Permission to Think - video playlist

Peter, thanks so much for being here.

I never thought I would start a conversation by saying, "Tell me about the conceptual penis

but tell me about the conceptual penis."

Peter Boghossian: The conceptual penis rises again.

It's actually one of the most cited papers according to Google Scholar in gender studies,

or in the top tier of cited papers.

Yeah.

Peter Boghossian: So the conceptual penis following in the footsteps

of Alan Sokal, who was or is still an NYU math and physics professor, wrote a hoax paper

and he submitted it to the number one post-modern journal in the world.

It was basically gibberish nonsense and he was concerned that they were misappropriating

scientific terms, particularly for political purposes, so he wrote this paper to expose that.

Peter Boghossian: So the conceptual penis falls in Alan Sokal's

footsteps and it's a more or less...

It's not a gibberish paper, but it certainly has a lot of gibberish in there.

A lot of, a lot of vulgarities for the penis, and we basically argue that penises are constructs,

and while there may be actual penises, we detail all the terrible things for which penises

are guilty and among those is climate change.

So it was a hoax paper and we did an expose in Skeptic magazine about it designed to show

that there were problems in certain bodies of literature, or were certain types of thoughts,

things that are morally fashionable.

Josh Szeps: What is the problem that you're trying to

tease out with the hoax?

Peter Boghossian: Well, even if I may step back before that,

so we published this paper and so many people said, "This paper doesn't do what you think

it does.

If you really want to show that there's a problem, that the scholarship is not rigorous,

that it's ideologically based, that it's not tethered to reality, there's insufficient

evidence for these claims, what you really need to do is you need to do A, B, C, D, E."

So, "Okay, let's do A, B, C, D, E." So my writing partner and I did exactly...

They gave us a roadmap and we followed the roadmap to a T.

Peter Boghossian: You need to publish more papers in more journals,

and you need to make certain kind...

We did everything they told us to do.

So the purpose of it, and we wrote it up in Aero magazine, was to expose the bankruptcy

of much of the scholarship that's coming out of these fields and that's informing public

policies.

Josh Szeps: And what are the fields that you're targeting,

that you're worried about?

Peter Boghossian: Almost everything with the word studies in

it.

Josh Szeps: That's a lot.

What does one form of studies have in common with another form of studies that's problematic?

Peter Boghossian: They're ideologically-based.

They start with their conclusions first and they work backward.

That's not the way science works.

That's not the way evidence ought to work.

You either have-

Josh Szeps: But the cultural studies professor might say,

"Well, that's because it's not science.

It's cultural studies.

It doesn't work according to a scientific method."

Peter Boghossian: Great, then-

Josh Szeps: "It's all about getting our hands dirty, reading

various texts and try and understand their relationship to each other and [crosstalk]

Peter Boghossian: Well, great.

Then don't claim it's true, and when someone wants to form public policies on it, say,

"No, no, no.

This is basically just... these are just our musings."

Josh Szeps: Can you give us examples of things that are

held to be true in these disciplines that you think aren't founded on fact?

Peter Boghossian: Oh, I'll give you things that contradict fact.

Now, one of the papers that we published was, we termed it fat body building.

We argued that there should be a classification in professional body building where, they

don't use the word morbidly obese, but morbidly obese people can come and display their fat

in non-competitive ways, and that body building competitions need to allow this.

I originally wrote, and I'm a big Star Trek fan, I wrote, "This is the final frontier

of fat activism to penetrate into the world of professional body building," and the journal

editor was upset at the word final frontier.

I took it from the Star Trek reference, but she looked at it as the slaughter of the Native

Americans.

Peter Boghossian: So a great example would be in the Journal

of Fat Studies, for example.

The entire journal is predicated on fat acceptance.

It's not what people would think.

Is it about A1Cs, the amount of sugar you had in your blood, or how many macronutrients

you should have, or should you intermittent fast?

It's about none of that.

It's a fat advocacy journal.

And so when these articles come out, the professors assign the articles in class and test students

on these.

So they're basically being asked right or wrong answers to things that are factually

incorrect.

And that's just one small example, but I think it's an example that shows directly how these

fields can...

They're kind of like toxins to people's conceptions of reality, particularly young girls' susceptibility

to, they call it, healthy at every size.

Josh Szeps: And this of course spans not just in terms

of body image, but across a whole suite of, I suppose, cultural-type issues, right?

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

Josh Szeps: And anyone who's done a university course

in the past 30 years is familiar with...

When I was at uni, instead of Australian history, there was a subject called Making Australia,

where you learned to problematize and complicate traditional narratives of Australian history

from the perspective of oppressed groups like indigenous Australians-

Peter Boghossian: Exactly.

Josh Szeps: ... which is a perfectly worthwhile thing

to do.

But I didn't yet know enough Australian history to understand even what we were doing, so

we were deconstructing things that hadn't yet been constructed to my 19-year-old mind.

Is this just something that universities play around with and always have?

Peter Boghossian: No.

Well, just on that, to borrow from Derrida, one of the French intellectuals, Helen Pluckrose

has a wonderful piece, How French Intellectuals Ruined the West.

Derrida does have a few nuggets.

One of the things he says is before you can deconstruct a discipline, you have to know

a discipline.

So you have to understand history, you have to understand the rudiments of what you're

talking about before you can attempt any form of deconstruction.

So, no, they're not playing around with this.

This is not fun and games.

These subjects are being taught and the conclusions that they have come to are being taught as

fact and they're being told that this is knowledge.

Peter Boghossian: And if you want, we can talk about idea laundering,

Bret Weinstein's phrase, what he said to me at a party one night, and I've published a

few pieces about it.

I think-

Josh Szeps: Yeah.

Let's talk about that idea laundering.

What is it?

Peter Boghossian: So idea laundering is a few people get together,

they have an idea about something, and if they're in the academy, if they're academics,

then they get together and they form a journal.

And so they discharge their moral impulses in the journal, so they go in the journal

as a feeling they have, a moral feeling or a conclusion, and they come out the other

side, they're laundered.

They come out as knowledge.

So then you have all these disciplines with all of these journals, with all of these articles,

making claims about reality that are simply not evidence-based.

They're completely disconnected from reality.

Josh Szeps: And the point is that someone can come up

with a hair brained idea and by putting it through the process of peer review and getting

published in a journal, which in a scientific context carries a lot of weight and lends

it a certain credibility, they're able to make it appear like it's a stronger opinion

than it is or that it's even factual.

Peter Boghossian: Not even in a scientific case.

That should be the gold standard of knowledge.

With all this disinformation and fake news and what have you, we have to have a source

where we can look that we can trust.

There's a crisis of confidence in our institutions now.

There's a legitimacy crisis.

And if people can't look to the peer reviewed literature, then where are they looking to?

They're looking to their own ideological sinkholes, right?

They become absorbed and they fall down a rabbit hole.

Josh Szeps: So you come up with this idea, this hoax paper,

the conceptual penis, and these other hoax papers and you submit them and they get published,

and then you use that as a way of saying, "Look, these idiots will publish essentially

anything and give it credibility."

[crosstalk]

Peter Boghossian: Not anything.

I'm going to interrupt you because this is very, very important.

This is the linchpin of the whole thing.

They won't publish anything.

They won't publish papers that contradict the narrative.

They'll only publish papers that are written in alignment with the dominant moral orthodoxy

that they're pushing.

That's the kind of papers that they publish.

Josh Szeps: Got it.

So you-

Peter Boghossian: It's not that they'll publish anything.

Josh Szeps: Right, so you tailored the conceptual penis

to inhabit a worldview that you thought would be sympathetic to them, a world view of patriarchy,

a worldview of misogyny, a worldview of the primacy-

Peter Boghossian: Yes, and more importantly, in this worldview,

and I've been doing this for so long and I've read so much literature, I truly, at this

point, understand how they think about things.

So for the conceptual penis, everything is a construct.

It's all constructs.

That's not to say that there's no objective reality.

That's a fine point.

They're not denying objective reality.

They're just saying that knowledge of objective reality is mediated through power relations

and discourse, and so part of the worldview is that everything is a construct.

So if everything is a construct, well then the penis must be a construct.

Well, if the penis is a construct, what follows from that?

Josh Szeps: Is it not true that our understanding of reality

is mediated by power dynamics?

Peter Boghossian: Yeah.

To a certain extent, it is, sure.

That doesn't mean you can't know reality.

That doesn't mean when you go into a bank and you want to make change, that you're going

to say in your reality it's something different.

That doesn't mean that...

Getting back to the fat studies example, one of the things they want to do to push a worldview

or push a narrative, and this has been utterly devastating and it's completely genius, is

they change the meaning of words.

So for example, in the journal of fat studies they don't use the word obesity.

The word obesity is a word that's used within medicine.

It's a medical narrative, whereas fat is a descriptor.

So they're saying that there are different narratives and they're promulgating, they're

pushing, they're forwarding the one narrative where they use the word fat and then that's

a kind of discourse in which people engage.

Josh Szeps: Are you noticing a greater abuse of words?

Peter Boghossian: Yeah.

Not only an abuse of words.

People are completely changing...

You could take this for what it's worth.

This is my opinion about how this has metastasized throughout our institutions.

It's not that they're making up words, they have neologisms, or what have you.

It's that they're completely changing the meanings of words and they're taking words

with a positive valence, changing the meanings of those words and then instituting policies

on the basis of the new meanings of words.

Josh Szeps: What kinds of examples?

What kind of [crosstalk]

Peter Boghossian: I could give you tons of examples.

Equity is probably the most prominent example.

Most people don't know what equity means.

Well, let me rephrase that.

Most people have heard of the word equity in terms of the amount of money you have in

a house, if you go to the bank, right?

So they've taken a term.

It has a positive valence.

And my kid's school now, everything is equity.

My former employer, Portland State University, every email, equity, equity, equity.

But when you ask people...

Peter Boghossian: I was at a faculty department meeting and

somebody actually didn't know what equity meant.

They looked it up and they said fairness, and they said, "Well, okay.

It just means fairness."

And I said, "Okay, well, you want to use the word fairness, let's do that."

Equity is the opposite of fairness and it's the absolute antithesis, it's the antithesis

of equality.

[crosstalk]

Josh Szeps: You say it's the opposite of fairness.

It's often constructed to make it distinct from equality where critics of equality say,

"Well, it's all very well to let everyone start out at the same place, but because of

historical injustices and intergenerational trauma and so on, it's actually important

to give people who are falling behind an extra benefit," which is not equality.

That would be equity because that's actually the fairest way to make sure that outcomes

are more similar.

Why is that not fair?

Peter Boghossian: Because, two things.

Did you see how you smuggled in outcomes there?

Josh Szeps: Yeah.

I didn't smuggle it in.

I intentionally put it in there because that's what they're talking about.

Peter Boghossian: But at no point in the conversation had outcomes

previously come in, so equity-

Josh Szeps: Well, I mean it's relevant to people who think

that fairness should be judged by outcomes, not just inputs.

Peter Boghossian: Okay.

I guess in that case, I would have to ask how they derive their conception of fairness?

Is that a rationally derivable conception of fairness?

On what principle?

So, we could talk about John Rawls, we could talk about...

How is that notion of fairness, how do we get that notion of fairness?

Josh Szeps: Well, that's a good question.

I mean, I'm not the one who's putting forward this idea of fairness, but I think it comes

to a lot of people instinctively that if you have a system that is sort of a rigged game

where you end up with outcomes that are different for reasons that are trivial such as, say,

the color of one's skin or one's sex, then it's fairer to try to modify those outcomes.

Peter Boghossian: Okay.

So when you say [crosstalk]

Josh Szeps: I don't know that they're consciously doing

a Rawlsian theory of justice [crosstalk]

Peter Boghossian: Well, I'm just saying...

In other words, I'm trying to differentiate it from...

I'm trying to figure out where they get this notion but, okay, let's just accept that by

fiat.

But even in that case, that means by definition that some people have to be treated unfairly,

by definition.

Josh Szeps: Yes.

Peter Boghossian: Okay, so then-

Josh Szeps: You mean the people who have the privilege

need to be treated unfairly to create space for the unprivileged to end up in the same

spot.

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

Josh Szeps: Yeah.

Peter Boghossian: So then equity is by definition, not fair.

Josh Szeps: I see.

Yes, well there's a differential treatment, but it depends on how you define fair, as

you say.

Whether or not you're looking at outcomes or only inputs.

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

Traditional definitions of fair have...

I mean, so again, these are conversations we're having and we can...

I'm happy to actually have this conversation, but one thing that I found to kind of bring

it up a level...

I'll go down with you more if you want... is that people are using equity as a synonym

for equality, and they're using it as a broad paintbrush for fairness.

Peter Boghossian: And I'm saying that it's the antithesis of

equality and it's not fair because some people have to be treated differently.

Now, if you want to claim that it's fair, for example, to discriminate against Asians

on the basis of their admissions to universities, particularly in math and sciences, I'd like

to hear that argument, because it's equitable but it's not fair.

Josh Szeps: Since we're digging into the kind of what's

underpinning the sort of moral philosophy of these conceptions, something that's just

occurring to me which is there are clearly differences in people's conceptions about

fairness as to whether or not you're looking at group outcomes or individual outcomes.

And it strikes me that there's been a shift in recent years from looking at fairness towards

individuals to emphasizing fairness among groups.

And I wonder whether or not you can enlighten me on that.

Peter Boghossian: Right.

Well, not everyone who participates in an identity group, for example, has the same

socioeconomic status.

Jaden Smith, Will Smith's son, would be an example, or O.J. Simpson or what have you.

Now that doesn't mean that the mode statistically of people don't fall into certain categories,

but you can't assume that because someone is white, a poor person in the Appalachians,

that they have any kind of substantive advantage.

In fact, quite the contrary.

So in a sense this orthodoxy has bartered socio economic status for identity markers.

Peter Boghossian: And I think that traditional leftism has wanted

to level the field in terms of the economic hierarchy, and now one of the things that

you see happening is the people who are in the [inaudible] ideology want to level the

field in terms of the privilege hierarchy.

Look, it is a fact that some people have certain unearned privileges and it is a fact that

some people just get, to use a vulgarity, they just get shafted.

I mean, there's just no question about it.

We have the answers to that and the answers are equality of opportunity.

For example, fixing our school system and giving...

So here's my question to you.

I don't know how it is on your island, but have...

It's an in-joke, the island reference.

Josh Szeps: Hey, I love that you call Australia on our

island.

You could call it a continent which sounds more impressive.

Peter Boghossian: That is, that is actually very...

That is far more impressive.

So with all this talk about equity, has there been a single instance of a school or a school

system that's been fixed because of the talk of equity?

I don't think so.

And if you know of one, let me know.

I haven't heard of one.

So people are talking about equity and they're trying to jerry-rig the outcome.

Meanwhile, poor people, and again, I say poor people and you can look at the overlap, like

venn diagrams, who happen to be, for example, African American, are still suffering and

struggling in those school systems and what have we done to help them?

We've tried to jerry-rig the outcomes.

Peter Boghossian: What we should be doing is giving every...

again, I'm speaking only for Americans, but I think this extends to the English-speaking

world and beyond.

I do think this is a universal principle.

We need to give all kids a public education of the first rate and not worry about jerry-rigging

the outcomes.

Josh Szeps: Wouldn't the defender of equity say, "Well,

you can say it hasn't succeeded but this is a long struggle, and there is no-

Josh Szeps: The equity say, well, you can say it hasn't

succeeded, but this is a long struggle.

And there is no finish line and we've only been trying to sort of pass three seconds

in evolutionary time.

And for most of the history black students, students of color haven't had the same opportunities

as white students, so it's time to address that.

Peter Boghossian: I guess, so how?

I think we already have an answer to that and it's to adequately fund schools in poor

districts.

This is not a mystery, this is not a secret, we know, and it's not just funding, it's a

complex Lyell Asher from Lewis and Clark has written extensively about this and other people.

I mean, we know pretty much what works at this point.

For example, we know phonics as opposed to whole language.

I mean, we know discrete things that work and we need to start moving, it's not just

a question of funding, I don't want to leave with that impression, but it's a question

of, what are the best evidence-based practices?

Peter Boghossian: Which is another problem with the ideology,

is you have a shift away from objectivity and evidence and towards subject, which are

considered white conceptions and patriarchal conceptions and towards lived experiences.

This philosophy is called a subjective turn.

A turn away from the objective and turn toward the subjective with lived experiences, and

that makes it incredibly difficult to put an evidence-based policies in our school systems.

Josh Szeps: Let's talk about that because I mean, it's

sort of, if there are analogies there between the shift from a focus on, are we being fair

and just to the individual to a conception of how we're being fair and just to this entire

group, which may involve strategies that are actually unjust and unfair towards individuals,

because we're looking at group dynamics instead of the individual?

And then in parallel, we've got this thing that you just alluded to, which is transitioning

from, "All right, let's look at the facts, let's look at the data, let's talk about the

problem, let's assess what there's evidence for in terms of improving that problem to

more of a, this is my lived experience, you as a insert identity here don't really have

standing to talk about this because you couldn't possibly walk a mile in my shoes and so on

and so forth."

And then essentially who even gets to talk about what solutions we should be considering

becomes cattail.

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

I want to go back to something you said before.

I think that the difference between individuals and groups is somewhat illusionary.

For example, if you privilege one group by definition another group has to receive this

actually is systematic or systemic discrimination.

You can't just privilege one.

If there are only so many slots, for example, in Yale's, I want to say some STEM field like-

Josh Szeps: Engineering.

Peter Boghossian: Yeah.

If there are only so many slots in civil engineering, for example, or particle physics or what have

you, and by definition, you would have to discriminate against some groups of people.

And again, you see this happening with Asian, so it's not like I'm making this up.

This is the courts have legally decided this, so I'm...

You could-

Josh Szeps: And when you say this is happening to Asians,

just to clarify what you mean is that there are actually fewer Asians admitted into top

courses in the United States because they're being discriminated against because they would

otherwise be too high up-

Peter Boghossian: No.

Kenny Xu book is written about this just an inconvenient minority, it's an amazing book

that I'd recommend reading.

No, it's not that fewer are admitted, it's actually that more are admitted, more Asians

are admitted.

I say this also as a father of a little girl who's Asian, and I'm also thinking-

Josh Szeps: That means few are admitted than would be

if there were a colorblind admissions policy?

Peter Boghossian: That's correct, yeah.

So they have to raise the standards.

So they raise the standards for some racial groups.

So basically it's a type of systemic discrimination against people.

And my claim to you is that that is unfair even if the reason is to redress past injustices.

If you want to redress past injustice, the way to do it is to truly make the school system

a first grade school system and provide everybody with fun, tasty lunches, education of the

first rate, breakfast, I mean, you'd really need to create the opportunities to allow

people to flourish.

Peter Boghossian: But we're not doing that, we're too preoccupied

with outcomes, and we're preoccupied with social grievances and we're preoccupied with

destroying or ripping down a system instead of...

So the Audre Lorde’s phrase, I think is very useful here, "The master's tools cannot disable the

master's house."

You can't dissemble, the ma the master's house is patriarchy white supremacy, et cetera,

the tools that built the house are reason, evidence, epistemic, adequacy science.

And so all of those conceptions are considered to be null and void in terms of they just

perpetuate the system, it's called privilege, preserving epistemic pushback.

Josh Szeps: You just throw in a word there, white supremacy

that I just want to pick up before we move on.

It's a term you didn't hear very much five or 10 years ago.

It basically meant people in white hoods carrying flaming torches through the streets and neo-Nazis.

Now white supremacy is everywhere and nowhere, do you know what it means?

Peter Boghossian: Well, the semantic range of white supremacy

has expanded significantly for that.

And Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in Cynical Theories talk about this, it's an important

point.

And so there were, and there still are literal Ku Klux Klan members fortunately that's decreasing

some wonderful work just parenthetically by Daryl Davis on that if you haven't seen it.

I'd highly recommend Daryl Davis's work, he's a black guy who goes in to speak to clans

members, be friends them, and they give him their abrogated hoods.

It's an orderly mind, genuinely mind-blowing, I don't know any other way to say it, but

balls of steel.

Josh Szeps: You can say that, we're on an Australia free

zone island apparently, so you can get away with a little saucy language.

Peter Boghossian: Okay.

All right, that's way saucy language for today.

So the range of that, so now I published an article I think in 2014 that said, "Privileges

the original sin," so to kind of whiteness as a kind of stain.

And if you look at Ibram kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin De Angelo, there's something

intrinsic to the property of whiteness that is or is inherently racist.

And John McWhorter and Coleman [Hughes] who was in Glenn Loury have written very elegantly rebutting

that, but that's the problem.

If you don't buy into disputation and argumentation and debate and dialectic is that you don't

even listen to that, why bother you have your lived experience?

