Sept. 19, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:30:59
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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How's everybody doing tonight? | |
| Woo! | ||
| All right. | ||
| Woo. | ||
| We can work with the woo. | ||
| We are live streaming this on my channel. | ||
| Can you guys make a little noise for the people at home that are naked watching this? | ||
| For some reason I assume that people watch politics naked with their computer. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I am very excited to be here, first off, You guys are obviously doing something right on this campus that I don't see anything burning right now. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| Shouldn't you guys be burning things or otherwise, you know, we didn't have to pay $600,000 for protection like they did when Ben Shapiro was at Berkeley last week. | ||
| We have a great event. | ||
| Oh, hello, we've got a mic too. | ||
| All right, pretty good. | ||
| We have a great event for you. | ||
| The two guys that I'm sitting between right now are really, I believe, at the forefront of this fight that we're having for free speech. | ||
| It's crazy to me, actually, that you guys have to come out to an event like this, that what they say about college students, you know, that you guys have become increasingly intolerant. | ||
| I saw a study today, 51% of college students say it's okay to shout down A speaker they disagree with. | ||
| We will welcome every and all questions that you guys have at the end. | ||
| I completely, I'm a free speech absolutist and that's how we're going to treat this event tonight. | ||
| So to start, I'm very excited because the administrators here at Harvard actually gave me a list of topics that we're allowed to discuss. | ||
| So we will go with what we said was okay. | ||
| Now, Before we start, though, you know, what I like when I do these events is that, you know, we talk a lot about diversity these days. | ||
| And, you know, there's a certain type of diversity that a certain type of person likes, which means I can look out and I can see people of different colors and different races and male and female and probably different sexualities and all that. | ||
| But that's not really the diversity that I care about myself. | ||
| I actually care about diversity of thought. | ||
| I think that that's actually much more important than the diversity that you You're born with your immutable characteristics. | ||
| So for example, how many Nazis do we have here? | ||
| A show of hands would be fine. | ||
| You guys are coming with me slowly. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, diversity of thought is what it's all about, and these two gentlemen have a wide variety of thoughts. | ||
| So without further ado, I want to start with Brett here, because you have been sort of at the forefront of what's going on in the college space. | ||
| Basically, you have had to resign from Evergreen State College. | ||
| You were a biology professor there. | ||
| You have had to resign because you were Anti-racist. | ||
| Actually against racism. | ||
| You wrote a letter against racism. | ||
| Your career has consistently been about anti-racism and you've been a progressive basically for 20 years, fair to say? | ||
| About 20 years? | ||
|
unidentified
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My whole life. | |
| Your whole life, okay. | ||
| But tonight you are sort of going to break some news. | ||
| So you just had a settlement with Evergreen State. | ||
| $500,000, but you and your wife are stepping away from the university. | ||
| And again, this was a fight over anti-racism. | ||
| Did I set you up there? | ||
| Yeah, that's a pretty fair introduction. | ||
| I was opposing a clearly segregationist policy, and I was protested very vigorously, as many people saw on YouTube. | ||
| And this resulted in a pitched battle between me, largely, and the college administration over the treatment of faculty members by protesters. | ||
| And in any case, my wife and I, we never ended up filing suit against the college because in Washington you have to file a tort claim and then wait 60 days before you can file suit. | ||
| But that suit was about to be filed and we met with the college and chose the only good path for us, which was to resign our positions, which the college very much wanted us to leave because our presence was very awkward and what they wish to continue Doing would have been difficult if we had still been around. | ||
| So I think my wife, Heather Hying, who is also a professor of biology, summed it up very, very well when she said that we had effectively been paid to leave a burning building. | ||
| The building is still on fire, and we've now left it. | ||
| So people here, all right, well, you guys got $500,000. | ||
| That sounds like something. | ||
| It's a nice chunk of change that I would imagine anyone out here would be happy to have $500,000. | ||
| But think about it, in your battle to say what you believe in, to fight policies that are truly racist that were happening on this campus, it cost you and your wife your jobs. | ||
| It's an incredible situation that you've been put in. | ||
| Yeah, two tenured professorships that could have supported our family for the rest of our careers, another 15 or 20 years, were lost to this. | ||
| And $500,000 sounds like a lot of money. | ||
| And indeed, I think what was important to us was that it is enough That you can tell that the college understood that it had done wrong things and that it feared going to trial. | ||
| And I think it in particular feared the process of discovery. | ||
| Because as foolish as people were on video, they were even more foolish in writing. | ||
| And that was available through public records requests over the campus email server. | ||
| But there was a lot more to be discovered in depositions and in other correspondence. | ||
| So in any case, the fact of the settlement does say that the college made terrible errors and that in some way it is aware of that, though it will not formally admit it. | ||
| But effectively, it's given my wife and me a couple of years to figure out what to do next in lieu of the professorships that we've had to leave. | ||
| Well, I have an idea. | ||
| I wasn't planning on doing this, but what do you guys think? | ||
| You think we could get this professor in exile a gig here at Harvard? | ||
| You think that's, can you guys write a letter or what do you? | ||
|
unidentified
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I assume some applause is how you get into college these days. | |
| Steve, what is going on on college campuses? | ||
| I mean, this situation right here. | ||
| We were talking about it all day long. | ||
| No, it's completely crazy. | ||
| I mean, what's going on in college campuses, I think, is a microcosm of what's going on in the country in general. | ||
| And the way I would put it is there's a serious battle of ideas going on in this country, and if we want to save free speech, we have to understand the ideas that underlie free speech. | ||
| We have to understand where free speech comes from. | ||
| Why is it a value? | ||
| Is it a right? | ||
| My position obviously is that it's a fundamental individual right, but it's also a value. | ||
| It's a value to every individual human being in this society, and I don't think people are taught that anymore. | ||
| In fact, I'm sure they're not taught that anymore. | ||
| And what we saw happen at Evergreen is a good example of what happens when you teach young people ideas that are contrary to freedom. | ||
| I mean, there are a number of ideas that we see taught or that we see manifested on college campuses today. | ||
| I mean, you could put it, I mean, throughout the entire country, tribalism is one. | ||
| The idea that individuals are really essentially meaningless and that they are given meaning only to the extent that they belong to some group, whether it's a racial group, a group based on gender, a group based on class. | ||
| You know, this is what identity politics is all about. | ||
| It's about fracturing the country into warring factions and warring groups. | ||
| And there are whole philosophies that subscribe to the idea that that's essentially what Society is. | ||
| Postmodernism is a good example of that. | ||
| Multiculturalism, I think, are both good examples of that. | ||
| And when you attack the individual and the sovereignty of the individual, or if you attack the ability of the individual to think, we see ideas taught, I think, on college campuses constantly today that attack reason, they attack free will, the idea that you can choose your own ideas. | ||
| If we get rid of free will, what's the point of having free speech? | ||
| So, I mean, there's much more to talk about. | ||
| But, I mean, what we are ultimately seeing is the manifestation of bad ideas that have been taught now for generations. | ||
| And one of the worst ideas, I think, that we see and that we really saw on Evergreen is the idea that speech is a threat. | ||
| It's somehow a threat to your safety. | ||
| And we see that in the whole idea of safe spaces, trigger warnings, | ||
| I think microaggressions, just the idea that speech is a variation or | ||
| a type of force and that if you don't like, if you're offended by ideas, | ||
| that's the same thing as being harmed. | ||
| If you really believe that, you are going to attack a guy like | ||
| Brett Weinstein when he says what you say is the wrong thing. | ||
| Although, I'll just emphasize, I think everything you said was right, Brett, | ||
| but obviously there are people who don't. | ||
| And if you don't teach people how to deal with contrary ideas and | ||
| how to think, they're either out of fear or out of animosity going to attack people when they speak. | ||
| And we saw a literal example of that at Evergreen. | ||
| But we're seeing examples of that all over. | ||
| Not just on college campuses, by the way. | ||
| I mean, Charlottesville, I think, is an example of that. | ||
| All throughout the country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'll go on the record as saying, now that this is settled for you, I mean, it seems to me that the school is actually going to just rot from the inside now. | ||
| They've staked out a position and got rid of two intellectually honest professors in the name of all of this political correctness. | ||
| And I suspect five years from now, you'll look back and be doing great things and go, man, I got out at the right time. | ||
| Well, it's actually already clear that I got out at the right time. | ||
| So, I know that it looks from video that I was opposed by a great many people and it was a large number of people, but it was a very small percentage of the students on the campus and the faculty is actually deeply divided about what happened. | ||
| So to make a long story short, I have lots of friends left on the inside who are forwarding | ||
| me. | ||
| You know, my email was cut off within seconds, you know, before the ink was even dry on the | ||
| settlement because the administration wished to sever that connection. | ||
| But people keep forwarding me things. | ||
| And if there's one thing that's absolutely clear from the traffic that remains on the | ||
| inside of the college, the college learned zero from this event. | ||
| It is, if anything, more convinced of the rightness of the direction that it was headed | ||
| and its phony vision of equity. | ||
| And so it's making the same move that it has made since— since May, which is to double down yet again | ||
| on those same wrongheaded policies. | ||
| Yeah, and what's interesting about Brett, I think, is that he says this as a lefty. | ||
| You say this as a committed lefty and progressive. | ||
| We were talking about it today. | ||
| But what's really interesting is I personally don't put the blame on the college students like you guys. | ||
| Well, you guys are here, so you're defenders of free speech. | ||
| You understand the exchange that we're trying to have. | ||
| But I don't put the blame on a lot of these college kids going through this, because we were talking today about how privately you've had a ton of support from faculty, and yet publicly they don't, because even if they, in their own hearts and in their own minds, they believe that what you did was right, they believe in these ideas, they don't want to be subjected to the same monster. | ||
