March 9, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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unidentified
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. | |
| It's a pleasure to be with you tonight. | ||
| My name is Bradley Devlin. | ||
| I'm the president of the Berkeley College Republicans. | ||
| But more importantly, who's excited to see our star-studded panel tonight featuring Dave Rubin, Heather McDonald, and Steve Simpson? | ||
| saying come on now. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us for this event titled Are We Killing Free Speech? | ||
| Sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| I find this inquisitive title and dialogic nature of this event crucial to the importance of what's happening on UC Berkeley's campus and campuses all across the country. | ||
| When the Berkeley College Republicans travel, oftentimes conservatives and liberals alike ask, how does it feel to be the tip of the spear in fighting for collegiate free speech? | ||
| It truly is an empowering experience. | ||
| What has gone on at UC Berkeley is emblematic of what is happening to conservative students all across the country in the face of indoctrination from regressive leftists that advocate for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions. | ||
| We don't like those, do we? | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| I channeled my inner Trump there. | ||
| It felt really good. | ||
| These lone conservatives who refuse to waver in their principles continue to question the status quo of hyper-liberal campus culture. | ||
| And tonight, with three very special guests, we will continue to push that envelope. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinguished honor to welcome Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report, Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute, and Steve Simpson of the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| ladies and gentlemen. All right. All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Is my mic working? | ||
| My mic working. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Make some noise, people. | ||
| You are... You are live on the Internet, so you represent all Republicans right now, all conservatives, all right-leaning people. | ||
| That's a lot of pressure for you guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you up to it? | |
| One lady over there is up to it. | ||
| All right, that's what I like to see. | ||
| All right, I'm very excited to be here. | ||
| I didn't realize, Berkeley, until I did a little research today, you guys actually have had some issues with free speech. | ||
| Did not, I did not know that until today. | ||
| Yeah, you almost burned the place down with Milo, which is, any of you guys were setting the fires? | ||
| Was that, probably not this crew. | ||
| I mean, imagine trying to burn a place down over a bleached blonde gay guy. | ||
| Like, that seemed completely ridiculous. | ||
| And then it costs, what, $600,000, right, to secure the campus for Ben Shapiro? | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Ben Shapiro, a little Orthodox Jew, $600,000? | ||
| I feel like he's, like, becoming, like, a sort of alt-right fairy tale, you know? | ||
| Like, ah, the Orthodox Jew behind the tree with facts! | ||
| We're in trouble! | ||
| All right, people. | ||
| I'm excited to talk free speech with you guys. | ||
| You guys know that it's sort of my gig. | ||
| I believe that the free speech issue, I truly believe, is the issue of our time for whatever you are studying at school, whatever you are learning about, to learn how to critically think, to tolerate other opinions, to engage people without silencing them, because there's a lot of people out there these days that want to silence you guys. | ||
| Just in the past week, look what happened. | ||
| Christina Hoff Summers, I'm sure you guys all saw that at Lewis and Clark Law School. | ||
| Yaron Brook and Sargon of Akkad over in the UK, and Jordan Peterson at his event. | ||
| Somebody literally brought one of those things that the mafia, you know those wires that the mafia, yeah, that the mafia uses to choke people. | ||
| All ended violently. | ||
| I have a better feeling about you guys here tonight. | ||
| Nobody has a weapon, right? | ||
| No weapons? | ||
| You would tell me now, right? | ||
| That's how it works? | ||
| That's how it works? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, I truly believe this is the most important issue of our time. | ||
| And regardless of whether... I'll do a little quick poll and then we'll start. | ||
| How many of you consider yourself conservative? | ||
| How many of you are... I mean, you can make some noise instead of clapping. | ||
| We've got the internet, people! | ||
| How many libertarians? | ||
| Okay, you were trying. | ||
| You were trying to get him going. | ||
| How many liberals? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Classical liberals? | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright, I'm reading the crowd. | |
| Progressives? | ||
| How many progressives? | ||
| You're clapping for everything. | ||
| This man has clapped. | ||
| He has literally clapped for everything, which you might be operating like a progressive. | ||
| You're running for governor? | ||
| Oh, he's going for everybody. | ||
| All right, very good. | ||
| All right, well, look, whatever your political leanings are, whatever you identify as, any of that stuff, it really is out the window as long as you will defend free speech, in my opinion. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| There's such a beautiful thing happening right now. | ||
| You know, think about this. | ||
| I'm sure many of you guys watch my show. | ||
| You could take a guy of the left like Sam Harris, and you could take a guy of the right like Ben Shapiro. | ||
| These guys disagree on literally everything. | ||
| Literally everything from the existence of God, and the value of religion, to abortion, to taxes, to the death penalty, to everything. | ||
| And yet they're allies now. | ||
| And they're allies because of the same reasons you guys are here right now, because they want to defend each other's ability to think and ability to live in a free society. | ||
| It's actually a pretty beautiful thing. | ||
| So for everybody that thinks that all hell is breaking loose in this country, I actually think there are some good things happening. | ||
| I think you guys are evidence of it, and I think I've talked enough. | ||
| So give me a round of applause for that and then we're going to sit down. | ||
| All right, so Heather and Steve are kind of right in the thick of the free speech battle. | ||
| And Heather, I'll start with you because I spoke at Claremont McKenna at the beginning of their... You spoke? | ||
| That's good for you. | ||
| Nobody got ahead of me. | ||