Josh Szeps: Well also, they're not real people of color

because they're not talking the way the orthodoxy would require them to.

I mean, many of those people are my friends and the amount of shit that they have to put

up with online about being called uncle Tom's or something, because they a verge from what

they're supposed to think as good people of color.

Peter Boghossian: So correct.

So lived experience is only lived experience and we'll relate to sort of diversity, which

is very important.

It's only lived experience if it comports with the narrative.

So when you hear diversity, just translate it as intellectual homogeneity.

So excuse me, Larry Elder, who's running for governor of California and after the recall

with Gavin Newsom, he is not considered to be a diverse candidate because he holds views

that just don't comport with the orthodoxy.

So even there when you're talking about what is diversity, what is the lived experience

of it while the lived experience of a black man means he's not a true blood.

I mean, what was the thing Biden said?

"How can you vote for Trump, you're not a true black guy."

I can't remember what it was.

Josh Szeps: He said something like, "If you don't vote

for me, then you're not really black."

Peter Boghossian: Yeah, something utterly deranged.

As if you see the same thing with Muslims when people who aren't Muslims look at somebody

and they paint the whole brush by the extremist section.

So someone's not a real Muslim unless they're blowing stuff up, right?

So it's a kind of injustice that they do toward people who believe.

And in fact, you can be...

I know that this is a hard, not for you I hope, but you can be black or white or Jewish

or Asian, you can be Asian and not good at math.

Peter Boghossian: A friend of mine [Jujitsu] told me a funny

story.

He was at a restaurant, he's a Korean, he's at a restaurant, and they were divvying up

the bill at the and they just handed him the bill.

He was like, "What are you handing me the bill for?

And then we said, "Well, you're good at math?"

He didn't think it was a microaggression, he thought it was really funny, but you can

be Asian and not be good at math, you can be black and be conservative, you can be white

and have...

Your identity marker tells you nothing about what you believe.

Josh Szeps: That's right.

And yet it does tell you something about some of the experiences that you might've had,

which is what leads people to believe that they have greater standing to hold an opinion

about something if they have a lived experience, right?

I mean, I have just never experienced racism.

I've experienced homophobia, because I'm married to a man, I've experienced anti-Semitism because

I'm a Jew, there are certain experiences that I've never had.

And when you talk about what about the disadvantaged working class white person who supposedly

carries around this white privilege?

Well, then this person is not privileged in economic sense, but it is true to say that

they have never faced the fact of racial discrimination for being a person of color.

Peter Boghossian: Right.

So I would put forth this.

So let's say that you aggregate the live again, but even to aggregate the lived experiences

of people, you need to use some kind of science.

You need to use surveys, you just can't get around using the tools of science at some

point, but okay, let's just go with it for a second.

But even in those cases, if there's anti-Semitism or homophobia or some kind of bigotry, just

as a pedestrian but important example in this country because it comes up so frequently

are black people pulled over by the police more than white people, right?

This is not a difficult question to answer.

In fact, it couldn't possibly be any simpler, barring some wrenches that are in there.

You can use the tools of science to test that.

Peter Boghossian: So if black people say, "Well look, this is

terrible, we're being pulled over by the police and we don't like it," but you don't hear

those complaints by white people, what you would do is then you could conduct a study

on it, right?

You could look at body cams and you could correlate because every time they pull someone

over, they read the license into David's, you can use the tools of science to figure

out if those claims are true and then you can make public policies to say, "Okay, so

this is a problem, so what do we do about it?

How do we address these problems?"

But even then the personal experience only leads you to think about what kind of tools

of science you can impose to give policy makers the most accurate data before they make decisions.

Josh Szeps: When things started erupting on university

campuses, and I think one of the incidents that a lot of people might recall is when

Nicholas Christakis tried to appease his students.

And you may just want to tell a younger Australian audience what happened there, it sort of was

an inciting incident, I suppose, in the university culture wars that have ended up with you in

the position that you're in, which we'll get to in a moment.

Josh Szeps: One of the things that one of the students

yelled at him was, "It's not your job to tell us what to know, it's your job to make us

feel safe."

And what you're talking about there about black people pull over more than white people,

you can have questions about what proportion of the male population is committing domestic

violence when you hear about allegations that all men are predators, there are all these...

And it's extremely sensitive to even broach these subjects, because it sounds like you're

being a defender of rapists or racist to worse.

Josh Szeps: But when you're digging down into the data

of this stuff, there is a parallel conversation going on at the moment with a lot of people,

which is like, "Who gives a shit about data?

This is my life we're talking about it."

But if I'm the girl who's shouting at Nicholas Christakis on university campus, I want to

feel as though I'm safe, right?

I want you as a partner in helping me to feel safe, regardless of what club says.

Peter Boghossian: Thank you for saying that, that's part of

the defense mechanism of the ideology.

The ideology has multiple defense mechanisms, not only to keep it in place, but to keep

other people from questioning the ideology at all.

So racist is a tool that they have in the toolkit if you contradict something, or harassment

is another one for my former university, Portland State University published or the Faculty

Resolution said that criticism of...

And I'm happy to send you these videos at a Faculty Senate Resolution that criticism

of critical race theory is a type of harassment.

Peter Boghossian: And again, this is a public because of the

coronavirus, these were all recorded and placed on YouTube, and then they took it down and

they wanted the National Association of Scholars to take down their commentary on it.

One of my colleagues published a critique on myself and another faculty member that

basically saying criticism of ideas is harassment.

So when you criticize these ideas, you're harassing, I'm getting to your point.

I published a piece in the Chronicle [Chronicle of Higher Education, CHE], "Criticism of ideas is not harassment,"

in fact, not only is it not harassment, it's the coin of the realm, this is what we do, we publish,

we engage, we debate.

So the ideology has certain things to keep it in place.

Another thing is platforming saying, "Oh, you're providing a platform, you're talking

to someone who's has an odious view."

And not only that, there's platforming by proxy.

So it's not that you don't want to have a conversation with someone, they don't even

want someone to have a conversation with you so you're guilty by association, so that all

of those things keep the ideology from experiencing any external criticism, they keep it in place.

Safetyism now, so that's the contextual background for your question.

Peter Boghossian: So safetyism is another thing, and we see

this all the time now, people say "I feel unsafe."

Okay, so if you feel unsafe, you should probably take a creative writing class, right?

And ethics class and philosophy is not the place for you, right?

Maybe you should sing on a street corner with a guitar or something, but to really make

a substantive engagement of more questions and more issues you have to take a sincere

look at the other side.

I mean, you just have to, because if you don't, you're validating the conclusions that you

came in with in the first place.

And the purpose of an educational institution and the purpose of an educational period should

not be to deepen people in the beliefs they have in that they come into the classroom.

Peter Boghossian: I mean, Plato Book 7 of the Republic it's

to lead people out of, right?

It's not to put stuff in it's to lead one out of a state of ignorance.

And to do that, you have to have some kind of challenging of the beliefs that you have.

If not, you're just kept in the cave.

Josh Szeps: Safety is another way, we're doing the greatest

hits of words that have become abused in recent times.

You mentioned equity, we went to diversity.

Oh diversity is also interesting because in the states, I mean, this was a usage of the

term diversity that I hadn't quite encountered.

But I lived in the states for a while and one of the first periods that I was there,

I read a review about this great new diverse show, which was super diverse.

And I think it was Blackish where every single cast member is an African-American.

I turned it on and I didn't even understand, I thought there must have been a mistake because

diverse would mean people from lots of different cultures, and then I tuned in and it was the

least diverse show on television in terms of just meaning of the word, but that's just

another way that words change, and safety is another one now that we've come-

Peter Boghossian: Yeah.

So can I also put another one that dovetails with safetyism that will help us understand

safety ism is inclusion.

So I have a series of videos that I'm putting out now, will be out next month.

I have a nonprofit that I just started since I left my job National Progress Alliance.

And one of the first things that I'm trying to do is to clarify the meanings of words.

And I do this in 60 seconds in very basic language, so let's let me prep to see how

good this is.

So inclusion basically means, it doesn't mean what you think it means.

So maybe you know because you're in the space, but ask someone in the crew over there what

they think inclusion means, and they'll probably, almost definitely say, "Well, including different

people," that's not what inclusion means, I'll tell you what inclusion means.

Peter Boghossian: Inclusion from the literature means making

people feel safe, making people feel welcome.

If people are not welcome, they do not feel safe.

How do we make people feel safe?

Well, how do we make them feel unsafe?

How do we make them feel unwelcome?

Well, if somebody says something that is offensive to somebody or bother someone or disturb someone,

then they won't feel welcome, but we want people to feel welcome.

So inclusion means restricted speech, that's what inclusion means.

Every time you hear the word inclusion, you should translate that in your head as restricted

speech, because that's the only way people can feel welcome is if you restrict their

speech.

Josh Szeps: [crosstalk].

And a counterpoint to that, well we're restricting speech, but we're restricting hate speech

where we're creating an inclusive space.

And if you want to come in here peddling, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and so on,

then we'll exclude that.

But that's in the sort of a more inclusive environment.

Peter Boghossian: Yeah.

I'll be very blunt with you, that's the kind of thinking that people, they're using a blunt

instrument and they haven't truly thought about it, and it's a pretty easy line to make.

If something is an immutable property of a person, then don't criticize it but all ideas

should be criticized.

For example, I have gray hair, that's an immutable property, I'm 55 years old, that's an immutable

property because I can't change it, there's no point in criticizing it.

I'm heterosexual, I can't change that.

I never like, "Oh, at 15 I've decided I've made this thought."

Peter Boghossian: But even if I could make that thoughtful decision,

there's a difference between an immutable property of a person and an idea.

And we need to be absolutely ruthless with ideas, and there's no criticism of immutable

properties of people because they can't change it.

Josh Szeps: Right.

But some ideas make people who possess certain immutable properties uncomfortable because

it would leave them with the short end of the stick so to speak.

If you were in an environment which people were saying that someone of your age and your

hair color should not receive the same tax benefits as everybody else, then you would

feel like that was not an inclusive place for you.

Peter Boghossian: I'll tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, I tried an experiment, this was before the pandemic.

I had white hair back then as well.

They don't call it gray hair anymore, they call it silver hair.

Josh Szeps: Yeah.

I like that because I can just see it coming in on the side, so [crosstalk].

Peter Boghossian: Yeah, they call it silver.

So I tried an experiment just for fun.

I think it's the first time I've ever told anybody this, but I like to stretch because

I think stretching is important.

And I go to a local gym here, it's one of those...

Peter Boghossian: ... go to a local gym here, it's like the

McDonald's of gyms, and they have basketball courts everywhere.

I would always sit on the basketball court, just as an experiment, stretching to see if

I would get picked.

Then I would tell people I don't want to play because I was just marching and stretching,

but it was an experiment.

It was for science.

What I would do is I would see when I would get picked, and invariably, I'd either get

picked dead last or I wouldn't get picked at all.

Now, the question is if your goal is to win, is it unfair?

Is it unjust to not pick me because of my immutable characteristics?

Well, the answer, that's exactly the kind of thing that you need to have a conversation

about.

If you cannot have a conversation about whether or not... look, the solution to all of this

is have a conversation, is have a dialogue, is to make a moral infrastructure from what

you can formulate your public policies.

But that moral infrastructure, like when you started the conversation about equity, that

moral infrastructure has to be rooted in rationally drivable principles or it's just arbitrary.

You're basically just making shit up, right?

So, we need to have a way to think, "Okay, well, that's a person."

What if some evidence comes out that there are racial differences in IQ?

Does that mean that we don't let people from a certain country in?

Or from your continent.

See, I've elevated you to a continent.

Josh Szeps: Thank you so much.

I appreciate the upgrade.

Peter Boghossian: We found that people from Australia or what

have you, it would usually be racial groups just saying that because it makes it more

palatable.

So, does that mean we don't have that conversation?

Does that mean that that's just off the table?

Here's the consequence of not having that conversation when confronted with data.

There will be people who are more than willing, not only to have that conversation, but to

come in with answers to those problems.

There will be people almost always on the extreme political spectrum who have answers

or will claim to have answers to those questions.

If you've not prepared yourself for how to have those conversations, that's my book,

How to Have Impossible Conversations, then you simply won't know what to say.

Peter Boghossian: That's the situation in which we find ourselves

now, although with less morally contentious and difficult topics.

With even the lowest of low hanging fruit, we're producing generations of students, I

think, a generation and a half at this point, who are utterly incapable of even knowing

what the other side is to have a substantive rebuttal of those criticisms.

That's a problem for all of us, because they're bringing that into the classroom.

Josh Szeps: Yeah.

I think you've really hit on the crux of things there, because even if people don't care about

being intellectually rigorous, and even if they only want their own side to win, and

they want safety ism and comfort and inclusion to take dominance over difficult conversations,

at the end of the day, their side isn't going to win if they don't know how to articulate

their position against the things that they disagree with.

This reminds me a little bit of the sense of safety or un safety around the gay marriage

debate that took place in Australia in 2017.

Unlike the United States, where it was a judicial decision, here it was a referendum, and everybody

voted.

There were a lot of people saying, "This makes me feel unsafe as a member of the LGBTQ plus

community.

This should not be a conversation, because this is a human right."

Josh Szeps: My position was always, how do you know that

it's a human right unless you talk about why it's a human right and hear the people who

don't think that it's a human right?

So, I had the Archbishop of Sydney on my radio show, and we hashed it out.

He didn't have any very good reasons as to why gay marriage shouldn't exist.

But the existence of the conversation, whilst difficult, was more valuable than my remaining

safe.

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

So, you handled that like an adult, right?

You had him on.

Hey, listen, awesome that he came on your show, right?

I mean, that's fantastic.

Kudos to him and kudos to people who were honest with you.

If someone says, "I don't like gays, I don't think they should be married," you might disagree

with them, but that's a person who's honest.

You can have conversations with people who are honest like that.

But when people are-

Josh Szeps: I mean, the other bait and switch that happens

is that if the person does like gays, but just doesn't think that they should be married

because they have a religious objection to they want to preserve that particular institution,

but they're not at all homophobic, that position is now erased from the landscape altogether,

and that person is by definition a homophobe.

You know?

Similarly, if you dispute what should be done maybe to address racial inequalities, then

you are by definition a racist, even if you're definitely not a racist, which brings us to

that word.

We've talked about these other words that are going to used.

Peter Boghossian: Okay.

Josh Szeps: I just want to come back to white supremacy

and racism.

Peter Boghossian: Okay.

All right.

You just said so much there.

We can disambiguate terms in a minute.

Let's slow down.

Okay.

We know, we know that the way to come about consensus and move forward in a democracy,

we know it's town halls, it's to hash out issues.

I'm not a fan of debating myself, because I think that it forces people to stick to

a conclusion that they think might be wrong, so there's a kind of a win element.

I think conversations are far better than debate.

But, okay, whatever, debate, conversation, we know we need that to move forward, just

like when you had the bishop on.

Again, good for the bishop for coming on.

The first thing I would have said to him is, "Thank you for coming on my show.

I really appreciate it," because right now we have people who simply won't talk to you

about anything.

They're completely convinced they know the right answers to moral questions.

Peter Boghossian: So, how do we address that problem?

That is not an epistemic problem, that's a moral problem.

That's a problem of, as Jonathan Haidt says, in The Righteous Mind, that morality binds

and blinds.

Morality binds and blinds.

So, to solve that problem, we need to change the moral mind about how people view dialogue

and safety ism, and what's happening now is this idea that they think that they should

feel safe is trumping the idea to have honest, open, civil conversations.

Was that clear?

Josh Szeps: That was absolutely clear.

Now let's take that to the next component of my multi-pronged octopus of a question,

which was about racism, white supremacy, and those terms.

Peter Boghossian: Okay.

The meaning of racism has changed.

We've brought in power to the equation, whereas before it was discriminating against someone

on an individual on the basis of a racial stereotype.

That was what the definition has been for a long time.

I think that's a rational, drivable idea that this ought to be universally morally repudiated,

and it is fundamentally odious.

But you've added the idea of power.

When you add the idea of power, you, again, from the postmodern notions, and really the

best source for this is Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories, which I mentioned

before.

When you add the notion of power into the equation, it completely changes it.

Peter Boghossian: So, for example, that's why on this new definition,

people in the majority or people in positions of power, like white people, only they can

be racist, but people absent to that power cannot be racist.

Like for example, trans people, or what have you, in the oppression hierarchy.

That's a meaning of a word that's recently changed.

I mean, look, you can ask, "Well, what about white farmers in Zimbabwe?

They don't have power."

I mean, you can just think of some pretty simple examples of how to work through this.

But, again, maybe that's the emerging theme in this conversation.

In order to even do that, you have to know what the opposing side is.

You have to know what the best... and not just a straw man.

That's why it's good that you invited the bishop.

You have to invite in really smart people who are true believers to have those conversations

with them.

That is not happening in the university.

Josh Szeps: What is happening in the university?

Peter Boghossian: It's lost its north star, or its north star

has ceased becoming truth and becoming an ideology now.

For example, the President of Portland State University, Steven Parsley, has said something

like, I think he said, "The primary mission of the organization," I think that's the quotation,

but look it up, "Is racial justice."

Really?

He said this publicly.

That's the primary mission of the university?

Not balanced budgets?

Not teaching excellence?

Not research?

I mean, that's an absolutely astonishing statement.

So, look, when there is a primary purpose of an organization, every other purpose is

subordinate to the primary purpose.

So, if there's a conflict, so, for example, like in the Bible, if there's a conflict between

commandments, they're not hierarchically organized, whereas John Rawls... okay, let me take it

back.

Peter Boghossian: John Rawls' theory of justice has principles

that are hierarchically organized.

I'd like to take a moment that I've been meaning to say this for a while.

I really wanted to thank Alan for this series, the Dean.

I think when Dean Davison even puts these things together, that's trying to change a

culture in which reoriented the institution's north star toward truth, right?

To an open dialogue, toward the free of exchange of ideas, because students are coming to the

university not to deepen the beliefs they already have, but to learn, to question, to

challenge, et cetera.

Okay.

So, back to if the north star of the institution is racial justice, then if there's a conflict,

then the primary mission of the university has to trump that.

So, if the conflict, for example, is with free speech, then that's always subordinate

to racial justice.

Peter Boghossian: So, every time you come out and say, "Well,

the primary mission of the institution is racial justice," you're basically telling

people exactly what you feel about free speech, and that's what they did in the faculty resolution,

and that's why they're claiming that criticism of critical race theory, for example, is harassment.

Well, they have to do that, because how else are they going to buttress the idea that the

primary mission of the university is racial justice?

That's the other thing, one more thing on that, the further one's belief is from being

rationally drivable, the more slack you have to make to keep the belief in place.

Peter Boghossian: So, for example, if you want to forward a

moral idea, let's say you're forwarding an idea, doesn't even matter what the idea, abortion,

or it doesn't even matter what the idea is, and you're extremely confident that the idea

is true, like on a one to 10, you're 9.9 confidence, but you only have sufficient reason and evidence

to get you to a five or a six, then that slack has to be made up somehow.

In the Islamic world, it would be a blasphemy law, in the university, it would be a speech

restriction or political correctness, or you can claim to be offended, but systems of belief

have to make up that slack somehow.

Josh Szeps: That's a fascinating definition of what offense

is.

I haven't thought about it that way, but that's quite nice, isn't it?

To interpret one's offendedness as a way of bridging the gap between what they can logically

argue and the emotional component of their response.

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

Josh Szeps: How did you get yourself into the pickle that

you're in, or should I say the Liberty and freedom that you now enjoy?

Tell us about how your trajectory of having run-ins with academia again.

Peter Boghossian: I liked the latter framing much better.

I'm much happier now.

Josh Szeps: I'll give you that framing if you give me

a continent.

Peter Boghossian: I'll give you that.

I was going to end the interview by giving you that.

I'll tell all my friends that immediately.

Oh, and the other thing is, if anybody wants, speaking of my friends on your continent,

Mike Nayna, N-A-Y-N-A, has a wonderful series that bridges the gap between the theoretical

and the practical with his videos of Brett and Heather from Evergreen and some of the

madness that's consuming universities, but he does a meticulous job in documenting those.

They're free on YouTube.

I'd highly recommend those.

I got in, truly, just by asking questions.

I just was curious about these new orthodoxies.

I was just curious about these new policies, and I couldn't figure it out.

Josh Szeps: Actually, maybe if you could just back us

up about how you got into academia, what you wanted to do, what interested you as as a

young guy.

Peter Boghossian: Oh, sure.

Josh Szeps: Yeah.

What did you want to do with your life?

Peter Boghossian: What did I want do with my life when I was

a young guy?

I'd say not a young guy anymore.

