well, so, it's almost unbelievable. | ||
| So I saw that on her Facebook page and I took a screenshot and I carefully purged her identifying information and I shared it with my faculty colleagues over the email list and I basically pointed out, I said, a faculty member is now threatening Heather and I was shocked that the response from Naima was that I had misunderstood the post that, in fact, collect has a special meaning in black vernacular. | ||
| I searched for that special meaning and I could find no evidence of it, which doesn't mean it isn't true. | ||
| But this is where this question of The right of people of color to boss white people around, especially in an environment where these anarchists are doing the bidding of this coalition, is so dangerous. | ||
| Even if it is true that collect is somehow a piece of black vernacular that I'm not aware of, Nothing says that the white anarchists know that and that somebody isn't going to attempt to collect my wife for, I don't know, an inquisition? | ||
| Yeah, when you've already heard that there were rumors of a kidnapping and all kinds of other stuff. | ||
| Well, the police in fact told me on Wednesday, the day after the protest at my class, they told me, they called me and said, are you on campus? | ||
| I said, no. | ||
| They said, don't come to campus. | ||
| The protesters are searching car to car and asking for identifying information of the occupants. | ||
| They're looking for what they say as an individual and we think it's you. | ||
| I mean the level, the ineptitude or the negligence I guess of the administration is off the charts here. | ||
| To me, that's the big... The student thing, we know this has been growing on campuses for a long time, but when a professor is under that type of threat, and police don't come to campus as a professor, and the administration refuses to say something, I mean, I don't know how much more evidence you need of a deep corruption. | ||
| I honestly cannot believe it. | ||
| The number of things that I have seen that I thought, well, now they have to act, and then they have failed to do so, is unreal. | ||
| And the fact, I mean, George Bridges, our president, continues to capitulate to demands that are leveled by these protesters when it is explicitly said, if these demands aren't met, there will be violence. | ||
| So I realize he's in a tough predicament, but to continue to throw us under the bus, under those conditions, can only make this worse. | ||
| What do you make about where you're finding allies right now? | ||
| So, you know, obviously when I heard about this, and I should mention, by the way, that you're Eric Weinstein's brother, who's a former guest of The Room Report and has become a good friend of mine. | ||
| And he's done a very public defense of you, which I think has been really wonderful. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| So you've gotten some interesting Jonathan Haidt publicly defending you, Nick Christakis from Yale? | ||
| Is it from Yale? | ||
| Or formerly from Yale? | ||
| Yes, right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you've had a whole bunch of people publicly defending you. | ||
| As I said, you're gonna go on Rogen in a couple of days. | ||
| But I saw you were getting some hate because you went on Tucker Carlson on Fox News. | ||
| Did MSNBC reach out to you? | ||
| Did CNN reach out to you? | ||
| Did NPR reach out to you? | ||
| Still haven't. | ||
| Did Huffington Post reach out to you? | ||
| Did the Daily blah blah blah reach out to you? | ||
| Did Salon reach out to you? | ||
| Did Vox reach out to you? | ||
| I can keep going here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You see my point? | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| That your allies That it's seemingly that the free speech, non-hysteria allies are all centrists or certainly probably more to the right of you in a lot of respects, or at least in the classical liberal sense. | ||
| Where's the backing on the left? | ||
| You're deeply progressive. | ||
| That's what you said on Fox News. | ||
| When's the last time that's been said on Fox News? | ||
| That's what you said. | ||
| Tucker even said to you, you must have voted for Hillary. | ||
| He said, I voted for Bernie and I'm deeply progressive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, so I think what's going on is this. | ||
| I think we've reached a moment where thinking has become very simplistic. | ||
| And I see this on my campus all the time. | ||
| When there is a nominally gay side of a story, or a nominally equity-oriented side of a story, There is no nuance whatsoever applied. | ||
| There's no extrapolation about whether or not there might be something that pushes in the other direction. | ||
| And so what that results in at the level of the press, I think, is how exactly do you process this story? | ||
| Right? | ||
| If I'm what I say I am, which is anti-racist, then what is the meaning of these protests and the demands for equity at Evergreen? | ||
| So I think they literally don't know how to report it. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| All right, so here's what we're going to do. | ||
| I'll go over here for just a sec. | ||
| I'm going to do about two more minutes with Eric right now. | ||
| We're just going to put a little bow on this, I think. | ||
| And we're going to do a live Q&A. | ||
| We're going to do it on Super Chat right here on YouTube. | ||
| So you guys, if you throw in a couple bucks, your comment gets bumped up. | ||
| We'll ask Brett some questions directly. | ||
| And we're also going to do that for people in Patreon. | ||
| So if you just comment in the feed right there, Well, there is one thing that I think is very important. | ||
| So let's just, did I miss anything here in the setup to all of this, | ||
| where now we're gonna kick it to the audience? | ||
| Is there anything else that you wanna add or that I might've missed in the context of this? | ||
| Well, there is one thing that I think is very important. | ||
| I'm getting a flood of email like nothing I've ever seen. | ||
| The unanimity is amazing and it is across the political spectrum. | ||
| It cuts across racial lines, every known fault line has united. | ||
| And so I haven't counted them, but it's at least 500 to one in support. | ||
| So that tells me something. | ||
| If I look at my campus reaction, the faculty are Closer to unified against me with, you know, people quietly calling to support and things like that. | ||
| But the public's response to this has been... | ||
| There's a moment, I think it's a little bit past the video that we showed earlier, where you were trying to calm the kids down. | ||
| on the campus and the way this looks to outsiders is profound. | ||
| There's a moment, I think it's a little bit past the video that we showed earlier, | ||
| where you were trying to calm the kids down. | ||
| I think you were saying something to the effect of this could be, what were you saying? | ||
| This could be a watershed moment or this could be a... | ||
| I think what I said was history could pivot in this hallway if we could hear each other. | ||