| They actually let me speak there, which is better than they did for you, actually. | ||
| You're not as important, I guess. | ||
| Well, I... | ||
| Hold on, I want to get out of this one respectfully. | ||
| Bring it back, come on. | ||
| Yeah, so you were supposed to speak at Claremont McKenna a few months before. | ||
| I spoke there, I think, in September of this past year. | ||
| I think you were there in May or June or so? | ||
| April. | ||
| And give us about a one-minute breakdown of what happened. | ||
| What were you intending to speak about, and then what happened? | ||
| Well, I was intending to speak about the police in my book and saying that, in fact, there is enormous unrecognized support for the police in high-crime neighborhoods. | ||
| For that, I've been called a white supremacist, fascist, homophobe, Islamophobe, transphobe. | ||
| Students at the various Claremont colleges were determined that nobody should hear me speak, so they blockaded the venue, the Athenaeum where I was supposed to speak. | ||
| I had to be escorted in through a secret passageway, but there was nobody in the auditorium. | ||
| I spoke to an empty room, it was live streamed like this event, but people were pounding on the plate glass windows during my talk and eventually the security decided it was not safe and I had to be escorted through the kitchen. | ||
| An ignominious retreat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this story, of course, is being played out all the time on college campuses right now. | ||
| It's why you guys are sitting here right now to figure out how do you fight the tide of this. | ||
| Where do you think this thing started, Steve? | ||
| Well, I mean, the pedigree of this kind of thing goes way back, right? | ||
| But one of the places that this kind of thing of protesting, blocking people from speaking, one place it starts is actually here at Berkeley. | ||
| Now, a lot of people look at Berkeley as the beginning of the free speech movement on campus. | ||
| I think that's a mistake. | ||
| It's not necessarily to single out Berkeley for criticism. | ||
| This is a criticism you could launch against a lot of schools across the country. | ||
| But in the 1960s, there was the student uprising and this notion that taking over a campus is equivalent to free speech or using force against people is equivalent to free speech or occupying other people's property is. | ||
| We're threatening people. | ||
| And this has all happened in the 1960s. | ||
| People look at this as the birth of free speech. | ||
| It conflates speech with action, speech with force. | ||
| And if you do that, people are going to respond to it. | ||
| And if people really think that speech equals protests that block others, that occupy other people's property, that in any way intimidate or harass or threaten people, they're going to do the same thing in reverse. | ||
| They're going to do the same thing back. | ||
| That's not necessarily to say that that's what was going on at Claremont. | ||
| I think we've normalized the idea that it's okay to physically block people, to physically occupy their property, and to attack them as a form of free speech, which is a crazy idea. | ||
| As soon as we conflate force and speech, we lose speech, and we lose the ability to persuade each other, we lose the ability to reason with each other, and the only option at that point is force and gang warfare. | ||
| But this is one of the great ironies of thinking that You know, that Berkeley is the beginning of the free speech movement. | ||
| I would say it's the beginning of, you know, if it continues, it's the beginning of the end of the free speech movement. | ||
| But it's certainly the beginning of the idea that it's appropriate to block other people from speaking or occupy their property as a form of speech. | ||
| That is not free speech. | ||
| That's a real mistake. | ||
| And it's leading to a lot of what we're seeing on campus. | ||
| Let's test the state of free speech at Berkeley at the moment. | ||
| Do this by applause so that the people that are watching online can hear you. | ||
| How many of you have, since you've been at school here, and I assume most of you guys are students, | ||
| how many of you have not said something either in a class or to a friend or to a professor because you | ||
| feared the repercussions? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I know it doesn't quite feel right to applaud that, but yeah, that says it right there. | ||
| It's funny, I get only invited by conservatives and libertarians and some classical liberal groups. | ||
| I always say I'll give the same speech to progressives or liberals, whatever you want to call them, Democrats, lefties, whatever, if they'll invite me. | ||
| They never do, but I find all the time I come and I talk to you guys and it's like, wow, I can look out here. | ||
| There's a lot of diversity out here. | ||
| The diversity that the left loves. | ||
| I see a lot of different skin colors here. | ||
| I'm sure there's some different sexualities here and all sorts of stuff, but that doesn't matter. | ||
| What I know matters and what you know matters is diversity of thought. | ||
| How did we lose that Well, I diagnose this as the free speech problem is very serious. | ||
| It is, as Steve says, you either have discourse or you have force. | ||
| And discourse is what human beings developed over millennia as an alternative to brute force to get their way. | ||
| And it is a thing of beauty and the pinnacle of civilizational accomplishment. | ||
| So the current attacks on free speech are extremely dangerous for our civilization. | ||
| But I think the free speech problem is just an epiphenomenon of even more serious problem Which is the incessant cultivation of a victim identity on the part of an ever-growing group of students. | ||
| And this is now the obsessive goal of education starting in grammar school even where you have fifth graders being indoctrinated into the whole complex mythology | ||
| of white privilege. | ||
| And it continues in high school and certainly in college. | ||
| There's now huge bureaucracies. | ||
| Here at Berkeley, you have a $20 million vice chancellor of equity, diversity, and inclusion | ||
| whose purpose is to continue hammering home the preposterous point that to be a female or person of | ||
| color on the Berkeley campus is to be under literal existential | ||
| threat. | ||
| And as long as that remains the dominant belief that To be in this ever-growing number of victim groups is to be a literal threat for your life. | ||
| There used to have a banner on campus of two students of color saying, allow people other than yourself to exist. | ||
| That's maudlin language, but it's meant literally. | ||
| As long as that remains the dominant thinking, it will follow that non-conforming Non-orthodox speech is viewed not just as hate speech, again, ridiculously, but that hate speech is a literal threat to one's existence. | ||