What did I want to do with my life?

I wanted to explore ideas.

I wanted to figure out what was true.

As I went along that path, I figured out that the

process of figuring out what was true was more important than figuring out what was

true, because it's very easy to, as [Richard] Feynman says, the easiest person to fool yourself.

So, you have to make sure that you have a rigorous process.

One of the things subsequently to that that I've learned is I almost never ask somebody

why they believe something anymore.

I know that this is a heresy, but one of the things that I've learned from studying belief

for my whole life, writing about it, reading about it, delving into the literature about

it, is that when you ask somebody why they believe something, they'll give you reasons

for why they believe it.

Peter Boghossian: What's actually happening in that process

is they're talking themselves into a higher confidence level, because they're hearing

themselves talk about why they believe what they believe.

But what you should be doing is giving them the gift of doubt, is enabling them to doubt

their own confidence in their beliefs.

You do that with a very simple question.

Under what conditions would you be willing to change your mind?

What evidence would I have to show you to change your mind?

When you do that, people don't talk themselves into more particularly in the moral domain

more confidence.

I got into philosophy.

I've always loved Socrates.

I used to read the Platonic Dialogues as a kid.

I got into it through the Socratic method.

I'm convinced, I just did an interview and someone said, "What's greatest technology

that we have, the greatest invention of humanity?"

I said, "This is no question, Socratic method, just hands down."

I was fascinated by this idea of how do we come to truth?

How do we figure out what's true?

Josh Szeps: Peter, just pause there.

What is the Socratic method?

Peter Boghossian: Oh, it's a way of asking questions.

Socrates does it with other people, but ultimately it's a way of asking questions to towards

yourself.

A way of asking you if you believe what you claim to believe, it has five stages.

It begins in wonder, and then somebody will pose a hypothesis, like, "What is justice?"

You're wondering, in the hypothesis, justice is paying your debts.

Then it has an [olincus], or a counterexample, and the next thing... this is from Plato's

Republic, first three books of the Republic, someone will say, "Well, what if I borrow

a knife?"

Well, maybe in this modern context it would be a gun.

"What if I borrow a gun from somebody who later becomes criminally insane?

Do I give them back the knife?"

Then you go to the next stage.

"Yes, you do."

Okay, then we've held that as provisionally true."

Or "No, you don't," so then you go back with another hypothesis.

It's a way of thinking through difficult questions honestly and sincerely.

Josh Szeps: So alien to the state of conversation at the

moment in our hyper-partisan, hysterical, Twitter-fied discourse.

Peter Boghossian: Correct.

That's because people aren't... a lot of reasons for that, but social media has contributed

to it, but we have lost the sense of truth.

We've lost understanding why that's important.

The moral mind in many senses was overriding the rational mind.

We're seeing the consequences of that everywhere.

Josh Szeps: When you say we've lost a sense of truth,

I'm just trying to imagine the pushback to that.

The pushback, I suppose, would be, we are seeing a demotion of a very stuffy, old fashioned,

narrow, data driven, scientistic version of truth in favor of bigger moral truths, like

the great arc of oppression that certain groups have endured, and we're trying to remedy those.

What do you make of that?

Peter Boghossian: Well, that's Martin Luther King's idea, the

more locked benched towards justice, and Michael Shermer has written a wonderful book, and

Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, he writes about that very eloquently.

I don't see... even those conclusions themselves were brought on by, in the case of Shermer

and Pinker, rigorous scholarship.

So, look, have there been injustices?

Yes.

Have there been narrow focuses on, or has there been too narrow of a focus on, I don't

know, some aspect of human wellbeing or what have you?

Yeah, sure.

But all of the answers to those questions have to take place within a framework of reason,

rationality and evidence.

The farther you stray from reason, rationality and evidence, the more arbitrary your beliefs

become.

Josh Szeps: Okay.

Let's loop back to you.

You're a Socratic nerd boy who loves this stuff as a younger man, and you go into academia.

You begin where and teaching what?

Peter Boghossian: Well, I taught in the prisons for my dissertation.

I used the Socratic method to help prison inmates to reason morally and think critically,

and thus desist from criminal behavior.

So, not just not go back in, in other words, not recidivate, but-

Peter Boghossian: Not not go back in.

In other words, it's not recidivate, but to actually desist and stop criminal behavior

by making better moral decisions, by giving them the tools to do that for themselves,

to self empower them.

And so, then I've been teaching in many, many universities for many years online.

I've been teaching on-ground, I've taught just many, many, many universities.

Josh Szeps: And where did you start getting a sense that

things were going awry?

Peter Boghossian: That's a really good question.

I thought initially that when I started teaching a Portland State, that there must just be

a lot of people who had mental health issues because of the way they were acting.

I never connected that to anything larger, any zeitgeist or system problem initially,

maybe like 2011, 2012.

And then, slowly, over time, I started to put the pieces together.

Josh Szeps: What was happening?

Peter Boghossian: What was happening?

How can I possibly explain this?

Okay, what was happening?

The institution was being engulfed by certain moral principles that were overriding traditional

educational conceptions of what an education is, and why it matters.

That's the broad, that's the low def version of what was happening.

Josh Szeps: How did you respond?

Peter Boghossian: By asking questions.

"What's the evidence for this?

I'm unclear."

"Under what conditions would you be willing to revise the belief that trigger warnings,

safe spaces and microaggressions are good for kids?"

I remember once, I was at a faculty meeting, and I asked one of the main proponents of

this very sincere question, I said, and I got to be careful, because I'm trying intentionally

not to dox anybody.

And because I'm curious, this guy, I'm trying not to say, he had all the credentials to

make any reasonable person to be like, "Wow."

I said, "Do you believe that in it's only been in the last five years of 2,400 years

of recorded history that we've figured out that cultural appropriation is wrong?"

And he said, "Yes, I do."

And I said, "So nobody thought of that before?

Or that was never in Kant, or never in any of even the obscure thinkers or never."

And he said, "Yes, I do."

And so from those conversations, and to his credit, he said that as opposed to being offended

or accusing them of a microaggression, which has happened on so many occasions.

Peter Boghossian: So I started to see this madness, overtake

my colleagues, and overtake public policies in the administration.

And I started to see the weaponization of offices in the university against dissident

voices, and all along the way, I just kept thinking, "Maybe there's something I don't

understand."

This was before the conceptual [inaudible] and maybe there's just something I don't get

here.

And so, I just kept, I'd go to a diversity panel, and everybody had the same opinion.

I'm like, "Wow, what kind of diversity panels?"

So I wasn't figuring it out, and I started asking questions, and the more questions I

had, I could tell by the responses from people that something wasn't right.

Instead of just answering the question, almost anything else would happened.

So that's what really ticked me off.

So, let's talk about what's happened now then; you've resigned.

In your resignation letter, you said that the university has basically become a place

that takes in grievances and victimization, and puts out a certain ideology on the world,

rather than a place for critical free thinking.

What was the straw that broke the camel's back?

Peter Boghossian: Oh, I tell you exactly what the moment is.

I'm trying to extend that a little bit.

So the camel was weighed down by an astonishing amount of straw.

I think that the one moment that made me realize that I couldn't do it anymore, because I had

really tried to make a meeting with the President of the university, and he refused to meet

with me.

And I said, "Look, five minutes," and his staff kept saying, "Oh, he's too busy.

He can't do it.

He's too busy."

So I managed to get just a very brief meeting with the Dean in my college.

And I said to the Dean, I said, "You know, Portland State University made the list from

Greg Lukianoff, he wrote The Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt, that he

has an organization called FIRE, Foundation of Individual Rights and Education, and Portland

State University made the list of the worst colleges for freedom of speech.

Peter Boghossian: And he said to me...

I shouldn't have said, "He" edit out the, "He," and this person said me with total sincerity,

"It's a good thing to be on those lists."

So that utterly blew my mind because up until that point, I naturally assumed that this

was a horrible bug of the system, but not a feature.

And this individual is telling me that this is a feature, an actual feature of the system.

And it just blew my mind.

And then I said, "I cannot be complicitous anymore.

I'm compromising my integrity."

I mean, I knew at that point, but I always justified it to myself to think, "Well, if

I left, who would the students have, right?

Who would be pushing back on this?"

But at that point, I just realized, well, it was that, that was really the point, but

then it was just the constant investigations.

Peter Boghossian: I mean, the last investigation was so fucking

insane that I was just like, "That's it.

Okay, you're really trying to throw me out in disgrace, I got it.

I got it."

I was on this call, they were upset that on my Twitter feed, I use the word, "Investigation"

and they were claiming that, to use the word investigation, you need to go to the IRB to

get some kind of permission from human subjects.

And I said, "Well, I'm doing this as a private citizen.

I'm not doing this..."

And an individual who was on the call, I will not name the individual, said, yeah but at

the time of my Twitter feed, I had a link to my book, How to Have Impossible Conversations,

now I have my website.

This individual said, "Yeah, but if you click on your book, and then you scroll down to

the author page, it says Portland State University in your bio."

And at that point I just realized, you are digging.

Josh Szeps: So they basically made life untenable.

They made life impossible for you, essentially.

Peter Boghossian: Well, yeah.

And for what?

For what?

I've been criticized a lot, "Oh, you should have stayed there," or, "You should have left

earlier," like, look, man, I did the best that I could.

And I'm constantly being harassed all over the place.

But I also want to make something extremely clear; I am not a victim in this.

I am not a victim in this.

I fought back against a bunch of things.

I fought back against in the liberal censorious ideology.

I fought back against the people who hired me to do a job that they themselves prevented

me from doing.

I fought back against the institution, and ultimately, I lost.

There was only so much I can do.

I brought in diverse speakers to challenge the orthodoxy.

I mean, I could go on, but there was simply no point to just stay there indefinitely.

I mean, why would I want to subject myself to that?

It's a form of insanity.

Josh Szeps: So, Peter, what do you think is going to happen

in the longer term, and in the broader picture here?

I mean, universities have historically tried to play a role of being a place where you

can argue for anything, you can say anything, it's a hot bed of different ideas, of crazy

ideas where the misfits can come, and flesh things out and try to figure out what's true.

If as you say, they're now becoming places that are committed to the opposite of that

ideal, at least in your experience, a place-

Peter Boghossian: [crosstalk] And many others.

Josh Szeps: That values and antipathy towards free speech,

in favor of racial equity, or justice or whatever they conceive it to be, then what becomes

of universities?

Peter Boghossian: Well, I don't have an answer to that question.

I mean, I can speculate.

Either the ideology will burn itself out, and in which case you will see an absolutely

historically unprecedented gaslighting where you'll have people say, "I never believed

that.

I never believed that, I just had nothing to do with it."

So the ideology will burn itself out, which I think it will.

I'm sure it will.

I don't know the damage it will do to the institutions, but it is inherently unsustainable,

because for an ideology to sustain itself, it either needs some kind of a state power

,or a state control in which they mandate, have some kind of a speech code or speech

restrictions.

And ultimately, that has to be by force.

So they could try to do that, there are technological fixes around that, but in order to keep an

ideology in place, its proponents need an apologia, they need a defense of the faith.

They need to know the opposite sides of the argument.

They need a first Peter 3:15.

They don't have that.

So the ideology is inherently unsustainable.

So that's the first thing.

Peter Boghossian: The second thing is I think what you'll see

happening is exactly what's happening now, is that parallel architectures will emerge

in which there are, just as in the '90s, the media empires were crumbling.

Now today the internet is revolutionizing and changing things.

And particularly with the pandemic expedited that, so we don't really need to work or teach

from home anymore.

So I think that one of the things that you'll see happening is the emergence of new institutions,

and I welcome those institutions to give people a choice from the corruption that we have

now.

Peter Boghossian: I also think that the legitimacy...

I wish you had asked me a few years ago, I would have given the same answer now, but

it seems less prescient now that I know the outcome, the legitimacy crisis will deepen.

The crisis of confidence in our institutions.

Like conservatives, for example, fundamentalist, evangelical conservatives will come up to

me, and when I'll talk about global climate change and they'll say, "Well, why should

I believe that?"

99%...

This is true from the National Association of Scholars, donations to political from Portland

State University, and I urge you to fact check was to the democratic party.

So we know most professors are liberal, so this is just a bunch of liberal people.

That's the other reason we need ideological diversity in our institutions.

And so, when people point to these bodies of literature in scholarships, "Look, this

guy's a Muslim.

This is a Mormon.

This guy's gay.

This guy is straight, this guy's..."

But they also have these views that it's not just a bunch of liberals telling you that

the Earth's warming is anthropogenic.

Peter Boghossian: So anyway, so I think you're going to see

a deeper crisis of legitimacy in our institutions.

I think we'll survive it, but I'm more pessimistic now than I've ever been, without question.

Josh Szeps: When you say, Peter, that the ideology will

burn itself out, because one reason why it might not would be if it had state sanctioned,

power enforcing speech codes, and so on, my worry is that you don't need the state there,

and that there can be a self enforcement mechanism where ideas...

I mean, we've seen throughout history in so many different places, where there's a kind

of an elevation of a certain group think or a mythology, and to transgress becomes an

almost quasi-blasphemous experience, and you just get shunned.

Corporations just don't want to have to deal with people who are squeaky wheels, and so,

they fire people for racism if the person just articulating a difference of opinion

about the quotas or something, and then it becomes a self perpetuating cultural.

Peter Boghossian: Okay, so this is going to take a long time.

Hold on on one second, because I have another interview.

This is going to take a long time for you to see if I can do this very, very quickly.

Josh Szeps: You can make your response here in the last

one.

Peter Boghossian: No, I'll give you one more after this, we

can end on something hopeful.

So the problem is that, I can't just walk in and teach in a K through 12 system.

I don't know about on your continent, if you can do that, but on this continent, you need

to go through teacher certification programs.

All of those teacher certification programs now have been compromised by warped ideology.

They're all predicated on one book, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, you teach

for liberation, you teach to overcome oppression.

So even if you had a wand, and you could wave the wand, and you take out all woke ism out

of the K12 system, it would repopulate with people who have been indoctrinated from the

existing K through 12 teachers-

Josh Szeps: Just for Australians, K through 12, it's just

the primary and secondary school system.

Kindergarten to Year 12.

Peter Boghossian: Okay, so we have a problem with the ideology

is not going away anytime soon, as long as the colleges of education are controlled,

and I would urge you to read Lyle Asher, A-S-H-E-R, he's a professor at Lewis and Clark, he does

some wonderful work on colleges of education.

So we have a complex set of problems in which there is a moral value, a moral imperative

that people don't know the other side of the issue, or they're not taught the other side

of the issue.

And to even get published, to enable you to get tenure, you have to publish morally fashionable

things.

You simply cannot publish something that goes against the dominant moral orthodoxy.

Now, ah, also on your continent, Peter Singer has the Journal of Controversial Ideas.

Maybe that will emerge as something?

But right now this is the situation we're looking at.

Peter Boghossian: That was an example of a parallel architecture

that I was talking about.

So it would be outside of the traditional norm or the mainstream, and as those norms

have broken down, new norms will emerge.

The decentralization, you see that happening.

So I don't hold up much hope for the university system in its current incarnation.

I think that there's been an erosion of confidence in public trust in those institutions, and

that will continue.

And the people in power are either in the orbit of the ideology, or they're true believers,

and they have jobs for life, and they hire people who also...

Now they want diversity statements.

So the problem is actually getting worse.

I don't know when our engines of knowledge production are compromised, if you think America

is bad, wait until you see the new [inaudible].

Josh Szeps: All right, let's end on an optimistic note.

What's the best thing about free speech?

Peter Boghossian: Enables you to figure out what's true.

And even enables you to figure out why you need free speech.

Let me phrase it to you positively.

Yeah, the best thing about free speech is that enables you to figure out what's true,

and it's free.

You just have to be honest with yourself, and find that person with whom you can have

conversations in which it's okay, you can let friends be wrong.

You don't have to agree on everything.

It's completely okay if you and your friends have a disagreement.

In fact, it's actually good, because then you can test and challenge each other's beliefs

in good faith from position of friendship.

Josh Szeps: And what's your advice to young people who

feel that they have to tread on eggshells about what they think, and they can't flesh

out complicated ideas for fear that they're going to trigger some tripwire, and attract

the ire of people who accused them of thinking the wrong thing or peddling hate speech?

Peter Boghossian: Your integrity is worth more than that.

Always speak honestly and bluntly with people, and be open with them.

The only way that you can have relationships that matter is that if you speak honestly.

If you're not honest with someone, then they won't know what you mean, and so they'll formulate

a relationship with someone who they think you are, but who you are not.

And so, if you want actual relationship that's based on virtue and trust, then you have to

be open and honest with people.

The consequence of that of course is you'll see it as bad, particularly if you're young,

because you'll lose all of your friends, but they weren't your friends in scare quotes.

They were people who just happened to be convenient.

Your friends are the people who love, you and the people who will tell you if you say

something wrong or they disagree with, and that won't challenge the basis of the relationship.

So stand up, and fight back and be bold.

The Greeks call it “parrhesia”, speaking truth in the face of danger.

Things are worth fighting for.

Relationships are worth fighting for.

Reason is worth fighting for.

Evidence is worth fighting for.

Free speech is worth fighting for.

So make a choice to not be a coward, and fight back and speak boldly.

Josh Szeps: Peter Boghossian, it's great to talk to you.

Take care.

Peter Boghossian: Thanks.

I appreciate it.

English

Let's kick things off, Elham.

Thanks for speaking with us.

Can you tell us where you grew up and what that was like?

You could call me a mixed salad of some sort.

I was born in Egypt.

My father comes from Yemen.

My mother has Egyptian roots.

It's a complex story, but Egypt is the focus here.

And due to my father's diplomatic career, I've been raised in eight countries.

I'll put it this way, including Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Morocco, Kuwait, Germany in my early

childhood, and then the United States.

And then I've settled here in Switzerland, 27 years ago.

And my husband is Swiss.

Right now I'm Swiss-Yemeni.

I'm a mixed salad.

Do you feel you have roots anywhere?

Do you have roots in Switzerland now after 27 years?

Yes.

Oh yes.

I certainly have roots here in Switzerland.

I live in the same street since 27 years, and it's ... I just came back from Egypt and

Turkey, but when I left Egypt, I also felt I left part of me there.

So do I have roots?

I have roots here in Switzerland, but I have roots also in the Middle East, and specifically

in Egypt and in Yemen.

You're feeling something there when you're talking about that.

Is that the smells, and the sights, and the sounds, and the memories, and the evocative

things of Egypt from your youth?

When you grow up the sounds, the smells, as you said, the streets, and even the Azan

call, in Egypt, it's done in a very beautiful melody form.

You have different forms of Azan in Yemen.

In certain areas, it wasn't exactly very pleasant.

But these sounds, smells, the culture, yeah, I miss that.

I really miss that.

I'll put it this way.

What did you make of that country you were growing up in?

What did you make of Egypt at the time?

Well, the problem is basically, I've been in different countries, and Egypt was always

a stop over.

Every summer I've been there because of my grandmother.

And I grow up also ... I have several years there.

What do I make of it?

It's part of me.

Egypt is part of me.

Yemen is part of me.

Yemen is also part of me.

And the fact that it's going through this civil war right now is very painful.

I have to put it this way.

But I try to deal with that pain in being constructive and doing something about it,

that is writing a research work about the roots of the conflict in Yemen.

When it comes to Egypt, as I said, just it's also home.

It's also home for me.

But that doesn't mean ... If you think about it, people think if you lived in different

countries, you don't have roots.

I do have roots, but I learned over time that at the end of the day, it's the human that

counts and I've met everywhere humans, persons, where you could connect with, where you can

transcend all of these cultural, religious differences.

And from that perspective you can call me a global nomad as well.

I'm asking only because I'm interested in whether or not people have diverged from their

roots or whether their intellectual life has taken them in interesting other places that

gives them a perspective on the things that they took for granted when they grew up.

How do you look at Egypt?

How do you look at the Muslim and Arab world from the perspective of where you're today?

Yes.

And that's a very good question, specifically because I understand as well, the importance

of the rights that I have here in Switzerland.

I've been here 26 years.

I enjoy a direct democracy that allows me to decide with my fellow citizens on the issues

that matter here in Switzerland.

I have certain rights as a woman.

And please understand me, Switzerland was a little bit late when it comes to women's

rights, as we only had the right to vote in 1971.

The family law that used to give the husband a form of guardianship changed in 1988.

And if you think about that, you understand that these were hardborn rights really, women

with men.

They fought really hard for these rights.

And coming from Yemen, here I have to basically ... Coming from Yemen, I know how difficult

the situation for women is, from firsthand experience, from family context.

And there was a period when I understood, I'll put it this way, emotionally that there's

something wrong with the manner by which we experience life as women within that context,

in different contexts, not only in Yemen.