| Yeah, and I thought that, so it's a beautiful phrase, first off, but it really showed that you were sort of, again, five minutes before that, you didn't know it was going to happen, but you were really, you know, within yourself at that moment. | ||
| Do you think that that's where this could be at? | ||
| That you Could be thrust into something that all of us in this space have been looking for reasons. | ||
| You know, this ball has been rolling down the hill and picking up steam and some of us have been sort of fighting it. | ||
| But you know, a lot of people are just getting lost in the spinning. | ||
| Do you think that this truly could be a moment? | ||
| Because it's so ludicrous what's happening here. | ||
| There's no iota of evidence of the charges. | ||
| Do you think this could be a moment that pushes it? | ||
| Answer me that and then we're gonna take a quick break and we'll go to the questions. | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| And the trick, in order to make that happen, and I really do want it to happen, in order to make that happen, the story has to stay out of the narratives that are supposed to explain it on both left and right. | ||
| In other words, it has to be kept in conscious space where we don't just push it to some sort of known animal. | ||
| So I think that could happen, I hope it does happen. | ||
| I'm afraid that some momentum is gonna get behind some version of this that's gonna cause it | ||
| to be dismissible, and then it won't, and who knows what the next episode will look like. | ||
| Yeah, all right, well here's what we're gonna do. | ||
| We're gonna take literally a two-minute break. | ||
| We're just gonna stand up and stretch. | ||
| You want a shot of vodka or something? | ||
| I'm good, thanks. | ||
| We'll do that privately. | ||
| And then we'll take your questions on Super Chat and on Patreon. | ||
| You can just comment in the feed right there. | ||
| Hang on two minutes. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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♪♪ ♪♪ | |
| ♪♪ All right, guys, we are back with Eric Weinstein, | ||
| What? | ||
| Brett Weinstein. | ||
| His brother is Eric Weinstein. | ||
| This is Brett Weinstein. | ||
| I got the Weinstein part. | ||
| I said Weinstein, not Weinstein. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| Come on now, get us started. | ||
| We are back with Brett Weinstein from Evergreen State University. | ||
| He's a biology professor there. | ||
| If you caught what we did in this last hour, he's involved in And really a big mess with false accusations of racism and just so many of the things that we talk about here related to free speech, related to a lot of the problems with the left right now, and with so much what's happening in society at large. | ||
| So I thought I ask you questions for an hour. | ||
| Let's open it up to the audience. | ||
| So we're taking questions live from you guys on Super Chat on YouTube and from Patreon. | ||
| So I thought this was a nice way to start. | ||
| And it's barely a question, but I will let you comment on it. | ||
| And this is from Super Chat. | ||
| It's wonderful, encouraging to watch, quote, live as individuals on the left awaken to the dangers of radical leftism. | ||
| I see that as a pretty, Clear statement. | ||
| I've been trying to warn people about this, the difference between liberalism and leftism. | ||
| Do you feel that you're awakening to something that maybe you didn't see that much of just in the past couple of years? | ||
| Or is it deeply personal now, you know? | ||
| No, I would put it differently. | ||
| I would say that we all need to level up. | ||
| And the fact is, there's nothing wrong with liberal progressive values. | ||
| In fact, I think they are the right values. | ||
| The understanding of how to accomplish those values, how to elevate them, is it's not good. | ||
| The standard left progressive vision is not rich enough to actually function. | ||
| That said, I don't see a functional version on the right either, and so I don't know how to say this exactly, but the older I get and the more I see, the less I think there is value in the left-right dichotomy, and really we all need to go up. | ||
| We need to find a new level and new ways to describe what differences we do have about how to accomplish what ought to be universal goals. | ||
| I have a lot of video game people that watch the show, so I think the idea of level up. | ||
| Level up, exactly. | ||
| will resonate with people. | ||
| This one was sort of interesting on Patreon. | ||
| I don't know that it's directly specific to the way you teach, but I think you'll get the thrust of it. | ||
| Do you feel like you helped create this environment by teaching these kids that colleges are racist and the system oppresses all minorities? | ||
| I suspect that you specifically didn't do that, but I think what they mean is sort of that leftist ideology is so predominant in colleges. | ||
| I do not feel that what I've been doing contributed to this in the slightest. | ||
| In fact, quite the opposite. | ||
| So what I do is I arm kids with incredibly powerful tools of reason. | ||
| And I use evolutionary biology as a landscape in which to teach critical reasoning. | ||
| But really what I'm doing is teaching them to think in a very careful, nuanced way. | ||
| When I look out at these protests I'm struck by the fact that I'm teaching at a small college and I have a lot of students and I don't recognize the people who are challenging me. | ||
| And in fact the students that I do know tell me that they can imagine if they had not encountered me and my wife they might have been sucked into this. | ||
| But I think this again is a place where we have to recognize That science is actually the cure for low quality thought. | ||
| Science, I've been saying, is the ultimate bullshit detector. | ||
| And really, my message to those who are protesting is that equality will be reached much more effectively if you arm | ||
| yourself with the best possible tools for getting there and those those tools | ||
| are contained in the sciences. Yeah I love how we all come to this from our | ||
| own discipline so I've been pushing the idea that the cure for | ||
| this is true liberalism and using logic and reason and real liberalism | ||
| of live and let live That's really the answer here. | ||
| But you come at it from a scientific place and using that as the basis. | ||
| There's a lot of fertile ground for us both to work on this from there, so I love that. | ||
| This is interesting from Super Chat. | ||
| The church I volunteer for turns a blind eye to this issue. | ||
| I've brought it to pastors, but I'm completely dismissed. | ||
| Roughly 95% of our congregation are left What can I do? | ||
| I've seen people socially lynched along with myself. | ||
| So I think when they're saying, turn a blind eye to this issue, I think they mean the issue of false accusations of racism. | ||
| Well, so I've been doing something for as long as I can remember, which is, and I actually did learn this from Eric, who taught me that the most important things you need to learn are often the province of people that you wouldn't ordinarily be talking to. | ||
| And so, in the environment that I teach in and in my life outside, I very much enjoy trying to cross gaps that are supposed to be uncrossable. | ||