| So by you leaving and them staying quiet, ultimately it will have to come for them as well, or they can remain silent the rest of their lives as professors, which is pretty sad. | ||
| Well, I will say I think many of them correctly understood that they would not be able to withstand what comes back if you stand up. | ||
| That the epithets that are directed at you are tactical. | ||
| They don't have to be true. | ||
| And so what comes back is designed to stigmatize you, to make you unhirable, to undermine the security that you're depending on. | ||
| And so I can't really fault people for recognizing that that's an actual hazard. | ||
| I certainly wish they had more courage, but I'm not surprised that they don't. | ||
| The correct response to that, for anybody facing this at another college, the correct response is for people to stand up together. | ||
| That's the only thing that's likely to work. | ||
| And I wish that they had recognized that early enough to save Evergreen, which I think is probably now impossible. | ||
| So just to be clear, since we are live streaming this, you are not a white supremacist, correct? | ||
| You are not a white supremacist? | ||
| I am not a white supremacist. | ||
| Can I make a point, though? | ||
| I agree with what Brett said, that people have to stand up, and they have to have the courage, the moral courage, to stand up and speak out for somebody like Brett, who speaks up. | ||
| people. | ||
| If you buy into a lot of the ideas for which you were attacked, or if you buy into, I would call it an ideology or philosophy, that you were, I think, opposing when you, and you can disagree with me, obviously, if you think I'm getting this wrong, but that you were opposing, which was the, I mean, it's what ultimately led to The Day of Absence being turned into something that is, I think, sensible in the context of its Douglas Turner Ward's play, Day of Absence, which is the play is about a segregated town in which all the black people leave and then all of the racist white people find that they can't shine their shoes or get anything done anymore. | ||
| And it's a nice parable on what happens when you get rid of or when the people who you hold in contempt and criticize finally say, to hell with it and leave. | ||
| Just to be absolutely clear, for the 20 or so years before this that the school did it and the black students left, or the black students or students of color or whoever considered themselves allies or wanted to believe In this cause, you had no issue with that. | ||
| It was only when it was flipped and white students were basically told not to come to campus. | ||
| Well, I mean, this might be too much inside baseball, but at some level, what troubled me was that one population was telling another population not to come to campus. | ||
| And it was voluntary, but it was very clear that you were making a statement. | ||
| If you showed up on campus and you were white, then you were essentially saying, I'm not an ally to people of color. | ||
| And for me, that was a problem, because I am an ally to people of color. | ||
| And I did not wish to be forced to demonstrate that by leaving as somebody else's idea. | ||
| I certainly have no problem with people absenting themselves from anything as a protest. | ||
| I support that. | ||
| I don't know how effective a protest it was in the years beforehand. | ||
| In other words, the Douglas Turner Ward play is predicated on a town, and the black population leaving the town makes this point. | ||
| I was afraid in the years that I was at the college prior to this year that in fact the day of absence when people of color left | ||
| inadvertently made the wrong point because it didn't cause the college to come to a halt. | ||
| And so I'm not sure it was an effective protest, but I certainly had no objection | ||
| to people absenting themselves. | ||
| But here's the point I was going to make, and I think that's a good point, and it dovetails with what I was going to say, although you can disagree, obviously, Brett, but I'm not convinced. | ||
| I mean, in the context in which that play was written, it makes perfectly good sense, because you have a circumstance in which A group of people, black people, are actually literally being oppressed or effectively the same thing. | ||
| And in that context, yes, they should go on strike, so to speak. | ||
| They should leave. | ||
| I'm not convinced that it applies in today's world. | ||
| In fact, I don't think it applies at all in today's world at Evergreen State College. | ||
| But to reverse that is completely crazy. | ||
| It's then to say, but now we're going to turn it on its head and tell all the white people to leave campus. | ||
| It makes no sense even if you accept the logic of the play. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| And it becomes a kind of intimidation effort to tell people of a certain race, you all should leave campus because you're all collectively guilty for, I would put it, the sins of your forefathers, so to | ||
| speak, or the sins of people who aren't even alive today, who lived years and years or decades and | ||
| decades ago. | ||
| And this is part of the problem. | ||
| We've accepted this idea of, I would call it racial guilt, and it flows in all kinds | ||
| of different directions. | ||
| It's not necessarily just white people that are supposed to feel guilty. | ||
| And this is what identity politics and intersectionality is all about, is you can't even keep track of who's supposed to feel guilty. | ||
| But to circle back to the original point that you made about your colleagues not standing up, I think part of the problem is a lot of them, or I would say people, intellectuals in this country, have accepted a lot of those ideas. | ||
| And if you accept those ideas, if you accept the idea, I'd put it this way. | ||
| That America is an inherently racist nation that oppresses all minorities. | ||
| If you accept that and you think that everything is about racism, I think you are going to fall for these ideas. | ||
| I think you will have a hard time standing up for somebody who says, no, I'm not just an example of my race. | ||
| I'm an individual human being. | ||
| And I deserve to be judged that way. | ||
| It doesn't mean there's no racism in America. | ||
| Yes, there's racism in America. | ||
| But that's a very different thing from saying that America is inherently racist and everybody is a racist. | ||
| If you accept that latter point, I think you end up with the kind of situation that happened at Evergreen and is happening on a lot of campuses. | ||
| You guys may find this kind of interesting. | ||
| We were told, and I can be corrected if I'm mistaken here, that this event was not originally we thought it was going to be open for everybody. | ||
| So that's what we posted online and wherever else. | ||
| And then we were told by the university that only free speech events are only allowed to be students, which is really an interesting position. | ||
| So if we had had a talk with Brett about biology, then non-students could be here, or if we had a talk with Steve about law or whatever else, then non-students can be here. | ||
| So I was getting tweets from people saying, I'm here, and I can't come in, which is an interesting position. | ||
| Even that, it sort of puts free speech on its heels. | ||
| And I say this as someone that's been welcomed into Harvard, and I'm thrilled to be here, and it sounds like the school basically has been pretty good on this. | ||
| But even that, these little subtle things that pop up put free speech on the defenses. | ||
| Well, actually, I think it brings up two issues that would be very fruitful for us to talk about. | ||
| One of them is, you know, yes, if I was to be here talking about biology, presumably letting the public in wouldn't be a problem, even though, frankly, biology is way more dangerous than free speech. | ||
| Most people are, at least in principle, agreed on free speech. | ||
| But when people start talking about biology of sex, gender, population, people get very nervous. | ||
| In part, what I don't think has been well understood about the evergreen situation is that the fact that I'm a biologist was not incidental. | ||
| Even if many of the students who were protesting me didn't realize that what had actually brought them to my classroom was the biology, The fact is, biology is deeply politically incorrect, and that deep political incorrectness both caused my classroom, frankly, to be kind of a popular place, because I was honest with students about, you know, what are you? | ||
| What is a human being? | ||
| Can you give an example of that type of political incorrectness? | ||
| Because this is one of the things that I've been talking about on the show, and I had James Damore, the ex-Google employee who wrote You know, who wrote that piece after the diversity memo. | ||
| And basically that it seems almost to me that biology and science are about to come crashing into the sort of social justice post-modernism, because these things cannot exist together. | ||
| They're in direct conflict with each other. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And I would point out that Eric Weinstein, my brother, and Jordan Peterson both predicted that biologists would be next on the list of people to come after. | ||
| So can you give an example? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, let's do the easy one. | ||
| Sex and gender. | ||
| You might all want to sit down. | ||
| Okay, so sex and gender. | ||
| Is gender a so-called social construct? | ||
| Is it just simply the fact that you've been handed a designation at birth and that this designation therefore has some implications for you that you're just as well off to jettison and do something else? | ||
| Well, in my opinion, you are actually pretty wise to think about whether you want to accept what you've been handed, but you've been handed a lot by biology. | ||
| And let me just take you a little ways down this road. | ||
| So, think about the biology documentaries that you've seen, right? | ||
| You're very familiar with displays, sexual displays, very flashy males displaying for very drab females, right? | ||
| Well, you will notice that does not exactly remind you of human beings. | ||
| That, in fact, if one of the sexes is flashy, it's females, and males are more drab, right? | ||
| Now, what comes along with flashiness in the animal kingdom is that males in these species where males are flashy mate indiscriminately. | ||
| They don't really care because they're not investing anything other than gametes. | ||
| Whereas females in these species are extremely choosy, right? | ||
| So then that would suggest that females who are flashy in humans because of a partial sex role reversal might mate indiscriminately. | ||
| Not true in humans, right? | ||
| So the sex role reversal is only a partial thing. | ||
| And you might say, well, this is all the result of human culture, something we've imposed on top of the biology. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| There are 4,000 species of mammals in the world. | ||
| There is exactly one mammal species in which mammary glands remain enlarged when not lactating. | ||
| That's humans. | ||
| So that means that somewhere in the last six million years since we branched off from chimpanzees, we have been modified such that females have a display characteristic, which you will notice is a focus for straight men, right? | ||
| So you can see how politically correct this gets inside of a minute or two, because now we're talking about the fact that breasts are clearly biology, that they have something to do with a sexual reversal within human beings, and then the cherry on top for this discussion is, well, which sex is choosy in human beings? | ||
| They both are, but they choose for different things. | ||
| Now I'm not telling you that any of this is something that you have to adhere to. | ||
| We are free going forward to retool these things because we don't live in our ancestral environment. | ||
| But the idea that these things didn't come from selection acting in our ancestral environment is nuts. | ||
| This came from biology and it is what it is. | ||
| Well, I also know it's politically correct because you called them mammary glands and not boobs. | ||