It was only when I started to research that with field work.

It was only when I started to look at the laws, when I realized, "No, this is systematic.

This is systematic."

And I have to thank my mentor and my ... He actually was my supervisor when I did my PhD.

I started with the Arabian peninsula Yemen internal politics.

But when I wanted to do my postdoctorate thesis ... Because in the German system, you need

to have a postdoctorate thesis to be a full professor.

He insisted that I talk about the gender dimension.

And I still remember at that time I was so angry inside of me at him and thinking, "Hey,

come on.

This is really typical.

This is like you just want to basically pull me in that discussion about gender, blah,

blah, blah, from a Western perspective."

And I'm so thankful for him.

I'm really grateful for him.

Because if it wasn't for that insistence, and if it wasn't for the fellowship that I

got, the money that I got, that allowed me to travel and to look closer as a political

scientist, at these specific dimensions, I don't think I would have been sitting with

you today.

It was like an opening.

It was as if I realized, what you felt, in fact, you can address in a rational manner.

Because it's not only patriarchal structure that we're talking about.

We're talking also ... Sorry.

We're talking also about how the system is structured in a manner that makes the life

of women hard, that makes a woman minor.

The laws are telling me that.

The family laws are telling me that, because on a constitutional level, you see men and

women are equal before the law.

Go to the family laws and you see a different picture.

But there is a political function for that.

There is a political function for that.

And that political function was for me like the aha moment.

And so, I'm very thankful to my professor.

What is the political function of that inequality?

If you look at the family laws in all middle Eastern countries, and I'm specifically talking

about Arab Middle Eastern countries, with the exception of Tunisia, you will see that

the family laws are based on your religious identity.

So, if you're a Christian, you will have religious family law.

If I'm Muslim, I will have a Muslim family law.

But while that is the case, this legal pluralism, that's the expression, each group has its

own family law, prohibits and prevents the creation of a national identity.

Because at the end of the day, I cannot marry you because you're Christian.

These laws makes it difficult to marry across these religious, but also tribal lines, sectarian

lines.

And that plays directly to the traditional base of power of the regimes.

They, in a way, depend on the division of society in order to be the arbiter.

That political function was really for me, very interesting.

Very interesting.

It's funny in a sense, Elham, that you've ended up in Switzerland, which of all of the

rich Western democracies is one of the most balkanized in that sense.

It has a French bit, and it has an Italian bit, and it has a German bit, and everybody

gets along, but they don't have different rules or different laws.

Has that given you any insight into the way that sectarianism operates in a democracy

versus in the Middle East?

That's a very interesting question because Switzerland is really interesting in this

respect.

And I have to say it also gave me insights of how difficult the questions that I'm raising

can be.

I just talked about family laws that makes it ... Legally, I cannot marry across my religious

line.

As a Muslim, I cannot marry a Christian.

I don't have civil law.

We don't have civil law for marriage.

Here in Switzerland, you didn't have laws that prevented you from marrying across these

religious lines.

If you were Christian Protestant or Christian Catholic, you don't have that.

But 50 years ago ... Just yesterday, we had lunch, my husband and I with two partners.

Do you say partners?

Two partners.

Friends who are, you mean a couple?

With a couple?

With a couple, exactly.

With a couple, and they were also explaining their background as Swiss Catholics, and how

it was impossible.

It was in fact, if you dared to marry across your religious sectarian lines between Catholic

and Protestant, you would lose your support of the family.

You would be expelled from your own village.

These questions, even from a society perspective can be very hard.

And I understand how difficult that can be.

And now I was just going to ask you about your opposition to proposals in Switzerland

and in Western democracies, to introduce greater sectarianism in the justice system, and proposals

to create alternatives to the conventional liberal democratic justice system by having

some Sharia courts for Muslim minorities in the west.

And you came out and you were very vocal in writing against that.

Can you give us some background on why?

Yes, because I think, this is one of the issues that made me decide to take a stand, I'll

put it this way.

I really had to take a stand, because I just ... I'll tell you what.

When this discussion started when I just came back from my field work and I finished the

research for this postdoctorate thesis, it was published in a book with the name, The

Arab State and Women's Rights: The Trap of Authoritarian Governance.

And you come back to Switzerland and then you hear these suggestions by really colleagues

that I respect where they basically say, "Maybe we should give a certain kind of space for

Muslim laws."

And the thing is for me, with all due respect, we're talking here about religious laws and

religious laws that were promulgated between the 7th and 10th century.

These are laws that were shaped during a historical period where slavery was an accepted institution,

where women were not considered as equal.

In fact, they were considered as minors in perpetual need of male guardianship.

And you come and you tell me in the name of religious diversity, we should allow religious

laws that violates the dignity and rights of women, in a context where we actually fought

hard to change the laws that made male guardianship enshrined.

I had to take a stand and demand that we look closer at these laws.

What are we asking for here?

Because at the end of the day, what these demands will lead to is legitimization of

systematic discrimination against women and children, in the name of religious freedom.

In the name of religious freedom.

The proponents of these alternative courts would never say that they do that.

They would say, "This is a way of empowering traditionally oppressed religious minorities,

to be able to conduct their affairs in a way that's consistent with their most deeply held

beliefs."

Even if that bumps up against, as you say, our liberal democratic conception of the rights

of women and gays and whoever else it might be, who might find themselves ensnared in

this parallel justice system, one place where such experiment has been tried is in the UK.

How has it gone there?

And exactly that was the point where I realized Britain has been with these Sharia Councils

and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals.

Britain has been used as a positive example when it concerns such models.

I decided to go to the UK and research this phenomenon within its social context.

Because I thought, "Okay, I'm a searcher.

Maybe the Islamic law that is being implemented in the Middle Eastern context in the manner

by which it shaped the family laws, maybe that has to do with the context of the Middle

East.

Look at that context within the UK, how it's being implemented."

And the outcome was Women and Shari'a Law: The Impact of Legal Pluralism in the UK.

And with all due respect, I've seen a situation laws.

Because if you look at family laws, I said at the beginning of our discussion, there

is an exception, and that is Tunisia.

Tunisia has a civil law inspired of an enlightened kind of reading of jurisprudence, where the

idea-

Why Tunisia?

I don't want to go down a total rabbit hole.

Why Tunisia and not Algeria or not Egypt?

Tunisia is in fact a very important case, because of its state formation.

Look at the history of this country.

And you see a state that has a long history of central authority, a long history of constitutional

development.

In fact, it's in the 18th century that this country inspired even the Ottoman Empire in

terms of providing basic rights to its citizens.

It was one of the first countries that abolished slavery.

And it was a development that came from within Tunisia.

Maybe there is also a factor that it is a country that is not really divided in the

manner that you see in Yemen.

The outcome, if you may say of the Arab Spring in Yemen and in Tunisia, it's no surprise

that Yemen disintegrated into civil war, and even a collapse of its central state, whereas

Tunisia is still holding despite the difficulties.

It's a very difficult situation that politically and economically the country is going through,

but it stands as an example.

And add to that, that when it was ... Since the colonial control of France, if you compare

how it controlled Algeria and Tunisia, you see huge differences.

In Algeria, it really deliberately tried to divide the society.

In Tunisia, it learned from the mistakes, because it led to war.

It led to a huge blood shed.

In Tunisia, it learned from these mistakes and did not try to destroy the whole kind

of bases central and administrative bases there.

In fact, it built on it.

And it did not try to problematize family law.

If you look at this, what happened in Tunisia, in a way the post-colonial state came with

much to start with.

It has to do with the history of the country itself.

It has to do with the different method of the colonial power that controlled the country

for a certain period.

And then you have the leadership and the vision of the president who came after independence,

Bourguiba, and this president had the vision that on the one hand, we need separation between

state and religion in order to have a state that is neutral to its citizens.

But on the other hand, we need a different family law.

A family law that changed also the social structure, because from his perspective, the

man wasn't a feminist.

This is very important.

What he was interested in, he was telling us, "I need a modern state.

A modern state needs husband and wife, and two children.

Not husband and four wives and several, I don't know how many children."

So the family law was a key tool for him to change that social structure.

And when he came, there was already development from the Muslim legal perspective, where they

came also with their own interpretation, that there is nothing wrong of saying that a woman

can be her own guardian.

[crosstalk]-

We have carved out Tunisia as the exception to the rule of family law dominating in these

countries.

Then when you having grown up in these cultures, these societies, these political systems,

go to the UK to look at the way that it's being implemented there, what do you ... For

a start, just explain to people who aren't familiar with the British experiment, what

a Sharia court in the UK even is, or what it presides over.

You have two forms of application of Islamic law in the UK.

The first type is through what is called Sharia Councils.

The numbers varies between 35 to 80, but you have really very famous councils, like the

one in Leyton, the other one in Birmingham.

And these councils, you have self-appointed sheikhs who reside on these courts, and they

decide when it comes to family affairs of Muslim couples.

When it comes to the Sharia Councils, the majority of those who go to these councils

are women, women seeking divorce.

Islamic law allows the husband to divorce his wife with uttering three words.

Talaq, talaq, talaq.

That means divorce, divorce, divorce.

One word three times.

Divorce, divorce, divorce.

Done.

And you have a marriage ending.

So that's-

I'm sure it's that easy for the women as well, right?

Yes.

And on the other hand, women either they can get a divorce if their husband agrees.

You know similarly in the Jewish law for a woman to be able to get a divorce she needs

to get from her husband that also he gives her the divorce in a get.

But that only with his permission.

That's the first thing.

The second thing, if she can prove harm, he hits her, he drinks, he doesn't sleep with

her for six months, things like that.

Or when she gives up her financial rights written in the marriage contract, and in that

case she can get a divorce from judge usually.

It's called Khula.

The problem is basically, if you look at the type of Islamic law that is being implemented

... That's why I mentioned Tunisia.

That's why I mentioned Tunisia.

Women, they go to these courts because they need a religious divorce.

This has to do with the fact that some of them think from a religious point of view.

They need to have a religious divorce to be really a divorce.

But the main issue in fact has to do with the lack of registration of religious marriages.

You have many studies, many surveys that showed that at least 61% of British Muslim marriages

are not registered.

They're done religiously.

Women, when they end up ... And usually the majority of them, they do not know that the

British law does not recognize these marriages.

You have to register it.

Here in Switzerland, we have a different situation where first I have to marry a civil marriage

in order for me to be able to marry a religious marriage.

That's not the case.

Right now this is what is taking place in Britain, where there is a campaign to change

the laws because the laws only consider the marriages of Christian, Jews and [inaudible],

these Quakers, I'm sorry, and Quakers.

These marriages are recognized.

Once conducted religiously, they're also registered automatically.

The campaigns right now are pushing for changing that to include Muslim, and Hindu, and other

minorities marriages.

To go back to the point, they find themselves in marriages, not recognized by British law.

They need a divorce, they have to go to these Sharia Councils.

The Sharia Councils unfortunately, the type of Islamic law they're applying is not the

Tunisian one.

The Tunisian one will tell you, "You don't need to go to a Sharia court.

You need to go to a civil court to get a divorce.

And there, you will divide your asset equally, according to the law."

Now what they do is that they take the Yemeni family law.

The one that tells you, I cannot leave the house without the permission of my husband.

I have to fulfill his sexual desires and not the other way.

That's written in the law.

That's written in the law.

And I even with the Khula option, the one that I mentioned before, where I have to give

up my financial assets and rights in order to get a divorce without his permission, that

family law tells us, "Now, the husband has to say yes to that divorce."

And you end up in a situation [inaudible].

I was surprised to go to the UK and to see a context that reminded me very much with

what I've seen in a Yemeni context.

In fact, you've made the point in the past that some of these interpretations of law

go even further than the law does in the home countries of the people from which they came.

They might be British Pakistanis, who are being ruled on in British Sharia courts using

a more extreme version of Sharia law than existing Pakistan itself.

And that shows you a certain dimension that we seem to forget, that very often specifically,

if certain communities start to close and in a new home country, they can often be more

conservative than their own citizens from their original home countries.

And I've seen that.

I've seen how ... In Egypt, for instance, every time I go to Egypt, I'm so surprised

of how things are developing and going in a direction, where you see even questions

that some here may not even dare to question, are being imposed in Egypt, but not here.

And when [crosstalk] it comes ... I'm sorry.

My step-grandfather was from Paris and he moved to Australia and he went back to Paris

for the first time, 30 years after moving to Australia, and didn't much care for it,

because it wasn't as good as the real Paris, the one that was still in his brain.

And that's often how migrant communities feel about ... They're stuck in a little bubble

from the past, while their homeland evolves.

But I want to get to some of your thoughts about what's underpinning all of this, because

it's really interesting.

You talk about a paradigm, which you call an essentialist paradigm, that the people

who are well-meaning usually white, Western left wingers inhabit in order to think that

it's the right thing to do to create these kinds of parallel systems for minorities in

Western democracies.

What is the essentialist paradigm?

It's, I would say, a paradigm of thinking that has become characteristic of Western

academic postcolonial and postmodern discourses.

And I'm not saying that all postmodern and postcolonial researchers exhibit this essentialist

kind of feature, but you see it's so dominating even in the academic sphere.

But it reflects on the policies that we are seeing.

What do I mean with that?

I see four features.

On the one hand, you have a tendency look at multiculturalism, not in the manner as

a lived experience.

You and I, regardless of our color or religion, regardless of what you might call differences,

we accept each other on an equal basis of respect, and we live together.

We live together.

Now, if you look at the essentialist paradigm, the idea is, in fact, we're talking about

multiculturalism as a political process.

One that put us, or set us into boxes and define policies accordingly.

So if I'm using myself as an example, I'm Elham Manea, an academic of ... I actually

tick all the boxes according to this form of identity politics.

I'm woman.

I'm Muslim, and I'm brown, the three boxes.

But you don't see me as Elham the academic.

You don't see me as Elham who may, in fact, not act in the manner that you expect a Muslim

woman to act.

Even a Muslim woman with a headscarf, you would have a certain kind of perception of

how she should behave, or what you expect her to want.

That's not the case with the essentialist.

One, in fact, insists, we are members of groups and members of oppressed groups, if I may

add this.

And as an oppressed group, we have to be protected.

And in a way, it takes the agencies of the individual within each of these boxes.

And finally, sorry, Elham, to interrupt.

But I'm just noticing that it's interesting that your status, as "oppressed minority"

leads the white savior academic to treat you in a certain way, and want to protect you

at as, let's say, a Muslim.

And yet in, so doing, they might actually be throwing you at the mercy of misogynistic

members of your own community who have less respect for your rights as a woman than the

left-wing academic, who claims to be standing up for you does.

And at the same time, that's the problem with the group rights, because that's another feature

of this essentialist paradigm.

That they insist ... As a group, I belong to the Muslim.

As a group, we have certain rights.

And that means this and this ties rather well with this idea of, "Let's apply Islamic law

in order to protect the rights of this religious group."

But look at this Islamic law that you want to apply.

See how it reflects on the lives of women, on children, men and women of different sexual

orientation, persons who may not be even Muslims, who

are free to choose or not to choose to be religious or not to be religious, to have

a religion or not to have a religion.

All of these are impacted by this very Islamic law that you're telling me I have to apply.

And while they're doing that, they also, in a way, you said it, they

look at these laws without its context.

It's as if they're taking us from our context.

Look at this social context.

Look in the Middle Eastern countries.

How many men and women are standing today, fighting for changes in these laws?

The agency it's there in many of these countries.

And yet we come here and it's as if it's something solid made, crafted, and you can cut and paste.

And that has consequences.

That's the problem.

The most important feature as well.

And that ties well with the fact that you bring laws, you know they are violating the

dignity and rights of the individual with impunity, and yet a culture relativist form

of approach tells you, "Well, that's their laws.

This is the way we see it as violating.

They don't see it."

Well, guess what?

Look at all the soap operas in Arabic.

When they talk about these laws, they show you the pain of the woman.

They show you the pain of the woman.

If you think that humans may feel pain differently, think again.

Just try to live under such laws and tell me afterwards.

Elham, some people in the west who regard themselves as being pro-Muslim, who regard

themselves as being on the side of Muslim minorities, whether they're Muslims themselves

or not, will respond to what you are saying frequently, by saying something like this

is a caricature of Islam.

Of course, there are extremes in every society.

We have sexism in the west.

We have extremists in the west.

We have religious fanatics like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

We have the Ku Klux Klan.

We have Texas passing laws preventing women from having abortions.

There are of course extremes.

You can't generalize about Muslims.

Most Muslims lead perfectly normal lives, and there's no reason to demonize Islam in

such a way by singling it out as being uniquely sexist.

What's the response to that?

It's a very good question.

And I'm not trying to demonize Muslims.

This is what I'm trying to say.

I'm just saying, stop reducing people to their religious identity.

Look at them in their diversity.

As they say, "Why don't you look at me as a Yemeni-Egyptian with my national identity,

instead of the Muslim?"

And at the same time address the fact that, yes, there are religious laws that infringe

on the human rights of those who belong to this very country, or very religion.

Address the fact that we're talking about communities that are diverse, and yet you

insist on reducing them in treating them as one block.

It's as if South Asian ... look at the South Asian context, for instance.

The South Asian Muslims in the UK.

They come from Bangladesh, from India, from Pakistan.

Even those from Pakistan, they're divided along regional linguistic and sectarian lines.

And yet we insist on looking at them without addressing the differences of the diversity

in their identities.

And at the same time, I'm just insisting that one should look at what is taking place in

Middle Eastern societies about the civil society actors who are trying to change these laws.

Those who are standing to sexual harassment, those who are trying to also change perception

to women.

Look at these countries, and you realize that what you're telling me that we are here, doesn't

really add up to what we're witnessing in these society.

And this brings the final feature of the essentialist.

The one that is the most important one.

It's the white man, white woman's burden.

This is the feeling of this guilt that you see so featured in this paradigm.

When so ashamed of the colonial past, of the wrongdoings that took place, and you have

a lot of problems that took place, and pain that was caused by colonial periods.

But that shame, that guilt translate into attempting to be paternalistic and maternalistic

towards what they consider as the oppressed group.

And that makes discussion very difficult, very difficult.

The there's so much to address there.

But I just wanna make one point about ... Since you mentioned South Asian Muslims, it made

me think also of a countervailing force to your anecdote about the quest for liberalism

in the Arab world, which is the impact that Arab Islam has had on Asian Islam.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, and Australia's closest big neighbor,

when I would backpack around Indonesia as a teenager the form of Islam there was very

moderate.

Women seemed very self-expressed, and today you can see more headscarves, more veils,

more burkas, more people reading Arabic texts, which is completely alien to Indonesians,

being funded a lot by Saudi money and by a more extreme version of Islam.

What do you make of that countervailing force inside Islam, which is extremifying things

around the Muslim world?

And that brings us to the issue of Islamism in its different forms.

You're very much right.

If you look at Egypt, in the 60s and the 70s, you would have seen a different picture than

what we're seeing today.

And here we bring the political dimension.

We're talking about a political ideology that is based on a fundamentalist interpretation

of religion, and that it's a religious far right political ideology called Islamism.

And this ideology was very important due to the political factors during the cold war.

If I talk about my region, the Arab Middle East, during that cold war, you can see countries

aligning with the Soviet Unions, and countries aligning with the United States and some regimes

that were facing opposition from movements that were leftist in nature.

The means to face this ideology was Islamism, from the perspective of these regimes, including

the United States, which worked together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

From their perspective, we were facing an ideological Communist leftist threat.

Within the Arab context, it was a pan Arab leftist threat.

And we're using a religion from their perspective.

But what they had was a political ideology and they didn't take, for instance, Sufism,

that's a very esoteric, beautiful form of Islam.

Instead, they took a new fundamentalist one, a reactionary interpretation of Islam.

The one that comes from the heart of Saudi Arabia.

It's called Wahhabi Salafi Islam named after it's founder.

But at the same time, if you look at the South Asian context in Pakistan, they used also

the interpretation of their own version of a new fundamentalist movement called Deobandi

also named after the seminary that was teaching this line of Islam in the 18th and 19th century.

The result was this, these movements, I'm talking right now, specifically these new

fundamentalist movements, they were modern, fringe in the sense that were not really embraced

by the majority of Muslim majority countries, due to this political factor, the state mainstreamed

them.

Mainstreamed them in the manner by which it gave a much bigger platform to their preachers

changing the curriculums, changing the way religion is being taught.

And even if you look at Yemen, for instance, in the 70s, before the curriculums were changed,

there was one class every week about ethics, inspired of Islamic religion.

Respect your parents, love your neighbors.

Don't steal.

Be a nice person.