| So, for example, when Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door, I very frequently, I mean, I always talk to them. | ||
| I will often invite them in and I'll tell them, look, you've got your work cut out for you. | ||
| You're talking to an evolutionary biologist, but let's see where we can get to. | ||
| And you'll give them a couple minutes? | ||
| Sometimes a half hour. | ||
| So my point is that actually I learn a tremendous amount from talking to people that I'm not supposed to be talking to, and that has been a very useful skill in the classroom as well. | ||
| But what I would say is in the context of the church, figuring out what the mindset of people who are ignoring this is so that you can get to it and figure out, you know, The trick is to get them to rise to consciousness. | ||
| If you're getting a reflexive answer, it's coming from a part of the mind that isn't conscious. | ||
| And once you can get the mind to throw an error, it is forced into consciousness. | ||
| And once you throw that error, it's forced into consciousness. | ||
| You can have all kinds of conversations. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| This is interesting because it did strike me when I watched these videos. | ||
| Where do you think the extreme use of profanity by the student protesters comes from? | ||
| Because it's not just yelling for yelling's sake, but there's a ton of profanity in it. | ||
| Is that just emotion? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I guess I would say There is... So the fact that the accusations that they level have no content to them tells you that they are actually tactical. | ||
| That they can turn you into a straw man and that doesn't mean that they've failed just because they're incorrect about you as long as the stigma attaches. | ||
| And so what I would say is we all process I mean, that's why Tourette's Syndrome is what it is, is that somehow we store those words differently. | ||
| And that means that when you face them, maybe the brain realizes that that's an indicator that you're, you know, you're only a couple clicks away from violence. | ||
| And so for the person who will stand up, if you start hearing those words tossed at you, it kind of says, hey, cool it. | ||
| So my guess is, whether the protesters know what they're doing or not, it's a tactical issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is interesting from Super Chat. | ||
| For people outside of the U.S., to what extent do you feel that what's happening at Evergreen is symptomatic of a general trend in U.S. | ||
| campus culture? | ||
| We touched on this a little bit, but you're in a very specific version of it. | ||
| Do you think that this is the trend? | ||
| This is the real thing that's happening right now? | ||
| Well, I've been talking to my wife and my brother about this, and I think the real issue is that in the 60s and 70s, a new type of scholarship emerged around critical theory, and at the moment it's critical race theory at the front. | ||
| It has reorganized the fundamental nature of the Academy because it is built from an incompatible set of assumptions from the sciences and the other disciplines that work forward from assumptions to conclusions. | ||
| And because of that, the two can't really be in terribly close contact. | ||
| They have to be compartmentalized away from each other in a normal university setting. | ||
| But that also means that they don't, they can't, well, science is not in a position to check critical race theory. | ||
| And so critical race theory has reached some conclusions that I believe are not valid, and it is now in a position, it is in such a strong political position to dictate those terms to the sciences that we are seeing a kind of reversal of fortune. | ||
| So, I don't know if that answers your question, but yes, I would say that Evergreen is having a very particular version of a pattern that is being seen across the Academy in this country. | ||
| I don't think this is a question, but somebody may be doing something very nice for you. | ||
| It says, reward free speech heroes. | ||
| GoFundMe, Bret Weinstein. | ||
| Free speech. | ||
| Your fans back home are proud of you, Bret. | ||
| So I don't know if that means they may be created a GoFundMe for you, but I guess you'll find out. | ||
| This one, I don't know that you're gonna wanna show your cards so easily. | ||
| This is super chat. | ||
| At what point would you quit working at Evergreen if this continues and what would you do afterwards? | ||
| You don't have to answer that in any way that's gonna. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Create a bigger problem at the moment. | ||
| I mean, I have to tell you, since Tuesday morning at 9.30, I feel like I'm living in some kind of odd dream. | ||
| I mean, parts of it are nightmarish, parts of it are reassuring, but in any case, I haven't even really been able to think carefully about what this means. | ||
| It's a hard enough issue just to even figure out whether I can hold class on campus or it's going to be in the park again. | ||
| I may have missed what this is referencing, but what was the question being asked of you regarding the physics department? | ||
|
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Are you sure what that's referencing? | |
| There may have been something in that whole melee with the students. | ||
| Well, I can't imagine. | ||
| For one thing, we don't have departments, so there isn't a physics department. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Oh, this is interesting, and I'd be happy to facilitate this. | ||
| Have you had any contact with Jordan Peterson? | ||
| Do you know Jordan Peterson up in Canada? | ||
| I sure, I know of his work. | ||
| I admire him greatly. | ||
| He has retweeted a couple things and as soon as things die down I certainly do intend to get in contact, but I haven't talked to him yet. | ||
| I will be glad to facilitate that if you'd like. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Here's another one on Patreon. | ||
| What can we do to help Brett and his supporters? | ||
| That may be the million-dollar question for everyone else, right? | ||
| Well, that's a very interesting question. | ||
| I guess I would say a lot of what is going to take place has to do with the narrative as it's going to develop. | ||
| And in fact, the program that I'm teaching right now is focused very heavily on the importance of narratives in getting people to alter the way they function. | ||
| So I would say the danger of this story getting sucked into some known narrative, at which point it becomes useless, is great. | ||
| And so, in conversations online, keeping people in their conscious mind as they engage this, so that they can actually tease apart the different aspects of it and understand them as they really are, rather than as the cartoon version, that would be very useful. | ||
| Yeah, and to me that seems so real because I don't know how much you know about my sort of political evolution or where I came from, but when I saw that whole crazy night, my audience knows this because I've told it a thousand times, but that crazy night of Sam Harris on Real Time with Bill Maher and the fight with Affleck and Gross and Racist and all that, And I saw the way this guy was being slaughtered. | ||
