June 14, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| If you have one sort of radical social justice activist type young person in the organization, they will weaponize every sort of protection for feeling harassed or uncomfortable they have on the books, and there's tons of laws like that. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me on The Rubin Report today is an editor at Reason Magazine and the author of the new book, Panic Attack, Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, Robbie Suave. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Before we do anything else here, I have a strict policy that we don't let people on the show with higher hair. | ||
| You and me, and yet you've come in here with higher hair. | ||
| I'm very upset. | ||
| I'm so sorry. | ||
| I'm so sorry, Dave. | ||
| And you're dressed like Jordan Peterson. | ||
| You stepped up the fashion game. | ||
| You got the whole thing going on right now. | ||
| I should have come in sneakers and shorts and a t-shirt, which is what I usually do. | ||
| Yeah, what kind of libertarian are you? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I'm trying to class up the idea of... | ||
| Libertarianism. | ||
| Of libertarianism. | ||
| All right, so there's a ton I want to talk about. | ||
| I really enjoyed the book here and you sort of really get on the inside of a lot of the ideas that I'm talking about on this show relative to college campuses and just sort of the fraying of politics and all these kind of micro groups on the left and right that are popping up all over the place. | ||
| But first off, you are an editor at Reason Magazine, which is sort of the libertarian standard. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| When did you become a libertarian? | ||
| So I'm one of those boring origin stories where I grew up in like a Republican household but my parents never really cared about social issues and were basically libertarians without knowing the word for it and then realized when I found out basically what libertarianism was when I went to college that, oh yeah, that's me. | ||
| So that's my, I pretend, I'm like, no, my father was born on like a seasteading platform and my mother was an Austrian economist, no, no. | ||
| Boring, boring origin story. | ||
| Just discovered that it was what fit my views. | ||
| So as people say to me all the time, Dave, you're not really a classical liberal. | ||
| You're not a liberal anymore. | ||
| You're a libertarian. | ||
| I don't mind being called a libertarian, obviously. | ||
| But do you see any meaningful distinction between classical liberal and libertarian? | ||
| Because this comes up all the time. | ||
| And I'm curious what the libertarians think of that. | ||
| I would say not really. | ||
| One of the things about libertarian, classically liberal people is that the belief in individual rights is our sort of most important thing. | ||
| So that tends to, I think the people who are attracted to the ideas of individual liberty tend to be against like forming Big groups and coalitions. | ||
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So they start to... That would explain the success of the libertarian party, I think. | |
| Well, exactly. | ||
| They get skittish when there's too many other people calling themselves libertarians. | ||
| They go, well, I only agree with that person on 99.7% of things. | ||
| What about the other 0.3%? | ||
| So then they want to say, well, I'm a classical liberal. | ||
| You're a libertarian. | ||
| Or I'm an individualist liberal. | ||
| Or I'm an anarcho-capitalist. | ||
| There's a lot of fracturing that is just... | ||
| what happens when you have people who are drawn to the idea of individualism trying to form a larger group. | ||
| So in a weird way, is that sort of the ultimate Achilles heel of anyone that cares about liberty, | ||
| that to then coordinate around liberty? | ||
| I guess the founders were able to do it somehow and had real disagreements on exactly what that meant. | ||
| But sort of in a modern sense, when there's so many different ideas of what freedom is, | ||
| and now we have 300 some odd million people that live in this country, | ||
| that it's really hard to get a unifying principle. | ||
| I mean, that sort of does explain and the naked guy running around | ||
| at the Libertarian Convention. | ||
| And just sort of the general lunacy, They want to be left alone, broadly. | ||
| They want to leave you alone. | ||
| As long as we're not hurting each other, it's fine. | ||
| I see no avenue to get there, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I think many people, maybe even most people, have a lot of libertarian impulses. | ||
| They want to be left alone, broadly. | ||
| They wanna leave you alone. | ||
| As long as we're not hurting each other, it's fine. | ||
| They like the idea of the government being small in the abstract. | ||
| But then when it comes to specific issues, a lot of people don't necessarily connect these things. | ||
| They go, well, I want a small government, but we need Medicare, and we need, you know, what about these other countries? | ||
| We need to make sure they're doing the right thing. | ||
| So it's the principles not being applied, I think, across the board. | ||
| That's what libertarians are always trying to make you do. | ||
| Apply that same thinking about this issue where you say, yeah, it's fine, they can do whatever they want, it doesn't affect me, to everything the government does, and then you'd be a libertarian. | ||
| So do you think most of it's just that people don't think about these issues that hard? | ||
| Because I'm sort of with you on that, that generally, when I've talked to people that, say, are more progressive or something, when you really get them to understand, like, oh, so you just want to live your life how you want? | ||
| You want gay people to be treated okay? | ||
| You want to smoke or you want to smoke? | ||
| The rest of it, like, actually, those are not things that the government's giving you. | ||
| The government should just have nothing to do with them. | ||
| There is a way to get through to them. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| And most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about public policy in general or educating themselves about public policy for very good reasons because it's pointless. | ||
| They have lives, you know, they're busy becoming doctors and lawyers and taking care of their family and providing value to society. | ||
| This is an idea that comes from economics, right? | ||
| This is the rationally irrational voter, the person who's not well informed about public policy because there's no reason There's no incentive for you to become well-informed, because in the end of the day, you only get one vote. | ||
| So if you just spend all your time educating yourself about this, it doesn't help you that much. | ||
| Is that the sort of ultimate Achilles heel then? | ||
| That it's like, if you're a libertarian, or you care about individual liberty or any of this stuff, it's like, if you were going to find a candidate that you like, the candidate would basically be like, I don't want anything to do with you. | ||
| And that's a pretty hard way to run a campaign, right? | ||
| And then there's no guarantee the candidate keeps these ideas when they get into, that's probably the ultimate Achilles heel, is that even if you get the right person in, well then the regulatory capture of government just turns them into another. | ||
| They'll be very selective on a couple issues, they'll still talk about the need to protect individual liberty, but then they'll become a big government crony person on every other issue. | ||
| Not all the time, but it happens most of the time. | ||
| Rand Paul's pretty good, though, on this stuff, right? | ||
| And he's trying to do it from within the Republican Party, which... | ||
| Rand Paul has definitely decided that being a kind of advocate of Trump and pushing Trump in a libertarian direction on a few very specific issues, most notably foreign policy, is the strategy he's going to use. | ||
| I think there are problems with that strategy, but also good things about it, and he has been, I'm glad he's there, you know, pushing Trump to be more, the thing I liked most about Trump, right, was his foreign policy. | ||
| Was his idea that the Iraq War was a mistake, that we shouldn't be nation-building, and the sort of normal people inside the Republican Party that never went away from the previous administration are trying to push Trump to not do that, to be just kind of another neoconservative. | ||
| And Rand Paul's been one of the only people, you know, kind of in a very flattering Trump way, like, hey, you're great, don't you remember? | ||
| Everybody loves you because you're not that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think he's making good headway there? | ||
| I mean, it's still, even with some of the Iran stuff right now, like, I don't think we're going to war, and I think there's a lot of big talk, but it does seem to me that Trump is upholding the, we're not gonna nation-build, and we're not, you know, we're talking to North Korea, you know what I mean? | ||
| If this was Obama, people would be going crazy, so there is some good stuff there. | ||
| There is some good stuff. | ||
| I wish they could have stopped Bolton from having any influence of the administration. | ||
