Feb. 17, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:36
4003 The Ugly Truth About Social Justice | Michael Rectenwald and Stefan Molyneux
While political correctness on college campuses is discussed, NYU professor Michael Rectenwald has lived it and faced significant blowback for speaking uncomfortable truths. Professor Michael Rectenwald joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss his lawsuit against NYU, the startling opposition he faced from both his colleagues and the NYU administration for being politically incorrect.Dr. Michael D. Rectenwald is the Professor of Global Liberal Studies at New York University and is the author of several books including “Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age” and “Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature.”Website: http://www.michaelrectenwald.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/antipcnyuprofLawsuit: http://www.fdrurl.com/rectenwald-lawsuitArticles: https://nypost.com/2018/01/13/deplorable-nyu-professor-sues-colleagues-for-defamation/Book: Academic Writing, Real World Topics: http://www.fdrurl.com/rectenwald-academic-writingBook: Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age: http://www.fdrurl.com/rectenwald-global-secularismsBook: Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature: http://www.fdrurl.com/rectenwald/british-secularismYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. It is Liberal Reach Out Weekend.
I am here with Dr. Michael D. Rechtenwald.
He is the professor of global liberal studies at New York University and is the author of several books, including Global Secularism in a Post-Secular Age and 19th Century British Secularism, Science, Religion, and Literature.
And we're going to talk about his...
Rather exciting interactions recently with New York University.
Rechtenwald, I'm sure we can go with Michael, if that's all right.
I'm not interfering in your office hours as a cringing, Marx-begging student.
So, Michael, what's the story about how we got to the story?
So what's the backdrop about the issues that you've had with the anti-free thought political correctness stuff that's been going on?
Yeah, I mean, it really started off as a sort of a social justice tipping point, if you will.
One day, it was back in the early, I think it was October of 2016, when a University of Michigan student, when given his choice, carte blanche choice for pronouns, he inputted into the Wolverine system, His Majesty. I merely posted a link to this on my Facebook page, and I had a lot of different leftist friends at the time.
And after that, all hell broke loose and thousands and threads just kept multiplying, condemning me.
And I just said, that's it.
This is over the top.
There was all kinds of hate mail and all kinds of calling me transphobic and committing discursive violence and on and on just for posting a link.
And I said, that's it. So I just thought about, you know, speaking up against the PC SJW authoritarianism that has been encroaching and has really come down hard on our campus.
For example, there was a bias reporting hotline instituted the same year, 2016.
Milo Iannopoulos was no platform from speaking on campus because somebody might walk by and hear something that triggered them.
So I started tweeting from anti-PC NYU prof.
And a New York University student reporter picked up on my tweets and asked, are you really an NYU professor?
And I said, yes. And she asked if she could interview me.
And I said, yes, but I'm not sure if I'll go on the record as myself.
After I gave the interview, I thought about it a while.
And I said, there's nothing objectionable in what I said.
I'm merely tweeting against all of these excesses and outrages of PC social justice madness on campus.
And when I did the interview, within two days, I was called into my dean's office.
Little did I know, waiting there also was the head of human resources for the College of Arts and Sciences.
Yeah, that's never a good sign.
You know, I brought HR in.
Oh, great. So we're going to play ping pong?
This should be fun. The interesting thing is that the first thing the dean did is he came real close to me, about six inches away, and he said, This has nothing to do with your Twitter account or your publicity.
Because already a couple of articles had come up really quickly about this.
That's kind of, sorry, that is a little bit of a mafia move.
You know, like, before the public show trial, the kangaroo Stalin court, it's really not about anything to do with, like, I mean, in a way that you can't reproduce, you can't prove, and it's sort of saying, I'm sorry that I'm kind of being dragged along behind this truck of political correctness, but, you know, I'm chained here just like you.
Exactly. And I didn't think about recording this.
It just didn't occur to me as the bright graduate student in Canada did over the confrontation about her showing a Jordan Peterson video.
I just didn't think about it.
I didn't know what was going to be coming.
And the upshot was they were really pressuring me hard to leave campus immediately that day for the rest of the semester, a paid leave of absence.
There were suggestions that people were worried about That my Twitter account and the interview were a cry for help.
It constituted a cry for help.
Which means to say, you know, that I was mentally insane or something.
They sort of made suggestions, overtures, that I was maybe, you know, losing it.
And because, after all, who else would possibly criticize PC culture and social justice ideology, but a lunatic.
Let's go back for just a sec.
I mean, I definitely want to get into the lawsuit, which is really fascinating.
Well, we'll put a link to it below.
But just to go back to the Your Majesty.
Yeah. No, see, that's an interesting thing, because there's, of course, the reduction to absurdity, the argument, saying, well, if anyone can be called anything they want, then sure, I can be called Zeus.
You can be called Tentaclehead.
Somebody can be called... And there is this odd thing that happens on the left, which is they kind of promise radical subjectivism.
They kind of promise an end to this Aristotelian tyranny that things have an essence that you must name correctly.
Right. You can be anything you want.
Everything is a social construct.
Everything is subjectivist.
But then when you step outside the particular bounds that are kind of unspoken, this unbelievable tyrannical hellhole descends upon you.
And so they kind of promise this massive amount of liberty and freedom and no constraints and to heck with traditional...
Rational approaches to things.
You can be anything you want to be.
But then if you say something that they perceive as mocking, the very subjectivism that they propose, boom!
Suddenly you're objectively evil and your words have become bombs.
Absolutely. They do this with everything.
I did it with Clover Gender.
People came out and said that they're a man trapped in a five-year-old boy's body and things like that.
They come down hard on those people.
Also, of course, there was the Hypatia.
A scandal in which the professor of philosophy wrote about the, you know, similarities between transgenderism and transracialism, and she was attacked by the whole field.