| By the way, we're allowed to say boobs here, right? | ||
| I mean, we can call them boobs, not offending anybody. | ||
| I know boobs are suddenly very offensive. | ||
| I only say boobs when I talk about people wielding authority in an inappropriate way. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ah, yes. | |
| You see what they've done to us? | ||
| Straight men can't talk about boobs anymore properly. | ||
| That is a sad state of affairs. | ||
| What about on the legal side of all of this? | ||
| You know, I was thinking, so Shapiro went to Berkeley. | ||
| Now, Ben, I know Ben. | ||
| We've become friends. | ||
| Ben, whether you agree with him or not, and I've had great disagreements with him on my show, I mean, on very personal things. | ||
| We've talked about gay marriage. | ||
| We've talked about abortion. | ||
| I'm pro-choice. | ||
| He's pro-life, etc., etc. | ||
| But I noticed that the reaction after the Berkeley event last week was a lot of people were saying, well, you know, it was actually pretty good because only five people were arrested. | ||
| There wasn't a ton of damage. | ||
| Six hundred thousand dollars had to secure that event. | ||
| I said to you today, I looked online, you can buy pocket constitutions for a dollar. | ||
| I mean, it would have been better to just hand out six hundred thousand of those, you know. | ||
| So in a way, does that show that we've sort of already lost here? | ||
| That to have this guy, who whether you like him or not, is really just a mainstream conservative, basically. | ||
| That we've lost because these events now, eventually schools and cities just simply can't afford The type of security that will be needed for mainstream thinkers. | ||
| We're not talking about some, you know, off the range. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's what you'll ultimately see is if it costs that much to have talks at schools, schools will just say nobody can speak. | ||
| And they'll find ways to do it. | ||
| There's ways legally that even a public school could do that. | ||
| But so I mean one way to think about this is what happened I mean I think again I'll use evergreen because Brett's here but there are other examples you could give Middlebury Berkeley back in February Claremont McKenna College with Heather McDonald All of those in Evergreen are examples of essentially people who believe that it's okay to react to speech that you don't like with violence or with force or really with action at all. | ||
| Getting the upper hand and then cowing administrations who then appease them and allow them to get away with that. | ||
| If that continues, I mean, one of two things happens. | ||
| Either they end up successfully preventing the event from happening at all. | ||
| They drum it out, and people just can't speak because of the threat of violence. | ||
| Or the administrations have to spend so much money to get, because at the Berkeley talk with Shapiro, there were cops out in riot gear. | ||
| And that was the only way they could keep the peace. | ||
| Now, why does that happen? | ||
| That happens for a number of reasons. | ||
| One is that the administrations and the police and the government appease those who use force against others, and they allow them to continue. | ||
| And I think part of the reason is that a lot of them tacitly agree with what they're doing. | ||
| Another is that our governments are not taking this kind of thing seriously. | ||
| Antifa. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| That Antifa can go around and create a gang war out of anything. | ||
| We're all white supremacists. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm not picking sides in this. | ||
| I'm just saying that anybody who's willing to meet free speech with violence has to be arrested and they have to be treated like criminal gangs. | ||
| That's essentially what they are. | ||
| If they're allowed to get away with that, either they can prevent the event or they | ||
| can cost the school so much money that it becomes moot whether you're allowed to do | ||
| the event or not. | ||
| They've ultimately won. | ||
| Our governments have to take that seriously and our schools have to take that seriously. | ||
| For a variety of reasons, they've had their hands tied. | ||
| I'm sorry to say, I actually think, and we should talk more about this, one of the reasons | ||
| that they've had their hands tied. | ||
| While I'm completely sympathetic with Brett's perspective and I applaud the fact that you | ||
| sued Evergreen over it, I think more people need to do that in order to protect free speech. | ||
| In a way, and I'll say this about Harvard. | ||
| It's understandable when universities take the position that they have to say, only allow students in with student IDs, that they have to have a serious police presence, that they have to spend half a million dollars on police presence. | ||
| Because if they're essentially forced to have these events, and if the government is not taking care of this, they've got to protect people in some way, right? | ||
| So part of what I think has to be part of the conversation is, how have the courts dealt with these kinds of threats to free speech? | ||
| And have they dealt with it the right way? | ||
| I think the answer is ultimately no, but it's a broader discussion. | ||
| But it'd be great if we could discuss that a bit more, too. | ||
| But yeah, if this sort of thing is allowed to continue, you know, there's two ways government can stamp out free speech. | ||
| One is through censorship. | ||
| One is the other is through inaction. | ||
| And I think what we're seeing often today is inaction, and it has the same result. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's so much here because we can talk about this from the perspective of a professor in exile and we can talk about this from the position of a legal expert. | ||
| But even today, did any of you guys see this, that at Reed College there was a class that | ||
| was on Greco and Roman history? | ||
| And basically a bunch of kids just ran up to the front and started screaming about the | ||
| racist history of Greek civilization, which has given us pretty much every philosophy | ||
| that we have here in the West. | ||
| And sort of the reaction to it was like, oh, well, maybe there's a point there. | ||
| That was kind of what I got online. | ||
| Not that you can get a lot of truth through Twitter. | ||
| That's the smartest thing that I'm going to say here tonight. | ||
| But this concept, I mean, that's what this ideology is sort of trying to steal from you guys. | ||
| Imagine, I mean, you guys are at Harvard, right? | ||
| Like, this is the place your minds to figure out what you believe and how to think | ||
| and all of those things. | ||
| Imagine if you were going to a class and just a bunch of students who thought that | ||
| they knew what was right or what you should be taught just demanded the audience, | ||
| just demanded the microphone from the professor. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy, but we've sort of just given in, in all of these ways. | ||
| So we have students kind of giving in, we have professors giving in. | ||
| I think on the legal front, we're kind of giving in. | ||
| How do we start some of the pushback? | ||
| I think we're starting it, actually. | ||
| Well, I would actually argue that our problem is bigger than this discussion | ||
| suggests so far. | ||
| Because what we're hobbled by is an 18th century notion of what threatens speech, and we have 21st century threats to speech that are just unanticipated. | ||
| So what we're really dealing with, you know, evergreen it happens is a state college, which means that free speech was an issue for me. | ||
| And one of the theories along which a case could easily have proceeded is a federal case about government oppression of free speech. | ||
| That was one of the possibilities under consideration. | ||
| Had Evergreen been private, that wouldn't have been possible. | ||
| And there's no reason, from the point of view of the value of a college or university, that it should matter whether or not the institution is public. | ||
| The real question is, do we have the tools to have the discussions that we need to have to bring civilization forward? | ||
| And I think it's actually fascinating that we can talk about this here, having been invited to Harvard by libertarians, because Libertarians, of course, traditionally are deeply skeptical of bringing government regulation in to solve a problem. | ||
| On the other hand, our problems at the moment may be as threatened by Google, which you know in many ways is bigger than a nation and more powerful than a nation in terms of its ability to shape our discussion and our thought processes. | ||
| And so we are now as a civilization running the risk that there will be a discussion at Google In which it will be decided that some set of ideas is to be promoted and some other set of ideas is to be down-regulated, and that that will begin to affect what we're capable of collectively thinking. | ||
| And because Google's private, we can't invoke the First Amendment as a protection. | ||
| And there's no reason that we should feel less threatened by that. | ||
| So what I'm imagining is likely to happen is people who have a libertarian I think what you're seeing there is a progressive giving some props to you libertarians. | ||
| of free speech. They're going to want to see government empowered to protect us | ||
| from private entities like Google that may be a greater threat than any nation | ||
| really could be. I think what you're seeing there is a progressive | ||
| giving some props to you libertarians. That seems like it's worth a round of | ||
| applause or something. I think. So this is one of the criticisms we've gotten at these | ||
| events is there hasn't been enough disagreements. | ||
| So I actually think that's wrong. | ||
| In fact, I would actually say it's the opposite of that. | ||
| I'm not a libertarian. | ||
| We were back there arm wrestling before and Brett kept winning. | ||
| So I actually think that's wrong. | ||
| In fact, I would actually say it's the opposite of that. | ||
| I'm not a libertarian. | ||
| I'm an objectivist. | ||
| I follow Irvine Rand's philosophy. | ||
| I don't want to get into now the distinctions there other than to say that objectivism is | ||
| a whole philosophical take on life. | ||
| But I think it's exactly the opposite of that. | ||
| I would say that the real problem, so I'll take it two steps. | ||
| First with education. | ||
| The government controls education from top to bottom in this country. | ||
| It's not just at the college level. | ||
| It's at the primary and secondary level as well. | ||
| And so one of the weird things about this whole debate about free speech on campus is while we are rightfully, I think, complaining that somebody like Ben Shapiro is not allowed to speak or Ann Coulter or whatever, and I don't like Ann Coulter at all. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, I think, is very bright. | ||
| But, leaving that aside, I mean, it's ultimately the choice of the college, and it should be up to them whether to invite speakers or not. | ||
| But this is, I look at that as, it's like, it's a tiny little sliver of what is happening in school today. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| So, meanwhile, everybody's fighting about Ben Shapiro, we have essentially government determining from kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade what every student is taught. | ||
| And that is a huge, I think it's a huge challenge to free thought and free speech, that government gets to determine that, that we don't have the kind of, you talk about diversity and competition in the realm of ideas today that we should, and I think that's part of the reason that we have students being churned out in droves who actually You know, they can't think, they can't write, they can't speak. | ||
| They're nowhere near as intelligent as they should be. | ||
| And the solution to that is to privatize education. | ||
| So that's one component of it. | ||
| I mean, there's much more that we can say about that. | ||
| But on the issue of Google and the private companies, I don't think that that's right to call them a threat to free speech at all. | ||