| And I think we're not going to solve the free speech problem. | ||
| We can have faculty signing all the petitions they want, if only more did so, in favor of free speech. | ||
| It's not going to matter as long as this victimology ideology remains the dominant one in higher education. | ||
| Well, Steve, as a straight white man, would you like to apologize to the audience? | ||
| Middle-aged straight white man, I mean, is there anything worse? | ||
| Straight white man with all women in my family, so I'm apologizing every damn day. | ||
| It's a constant apologizing. | ||
| All right, how do we reverse some of this? | ||
| I mean, we talked about this over dinner, and we all sort of were like, wow, are we? | ||
| I like to think that I'm an optimist at heart. | ||
| Heather, you said you're a pessimist. | ||
| Constitutionally, yes. | ||
| Where do you consider yourself optimistic? | ||
| I'm torn between you two guys. | ||
| I was on your side at first, and now I'm... I'm generally an optimist, but I'm an optimist that's realistic about... I'm optimistic because of the potential of human beings. | ||
| I'm optimistic because we can think, we can achieve things. | ||
| Look at the society we live in today. | ||
| This is one of the big rebuttals to, or one of the things that people just ignore in the whole victimology. | ||
| Look at the society we live in. | ||
| My God, it's the most advanced, freest, greatest society in the history of the world. | ||
| That, I mean, there's something to be taken from that. | ||
| Not just that they're wrong to constantly be playing victims and claim that they're oppressed in a context in which they're not oppressed, but that human beings can achieve unbelievable things. | ||
| That's a great thing. | ||
| So I'm optimistic there. | ||
| Human beings can also ruin great things, and I'm concerned about the future because of the direction of this issue. | ||
| And I think a lot of what Heather said, I think there are deeper issues going on, which I don't want to, we can talk about them, but I agree with the victimology point. | ||
| I think that's a consequence of even deeper philosophical convictions and convictions about ideas that are leading us To be victims, to reject rationality and speech, to reject individualism, to cloy onto groups and the rise of tribalism. | ||
| All of these things are playing a role. | ||
| But you're absolutely right that the prosperity that has been achieved through freedom, through trade, through free markets, is stunning. | ||
| I mean, every item in this room has been created by some guy who's got a company or some woman. | ||
| In the market chain, it's extraordinary. | ||
| But that doesn't persuade people. | ||
| And if they can, if a student on a campus like this, which is so beautiful, I was in the main library today, with these grand reading rooms and the noble architecture and the plants, the trees you've got around here, if they can feel sorry for themselves and feel oppressed at Berkeley, I mean, that's preposterous! | ||
| They are leading a delusion. | ||
| They are completely unable to perceive their privilege to be at a place of learning where they should be down on their knees every day saying, thank you for giving me this opportunity to absorb human history, languages, science, you name it. | ||
| Well, that's why I think it's so fascinating, because there's such a disconnect between the reality of the goodness of this country, not to say we don't have problems, and what this sort of post-modern, cultural Marxist, collectivist set of ideas, whatever you want to call it, is about. | ||
| I mean, you know, I say this on the show all the time, but the essence of prejudice is to prejudge. | ||
| I could look at you guys right now and go, okay, brown guy here, white guy here, girl here. | ||
| Brown guy there, Asian guy there, white lady there. | ||
| And that would, assuming that I thought that that meant I know what you think, that actually is prejudice. | ||
| And yet somehow, we're the ones that are constantly being told that we're bigots and racists. | ||
| I assume most of you guys, again, we'll do it by applause. | ||
| I know it's weird to applause these things. | ||
| But most of you, I assume, have been called all of these things. | ||
| I need to figure out. | ||
| I need to figure out some other way to gauge reaction other than applauding all the bad things. | ||
| We know this is the way this thing will be clipped on YouTube. | ||
| Ruben did a live stream! | ||
|
unidentified
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They were applauding bigotry and racism! | |
| Oh, Lord. | ||
| We stepped in it, people. | ||
| Somehow the raising of the hand does, you know, a hand signal. | ||
| That won't go well either, so... | ||
| Jazz hands. | ||
| Alright, we'll do jazz hands for now on. | ||
| See people? | ||
| We have a gay guy. | ||
| You see? | ||
| You see? | ||
| Gay people, but I don't judge them. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| It's okay, people. | ||
| How do we start turning the tide here? | ||
| Because when I was asking you about whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, it's sort of about now, well, OK, a lot of us recognize this. | ||
| All of these people, they recognize this. | ||
| The people watching at home, they recognize it. | ||
| But how do we actually start turning this? | ||
| Because it can't just be on the students at colleges. | ||
| Steve? | ||
| You have to go back to fundamental ideas. | ||
| You have to challenge the fundamental mistakes that people are making. | ||
| Let me just flag two of them. | ||
| There's widespread disdain for the idea that human beings can think and can reason their way out of problems. | ||
| It's a weird thing to think that that is true, especially since Everybody, to attack reason, you have to actually use reason. | ||
| It's wacky. | ||
| It seems wacky. | ||
| But there's a whole philosophical tradition of irrationalism that has been attacking reason for generations. | ||
| It culminates, I think, in postmodernism and a lot of the points that you made before. | ||
| But there is real disrespect for reason. | ||
| If you don't respect reason, if you don't respect the fact that, or believe that human | ||
| beings can make choices in their lives, you're going to look at them as just they're determined | ||
| by other factors. | ||
| What's the point of thinking? | ||
| What's the point of speaking? | ||
| If you can't reach other people because they're determined by factors outside themselves, | ||
| then you're lost. | ||
| Another point, individualism is under attack, and in favor of collectivism and tribalism. | ||
| This idea that the individual should submit to the group, should sacrifice him or herself | ||
| to the group, and that the group is somehow all powerful. | ||
| That's an idea that's been around for centuries, but it's actually on the rise. | ||