There were very few who didn't come down on her.
I mean, these are philosophers, so if philosophers are condemning certain avenues of thought and prohibiting comparisons, even, Then we've got real trouble.
Well, there is, of course, you know, we don't have to get into this debate if you don't want to, but there is, of course, this big challenge where the sensitivity of every group is put front and center.
Except for white males, of course.
If you're a white male, you're privileged, you're probably racist, unless you conform with what everyone else says.
So when it comes to this hypersensitivity towards people's feelings...
I must say that in looking through the lawsuit, Michael, I did not notice a massive amount of sympathy towards your feelings or your perspectives or your happiness.
So I do take this massive raw skinned hypersensitivity with a certain grain of salt because it does not seem to be evenly applied across the diversity spectrum, to put it mildly.
The double standard is incredible. The double standard is incredible.
They can whip you if they like.
If you're a white straight male, especially a cisgendered male, that's the crime of the century.
If you're cisgendered white male, straight male, they can literally lash you, you know, they can give you 50 lashes and if you say anything or complain they call it white male tears.
So they deride even your complaining about their abuse of you.
So you have to take it and you can't even speak back.
It's incredible. Well, that is interesting as well.
And let's start to dig into what happened after the meeting where you were given that kind of Don-style whisper aside.
What happened after that meeting when you were, I guess, offered the paid leave?
What happened was then this committee calling themselves a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group, Wrote an op-ed letter to me in the same paper, the Washington Square News, condemning me and suggesting that I was quote unquote guilty for the quote unquote structure of my thinking.
And I was ethically low on the ethical totem pole for my views.
So they really handed it to me.
This caused the whole faculty to shun me.
I'm talking over 120 faculty members in my program.
It's a very big program in the university.
I've been universally shunned by all but about two or three now.
That set the whole tone for what followed.
Yeah, no, it is. Of course, you're talking about a lack of intellectual content in arguments.
And, you know, the whole point, at least the classical idea of the university was, if you are already correct, you kind of don't need to go to university.
So we assume that people have incorrect or unformed or absent conclusions.
That's why, you know, if you're already the world's greatest surgeon, you don't go to surgical school.
You might teach there, but you won't go there.
So we assume in university that people have thinking that needs to be developed or corrected.
And the best way to do that is to engage in debate with people who disagree with you.
That to me is the whole point.
It's like saying, I'm going to run a tennis school, but you never get to play tennis against anybody else.
It's like, that's kind of how you get better.
And what frustrates me, and I'm sure it's you as well, Michael, is the lack of intellectual content in the opposition to what you have talked about is, I guess you could say, shocking and It kind of is and isn't. Not an argument.
It's not an argument to say that your thinking is incorrect or is deviating from groupthink or anything.
None of these are arguments.
And of course, when people strongly oppose you but can't oppose your arguments, the natural thing to draw is the massive sword of ad hominem.
And that seems to have been flying around the network extremely fast.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
They also said I gaslighted them, which I think they were just pulling these, I call it plug-and-play social justice language off the internet, and they just pasted them together.
All these phrases just float about gaslighting, all these kinds of microaggression nonsense that I said I committed, and there were no arguments, no content to the arguments, and they said I had engaged in And I had never mentioned a single person by name, so I couldn't have engaged an ad hominem because an ad hominem is an attack on an individual.
So they don't even know the proper terms that they're using to talk about a fallacy, for example.
And this was an official committee consisting of several faculty members, two deans, and a few students.
So, I mean, this was a significant Condemnation by NYU basically suggesting that they officially adopted a particular ideology, a social justice ideology.
Now, I just wanted to point out, as I was reading through the lawsuit, one thing – well, an endowment of over $3 billion, that seems like quite a lot.
But one thing that really struck me was an enrollment of over 50,000 students at NYU and almost 10,000 faculty members.
I mean, I'm no mathematician, but that strikes me as something in the vicinity of five to one students to faculty members.
Do you think that there may be a certain amount of top heaviness in the bureaucracy and the faculty enrollment at NYU? No.
The top heaviness in administration is unbelievable.
To say nothing about the faculty right now, they keep adding layers and layers of administration.
And one of the layers is now this new diversity layer.
And they added this whole team of diversity officers, chief diversity officer, executive director of diversity, dean of diversity.
It just goes on and on.
There's just this pluralism of diversity officers.
And also that constitutes the bias response team, who is this team that adjudicates behind closed doors and with no transparency at all, any bias infractions or microaggressions that are reported to it.
So, I mean, this is just layers of bureaucracy and diversity has added a whole new sheath of all this.
Well, and of course, diversity is supposed to invite a variety of viewpoints into the discussion so that reason and evidence can hold sway in the long run.
And again, we're sort of back to the thing I was talking about originally, which is they promise all of this freedom and inclusiveness, but what actually happens is a very narrow-minded, aggressive tyranny.
I mean, the left has, I think, some very interesting arguments of very good criticisms of things like imperialism and so on.
And, you know, great.
Welcome. You know, fantastic. Let's debate and discuss all of that.
But if it turns, like if this promise of diversity and enrichment and so on turns into a very narrow-minded, you have to believe all of these conclusions...
Without displaying any of the methodology that helps you arrive at those conclusions, because methodology is part of debate.
Once you've come to your conclusion, the debate is kind of over.
So they promise all of this inclusiveness and diversity, and it's going to open things up to more debate.
And then what is actually delivered is, I don't know, it's like the picture on Tinder versus the person you meet on the bar.
Like what is actually delivered doesn't seem to have much relationship to what is promised.
No, not at all. In fact, they don't even debate or allow a debate about what diversity means.
And I've argued that it's very superficial and it's based on phenotype, strictly.