| Pompeo is more of a neocon type person. | ||
| But I'm glad there's somebody doing it. | ||
| You know, Trump, this is one issue where I think his instincts, and I disagree with Trump on a lot of things, where I think his instincts are actually better than the people around him. | ||
| This is the one thing where he just trusted what he thought was right on the military dimension of foreign policy. | ||
| Do you think he possibly puts those guys in, like a guy like Bolton, who's thought of as this hawk, so that it seems like you're gonna go to war at any moment, but in actuality, it's like that's the exact reason you don't go to war. | ||
| You know, it's sort of like, this is where his people would be like, oh, well, that's the 4-D chess move. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I was gonna say, that is the 4-D chess move. | ||
| But there is some truth to it. | ||
| If you just, if you keep bringing in all these peaceniks, well, then your enemies know that they can mess with you, where it's like, you bring in a guy like Bolton, and it's like, whoa, we got Bolton and Trump. | ||
| At any moment, they could do something nuts. | ||
| That could be, but I think Trump is just so much more personality-driven than we all, you know, we are policy, politics people. | ||
| And so many in the media do that. | ||
| They try to think of what Trump's doing in terms of just sort of politics or what political calculus he's making. | ||
| But I think he makes a lot of decisions based on who he likes or who he gets along with. | ||
| And I'm not faulting that approach either. | ||
| The just it's all politics and all policy approach obviously leads people astray all the time. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, it's just a different kind of thing where I think he plays it by ear. | ||
| I think he can be talked into and out of things based on the rapport he has with various people. | ||
| And I think that partly explains what Rand Paul is doing, possibly to his credit. | ||
| Alright, before we get too far into the book, you spoke To Congress, correct? | ||
| I did! | ||
| And then something crazy happened. | ||
| You told Congress that white supremacy is not completely running rampant. | ||
| That was in essence what you said. | ||
| What was the title of the function that you spoke at? | ||
| It was a subcommittee meeting before the House of the House Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Committee. | ||
| And I discussed with a number of other panel members the ostensible rise in hate crimes and white nationalism. | ||
| I was brought, I was the one Republican, I'm not a Republican, but I was brought by the Republicans to offer some kind of counter perspective to the experts they had who were all talking as if there is this rise in hate crimes. | ||
| And I was kind of contextualizing the numbers. | ||
| You know, obviously hate crimes are terrible and I'm not saying they don't exist. | ||
| Which is exactly what you said to them, yeah. | ||
| Which is exactly what I said. | ||
| But the idea that they are off the charts higher than they've ever been and that it directly is because of Trump or Trump's rhetoric or something is just not, there's not a lot of good data to actually support that. | ||
| The FBI's tracking of hate crimes is actually just really bad. | ||
| They're counting like 7,000 hate crimes. | ||
| Not all agencies report. | ||
| Some agencies that probably do have hate crimes just report zero. | ||
| It's an optional reporting thing. | ||
| Actually, if you go back to 1996, There are more hate crimes being reported then for fewer agencies than there are now. | ||
| So, you know, it fluctuates. | ||
| It's just not a very good number. | ||
| It doesn't really give us a very good impression of anything. | ||
| Which is what I said, and actually the other people who were testifying pretty much agreed with that. | ||
| I mean, this was not like a fireworks session. | ||
| We had some disagreements, but the important thing was this was a civil liberties subcommittee in addition to everything else. | ||
| And I just want, you know, when we're discussing how to confront hate crimes, hate incidents, | ||
| some things that actually aren't crimes, but it start to impugn on speech and things like that. | ||
| Just that we understand if we're creating, we're empowering the FBI to watch more people, | ||
| to do that kind of thing. | ||
| There are civil liberties trade-offs, and we have to be a little, | ||
| we can't just say, rah, rah, we're gonna fight hate harder, we the government, and there's gonna be no downsides | ||
| to that approach whatsoever. | ||
| That's all I really wanted us to recognize, and broadly, that's what happened. | ||
| Right, we're gonna fight hate, because that sounds like a winnable fight. | ||
| Right, the war on hate. | ||
| The war on hate, that's the war we're gonna fight. | ||
| So, the people that were taking the counter of that, though, even though you're saying that, privately, maybe they were agreeing with you a little bit, or maybe not that hysterical, if you listen to the media, I mean, if you listen to mainstream media, it seems that the white supremacists are everywhere, the KKK is everywhere, Westboro Baptist Church, and all of these things. | ||
| Were they making any statistical arguments, or was it just sort of a general, You know, vague sense of, well, we see more of this, or there's more anger on Twitter or something like that. | ||
| Because that seems to be what the argument is about these days. | ||
| It's never about numbers. | ||
| And if you use numbers, you're usually called a Nazi. | ||
| Well, and they put out numbers that are just easily abused, like the Southern Poverty Law Center has numbers on. | ||
| Oh yeah, love those guys. | ||
| Well, right, you know, they probably consider you not to be. | ||
| Southern Poverty Hate Center. | ||
| But there, you know, I've looked at their chart and their chart shows, you know, more, it's a map of the United States, more hate groups than ever. | ||
| But if you click on any state, you're gonna see like, okay, well, how many people are actually in this group? | ||
| You know, maybe it's like a souvenir shop that sells Confederate memorabilia or something that's like two people. | ||
| Maybe this group was four people, and they had a fight, and now it's two groups. | ||
| So now it's more groups than it was before. | ||
| And I'm looking state by state, and in many of these states, half of these groups are actually black nationalist groups, which, again, I think present no threat whatsoever. | ||
| They're, again, nine crazy people yelling at you at the street, like the group that yelled at the Covington kids in D.C. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| The black Israelites. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A lot of wackos out there. | ||
| That their group, you know, increased a certain amount doesn't show that there's some massive spike in hate crimes, that kind of stuff. | ||
| A number of groups like that, pro-Jewish groups, put out statistics showing, well, there was an increase in maybe anti-Semitic harassment, but actually anti-Semitic violence was down, and actually all these threats were made by this one, like, crazy teen who lived in Israel. | ||
| Right, right, right, the guy who called in the bomb threats to the JCCC. | ||
| Right, so that doesn't, okay that's bad, and all these things might be bad, but do not speak to the kind of massive rise in hate that would be caused by Trump, which is what they're, they're making a political connection there. | ||
| So to really bring this to a libertarian place, when you go and talk to these people, and Congress has these sort of meetings and hearings all the time, the people that are listening, well, first off, it's hard to tell how many people are actually listening when people are talking. | ||
| There's a lot of people on their phones in the back and the rest of it, but do you actually think that what you're saying is getting through to the members of Congress that are there? | ||
| What is the intention behind, okay, you go and you say your piece, and that's nice, and it can get clipped and shared, and hopefully some sane people hear it, They realize that, oh my God, the Nazis aren't coming. | ||
| Okay, that's fine. | ||
| But do you think that the members of Congress that are there are actually doing anything with this information? | ||
| Or is this just busy work for them? | ||
| It's like, what am I going to do today? | ||
| I'll sit on a panel of white supremacy. | ||
| Like, what are they doing? | ||
| Yeah, it's promotion for them, right? | ||
| So they want that clip of them asking a tough question and looking very tough on this issue. | ||
| For instance, there was a Now This or Now Next or one of those progressive Twitter videos. | ||
| So they took a video of AOC, who briefly chaired this committee, actually. | ||
| toward the end and they had a clip of her asking this tough question. | ||
| By the way, it was a perfectly legitimate question. She was saying why do some of | ||
| these incidents that have to do with Islamic extremism get marked terrorism and these having to do with white | ||
| supremacy didn't get marked terrorism and that actually seemed like a perfectly | ||
| legitimate question to me. | ||
| But the person before her, another Democrat, had just asked the same thing, like the | ||
| exact same thing, but she needed a clip of her saying it. | ||