| That forced me to get involved. | ||
| It just got me to a point of saying, I can't take it anymore. | ||
| And it got me there. | ||
| And now there are people that defend me from some of that. | ||
| So it's just we need more of us. | ||
| Well, that's an excellent answer, and I think the thing is, imagine everybody is somewhere on the spectrum of courage, and imagine that when somebody crosses over and can't take it anymore, as you've just described, and they speak up, That creates cover for the people in the layer right below them. | ||
| And if this is to become a turning point, having those people who know better emboldened by the people who've stood up before them, that is the way it will turn. | ||
| Well, you got it from your brother, you got it from me, you got it from Joe, and you got it from many more, many more. | ||
| You got it from many more because my iPad's blowing up over here. | ||
| This is interesting on Super Chat. | ||
| Brett, were you previously aware of this anarchist element within progressivism? | ||
| What are your thoughts on why progressivism is the foothold for these anarchists? | ||
| I think that's interesting, because you've addressed this sort of white allies of this that really are more anarchist. | ||
| Did you realize that they were a piece of progressivism as a whole, which obviously you really like? | ||
| You know, I've understood that this anarchist thread was important and needed to be taken seriously since Occupy. | ||
| That's the first place I really understood what it was. | ||
| I didn't necessarily expect it to function this way. | ||
| I have seen things in this last week that are so overt with respect to a racial hierarchy that is the inverse of the usual hierarchy, but nonetheless, an overt racial hierarchy on a college campus just shocks me every time I think about it. | ||
| But once one wraps their mind around the fact that that hierarchy is going to emerge in overt form, it makes perfect sense that the white anarchists would show up as they do. | ||
| Another one on Super Chat. | ||
| Has the left, which for so long has used the epithet racist liberally when attacking the right, now painted itself into a corner? | ||
| Is this just the beginning or the culmination? | ||
| I guess we'll sort of find out where your adventure goes with this. | ||
| I suspect you hope this is the culmination, but... Well, yeah, I hope we've hit bottom, is what it is. | ||
| And really, Well, actually, maybe I'll just say this. | ||
| It looks to me, as I look across the landscape of forces, that almost every coalition is an unholy alliance between two things. | ||
| In the case of this equity movement, most of the people in the equity movement are interested in equity as their objective. | ||
| A small percentage of the people in the equity movement are interested in reversing the oppression. | ||
| They don't know that they're two different factions, because until you reach equity, they are pushing in the same direction. | ||
| But they really want things that are fundamentally different from each other. | ||
| So my hope is that every coalition will look at itself and the honorable people, the adults who are willing to give up some of the sacred stuff that surrounds their movement will join together and basically a coalition of the reasonable would be an excellent thing to come out of this. | ||
| This is, we'll jump back to Patreon for a moment. | ||
| This is good because I mentioned to you before we started that I was recently at a conference over a weekend where there were 400 college professors all talking about how do we fight this stuff? | ||
| And this is before sort of all this had bubbled up publicly to you. | ||
| So the question is, the thrust of the question is basically about donors. | ||
| Like, is that really the answer here? | ||
| That you've gotta hit these donors because ultimately these forces, if they realize there's no money in this, We'll stop doing this stuff. | ||
| So in which context are you asking about the donors? | ||
| Are you talking about the college context? | ||
| Yeah, I think in the college context that really hitting the donors, that if you can't make headway with the administration, which at this point is being grossly negligent it seems in defending you, in not defending you, that maybe if you go for donors in generally in these schools that that's the way to affect change. | ||
| The bottom line is the bottom line. | ||
| We're in a very difficult position because we're a public college and we're hovering at the border of fiscal coherence. | ||
| So what I would say is I don't know how Evergreen gets out of this because this is obviously damaging to its reputation and we can't afford that. | ||
| I suppose I hope that somebody, a donor that is in line with progressive values will step in and save the college. | ||
| And I don't know if that's conceivable or not, but there is something there very much worth saving. | ||
| And frankly, you know, even these protesters stand to gain a tremendous amount if the college can right itself, find its original values and, you know, move forward towards the, you know, the noble version of equity rather than the one that they're pushing towards. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| This is something that I've thought about from Super Chat. | ||
| I believe that the U.S. | ||
| is the largest export of culture. | ||
| My biggest fear is that we are radiating this polarity across the globe. | ||
| What are the implications? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| And this has changed so much in our lifetimes because of the way the cultures are now linked together. | ||
| So this is a tremendous danger, which is that good ideas can spread, but so can bad ideas. | ||
| I will say I'm starting to get lots of mail from overseas, and I don't know what it is that caused that to happen. | ||
| But I do think I'm I'm ashamed and saddened that it's my institution that's causing it, but this is a wake-up call. | ||
| And maybe the point is, having seen this over social media, people will not capitulate to movements that are pushing towards illiberal ends. | ||
| So this is super chat, this is slightly off exactly what we're talking about, but why do you think it's acceptable for neo-Stalinists, say Marxists and Communists, to wave the hammer and sickle flags in our society when flying the neo-Nazi flag rightly gets a disgusted reaction? | ||
| Do you even want to? | ||
| Have you not got into enough trouble yet? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know that there's a winning answer to that one. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, again, let's just say this. | ||
| If we can get you in a lot of different troubles, then it could defray the main trouble. | ||
| That's just what I need. | ||
| I need everybody united with me as the common enemy. | ||
| Yeah, maybe I will just leave it at that. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| All I can do is promise to ask the ones that I'm asking. | ||
| I can't force you to answer anything. | ||
| I'm not sure if you'll know about, well, let's not do that one, because I don't know about that one yet. | ||
| Brett, I fully support you, and it may not feel like it, but the support is there. | ||