To use a leftist term, it's essentialist.
That is, they're ascribing to individuals, they're pointing out the particular traits of individuals and then those people meet the diversity traits And so they're put in that diversity box.
And so now we have that type of diverse person and this type of diverse person, but it's all based on either, you know, a very narrow, superficial, phenotypical trait or set of traits or It's race obsessed.
It's race and numbers obsessed.
I guess my fundamental question is, it's sort of like looking at your situation, Michael, it's sort of like looking at a superhero movie where the superhero simply refuses to use His awesome powers.
So my question is, why didn't you just use your white privilege to make all of this go away?
If you have this amazing weapon that everyone says is just the domination of the universe, if you can bend physics with your white privilege willpower, why didn't you just use that to make all these problems go away?
That's very interesting, isn't it?
Because white privilege is actually quite the inverse of white privilege, isn't it?
It's just an excuse to beat on white men.
I mean, there is no such privilege other than their privilege of abusing you for being a white male.
So I don't know. Whatever this privilege consists of, it's certainly not worth it for me.
I'd really like to turn in this card because it seems to be drawing in more airstrikes than giving me the capacity to fly.
Right. So, this, there's a bias reporting hotline, there are safe spaces and so on, and it does, you know, this may seem like an extreme example, and I certainly don't mean to characterize it.
New York University or other politically correct areas as, you know, open Stalinist conformity camps, but there is an element of horizontal reporting of hidden chamber accusations of even sometimes the inability to confront your accuser, a lack of regard for due process, a lack of regard for the standards of reason and evidence.
And it does seem to me not as far, but definitely in the direction of totalitarian systems of pretend law.
And the whole point, of course, is to make people self-censor, to make them jumpy and to make – I can't possibly imagine, Michael, that out of 120 of your professional compatriots, none of them have any sympathy for anything that you've experienced.
That would mean that the entirety of the faculty is on board with this kind of witch hunt, but they're not saying anything for fear of suffering the same consequences.
You know, oh, yeah, she's the witch, burn her, say all the women to make sure that they go burn someone else, and hopefully that sates their aggressive lust for a while.
And it just seems to me that it is totalitarian in its essence, and that does not speak well when a totalitarian mindset is molding the minds of the next generation.
No, I've said this.
It's a very seriously leaning towards totalitarianism.
It's a soft Maoism.
I mean, you have the same exact kinds of mechanisms in place.
You know, privilege checking, it corresponds with, you know, struggle sessions and auto-critique.
Where you call yourself out, self-criticism is also a part of their lexicon.
So they just adopted some of the worst disciplinary mechanisms of the Stalinist and Maoist regimes.
Unbeknownst to them, I think the administration has no clue that they have actually borrowed from some of the most totalitarian, authoritarian regimes in history.
And they are doing this, like you said, with this horizontalism, with reporting on each other, having students as sentinels, as surveillance as I call them, everybody a potential spy.
It's a chilling effect and therefore the academic environment is totally constrained.
I mean, you have to be so careful about what you say that you don't get reported for it.
Intellectual curiosity, intellectual inquiry, open inquiry, all of this is very, very constrained and curtailed.
Oh, I think it is really tragic because this, of course, is where minds are supposed to be sharpened through opposition.
And if there are massive swaths of topics that you simply can't talk about or other topics which you have to talk about a certain way, that to me is really tragic.
And I don't think...
Of course, that's not exactly when the New York University or other universities go around to high school campuses and say, you know, come here and in the brochures and so on.
I don't think this is specifically mentioned a lot that, you know, you have a free thought, critical thinking, reason and evidence.
The criticism of this endless list of particular topics is not going to be allowed and might cause Academic suspension might cause loss of privileges, might cause you to waste huge amounts of money and never get a degree.
It's not really discussed about until, in a sense, you've paid and you get to see what's behind the iron curtain of academic non-discourse.
Yeah, I mean, like, for example, gender.
You know, gender, you know, women's studies or gender studies or almost any classroom, to bring up the questions of, you know, Physiology, anatomy, genetics.
Or even question the wage gap.
The wage gap, of course, you can't question.
Evolutionary psychology is utterly verboten.
You can't take that approach to gender, that there's some sort of evolutionary history that may account for gender differences.
You can't even question the ever-proliferating number of genders.
Who knows how many there are, depending on which Which country you're in, in Facebook, there's 56 in the United States, 72 in Great Britain, so much X amount in Tinder, whatever.
So gender proliferates, the pronouns proliferate, and Harvard University, for example, says that a person's gender could change by day, day by day.
So they could have a gender du jour, such that, and then the university must honor They're gender du jour by pronouns.
Well, that seems entirely exclusionary and bigoted.
Why on earth would a gender be constrained to a full day?
I mean, why can't it change minute by minute?
Why can't it change second by second?
And you can slice down to milliseconds.
And so during the time that it takes to pronounce a pronoun, the gender could have changed and you're a bigot.
So it seems to me that's very exclusionary.
Ah, Mike, don't you miss the old days when Marxism simply sought to divide the world by class?
And now, of course, it's moved on to race and gender, and I guess various other flavors, because the class thing didn't really work out.
The proletariat revolution didn't really occur, as workers justly got unions and benefits and 35-hour work weeks and government jobs and so on.
So, of course, they had to pivot out of class as the way to set human beings against each other.
And now, Making everybody obsessed with race and gender as the way to pit human beings against each other and anything which unites us.
And I like to think that we're united by rational discourse, the Socratic method, reason, evidence, science, all of that good objectivity stuff.
So this radical subjectivity creates, in a sense, a multiplicity of worlds.
That cannot speak to each other.
We can't meet except in reality.
I mean, like two people having psychotic episodes can't agree on anything because they're fundamentally in different subjectivist universe.