| Again, I'm not even faulting, the questioning was perfectly fine. | ||
| Again, this was a fine hearing, but everyone is just operating, I think, under the incentives that, now look at me, I'm being tough on this issue, this will be good for me. | ||
| Republicans, Democrats, it's the same thing. | ||
| It's not a partisan issue, but yeah, these were hearings probably for a promotional purpose for the people holding it. | ||
| Right so the reason actually that I mention all of this is because so you go up there you do your thing you lay out some statistics and you were you did not deny that racism exists just as you said right here you laid out some pretty sort of what I would say are just base level arguments in the good sense right but then the Huffington Post and decided to go after you. | ||
| This author at the Huffington Post went after you, implying that you're sort of denying that hate exists and all of these things. | ||
| And the reason I mention all of that is because this happened, I'm not even gonna mention the guy's name unless you want to, it's not worth it. | ||
| But it happens to be the same author at the Huffington Post who a couple weeks ago when I invited Mayor Pete Buttigieg on the show, was immediately tweeting at him to not do my show because, you know, I'm a scary evil, whatever it is. | ||
| He was saying about me, and I thought, these people, the way these guys operate, these faux journalists, that's far more dangerous than the rise of white supremacy in America, at least in my opinion. | ||
| And in both these instances, he's trying to say that there, this HuffPost author was trying to say that there should be no dialogue between these two people, between you and Buttigieg, and between me and the other panelists, because it's triggering or makes people unsafe, or it's so horrible. | ||
| When we would have both, In both situations, you would have had a great conversation. | ||
| You would have learned. | ||
| Mayor Pete would have learned. | ||
| I learned from listening to the people, even though I didn't agree with them. | ||
| For instance, that thing about classifying some groups as terrorists. | ||
| I didn't know that before. | ||
| That's kind of interesting. | ||
| There might be some legitimate issues there. | ||
| I had a very nice conversation with one of the panelists who was the mother of the woman who died at Charlottesville. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| and she was a lovely woman, very courageous speaker. | ||
| We talked after the, far from, the HuffPost author said how horrible it was | ||
| that she had to sit anywhere near me, this person who's denying that white supremacy even exists. | ||
| Which again, wasn't what you did. | ||
| Said it very much exists. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| But we had a very nice conversation. | ||
| I learned from her. | ||
| I told her about Reason Magazine. | ||
| So, you know, difficult conversations, and this wasn't even a difficult conversation, but conversations between people with different perspectives are a good thing. | ||
| I mean, that's, then I have an ideology that's kind of that, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a very important part of classical liberalism. | ||
| So it's just, it's frustrating and crazy for me to see someone like, again, this author, Contending that it's just it's just wrong on its face or it's or it's dangerous or it makes it It's it's a it's a form of discomfort bordering on violence, which is this conversation which ironically, of course what they're doing is actually Fermenting more of it because if they're gonna say that a guy like you is too fringe to talk at a panel like this I mean if I'm too fringe I have no I can't imagine who is no, but that's what that's what they're doing to me. | ||
| It's like alright If these two guys are too fringe, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, well, then who is left? | ||
| And they just keep moving. | ||
| But what do you think more broadly about just sort of the way journalists are operating? | ||
| There are a million examples of HuffPo and Vox and BuzzFeed and the rest of them doing this sort of thing, taking sort of mainstream thought or something that's politically incorrect, but factually true and an uncomfortable truth, let's say, and trying to pin the people who say it as awful when it's not their job to do that. | ||
| This guy's a reporter, not a columnist. | ||
| As far as I know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Twitter, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, has allowed a lot of these ostensibly neutral or objective or straight news writers to reveal or kind of almost like mellow in their biases. | ||
| They freaking unmask themselves pretty quick. | ||
| I try not to paint with a broad brush because there are people at all of these various media institutions doing great work. | ||
| I'm friends with many of them. | ||
| I like a lot of what they have to do. | ||
| And even people who get things wrong sometimes can be right other times. | ||
| Um, so I try to be a little careful when I, you know, characterize the media, but, uh, you are seeing a level of, I think because Trump has positioned himself, or to some degree the media has positioned Trump this way, it's Trump versus the media. | ||
| Which is, which is a framing that Trump himself likes. | ||
| Um, so then it's, it's hard, you're not, no longer like the, like the scorekeeper or the referee if you're the opposing team. | ||
| I'm making a sports metaphor. | ||
| First time ever in my life. | ||
| I've got a basketball right there. | ||
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A very simple one. | |
| I'm not a big sports fan. | ||
| A very simple one about two teams and a referee. | ||
| You could have made any metaphor there. | ||
| If you want to do something that fits within your lifestyle more. | ||
| Game of Thrones. | ||
| So, anyway, because the media is in the oppositional camp, there's a kind of media solidarity, or there's an extra, I think, hunger to find, well, what's the anti-Trump angle in this story? | ||
| This can be a tough thing. | ||
| Sometimes I agree with the media. | ||
| Sometimes I agree with the Trump people. | ||
| But even me, they're like, well, which team are you in? | ||
| Like with the Covington stuff, for instance. | ||
| That was an example of me saying to the kids that I wrote a lot about how the media had mischaracterized what happened to them. | ||
| But I'm not saying that from a pro-Trump way or anything. | ||
| It was hard for both sides to understand. | ||
| Which team are you on? | ||
| Which is so ironic, because I think that, and that is interesting about you, because I follow you on Twitter, we've met before, and I don't, I know what your feelings are on liberty, let's say, and freedom and individual rights and all that, but I don't, it's the right stuff, I'd say, something like that, but I don't know exactly, like, I wouldn't say you're a Trump supporter, per se, or a sort of Trump derangement syndrome person, and that, and I think people sort of think that about me, too, and then, because of that, you just get it constantly from, from both sides, which I guess means you're doing something right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I have to believe that, right? | ||
| I have to believe that. | ||
| All right, let's shift to the book a little bit, because you really dove into the college craziness, which obviously we talk a lot about on this show. | ||
| Was there a specific incident that you were suddenly like, holy cow, I have to write the book about that? | ||
| Because there's just this endless cascade. | ||
| I mean, every day, there's something new, right, where I'm like that. | ||
| The stuff that happened to Christakis at Yale, the dean who was confronted by this sort of mob of students because his wife had sent an email to the campus saying, you know, baby, you can wear whatever you want on Halloween, it's not a big deal, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Had him in here a couple weeks ago. | ||
| True radical, this guy. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That was, I think, maybe the galvanizing incident for this sort of phase of campus sort of political correctness, outrage, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| Or the media, people in the right-leaning media, and also people in the mainstream media paying more attention to this issue. | ||
| You know, the stuff that happened to Weinstein, all those things. | ||
| And, you know, my question was more than just, you know, criticizing these students, which is easy to do, and we all do that, trying to understand, like, okay, but why are you doing this? | ||
| Like, when did you decide this was a good tactic for getting what you want? | ||
| And I sort of, through the process of writing the book, kind of increasingly came to the point of view that they don't actually see it the way I was thinking of it. | ||
| It's like, aren't you trying to persuade people and you think this is right? | ||
| They're not thinking of it in those terms. | ||
| They're thinking of it in terms of self-defense. | ||
| That if you are bringing someone to speak on campus who's going to make people feel uncomfortable, even a small number of people uncomfortable, or you yourself make people uncomfortable because of what you think or what you say, emotional or psychological discomfort is On the same spectrum of physical violence. | ||