| Somebody wrote in the Washington Post the other day that we should try socialism. | ||
| Maybe socialism is a good idea. | ||
| Look at Venezuela, for God's sake. | ||
| Well, they always say it's never been tried yet, right? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I mean, these are ideas that have been around for a long time, and if you follow them to their logical consequences, they have to lead to attacks on free speech, and free speech has to be blotted out of existence. | ||
| If your obligation in life is to just submit to the group, who are you to stand up and say, I disagree with the group? | ||
| This is why you have censorship in totalitarian countries. | ||
| A knowledge of history would help. | ||
| I mean, what's so amazing is students don't realize that traditionally free speech helped the underdog. | ||
| Frederick Douglass in 1860 was going to be attending a meeting in Boston to commemorate the one-year death of the abolitionist John Brown. | ||
| And the papers in New England had been calling for silencing abolitionist speech. | ||
| And a mob attacked this gathering. | ||
| And there was fights that broke out, very much like Antifa. | ||
| And eventually, Douglas and his fellow orators were routed. | ||
| And several days later, he wrote an extraordinarily moving Another oration calling for free speech in Boston, and he said, slavery cannot survive free speech. | ||
| Five years of its exercise would break every chain and every block. | ||
| And the historical ignorance both about the power of free speech to take down tyrants and the sort of charming naivete that they think they're always going to be in power, are they really willing to give Trump the ability to define hate speech? | ||
| You know, it works both ways and you have to be, if you believe that you have the right to censor, you have to think, what if the other side gets that power and do I want to live under that regime? | ||
| but people don't know the history of how governments have used suppression | ||
| to silence opposition, to silence heterodox thought. | ||
| And they're also extremely naive about their own precarious one hopes hold on power. | ||
| Yeah, it's partly why I feel like this is happening all over the West right now. | ||
| I get emails literally from virtually every country on Earth. | ||
| and we bounce around the globe from France and Australia and Mexico and China and Japan | ||
| and every, literally every, from Saudi Arabia, places that don't have freedom and the places | ||
| that do, but the most alarming ones I get actually are from the Western countries. It's | ||
| from people that are in France and that are in Belgium and Eastern Europe, which is having | ||
| all sorts of problems with this. Do you guys think that part of this is actually the success | ||
| of the West? I mean, it's like, as you alluded to earlier, we could look out here. | ||
| These are students at one of the most incredible schools in the entire country who have everything at their fingertips. | ||
| You come from different things. | ||
| Some of you are going to make great successes, and some of you are going to be miserable failures. | ||
| Hate to tell you. | ||
| I could point at a couple of you now. | ||
| It's pretty obvious. | ||
| No, just kidding. | ||
| That guy looked at his friend. | ||
| He was like, yo, dude. | ||
| But that part of what's happening here is it's the success of the West, I think, that all of these countries, they got to a certain point, not that it was perfect, not that there aren't racists, not that there aren't bigots, and all of those things which will always exist, but that a certain amount of freedom started turning on itself, and I think that that's what we're seeing here. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair assessment? | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't quite put it that way. | ||
| I don't blame freedom for that, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that The issue... I mean, that's part of... It's easy to take things for granted when you're as rich as we are. | ||
| I tell my kids this every day. | ||
| You have no idea what it's like to even have a job. | ||
| Why are we complaining about the fact that you don't get to drive the exact car that you want to? | ||
| It's hard to communicate that to young people. | ||
| But I don't think it's the fundamental issue. | ||
| I think the fundamental issue is that the West, when you're referring to the West, I would think about it more as America and the pinnacle of freedom. | ||
| I don't think people really have ever understood what freedom really has to be grounded on And they haven't understood consistently, | ||
| and we haven't had the real defense of freedom that we need. | ||
| And it's been flawed. | ||
| I mean, the founders were great men. | ||
| They did many great things. | ||
| And they were, I think, political geniuses. | ||
| But there were flaws in their thinking about the founding of America. | ||
| And there are flaws in our views of free speech today. | ||
| There's all kinds of problems with our views of free speech. | ||
| I mentioned earlier the idea of conflating force with speech. | ||
| That happens all over the place. | ||
| People don't understand the role of property rights in free speech. | ||
| Your free speech basically ends at somebody else's property. | ||
| You do not have the right to speak on someone else's property. | ||
| If we conflate that, we cause all kinds of conflict. | ||
| And then you actually plant the seeds of people thinking, it actually does make sense for me to fight back. | ||
| If I'm forced to have to deal with this, if it's okay to take over somebody else's property, if it's okay to come into my living room, let's say, or take over my company or my school, and I'm really conflating force and speech and many other things, then I think people will start to see free speech as a flawed, impractical concept. | ||
| And they will fight back against it. | ||
| So some of this makes sense. | ||
| It's not to excuse the people who are doing it. | ||
| But I think a lot of what we're seeing in the attacks on free speech and just freedom in general, there's a kind of logic to it. | ||
| If you accept the flawed views that a lot of people have, it does make some logical sense to be opposed to free speech because you think it really is a threat. | ||
| Again, that's not to defend the people. | ||
| I do think, though, I agree with Dave, that prosperity has bred a certain Overripeness, a certain decadence, and I would, Steve, you and I probably disagree about this because of emphasis on tradition versus complete individual rights, but I would say that with the 50s, we had something for the first time in human history ever, which is adolescence with buying power. | ||
| Never before had there been a society so prosperous that 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds themselves could now control enough spending power that you had capitalism catering to their tastes. | ||