| What would you suggest we do to resist these social justice warrior actions? | ||
| So just for the regular person, I think we've sort of addressed this already, but is there anything else, just for the average person that doesn't want to publicly do something, maybe? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Realize that most of them are good people who are confused about something and have gotten caught up in something bigger than they are, that isn't headed in a good direction. | ||
| But they are reachable. | ||
| I mean, you can even see that in the clip of me reasoning them. | ||
| And the more of us that are actually compassionate about the fact that there are real problems that need to be addressed and they haven't been addressed, Maybe this is the thing to say. | ||
| The oddness of this protest at Evergreen is hiding a more difficult truth. | ||
| We have desperate inequity. | ||
| If that same protest, that same intensity of protest, was directed at inequities in our system of jurisprudence, it would make a lot of sense. | ||
| What I think has happened is that the university system is being attacked because it's a soft target, not because that's the place that is I'm spreading all of this inequity and so it's incoherent in the context of the university system, but really it's just pointed at the wrong thing. | ||
| So if one goes into talking to social justice warriors with the mindset that they're making it up, that's I think sadly partly right. | ||
| They're making it up at some level about the university system, but they're not making it up entirely. | ||
| The inequities are there, they're very important and they're crippling. | ||
| So Give them the benefit of the doubt with respect to the fact that there is something that they are responding to, and then talk to them about whether or not they're in fact pointed in the right direction. | ||
| Yeah, I love that. | ||
| Look, you can't force them to sit down, but it's why I always say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| These people who I often have huge disagreements with, I don't disagree with or deny that they believe what they're saying is right. | ||
| So we have to at least give them that to then be able To do this. | ||
| This is a good one from Patreon. | ||
| Can we get even five thought leaders on the left to publicly denounce these regressive trends and help us create a dialogue on the better ways ahead? | ||
| I think this is particularly interesting because it's related to sort of you being on Tucker and invited to be on Fox and nothing from MSNBC or NPR or Huffington Post or any of that other stuff that the left, I think, has been so cowed by these words of racism that they just won't stand with you publicly, even if they know that they should. | ||
| So the leaders just simply would rather throw you to the wolves by doing nothing. | ||
| What is this left you speak of? | ||
| I haven't seen them in so long. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, where are the people that should be, forget you for a moment, but just as these trends have happened for a while, where is the broader left that should be standing up for free speech and for all of these things? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It has dropped below the threshold of coherence for some reason. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Well, I don't like the idea of it, but I like the way you said it. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| This is on Super Chat. | ||
| Someone said, please ask Brett about the high art of communication. | ||
| It will be worth it. | ||
| Ah, the high art of communication. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| It got there somehow. | ||
| Yes, it did. | ||
| It had to connect with a particular... So, one of the people that I've been working with is the wrong term, but collaborating with in trying to envision how civilization might be altered so that it actually functions and doesn't put us all in jeopardy. | ||
| It's a guy named Forrest who has come to the conclusion that the problem, the primary problem that we face getting to a functional system is that people don't know how to talk to each other anymore. | ||
| And he's been working on a system for essentially bootstrapping Schools is the wrong term, but events that would cause people to develop the capacity to talk to each other in an ever deeper fashion. | ||
| And having done so, the hope is that what will emerge from that is really much tighter language, that most of us, because we Share a basic language. | ||
| Speak as if we know what we're being heard to say. | ||
| But in fact, when you get right down to it, anybody who's doing high-quality work in some corner has had to narrow the definitions of their words. | ||
| And when two such people get together, there is intense confusion until you've hashed out those As an interviewer, I should probably be doing a little more research on this, I think. | ||
| You know, it's so funny. | ||
| I accidentally called you Eric once and it keeps almost coming out of my mouth. | ||
| we are to be able to talk about the issues we face at a sophisticated enough level to really address them. | ||
| As an interviewer, I should probably be doing a little more research on this, I think. | ||
| You know, it's so funny, as I accidentally called you Eric once | ||
| and it keeps almost coming out of my mouth, but basically you throw a beard on Eric | ||
| and you get him a slightly more form-fitting haircut. | ||
| And I've got him right across the street. | ||
| I've heard this before. | ||
| Brett, with the responses on Evergreen and Berkeley, how can conservatives find a voice on campus today? | ||
| What are your thoughts on what the further escalation may be by either side? | ||
| I think the first part's interesting because you're not a conservative, but I suspect you wouldn't have a problem with more conservative voices being heard. | ||
| Well, I must say, as I said at the beginning of your program, I'm sort of abandoning this continuum because I just don't think it's useful. | ||
| It is amazing how much more likely at the moment it is that if I sit down with somebody who says they're a conservative that we're going to have an interesting, productive conversation. | ||
| And it's not because I'm a conservative, but it's because I think if you're a conservative, | ||
| you've been challenged in a particular way for so long that you've had to deal across | ||
| aisles before, whereas the left is more insular. | ||
| So one thing I would say to whoever asked that question is consider whether you are | ||
| in fact a conservative. | ||
| To me, a conservative is somebody who wishes for the structures in place to be preserved | ||
| as they are. | ||
| And I can't imagine how a reasonable person looking at the structures the way they're | ||
| functioning now would find themselves in that situation. | ||
| So, is conservative, is that label doing you a favor? | ||
| Just the word itself doesn't sound cool. | ||
|
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No. | |
| You want to get young people, you can't use the word conservative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why are we, this is super chat as well, why are we letting these children have their way? | ||