| Of true violence. | ||
| So if you're doing that, then you've engaged in violence. | ||
| Even on libertarian grounds, right? | ||
| You can practice self-defense. | ||
| If someone attacks you, you can fight back. | ||
| You just can't start fights. | ||
| That's the classically liberal value. | ||
| Well, they're saying, well, you started the fight. | ||
| You threw the first punch because you brought this person who makes people feel unsafe. | ||
| So the sort of radical New understanding of safety is at the heart of so much of the kind of culture that has changed on campus. | ||
| Were you able to figure out what the genesis of that is? | ||
| Like, where did that idea really come from? | ||
| That speech is violence, because we see it all over the place now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which then leads you to, oh, label someone a Nazi, and then what do you have to do when you see a Nazi? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You punch a Nazi. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Campuses are very safe places, actually. | ||
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So, I think to some degree- You mean literally, not safe places? | |
| No, they're very literally safe places. | ||
| Like, you're safe from a lot of, I mean, even, we talk about the sexual assault stuff. | ||
| I read a lot about sexual assault. | ||
| Women who are of the same age who are not students, who are not on campus, are at a higher likelihood of suffering sexual assault. | ||
| Right, yet we hear all the time there's a rape epidemic on campus. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So, I think when you have sort of smaller grievances than the average population, but you have this immense bureaucracy that is supposed to be meeting your needs. | ||
| I mean, I toured Arizona State University for this book. | ||
| Beautiful campus. | ||
| You know, very happy place. | ||
| Sun shining. | ||
| Every five feet, there's a sign saying, are you doing okay? | ||
| Did you remember to breathe today? | ||
| Like, do the students, they don't know how to breathe? | ||
| Like, you should go, you're not okay. | ||
| You should go to the counseling center. | ||
| If you're having trouble breathing, there's definitely a couple places you should go. | ||
| But these are very, you know, most, not all students, but these are very privileged people, | ||
| and being told that there is something wrong with them on a sort of psychological level. | ||
| And I think, so I think there's an openness to talk about mental health on campuses | ||
| that has gone maybe too far. | ||
| Again, people who need help, I'm glad they can get it, I'm glad it's been de-stigmatized | ||
| so that people can talk about it when they do need help. | ||
| But there's almost a, like, you want to see something wrong with yourself, | ||
| because also that now gives you standing in the activist community, | ||
| because intersectionality is the other kind of big phenomenon. | ||
| I talk of the intellectual phenomenon, which holds that, you know, the oppressed are the experts on their own oppression. | ||
| So within a circle of activists, the person who has the most layers of oppression is going to be looked to for guidance. | ||
| No one else is allowed to speak on these issues, in fact. | ||
| And considering I'm talking to a cisgendered, white, heterosexual male right now, this is... I know, I don't know why... You really got some nerve! | ||
| Yeah, they're going to love this interview too, white men talking about this. | ||
| So one way to have some, so if you don't, like me, if you don't satisfy any of these marginalized characteristics, but if you have a sort of mental or emotional issue, if you have trauma, if you have PTSD, well that's a marginalized category. | ||
| And you're sort of being encouraged to see yourself this way and to kind of look for something like that? | ||
| I mean, I've read sort of biographies of like administrator activist type people on campus where the first thing they tell you about themselves is that they suffer from PTSD. | ||
| Which, again, I don't think this is something you should be ashamed of. | ||
| If you have this, you should absolutely get your help. | ||
| But, you know, I've talked to professors who are like, there's no way every single member of my class at a prestigious liberal arts university, my very wealthy students, actually have PTSD. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| Like, it's just impossible. | ||
| And when they ask me for, like, exam extensions and homework and things like that, and they're saying it's because I have PTSD and you said something that triggered it in class, like, there's just no way. | ||
| It's every student. | ||
| But professors I've interviewed for this book told me they had that experience. | ||
| So what are the professors doing? | ||
| Because there's always this sort of chicken-and-the-egg thing and the inmates are running the asylum and it's like, well, who started this? | ||
| Is it the professors that started this that are now getting their comeuppance? | ||
| So this is something I think that separates me from some of the other people who talk about this stuff, particularly from the right. | ||
| There's this idea among conservatives that, yeah, professors are brainwashing their students. | ||
| I think, so first of all, professors are terrified of their students. | ||
| They're just utterly terrified of them, for good reason, because it only takes one. | ||
| And again, I'm not talking, when I, the problems I'm talking about, it's not, this is not all students. | ||
| It's not even most students. | ||
| This is a small fringe number of students that all of a sudden have tremendous power and are getting whatever they want. | ||
| And it just takes one of those in class, and you're going to have a Title IX complaint filed against you if you said anything having to do with sex or gender. | ||
| Again, these are very far-left professors getting these complaints from their students. | ||
| Because they've sort of fostered this atmosphere. | ||
| I mean, that's the irony. | ||
| You mentioned Brett Weinstein before, but that's the irony. | ||
| Evergreen basically was thought of as the most lefty progressive school in the entire country. | ||
| So you'd think if those ideas are about, if those are truly about diversity and inclusion and freedom, you'd think it would be a bastion of those things there, but. | ||
| These students are learning it from other students. | ||
| And they're learning it from students at other campuses. | ||
| Again, social media, they're in Facebook groups together, they see what the kids at Berkeley did, or at Reed, or at Oberlin, and the kind of ideas, there's a vocabulary around activism, there's an appreciation for A couple older sort of activists here like Gloria Steinem or someone like that. | ||
| You know, there'll be a picture of her with a quote shared in a Facebook group that somehow, you know, pertains to kind of their safety activism. | ||
| So they're learning more from each other, I think, than they are. | ||
| They're learning from a couple professors in some activist disciplines that have proliferated in the last 30 years. | ||
| But for the most part, they're really radicalizing each other. | ||
| Did you happen to see the video when I was speaking at University of New Hampshire and hundreds of protesters showed up with noisemakers and they were screaming at me? | ||
| I need more. | ||
| That sounds like everything. | ||
| You could have wrote a book about it, but there was a really interesting moment. | ||
| They're shouting me down and they have noisemakers and every few moments they've set up people to chant. | ||
| And I keep getting right in their face, I mean, as close as we are, and say, you know, they won't look at me, right? | ||
| Because they won't look at you, because they don't even want to think you're a human. | ||
| But I kept saying, you know, instead of chanting, I'm standing right in front of you, ask me a question, but they won't do any of that stuff. | ||
| But I bring this up because there was a moment where an older woman, who I don't know if it was a faculty member or just a local member of the community or something, started screaming that, these students could be killed when they walk out of here! | ||
| They could be killed and you don't care! | ||
| Something to that effect. | ||
| And I thought, This is really out of control. | ||
| Not just the screaming and the rest of it, but the idea that students at the University of New Hampshire, who are all privileged in the true sense of privilege, I don't care about their skin color or their gender or their sexuality, privileged in that they're at a great school where you can learn and you're gonna be basically treated okay and all that, but that people are trying to put the idea in their mind that they're gonna walk off campus and be slaughtered, and then they start believing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That it's a matter of being killed. | ||
| Again, some students might have grievances that I would agree with. | ||
| They obviously have financial because of student loan and all that. | ||
| I'm sympathetic to some students on things like that. | ||
| But they're not literally going to be killed. | ||
| That is scaring people. | ||
| And we know as libertarians, when you scare people, that's when you get them fired up to support a police state and government intrusions that have all sorts of negative side effects. | ||