And this breaking of the common bond of objectivity that unites us in our society, to me, is an egregious act against any kind of rational social compact or construct.
Yeah, and, you know, I've seen some of your I've got videos about, you know, where does this social justice come from?
And my argument is that it's very highly connected to postmodern theory.
And postmodern theory's notion that basically what they call social and linguistic constructivism, which means that basically we don't perceive objective reality.
It's not there. It's a construct that we produce and effectively project into the world.
So, therefore, whatever one says is true is true.
It's no longer a matter of empirical evidence.
This comes down to beliefs and language.
So whatever I believe I am, I am.
And whatever I say I am, that is what it is.
And, you know, empirical evidence or reality may or may not correspond to that.
It's kind of a non-conforming biology, if you will.
It doesn't conform to the gender ideals.
And so we have to basically go along with this kind of delusion, this mass delusion that is being perpetrated.
And to accept it without question, as if, you know, okay, yeah.
So somebody says they're part, as the one employee at Google did, if you look at the Google lawsuit, there's a person who said they're part dragonfly otherkin and ornate building.
I mean... Somebody sexually identifies as an ornate building.
Because, you know, a plane building would be crazy, but ornate, totally sane.
Right. Must be your name.
Well, this, okay, and this is the trap, and it is kind of a trick.
However much I would disagree with this radical subjectivism, this postmodernism, I would have some respect for it if it were consistent.
So if you're being attacked for being a white male, you say, no, I am an orange-hued garden gnome.
Therefore, I am a minority of one.
Therefore, I can't be racist.
And if they were to say, oh, yeah, you know, that's well played.
That's a very good point.
If you do self-identify as an orange-hued garden gnome who is a minority of one, then you can't be racist.
I apologize for calling you a white male.
And... Off you go.
But they don't, right?
So it's kind of like a con in that this is what is promised.
Again, this is what is promised is this radical freedom.
You can be anything you want.
You can do anything you want. You can be a dragon.
You can be a building. But if you're a white male who criticizes this, you know, airstrike from Mars and, you know, you are not allowed to self-identify as rational, that seems to be the big problem.
It's a trap. You know, our gender, our identity is a trap from which we cannot escape.
But others are just perfectly permissible to move wherever they'd like.
And also, you know, even the transgender movement can use a form of essentialism if they wish.
For example, they'll talk about the female brain.
So, okay, I'm in a male body, but I have a female brain.
So that is a very, you know, Biologically determinist idea.
First of all, it's lunacy. I don't think there is such a thing.
But to suggest that, you know, you have a female brain, that's very essentialist.
But James Damore couldn't say that there were any difference between sexes at all.
So it's okay if they're essentialist, but you can't be.
Well, it is funny and tragic, and it's another one of these paradoxes that kind of drives me crazy.
Listen, there's stuff on the right that drives me crazy too, but we just happen to be focusing on the left at this point, which is the left comes out of a kind of materialism and to some degree an anti-theism.
And, therefore, is a big fan of science, of reason, of evidence, and of materialism, and therefore of evolution.
And that, to me, is really quite fascinating.
It seems to me that Christians accept human biodiversity, gender biodiversity, based upon evolutionary psychology, even though some Christians, of course, will reject evolution.
Evolution. Whereas those on the left, who often reject religion of any kind, are then left with evolution as the methodology for explaining how we got here and so on.
And yet they say that the genders and races and the human brain and so on are just magically excluded from every evolutionary pressure under sun and moon, even though the brain is like a third of our caloric use and only 3% of our mass.
It's our most expensive organ.
And so that I find quite fascinating in that by abandoning religion, they don't seem to have ended up with scientific materialism.
They seem to have ended up with a kind of magical superstition of radical egalitarianism with, of course, an asterisk.
Everyone's equal. Everyone can self-identify.
Unless you're a white cisgendered male who happens to be a conservative or whatever, right?
I mean, and that to me is really one of the great paradoxes.
I mean, I thought, okay, I have my issues with religion, to put it mildly, but okay, let's get rid of religion.
Then at least you end up with science and evolution and reason and can discuss these things.
No, absolutely not.
Completely forbidden. It's like, well, then you're against science and therefore you're more, you don't even have the self-restraint of religion.
You just rank superstitious and aggression.
There's a lot of anti-scientism on the left, and it goes back all the way to the 90s when, I don't know if you recall the Sokol hoax.
Oh, tell people about that for people who don't know.
I love that one. There was a huge movement in the 90s called Science Studies.
Effectively, it was a bunch of humanities and social science scholars who were criticizing science from the left, from a leftist humanistic social science perspective, suggesting that science was socially, scientific theories are socially constructed, that they suggesting that science was socially, scientific theories are socially constructed, that they have, there's a huge amount of social input and ideology and things like that that go into the construction of scientific ideas
Well, there was a really radical contingent of that, the postmodern contingent, which basically believed that, you know, it was a radical constructivism and they believed that basically there is no, you know, one theory is as good as any other theory because we're constructing one theory is as good as any other theory because we're constructing them anyway So the material world isn't really there as such.
It's what we construct.
So Alan Sokol, this physicist at NYU, interestingly enough, He sent an article to this journal called Social Text and they were publishing a special issue on science studies.
And it's called Toward a Hermeneutic Understanding of Quantum Gravity, in which he argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct.
And Alan sent the paper into Social Text, one of the editors, Andrew Ross, also at NYU, and a couple other editors, they accepted it and they published it.
And then Lingua Franqua, in Lingua Franqua, another journal, Sokol announced that it was a hoax, that the entire thing was just a complete fraud on postmodern science.
They published it and it was a complete outrage.
The thing was completely ridiculous.