| Won't rewarding bad behavior only perpetuate it? | ||
| I think that's a particularly good one because it shows what the position of the of the professors is that it's like they don't want to be treated like you are now treated. | ||
| So they do let these kids do things that they probably shouldn't. | ||
| The kids can do whatever they want, but I mean they don't challenge them in a way that you should be challenged at college. | ||
| I think this definitely applies to the way the administration has handled the demonstration. | ||
| It shouldn't be negotiating based on threats. | ||
| As far as, I think these kids is also a little too simple. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of structure within even the group that's protesting. | ||
| And, you know, there's a video that you didn't get to hear. | ||
| There's a video in the middle of the day, on the day that I was challenged, in which the protesters or some of the leaders of the protest have corralled the president. | ||
| I think he's I think he's essentially literally a prisoner. | ||
| My understanding is he wasn't even allowed to go to the bathroom alone. | ||
| But they're talking to him about their demands and I believe they're mistaken about a number of things, but they are totally understandable and one can relate to them. | ||
| And I had the feeling watching it Wow, I really wish I could be in that room. | ||
| The president is blowing this because he's negotiating with them rather than, this is the ultimate seminar. | ||
| This is the place where we can have this discussion about, are the things you're asking for reasonable? | ||
| What would be reasonable? | ||
| What are the real problems? | ||
| And he didn't do it. | ||
| Seeing how, there's an interesting theme here, and I think they're going to this | ||
| because you're a person of the left. | ||
| This is Super Chat. | ||
| Seeing how liberal arts colleges seem to be indoctrinating students | ||
| with mainly post-modernist ideas, what needs to change to have an open and honest education? | ||
| I think you've sort of already hit this, right? | ||
| Let's just say that that's not the right portrayal. | ||
| The sciences, especially at Evergreen, are extremely strong. | ||
| What they are facing is an overthrow, and the key is not putting the postmodernists in a position to dictate terms to the hard sciences and the other fields that are earnestly interested in inquiry. | ||
| history or whatever. So that's interesting. So you can, not that you'd want this necessarily, | ||
| but you could almost let them play in a certain area for a while and maybe that's what we all did for a long time. | ||
| But now you're seeing it encroach into the hard sciences and that's where the real threat is. | ||
| The chickens have come home to roost is what it is. | ||
| Well, I'll put you on the spot with this one. | ||
| This is Patreon. | ||
| Do you think that after this ordeal is taken care of, the president of Evergreen should step down for his slow response to de-escalate the situation on your campus? | ||
| Ideally, I think he should step down on Tuesday of last week. | ||
| I can't imagine... I mean, it is so insane that he allowed the four o'clock meeting that nearly boiled over into violence, where the chief of police literally told me she thought that she and I were in severe danger in that room, to have allowed that to happen and not to have To shut down the college is clear negligence that put people in danger of life and limb. | ||
| He should clearly resign. | ||
| Yeah You like this one as a biologist see we were gonna get to biology here somehow as a biologist do you see the actions and events like this and others as an evolution or De-evolution of the human species. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Hmm And can it be both at the same time, perhaps? | ||
| Well, I... Oh, yeah, that part. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How about this? | ||
| Human beings are a very unique creature. | ||
| And if you think about what you know about human history, you will realize that human beings are a species that, without changing substantially in form, has switched from one niche to the next as they've moved across the globe. | ||
| So we are a creature that is capable of reinventing ourselves very... | ||
| Seamlessly. | ||
| What has happened here is that the cues that say it is time to reinvent ourselves and to behave in a different way have not hit their mark. | ||
| And so I believe what's happening is somebody has, not somebody, but some force has prevented us from evolving as we would normally do into a new and more stable | ||
| phase. | ||
| And so what you're watching is the boiling over of a system that has | ||
| outlived its usefulness in the absence of the natural change that should replace it. | ||
|
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Has... here we are. | |
| Professor Weinstein, is there any improvement or conflict that you could imagine coming in the next decade or so with society at large, with the left or society at large? | ||
| So you are hopeful in some ways that this, if this is a watershed moment, that things could start turning. | ||
| Well, I'm hopeful on two fronts. | ||
| One, the Academy needs to get its footing, because no matter what your view of the way forward is, we need an entity that's capable of figuring out what's true. | ||
| So, let me just say this. | ||
| If critical race theory wins the battle with the sciences, The sciences will reformulate somewhere else. | ||
| They will have to in order for society to function. | ||
| And then critical race theory and its postmodern partners won't be able to survive alone. | ||
| You can't have a university built on that alone. | ||
| So I'm hopeful that this will cause people to wake up and that when it does, the sciences will be shored up and we can return You got 15 minutes more? | ||
| We'll do a full hour of Q&A? | ||
| I think we need to realize that all of the mechanisms that have functioned to produce positive change | ||
| in the past are not going to work in the present context and we need to start thinking outside the box. | ||
| You got 15 minutes more, we'll do a full hour of Q&A. | ||
| Can you hang for 15? | ||
| Okay, all right, so we're gonna do 15 minutes more. | ||
| So if you've got some more super chats or you're on Patreon, let us know right now. | ||
| This thing's growing fast here. | ||
| This is Super Chat. | ||
| As a rising senior starting to look at colleges, I'm equally baffled and horrified at the extent of affirmative action. | ||
| I obviously have a horse in this race, but do you think I'm justified or biased? | ||
| Now, interestingly, this person didn't say what their race is. | ||
| We can deduce something, but what do you make of the question? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's an odd question. | ||
| I'm noting the term affirmative action in there. | ||
| And I must say, I'm not against affirmative action. | ||
| I'm not convinced that the structure is the right one. | ||
| In other words, we all know that it has problems and that it creates stigma for people. | ||