| And here's the reason. | ||
| So, I mean, there are a number of reasons. | ||
| Number one, a private company cannot control what people think. | ||
| government can use the force of law to restrict what people can say and think. | ||
| It's only possible for governments to do that. Wait, let's pause there though for a | ||
| second because do you think it's possible that Google is now getting so | ||
| big that the information that we all get is now basically controlled by two or | ||
| three companies but Google's really ahead of that? No, I don't think it's possible but | ||
| but here's how I think I think you have to look at it. You have to take a broader | ||
| more historical view. I mean you could have said the exact same thing about | ||
| radio when it came out, that it was supplanted by TV and then guess what? TV | ||
| was only three networks, right? That was government-controlled. | ||
| And then what did you get? | ||
| You got two things. | ||
| You got talk radio competing with it, and you got cable competing with it. | ||
| So in, you know, a manner of like a decade or so, the supposed monopoly within broadcast TV was destroyed by cable companies and by talk radio. | ||
| And everybody thought, oh, my God, the cable companies are getting too big. | ||
| Then Internet came along and destroyed that. | ||
| And even once the Internet came along, you have constant disruption even within that Space. | ||
| Now, yes, does it look like Google controls all the world's information? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right now, for like the last year or so, when Google has become ascendant, I think it's easy for people, if you only focus on that, to think that they control the world's information. | ||
| I don't think they can stay in that position. | ||
| One of the reasons that I'm a huge supporter of capitalism is that I think it's great to have the free flow of capital and finance, to finance people like you, let's say, or anybody who wants to compete with YouTube and create a new company. | ||
| Leaving that aside, I mean, I think that will ultimately happen. | ||
| If enough people are dissatisfied with YouTube, let's say, or with Facebook, you'll see competition arise in that space, just like Apple knocked over, or Microsoft knocked over IBM. | ||
| Everybody thought that was impossible. | ||
| Then Apple knocked over Microsoft. | ||
| Everybody thought that was impossible. | ||
| Then Samsung is now in, and they're actually the leading, probably, seller of, you know, what used to be or what are Now, smartphones and used-to-be iPhones, I mean, there's constant competition throughout the economy in general. | ||
| One thing you have to keep in mind when we talk about... And look, I'm sympathetic to what's going on with you. | ||
| I think it sucks what YouTube is doing with you demonetizing your videos. | ||
| I think it's colossally stupid. | ||
| But we have to draw a distinction between what is smart for a private company to do and what is a real threat to our freedoms for a private company to do. | ||
| But we also have to look at the other side of this. | ||
| It's really wrong to say, I disagree with what Google is doing in one small sliver, but I'm going to ignore the fact that Google, just Google and Apple, two companies, have probably brought more information to more people in a shorter period of time than any other entity in the entire history of mankind. | ||
| Everybody carries around with them A phone, which to me is basically a magical device that allows us to access all the world's information in a few clicks of our finger. | ||
| That is absolutely astounding. | ||
| You can't ignore that if you're going to talk about the supposedly negative impact that Google and all these companies have had. | ||
| You've got to look at the positive impact. | ||
| I think people are looking at it way too narrowly. | ||
| But the salient point to take away is this. | ||
| Only government can really clamp down on your free speech. | ||
| Private companies, they're not able to do that. | ||
| They're able to ruin their own companies. | ||
| They're able to do really stupid things. | ||
| They're able to lose their customers. | ||
| Or they're able to win over a lot of customers who think the wrong things and it's our job to convince them to change their minds. | ||
| If Facebook is spewing crap, which I don't think it necessarily is, it's everybody's job out there to convince people who continue to use Facebook and Twitter and consume all of that crap to convince them not to do that. | ||
| If people want to consume that, that's what they ultimately want to consume. | ||
| It's interesting, because I can really see both sides of this argument. | ||
| I think it's a principled argument either way. | ||
| I mean, look, first off, no one's forcing me to be on YouTube, and it's a voluntary service. | ||
| And I would like a little more transparency with YouTube. | ||
| I'm sure most of you guys probably would like a little more transparency, too. | ||
| And yet, the libertarian side of me, I don't want the government to come crashing in and tell this company what to do. | ||
| So there's two sort of competing factors there at play. | ||
| But yes, I think ultimately capitalism is... Ask yourself, do you want Donald Trump to be deciding what's on YouTube? | ||
| Because that's ultimately, and if he's not the best example or best argument against government control of any form of media, I would say the entire economy, I cannot imagine what is. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you brought up Trump, but... | ||
| Yeah, I won't. | ||
| No one's ever said that before. | ||
| I don't disagree with you that, at least in principle, if history is any guide, if Google oversteps its bounds, and even if it doesn't, sooner or later it will be toppled by somebody else. | ||
| And so there won't be one entity persistently in control. | ||
| On the other hand, if all of those entities are market-driven, then whatever it is that they are attempting to accomplish in restricting our speech, and you know, from what I understand from the Google memo episode, Google, like Evergreen, is wrong-headed, and it is attempting to deploy a very naive understanding of the world, and hard-coded into the structure of, in Google's case, what it is that we, or what you can make a living putting on YouTube, for example. | ||
| But my point is, even if Google is toppled, the same forces that cause Google to be doing what it's doing will be in charge. | ||
| And what we really need is a principle that says that we have a right to discuss anything, right? | ||
| including wrongheaded things or things that sound wrongheaded and turn out not to be. | ||
| But we have a right and in fact we have a need to be able to discuss those things in | ||
| order for civilization to navigate. | ||
| And it doesn't make sense for any entity to block that, whether it be governmental or | ||
| whether it be these mega corporations. | ||
| And so, you know, net neutrality is a good test case. | ||
| Net neutrality is an idea that nobody should be in charge of which bits have priority, and really nobody should be in charge of which ideas have priority. | ||
| To the extent that an idea spreads, it is an idea worth hearing. | ||
| It may be vile and it needs to be repelled, but to be silenced by an algorithm is very, very dangerous to Frankly, the biotic mechanisms that human beings use to figure out how to stop doing what they've been doing and move into a new niche. | ||
| And we are in danger of, for short-term economic reasons, taking temporarily true things and writing them into a code so that we can no longer escape. | ||
| Yeah, if I could just put that a little more in layman's terms. | ||
| I mean, in effect, what's happening right now with Google and with the algorithm is that The system that's giving you the information, that's allowing you to get YouTube videos, that's allowing you to Google something, that's showing the information after, is now, we know, I mean there's basic evidence, and this is exactly what Damora was talking about, there's basic evidence that this is now being manipulated because of these diversity memos that they're passing around Google. | ||
| It doesn't sound like Like something that's so inherently evil, but there's an incredible danger there, that we're going to hardwire false information basically into the system that is giving us search results, which is incredibly dangerous. | ||
| But we don't have to talk too much about Trump, but for just a moment, where is Trump on this free speech thing? | ||
| Because there's something kind of interesting here, that the Trump supporters seem to be, at least for the most part, on the right side of this. | ||
| And yet there's obviously a piece of Trump that is a real authoritarian that probably wouldn't have a problem taking away certain people's free speech. | ||
| Yeah, I definitely think Trump is, I would put him as an authoritarian at heart, or I think he has the soul of a dictator, ultimately. | ||
| By the way, it's pretty beautiful that you can say that in America. | ||
| If it's any consolation, I don't think he's fundamentally different than a lot of presidents that we've had. | ||
| Now, he's definitely different in a lot of ways. | ||
| He's way more overtly authoritarian. | ||
| Many politicians out there are authoritarian. | ||
| By authoritarian, what I mean ultimately is they think it's up to the government to essentially tell you how to live your life and what to think, what to say, what actions you're allowed to take in your life, and that essentially it's the rule of men over the rule of law or the rule of people over the rule of law, meaning the decisions of the government officials are what controls your life rather than any kind of a principle. | ||
| The proper principle is individual rights, although there's way more to say about that. | ||
| But, I mean, if you look at what Trump has done, he hasn't done or said anything that is really fundamentally different than a lot of presidents have done. | ||
| So Trump attacks the mainstream media. | ||
| He attacks CNN. | ||
| Obama attacked Fox as fake news. | ||
| I don't care which of those. | ||
| I frankly think they're both, you know, sometimes good and oftentimes horrible. | ||
| But it's really the same thing. | ||
| With Obama saying that to Fox and Trump saying that about CNN, it's not fundamentally different. | ||
| I think that there's a certain kind of hysteria around Trump. | ||
| A lot of it for good reasons. | ||
| He is, as I said, he's way more overtly authoritarian than I think previous presidents have been. | ||
| But he hasn't adopted, nor does he support policies that are fundamentally any different. | ||
| So the way I've often put it is, we don't have a Trump problem, we have a free speech | ||
| problem. | ||
| And by extension, we have a freedom problem. | ||
| People don't understand what freedom really means in this country. | ||
| And then what you get is the factional conflict with left attacking whatever the right, the | ||
| conservative president is, and the right attacking whoever the liberal president is. | ||
| But both of them are saying essentially the same thing, and it's really just my guy is in office, so I'm comfortable with him controlling things versus the other guy. | ||
| Now, in terms of Trump supporters, I mean, I don't really think that the right is... For a long time, I thought the right was better on free speech than the left. | ||
| I don't really think that anymore because I don't think there's a real principle distinction between the two. | ||
| At least broadly speaking, that doesn't mean there aren't good voices on the left and good voices on the right. | ||
| There definitely are. | ||
| Right, but the simple truth is that the Trump supporters aren't stopping people from coming to college campuses, right? | ||
| Well, no, that's definitely true, but a lot of... I've heard so recently, and I mean this gets back to the disagreement that Brett and I had before, I've seen many voices rise up on the right saying, yeah, I'm in favor of a free market, but I think the government needs to clamp down on Google, Facebook, and YouTube. | ||
| And it's so obvious to me that the only reason these voices are doing that is because Google, Facebook, YouTube, Silicon Valley stands for a, quote, progressive worldview. | ||