| I mean, that was part of the reason I was pushing back at that subcommittee. | ||
| Just remember, when we empower the government to do something because people are scared, that has all sorts of negative consequences for your liberty. | ||
| But I had the same experience when I saw Charles Murray speak at Michigan, which is where I graduated from. | ||
| And yeah, there was a student screaming at him as he tried and failed to speak because there was no way to do so, that Charles Murray wanted him dead. | ||
| And the one thing that sapped kind of the power of the mob very briefly was when another student who was a minority student stood up and said, well I don't think I agree with Charles Murray, but I'd like to hear what he has to say. | ||
| I don't know how I'm supposed to know what he thinks unless I actually hear this talk. | ||
| And that was the thing that, so then the mob doesn't know how to deal with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When they're challenged by someone else on their side, another student, a faculty member, something like that, they can stand down in some cases because they are relying on nobody's going to do anything to them. | ||
| You know, because again, they're a minority. | ||
| There's just a small number of people. | ||
| And they used to do this, and then they would stop because they would get in trouble, or the other students would say, would you please shut up? | ||
| I would like to hear this person. | ||
| And they would, you know, they read the room. | ||
| They knew if people were going to turn on them, they're not going to put themselves in that position. | ||
| So now it's, the problem has been for the last like five years, people are just not doing that. | ||
| They're letting the mob shut down the speaker, and they're just afraid to say anything. | ||
| What do you make of the self-righteous nature of this? | ||
| The idea that they walk into these rooms, and I get it, they may think that these are awful people and I won't even sort of besmirch their intentions, right? | ||
| So they think that they're under attack and all of these things. | ||
| But what do you make of the self-righteous nature that they think That sort of everyone before them was a bigot and a racist or an idiot or a buffoon or somehow evil. | ||
| But not only that, they also think that all of their equals, the students that are their equals, should be basically silenced because they don't even have the opportunity like that kid wanted to hear the speaker. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Free speech is a double right. | ||
| That's actually something Frederick Douglass said. | ||
| It's the right to be heard as well as the right to speak. | ||
| I mean, all these other students would probably like to hear this person again, even if they don't agree with the person. | ||
| One of my formative experiences as an undergraduate was I was writing for the campus paper and I went to cover an event that Bill Ayers, this radical, whether underground, domestic terrorist, whatever you want to call him, he was speaking. | ||
| And I interviewed him for the paper, and I thought that was so cool. | ||
| I'm interviewing, you know, a historical figure. | ||
| I'm a young person who wants to be a journalist. | ||
| Like, that was a really cool educational experience for me. | ||
| You mean that doesn't mean you agree with everything he said just because you talked to the guy? | ||
| Well, but think if, like, conservatives had been running the campus then, or if there are concerns that a dangerous person... It's the exact same thing. | ||
| He makes us feel unsafe. | ||
| He shouldn't be allowed on campus. | ||
| And, you know, there were Republican legislators who said that exact thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, he did commit actual acts of violence, though, so it's a little bit different, but I get the point. | ||
| But it's college. | ||
| You're there to learn from interesting people. | ||
| You're paying a ton of money to do it, to deprive the other students of their opportunity to hear and to speak and to question these people. | ||
| Again, an experience that they're paying an exorbitant amount of money to have. | ||
| There's just a selfishness to doing that but again they say we are obligated because we are people's lives are on the line and we are protecting people's safety their emotional comfort is on the line if they don't feel this is a home to them and you can't bring this awful racist person into our home or this person who some awful racist person maybe retweeted or quoted once you can't bring them into our home it's our home and uh... that's wrong | ||
| Yeah, and someone needs to tell them it's actually not their home. | ||
| I mean, that's what the girl that was yelling at Nick Kristakis kept saying, right? | ||
| This is supposed to be our home, our home, but no, it's actually not your home. | ||
| It's your place where you're supposed to learn. | ||
| I mean, everybody does want to feel comfort on some level, right? | ||
| Comfort is a natural, you know, I'm not gonna bash them for wanting there to be some like level of civility, maybe, but they're not practicing civility when they do these things. | ||
| So it's, you know, they're screaming at people. | ||
| So, and again, it's not exactly, if it's a public university campus, I mean, they're supposed to be in the public square. | ||
| There's supposed to be uncomfortable speech. | ||
| People can, you know, chalk horrible things about Trump or whoever the Republican president is. | ||
| They did that at Michigan when I was there. | ||
| The crazy homophobic preacher can scream crazy Westboro Baptist Church-like things in the public square. | ||
| I mean, these used to be things that like the progressive ACLU type consensus said, | ||
| like, nope, we're gonna allow. | ||
| And these students completely reject that view. | ||
| And in fact, they hate the ACLU for even once having it and would like them to unhave it as soon as possible. | ||
| Which is sort of the ACLU is kind of flaking on some of these things at this point, right? | ||
| Yeah, there are some real concerns. | ||
| I think the organization itself is trying to figure out how it can appease the kind of progressives that want it to not hold so tightly to those commitments. | ||
| But I think a lot of people at the ACLU want to hold to those commitments, but they just don't know exactly. | ||
| But it really is in tension with these very loud, even some of the people who work for them. | ||
| Again, the theme of the book is it only takes one. | ||
| If you have one sort of radical social justice activist-type young person in the organization, they will weaponize every sort of protection for feeling harassed or uncomfortable they have on the books, and there's tons of laws like that. | ||
| Title IX at universities, other titles for private sector businesses, and they can make it so that you just can't have difficult or uncomfortable conversations in the College and in the firm. | ||
| That's why it's so fascinating what's going on with them, because it's like, you guys used to defend everybody's right all the time. | ||
| The Skokie case, obviously, is the big one. | ||
| Nadine Strassen, her book, Hate. | ||
| And she's wonderful, by the way. | ||
| I'm not bashing all of you. | ||
| No, she's incredible, but she's not working there anymore. | ||
| And you can see how social justice has just sort of infected. | ||
| I mean, the Westboro Baptist Church case. | ||
| I mean, these were people screaming at military servicemen who had died for their country, screaming horrible things about them. | ||
| If that speech, hate speech, is protected under the First Amendment, everything that Charles Murray says or whatever the students are upset about is clearly protected. | ||
| But when I... They also don't have a very good education about the First Amendment, which isn't just them. | ||
| That's just the whole country. | ||
| You know, when you quiz people on what... | ||
| Nobody knows, maybe for reasons we discussed earlier in this interview. | ||
| Many of them think hate speech is already illegal. | ||
| I talked to activists who said, I just want the college to bring its hate speech policy in line with federal speech law. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
| I guess it's already in line by not having one. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, that's not really what they want, because if they understood what it was, that's the last thing that they want. | ||
| They don't want that exchange. | ||
| You mentioned Arizona State. | ||
| So I was at Arizona State about a year, year and a half ago. | ||
| I was speaking there with Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine, and I did this little thing, sometimes I do it when I'm doing stand-up, where I just kind of poll the crowd. | ||
| how many conservatives are here, how many liberals are here, progressives, blah, blah. | ||
| And then at the end I said, how many Nazis are here? | ||
| And usually, usually, nobody applauds. | ||
| One person in the back, a woman started applauding that she was a Nazi. | ||
| So I said to her, I said, all right, that was kind of surprising, | ||
| and everyone's looking at her and it's all kind of awkward. | ||
| I said, but when we get to the Q&A, I will gladly give you the microphone first, | ||
| and you can share your Nazi thoughts. | ||