And after the coalition that took place specifically at the end of the 70s, and with the rise of

the influence of Muslim Brotherhood, that's a political Islamist movement, you saw a change

in the curriculum to seven hours, unfortunately, of an interpretation that literally is a fundamentalist

interpretation of religion.

And I remember when I came back from Morocco, I was 16 years old, went to high schools and

in Sana'a, in the religious classes that I learned there, they were telling me that if

I don't pray five times, I will be killed.

I deserve to be killed.

The way religion has been taught to us, it was not a message of love.

It was a message of control, hatred because it's not only me.

Basically the rules don't only apply to me.

The rules also insist that I treat those who do not share the same interpretation, I'm

not even saying the same religion.

They should be treated by me differently due to their religious practices or religious

identity.

And that changed a lot.

And you'll see that in the manner by which Indonesia, Malaysia today, the discourses

that you'll hear, the most visible feature of it, because when they start, they start

with women and in Afghanistan you've seen right now.

You saw Taliban just came.

What was the first thing they did?

You have to wear ... They have their dressing code.

They are segregating men and women, erasing the faces of humans from the walls.

This is Deobandi Islam.

This is a new fundamentalist Islam.

And that fringe new fundamentalists interpretation became mainstream because of this political

factor, because of these states.

[crosstalk]-

And here in the west ... Elham, I just want to make a connection that you make in your

book, Women and Sharia Law, which is this interpretation of Islam,

this Islamist interpretation of Islam, insofar as it takes, Islamic law as a given and as

synonymous with Sharia, and insofar as it regards all Muslims as being homogenous, and

insofar as it regards Muslims, as people for whom religion is the most important thing

in their lives.

These are the same beliefs that Western leftists have when the Western leftists are introducing

things like Sharia courts in the UK.

Yes.

Isn't that interesting?

It's amazing.

You made the point, not me.

I'm just quoting you.

Isn't that interesting really?

It's that instead of taking the most ... And that's here, again, how you reduce groups

or individuals into their group identity, and thinking you put them into boxes, and

instead of addressing the fact that the Islamic tradition is very diverse.

Me living in different countries of Islamic tradition has enabled me to see that diversity.

Yemen is not Morocco.

Morocco is not Syria.

Syria is not Egypt.

And yet we insist on treating them, or like Iran.

Unfortunately with the Iranian regime after the Islamic Revolution, you had a different

Iran than the one that I experienced during the Sharia-

Of course.

... time.

So that diversity doesn't seem to be relevant to the discussion of the [inaudible].

Elham, what do you make of the almost pathological fixation on the headscarf in the past 10,

20 years in the west?

It has become a symbol.

In the Women's March, in the United States after Donald Trump was elected, everyone wearing

Muslim headscarves, non-Muslims as a way of gesturing their inclusiveness, I suppose,

and their opposition to someone of what they regarded as being an Islamophobic bigot.

But it has come to represent some sort of female liberation, which seems wholly unhinged

from the way that it is used in conservative Muslim societies.

Yes.

And that's the problem because context matter.

And again, this tendency to take an issue, and tear it from its social context, that's

the way it's been done.

We're talking about a headscarf.

Headscarf, you have to look at it within the context of how it has been used within Muslim

majority countries, how women liberation movements in the 19th century, the beginning of the

20th century, were using this very symbol as a mean to liberate themselves.

Does that mean ... It's like they will burn it.

They will burn it.

And that's not only in Egypt, that's not only in Syria, that's not only in Tunisia.

That's even in south of Yemen.

You have well-documented cases, where basically woman activists, in order to show, we are

moving away of patriarchal conception of rights.

We are basically burning this symbol, comes political Islam.

The founder of Muslim Brotherhood, that's the womb of political Islam.

Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by a primary school teacher, Hassan al-Banna.

If you look at the way he used the woman, he was in fact reacting, not only to the west,

as everybody is insisting, not only, no, to Kemal Ataturk in Turkey.

Kemal Ataturk was the leader that came after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

He abolished the Khilafat [Caliphate].

He insisted on the separation of state and religion, and he too used the woman and her

body as a symbol for his vision, for his project.

Hassan al-Banna was against the abolition of the Khilafat, was against separation of

state and religion.

For him, religion should be a political project.

That means society should be guided, and ruled, and controlled by religious laws.

And was against, at the same time, the liberation of women as Kemal Ataturk was pushing for.

Again, just like Bourguiba in Tunisia, Kemal Ataturk was no feminist.

He just saw the woman as tool for social change.

Comes Hassan al-Banna, what does he tell us?

No, we have a different model, and the woman is very central to it because she will create

the new Muslim, the one that will create that Islamic state.

And there is dress code for that woman.

And from his perspective, it should be like this and like this.

And that's why immediately, you can tell if a woman is wearing the headscarf out of an

Islamist belief, or if she's doing that because of tradition, because of religious belief,

or because of economic reason.

You can tell.

But that political movement was again, fringe until the 70s, until Anwar el-Sadat the President

of Egypt decided that he needs to counter his leftist competitors by depending on the

Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

And with that, if you look at the pictures, the albums of the pictures at the end of the

70s, you will hardly see a woman with a headscarf.

Today, the majority are wearing the headscarf.

The majority are wearing the headscarf.

And that doesn't mean that women are wearing the headscarf because they're Islamist.

Please understand what I'm saying.

I'm just saying that for the Islamist movement, this headscarf is central for their own project.

Bring this-

Elham-

... discussion here, and you realize that this whole context is really absent from the

discussion.

The fact that you have women ... Yes, I know.

Half of my family is wearing headscarves, and I know that you have women who are wearing

that by their own will, but you also have those who are being pushed to wear it, whether

they like it or not.

You also have women who are being forced to work with grave consequences.

And that is absent from this whole discussion, that power dimension, that patriarchal dimension,

that political dimension seems to be absent from the discussion.

And I'm just insisting, look at the issues in its complexity, and stop turning this because

these nice, with all due respect, Western feminist women who come, and they basically

the headscarf in solidarity with Muslim women, tell me why don't you do same campaigns for

those women who are forced to wear it?

Just as you're wearing it in solidarity with those who are being attacked because they're

wearing it, do the same for those who are being beaten to wear it, forced to wear it.

And without that complexity, just basically naive essentialist.

Let's talk about supporting the Muslim communities in the west, because there's oppression.

There's bias.

There's prejudice against Muslim communities in Western countries.

There's a justifiable desire amongst progressive people to ensure that Muslim communities feel

welcome, that they're not subjected to harassment or prejudice.

And yet, as you've been saying, that can sometimes bleed into a support for the most reactionary

elements in the Muslim communities and the misguided essentialism about those communities.

And if you tried to do both, if you try to take the best of both worlds and split the

baby in half and say, "We want to support the Muslim women, but that doesn't necessarily

mean that we're going to support what the Muslim community claims to want for itself."

Because maybe it's just a very loud Imam, who's actually quite sexist, who's telling

us what the community wants.

So we have to sideline the community in the interests of the 15-year-old girl who lives

in that community here in Australia, who might not want to wear the headscarf, but might

risk ostracization from her family if she chooses not to.

How do you do that without coming across as being a bigot?

Yes, it's a very important question, and it's a very difficult question.

But I will start with something that you said.

Let me ask the question, who's speaking in the name of Muslim communities in their diversities?

And very often you see organizations well organized, flushed in resources, and they

insist that they are the sole speakers of their Muslim communities.

And if you look closer, you see political dimension here, where some, and I'm not saying

all, but some of these organizations in fact are affiliated with one form or another of

Islamism, either political Islam or new fundamentalist movements.

And when they make their Islamist demands, but they make it in the name of the whole

of the communities.

And that would lead to consequences.

Because the first thing that usually policy makers ... Because that's the problem that

I see from the perspective of policy makers here in Western democratic countries.

Policy makers, they want an easy way out.

"I need someone who speaks in the name of these Muslim communities.

So we'll make the good policies, and we are really treating our minorities in with good

conscious, what they want."

Instead, what they do is that they empower such movements.

They empower their agenda in terms of giving them the power to dictate what children are

being taught in their religious classes.

And very often these classes will tell you that the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood

is a saint.

That the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islamia, Ala Maududi is a holy person.

Someone who tells you, I need an Islamic state and any state that does not apply Sharia is

not a legal state, is being taught as the role model.

It changes the perception.

It tells you that women are minors in perpetual need of male guardianship.

This is the outcome because in a way, it teaches children a different model than the one that

they are living in.

Actually a model that stands against this democratic liberal sitting that they're living

in.

And indirectly, this cooperation, if I may say lead to communities closing up.

We've seen that in the United Kingdom, we see it in other countries, in Sweden, for

instance.

And that leads to closed communities.

And unfortunately, by treating them as groups and selecting leaders for these groups to

speak in their name, you end up empowering the most reactionary elements within these

diverse communities.

And you end up with a situation, a demand that girls should cover their hair when they

go to the school becomes ... This is a religious demand, that look at the schools in other

countries, Muslim majority countries.

When did we start to have that?

When did we start to have that?

And you see the political connection, the Islamist dimension to it,

Elham, sometimes a certain accommodation with Islamist or conservative Muslim thinking is

necessary, in order to bring the Muslim community into the daily life of a Western democracy.

I'm thinking of, for example, swimming pools in Australia, some of the public swimming

pools have created one afternoon a week where there's a section that is covered where just

Muslim girls can swim.

And so they don't have to see any male bodies.

They don't have to see any other Australians.

They can be covered, and they can be protected.

Of course, that causes a debate.

Are you pandering to chauvinism, misogyny, sexism, perpetuating ancient gender differences?

Or are you using the only tool you have to try to take these girls and make them part

of the Australian lifestyle, where we all love going to swimming pools and swimming,

because we're a sunny-heat country who loves to go to pools?

Which one is it?

It's important.

All I'm trying to say here is that it is important not to work with Islamists.

That's all I'm saying.

I understand you have religious Muslim.

I understand that you have religious Muslims.

And these religious Muslims, they do have their own religious demands.

The question for me is, does accommodation leads to infringement in violation of human

rights, or this accommodation can be done in a plural context?

This is one way of looking at it.

But at the same time, until today, I have yet to hear a policy maker that tells me I

am not going to talk ... No, no.

I'm not making any sense here.

Let me put it to you this way, and maybe this will be a way to get into it.

I saw a story on the news which was about Australia's first Surf Life Saving team of

Muslim girls who were between the ages of maybe eight and 12 or something.

They had full body swimming outfits, and they were undertaking this very traditional Australian

activity of Surf Life Saving, running along the beach, doing exercises and swimming and

so on.

And they felt liberated because they came from conservative Muslim households.

Now, one part of me thinks that's fabulous.

One part of me thinks ... Well, what I'm asking I suppose is, how should I feel about the

spin that the journalist was putting on it, which was to present it as a story of liberation?

It's the story of these young girls who are being liberated, because they are fighting

back against bigotry in Australia, they're fighting against Islamophobia, and they're

expressing their truest deepest sense of themselves at the age of eight, by covering themselves

completely.

Is this a joyful?

Am I supposed to share in this joy

And that brings me also my mixed feeling then.

The mixed feeling about this, because on the one hand, I can see how this eight-years-old

girl is very happy to do this.

Very happy to be allowed to do this, knowing that she won't be able to do it if she didn't

cover herself.

And this dimension is the missing one.

It's the missing one.

Because as you said, the media is spinning it out, and this is against our bigotry, our

discrimination, Islamophobic reaction.

But look at it from the perspective of this child and yet she has to cover herself, as

if she is a sexual temptation of sorts.

And that shows the problematic side of it.

If I cannot do an action, unless I do it in this framework, there is something wrong with

the context that tells this girl, "You have to cover yourself."

There's something wrong.

And without seeing this power dimension, this patriarchal dimension, and at the same time

that most likely Islamists or new fundamentalists are the one who imposes on a child, this code

of dressing.

We're missing the whole picture.

We're really missing the whole picture when it comes to this.

And yes [crosstalk]-

Elham, when you talk about the different ways in which Islam expresses itself in these different

communities, and the richness, and the complexity of these different interpretations ... There

was a whole conversation after the terrorist attacks in 2001 in the west, about whether

or not this is a problem with Islam, whether Islam needs a reformation, whether it needs

to find a way to be more pluralistic, and so on.

What do you make of that?

Is Islam part of a problem?

We certainly need Islamic reformation.

We need that.

I'm not the only one who's saying that, God knows.

We have many intellectuals, men and women from different

countries of Muslim majority countries who are saying that.

And the discussion is taking place.

And it's a difficult process.

It's a very difficult process because we have to raise very difficult questions about the

nature of our religion, of how to move forward of reformation.

What does that mean?

But your question, in fact, brings different dimension.

Brings different dimension.

Before, I talked about a far right religious political ideology.

But that ideology is religious, in that it depends in its interpretation on a new fundamentalist

interpretation of Islam.

And without acknowledging this component, it becomes difficult to address the issue.

Look at the recognition of many Arab countries after ISIS, the Islamic States rise, how they

came to the conclusion that, "Hey guys.

We've been mainstreaming this fundamentalist interpretation.

We have to stop doing that."

In my book, The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism, I mention that important article of the former

Kuwaiti minister who wrote an article with the title, "We're ISIS."

He said, "We mainstream this interpretation in our schools, in our mosques.

And it's time to stop that."

In order for us to stop radicalization, we have to understand as well, there is a religious

component that has to be countered, but military interventions, and I think Afghanistan have

shown us, that clearly are futile.

The interventions that we've seen in Iraq, interventions that we've seen in Afghanistan,

they just wasted a lot of resources and opened a Pandora box that really reflected badly

on these very societies.

But at the same time, they did not really address the issue.

And the issue is that you have the ideological foundation of this Jihadism, of this violence.

And that ideological foundation is called Islamism, a political ideology.

But the political ideology is based on a religious interpretation.

And without saying it and articulating the problem, we will be basically moving in circles,

and not crossing the boundaries of these circles.

And yes, on the one hand, when it comes to this violence, to this terrorism cost by Islamism,

there is a very important component that has to do with this new fundamentalist ideology.

And that means we have to look what kind of Islam we're teaching children, under the leadership

of Islamist organization.

That's one component.

And the general question, does Islam need reformation?

Yes, Islam does need reformation because until today we are unable to look at our holy texts

and acknowledge the human nature in it.

And without addressing this specific point, without separating ourselves from, or without

the ability of looking at these holy texts within their historical context, we will keep

asking the same questions again, and again, and again.

And let me just tell you something, because I don't want the listener or the viewer to

come out of this session feeling pessimistic.

After the uprisings of 2010, 2011 in the Middle East, today everybody will tell you the Arab

Spring that was a catastrophe, politically maybe, but look at the consequences on a social

and intellectual level, and you see something is changing.

Something is really changing.

And the discussions that are taking place, the forums, the online publications, the ability

to access information has been important.

I'll put it this way, all of this give space for optimism ...

Last week on Saturday, I was invited to an online

discussion by a Yemeni professional forum.

We were three speakers, all speaking in Arabic and we were talking about future, freedom

and thinking.

Our session here, it has the title Permission to Think, and we were permitted to Think there.

And in my talk, in Arabic, I talked about the importance of breaking these boundaries,

of thinking and acknowledging the human nature of Quran, our holy book.

And making sure that we basically reach to a conclusion that we can separate ourself

also from certain perceptions and laws in our holy books.

What I'm trying to say is basically, even while I'm talking to you right now, I'm talking

in English and Arabic, I'm saying the same.

I'm glad that you emphasize that you're saying the same thing in English and Arabic, because

you also talk about it in your writing and that we can end with this because I think

you can take it wherever you want, but you talk about how after the Charlie Hebdo massacre

in France, the Saudi government said, "This is terrible.

We oppose all of this.

There is freedom of thought and freedom of speech."

They did all of the necessary genuflection towards liberal ideals that you might expect

them to.

Came to France, the crown prince or whoever it was, and paid respects, and marched with

the French president.

And in that very same week, you make the point that there was a blogger, probably more than

one, a free thinker in Saudi Arabia who was being publicly flogged in the town square

for having the wrong beliefs about Islam.

Is it possible to move to another stage of Islamic enlightenment or reformation without

doing away with those power structures at the top in Saudi Arabia and similar countries?

And if so, or if not, what could we in the west be doing to do better?

No, I'll tell you something.

That was 2015.

Move forward, so 2021, and you see things are changing also in the very country that

you mentioned Saudi Arabia.

You see a movement away from this reaction in the interpretation of Islam.

Now, the question for me, moving away because you see a form ... The developing Saudi Arabia

right now has taken a shape where the suffocating, social and religious control that was imposed

by the regime of this very religious fundamentalist interpretation ceased, ceased.

The things that were imposed, segregation between the sexes, imposition of either a

niqab, or burka, or a headscarf that ends.

More liberal freedoms is being given.

Now, for me, the key issue is, when Saudi Arabia through its Salafi arm, that is the

World Muslim League when it propagate this new line religiously.

The problem is this World Muslim League build mosques, provide the books, provides the training

for the Imams.

And that happens in Australia, that happens in other Western democratic countries.

For me, in order for these changes to be really authentic, sustainable, and believable, I

need to see the books that are being taught to the children.

Are you still promoting the writing of the Wahhabi founders and specifically,

Muhammad ibn ‘Abdul-Wahhab has a very famous book, “Al Tawhid”.

Are you promoting the writings of the Salafi Saudi religious leaders?

If you're doing that, then you're contradicting your own policies.

But they're Salafis.

Of course, they're going to be using those books.

That's the problem.

That's the problem.

And that means on the hand, I'd like in country, in Western democratic countries to make laws

that stop the financial resources that are flooding these organizations or mosques.

Stop it.

Make a stop to it.

And then afterwards, when it comes to ... Because as a Muslim, this is like, now I'm Swiss of

Arab origin, but Islam is my religion.

It's my faith.

I would like to go to a mosque where I could even trust the Imam or the religious classes

they provide to teach my daughter.

I refrained from doing that because I don't have that trust.

So, in order for [crosstalk]-

Would you create, would you create an independent funding source for Muslim theology in Western

countries to cut them off from Saudi Arabia?

That's what I'm actually demanding.

Is that we need to develop at the universities, certain kinds of theology colleague that brings

the best of this tradition and train Imams and create religious curriculums for children.

We need the states in Western democracies to make sure that this is being done in a

manner that is not subject to abuse by fundamentalism or Islamists.

And that is yet to be done, in a manner that you could say, this country is implementing

this model, and we could follow suit.

This is important.

We need policy measures that make sure that the religious teaching, the imams are being

trained and taught in a manner that covers the religious demands of those who would like

to believe, but in a manner that stops this influence from the outside, and changes the

nature of people.

Good luck with that project, Elham.

Thank you for articulating it so eloquently, and thank you for joining us.

It's lovely to meet you.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you very much, Josh.

Josh Szeps: Dina, thanks so much for being here. What's a social scientist?

Dina McMillan: A social psychologist is different from a clinical  

psychologist in that we don't study neuroses  and psychoses in people with personal problems.  

We stand back a little and look at the ways people  are influenced, everything from how you learn  

to how you're persuaded, how you're manipulated,  how you're coerced, even how you're brainwashed.  

We do a lot of experimentation on how that  can happen, how you can actually manipulate

and maneuver things and get people to change  their beliefs and their behaviors, especially  

when it can be done without alerting them that  you're actually actively manipulating them.

Josh Szeps: What got you interested in social psychology?

Dina McMillan: I was studying psychology as a general

topic as an undergraduate and took a social  psychology class and just fell in love with it.  

I thought it was fantastic so I kept going  all the way through and got my doctorate.

Josh Szeps: Tell us where you grew up and what that was like.

Dina McMillan: I'm a military kid. I'm known as a brat.

My father was in the army when I was growing  up, so I lived quite a few places including

going to high school in Germany. Then I went  back to New York and stayed there for a while,  

got married, had a baby, decided to go back to  university and nine years later, I graduated.

Josh Szeps: Did you like living in Europe?

Dina McMillan: I loved it. In fact, living in Germany...  

We lived there for three years. Then my dad  got transferred back to the States to New York.

He's not from there. None of us are, but that's  where they sent him. I really wanted to get back

to Europe, so when I left for college, rather  than looking for a college in the States,

I went to the American College in Paris.  I went and lived in Paris for a while.

Josh Szeps: It's a tough life. That must have a good place to spend some of your youth.

Dina McMillan: Well, I mean, I was a broke student, so  

it's not quite the same as if you go there  with enough money to go to all the fabulous

restaurants and things, but I wouldn't trade  it for the world. It was absolutely phenomenal.

Josh Szeps: I think Paris and New York

are both cities where they're great with a lot of  money and they're great with no money as well.

You can scrounge your way along the banks of the Seine  or along the East River and still have a blast.  