He just goes on and on and basically relativizing and subjectivizing every phenomenon on Earth, suggesting that quantum gravity, quantum physics even draws into question the possibility of existence itself as they're reading the text.
And interestingly, Ross had just, or previous to this, suggested that no way would ever a science studies journal publish an article that questioned gravity as a fact.
And lo and behold, within a month, he did just that.
And by the way, Sokal then, when he was criticized for this, and of course they got mad at him rather than wondering why they had such lax standards, is because he made all this stuff up.
I mean, he just punched... There's actually online, there's a postmodern generator, a postmodern newspeak generator where you can just get a whole bunch of verbal garbage that adds up to absolutely nothing whatsoever.
I sort of like...
It's like music. You know, you can play a whole bunch of flourishes on the piano, but the real music is a melody you can play with one finger.
And that is the same thing with ideas.
I mean, Socrates never used any complicated or technical philosophical phrases because he was trying to be of use to the society as a whole.
But he said, Professor Sokol said, hey, if you think it's easy to just make up a bunch of stuff and send it in, I invite everybody who's in the social sciences to come up with a physics paper and submit it to a physics journal if you've got no training in it and see what happens.
I mean, you know, they couldn't possibly do so.
And they just accused him of having no ethics and there was a huge backlash.
That's right. So gravity is subjective, but ethics are perfectly universal.
Ah, well, they've solved that problem.
They've solved that problem then.
Now, let's talk a little bit about...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I just want to talk a little bit about some of your background and then compare it to the way in which you've been discussed in some of the emails floating around at NYU. So, this is from the lawsuit itself.
So, Professor Rechtenwald has been published extensively, having authored numerous books and articles on wide-ranging topics, including writing, religion, the history of science, and philosophy.
Also not a big fan of Trump, if I remember rightly.
Just wanted to put that out there so that you got your bona fides from that group.
I love the deplorables. I'll say that.
I love the deplorables. And I hate the resistance.
So, Professor Rechtenwald regularly receives outstanding reviews from his students, many of whom appreciate his candid, no-nonsense, and non-doctrinaire approach to teaching.
And... After you took this leave of absence, I'm not sure I understood what triggered the escalation to the point where they were publishing medical information and they were publishing the private emails and I guess what was supposedly closed-door sessions.
What was it that triggered the escalation on the part of NYU to start publishing this stuff internally?
Yeah, when I went on the media and I said, you know, basically what happened...
I was contacted the day that the letter was posted, the open letter from the Diversity Equity Inclusion Group, and the same day that I met with the dean, I got a call from the New York Post, and they said, you know, we're following your case with interest.
What's going on over there? I was like, what case?
Because I didn't know that, you know, I just found out about the lead that minute.
She said, there's this open letter.
It's the first time I had heard about it.
So I went and read this open letter and I saw this condemnation.
So I thought, okay, so there is a connection between the leave, the open letter and my views, obviously.
So I can't stay silent.
If I do, I might be buried, you know?
And so I went on the record with the New York Post and then the press just started escalating after that.
And then at the end of the semester that I came back, the spring semester, I just posted something on Twitter about a book I was writing about social justice ideology.
And one of the people, I guess they were monitoring my email or my Twitter, one of the faculty saw it and started to attack me over it.
And then a blizzard of email attacks from other faculty started in these official email lists.
To all the faculty and all of the administration and our whole program.
You saw what they said and those emails are just outrageous.
And I, you know, I don't really want to go into the content of it if people want to look.
And it just, let's put it this way, there is nothing horrible that could be said about somebody that wasn't said, with no evidence whatsoever, and using purloined medical information that is highly private.
And so I don't want to even honor the language.
I mean, if you want to, that's fine, but it is unbelievable hatred and venom.
And this from a group of people who claim extraordinary sensitivity.
To opposing arguments.
And again, this is the hypocrisy that, you know...
Everything they say you're doing, they're doing to you.
Yeah.
I mean, so they can't hear Milo Yiannopoulos make an argument, say, against the wage gap, because they're so fragile.
They need their hug rooms.
They need their beanbags.
They need their videos of puppies playing with Frisbees in order to be able to survive such an onslaught of reason and evidence.
And so this fragile, this is what they call the crime bullies, right?
Like these supposedly very fragile people who can't stand opposing ideas without fainting can disgorge the most horrendous and verbally abusive venom in a public space with no evidence whatsoever.
That is truly astounding.
And I mean, while I certainly do have, I think I have sensitivity.
If somebody has been raped, then a discussion of rape is going to be upsetting.
I have sensitivity to that.
That doesn't mean nobody can talk about things, but I think sometimes warnings about very volatile topics can be helpful to people because it can be hard to manage your own reactions if you've had a very traumatized history.
So I'm sensitive to all of that.
But my lord, when they're calling you...
Racist while hurling actual racial epithets or aggregations of language at you when they call you hypersensitive while reacting like, you know, kids having a tantrum in a candy store.
That just seems a little bit hard to take this, you know, I think that a few biased reports could have been filed, I think, while looking at these emails.
Yeah, it's just incredible.
I mean, the utter hypocrisy, double standard, and lack of self-awareness is just stunning.
And while they're bullying me, hurling racist and sexist epithets of all kinds, calling me everything in the book, they're saying that I am the racist and the sexist and the bully.
Just amazing.
While attacking you for your gender and your race.
Gender and race.
I was reminded, of course, of Edward Snowden when reading through your, not because of the leaking of this kind of information, but because where you ended up having to take refuge.
I wonder if you could tell people a little bit about where your office is now.
Oh, yeah. So, basically, I met with the head of HR again, the head of Equal Employment Opportunity, and the EDO person said, you know, I think maybe we should move your office.