| They don't like that worldview, so they want to clamp down on it. | ||
| It's no different from People on the left saying I don't think corporations should have the freedom to spend money on political speech. | ||
| I hate the Koch brothers. | ||
| It's the exact same attitude on both sides. | ||
| And it's totally unprincipled in my view. | ||
| Maybe we should discuss that or disagree more. | ||
| But I think you see exactly the same view on both sides. | ||
| And what it amounts to is Ultimately, I don't like what that guy's saying, so I want to clamp down on him. | ||
| That's not a principled view of free speech, but it takes a whole lot more understanding of what free speech really means. | ||
| Ultimately, about the freedom to speak, you also need the freedom to take certain kinds of actions. | ||
| You need the freedom to spend money. | ||
| I think you are the perfect example of this. | ||
| If people can put a restriction on your financial life, as YouTube essentially is doing, that's going to have an impact on your speech. | ||
| Now, there's a difference when the government is doing it versus a private company. | ||
| If we really want free speech, we've got to support freedom across the board. | ||
| I'll quote Ayn Rand on this, a free mind and a free market are corollaries. | ||
| They both go together. | ||
| And if you don't have one, you're not going to have the other. | ||
| And it goes in both directions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So since we're talking to college students, I think it's interesting when I go to colleges, because you guys to me are growing up in the age where everyone is outraged about everything constantly. | ||
| I mean, we wake up and you're suddenly outraged about someone who you never heard of. | ||
| That said something that you don't really understand and you can spend all day long being outraged about it and tweeting about it and all that. | ||
| Now, you just survived the outrage machine. | ||
| I mean, you really did. | ||
| You came out on the other side and you'll figure out what's next for you. | ||
| But how much does that, that sort of... Now, look, we're all free speech absolutists here, so if people want to be outraged, you can be outraged, obviously. | ||
| I'm not trying to stop people from being outraged. | ||
| But I sense that our outrage meter is so out of whack right now, we can't figure out what real threats are. | ||
| So to bring this back to boobs, or as you call mammary glands, I mean, even that silly moment happens on CNN a couple days ago, and Clay Travis says, boobs? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The guy, you know, he said, two things have never failed me. | ||
| Free speech. | ||
| I think it was the First Amendment. | ||
| And boobs. | ||
| All right, it's a kind of silly glib line, whatever. | ||
| But the outrage immediately, and that Brooke Baldwin has to issue a statement on Twitter that he'll never come back on the show and all that, I think it actually starts corroding our ability to figure out what we're supposed to actually react to. | ||
| Well, I would argue that's actually a feature and not a bug. | ||
| And that, you know, the easiest way to understand what happened at Evergreen, what's happening at Reed, and all of the things that look like variations on this theme, is that they are not actually arguments in the traditional sense. | ||
| They are insurgencies. | ||
| They are effectively attempting to shape what can be taught, what can't be taught, what can be discussed, what won't be discussed. | ||
| And they are shaping policy in this way. | ||
| And I mean, I think maybe the most bitter pill in the whole thing is that there is actually a point at which that is appropriate. | ||
| There are moments in history in which your system is so broken that you are actually justified in resisting its ability to talk to you, influence you, and all of that. | ||
| But we are not there. | ||
| This is happening and it is entirely counterproductive. | ||
| So what I would argue is that We have come to a point where our environment is so novel, I mean so different even from the world we grew up in, that it is impossible that any political system or ideology or economic system that is old enough to have a name that we would all recognize, there is no one of those that's right. | ||
| None of them are up to speed, right? | ||
| We actually have to discover a new mechanism for dealing with the modern realities that we face. | ||
| And what that is going to require is license for us to talk about possibilities, most of which will be wrong. | ||
| And if your response to hearing something that strikes an off note is outrage, That conversation can't happen. | ||
| So this instinct to resist a corrupt and broken system by shutting down everything that doesn't sound right is going to prevent us from getting to a new system, which is exactly what we have to be doing at this moment. | ||
| So then what do we do about the truly bad ideas? | ||
| So when these white supremacists are out there marching, basically saying that by the color of their skin that that somehow gives them more either more importance or more ownership of this country. | ||
| I mean, it's contrary, of course, to the Constitution and to basic decency and all that. | ||
| What do we do now? | ||
| I don't want these people silenced. | ||
| I had to defend Richard Spencer when he got punched. | ||
| I hate the fact that we use Nazi now all the time. | ||
| But I don't want these people to be punched for their ideas. | ||
| You actually make them the victims, which is really what they want. | ||
| They want to claim victimhood. | ||
| So what do we do, though, about the ideas that are truly terrible and truly dangerous? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| I guess there are two things. | ||
| One is we have to have better ideas and confidence in our good ideas. | ||
| And I think that's part of what's going on here is that, I mean, you know, all of the | ||
| what I would say the best ideas in history in Western civilization are under attack right | ||
| The idea of reason, the idea of individualism, you know, I think the free market and freedom in general. | ||
| People don't understand what individual rights, the rule of law looks like. | ||
| And when you get to a point where, especially, people are actually attacking reason, | ||
| free will, our ability to think, it disarms people. | ||
| And they have every reason then, if you haven't taught them to think throughout | ||
| their lives, they have reason to fear bad ideas, because they don't understand how bad ideas function. | ||
| But let me make one more sort of practical point, which has to do with | ||
| the intersection of law and our understanding of individual rights. | ||
| Take Charlottesville, there's a lot of really bad ideas woven into our laws today, | ||
| and the First Amendment is no exception. | ||
| Now, I'm about as free speech absolutist as you can find, but | ||
| I think there's something very wrong with the idea, and this has been a mistake that the Supreme Court has made for | ||
| a long time. | ||
| Very wrong with the idea that, number one, that we don't make a distinction between speech and action. | ||
| We have to make a distinction in law between speech and action, and number two, there can't be a right To march on public property the way the white supremacists did in Charlottesville. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| It's not that I'm against, you know, people marching for their ideas. | ||
| They have to do it, I think, if you're going to have public parks and public streets and all the like, which we obviously have, it's just not fundamentally possible to say People like white supremacists or anybody have a right to clog the streets, have a right to march in public parks. | ||
| Think about how the people in Charlottesville felt and what they were confronted with. | ||
| I mean the people who live there. | ||
| One day a bunch of white supremacists and Nazis show up literally carrying torches in | ||
| their public parks. | ||
| And then you get a rival gang showing up. | ||
| And they basically have a gang war. | ||
| And the police are confronted with this idea that somehow this is free speech, that we | ||
| have to tolerate this as an example of free speech. | ||
| It's not free speech. | ||
| I think the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| Is that contrary, though, to Skokie versus Illinois? | ||
| It is, yeah. | ||
| So I think that's why I started by saying I think the Supreme Court has made a mistake. | ||
| Now, it's an understandable mistake, but I think it was the wrong decision to say that you have a literal right to march on public property. | ||
| It's not a right that can be made consistent with the rights of other people. | ||
| You're building an inherent conflict into the law. | ||
| And once people come to see the right to free speech as Nazis | ||
| literally have a right to come to my town, clog the streets up. | ||
| And what they were doing, what the white supremacists were doing, and Antifa both, which I regard basically | ||
| as morally equivalent. | ||
| But they're not in that circumstance. | ||
| They didn't do all the exact same things. | ||
| But I mean, imagine what that means. | ||
| A band of people with helmets on, with shields, with sticks, and actually carrying torches. | ||
| That's not an effort to communicate to people. | ||
| That's an effort to intimidate people. | ||
| That's, I think, what the Nazis were doing in Skokie was. | ||
| That was an effort to intimidate the people of Skokie, Illinois, and I think it's a mistake that the Supreme Court allowed them to do it. | ||
| Now, that's not because they were Nazis. | ||
| It's because they were engaging in a kind of intimidation. | ||
| We can't conflate speech and action. | ||
| Those two things have to be separated. | ||
| What's the action? | ||
| The march on public streets. | ||
| Look, the best thing would be if they want to have a march on private property, that's all up to them. | ||
| And everybody can say, screw you, we're going to stay away. | ||
| I don't want to do it. | ||
| But think of what happens when there's a march on public property. | ||
| It amounts to my tax dollars as a person in Skokie, let's say, Illinois. | ||
| Or in Charlottesville. | ||
| I have to now pay for these assholes to come and intimidate people in my town. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Why should I be forced as a taxpayer to pay for these guys to have a march that is designed to intimidate people? | ||
| They are coming ready for a gang war. | ||
| And for some strange reason, taxpayers are supposed to pay for that. | ||
| Well, it's interesting you're making the equivalence though with Antifa, because again, $600,000 out of the Berkeley coffers. | ||
| If you treat that as free speech, if people come to view free speech as someone has a right to invade my space and at my expense have a gang war on my property, I'd be against free speech as well. | ||
| So the only solution in that is you have to separate those two issues. | ||
| Two issues. | ||
| Speech and action have to be made separate. | ||
| We can't treat all action as speech. | ||
| Action is necessary for speech. | ||
| Speech is a type of action. | ||
| But it can't be that I have a right to intimidate other people. | ||
| And that's definitely true in the law. | ||
| So you don't have a right to incite violence. | ||
| You don't have a right to threaten people. | ||
| But it's, I think, far too narrowly construed what constitutes a threat. | ||
| And I think the white supremacist marching in Charlottesville was a threat. | ||
| It was intended as a threat. | ||
| Antifa coming in was also a threat. | ||
| It was basically a gang war at public expense. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| People are not going to support free speech if they see it under those terms. | ||
| And then finally, to the extent we have public spaces and public parks and the like, it can't be that anybody has a right to do anything on that property that they want. | ||
| It's not true now in many ways, but it shouldn't be that we hold that every public space is open to any kind of speech. | ||
| It just can't be. | ||
| It's not actually feasible. | ||
| And this is why when you hold that you have a right to essentially confront others on public property, | ||