Where did you end up staying? You went  to Stanford for social psychology?

Dina McMillan: Yes, for my master's and my

and my doctorate. I went to City University Hunter  College in New York for my undergrad.

I started at the American College, but I didn't  finish. Then I went back to the States and then

I went to Hunter College and I did finish then.  I decided I was going to go for graduate school

to whatever university was rated number  one that year. US News and World Report

rates the universities in the United States.  There are about 28,000 of them.

They rate them every year, so I said whichever one is number one, that's where I'm going.

Josh Szeps: Tell us what university life was like.

Did you find it welcoming? There's a whole  conversation going on at the moment about campuses

going crazy and being super woke and all the  old establishment professors having run ins with

students who are coming in, who want to run things  their way. What was it like while you were there?

Dina McMillan: It was interesting because the wokeism was there,

but it was more underground. In fact, I ended  up having to replace one of the professors that

was on my committee for my doctorate because  she didn't like the topic that I chose for  

my doctorate. I had worked on a landmark study  of homeless and formerly homeless and at risk families.

I suspected that being on welfare, being  dependent on the government would have an impact  

on how people lived their lives, how they thought,  their relationships. So I decided to study that  

for my doctoral thesis. One  of my professors was very woke  

and said I wasn't supposed to look at welfare. I  was supposed to just leave that alone. I told her  

I was a social scientist. There was nothing that  was off limits. I ended up having to replace her.

Josh Szeps: Wait, what's the thinking about not studying  homelessness? I don't even understand the logic.

Dina McMillan: No, no, not homelessness, welfare.

Josh Szeps: Sorry, welfare.

Dina McMillan: She didn't want me to look at welfare because  

there's a disproportionate number  of black people on welfare.

She was white and I'm black. She  didn't want me to look at it.

Josh Szeps: Right, she's telling you how to be a good black person.

Dina McMillan: Yes, again.  

We had some of that there. I personally thought  you can't fix anything if you don't really know  

what you're looking at. I went ahead and  studied it and I see why she was worried.

There was not just a statistically  significant impact of being on welfare.

It was a dramatic impact. It had a very  dramatic detrimental impact on people's lives.

Josh Szeps: Welfare did?

Dina McMillan: Yes. Josh Szeps: Is that because  

of how it was delivered and  how the system was managed?

Dina McMillan: Absolutely. All the rules from the well meaning  

pre-woke woke back in the 1960s, who decided to  make it easy for poor women to get welfare.

You had generation after generation of poor urban  people brought up with no fathers in the house  

because one of the rules was you could not have  a man in the house if you were going to receive welfare.

You have all of these children with no  fathers and the detriment of having no father.

Also, getting money without having to work  for it, it gives you no sense of purpose.

It makes you highly dependent. I found the people  that were on welfare compared to an equally  

equally impoverished population, who actually had  jobs, but they just had low paying jobs,  

they had stronger relationships with  their families. They had stronger friendships.

They had more hope for  the future. It was not a good thing.

Josh Szeps: Part of your expertise there  

became abusive relationships and  manipulative relationships.

What did you come to learn about the  structure of those relationships?

Dina McMillan: That came about because my daughter's best friend,  

her mom came to me. Most people don't know what  a social psychologist is. They think we're a  

clinical psychologist. She just heard psychologist  and thought... She came to me and said she had  

a close friend who was in an abusive relationship,  could I help. I spoke with the woman, I did what  

I could, but I realized I didn't know enough  about that specific topic, so I went and got  

additional training specifically about abusive  relationships and seeing what a pervasive problem  

it is I've been working in that field, not only  in that field, but in that field ever since.

Josh Szeps: What do we know about how those relationships work?

Or don't.

Dina McMillan: There's a difference. Unfortunately, I've run  up against a bit of a wall for a lot of people  

because I look at most of the domestic violence  services that we have now. They're pretty much  

the same as when I started in this business 20  years ago. They wait until after someone gets into  

a very imbalanced, toxic relationship. Then  if it gets really serious and physical,  

they'll offer them some short  term, temporary topical,  

minimal help. I looked at it on the other way  after working in the field for about nine years. 

I realized my social psychology was actually  very valuable because I recognized the tactics,  

the manipulation tactics being used by abusers  from the very start of these relationships  

and what I saw was that there were only a set  number of manipulative tactics being used no  

matter who the person was. It was a small discrete  set. I could teach the information to anyone.

I put my Unmasking the Abuser program together and  started together it to anyone aged 13 and above.

Josh Szeps: What are some of those tactics?

Dina McMillan: The first thing I would say is too much too soon.  

One of the things that with abusers, abusers  have a lot of psychological problems.  

When I do workshops, depending on the demographics  of the participants, I talk about the psychology  

of abusers because it's quite distinct. One thing  is they are very uncomfortable in a relationship  

where they don't have total and complete control.  So the relationship goes really fast. You go from  

the guys not in your life to he's  all over your life in one fell swoop.

Josh Szeps: Right. That sounds a lot like falling in  love. Is it hard to tell the difference?

Dina McMillan: No, it's not hard to tell the difference at all.

It really isn't. In fact, one of the  things the I try to do is teach the difference  

between falling in love with someone and  being lured into a manipulative and toxic  

relationship because it is quite distinct and  it is really important to know the difference.

Josh Szeps: What is that? If I'm going head over heels,  

I'm crazy about somebody and I can't imagine  living without them because all of the dopamine is  

juicing my brain and I have visions of us together  forever, how is that noticeably distinct from what  

you're talking about, the warning signs of  a manipulative or an abusive relationship?

Dina McMillan: First of all, one has to ask

how quickly did it happen. With the abuser, the  relationship... First of all, there are tactics happening. 

You don't just fall in love. This  person is purposefully putting lures out there  

to pull you closer, using things like what I  call the fairy tale lure. The moment you go out,  

they're talking about a future together.  They're talking about happily ever after.  

They're talking about naming your children, this  kind of thing. I also teach people if you fall in  

love and collapse yourself into relationships,  you're going to spend a lot of time in therapy.  

That's just not a good way to run your life.  You're going to find yourself in love with  

people who don't love you back. You're going  to find yourself in unhealthy relationships. 

Put the brakes on it first. Be  careful because if you choose wrong,  

it can be extremely destructive to your  life. Anything real will be there if you  

are just a little bit more cautious.  Anything real bears up under scrutiny.

Josh Szeps: How do you teach resilience once  people are in such a relationship?

Dina McMillan: It's really challenging.  

You have to start where you are. One of the  things I'm putting the course together and I was  

writing today about often people fail at acquiring  new skills because they try to do it all at once.  

You always have to start where you are.  The Chinese have a very wise saying that  

journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single  step. If you're going to start being resilient,  

if you're going to get out  of an abusive relationship,  

you have to start where you are. Emotionally,  pulling back just a little bit, just a little bit,  

just a little bit and then once you get used  to being there, you pull back a little further,  

you pull back a little further, you pull back a  little further, you pull back a little further.

Josh Szeps: This dynamic between someone  

who is potentially an abusive or manipulative  partner in a relationship and the target  

of their affection if you can call it that, that  can be reflected in group dynamics, at a social  

level as well. That's one of your great insights  I suppose. Can you tell us the connection there?

Dina McMillan: It's interesting that if you... One of the things  

with my podcast series, for instance, I took  my entire project and I put in a podcast series  

called Unmasking the Abuser. I walk you through  all the tactics. As I said, the list isn't long,  

but what is amazing is that you see the  same tactics being used, whether the person  

using them is male or female, whether it's a  romantic relationship or a friendship or a work  

relationship. You also see it in social movements.  You see the same sort of lures being used  

like a love bombing. If you look up the word  love bombing, you see a lot of that in cults. 

What that is someone just showering you  with praise and superficial acceptance  

and talking about how wonderful you are and how  great you are, but it comes with conditions.  

If you do anything, if you ask questions, if you  stand back a little, if you're not willing to  

immediately collapse yourself into that  relationship, then that tap of wonderful praise  

and good feelings is turned off immediately.  You see social movements doing it all the time.

Josh Szeps: What are the kinds of social movements that do that?

I can imagine some self helpy sort of personal development type. Dina McMillan: Yes.

Josh Szeps: Or even Silicon Valley tech bro cults nudging at the  edges of that, but what do you see?

Dina McMillan: I have to say that  

whenever I've had an opportunity to go to one  of those change your life in a weekend seminars,  

the ones where they have the intro that's free,  where they get people to bring all their friends,  

I also go along and look to see which tactics  they use. I see right now the progressive left,  

otherwise known as the woke, are  using all of the tactics from my abuse  

series. It really frightens me, where it  presents everything has all the solutions,  

but you're not allowed to ask questions. You  have to absolutely stick to the narrative with  

no exceptions. If you stick to the narrative,  if you say you're one of them, then you can do  

all sorts of things wrong and it's accepted.  It's really quite frightening. [inaudible].

I look at it and I find it quite frightening  because it's an absolutist, totalitarian religion.  

It is not... I can't even call it  a social movement. It's more like  

an extremist religion or one of those weekends  that they claim that you can change your life.

Josh Szeps: Can you explain, Dina,  

to people who aren't very online what the nature  of this movement is? Because I feel like we've had  

a hard time giving it a name really and defining  exactly what it is. John McWhorter has his  

terms for it. Other people will have their  terms for it. We can call it woke. We can  

call it a certain elitist, regressive leftism  or something, but can you help people who  

don't spend all of their lives on Twitter  understand what it is that you're talking about?

Dina McMillan: 

I don't think I spend all  of my life on [crosstalk].

Josh Szeps: I'm talking about me.

Dina McMillan: I was going to say though  

I have been on there more since recent events  have kind of impacted on my social life,  

but what I'm looking at is if you have a movement  that says it's about justice and fairness,  

but if you ask questions, you see inconsistencies.  For instance, it's supposed to be a movement that  

supports women's rights, but so many of  the groups that are also supported by this  

movement don't believe in women's rights and  what women's rights are you talking about?  

If you are a conservative women, your  rights aren't included. You can be bullied  

enormously, terribly and that's okay.  There's so many contradictions in it,  

but you're not allowed to notice. You're not allowed to step away. You're  

not allowed to say, "I believe in this part, but  I don't believe in that part." Because if you're  

not all in, you can absolutely be bullied. That's  what I mean about an extremist religion because  

with a social movement, it's like if you look  at the environment... I come from California,  

so I care about using recyclable things. The place  I lived in California, we got rid of single-use  

plastic 20 years ago. I like seeing things about  regenerating things, taking care of the Earth,  

but some of the movement, some  of the things they advocate,  

I don't buy into. I don't have people  protesting outside of my house because of it. 

With the woke movement, if you are a  public figure at all and don't buy into  

every single thing that they say, you can be  bullied to the point where you lose your job,  

where they'll dox you. They'll post your personal  information online. You'll have all sorts of  

people calling you names. If you're female,  you often get rape threats and death threats  

just for questioning what they believe is  right and true. That's, I find, very scary.

Josh Szeps: I suppose the acolytes of this way of thinking,  

the social justice warriors if you will, would  say to that this is what women and people of color  

have been enduring from the white patriarchy for  centuries, feeling like they're being sidelined,  

diminished, spoken over and abused and  that what they're trying to do is excise  

from public discourse people who are racist and  sexist and proto fascists. They see themselves,  

needless to say, as being on the right side of  history and fighting for progressive courses.

Dina McMillan: And yet, they would look  

at someone like me and give me a hard time because  I don't buy into everything, but I ask questions,  

because I have been trained to assess research.  When they give me crap research and say it  

proves their point and I can see through it,  they come down on me like a ton of bricks.  

As a black woman who has faced racism... If  anybody follows me on social media or in any  

of my interviews and in fact my YouTube  videos, I talk about the racism that I  

have faced as a black woman. I talk about  sexism and I talk about the fact that these  

social justice warriors are making everything  worse. That is not how you cure the problem.

Josh Szeps: Was Stanford racist?

Dina McMillan: Very. It was the worst  

racism I'd faced in my life. Are you kidding?  They didn't know I was black until I showed up  

because even though they had affirmative  action programs even then, I didn't want  

anyone later on to say that I'd only been  accepted at the university because I was black.  

Now, my name is Dina, so you cannot... That's a  woman's name. They knew I was female, but they  

did not know I was black until I got there.  Then the war started. I was treated so badly  

it is like... I could make a Netflix drama off of  how I was treated at Stanford because I was black.

Josh Szeps: How did that show up, Dina?

Dina McMillan: I'm sorry?

Josh Szeps: How did that show up, what sort of things?

Dina McMillan: It was very simple. When I was in class...  

In my year, they have over 700 applications  for the PhD program. They only accepted nine.  

So it's a small class. When I was asked  a question, I was ignored. What I asked  

was not ever considered. When the professor would  arrange to have appointments with each of us, they  

wouldn't show up to mine. They kept up quoting  research in the courses about how inferior black  

people were. I didn't find out until my second  year, after I'd learned to analyze the research,  

that they were using... They knew they were using  absolutely irresponsible research that was not...  

It was not rigorous at all. I think it was  kind of an experiment to see what I would do. 

In fact, when I graduated, they finally had a  chair for my department who was... The first time  

having a female chair in my department. She asked  me point blank, "How do you handle being treated  

so differently from everyone else?"  I told her, "Eyes on the prize."  

I had known and grown up seeing people set on my  dogs, beaten, hanged from trees so that I would  

have an opportunity to compete, so unless they  killed me, and I mean dead... Even if I were on  

crutches, I would have still gone to class. I told  them point blank, "You're not getting rid of me."

Josh Szeps: Were you afraid of physical violence?

Dina McMillan: No.  

That's one thing. No, they were way too cowardly  to ever do anything like that. That's too easy to  

prosecute. That's too easy to have evidence. They  had a lot of leeway on how they behaved because  

they were tenured professors. The top professors  had all been tenured professors at Harvard who had  

been lured to Stanford. They got away with a lot,  but they knew they couldn't get away with that,  

so no I was never physically threatened, but  they did everything they could to get me to quit.

Josh Szeps: When you were  

living in Germany, and subsequently having  lived in Australia, did you notice any  

differences between the way that racist plays  out in those places versus the United States?

Dina McMillan: I've lived in England and France too by the way.  

Yes. Even being from California,  and California definitely is not  

a state with strong racial divisions...  People keep giving Australia a hard time,  

but I have faced much less racism in Australia  than I did in the States even in California.  

In Germany too. We moved from the Midwest to  Germany and I was treated better in... I was  

like, "This is amazing." These  people were the former Nazis  

and they treated us better than we were  treated at home. I thought it was really sad.

Josh Szeps: 

In what ways did that show up in your  daily life? Can you give us an example?

Dina McMillan: Yeah, an easy example.  

How easily and readily people will just start  a conversation with you. How little old ladies  

act when you walk next to them on the sidewalk.  Do they seem unnerved or scared? If people chat  

with you and like you, do they invite you  to their homes? Australia has been amazing,  

but I will say something. I have to put  this out there because I have to be fair.  

What I didn't realize until I'd lived in  Australia for a few years is how much of how  

I was being treated... Not all of it of course,  but how much of it was actually coming from me. 

My father when he retired from the military,  retired in Tucson, Arizona. When I lived in  

California, of course you go to visit family.  You go to see your parents, go for Christmas.  

I was very underwhelmed by Tucson. I  thought it was kind of an unfriendly place.  

I moved to Australia and the first two years, my  daughter came out to visit me. I couldn't afford  

to go back. I was short on time, short on money,  so two years after moving and living in Australia,  

I went back to Tucson. Now, politically nothing had really  

change. There was no big difference, but all of a  sudden, everywhere I went in Tucson, the cashier  

would start a conversation, people sitting next to  us in the restaurant would start a conversation.  

People would smile at me longer, longer eye  contact. All of a sudden, I was treated completely  

differently. You would not hear me speak or look  at me and say, "She must live in Australia," so  

it's not that my living in Australia started the  conversation. They had no way of knowing that.  

But my non-verbal behavior had changed from living  in a country where I was basically accepted.

Josh Szeps: It's funny that  

you say that people in California assume that  Australians are racist or more racist because  

it really depends on what your definition of  racism is. There are certainly codes that I have  

to speak in with my American counterparts, mostly  white university-educated American counterparts,  

that I have to adhere to, that I don't have to  adhere to in Australia. I certainly don't have  

to adhere to if I'm speaking with friends of mine  who are black, but there is such an uptightness  

at the moment among... And terror. Really a  terror amongst white Americans about making  

sure that they do the right thing racially. It means that all of that closeness and that  

casualness and that laidbackness that you normally  use to stoke closeness with another individual  

have fallen by the wayside. I find the relations  between races in the States at the moment  

to be boxed into quite a cold and rigid  archetype because people don't feel free  

to treat each other as human beings. They're  treating each other as racial categories that  

they have to make sure they speak to perfectly  and correctly, otherwise they'll be hounded.  

I wonder if that's part of the difference  between Australia and the States right now.

Dina McMillan: One thing,  

you know that in Australia, if you can't take a  joke, don't come here. Anybody listening to this,  

if you're super sensitive and everybody  has to use the latest term for who you are,  

don't come to Australia. Nothing is sacrosanct  here. I remember when I was working on a show and  

at one point, I was trying to explain to the  cameramen and the crew why I was having such a  

hard time at my day job, where everyone kept  giving me a hard time about being American.  

They were like, "We don't  understand why you're so sensitive." 

I said, "Okay, try to understand this. By  putting down my country, it's like saying  

your mother is a whore." They stopped and  looked at me. Then one of the guys said,  

"Yeah, but she's a good earner." The next  [crosstalk] said, "She taught me everything."  

They just went around [inaudible]. We got  no work done because we were on the floor  

cracking up laughing like you would  not believe. Welcome to Australia.

Josh Szeps: It's funny. Maybe there's a difference here  

between terminology in terms of what  we mean by racism. In other words,  

a difference between racial bias, racism,  language codes. What is racism to you?

Dina McMillan: Racism to me is racial hatred.  

I learned this from my mother. My mother,  when we were young... I was like seven.  

We had lived in some military bases and then we  moved near my mother's family in the Midwest.  

We, at first, for about a year, lived in  an all-black area. Then we integrated an  

all-white area. Our mother taught us there's a  difference between ignorance and hatred. She said,  

"Pay attention when someone says something  that you find offensive because it may be  

just that they don't know any better. That  person who says that if it's out of ignorance,  

if you handle it well, they could  turn out to be your new best friend." 

Hatred comes out differently. When you correct  them and says, "That really hurts my feelings  

when you say that and here's why," they  keep doing it. Unless it's directed hatred,  

I try not to take offense. I live in an  area. I live in Victoria, out in the suburbs.  

There are no black Americans out here but me.  If somebody said something that was offensive  

according to the latest Black Lives Matter  protesters and I got offended, all that would  

do is make them uncomfortable with me. It would  not inform them in any way. If they didn't mean  

it to be offensive, why should I get offended? I  guess I've been Australia too long. I don't know.

Josh Szeps: You've been in Australia way too long,  

Dina. You don't sound like Americans sound. Not to  generalize, but I just saw a poll from the States  

of Hispanic Americans. 4% of Hispanic Americans  preferred the term Latinx to Latina or Latino.

Dina McMillan: Latinx.

Josh Szeps: 4%. Yet Latinx is now  

the term for Latino and Latina  Americans at National Public Radio,  

in the official government documents, in  the Biden campaign. This has been taken on.  

This is just as an example. It's supposed to be  a gender-neutral, more politically correct term  

for Latino people, but this is something  that has become entrenched as the result of  

largely white, university-educated elites  insisting on the use of a term that the  

people who they're talking about themselves,  96% of them don't even want to be called.

Dina McMillan: Look how they treat black  

Americans who don't buy into the "I'm the victim"  mindset. We get called white supremacists. Please  

understand I am not part of that group that says  that there is no racism. I am above everything  

a social psychologist, so I'm looking at patterns  of behavior, non-verbal cues, eye contact, smiles,  

conversation, tone of voice. I've been trained  to see the differences in how people interact  

with each other so I can tell the difference. I know there is still some racism. I'm not  

going to pretend, but I also know getting rid  of it by having violent protests and looting  

and making white people so self conscious  around you they're afraid to say anything,  

that is going to set up such an extreme backlash,  it's going to take us back to like the 1890s.  

Notice again they did not ask the Latinos what  they wanted to be called. They decided for them.  

I found that scratch a lefty, find a  racist. They are so elitist, they are so  

white man's burden with regard to ethnic  minorities. They don't want us to make up  

our own minds. Nothing offends them more than  a black person saying, "I'm not a victim."

Josh Szeps: 

What do you do then, Dina, about  what they called structural racism?

Dina McMillan: Yes.