| Anyway, we do that, we do just that, and she goes on and on about how the Holocaust is a hoax, and Michael Shermer, who's debunked a lot of these Holocaust skeptics, she asks him some questions, and he just has all the facts, and he just smacks her down in a totally respectful way, but sort of puts her in her place with facts. | ||
| I mention all this because it turns out that this Nazi was a trans woman. | ||
| Which I just think is just sort of hilarious in like just the way... Isn't intersectionality beautiful? | ||
| In just the psychotic way that intersectionality works or doesn't work. | ||
| It was a trans woman identifying as a Nazi and I thought that is a real something. | ||
| You know, it's funny you mention having a Nazi in your crowd. | ||
| So I, in part of the research I did for this book, I found out that in 19, it was either 1963 or 1964, the progressive student group at Berkeley, you know, this is right after or in the middle of the Berkeley free speech movement, where you had progressive students and conservative students, the students really rising up and saying, no, we're gonna have whatever speakers on campus we want, we're gonna do whatever political organizing we want, the administration can't tell us we can't, that was the free speech movement. | ||
| The progressive student group was so committed to free speech that they invited a member of a Nazi, a member of a neo-Nazi group to campus to speak. | ||
| Not only did they invite him to speak, they all dressed up in full Nazi regalia to promote this event. | ||
| Again, this is in 1963. | ||
| This is only like 20 years removed from the actual threat of Nazism versus today. | ||
| And nobody heckled the guy. | ||
| He would make his remarks and then they'd laugh at him. | ||
| And when he was done, he went off and that was that. | ||
| There was no crisis of safety on the campus. | ||
| No one shut him down. | ||
| Can you imagine if they did that today? | ||
| Well, they already burned the place down once, but they'd re-burn it. | ||
| But now, when we are much further removed from the threat of actual Nazism, you could never do that. | ||
| And this was the progressive students who thought it was important to make, A, do a free speech stunt, and B, what is the harm from hearing from a Nazi? | ||
| We'll learn how abhorrent and dumb Nazism is. | ||
| You know, if you want to... When Richard Spencer is speaking on campus, for instance, shutting him down or screaming at him or getting violent is exactly what he wants. | ||
| Congrats! | ||
| Exactly what he wants. | ||
| He gets to say, look at the intolerant left, look at what they'll do, they're going to do this to me, they'll do this to you next. | ||
| He gives his remarks to, like, an empty stadium with, like, three actual Nazis there. | ||
| That's probably embarrassing for him. | ||
| Don't show up with a violent... You're playing into their hands. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Let's talk about some of the sort of subgroups that go on in this, because we always talk about sort of the left and the right, and it does seem like it's coming more from the left these days, but give me some of just the subgroups on each side that are bubbling up. | ||
| Sure, so I did a lot of work on, since I read about sexual harassment and sexual assault | ||
| and the Title IX stuff on campus, one of my chapters is about Title IX related activism, | ||
| fourth wave feminism, and what has happened on campus because of that, and that's a chapter | ||
| that I care a lot about because I write a lot about that. | ||
| So when you were writing this, Title IX was still in effect, right? | ||
| Yes, so this is the only one that has sort of a, there's a good news resolution that, | ||
| and again, I disagree with a lot of things the Trump administration does, | ||
| but Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, changed the guidance related to Title IX | ||
| in a way that I absolutely applaud. | ||
| Can you just explain what it is? | ||
| This is a federal statute from the 70s. | ||
| It's one sentence long. | ||
| It's attached to the law that funds higher ed. | ||
| All education. | ||
| Funds all education. | ||
| If you get federal funds for your school, you can't discriminate on the basis of sex or on the basis of gender. | ||
| That's all it says. | ||
|
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Perfect. | |
| That's perfectly benign. | ||
| It was intended, you know, if you have a male sports team and there's comparative interest in having a, you know, you don't have to have a girl sports team if no one wants to play. | ||
| But if you have people who want to play, you have to fund that team. | ||
| You're not going to force women to play football, but if enough of them show up. | ||
| Well, I mean, we were probably getting to that. | ||
| But originally in the 1970s, that was not what was going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Under the Obama administration, the assistant secretary, the bureaucrat under this, who is charged with making sure universities are complying with Title IX, started interpreting it much more broadly to include harassment and sexual assault. | ||
| And they were defining these terms so broadly that sort of anything that made someone feel uncomfortable for a reason of sex or gender Could be considered a Title IX problem. | ||
| Now, it wouldn't actually be. | ||
| If you brought this before court or something, that wouldn't happen. | ||
| But universities are compliance places. | ||
| So if you have this big government bureaucracy telling you, well, we kind of think you should do it this way, you're not going to fight them. | ||
| You're going to roll over. | ||
| So they rolled over in ways that were just disastrous for free speech because, again, speech related to sex and gender. | ||
| They're saying, well, if you're making people uncomfortable for that reason, it violates the federal law. | ||
| and also due process. So when there is a student accused of sexual misconduct | ||
| they were saying, "Well, we would like you to adjudicate this under this standard | ||
| and we really don't want you to have any cross-examination at the hearing | ||
| and we don't want you to do any of these other things." | ||
| So they were literally obliterating due process. | ||
| They really were. | ||
| I mean, there have been a hundred lawsuits brought by students, usually male students, often athletes, often male students of color, by the way, or immigrants. | ||
| Again, the normal issues in the criminal justice system where black people get arrested more for things. | ||
| Totally true in the university bureaucracy as well. | ||
| These students sued for saying I was wrongfully accused or regardless of whether it was wrongful or not, you violated my rights in a due process sense. | ||
| And when it goes to court, they win. | ||
| And then they sue the university. | ||
| The university's just caught because they're like, well, the government is going to yank our funding if we don't do it the way they say. | ||
| But we're going to get sued and lose because this is ridiculous. | ||
| This is a farce. | ||
| And this was all because of this guidance from the Obama administration. | ||
| The guidance comes out in 2011. | ||
| Feminist activists on campus, I think, quickly realized within a few years of that that Title IX now was this great tool For adjudicating grievances or for punishing people who engaged in speech the way you didn't like. | ||
| I mean, there's literally an activist group where the leaders of it got the numeral 9 tattooed to their ankles because that is how important this interpretation has been to feminist activism. | ||
| So Laura Kipnis is probably someone you're familiar with, who is a professor, but there's all these cases, there are cases that were never famous, you know, where someone just got like an F on their exam because they wrote the name of their instructor wrong on it, and someone said, you wrote, well that's a pornographic actress's name, so you intended this as a sexual slur, and the professor actually said, so we're concerned this would violate Title IX. | ||
| Again, it wouldn't, that's not what the statute means, no court would agree with you, But... And what about those two kids weren't there? | ||
| There was the one case of the two college students, guy and a girl, that were hooking up and then they both went after each other for Title IX because they were basically trying to preempt each other. | ||
| Yes, that started becoming like legitimately a thing. | ||
| If you had a sort of sketchy sexual encounter, which is the case in many of these, this is not... College! | ||
| Well, right, this isn't, you know, someone broke into your dorm room and you were, like, held their hand over your mouth. | ||
| This is, we were drunk, we were doing drugs, it began consensually, or we sort of intended to do something, then I don't remember what happened, now I'm uncomfortable about it, and maybe something bad or violence in policy did happen. | ||
| I mean, these are hard to adjudicate anyway, right? | ||
| Because they were relying on hazy... Alcohol is a factor in the overwhelming majority of these cases. | ||
| So then you wake up from this encounter and the first reporter has a huge advantage in these Title IX cases. | ||
| I was starting to see cases where you had the male go to the Title IX office first to accuse the woman, probably fearful that she would do it. | ||