| you necessarily build a clash into your laws. | ||
| And it becomes irresolvable. | ||
| People see it as irresolvable. | ||
| And I think the logical response is to say, well, then let's jettison free speech. | ||
| So no public square? | ||
| No, I think you could have public squares, but they have to be very highly regulated. | ||
| It's an unfortunate fact. | ||
| I'm not a fan of saying this. | ||
| This is the guy who doesn't like regulation. | ||
| A little surprised. | ||
| We've done something very backwards here. | ||
| I know, but I'm not saying... The libertarians are getting pissed. | ||
| I know, the libertarians will definitely get pissed at me. | ||
| A lot of people will, but that's fine. | ||
| I'm a fan of having people pissed at me, or I don't mind it. | ||
| But my point is not that I want to restrict free speech. | ||
| It's that you just can't have public property, a public square where anybody gets to go in there and have what essentially amounts to a melee or a march that is intended to intimidate people. | ||
| That's what the white supremacists were in Charlottesville to do. | ||
| I mean, you can tell by everything they did. | ||
| Carry torches, for God's sakes. | ||
| It's like they were going after the monster. | ||
| They surrounded the statue. | ||
| That's all intimidation tactics. | ||
| If you're going to have public squares, and I mean, we have them, right? | ||
| So they are a fact. | ||
| I'm not arguing against the existence of... I mean, you know, in a perfect world, yeah, we can get rid of them. | ||
| But we have the world in which they exist. | ||
| So all I'm saying is, given that we have public property, it has to be managed by the government. | ||
| There's just no choice. | ||
| I'm not a fan of having the government manage these things. | ||
| But the way the Supreme Court, I think, has interpreted the First Amendment to allow this | ||
| sort of free for all or to interpret a march as the same thing as us communicating up here, | ||
| it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I think it's just sort of metaphysically wrong. | ||
| It's a real mistake in the way they view free speech. | ||
| Just as if I stand up now and I threaten to punch you, that's not free speech, but it | ||
| is communicating something. | ||
| And if we allow people to get away with that, then they will come to associate speech and | ||
| force and they will jettison speech. | ||
| And that's actually what's happening on college campuses. | ||
| I think a lot of students feel threatened. | ||
| They think, God, how do I get away from this stuff? | ||
| Imagine being in Charlottesville and thinking, I don't want white supremacists in my town. | ||
| How do I get away from this? | ||
| The Supreme Court has said I have to put up with it. | ||
| And what's the logical conclusion from that? | ||
| Well, then screw free speech. | ||
| And my answer is, you don't have to put up with it. | ||
| I thought I heard one clap. | ||
| There was one very intense clap. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because we've done a bunch of these and I've never heard that argument before and I think there's a lot of legitimacy to it. | ||
| So I want to move to the Q&A because I usually find that that's the best part of these whole things. | ||
| But do you have anything you want to surprise me on? | ||
| Well, I mean, I do want to respond a little bit. | ||
| I mean, I think the thing about free speech is it is so vital to what we are doing that we have to err in the direction of tiki torches don't actually sound like speech, but we probably have to allow them. | ||
| And the proper thing to do is to draw the line. | ||
| at action, but people have to be able to speak. | ||
| And I would say the idea, I think it's just wrong-headed, and this is something that Antifa and the left are screwing up badly now. | ||
| The idea that regulating what can be said is the way to deal with the hazard is nonsense, right? | ||
| The hazard of what happened in Charlottesville Is that we are at a point in history where those arguments begin to resonate. | ||
| And we need to deal with the reason those things are resonating, right? | ||
| Keeping those people from carrying their torches and surrounding statues doesn't deal with the fact that people are feeling boxed in and they're beginning to turn on each other in a very tribal, familiar way, unfortunately. | ||
| So, again, I would say what we ought to do is leave ourselves enough room to have discussions that allow us to figure out a way out of the cul-de-sac that we find ourselves in, rather than to figure out any way to regulate speech. | ||
| Offensive or not, it needs to be permitted. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, for me, at least, this hour went by incredibly quickly. | ||
| We've got a couple of mics out there to take some questions from you guys, but I do want to just kind of wrap this up with one thought, which is, I mentioned this to some of you guys that set this up at the beginning. | ||
| I went to college from 1994 to 1998. | ||
| I guess that seems like a long time ago, maybe, but to me it doesn't seem like that long ago. | ||
| And I was on PlayStation 1. | ||
| What are you guys on? | ||
| Switch? | ||
| What the hell is it? | ||
| All right. | ||
| That doesn't seem like that long ago, and I don't think in the scheme of things it is that long. | ||
| There is just simply no doubt that you guys live in extraordinary times. | ||
| These issues on what you are allowed to think while you're at college, the place you're supposed to learn how to think, This was not a debate when I was in college. | ||
| I suspect it was not a debate, really, when you guys were in college. | ||
| And yet it's THE debate. | ||
| It is literally, I think, the most important thing that you will learn while you're here, whatever your major is, whatever you're going to do. | ||
| The free speech and your ability to think critically and use logic and reason will frame everything else you can do. | ||
| So I thank you guys for coming out and taking a little time to exercise that. | ||
| I hope you feel Maybe a little more enlightened or emboldened to stand up for what you believe in. | ||
| And let's take some questions. | ||
| And they don't have to all be nice. | ||
| Say some... Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
APPLAUSE We have no rules. | |
| So, Professor Weinstein, you, let's see, Steve alluded to, you know, sort of having some appreciation of the value of free speech, and Professor Weinstein, you mentioned, I think you were very specific about, you know, the notion that that's the only way to grapple with sort of these unknown problems that are happening. | ||
| Steve, could you go further into, like, elucidating and listing the values, the value, the good | ||
| side of having free speech. | ||
| Oh, I mean, I would put it as free speech is absolutely essential to living a good life. | ||
| It's absolutely essential. | ||
| Free speech is a corollary of free thought, right? | ||
| To get along in life, we have to think, we have to make choices. | ||
| We live in a social situation, we're social creatures, right? | ||
| So it's an enormous benefit to us to be able to communicate with other people. | ||
| I mean, you can barely, that barely scratches the surface of just how important free speech | ||
| is. | ||
| Typically, I think it's put as it's important to maintaining a free society, which I wholeheartedly | ||
| agree with. | ||
| But I would say it's more fundamental than that. | ||
| It's important to living a good human life and pursuing happiness in the way that the | ||
| founders thought of that, which I think is the appropriate way to think of it. | ||
| We all have to pursue, or ought to pursue, our own lives and our own happiness. | ||
| Thinking and communicating is absolutely essential to that. | ||
| So it's one of the most fundamental and important rights that we have as human beings. | ||
| And I don't think it would be possible to live a proper human life without it. | ||
| And it's no surprise that dictatorships always clamp down on free speech. | ||
| they can't tolerate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Big fan, Dave. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So I pretty much watch all your videos. | ||
| So my question is to Steve. | ||
| when you're saying the guys with the tiki torch and we should have some line in the sand | ||
| that that shouldn't be allowed. | ||
| But I don't know if you're familiar with what happened in Boston | ||
| where there was 40 people versus 40,000 people. | ||
| So where do we draw a line over there? | ||
| I mean, every single people I knew, they went out and they were like, we're gonna go, | ||
| there's all these white supremacist people coming in and they're literally, I was like, | ||
| dude, you got a virtue signaling, right? | ||
| You don't have to do this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't have to do this. | |
| But they were going out, and I had fought with people. | ||
| And I wasn't around, so I probably would have been 41% there. | ||
| But I couldn't be there. | ||
| So when you're saying that those guys, we have to somehow, some entity will come in and control these people with the ticket torch. | ||
| I don't see the line. | ||
| I like how we made this about tiki torches. | ||
| So I think that's a great question. | ||
| And part of the reason that I oppose the current paradigm is precisely what happened in Boston. | ||
| So this is the Boston march that happened not too long after Charlottesville. | ||
| Everybody thought it was a white supremacist march. | ||
| It wasn't. | ||
| It was a bunch of libertarians. | ||
| I think there were some other groups that sort of glommed onto them or something like that. | ||
| But notice what happened. | ||
| So that march was cut short. | ||
| It wasn't even a march. | ||
| It was a peaceful demonstration or peaceful just discussion. | ||
| That's actually how it should happen. | ||
| It should be what those guys did in Boston. | ||
| It's peaceful if they want to stand on a stage. | ||
| This happens on the mall in Washington, D.C. | ||
| all the time. | ||
| You get a permit. | ||
| You go. | ||
| You have your talk. | ||
| You stand on your stage. | ||
| people have the mic, and they speak. That's speech. And yes, that's what I would say should | ||
| happen in the public square. What I'm making a distinction between is the idea that we | ||
| allow people to march around and to engage in action that isn't, strictly speaking, speech. | ||
| It's not because I'm against action. It's because if we're going to have public squares, | ||
| they have to be managed orderly and people's rights have to be protected. | ||
| And you cannot have masses of people going around intimidating people. | ||
| That's what happened in Charlottesville now. | ||
| But one final point. | ||
| I want to try to keep this quick. | ||
| If you recall what happened in Boston or the big complaint of the organizer of the march Was it that the cops on the beat, the cops on the street, so to speak, that were managing that protest, they ended up deciding when to cut off the thing. | ||
| They ended up circled by cops, all of whom were convinced that This was white supremacists. | ||
| We don't really want to allow you, so we'll sort of wink-wink. | ||
| Yeah, you can have your speech for a couple minutes, then we'll shut the whole thing down. | ||
| That's not necessarily criticizing the individual police. | ||
| We've achieved the worst of all possible worlds. | ||
| We thought we were taking out of government's hands the ability to make content-based distinctions. | ||
| Instead, all we've done is put it on the cop, on the shoulders of the cop on the street, who either As in, Charlotte says, well, I have to respect people's right to free speech, so there's nothing I can do when Antifa and white supremacists start fighting, unless they're fighting, and now we have an impossible situation to solve. | ||
| Or, well, I think these guys really are white supremacists, so, you know, let's among ourselves decide not to really let them carry on too long. | ||
| It's the worst of all possible words, and I think that was an example of exactly what happens when you give this kind of authority to government and you tell them, essentially, that marches and that protests are the same as free speech. | ||