And I said, fine, I think so, too, because there was not only where, you know, was the environment toxic and quite hostile, there was the potential for violence because of one of the persons on that email list.
I really shouldn't say any more about it, according to my lawyers.
So I agreed, and they moved me into, of all places, the Russian department, which I just find a beautifully poetic irony in that.
Because of all this insanity by Russian collusion.
So I guess I am really just a Russian spy.
And I'm in the Russian department where they can keep an eye on me, I suppose.
It's just amazing, yeah.
And I'm completely away from them.
I have an office that's barren because I can't get any help getting my books moved.
They wouldn't give me anybody to help me move my books.
I got a lot of stuff. So I'm sitting in a barren office in the Russian department.
No name on the door.
No access to any facilities in terms of printing or anything at all.
I can picture a couple of buckets and mops, you know, some bleach.
And it is, of course, ironic that you flee Stalinist techniques and tactics and end up in a corner of the Russian building.
That is used to extend the culpability for what was said about you and to you, to extend that beyond the individuals to New York University itself.
So what's the argument that allows you to scale up, so to speak, on the defendants?
You mean, why can I sue them?
Yeah, not just the individuals, but the university itself.
Oh, the university itself, yeah.
There's a particular legal concept called...
Respondent Superior, and basically it suggests that since these emails were all through NYU's official email servers, and they all related to NYU business because they were suggesting that I was unfit to teach and things like that, that I was going to abuse minority students and women, which there's absolutely not a shred of any evidence.
I've had nothing but superlative evaluations from students.
Because NYU did nothing for five days and let this barrage go on without intervening, without mitigating any of the damages, and so on and so forth, they are considered responsible.
Yeah, people did it on university computers, I assume, in offices on university paid time and so on.
And as far as the people who acted in such an egregious manner, which, I mean, I'm sure NYU has their lawyers who would have looked at this stuff and informed of any liability.
Were there any consequences taken to your knowledge, even to say, well, we've got to delete this, or please don't send this stuff, this is inflammatory, this is legally questionable?
Has anything happened to the people who took these kinds of steps?
Well, after I met with those two officers, they did stop.
So I'm assuming they told them to stop.
But as far as I know, and I have no indication that there was any ramifications for them at all.
In other words, no punishment, no No sanctions, nothing.
They were just going to stop.
And what does this mean, Michael, to your career trajectory as a whole?
I mean, because there is a purpose behind all of this.
I mean, there is, of course, the immediate acting out the rage and the immaturity, as I would see it.
But what are the direct empirical effects that they're trying to achieve on your career?
They're trying to ruin me.
And I'm not a tenured faculty member.
I am a full professor.
That's the highest rank. We have rank, but we don't have tenure in our program.
So I have to be renewed every five years.
And I have another three and a half on my current contract.
Yeah, the people that would be on the committee to approve my renewal are the same faculty that was so contaminated by all those emails.
It's going to be drawn from that faculty.
So the chances of renewal are very slim.
They've basically curtailed my career by 10 to 15 years.
And I'm sorry for all of that.
And when you say, or what is said in the, I didn't quite follow this, I'm not aware of the sort of ins and outs of faculty.
It says he is unwelcome to serve on any NYU faculty committees and therefore is unable to accrue any service work, which is a prerequisite to employment renewal.
And what does that mean? Yeah, like there's committee work, you know, you meet and deal with like curricular issues or other types of A lot of it's busy work that they give each other to do to make themselves feel more useful, but some of it's vital.
I can't really serve on any committees because no one will have me on any committees.
If I come into a room, people will leave.
I've had instances where I try to get on an elevator and people wouldn't get on the same elevator.
They were on one and they wouldn't let me in.
So, I mean, this is just how far.
These people are extremely histrionic in their responses.
In fact, I've been called the devil.
I've been called Satan. I mean, I am evil incarnate.
For what, I don't know, but it's just incredible.
And this is kind of the job, though.
You know, like, we expect firefighters to expose themselves to a damn fire.
We don't expect surgeons to faint at the sight of blood.
Like, to be an intellectual, to be...
That is the gig, is to expose yourself to opposing ideas and may the best reasoner win.
That is the entire...
It's like, you know, well, if you work for the sewage company, it's like, well, I don't want to touch anything dirty.
It's like, well, I'm sorry, that's kind of the job.
And the fact that they would use these kinds of tactics, which would be embarrassing for people in grade school to do against an idea they disliked, it seems to me very much counter to the fundamental job description of being an intellectual and an educator.
It's totally antithetical to all intellectual activity that we're supposed to be carrying on in a university.
I mean, it's utterly the exact opposite of what's supposed to be happening.
And I think one of the things, to go back to the Trump thing, I think one of the things that really did it was that I called myself the deplorable NYU professor.
And that was on my Twitter account.
And I did that mostly out of Quite frankly, solidarity with the deplorables.
I found the castigation of this group of people by Clinton and basically the entire left intelligentsia and elitists on the East and West Coast.
I found it deplorable in itself to castigate these people and to call them such a name, put them in this basket.
First of all, what a terrible campaign strategy.
Who would switch sides after being called such a thing?
It was out of sympathy for those people to fly over states, people that I thought were being highly neglected in this culture of identity politics.
In fact, it's no wonder to me that the alt-right has risen in response to the identity politics of the left, as I see it.
I mean, it just makes perfect sense.
So I think that just that association with Trump was enough for them to declare me utterly, you know, deplorable in itself and therefore completely fair game for anything they might hurl at me.
More than half the country voted for Trump.
Therefore, according to the mandates of diversity, about half the faculty should be composed of Trump supporters.
But I don't think there's going to be a lot of outreach in that direction.
I don't think that the diversity extends to, say, half the population of the country.
No. In fact, after the election, they held these, you know, these sessions dealing with the election, healing from the election, teaching the election.