| I saw cases where a fleeting kiss became a Title IX issue, where the normal just human courtship-- | ||
| again, I'm not saying sexual assault is not a problem on campuses or wherever else. | ||
| But things that should not have been handled by campus authorities were being handled by campus authorities. | ||
| Things that might have been regrettable or bad or maybe they should learn, you know, don't drink so much, to the male and the female. | ||
| Lessons are not being learned. | ||
| This is immediately going to sort of a criminal matter that can destroy people's lives on both sides. | ||
| I mean, to get expelled from college for rape? | ||
| I mean, that is a huge financial hit that you're going to take. | ||
| Also, without ever having a trial for rape. | ||
| That was the whole point. | ||
| Without having a lawyer. | ||
| I mean, many of these policies said you couldn't have a lawyer there. | ||
| One of the things DeVos has done is said, yes, there has to be a lawyer there, if the student wants a lawyer, who can ask questions of the other side. | ||
| You don't have to have the man and the girl questioning each other, but you have to have at least questions interchanged. | ||
| I mean, at some of these hearings, You were having, not even panels, they were starting to do away with panels, where it was one administrator was investigating the case, was deciding which witnesses to talk to. | ||
| There was a case where they accused, again, a male black football player, said, well, can you interview all these people who know? | ||
| Including, one time, the victim, because she had not filed a complaint. | ||
| They were dating. | ||
| And it was someone else who didn't like their relationship. | ||
| So this person filed a complaint. | ||
| Wow, so a third party could file a complaint? | ||
| That is incredible. | ||
| They were obligated to if they became knowledgeable of alleged or suspected or possible violation of Title IX. | ||
| They were all obligated to report it. | ||
| That is some seriously dystopian... And this is Catch-22. | ||
| There's a Hulu miniseries on it right now. | ||
| I'm watching it. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's exactly that. | ||
| So you had cases where, again, there's no actual dispute and they're being adjudicated. | ||
| And that guy got expelled. | ||
| The administrator would not talk, would not interview the people who knew this is all nonsense. | ||
| He said, no, it's my job to determine who I speak with. | ||
| And then you can't. | ||
| And then he creates a report. | ||
| He wasn't even recording his interviews. | ||
| It was just his recollection of who he talked to. | ||
| And this is standard practice across the board for the single investigator model, which was becoming very important. | ||
| And then the new guidance has gotten rid of, thank God. | ||
| Yeah, man, that is some evil stuff. | ||
| So I find the Title IX stuff so interesting on so many levels, because there's sort of the social justice level, there's a legal level, there's a sort of- There's a fundamental sort of classically liberal due process. | ||
| Yeah, if you're accused of something, you should be able to defend yourself and use all the powers of the law that would allow you to do that. | ||
| But the other part that I think is interesting is I remember when DeVos reversed All of these things that you're laying out of why they're so wrong. | ||
| I remember the blue check celebrity Twitterati and the Bette Midler's and Sarah Silverman's and the progressives on Twitter, basically. | ||
| Trump hates women, he's pro-rape, all of these things. | ||
| And then you look and it's like, oh, these things get 50,000 retweets and 80,000 retweets. | ||
| And it all sounds right. | ||
| Trump's removing protections from rape victims and it's like, ah, "I'd better scream about that, it sounds right." | ||
| And they never wanna hear any of the things you just said, the uncomfortable truths that you laid out there. | ||
| And breaking that, well, it's very similar to breaking the white supremacy argument | ||
| that you're trying to break as well. | ||
| Yeah, they don't wanna hear, I mean, complicated narratives are less sexy for reporting. | ||
| They don't wanna hear that, "Actually, this is kind of a problem." | ||
| And anyone who's studied this issue in any seriousness knows that the existing system just wasn't working. | ||
| And again, like I was saying, it was causing lawsuits from both sides and the universities cannot handle this under the, you know, that's like a complicated thing. | ||
| Nope, this is further evidence that the administration is waging its war on women. | ||
| That is an easier sort of headline. | ||
| So much of the reporting, when DeVos Change this stuff was just was just it was clear | ||
| They hadn't even read what the new guidance was going to be in their defense. It was very long. I guess | ||
| But there it was completely disconnected So I saw some journal there's a journalist at slate | ||
| actually who's covered these things a little bit better And he was saying and he when he wrote about he's like yeah, | ||
| this was actually there were some problems here I don't know if a new approach is better, but like there | ||
| was this was not exactly working People who had studied the problem a little bit more closely knew that, but the activists, I mean, the activists knew that, but they wanted it to still be the other way, because they did not take the, like, enlightenment liberal view that these people deserve due process. | ||
| They think it would be better, you know, if Everyone is expelled even if, you know, half of them are innocent as long as we got the other half, which is just like a total inversion, right? | ||
| Of kind of the enlightenment principle that it's better, you know, that guilty men go free than to put away even one innocent person. | ||
| That's like the bedrock of our classically liberal Western understanding of justice. | ||
| And they were just, they were utterly against that. | ||
| And they'd say, well, you know, we're not sending these people to jail. | ||
| We're just destroying their lives. | ||
| We're just making them unemployable forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so what are some of the other sort of subgroups that you dive into here? | ||
| Because the fascinating thing I thought was, because of the way the internet is, and message boards, and message boards, are people on message boards? | ||
| Whatever these little groups are, and telegram, and all of these different things, that all of these little niche Yes. | ||
| very, very niche groups that often have these competing interests. | ||
| They're all popping up and it's hard to really, it's hard to gather, and you do talk about this, | ||
| like how much actual influence they have, how much momentum they have, | ||
| what they're really trying to do, how much of it is just purely trolling | ||
| and just trying to burn things and all that. | ||
| Well, I'll talk about the one that's actually doing the best right now, | ||
| which is the Democratic Socialists of America. | ||
| Unlike many of the other groups I've studied, they are highly organized. | ||
| They clearly have a lot of people in them, and they're poised to have a big impact. | ||
| I mean, they're having a political impact. | ||
| I can't underestimate, or overstate rather, their dramatic increase in the last few years. | ||
| I looked at some of the numbers for these groups. | ||
| So this group, this is the far left economic Bernie Sanders-esque group that was just a bunch | ||
| of old hippies, like there were a couple thousand of them from when the group started in the late '70s or '80s | ||
| or whenever it was up until three years ago. | ||
| It was the same people, nothing had changed, they'd gotten 30 years older, but they had not added | ||
| a single new member or had a single new subscription for their publications. | ||
| In the last three years, the average age of one of their members has dropped from like 90,000 to 30. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These are highly motivated young people who are passionate about socialism. | ||
| We talk a lot about cultural issues, but what animates them is the economics, the economic inequality. | ||
| I interviewed people who said things like, you know, capitalism is the most evil system ever devised, and we're going to convince people that socialism is good. | ||
| While they're at their private university holding an iPhone. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| But they also hate something that makes them similar to some of the other groups. | ||
| Again, they hate liberalism, broadly. | ||
| they hate sort of moderate liberalism, like the normie, they call them normies, right? | ||
| They hate the just, and that's everyone from like Hillary Clinton to me | ||
| in the spectrum of people who like, broadly like free trade in markets and stuff, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're all the same, we're all just normie liberals. | ||
| In a way, they hate you, and I would include myself in that too, probably. | ||
| They hate us more in a way than they hate the conservatives, right? | ||
| Because they think we're sort of faking it or something like that. | ||
| Well, and Trump is weird for them because while Trump, you know, is like the most hateable for a lot of these other intersectionality groups | ||
| for sort of like cultural reasons, and the things he says about immigrants, women, and so on. | ||