| I think that the judge and the cops in Boston were rightly concerned that they would get violence, but it's because we've gone down this path of allowing violence to happen and calling it free | ||
| speech. That's the mistake that I'm saying is made. I'm not saying no speech on public property. | ||
| I'm saying it has to be managed in a way that you strictly separate between action and | ||
|
unidentified
|
speech. | |
| So there's a distinction, right, between free speech and hate speech, and one of them is | ||
| protected, one of them isn't. | ||
| Hate speech is classified as speech that is basically a direct incitement to violence or discrimination. | ||
| And I want to bring up two events that happened within the last year in our area. | ||
| There was one event in March where there was this bus called the Free Speech Bus. | ||
| I don't know if you guys had heard of it, but it was this big orange bus that was touring the country, and on the side of it it said, boys are boys, girls are girls, that's biology, and so on. | ||
| And it was touring the cities in the U.S. | ||
| And the other event was the Charles Murray event that happened a week or two ago, which I'm sure you guys are aware of. | ||
| And while neither of those events were what I would personally consider to be hate speech, you know, they weren't direct calls to violence or discrimination. | ||
| They were expressions of those people's views. | ||
| Many of the arguments on the other side of the protesters who attended both of those events was that was either saying that that form of free speech was actually hate speech or that it was a form of free speech that nevertheless incited violence and discrimination despite not being a direct call to that. | ||
| So how do you guys respond to that? | ||
| Well, I would argue that there really is no such thing as hate speech first. | ||
| I mean, there's a direct call to violence, which is a legal issue. | ||
| That is one thing. | ||
| If we directly threaten each other, now the authorities can get involved. | ||
| I'll kick it to you for what it said on the side of that bus as a biologist. | ||
| What was the exact quote again? | ||
| Boys are boys, girls are girls, that's biology. | ||
| As a biologist, would you put this on the hate speech list? | ||
| No, I would put it on the wrong speech list. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's incorrect. | |
| But the point would be it is a valid argument. | ||
| It is incorrect. | ||
| It does not make sense whether we are abstracting from the biology of other creatures or whether we are looking at human beings. | ||
| There are certainly Many instances of cultures that have some sort of alternative gender to them. | ||
| At the moment, the Kuna of Panama sprang to mind. | ||
| But nonetheless, there are many examples where evolution may be acting on the cultural side, but has produced something other than boys and girls. | ||
| And there are plenty of examples where people switch. | ||
| And then within the animal kingdom, there's also tons and tons of gender switching. | ||
| I mean, unbelievable stuff. | ||
| So, it is an incorrect argument, but the idea that one cannot deliver it as a challenge, is it not simply true that boys are boys and girls are girls and girls are XX and boys are XY? | ||
| You know, that is an argument that is valid and it does not induce anybody to harm anybody else. | ||
| So, I think the problem is people want some kind of guarantee About what biology is going to deliver them on topics that are sensitive. | ||
| And, sorry, but it's not going to happen. | ||
| There is no guarantee. | ||
| The biological truth of these things is messy. | ||
| And even when you hear that something is cultural and not biological, we are making a fundamental error designed to save us from some of what biology has Delivered to us. | ||
| As wrong as this is going to sound, our culture is equally as biological as our genes. | ||
| So it is fair to make a distinction between genes and culture as two different places that information can evolve and be transmitted, but it is not a distinction between biology and culture. | ||
| That's not a valid distinction, even though some of my colleagues would disagree with me on that. | ||
| But in any case, it can't be true that just because a biological idea is incorrect or leads to a suggestion that's overly simplistic that it is oppressive. | ||
| It can just simply be inaccurate. | ||
| Can I just say one thing about the legal issues? | ||
| You equated hate speech with incitement. | ||
| That's a mistake. | ||
| There is no such thing as hate speech in the law. | ||
| There's incitement in the law, and that's illegal. | ||
| But hate speech is not a category. | ||
| You said it's not a thing. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| But it's not a legal category at all. | ||
| And that's a real mistake. | ||
| A lot of people make that mistake. | ||
| And it's a dangerous mistake. | ||
| Although I understand why you make it. | ||
| Because it's prevalent out there. | ||
| But just to speak to the way I think to think about where the line is between what should be appropriate speech or legal speech, let's say, and speech that can be made illegal. | ||
| It's essentially, if you're actually, if speech is incidental to the use of force against another person or to a crime, that can be prescribed. | ||
| So fraud is a good example. | ||
| If you threaten somebody, that can be prescribed because, if it's an actual threat, because it's essentially the same thing as carrying out force against them. | ||
| It's just, you're doing it, you're claiming you're going to do it in the future. | ||
| And then incitement you can think of as, it's kind of a group threat. | ||
| I'm not carrying out the threat myself, so I'm going to, it's not just, I'm going to kill you, you know, right after this talk is done. | ||
| It's, hey, everybody join me together and then we'll kill you after the talk is done. | ||
| If that's serious, that's incitement. | ||
| But that's the line. | ||
| The line really ultimately is it's the use of force against people or the intention or some sort of a plan to use force. | ||
| It's not the same thing as I said something that pissed a lot of people off. | ||
| That's not incitement. | ||
| So that's the line we have to keep clear on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I'll leave it at that. | |
| My question for you guys is, after Charlottesville, after the Boston riots, the free speech movements take a hit, at least in Boston. | ||
| So for all the college activists for free speech here, what do you think should be the next steps to undo the damage that Charlottesville happened after Charlottesville and after the second Boston free speech rally? | ||
| Well, I can give you the one that I Every time I give a speech at colleges, which is you guys must stand up for what you believe in. | ||
| It sounds sort of cliche and whatever, but the amount of people that email me constantly are like, oh, I'm afraid to put one of your videos on Facebook or, you know, my cousin's not going to talk to me anymore if I say this or that. | ||
| This concept is insane. | ||
| I often talk about on the show that it seems to me that the bigger threat to free speech right now at this moment in time, 2017, right now in September, I am not that afraid that the government is coming for my free speech. | ||
| I kind of wish that that was the fear that I had most because that's every sci-fi movie that I ever watched. | ||
| That's what it's about, right? | ||
| So I kind of wish that that made sense in my brain. | ||
| What I fear is that slowly we're just not saying things. | ||
| We're just simply not saying things. | ||
| We're cowing people into silence by the outrage machine that we were talking about. | ||
| We're in a position where tenured professors that know that this man was on the right side of history and fighting against racism are afraid to step up and say that. | ||
| Where students... I went to UCLA with Milo. | ||
| And all hell was breaking loose. | ||
| I mean, they were spitting in cops faces. | ||
| They were dumping garbage cans. | ||
| They created a wall, a human wall. | ||
| So they're not against walls. | ||
| They just don't like Trump's wall. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And like this concept of being so afraid of ideas, say, you know, Douglas Murray, who's the guest on my show tomorrow, we taped already. | ||
| I'm going to just steal a line that he hasn't even, I don't know that he said it publicly, but I asked him this basic question. | ||
| What would you tell young people who want to do what you do? | ||
| Because I think Douglas, Is basically the next Hitchens. | ||
| I think he's so clear and concise and honest and because he's British, he has a way of just, you know, just getting it out. | ||
| And I asked him that very question and his answer was, you know what? | ||
| The water isn't that cold. | ||
| And I thought that that was pretty great. | ||
| That if you put your butt on the line, you might find that all of the things that you've built up, that you're going to lose friends, or your professors are going to turn on you, or whatever else, I think you might find that actually you'll find new allies and new friends. | ||
| And you will lose some. | ||
| I've talked about a lot. | ||
| I've lost a lot of friends over the last couple of years. | ||
| Not because I'm a racist, because I'm not. | ||
| But because I've started talking about some of these things. | ||
| But I've gained a lot of new friends and new allies. | ||
| I happen to be sitting here with two of them. | ||
| I think the best thing you can do is simply fight for what you believe in, even if it's everything that I don't believe in. | ||
| I would encourage you to do that. | ||
| I have a couple things I would add to that, first of all. | ||
| That was pretty good, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was good. | |
| It was very good. | ||
| I'm slightly disturbed to hear that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was good. | |
| So what I would add are a couple things. | ||
| One, The problem is the threshold of offense. | ||
| People are offended so quickly that they never get around to hearing the part of what's being said that they need to hear. | ||
| And so we get these echo chambers, which are absolutely industrial strain. | ||
| So one thing is, find the people that you disagree with, figure out which ones you can sit down with and talk productively, and talk to them. | ||
| You will be shocked. | ||
| You will be shocked. | ||
| The other thing is stop being afraid to polarize. | ||
| If you hear that somebody is polarizing, one has the sense that that must be a very bad thing, or that having enemies is a bad thing. | ||
| What you want to do is be ready to polarize, because if you're not polarizing, you're probably being too timid. | ||
| And what you want is for the room, or the institution, or whatever entity it is, to polarize correctly, so that when you look at your enemies and your allies, the allies are the people that you would want as allies, right? | ||
| If you polarize the room correctly, you don't need that many friends in life. | ||
| So, be bolder, don't be terrified by the fact that it will create enemies, and realize that as you create enemies, the quality of your friend group will go up, | ||
| because the people who will stand by you in such circumstances are simply higher quality. | ||
| And I think in essence what we both said there was have less friends, which kind of. | ||
| Have less, better friends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But higher quality, there you go, all right. | |
| Professor Weinstein, you made some great points about biology and theory of biology. | ||
| I was wondering if you have any plans to do a YouTube lecture course similar to other professors who have moved not from their jobs. | ||
| Yes, I'm already trying to do so on Patreon and YouTube. | ||
| I will say probably the problem for doing so is that there is a toolkit that I've been using to teach for the last 14 years And without presenting that toolkit in some way that people have access to all of the parts of it, the a la carte pieces of the puzzle, some of them sound like they might be flat out wrong. | ||