| But I believe some structure is justified and that we ought to be earnestly searching for what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, that's about the best I can do. | |
| This is a good one on Super Chat. | ||
| How do you reconcile your views on equity and the horrors of all equity-based ideologies over the last two centuries? | ||
| This is sort of that, I think that road to hell is made with good intentions thing. | ||
| No, I mean, I think that person is synonymizing equity with equality of result. | ||
| If that person thought about equality of opportunity, equality of opportunity is in fact something we all ought to be able to agree on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But does it always get morphed? | ||
| Are there real instances where, I know we can fight for equality of opportunity all day long and plenty of other people do obviously, but it seems like it always gets morphed into equality of outcome. | ||
| I think it's a special case of capture and that really one of the largest problems, maybe the largest problem that humanity faces is that in the modern environment capture comes for everything sooner or later. | ||
| So the fact that equality of opportunity gets captured by equality of result is one more instance of a malady that we have to address generally. | ||
| This is Patreon. | ||
| What percentage of university students do you estimate condone or participate in the silencing of non-leftist opinions and even facts on campus? | ||
| I don't know that you have a like a hard number on that, but just from your experience right now, what do you think? | ||
| I would say it's a much smaller percentage than people realize, that these protests are so overwhelming. | ||
| I would say almost all of my campus has some sympathy with the protests. | ||
| I mean, you know, as I do. | ||
| I'm not interested in preserving privilege, and there is privilege. | ||
| I don't think it's happening at the college. | ||
| And so I would say the vast majority of students are not participating in the protest, nor would they support its excesses. | ||
| But there are sympathies because there are real problems. | ||
| This is interesting. | ||
| Is there research that the hard sciences are being pressured out of performing? | ||
| Do you know of anything right now that they're getting hit on? | ||
| Well, I don't know that that's exactly how it works. | ||
| I think what it is, is it works through taboos and stigma. | ||
| That there are certain things that one can't study. | ||
| And in fact, you know, one of the things in the letter that I wrote that caused such a stir was that I was offering to give a lecture if people wanted it on day of absence or at any other time. | ||
| on the evolutionary view of race. | ||
| And people immediately assumed that they knew what lecture I was planning to deliver and that it was, you know, it was basically scientific racism, when in fact it would have been quite the opposite lecture. | ||
| So what I would say is the idea that we can't go to certain places because we know that they are weapons of oppression is a stifling world to work in. | ||
| And it's the taboo we need to work on. | ||
| Are things really as bad as they look on college campuses? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unfortunately, they are. | ||
| Would you have said yes three weeks ago? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, that says something right there. | ||
| This is Super Chat. | ||
| How do I answer my Christian family when they say there has never been a gain of genetic information from one generation to the next? | ||
| And is the geologic column an actual thing outside textbooks? | ||
| The second part of that went over my head. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what they're talking about. | ||
| Let's do the first part. | ||
| So this is a very important point. | ||
| It's going to be a little bit hard to convey in this format, but there was a spectacular | ||
| failure in the study of evolution at the point that DNA came to be understood. | ||
| So Darwin, of course, knew nothing about genes because he didn't have the tools to know. | ||
| At the point that first genes were discovered and then DNA was understood to be the genetic | ||
| material, the mechanism was so elegant that people assumed that is Darwin's mechanism | ||
| rather than that is a Darwinian mechanism. | ||
| And what that did is it removed the ability to understand how a creature like a human being evolves. | ||
| Because human beings, we do evolve genetically, but that's not the primary way in which it occurs. | ||
| The primary way in which it occurs is a replacement of the software program. | ||
| And so We still have not dug ourselves out of the hole and built the toolkit that can address those questions properly. | ||
| So I would say, yes, human beings have not altered in a major way in, well, depends how major a way, but we have been like we are for something like 200,000 years, but that doesn't mean that we haven't been revolutionized over and over again by the replacement of one software program with another. | ||
| This is from Patron. | ||
| Who do you believe is most responsible for the oppressor-oppressed dynamic that these students seem to live by? | ||
| Responsible for creating the dynamic? | ||
| Is that what you... I would guess that that's what the question is. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Well, the answer isn't a fun one. | ||
| The answer is that human beings are genetically predisposed, like every other creature, to favor behaviors that cause the exclusion of alternative genetic spellings. | ||
| That's what every creature is about. | ||
| And what that means is that human beings, like all other creatures, when an opportunity to spread genes is the result of a kind of oppressive behavior, that that is favored. | ||
| And so one of the things that I've been trying to explain to people is evolution has given us some gifts and it's given us some hazards. | ||
| One of the hazards is that people are wired to be More generous with those who are more closely related and that that happens at every scale. | ||
| And so the same force that causes a mother to love her offspring causes one population to go to war with another. | ||
| And we have to allow ourselves actually to be inconsistent and to favor maternal love as we reject war. | ||
| So my basic point is this is not a simple problem. | ||
| We have to realize that evolution is playing a role in creating human behaviors and that what it is pointing us towards is not always honorable. | ||
| And by the way, I think in the video that we showed there's a further portion where you start explaining that. | ||
| And even saying that was eliciting a response to people that somehow you were pushing some sort of racial identity on people or something. | ||
| Well, I think the danger is that once people start hearing about genes and exclusion, they think that you're advocating for it, rather than saying, actually, this is a warning. | ||
| We have this Dangerous mechanism built into us. | ||
| It doesn't have to be triggered. | ||
| There are lots of times when people are not, you know, you sit around the dinner table with people who aren't closely related to you and you're not constantly thinking about whether you can steal their stuff. | ||