| For them, you know, they actually share some of like the trade not liking | ||
| and just kind of dislike of business that occasionally Trump has sort of, you know, | ||
| kind of addressed or talked about that makes, also they think the Russia stuff is stupid | ||
| because they kind of like Russia probably for, they admire sort of communism or something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's actually weird to see them not as worked up about Trump in the exact same, | ||
| I don't wanna say they're not pro-Trump at all, they still hate him. | ||
| But they hate Democrats, liberals, neoliberals, who are like squishy and like markets sometime and are not radical enough. | ||
| They don't want, Joe Biden is just as bad as anyone else. | ||
| It's Bernie, maybe Warren, no one else. | ||
| Everyone else is equally is tainted by the same original sin of liberalism. | ||
| Do you think there is any chance, any chance whatsoever that the modern Democratic Party, not that I have any love for the modern Democratic Party, but can it, Can the shell of that thing survive this, or are they going to completely dismantle any remaining liberal, and JFK will be, you know, his memory will be destroyed, too, in the course of all that, because they'll have to. | ||
| Well, here's a moment for hope. | ||
| I think it's going to be a lot harder for them to do this than maybe they expect. | ||
| Right now, they're riding high on victory. | ||
| They got AOC in. | ||
| Bernie's really popular. | ||
| They think it's their moment. | ||
| moments don't often last as long as the people who are adherence of them think | ||
| they're gonna have a lot more difficulty sort of just convincing your just sort | ||
| of regular older maybe even religiously inclined normal sort of Midwest rest of | ||
| America Democrat not not Republican Democrat right - There are a lot of those too. | ||
| So they're gonna have trouble getting the people that they're constantly saying are horrible. | ||
| The people who just like Biden. | ||
| There are a lot of people out there who just like him 'cause he was the vice president. | ||
| And again, people who are not as motivated to know every detail of policy | ||
| the way your activist woke set is. | ||
| Right, but I guess my question is, do you think, so let's say, I mean, conventional thinking, | ||
| if you just look at the polls, and I hate polls, but it's basically like Biden is crushing it right now. | ||
| He's up by 20, 30 points over Bernie in most of the polls, and maybe to your point, Bernie already peaked four years ago, so maybe it's already over, but that they will have to destroy him. | ||
| That it will cause such a rupture in the party that it may be what the natural entropy of it is, is that the party actually does have to split in two. | ||
| And I think there's a version of this for conservatives and Republicans as well. | ||
| This fracturing taking place on both sides is very interesting right now because, yeah, Republicans as well are kind of breaking into this more populist-y in the vein of Trump versus, I'm sure you've seen some of this fighting between National Review and First Things People over a more kind of libertarian, I mean, lightly libertarian, not even as libertarian as I am, version of the Republican Party that maybe existed. | ||
| I've actually been enjoying watching It's been very intellectual. | ||
| Because it's David French and Sohrab Amari. | ||
| And I've been watching it going, this is how an intellectual fight's supposed to happen. | ||
| You guys are fighting for the heart of what you think conservatism is supposed to be. | ||
| And it's basically being done respectfully. | ||
| And I think they're going to sit down. | ||
| I'd be happy to host it here. | ||
| It's like, wow, there's something cool going on there. | ||
| But that's not how the fight is going down on the other side. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I do see similarities, though. | ||
| Because, again, it's because one of the sides sees itself as ascendant. | ||
| They think their political moment has arrived. | ||
| And maybe it has. | ||
| I mean, maybe both of these things could go in the direction of you're going to have a more nationalist Trade and immigrants skeptical. | ||
| You already have an immigrant skeptical, but also very trade skeptical Republican Party, and you're going to have a sort of much further left socialist inclined Democratic Party the way you have in Europe. | ||
| The problem is with the American system, because of the way we're devised, we always just have the two parties. | ||
| Whereas in Europe, you can have both of these parties and then a spectrum of more libertarian or more centrist or more moderate parties. | ||
| Do you think it would help? | ||
| We can't because of the way the system is. | ||
| Right, but do you think if we had a little more of a coalition-based system where people, because the idea that these broad blankets of left or right or Republican concern, it doesn't really fit anymore. | ||
| Do you think a coalition system might? | ||
| I mean, they've got all sorts of problems because of coalitions, because those tiny parties have absurd power. | ||
| You can take out anybody at any time. | ||
| I'm always skeptical that any kind of that tweaks to how the system of votes are tallied will ever translate to anything being better for what I want. | ||
| But yes, I would I would prefer if sort of libertarian inclined people could ally with certain groups on select issues, but like maintain our own identity. | ||
| And right now it's just you have to fall under the umbrella of one or the other, which is frustrating because we're at a moment where I think both parties are Moving away from... I mean, that's part of the theme that I talk about in the book, the meeting of the extremes, and that there's a radicalizing taking place on both. | ||
| Obviously, on campus and in social media, we see the influence of the left. | ||
| But I try not to, you know, again, I don't want to overstate it. | ||
| Campus and Twitter are not the whole world. | ||
| The Republicans have control of government. | ||
| You think there's a way you can maybe split the difference or something? | ||
| Like one idea that sort of makes sense to me is like, because I would love a somewhat functional Libertarian Party, but you know that if a Libertarian Party got in and got five percent, which they never get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Five?! | |
| Yeah, five! | ||
| My god, it would be incredible. | ||
| But you know what would happen, of course, it would lead to probably President Bernie or something like that, so I don't want that. | ||
| So the idea may be that What if you had something where you could vote for whatever third party you want, and then once the 3% checks in, so there's the election, now 3% checks in, and now you know they're not gonna do anything with that 3%, that then they could decide where they're gonna give their support, so that people could at least still feel good about the original vote? | ||
| Does that make sense, something like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that might be better. | |
| Politics is by its very nature disgusting, right? | ||
| I'm just trying to, 'cause so many people are gonna be disgusted at what they have to do | ||
| at the next election, and they were already disgusted last time. | ||
| And I think the more we keep having to be disgusted, just the more people will just check out. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, politics is by its very nature disgusting. | ||
| We're deciding which policies the entire country, all 300 or 400 million people, | ||
| are going to have to live under. | ||
| Which tyrant will be oppressing them on which things. | ||
| Because we have a just sort of unitary system where the executive gets to do everything. | ||
| Congress has delegated all its authority to the president, whoever the president is. | ||
| Not to Trump, but to the office of the presidency. | ||
| So-- | ||
| And they're always happy to take more to that power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and Congress has been saying, yeah, you can decide. | |
| Congress doesn't even weigh in when we're declaring war. | ||
| They're like, no, you can choose who we bomb. | ||
| We don't really care. | ||
| Actually, I think the Supreme Court has, in some sense, stood up and is playing a role of Congress by almost adjudicating policy more directly than maybe they were intended to do, because there's just no body separate from the president, from the office of the president. | ||
| Congress is just a rubber stamp. | ||
| But again, and we have this big country where these rules will be for everyone. | ||
| People who live in Florida, people who live in California, people who live in Iowa, in Michigan, all have to listen to, even though we have different values and might care about different things, because of this just immense central government, which is not the way it was intended to be and makes us all mad at each other on Twitter and everywhere else. | ||
| Let's decentralize the whole damn thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, Robbie. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| I'm still annoyed about the higher hair, but beyond that, it was pretty good. | ||
| That's gonna be your issue in the election. | ||
| Lower hair. |
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