And it all had to do with how do we cope?
How do we survive? How do we live after a Trump victory?
Everybody agreed that he was just the worst thing that's ever happened, and therefore we should all look at our students as victims of this.
And we should all agree that teaching the election was about how to heal and how to respond to this horrible eventuality, you know?
Now, you've been kicking around academia, of course, for a long time.
I've actually never attended, I've spoken at, I think, but I've never attended an American university.
I did go to three good schools, good universities up here in Canada.
And when I was there, I guess it was in the 90s, Yeah.
It was, you could sort of see this foaming tsunami political correctness still brewing on the horizon, but I was still taught by a lot of old school professors, you know, professors in Canada.
I don't know how it is in the States.
Like, I think the only way you can be dragged out of office is with a stake through your heart because, I mean, just like these guys.
I was actually taught by a professor so old he became a professor when you only needed a four-year degree to become a professor.
That's how old the guy, he taught me Victorian literature and he was pretty good.
But Thinking about what you've seen change over the years in academia, because I think a lot of people get stories about what college was like from their parents, right?
So maybe their parents went to school in the 90s or the early noughties or whatever.
It seems to me That things have really changed over the past 10 to 15, maybe 20 years, probably closer to 10 to 15.
There has been a real cycle of the old school, the boomers retiring, the new kids coming in, so to speak.
And I think that people are judging, the people who are paying for college a lot of time, the parents are kind of judging college by how it was when they went to school.
And I keep reminding people, landscapes changed just a smidge since you were kicking around.
What have you seen in terms of changes over the decades?
Oh, wow.
I finished my BA in 82, so then I went into advertising for nine years.
I was an English major, so I studied the standard English literature, canon, basically the whole canon of literature, all the greats, and so forth.
Basically, you wrote about great literature, and that was that.
But in the interim, I went back to graduate school in 93.
And in the interim, a sea change had taken place that I had no idea about from the outside.
I could have followed, I guess, in the news, but the media didn't really cover the extent to which theory had utterly and totally taken over, for example, the English department.
But really, this is not just theory.
This is postmodern theory.
Postmodern theory took over in that interim, and everything was changed, and literature was no longer studied.
As an aesthetic artwork or something that has intrinsic value now, it was about what can we find in it?
You know, what racism, oppression, who's the victim here?
Who's the oppressor? How can I pin my identity interests on this?
So we have people studying literature basically willy-nilly projecting their own biases and their own identity agendas onto literature and onto texts and then, you know, basically making careers out of their identities.
This is what I noticed happening.
I bought into it to a certain extent.
I had to. I would have never made it.
So I actually went and got a PhD in literary and cultural theory.
And we studied things like feminisms, Marxisms, post-structuralism, semiotics, theories of the subject, post-colonialism, all of the isms.
And so I became extremely well versed in them.
And I didn't notice the sort of hostility building towards me as a white male in this until after a few years in the field.
So I had a few inklings of this in graduate school.
For example, I was in this class called Science Studies.
I studied that field of science studies that Sokol was heckling, that he made a joke of.
There are some legitimate stuff in there.
For example, there were a couple of women.
I think, you know, they were together.
They were a couple. And, you know, out of nowhere, they just start abusing me in the classroom, like making heckling sounds and farting noises while I'm trying to speak in the classroom.
So there were some indications that I was being targeted early for my identity, but I kind of brushed it off because I couldn't pay attention to those things if I wanted to move forward.
And it wasn't until I would say after Obama got into office and the social justice Gamergate stuff hit in 2009, I think, and then it started encroaching back into the university in the form of social justice.
And I would say it wasn't until 2015, actually, or 16, that this stuff really started to come home strong in its current incarnation.
And everything has shifted dramatically.
Everything is about identity.
I said that the universities, social science, these people will be walking around with mirrors, basically, because that's all they do is study their selves, That's all that's talked about.
Identity, identity, identity.
There's nothing else. So I've noticed that I sort of resented it because I don't study things like that.
I don't study my identity.
I don't study identity.
I think there are other things in the universe to deal with.
I do history of science.
Secularism is one of my main topics.
Identity just doesn't strike me as the be-all and end-all of everything, but it is now.
The hiring practices got more and more such that basically I squeaked in there before it was too late, but I don't think you have any chance of getting hired in any job as a white male today.
If you go in a hiring committee, they literally put the white males in a separate pile.
If there's nobody of quality in the other pile, that's the only time they'll take recourse to the white male pile.
It's really been the last three years that it's gotten extremely strenuous.
I see these It's kind of like it went into a disease that was Kind of on hold, it wasn't quite active all the time.
Well, they're not going to attack until they feel they have sufficient strength, right?
So they're building their roster, right?
They're building their power base, they're building their entrenchment, and they're getting the policies passed that allow them to attack with impunity.
And, you know, once they have the power, then you'll see the teeth come out.
But before that, of course, they're consolidating and therefore seem to be relatively inert.
Right. They seem to be in remission there for a while, but then it just came back with a real vengeance.
And it's just, it's extremely, extremely profound at this point.
It's a very difficult environment.
Right. Well, I mean, and this would be something that, not to speak for you, of course, but I would say that if you are A benefactor or a donor or somebody who supports the universities, don't assume that they're the same as when you went.
Don't assume that they're the same as what they are in the brochures.
If you want to be responsible with who you fund and what you pay for and who you donate to, you really need to figure out what's going on at the moment because the mission plan, I think, has changed.
Yeah, I mean, if you take a look at what they did at Yale, they took down, you know, Shakespeare's picture over the, you know, portal for the English department and replaced it with Audre Lorde.
I mean, Audre Lorde's a fine author, but basically everywhere, white males are being assailed, like in the, you know, historical white males.