Josh Szeps: You're talking  

about a kind of a racism, which  is an antipathy or a hostility  

from a person of one race and maybe a belief in  racial supremacy. What about the institutional  

ways, the subtle ways in which people of minority  races are disadvantaged in the 21st century?

Dina McMillan: Absolutely. I even did a video on this, on  

how systemic racism was set up, why it was set  up that way. It was set up as a way of keeping  

people in their places, making it seem right and  true. All of the systems had to interact together,  

the banking system, finance system, culture,  marriage system. Even had to work together.  

Otherwise, you would have constant discord  and constant revolution by the people who were  

being oppressed. Both sides, the people who were  advantaged by the system and the people who were  

disadvantaged, had to be taught it was fixed,  it was inevitable and on some level that it was  

right and true. It pervaded all the laws. As time went by and the laws... Protests  

started. The Civil Rights Movement  came. The laws started to change.  

Some of it while the systems themselves would  alter. Sometimes the people who had been  

hurt by the system all this time weren't really  aware of it. It's one of the reasons if you  

want to look at racism in America, compare the  outcomes for black Americans versus Caribbean  

people who moved to the United States and  Africans who moved to the United States.  

They moved to the United States based  on the laws and the cultural norms  

of when they moved, not the historic system that  kept blacks marginalized and oppressed, so they  

have different expectations and so they're treated  differently. They'll try for different things.

Josh Szeps: And they have  

different outcomes, as I I understand it as well.

Dina McMillan: Absolutely, they have different outcomes.

Josh Szeps: First or second  

generation Nigerian Americans I think have a  median wealth above the average white person or  

a median income above the average white person in  contrast to people who are descendants of slaves.

Dina McMillan: Yes, but also too  

people have to take into account culture. You  also find that blacks who live around whites  

do better than blacks who live around blacks.  The reason is that cultural norm often...  

Even if I were talking about my parents. When my  parents were small, my dad was born in the South  

during Jim Crow when he could have been  killed and nothing would have been done  

about it. They grew up when racism was the  law of the land. There were a lot of things  

that they didn't strive for and a lot of  limitations they thought might still be there  

because that's how it was in place  and so firm and so dangerous to step  

outside the line when they were growing up. Although to give her credit though, my mother  

was unusual. She came from a very well educated  family. My great-grandfather was a professor  

at the University of Colorado. I have a great  uncle who was a Tuskegee Airman. If your  

audience members want to see something really  interesting, they should look that up. There was  

actually a film with Laurence Fishburne from the  Matrix called the Tuskegee Airmen. My great uncle  

was one of those guys, the first flyers, combat  flyers for the United States during World War  

II with absolutely the best record of protecting  the bombers that they escorted of anyone. 

They were all lawyers, they were doctors.  Even though we grew up without money,  

by mother had an idea that with  education, you can do whatever you want,  

if you have a certain mindset, you can do whatever  you want. It made a huge difference. I didn't  

grow up with that "The white man won't let us  do" mindset like many black people grow up.

Josh Szeps: Yet then when you got to Stanford,  

you experienced all of the racism that you found  at Stanford from the white professors there,  

which would seem to play into the current  narrative that all white people are racist  

even the left-wing liberal ones  are racist. This is all part of a  

racist patriarchy essentially and without  dismantling the structures of power, we're not  

going to be able to achieve justice and equity. Explain to us the difference between the forms of  

racism that you found at Stanford and conventional  Southern Jim Crow conservative racism.

Dina McMillan: The senior professors that I was having  

so much difficulty with at Stanford were absolute  fallacists. I'll go on record calling them that,  

but they were also female professors in other  departments and people working in the financial  

aid department who were white, who really went out  of their way to make sure I had enough funding to  

keep going, so I never saw it as they're white  so they're all out to get me. I saw it as these  

guys have some serious issues and someone  needs to give them a swift kick in backside.  

I never generalized it. That's probably how I  was able to get through. I never generalized  

it to everyone else. I did not hold other  people responsible for their silliness.

Josh Szeps: 

That's interesting because generalizing to  everybody else or at least everybody else within  

a certain racial or gender group is basically  the philosophy now of what you're expected to  

believe if you are a progressive and if you are  to be considered an anti racist and anti sexist.  

I remember... I'm sure you will have seen some of  the images out of the protests after the death of  

George Floyd last summer in the United States. One  of them that sticks with me is an African-American  

police officer being shouted at by a young white  girl, who's accusing him of being racist. One of  

his colleagues says, "He can't be racist, he's  black." She starts screaming. She's foaming at  

the mouth talking about how, "Of course, you can  be racist if you're black. You can be structurally  

racist because you're part of a system of  racial oppression. Just because you don't  

have personal animus towards someone else doesn't  mean that you're not a cog in a racist machine."

Dina McMillan: Oh dear.

Josh Szeps: And so on.  

Talk to us about education. Where is  this coming from? Where is it going?

Dina McMillan: It's this indoctrination. I blame  

all of us because I sent my daughter to school.  My daughter's so much more left wing than I am.  

She'll wake up one day. I'm looking at the  education system and Malcolm X, who I don't  

agree with on some things... He had a different  philosophy in life, but darn if he didn't say some  

really true things. He said, "Only a fool would  let his enemy teach his children." The problem is  

we've been so worried about being nice and getting  along that we have not been paying attention to  

what our children are being taught about right and  wrong, about family structure, about who we are,  

about what we should attain, about our history." We have allowed these extremists with this very  

totalitarian religion to come in and take over  our schools and teach our children self hatred,  

other hatred, disrespect for their parents, teach  them that young people know more. I notice this  

even when my daughter was young that all of the  shows targeting young people always had the young  

people presented as smarter than their parents.  That's so dangerous because you really aren't.

Josh Szeps: Hasn't that always been a  

strain of American culture? The aspirational,  "We are a young country, a visionary country,  

looking forward to the future, sloughing  off British royalty, having a revolution,  

paving the way forward with Hollywood  and Silicon Valley and Wall Street,"  

it feels like there's a certain vigor in at  least the assumption even if it's not true  

that the future belongs to the young and old  fuddy duddies should just get out of the way.

Dina McMillan: Innovation's one thing.  

Believing that you're smarter than your parents  is dangerous because the brain is not really  

fully formed until the mid 20s. Even then, if  it's full of indoctrination, it's going to take  

you somewhere grim and scary. We are an innovative  country, but if you look at the television shows  

and things from like the 1950s, even 1960s,  you did not see it presented to young people  

that they were always smarter than their  parents. Television isn't just television. Media  

isn't just media. When you study the brain...  Social psychology studies the brain and how we  

actually interpret information, how we get an idea  about the world that we live in. If you look at  

the imagery that is presented to young people and  has been for the last 20 years, there is no way  

that a culture that we are promoting will allow  us to continue to succeed. We are so vulnerable  

to being conquered by enemies who despise us.  We're so vulnerable to just falling apart.

Josh Szeps: Part of the reluctance perhaps amongst  

establishment people to metaphorically slap down  younger people who think that they know everything  

about the way that the world works is that they'll  be regarded as being bigots. They'll be regarded  

as not being kind. Sometimes accusations of hate  speech are leveled against people for having a  

different opinion about immigration or a different  opinion about something that a generation ago  

would have been regarded as being well within  the bounds of a liberal democratic discourse.  

Since you're a social psychologist, how  does one rebalance that power dynamic?

Dina McMillan: Because we're in Australia,  

I would say grow a pair. Right now, I would  say I have faced enormous animosity because  

I'm plain spoken about these things. We  have to be willing to have people dislike us  

because if we keep giving in, our society  is going to be completely destroyed.  

Someone calls you a bigot, oh well, you  know you're not. Of course, please do not  

try to explain to them why you're not. Don't tell  them what an ally you are. Don't be an ally to  

anybody. Take every cause as it comes. If it's a genuine cause, it will not  

mind you looking closely and seeing what's going  on. It will not mind you looking out for your own  

interests as well. It will not mind you thinking,  "Okay, let me have a think about this." It's only  

when someone is trying to indoctrinate you  that they expect you to give in, to submit  

to whatever they say or they'll call  you names. Now, how is that not abusive.  

"You must submit to everything I say  to you, everything I want from you  

even if it hurts you or else I'm going to punish  you." For me, that's the very definition of abuse.

Josh Szeps: You used an interesting word there,  

Dina, ally. Don't try to explain why you're  an ally. This has become... Five years ago  

people didn't talk about the importance  of allyship. What do you make of allyship?

Dina McMillan: To me allyship is tolerance. It's  

saying, "I'm going to ignore all the details  and any questions that I have so that you  

won't dislike me or look at me as someone who's  narrow minded." I explain very frankly to people  

I'm no one's ally. I'm a social scientist. If you  want me to support your cause, show me the facts,  

stand back and let me look. It's so interesting  because one of the big tactics that I talk about  

is misattribution. I see the woke using this so  much. Misattribution is putting a positive spin,  

a positive label on a negative behavior. Saying you want to be someone's ally,  

that sounds like a nice thing, doesn't it? It  sounds like, "Oh yeah, you're understanding."  

In actuality, what it means is you ignore  everything that shows that your values clash,  

that your values are inconsistent, that what  you're supporting may actually be harming you.  

It reminds me of the British being allied to  the Soviet Union during the Second World War.  

We had absolutely nothing in common with  Stalin. He was such a force for wrong  

and yet we ignored it because we were fighting  together against the Nazis at our peril.

Josh Szeps: There's also a certain condescension  

in it, isn't there? There's something I find  uncomfortable about the notion of being an ally  

to a member of a minority group because there's  something almost paternalistic about the notion.  

Rather than respecting you as an individual with  whom I can speak freely, as someone who is capable  

of hearing what I have to say, judging it on  its merits and then giving as good as you get,  

I'm supposed to treat you as someone who  is solely in a position of schooling me  

about how I should be the best ally for fear that  I should hurt you in some way. I have to tread  

on eggshells in order to do so. That, for me, is  part of the concern about allyship that it becomes  

essentially a subservient position  to the person who's insisting on it.

Dina McMillan: It's two things. It's the  

person who's demanding someone be a good ally. It  means you're supposed to accept what I say with no  

assessment of whether it's true or not, whether it  harms you or not, whether it is going to take us  

into a bad place. You're just supposed to be quiet  and clap whenever I say I want to do something,  

but at the same time... Any group you're allied  to, you kind of look at them as your pet.  

It's almost like you pat them on the head  because in order to be an ally to somebody,  

you almost have to think they're not important  enough to really alter your quality of life.  

It's just not true. We just need to lose the  whole concept. If you want to support people  

who do things, think a certain way or whatever,  do so, but by calling yourself an ally, it means  

there's no discernment and there's a submission  and a lack of honesty on your part about how that  

person's values, lifestyle, what  they're demanding is impacting you.

Josh Szeps: Don't worry, Dina. We're not going to be  

clapping along. We're just going to do jazz hands  because claps can be triggering to people these  

days. You know what I mean? You said something  interesting there. You said you have to accept  

what they say whether it's true or not, but truth  itself is now something that is questioned because  

their truth might be a lived experience and that  might give them standing to talk about something  

that you're not allowed to talk about. This is  another thing that is coming up increasingly  

in I suppose what you might call the cultural  wars, which is we can't really... A white person  

can't have a conversation with a person of color  about police brutality against people of color  

because the white person hasn't experienced the  lived indignity of being oppressed by racist  

police. Someone who doesn't have a grandmother  who was in the holocaust can't talk to someone  

who did about the nature of Judaism or whatever it  might be or anti Semitism because they don't have  

the lived experience. How do you balance  the value, if any, of lived experience?

Dina McMillan: Lived experience is also subjective perspective.  

It also doesn't look at causation. It doesn't look  at interaction between those people. It's a mild  

again misattribution. Lived experience is  a nice way of saying, "Let me bully you.  

You submit to what I say and you don't complain  about it or else I'm going to pick on you."  

I'm not saying lived experience doesn't have  value. We've been talking about the fact that I  

experienced significant racism when I  was in graduate school, for instance, and  

it mattered, but by saying no one else has  a right to talk about it unless they've had  

the exact same experience that I did,  we're losing out on shared experience. 

For instance, when you have black people  saying, "No white person can understand what  

I'm going through." If you get a group of women  together, there are so many things that women  

often experience. We have more in common than  we don't. You lose that if you automatically  

look at anyone who doesn't look exactly like  you, sound exactly like you as your enemy.

Josh Szeps: We're also being trained... I mean,  

I suppose it depends what you're talking about,  doesn't it? Obviously, if you're talking about  

what it feels like to be oppressed in a certain  way. If you've never been oppressed in a certain  

way, then you don't have the standing to have  a conversation about what that feels like,  

but if on the other hand, you're having a  conversation about public policy is dependent on,  

for example, data about indigenous deaths  in custody or something like that, then  

you surely can have a conversation about that  data even if you're not an indigenous person,  

but we seem to currently be confusing those two  categories of conversation, such that you need the  

lived experience in order to have standing even  to have a conversation about facts on the ground.  

Is there a way out of that Chinese finger puzzle?

Dina McMillan: Yes. With my Healing The Rift program...  

What I did is in 2020, when I saw the Black Lives  Matter protests really taking off and I knew...  

As a social scientist, I've studied flow on  effects. I knew that this is taking us in a place  

where racial disunity was going  to become significantly worse.  

I developed a program called Healing The Rift.  Let's talk about the lived experience thing.  

Let's say that I'm dealing with someone  and their grandmother was in the holocaust.  

If that person and I get together and they do  everything and we have a safe space together,  

where I'm not considered a bad person because my  grandmother didn't go through the holocaust...  

She's not looking at me as the enemy and  I know that. Then you can actually have  

something where you find common threads. You find storytelling where you can walk  

that person through what you're talking about,  allowing them to see the world a bit from the eyes  

of the person who has experienced whatever it is  you're talking about and give them some level of  

understanding. But it only happens if they're not  under attack, if you're not making them defensive,  

if you're not criticizing them and calling  them privileged. This whole world privilege  

is just... It makes my... I tell you, my dentist  said, "You know you're grinding your teeth?" Yes.

Josh Szeps: I'm here about too much privilege, Doc.

Dina McMillan: Yes, I'm grinding my teeth.

Josh Szeps: What do you make of privilege?  

What do you make of privilege as a notion? Why  does it make you grind your teeth at night, Dina?

Dina McMillan: Again, what the woke have done very cleverly and  

in a very sinister way is alter the definitions  of everything. Now, racism is just being white.  

It used to mean conscious hatred of other groups  because of their race. Now, it just means walking  

about living your life if you don't happen to  be black or brown. When you're talking about  

privilege, privilege used to mean somebody  with a trust fund who would get bailed out of  

jail even when they committed a crime. Now, it's  saying if I am a group, if I belong to a group,  

whether I'm born into that group or whether  it's a group that I have decided to join,  

then you are privileged if you're not in my group.  Therefore you have nothing to say. You should step  

aside. You should let me do what I want because  you're privileged. People get so defensive and I'm  

glad they get defensive because they should not  accept this. I try to explain to people that what  

they're really describing isn't privilege.  It's saying that the group you belong to  

does not normally face negative discrimination  because of that characteristic. If you're talking-

Josh Szeps: Isn't that a privilege, though, Dina?

Dina McMillan: In a way, it is. When you walk through  

life... Let's talk about an example growing  up. When I grew up, if we went on a road trip,  

we would have to think about where we were  driving through and how they treated black people  

because it may be possible we wouldn't be able  to find a place to get food. We might not be able  

to find a place to sleep that would accept black  people. If we broke down on the side of the road,  

we might not get any help. In that  way, I can understand that not  

being exceptional, not facing negative  discrimination because of a characteristic  

does give you a bit of an edge. It's not a  privilege. It's just a little bit of an edge, but  

it doesn't take into account anything else that is  going in your life. I know white people that have  

had much harder lives than I've had. Much  harder. So to call them privileged just because-

Josh Szeps: Isn't the point of [crosstalk]. Sorry, Dina.

Dina McMillan: I'm sorry?

Josh Szeps: Isn't the point of  

articulating white privilege not to say that all  white people have it better off than all black  

people, but that a white person doesn't have to  worry about being discriminated against on the  

basis of their whiteness and that is a certain  privilege? I walk into a shop, I don't have to  

worry about whether or not the person behind the  counter is racist. Maybe I do if they're from  

some particular ethnicity that has a chip on its  shoulder about white people, but generally not.

Dina McMillan: If you belong to the same group as the  

people in power, then on a... As a general rule,  you're not discriminated against because of that.  

It's like the way that men can walk through life  in a way women can't. I know that Jackson Katz,  

who wrote the Macho Paradox, does a seminar where  he has... It's a mixed-sex seminar. He starts off  

by asking the men, "All right guys. I'm going  to write this down. What did you do today when  

you got up to keep yourself from being sexually  assaulted?" The guys laugh. A few of them say,  

"I didn't go to jail," but for the  most part, they make a joke of it. 

Then he asks the women and they start the list.  "I wore this, I didn't wear that. I looked  

where I parked my car. I had my keys here. I told  someone where I was going." Again, you're talking  

about the fact that when you don't belong to the  group that has the most power, it does impact  

what you have to think about as you go through  your day, as you decide what you're going to do  

for your living if you're going to... planning  your holiday, for instance. It does matter,  

but the approach that we have right now is so  alienating and so divisive. It really isn't going  

to make things better. The backlash is going to  send us back to the 1850s if we're not careful.

Josh Szeps: Since you're  

speaking about gender and the benefits of  being a man, certainly when it comes to  

sexual assault, do you think  there is a gender split on  

this ideology? Is there a difference between  the susceptibility of men and women to wokeness?

Dina McMillan: Yes, I think women are far more likely to get  

caught up in it because from the time we're small,  culturally women are rewarded for being likable,  

for being accommodating, for putting  other people's needs before our own.  

Males are not usually brought up that way.  

You do have a lot of woke men, but not  nearly as many as you have woke women.

Josh Szeps: I've heard you before make the analogy of the  

Puss in Boots character in Shrek, which I think  is charming. Do you want to tell us about that?

Dina McMillan: What was I talking [crosstalk]?

Josh Szeps: You were talking about how the  

Puss in Boots character in Shrek, when he wants  to manipulate anybody, the lip starts quivering,  

the tears start flowing. Then out  comes the sword and he stabs you in the  

chest. The analogy that you were drawing was that  there's a certain sort of performative victimhood  

that takes place in some of these  conversations in terms of the group  

dynamics that you're a specialist in with  regards to social psychology, where hamming up  

one's own offendedness becomes one of the  tools in the armory of your group succeeding.

Dina McMillan: Yeah, it really is about... Right now, there's a  

competition to see who can be the most victimized.  Walking through life as a perennial victim  

is... First of all, anybody that knows you, it's  draining, but often like Puss in Boots, there's  

often a sword. A lot of the groups that are  getting so much time and attention right now and  

getting so much accommodation because they know  how to do the big eyes and the quivering lip... So  

many people have been conditioned to accommodate  whoever is standing in front of you and crying,  

but should you look a little closer at what  they're asking and how it's going to impact you  

and how it's going to impact your family... You  look at what they're claiming to be the truth and  

seeing some real holes in the data and the sword  comes out. You can get really damaged because  

the vindictiveness of the perennial victim is  exceptionally high. They are extremely vindictive.

Josh Szeps: Are we training victimhood?

Dina McMillan: Absolutely.

Josh Szeps: Are we empowering victimhood?

Dina McMillan: Anything you give attention to. That's why...  

I have one more video. I have my videos. I  promised I would do a video. My first video was  

called Why You're Not a Racist because I didn't  want white people to think it's fair for somebody  

to switch the definitions on you and then all of a  sudden, just for being white, you're a racist. The  

second one's called Bias Isn't Bigotry. All of us  have bias. It does not... Bigotry is a deep-rooted  

and heavily clung to hatred. I want people to  understand that too. I'm going to do something  

called Being Black: The Shadow of Racism. I want  to show white people how the systemic racism that  

was there for so long, how its shadow is still  cast into the lives of the average black person,  

and it can't just be dismissed by  saying, "We're not like that anymore." 

We need to have a concerted effort to  do something about it, but after that,  

I'm going into influence. I'm going to show  people the tactics being used to condition us  

in the worst possible way to give in  to whoever claims to be a victim group,  

to preach self hatred. It's like a race  to the bottom. I can hate myself more than  

anyone else. Anyone who's demanding that you  pay a price for historic crimes is trying to  

manipulate you. One thing I really want to do,  I want to make good people manipulation proof.

Josh Szeps: Why shouldn't  

you pay a price for historic crimes? Germany  pays Jews for the holocaust. The structures  

of white people are still benefiting from the  unpaid labor of ancestors who are alive today.