| And this gave rise to the counterculture and the youth revolution, which, you know, you may say has benefits, but I would say that some of the loss of parental authority and the rise of an adolescent culture, the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of an immediate Personal gratification and wish fulfillment has not worked out ideally. | ||
| I think we've lost something, you know, to be honest. | ||
| And that was because capitalism has been so fantastically successful that now you have Uh, companies that are going over the heads of parents and marketing directly to kids. | ||
| And their, their tastes in entertainment, in music dominate. | ||
| And that's, that's a very unusual and unprecedented situation for human civilization. | ||
| And some of those adolescent values I think are now quite dominant. | ||
| And even the victimology in terms of the maudlin narcissism of people, you know, a college student saying, like at Brown, the students that went and met with the provost and said, please exempt us from traditional academic requirements like going to class and taking exams because we're trying so hard to stay alive at Brown. | ||
| I mean, come on! | ||
| You should be embarrassed to say something like that. | ||
| But that sort of adolescent self-pity is now part of our culture. | ||
| Yeah, and it's interesting to me how this stuff just bleeds through everything and that there's sort of no end to this movement. | ||
| So one of the things that, when Steve and I have done a few of these before that we've talked about, I'm sure you guys remember on inauguration day when that guy punched Richard Spencer, the alt-right guy. | ||
| And now I think his ideas are odious. | ||
| America is not a white country. | ||
| That's actually the reverse of what the founders intended. | ||
| We are a multicultural society. | ||
| We're a melting pot. | ||
| But suddenly I saw all of these people, the whole blue check Twitterati brigade, | ||
| not only defending the guy who punched him, but saying, yeah, you've got to get out there | ||
| and punch Nazis. | ||
| And then it's like, I know you've all seen this, where this definition of what is a Nazi, who is alt-right, | ||
| where this just keeps expanding, keeps expanding. | ||
| And then it's like, all right, well, if you can punch a Nazi, | ||
| well now let's just start labeling everyone Nazis. | ||
| And can you burn down a Nazi's house? | ||
| Can you break into his car? | ||
| What if his wife's in the house? | ||
| What about the kid? | ||
| So we're creating something that actually is just spreading, sort of, to me it seems like this is spreading like a virus, because it's like, this stuff, this idea of identity politics and the oppression Olympics and all this stuff, It's very easy to get, you know? | ||
| You can catch it really easy. | ||
| It's very easy to think, look around, and everyone's racist, and everyone's evil, and I'm oppressed, and I'm a victim. | ||
| It's not that easy to do what I think you guys are doing, which is go, alright, I gotta make something of myself, and I gotta do something in this world. | ||
| That's a lot harder. | ||
|
unidentified
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So is that... Look at that guy! | |
| You see, he heard something brilliant, he slowly clapped until the rest of you thought, I can clap too, because freedom is good. | ||
| It takes a little while, I get it. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| Well, can somebody explain why Antifa gets to call itself Antifa? | ||
| Who's the one that's engaging in fascist, proto-fascist behavior? | ||
| I mean, I don't want to get too hysterical here and, you know, become exaggerating what's going on, but we're not obviously a fascist state. | ||
| That would be... I don't want to adopt their tactics, but by and large, they're the ones that are breaking windows and trying to silence... Why? | ||
| Why can they get away with this? | ||
| It's totally bizarre. | ||
| I guess if they just called themselves Fa. | ||
| Fa, let's say the Fa, not the Antifa, right. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't sound that good. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's, well, you guys must see a lot of them around here, and it's like, do any of them make a coherent argument? | ||
| I mean, do you ever, where do you sit down with these people? | ||
| I mean, I guess they don't go to Starbucks, that's capitalist. | ||
| Where can you sit with these people? | ||
| They probably do go to Starbucks. | ||
| You know, we'll hold it to the Q&A, but I do want to hear your thoughts. | ||
| Go ahead, real quick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's about forceful tolerance. | |
| That's how they justify it. | ||
| They're being tolerant, and they're going to make you do it, too, damn it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Forceful tolerance. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that really is it, and that's partly what we're up against. | ||
| And what's interesting is so many, it's not just the students. | ||
| I mean, again, I think, unfortunately, you guys in college right now, you get a bad rap because of this small group of people, but it's the professors. | ||
| It's the administrators. | ||
| I get emails every day from people at school saying my teacher, you know, I said something about the gender pay gap and my teacher called me racist. | ||
| I mean, really legitimately crazy things. | ||
| So it's like we have to really rethink all of these institutions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm sort of starting to be in favor of homeschooling for college, you know. | ||
| You guys will be the last generation, and then everybody's going to get private tutors and do the Grand Tour in Europe or something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because we're going to reach a tipping point when Older faculty retire, and now the younger ones are themselves the product of the victimology university. | ||
| And that gets to be a worrisome point of how you break the monopoly hold of a worldview that I think is demonstrably false. | ||
| It is just demonstrably false that there is institutional racism on an American college campus. | ||
| The opposite is the case. | ||
| There is not a single faculty search where the primary goal is to interview and ideally hire either females or underrepresented minorities. | ||
| That is happening in the STEM fields, in the humanities and the social sciences, and in most college admissions. | ||
| The goal is maximal diversity defined, as you say, by these superficial characteristics. | ||
| of melanin, and the schools like UC is twisting itself into knots to get around the constitutional | ||
| ban on racial preferences. | ||
| So it's the exact opposite. | ||