| And so anyway, I think what needs to happen is I need to deliver that toolkit in a book form so that people have access to the assumptions that go into it and the particular models, and then delivering the particular details of What this system means, or that system, or what it means that people behave in such and such a fashion, those things will make more sense. | ||
| But anyway, I wasn't expecting this turn of events to happen, and so it catches you off guard, and it left me trying to build that presence on the fly in the midst of a lot of other things. | ||
| But it is very much on my mind as a thing to do. | ||
| By the way, you know, with Brett's situation, I'm sure some of you guys saw the conversation that Brett had with Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's show. | ||
| And as you said to me today, it's interesting because Brett comes from the left, Jordan comes from the right. | ||
| They've both suffered from this crush of free speech at the academic level. | ||
| And because of that, these guys are absolute allies now. | ||
| Even if you have every political disagreement known to man, which you may or may not have, but it's actually irrelevant because you're on the right side of the free speech debate. | ||
| And that's far more important than quibbling over every little economic argument or whatever else. | ||
| Well, I would say also, you know, I think this pattern will become clearer as more and more people get pushed out or pushed into the public eye because of taking a principled stand. | ||
| But it's very clear to me that Peterson is a principled person who will have arrived at every one of his positions for good reason and that to the extent that he and I might disagree, if I catch him out on something, He'll get on the right side of that issue and the same goes for me. | ||
| So there is a kind of ability to play, right? | ||
| That adults can interact in a particular way that does not require agreement. | ||
| And in fact, you have vastly more to gain talking to somebody you disagree with because somebody will be leveled up by it at the end of the discussion. | ||
| So, you know, let me compare for you on the The trip over, I looked at some videos of people that I disagree with. | ||
| I actually looked at Ben Shapiro and Richard Spencer. | ||
| And at the end of that, I realized, you know, more or less what I expected. | ||
| I looked at Ben Shapiro and he and I disagree on a tremendous number of things. | ||
| No question in my mind we could sit down and have very productive discussions and that, you know, everybody's positions are arrived at straightforwardly. | ||
| I look at Spencer, there's no there there, right? | ||
| There's no point in having that discussion because it arises out of such a basic misunderstanding of fundamental things that really the point is, you're just wrong. | ||
| And you're just wrong for very simple reasons that you'd know if you were interested in finding out if you were wrong. | ||
| So anyway, I would suggest that for all of you, take a look at the people who you, your instinct is you're on the other side, and see what they're saying, and figure out what fraction actually divides you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, guys, again for a really fascinating talk. | |
| So, I'm sympathetic to your argument, Mr. Simpson, that regulation, government regulation, is never the solution to these problems, partly because the government has a monopoly on violence, you know, this sort of Randian idea. | ||
| But what I think we're coming around to is that the implication is that these things can be fought based on, based out of discussions with people and debates and rational debates. | ||
| And I'm definitely a believer in that, or at least I very much want to be. | ||
| When I'm being optimistic. | ||
| So my question is sort of a practical one. | ||
| How does one have a discussion with people who are trying to tear down Free speech, which is actually what is enabling the discussion. | ||
| Um, partly because the, the, the, the problem is twofold. | ||
| It's partly because these people are incredibly, um, intoxicating and very, very able to get people to their side. | ||
| And the second part is that they're more or less incapable of listening to something that they disagree with. | ||
| Um, so I'm wondering practically how does one have these discussions? | ||
| I mean, I don't think it's... My answer isn't different, really, from what Brett and Dave have said. | ||
| I think that at a certain point, if somebody is not willing to listen, and they're stuck in their position, and they're just gonna scream at you, there's nothing much you can do about that. | ||
| There's no practical Answer to that. | ||
| You can try to appeal to them. | ||
| You can try to find common ground. | ||
| I think you have to be dogged. | ||
| You have to be calm. | ||
| You have to be confident. | ||
| But at some point, you have to be willing to say, as Brett said about Richard Spencer, there's no there, there. | ||
| These guys aren't listening. | ||
| I'm not going to waste my time talking to people who aren't listening. | ||
| The one thing that I would take issue with your question is that The idea that this is in any way the majority, I don't think it's even close. | ||
| I think you sort of implied that, that there are a lot of people like this and that their ideas are catching on. | ||
| I mean, there are reasons that their ideas are catching on. | ||
| It's because of more fundamental ideas. | ||
| But I don't think it's anywhere close to the majority of students, even, that are opposed to reason and opposed to free speech. | ||
| I mean, I read about a poll today which is of great concern that students are very confused about free speech, that some of them think that shouting people down is appropriate, that something like 20% of them even think that using violence is appropriate. | ||
| Now, that's one poll, but even assuming those are the numbers, I think that that doesn't necessarily mean that the majority of students, and it was by no means the majority, Even in the poll are closed to reason. | ||
| I think you can reason with most people. | ||
| I think it's a vocal minority of people who are opposing free speech. | ||
| And ultimately what you have to do is you've got to try to appeal to them and really try to appeal to their sense of reason and honesty. | ||
| But more broadly, I mean, we have to do a better job of teaching people in this country. | ||
| That's something that I think the issues that we're talking about here go way beyond the | ||
| personal how do you interact with people and go to more broader philosophical and political | ||
| issues of how does a nation ultimately protect the ideas that are necessary for that nation | ||
| to continue. | ||
| And that goes to many more fundamental things. | ||
| We have to we've got to reform our educational system. | ||
| There's a lot that we have to do. | ||
| But no individual can do that. | ||
| But if you're not willing to start learning what ideas led to the erosion of free speech, | ||
| you're never going to be able to get back to or get to a point where free speech is | ||
| protected. | ||
| If I could just jump on that for a second because by the nature of what I do for a living | ||
| where I try to calmly talk to people and get them to use logic and reason and all these | ||
| things, I do worry about what you just said because you used the word intoxicating. | ||
| And this sort of hysteria that we see from both sides these days, where if all of your intellectual opponents are a Nazi, well, that's pretty powerful. | ||
| You are now very high up. | ||
| They're very low. | ||
| And there's a virtue signaling, as my friend over here said. | ||
| There's a sense of that you're on a mission. | ||
| And I sometimes do wonder that if we just try to out logic everybody and out reason everybody, that actually we'll kind of lose the game without even realizing it. | ||
| Because the two sides will go so bananas that we'll just kind of be caught and pinched off. | ||
| And I've even seen, you can just sort of sense it online now, That there is a movement that's very anti-centrist now because they're making it sound like we don't stand for anything because we're not picking a side in this battle. | ||
| Now, I don't think those are the right sides we should be picking between if we have to pick between two. | ||
| And I don't think you have to pick between two. | ||
| But I do worry about that. | ||
| That, look, if any of the three of us had had a long history of saying crazy things, there probably would have been protests outside. | ||
| There probably would have been television coverage. | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| Now, does that strengthen those ideas or weaken them? | ||
| It depends on the case, I suppose. | ||
| But I think you're making a really good point, which is, can people be decent, try to find answers, and care about liberalism and inquiry and all of those things, and still win? | ||
| I guess we'll find out. | ||
| That's really up to you guys. | ||
| I would actually maybe add something to that. | ||
| Realize that there is the context in which any of these confrontations take place, and then there's a context that you will discover the full dimension of later. | ||
| And being college students, you'll anticipate it better than, let's say, I would at my age. | ||
| The conflict in the room is one thing, and then there is how it plays elsewhere. | ||
| And I want to confess something to you guys that I haven't said to anybody yet, which is, as things were heating up at Evergreen, you know, this took place over the course of a year, and so it was a very intense experience, and very isolating as it was happening, and the world was unaware and uninterested in it. | ||
| So, I was looking at other models of how this is unfolding, and I actually spent some time watching Peterson. | ||
| And I remember watching Peterson face down this one particular group in some sort of a lecture hall, and they're shouting vile things at him, and he is sitting there very calmly, right? | ||
| And he is speaking back in a way that tells you that he's not frightened, he's not backing down, he's not putting up his fists. | ||
| And the thing is, at the time I knew that's a skill I actually possess, but I needed to be reminded that that was the skill that was going to get me through at the point the thing boiled over, which I felt was very likely to happen at some point. | ||
| I didn't know that they were going to come to my class and disrupt that. | ||
| In any case, I would say part of the answer is think through now what you will do in the face of an unreasonable response. | ||
| And being more reasonable is very powerful. | ||
| Being more reasonable without being weak, right? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| You don't want to advertise weakness. | ||
| But there is strength in simply being able to say, no, actually the accusation you're leveling at me isn't true, the arguments you're making aren't right, and I'm confident in that. | ||
| One caveat is I would say, before you decide to dig in on such a position, make sure that you do have it right. | ||
| You want your position to be dead right first, and then stand your ground and you'll be all | ||
| right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sorry to cut off that next question, but we're just about out of time. | ||
| I just want to take a minute and thank our panel speakers for a great discussion today. | ||
| On behalf of the Harvard Libertarian Club, we frequently like to joke that our meetings are our safe space for free speech. | ||
| So if you're interested in having these kinds of discussions with people who are going to be OK with whatever kind of ideas you throw out there, definitely come find us. | ||
| We can add you to our email list, and you can find out when our next meeting is. | ||
| I just realized you just said safe space to all of our YouTube subscribers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is not going to go well for you guys. | |
| That's why it's a joke, hopefully. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| So I just want to thank our speakers, and I hope everyone has a great night. | ||
| If you're interested in either of our two groups, then come talk to us afterwards. | ||
| But have a nice night, everyone. | ||
| Thank you guys for coming out. |
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