You know, for example, at the University, I think it's University of London, don't quote me on that exactly.
There's a university, it's right there in Burkbeck Square, That doesn't teach in their philosophy department any white males because they took all the white males out of their curriculum.
So you mentioned trigger warnings.
The only problem I have with trigger warnings is that there are slippery slope to basically removing things from the curriculum.
I mean, Ovid's metamorphosis has been removed from curriculum because of different triggers of Dante's Inferno.
It's on this chopping block because it figures Muhammad in hell, for example.
Things like that. So all of these great pieces of literature are being totally banished from the curricula as we speak.
And it's really, I can't help but think that Western culture itself is really the target.
And I don't want to be one of these people like Western civilizations under attack.
It does seem to be Western culture that is really being targeted here.
Well, I will be one of those people, again, not to speak to you, who says that Western culture is under attack, because it is a one-sided opposition.
And I mean, it's one of the challenges, you know, if you accept Charles Murray's argument, he did a lot of research on this, where he was pointing out that if you look at the history of science, from 800 BC to 1950 AD, 97% of the world's progress in science came from Europe and North America.
Now, if you want, you can take issue with that, but nonetheless, if those numbers are anywhere close to accurate, then you really can't teach the history of science with a strong reference to China in the past, or Bangladesh.
These are the facts.
To me, it would be incomprehensible to go to Japan And say, well, now the Japanese have to hate everything about their history.
They have to get rid of anything about their history.
And you can't study Japanese authors in Japanese at a Japanese university.
That to me would be incomprehensible to me any more than I would go to Saudi Arabia and say, well, you can't study Saudi Arabian history in anything positive light, even though they...
Could have some negatives.
It could be thought here or there, as could Japan.
And I think that one-sided approach is a problem.
And the West stands in the way of the Marxist agenda, and white males in particular.
We know statistically that white males want smaller governments.
They want lower taxes.
They want more political freedom.
They are more for freedom of speech than just about any other group in the world.
And in the same way that the church stood between Marxism and their control of the state, the white males, the sort of traditional white culture, the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and particularly the classical liberal tradition, the argument from Locke about the need for the state to serve the needs of the people, all the argument from Locke about the need for the state to serve the needs of And I don't think in particular it's white males per se that are being attacked.
It's all these ideas. They happen to overlap a lot with white males.
But try being a black conservative and speaking out about these issues.
Try being a lesbian.
Try being Milo. Right, being a flamboyantly, not-so-subtly gay man and speaking out about these issues, it is not so much a hatred of race or of gender or of sexuality.
To me, it is a hatred of particular ideas that limit the power lust of those who want near-infinite control over the population.
They happen to aggregate in certain populations, and they also happen to be supported by reason, evidence, and history, which is why reason, evidence, and history all have to go bye-bye.
Right. I mean, recent evidence of history and the Enlightenment itself are purely, you know, they're oppressive.
They're oppression itself.
I mean, science is a white, masculinist, patriarchal discourse.
All of this stuff has to go.
I mean, you see this straight up.
There's no such thing. Objective reality, some students in California said, is a white, patriarchal discourse.
Oppressive idea.
And it's insane because they say numbers are subjective and there's no such thing as race, but we have to hit these numbers in hiring these racial groups.
It's like, pick one for heaven's sakes!
They pick both anytime they wish.
They always do that.
Whatever works for them at the time.
You know, they do kind of suggest, you know, you mentioned white males aren't necessarily the target.
There is a sense in which the white male, regardless of their class position or whatever, seems to be Taking the position of the ruling class in the minds of these people.
They think we're the ruling class.
And therefore, we want free speech because we want to oppress them further, you see.
Free speech is just a tool that we use to oppress them.
And that's why we're so for it.
But it's really a disguise.
They say this all the time.
Free speech is really just a ruse that we're holding in order to, you know, That seems kind of racist to me because if free speech is an equal playing field, then they're saying that white males are very much the best at free speech and all other groups fall short and therefore can't win and therefore need their bike locks to hit protesters with.
And that seems to me entirely biased.
I mean, let's just have free speech.
And, you know, I don't care what race, what color, what gender, any of that.
Just make a good argument and let's hear what you have to say.
But that is something on the left where they have this really double speak or double think really kind of approach where when somebody is violent against conservatives, well, they're just protesting.
They're just exercising their right to protest by hitting somebody with a bike.
So for them, violence is free speech, but the free speech of non-leftists is actual literal violence, and that justifies, of course, a violent reaction to mere language, to mere arguments, which is fundamentally the initiation of the use of force goes against very much everything that the West has been trying to restrain since the Magna Carta, which is the initiation of the use of force against usually legally disarmed citizens.
And it's nasty stuff, and it is very much the front lines of the culture wars as it stands at the moment.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the interesting thing is they want safe spaces from discursive violence.
And yet, you know, Antifa flipping over cars and setting them on fire, you know, pepper spraying people, this doesn't trigger them.
I guess, you know, so they're not really triggered by violence per se.
They're triggered by things they don't like and what they don't want to hear and what they don't approve of.
And so there's no real standard.
Discursive violence is this idea they have Really comes again from this postmodern idea of linguistic and social constructivism, because they believe that language is a material agent, so therefore it can enact violence by itself without any further actions by people.
So it's a very bizarre thing, but when they engage in this, And the only thing that we can do to oppose these double standards is to continue to point them out and continue to fight for freedom.
And I appreciate what you're doing.
I'm definitely going to follow this lawsuit.
So I really, really thank you for your time.
I want to remind people, it's Michael Recton-Wall Really appreciate your time.
I appreciate this clarification and this lifting the lid into the modern hell that is certain aspects of what used to be called free thought and critical thinking.