| So, we can turn these mechanisms off, but we have to be deliberate about it. | ||
| And, you know, really, ultimately, we have to build a society in which children develop in an environment that reinforces the standing down of those mechanisms. | ||
| I like this because it gets right to mechanisms. | ||
| What legal structure would you remove or replace to provide more equity of opportunity? | ||
| So if we're going to really get this equality of opportunity there, is there anything that you would remove or replace? | ||
| Well, that's a very big question. | ||
| I would say the ways in which power reinforces itself are many, and they are insidious. | ||
| They show up in places where they're not labeled in a way that you can recognize them. | ||
| So I would say we would have to actually You would have to go through all of the mechanisms that allow society to function in order to discover things that hobble. | ||
| So anyway, I think it's too big a question to answer in a short form, but it's a very important question. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| We've got five minutes left. | ||
| Brett, I feel like too much focus is on students in these situations. | ||
| 18 to 20-year-olds across the nation are not organically spawning these ideas. | ||
| How do we confront the faculty who perpetuate this? | ||
| So we talked about that a little bit. | ||
| These students are being led in a way. | ||
| They're not just magically coming up with these ideas. | ||
| What's been your best technique with a faculty member maybe that's Well, unfortunately, and this is why I think it is this issue that is boiling over in this particular fashion, the stigma is so intense that there is no way for almost anybody to challenge a faculty member wielding these epithets. | ||
| Unfortunately, the rules have to be structured such that those who stand up are protected by their colleges. | ||
| In other words, there have to be penalties for trying to stigmatize somebody. | ||
| Unfortunately, we are in an environment where if anybody proposes such a thing, they will be stigmatized and the reforms won't occur. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting because you haven't said anything about asking or calling for the woman, I'm sorry, her name one more time. | ||
| Naima. | ||
| Naima, to step down, because really it falls on the administration and the president Not necessarily on her. | ||
| She's saying what she believes, whether you like it or not. | ||
| Well, get this. | ||
| The first time that she came after me, I went to the president of the college and I sat down with him for a couple of hours and we talked about the situation. | ||
| She is, in fact, on the equity council. | ||
| And my feeling is anybody who is so blatantly biased in a racial fashion doesn't have any business in the discussion of equity. | ||
| And I told the president this and I said she has to be removed from the Equity Council in order for the Equity Council to have a prayer of doing their work. | ||
| And he said, yes, but that's the provost's job. | ||
| And so I went to talk to the provost and he agreed. | ||
| He said it was the president's job. | ||
| And so privately there was agreement that she needed to be removed, | ||
| but publicly there was nothing. | ||
| Since this seems to come out of the humanities, do you think that the difference between scientific method, | ||
| meaning empirical falsification, and critical group theory accelerates political division? | ||
| Could you repeat that? | ||
| That's a big one. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| And we've only got three minutes left, so we're going to do one more after this one. | ||
| Since this seems to come out of the humanities, just this battle that we've been talking about now for two hours, do you think that the difference between scientific method, meaning empirical falsification, and critical group theory accelerate political division? | ||
| I have to parse this a little bit just so that I fully understand it. | ||
| I think I got it. | ||
| I would say it results in inevitable division because the assumptions of the two mechanisms for inquiring are not compatible. | ||
| The assumptions from which these two modes proceed. | ||
| So what I would say is, invoking the humanities is the way to address this. | ||
| The humanities are not inherently postmodern. | ||
| The humanities can be addressed with the same or similar assumptions as the sciences. | ||
| And when you do that, you get very powerful stuff like guns, germs and steel, for example. | ||
| Really, the point is there's a set of assumptions that really can't be allowed to persist within the university system because it is destructive of all of the other work that the system can do. | ||
| And that's really the solution to the problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| There's a whole bunch here that we could keep getting to. | ||
| I suspect this is not your last appearance on the Rubin Report, whether you like it or not. | ||
| Also, I want you to be able to speak when you have Rogan in a couple days, because you're gonna do three hours of this with him. | ||
| So I asked you at the end of the original interview if you had some final thoughts, but now after seeing just sort of the theme of some of these questions and everything else that we've talked about, is there any last thought that you have? | ||
| And then we'll step outside and go walk my dog and take a breath of fresh air. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I have one thought. | ||
| We have either We have an indefinitely large number of problems, or we have a small number of problems and an indefinitely large number of symptoms. | ||
| If you're caught in a narrative that's a familiar one, it's not rich enough to address the problems that we face. | ||
| And so what I would ask is that everybody should look around in their own corner and figure out what assumptions are here that I haven't checked that might be getting in the road to understanding what other people are talking about. | ||
| No. | ||
| I was going to send people to your Twitter at the end of this. | ||
| Is that where you want me to send them? | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Where else can we send them? | ||
| No, that's probably the place for now. | ||
| I'm probably going to put up a channel at some point. | ||
| It's at Brett Weinstein on Twitter, but that's with one T. It's usually with two T's. | ||
| What happened to that other T? | ||
| My parents were reasonably strapped for cash when I was born. | ||
| All right, well, it's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| You obviously know you have an ally in me. | ||
| I think this thing that you're on, sometimes people just get thrust into this, and it's truly an honor that you chose me as the first person to sit down and talk to you about this stuff, because we need each other. | ||
| And I don't mean just we, but I mean all of us, anyone watching this that gets it. | ||
| We need each other, and I think maybe this will hopefully be a seminal moment that we got some of the winds back on our side. | ||
| So I appreciate you taking the time. | ||
| This is an honor for me too, and thanks for having me on. |
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