| These are the most tolerant institutions in human history that value precisely the traits | ||
| that can still get you stoned to death elsewhere, and yet people insist on viewing the college | ||
| campus as a place of maximal oppression. | ||
| It's astounding. | ||
| Steve, do you think that technology is part of the answer here? | ||
| I mean, all of these guys know about us because of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook, companies that have major problems that are actually completely related to free speech. | ||
| But you have access now to great minds online that you didn't have access to before. | ||
| I mean, just some of the people that I get to sit with on any given week. | ||
| I mean, I'm sitting with the Weinstein brothers and with Jordan Peterson and Ben and Sam and all of these guys, and it's like, man, if you're a college student and you're, you know, just crushed under this nonsense, which is not learning, it's the reverse of learning, you can actually go out there and for free, you know, be able to learn from some pretty great people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's definitely part of the solution. | ||
| It's not a complete solution because you have to have good ideas to, you know, technology disseminates the ideas and that's great and we can, you know, the attacks on social media today, even frankly, I mean, there's a lot wrong with Google, but the attacks on Google, the attacks on YouTube, I think they're all really badly mistaken. | ||
| Now, it doesn't mean that there aren't Great things to criticize. | ||
| And we can talk about that. | ||
| We were talking about it before. | ||
| There's loads to criticize about YouTube, Google, even Facebook, although I think Facebook is better. | ||
| But the idea that somehow the problem here is technology because you can disseminate bad ideas through technology. | ||
| It's really badly mistaken. | ||
| I mean, you can just as easily disseminate good ideas through technology. | ||
| And frankly, it's easier now to debunk fake news than probably it ever has been in history. | ||
| Yeah, it's also easier to disseminate fake news. | ||
| But, I mean, you can learn. | ||
| We have access to more information today than I think anybody has ever had access to before in history. | ||
| Now, that doesn't help if people aren't able or willing to use the information. | ||
| So there's an education issue. | ||
| There's an issue of Of just having the right ideas and knowing how to think. | ||
| People have to be able to think. | ||
| There's huge problems with our education. | ||
| We are not teaching people how to think. | ||
| We're not teaching them respect for reason. | ||
| We're not teaching them respect for free speech. | ||
| So technology won't solve it. | ||
| It's a wonderful tool to help solve the problem, but we still need better ideas and we need better thinking. | ||
| Well, I, you know, critical thinking is a is a watchword of the progressive education establishment. | ||
| And, of course, what they mean by it is like deconstructing commercials to show the, you know, the hidden evil capitalism behind it. | ||
| But I actually disagree with that. | ||
| I don't I don't think the goal of education is critical thinking. | ||
| I actually don't even think that the goal of education is debate. | ||
| I think the goal of education is to cram as much knowledge into the empty noggins of students, including myself, which | ||
| it was not crammed into, as possible. | ||
| And debate is part of that. | ||
| But there's vast fields of knowledge for which the dialogic model | ||
| of, well, debating opinion is simply irrelevant. | ||
| It doesn't make sense to say, well, I have an opinion about the second law of thermodynamics, but I'm willing to listen to yours. | ||
| Or I have an opinion about the spread of civilization in the early Mediterranean. | ||
| Or I have an opinion about German cases. | ||
| I think that the problem is not lack of critical thinking. | ||
| The problem is the lack of knowledge. | ||
| And knowledge of... Thank you. | ||
| I'm glad you agree. | ||
| Knowledge of our history. | ||
| Its flaws and its strengths, the fact that we have created a stable society out of what has been always usually brute force and chaos, that we've created works of extraordinary beauty, whether it's Mozart or Beethoven or Milton or Shakespeare, this should be understood and appreciated. | ||
| The history that got us here, if people don't know that, I don't think any amount of critical thinking will suffice. | ||
| So I definitely agree that you have to have knowledge, but it's both of those things. | ||
| I don't think you can acquire knowledge without thinking and understanding how people learn and how people think. | ||
| So I don't mean to suggest it's critical thinking or knowledge and I'm going on the critical thinking side. | ||
| It's both. | ||
| And you're right, absolutely people need knowledge, but you need the ability to understand | ||
| how human beings learn and how to teach people. | ||
| And so I think it's both of those things, and I definitely agree with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But consider this the- You learn critical thinking by absorbing knowledge, though. | |
| Yes, and well, but- You can't teach it separately. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| I definitely think you're right about that. | ||
| But ask yourselves, why is it that people think... So your point about the debating, about the idea that everything should be subject to a debate, debating is the best way of learning, I agree with you wholeheartedly. | ||
| It's totally wrong. | ||
| And today, and this is part of, though, I think we have to face the fact that Oftentimes, when we hear people talking about free speech, they're always saying, well, what we need is more debate. | ||
| We need more intellectual diversity. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, intellectual diversity in itself is not a thing. | ||
| It's not good to say, well, we want intellectual diversity, so we've got to hire some racists and hire some communists and hire some people who, you know, deny physics, the flat earthers, the people who deny evolution. | ||
| It's like, no, that's not... | ||
| That's not what it means. | ||
| And so if we hold out an idea like diversity of thought just as a floating abstraction, it doesn't mean anything. | ||
| But people do then think, oh, we just need the solution to the education crisis or the fact that people aren't learning. | ||
| Those would just throw a couple other professors in there who have a diversity of thought. | ||
| That doesn't teach anybody anything. | ||
| They need to be discriminating. | ||
| They need to actually figure out what knowledge is true and how to even think about that. | ||
| Another idea I think that I think we should challenge, that it's what I would call a package deal, is the idea of tolerance. | ||
| That we should just tolerate every idea. | ||
| And this I think leads people to be repelled by free speech and the idea that I always have to tolerate Anything. | ||
| You shouldn't tolerate every idea in the same way that you should be discriminating about what you learn. | ||
| I mean, take a benign example, or a relatively benign example. | ||
| If I were in biology class and they marched in the intelligent design guy, the creationist, and said, just tolerate this guy because his views are just as good as Brett Weinstein's, for instance. | ||
| No, that's nonsense. | ||
| You can say bullshit. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| But it doesn't mean you attack the guy, right? | ||
| You don't attack him. | ||
| You say, I don't buy this. | ||
| This is nonsense. | ||
| I'm going to criticize this person. | ||
| If this is really what this school is all about, I'm out of here. | ||
| I want to walk. | ||
| I'm going to vote with my feet. | ||
| We have to understand that thinking, reasoning, speaking involves not just saying things to people. | ||
| It involves sometimes taking action and sometimes saying, What you are teaching me is crap. | ||
| I don't want anything. | ||
| Or, I think your ideas are evil. | ||
| I'm not going to support those ideas. | ||
| I'm out of here. | ||
| We have to have freedom of association. | ||
| We have to have freedom of movement, you know, freedom of action, and freedom of speech. | ||
| So there's an interesting component here that Steve kind of touched on, which is the technological side of it. | ||
| How many of you actually believe that YouTube, Google, all the social media companies are now an active threat to free speech? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is a lot. | ||
| That is a huge problem right now. | ||
| And there's a huge debate, obviously, in the YouTube community about what do you do about this. | ||
| And there's organizations run by a guy who I love, Dennis Prager, and they're involved in a lawsuit right now. | ||
| My libertarian side says that getting the government involved is never the answer. | ||
| I know, Steve, you're kind of where I'm at with that. | ||
| But it's interesting, I think there's a compelling, this is an interesting case, where I think there's somewhat of a compelling argument that Google controls so much information, so much of the tubes, the pipes that we get this stuff through, so much of our ability to communicate, that perhaps there's something unique here. | ||
| I haven't been fully sold on that, but I'm curious what you think about that, Heather. | ||
| You're asking the wrong person. | ||
| As far as the tech possibilities here... Well, basically, broadly, if the government should be involved in this at all. | ||
| You know, what we've got now is not working. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I have no faith it would be any better, say, under an administration, call it the Obama administration, just what the heck, that shares the same victimology ideology. | ||
| Would they do anything different than Google? | ||
| They may have the exact same views that Dennis... My two Dennis Prager videos have been taken off. | ||
| The web, one on the diversity, bureaucracy and campuses, and the other on the war on cops and the Black Lives Matter movement. | ||
| So I don't know if it would be any better. | ||
| I think you mean unrestricted, right? | ||
| Unrestricted, right. | ||
| But it's very hard to get to. | ||
| But I, you know, I think what we've seen, we've had this extraordinary window into the So, thinking at Google, and it should scare all of us, it turns out that it's no accident what the political leanings are of how they categorize speech as unfit for juvenile consumption. | ||
| Because they are now a mirror image of the type of narrow thinking that you're experiencing on colleges. | ||
| It's extraordinary. | ||
| This lawsuit that was filed against Google has pulled out screenshots of some of the internal messaging, | ||
| and they're all talking about microaggressions and punching Nazis and absolutely demonizing | ||
| white males, and the thing that's most scary is not only that Google decided that it could fire somebody | ||
| for daring to challenge the feminist explanation for why there's not gender parity in tech, | ||
| which is that there's widespread discrimination against females, and. | ||
| And Damore said, well, there may also be career preferences that come into play and certain on average dispositions | ||
| between males and females with regards to abstract work versus people-centered work. | ||
| Again, he's talking about averages, not any individual male or female. | ||
| But the actions of Google in firing Damore were upheld by a associate general counsel | ||
| of the National Labor Relations Board, who declared that to challenge the feminist explanation | ||
| of the law. | ||
| of why there's not gender parity and to say that there may be certain biological differences between males and females, that constitutes sexual harassment and discrimination at such a pernicious level that an employee can be fired. | ||
| That means that anybody in an academic science department working on evolutionary biology or psychology or economics I know a female economist who has done research and found that across every culture that's ever been, whether it's hunter gatherers or our culture, men are more competitive, all those people can be fired for sexual harassment. | ||
| So science now Can I just address the social media issue? | ||
| I won't take too much time. | ||
| Other than the sense, everybody who clapped for the proposition that social media is a trap or a threat, you're all wrong. | ||
| Now, you're probably nice people and everything, but absolutely wrong. | ||
| You're all fascists. | ||
| No, I'm kidding. | ||
| I'm not a fascist. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| This is a really grave error. | ||
| This is what I was talking about before. | ||
| People don't understand free speech. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I don't think it's possible for social media. | ||
| It makes no sense to say social media is a threat to free speech. | ||
| That's like saying all of us talking, and we'll get to questions later, all of us talking and trading our views and just disseminating information is itself a threat to free speech. | ||
| It's like saying free speech is a threat to free speech. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| That doesn't mean that everything that Facebook and all of the various social media companies do is perfect. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you. | ||
| What Google did to Damore really is atrocious, in my view, if we accept the Damore complaint as true, although they have emails in there. | ||
| I mean, there's really atrocious behavior. | ||
| I think it seems to me that they fired him because he did exactly what they wanted him to do. | ||
| He expressed his views. | ||
| Now, I think there's a lot wrong with his views, although he expressed them intelligently, exactly the way you would want a person to do that. | ||
| And they canned him, and I think that's really bad news. | ||
| But it doesn't make Google equivalent to a censor. | ||
| Google cannot censor your speech. | ||
| Facebook cannot censor your speech. | ||
| YouTube cannot censor your speech. | ||
| They can say, I don't want you to speak on my platform. | ||
| My platform, I created it. | ||
| You don't get to speak on here. | ||
| It can be stupid. | ||
| It can be disagreeable. | ||
| They can be wrong about that. | ||
| I know a lot of your videos are restricted. | ||
| And I think it's stupid. | ||
| I criticize them. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| But the issue here is they created this platform. | ||
| It is their platform. | ||
| It is not your platform. | ||
| You do not have a right to have a video on... Hold it up. | ||
| We'll get you in the Q&A. | ||
| We'll get you in the Q&A. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fine. | |
| Speak later. | ||
| But this is a good example. | ||
| We'll get you. | ||
| If you can't, look... Hold on, buddy, buddy, buddy. | ||
| Yeah, if you can't... Hang tight. | ||
| Hang tight. | ||
| We'll get you. | ||
| We'll get you in the Q&A. | ||
| We'll get you. | ||
| It's not a place for... We'll get you. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| My friend. | ||
| My friend. | ||
| Respect... Yeah. | ||
| Respect everybody else here. | ||
| We'll get you. | ||
| I promise. | ||
| Hang tight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hang tight. | |
| We'll get you. | ||
| No, I got you. | ||
| Crucial. | ||
| We got it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'll get you. | ||
| Steve, go ahead. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| The issue of California... | ||
| Well, I don't want to get into legal issues. | ||
| It's too big a discussion. | ||
| But the point is that it's all wrong. | ||
| I'll just put it that way. | ||
| They're wrong. | ||
| Prager, his lawsuit, I could even be sympathetic to it. | ||
| They are definitely wrong. | ||
| And it's crackers, in my view, for a conservative to be suing A private company by invoking law written by the most leftist court in the whole goddamn country. | ||
| The California Supreme Court decisions he's relying on are crap. | ||
| They are totally wrong. | ||
| And I don't give a rat's ass how many lawyers line up to tell me, oh, this is president and this is what the law says. | ||
| They're all wrong. | ||
| I mean, they're right that it's precedent. | ||
| They're wrong that it's good. | ||
| We complain about law all the damn time in this country, constantly. | ||
| The fact that a court issues a damn decision that says something crazy or even, you know, the fact that a court issues a decision doesn't make it right. | ||
| We should criticize the law constantly, just like we should criticize what Google is doing. | ||
| So don't tell me about what the law says. | ||
| I don't care what the California Supreme Court said. | ||
| They are definitely wrong. | ||
| What they have basically done is said that a private company is now a public forum. | ||
| Once you do that, free speech is over. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You cannot have free speech if you don't have private property. | |
| Absolutely, positively. | ||
| I mean, that's the same thing as saying that when the university reserves this space for us to speak, it's a free-for-all, and if we don't let everybody speak at once, that's somehow a violation of their right to free speech. | ||
| That is totally wrong. | ||
| It's viciously wrong. | ||
| Do they have a monopoly of transportation, in which case can it be regulated? | ||
| I don't want to get too far into that. | ||
| All I would say is this, public utilities are a mistake, but private companies do not exercise the same kind of power that governments do. | ||
| And if we conflate that, free speech is done, and all of freedom is done. | ||
| To quickly put a button on this, you guys have invited Dennis Prager here next week, right? | ||
| Dennis is a great guy, and I hope that you'll ask him these very questions, because this is what it's all about. | ||
| You've got principled people on both sides who both defend freedom. | ||
| I don't know many guys that defend freedom more than Dennis and more than you, Steve, that have a different approach on this one, and perhaps this is a unique case because of the utility argument and all of those things. | ||
| We can't fully resolve that here. | ||
| I do want to add one other thing, and then I want to jump to your questions, because I can sense there are a few questions that you might have for us. | ||
| One of the most nefarious things that Google did in the last week, that many of you probably saw, was that there was this internal memo about how they weren't going to hire Asian or white male engineers. | ||
| I mean, think about that. | ||
| There are some of you here that are Asian. | ||
| Should you be discriminated against for working hard and going to school? | ||
| And, you know, hopefully you're trying to get the job that you deserve and all that. | ||
| So actually, we're flipping logic on its head the more we allow this faux diversity. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| This is not real diversity. | ||
| This is faux diversity. | ||
| And eventually it will come eat itself. | ||
| On that note, I think we should bring us home and then we're going to take a break. | ||
| As Steve and I were discussing, in one sense, Both Steve and I would sort of say if Google wants to destroy its own competitiveness by completely self-destructive hiring criteria that are irrelevant. | ||
| I mean, it's just irrelevant what somebody's race or gender is. | ||
| They should be hiring the best possible engineers. | ||
| That's their prerogative. | ||
| What I worry about is that China is not yet infested by this. | ||
| And I think if Trump wants to help America compete, he should airlift several plane loads of gender feminist theorists to China, Beijing University, drop them down and let them do their work. | ||
| But as long as they're free of this... | ||
| We're doomed. | ||
| We are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you know, at some point... That's some outside-the-box thinking right there, people. | |
| Take him from Berkeley. | ||
| You've got... I can name a few professors that I think could be helpful to Beijing if we want to have some trade wars going on. | ||
| That's not a bad idea. | ||
| We tell them we're teaching, like, the greatest diversity class of all time. | ||
| They show up, and then we airlift them to China, and, you know... Good luck, guys. | ||
| All right, well, give these guys a round of applause. |
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