Dina McMillan: Because it will never end.  

There has to be a point where you're like,  "Okay." You can actually establish a system  

that tries to correct for past mistakes  without making the people now feel guilt  

for what happened. If you didn't do it,  you shouldn't pay for it. Otherwise,  

it's like the whole philosophy about an eye  for an eye and then everybody ends up blind.  

All it does is build resentment. It does not  correct the past ills, and it teaches victimhood.  

It teaches entitlement. It teaches manipulation.  It's too expensive to correct it that way.

Josh Szeps: 

We sometimes hear the term intergenerational  trauma being used as a justification for paying...  

What do you call it? The  movement to pay for [crosstalk]?

Dina McMillan: Reparations.

Josh Szeps: Reparations, that's right.  

My apologies. You sometimes hear intergenerational  trauma as a term that's being used for reparations  

and so on. Does it make sense to you that  trauma can be inherited intergenerationally?

Dina McMillan: Absolutely. It's  

funny because I do work in a lot of different  communities. I do work in the Jewish community.  

I've met two women who are doing research on  findings that the anxiety level, stress levels,  

depression levels of Jewish people who had  grandparents who survived the holocaust  

are significantly higher than among Jewish  people's whose grandparents didn't go through  

that experience. They're also finding that  extreme trauma can actually mark your DNA.  

There is something to it, but here I'm going  to [inaudible]. I hope you don't have any  

black Americans watching this because  they're going to get pretty mad at me. 

When you look at the reparations, the demand  for monetary reparations, I think, is the wrong  

approach. If you want to do reparations for the  black community, then we should do things like  

build community centers and  teach financial literacy,  

have sociologists go through and look  at the cultural factors that are holding  

black people back and look at the history  of those and talk about correcting them.  

That's the kind of reparations that will  actually have an impact. Show young black  

kids how to save and invest their money. Just  handing people who've never had money money,  

all it's going to do is attract a lot of  predatory business people who will get  

that money off of them as quickly  as one, two, three. It [crosstalk].

Josh Szeps: 

I somehow get the feeling that those proposals  are going to down like a lead balloon generally.

Dina McMillan: Well, they should do,  

but I'm looking at what would really  help. I'm looking at... All the talk about  

the Black Lives Matter protests talking about,  "We have to get rid of the police," they really  

have a grudge against the police. The police is  the least of our problems in the black community.  

Kids with no fathers is a huge problem. Lack of  self esteem is a huge problem. Not understanding  

our history is a huge problem. My mother taught  us black history before we went to kindergarten.  

She taught us you correct ignorance with knowledge  

so when the little white kids in our new white  neighborhood said, "Black people have never done  

anything," we were like, "The first man to die  in the Revolutionary War was Crispus Attucks,  

and he was a black man." That's  us as kids. We sat in the front-

Josh Szeps: Nice impersonation  

of yourself at the age of eight.

Dina McMillan: You can see me there. We were in the front of  

the class. We were the little black [inaudible].  Charles Drew, the first man to perform open-heart  

surgery. She said you fight ignorance with  knowledge, and she gave us that knowledge,  

so we walked in with a sense of pride. It made all  the difference. I come from a poor black family,  

five kids. My dad was enlisted military, no money.  

Four out of the five have university degrees.  Three out of the five have graduate degrees.  

That is well above the average, and it's  because of the mindset my mother taught us.

Josh Szeps: 

There's a narrative going around about white  fragility. There's a book called White Fragility,  

which is mandatory reading in  the United States especially for-

Dina McMillan: Oh yeah.

Josh Szeps: For the woke. The thesis broadly is that  

when you try to talk to white people about racism,  they become defensive, and they're very fragile in  

acknowledging their own complicity in racist  structures. This makes it very difficult to ever  

dispute the claims of anyone who accuses you of  being racist because you're disputing of the claim  

is itself more evidence of their thesis, which  is that you're fragile. It's a kind of ingenious,  

non-falsifiable theory. I wonder if you've thought  about how that is functioning between groups.

Dina McMillan: 

Yes. That would be White  Tears you're talking about.

Josh Szeps: White Tears, yeah.

Dina McMillan: I've actually heard somebody,  

a young black woman, talk about someone in a  totally different context because she's woke.  

This incident had nothing  to do with race whatsoever,  

but when the woman got upset, "Oh, it  was white tears." I'm like, "Oh my God."  

They say it's a bad craftsman who blames his  tools. If you're teaching whites about racism and  

they're getting angry and defensive, then you're  teaching it wrong. It's not because whites are  

fragile. It's because the people teaching this  are hostile and they're teaching self hatred.  

The only reason to teach someone self hatred is  so you can take advantage of them. [crosstalk].

Josh Szeps: 

Maybe the whites are so ignorant in their  own self certainty about their own goodness  

that they can't bear to hear the truths  about the system that they're part of.

Dina McMillan: It's our role as educators to break through that.  

I haven't had that problem. As you've noticed, I'm  not the kind of conciliatory, "Oh, everything you  

do is okay," kind of woman. I'm quite blunt, but  I also advocate for whites, "Please stand up for  

yourselves." These people are trying to absolutely  destroy everything that is good about our society.  

Whenever I see those abusive tactics being  used, it makes the hairs on the back of my  

neck stand up. I'm like, "Nothing good can come  from this." Again, if the people in your audience  

are getting defensive, that means for me, as  an educator, I need to find a way through.  

That's what I do with my Healing The Rift.  I don't find people getting defensive.

Josh Szeps: 

You called it a totalitarian religion earlier  in this conversation. Certainly, it has  

aspects that religions do. It has its own taboos.  I've heard John McWhorter talk about the N-word  

as being almost like you might find a culture that  has a long dead ancestor that they can't name who  

is now a God or something. It's almost gotten to  that level of that, "He who shall not be named."  

It's the Voldemort of words regardless of whether  or not you're using it in a particular context,  

even if you're saying, "You should never ever say  the N-word," you still can't say the actual word.  

Otherwise for some reason you summon the demons  and the volcanoes explode and we all go to hell.  

I wonder if you can just tease out your thinking  about the parallels between wokeness and faith.

Dina McMillan: First of all, when you have a faith,  

by definition, not every aspect of it  can be proven. There are aspects of woke  

culture that have been really supported in  society. I look at every study I can find  

and I turn immediately to the methodology  page. I am amazed, but no longer surprised  

that if I had presented methodology that  shoddy, I would never have graduated.  

You have the jargon. Even you were describing  that young woman who was really castigating a  

police officer and using all of the ideology, all  the ideological terms, all the jargon with regard  

to why he could be a racist as a black man, when  she's never walked a mile in his shoes at all. 

When you have the jargon, you have the absolute  beliefs, you have the trained thinking, where  

you look away from anything in your own tribe,  in your own belief set that's incongruent.  

You don't focus on it. You get really  angry at anyone else who questions any  

aspect of what you believe. You don't look  at the real flow on effect of your beliefs.  

The people who are at the top of your  religion are allowed to behave in a way  

that is morally in conflict with what you claim  to believe. If you're one of the top people, you  

can literally do anything and get away with it. Now, how does that not echo what we've seen in  

very powerful religions and everyone  who wants to get the approval of that  

group has to kiss the ring. They have to,  whether they really believe in it or not,  

they have to make a promise to not say anything  that goes against any of the accepted narrative.  

It's like if you look at Joe Biden's history  of what he believes and who he is as a person,  

what he's supporting and what  he's signed into law with this...  

What do they call them? Executive orders. First  day in office, he signed a bunch of executive  

orders and at one point said, "I don't even  know what I'm signing." Said, "Keep signing it."  

He doesn't believe a lot of what he's  supporting right now, but that's the  

deal you have to make with this group because if  they get angry, then they burn down your cities.

Josh Szeps: Of course,  

punishing dissenters is part of any good  religion or any faith, calling out blasphemers  

essentially. We see this of course in social  justice movements, but what's been striking  

recently is that people who ought to be  in a position of authority to be able to  

stamp out that kind of misbehavior just aren't.  I'm just talking about people in companies,  

who might be the head of a company, people even  in academic institutions and universities will  

feel too cowed to be able to stand up to the  students who have a certain ideology and who  

are calling out blasphemers for not being part  of their clique. Are institutions to blame then?

Dina McMillan: What we have is we have a culture that is...  

We've gone too long without training our people  in what it takes to have personal courage.  

We've tried so hard to be accommodating  to everyone that we are not clear of  

what our own values are and are not  willing to defend them. When we see  

things that are so in conflict with each  other... One of the things that I thought  

was really astounding about the woke is that so  many of their beliefs are in complete conflict  

with each other, but nobody that's part of  their group is allowed to comment on that.

Josh Szeps: Like what, Dina?

Dina McMillan: Like being supposedly pro women and  

supposedly pro gay rights and also pro  Islam. I'm looking at this and going, "Hmm,  

one of these things is not like the other." I'm  

looking at this and saying, "Does anybody  else notice that this doesn't make sense?"

Josh Szeps: 

Right Saudi Arabia and Islam and ISIS are  well known for their feminism and gay rights.

Dina McMillan: And having people that are  

leading the women's march in the United States who  want to institute Sharia law in the United States,  

but now they want to come down on Texas for  changing their abortion laws. By the way,  

the states have rights with regard to abortion  laws. Those abortion law changes started happening  

under Obama, so we cannot hold any president,  even Biden, we cannot hold any president  

to blame for that. That's not how it works,  but their values just don't mesh together.  

No one that's part of that religion is  allowed to really comment on it or else  

you're vilified. You could even  be thrown out of the group.

Josh Szeps: 

The end game seems to now be something that's  equity. The end game in the era of Martin Luther  

King Junior was equality, was judge people on the  content of their character, not the color of their  

skin. That has now changed to a conception of  justice that is much more proactive and much more  

about ensuring that the outcomes for everybody  by group are the same. I think this is probably  

a good place to end it, so take it wherever  you will, but where do you see that going?

Dina McMillan: That kind of a thinking  

is completely contradictory to Western society. It  is a socialist ideology that even in the socialist  

countries has never been born out by how they  live their lives. Those who are at the top of the  

hierarchy live completely differently. There's so  equity. They live in gated communities. They have  

multiple homes and access to things and we're  seeing that also. While they're talking about  

equity, all of the people at the top  of the Black Lives Matter organization  

are buying multi-million dollar  homes in all-white neighborhoods.  

The issue about equity, equity never works  because all it does is hold back people who  

could bring a lot of value to their own  lives and to the lives of everyone else. 

I just hope... I want to see courage. Courage  speaks to courage. I'm going to be brave enough.  

You'd be stunned how much money I've lost in  contracts because I won't be quiet and just be a  

good black girl that just echoes the woke though.  If I were woke, I'd make so much more money right  

now. But we need courage. We need people to stop  and say, "This is not going to take our society  

anywhere we want to go." We don't want equity.  We want equality. We want better opportunity, but  

we're not going to hold other people back because  this person doesn't want to work hard or succeed.

Josh Szeps: 

Dina, thank you for your courage and thank you  for speaking with us. It's great to talk to you.

Dina McMillan: Nice talking to you too. Thank you.

lee thank you so much for being on the show can we start with a big question what is

free speech um free speech is the

freedom the uh the lack the the absence of sanctions for people to

express themselves does that that's it does that mean the sanctions of one's peers and one's

friends as well or just the sanctions from the government to me it's all of it i mean they are not the same sanctions from the government

and sanctions from one's peers or co-workers or bosses or whatever but

they're all all of those play into the people's ability to speak and express

themselves freely how does that relate to consequences for

a person's speech because i think part of what we're going through at the moment is uh

a battle between people who want to see greater or harsher consequences against

speech that is intolerable and those who have a i suppose a more boisterous view

about what should be able to be said so if i if i say that jews are inferior or that women are no good at science uh

that you know a lot of people will take offense at that and they will sanction me in certain social ways they'll be

might not be invited to to cocktail parties and so on is that appropriate or inappropriate what about my free speech

well appropriate inappropriate i mean you started with what is it sort of a different question

is what are the appropriate limits to free speech and exactly as your question

implies uh there is a i don't know certainly in the states possibly across

the democratic west this is a hot topic of conversation where people are trying to renegotiate

in some sense what constitutes appropriate limits and boundaries on

free speech there are people who say they're absolutists i don't really believe them

like i think they haven't thought it through i don't think anybody can be an absolutist because even absolutists i

think would you know stop at you know someone holding a gun or an

axe to your head saying give me your money or i'm gonna you know i'm gonna blow your head off like i don't maybe there are people who

think that's okay but but but not very many and so

so once you accept that you're accepting there are some limits to speech and then the question is

under what conditions and when well let's answer that question what's your opinion on that

what are the appropriate limits to to free speech thinking specifically i suppose about the denigration of

minorities which is the one that is coming up at the moment in the in at this cultural time

well so there are different right there's a moral perspective and a legal perspective and they're they're

different um and so and it's often good to start from one

and then move into the other so from a legal perspective in the at least in the states

you know hate speech is completely legal right there i mean there's just no prohibition anywhere against hate speech

so that's from a legal standpoint but at the same time what that means is there's

no prohibition against denouncing those who use hate

speech and this goes on and on in that well okay

if hate speech is legal then anything short of hate speech is legal

and but denouncing anything short of hate speech is also legal so there's denouncing right so there's

denouncing which may create social pressure for people to maybe walk back or not be so brazen and how they express

themselves um but that's still you know it's curtailing free speech whether it's a

different question whether that's a good thing or a bad thing i think sometimes it's good sometimes it's not good each case is so different you in my

opinion you need to actually consider specific cases

on their merits whether it's a sort of good thing or a bad thing so maybe i'll just stop there

i'm glad you used the word denunciation because you make a distinction in your work between criticism and denunciation

what is that distinction oh well so you or i or anybody may propose some

idea i mean in my you know regular life it's some academic presenting evidence that bears on some

issue in the talk might be a series of studies or theory or something like that but it doesn't have to be academics

talking about science it could be a political idea a policy idea um

it really could be anything and so criticism is some version of no that's a

bad idea or no you're saying this is true but the basis on which you're

saying this is true is so flawed no one should believe that it's actually true

or or you're proposing a certain policy and you think this is a net good i i

believe this policy is horrendously immoral and here's why i think it's immoral so

that's criticism that's like you know a reasonably functional way for a group

of people or a society to figure out which way should go denunciation

um is you know is some version of anyone who promotes an idea such as

yours is so revolting uh what we should do is punish them to the fullest extent

that we're able to do and what that means is you know who knows what it means right

it could mean getting you fired from your job right that's not criticism that is

punishment so there is now people absolutely from from a legal standpoint people have every right to

call for your job or to call for my job that's from a legal standpoint that's part of free speech they have the right

to say you should be fired i should be fired but you will neither one of us should ever work in this town again like

they have the right to say all those things but typically for most of us

we're hired by somebody somebody is paying our salary i mean unless we're independent entrepreneurs that's

different but if you have a job the punishment can actually only come

from your employer from whoever holds power so regardless of what the mob says

it's really the person maybe it's my dean or my provost maybe it's your boss

you know or the head of the company the ceo of the company or whoever it might be those are the people making the

decisions to inflict the punishment the mob they may be doing it in response to

a mob the mob cannot get you or me fired unless they win

the relevant authority over to their side so distinguish between all of those but the mob has the right to call for euro

in my head and they have the right to call for your head or my head for what you or i might think are the stupidest reasons they have the the mob has the

right to demand that i get fired because i'm wearing a brown cap at this at this uh podcast this interview i was gonna

say i i was going to say something but i thought i'd just write a sternly worded letter to your boss after the interview

is the mob getting more powerful and are bosses giving into it more

that's a great question i think so i think the answers to that are yes and i think the main reason the

answers to that are yes is because social media has made two

things much more easy but for

to come into the public eye so so that's that's one part of it and the

other part is social media has made it easier for denunciation mobs to form

so um because of social media if

someone you know the range of things that people

get sanctioned for regarding speech and oppression and expression

range from in my opinion range from nothing at all things that are just like completely legitimate like somebody is

an academic opposing affirmative action or opposing diversity equity and inclusion programs like that should be a

completely legitimate thing to discuss i'm not saying i agree with those positions necessarily you have to go into the specifics of the position to

figure out for me to figure out whether i agree with it but it should be able to be discussed this is not like espousing

genocide or you know race superiority it's just it's not doing any of those things um

so but so people have been denounced and called to sanctions and sometimes actually sanctioned for things that range from

completely legitimate to minor faux pas you know there was a guy i think at the

university of michigan who showed um i think was a version of a fellow with

um i think it was lawrence olivier playing a fellow in blackface now

there's a 1960s movie it was some theater create some

you know relevant class and you know this created a firestorm and he

was removed i believe you the op shot was he was removed from teaching that class now

that is at worst the faux pas it's debatable whether that's even a faux pas but but at worst this i mean he

didn't use a racial slur he wasn't unprofessional with his students he showed a movie from the 1960s

so but we could call that okay kind of made a mistake but but he's sanctioned for that up until things that well you know

people um have said things that are you know

would by most people be considered deeply insulting and and either are or

at least border on things like racial ethnic slurs which really for the most part well again there's a difference

between use and reference so again this is a hot issue

that seems to be resolved on the wrong side in my opinion and that is in academia

as in the case with the professor who showed an old movie with uh um an actor playing in blackface um

you know if you have a book or a source that now

uses racial slurs or ethnic slurs or gender-based slurs

you can you're routinely now sanctioned i don't know if you're always sanctioned but you're routinely sanctioned um so

which means you know if i was tempted to teach huckleberry finn i would not be allowed

to do that i i wouldn't do it because there are those racial slur in there

so but but up to and including the use of

these sort of slurs so people can and have been punished

so that you know i mean that's the state of play and and it and so

this happens in part because social media spreads this kind of stuff in a you know

like a wildfire kind of way that was never the case before social media

so lots of people know about it they hear about it they see about it and social media makes it way easier for a

mob to form you know and in the space of two days you have a thousand people calling for somebody to be fired or

suspended or punished in some way which again that was very rare to have such

rapidly developing outrage mobs 30 or 40 years so the technology is enabling a kind of

a cultural upswell and then the cultural upswell reinforces the technology in the

sense that everybody knows that these things happen like we're familiar with this script now right we're familiar with the

the person in a at a university or a college or a newspaper or a celebrity or

someone on the today show or whatever it might be saying something that uh you know they trigger a tripwire and then we

see the process unfold it's almost like you're watching the same movie over again the the twitter mob comes for them

you know the corporation or the university tries to figure out what to do about it they put on a suspension you

know pending investigation who knows what the investigation is you know and then ultimately either the mob wins or

it or it doesn't win do you see this then as as predominantly a technological phenomenon

or predominantly a cultural phenomenon like how should we think about this and particularly let's start talking about

universities and colleges and where we're sort of getting our ideas from because i suppose that's the most relevant place where we learn how to

think there is a a a controversial social

science issue not hotly debated but like in which the

social science is unclear is the extent to which

universities and i'm talking about american universities i i don't have enough knowledge about you know the

netherlands or nigeria to have a serious opinion about what university life is like in any of those

places um our hotbeds of political indoctrination

and certainly the faculty are way way left i mean that's and which you know i mean i feel like it's gonna make me

sound like tucker carlson or something like that but just the data are overwhelming that the faculty are

overwhelmingly left and when i say overwhelmingly talk about the social sciences and humanities it's less in

physics and chemistry but it's pretty skewed there also we're talking 90 95 99 of people who

will identify as on the left of you know on the left of the american political spectrum and it doesn't matter how this

is done it could be done with party identification self-reported ideology and so on it's it's you know you know 90 to 99

of people in anthropology sociology philosophy are on the left and a substantial

minority self-identify as as far left radicals activists marxists

so this is not some delusion of you know of of right-wing axe grinders that's

literally literally the state of the universe it's here it's not every university but it's on

average in general that's what it's like okay so but that's a different question than whether they gave and engage in

indoctrination and there were a series of studies over the last 20 25 years or so

that have found that it's even though it's unclear

whether faculty try to indoctrinate students evidence on that's kind of mixed they

basically fail that students are not heavily influenced or at least their political ideologies not heavily

influenced by the ideology of the faculty they are heavily influenced by the ideology of other students but

that's a sort of a peer group type effect and that that sort of teenagers and young adults being heavily

affected by the peer groups that's long established common phenomena but

paper just came out and i have to admit i'm still digesting

it but it just came out finding that what you do get at universities

is faculty experience at universities increases

students moral absolutism

so whichever side they're on and you know they skew left to start with

you're getting this this paper it's only one paper it only just came out typically

you know on general principles most of these sort of new hot findings in my

opinion need five to ten years before anyone figures out what they really mean until other people try and look at the

same thing but but this walk you know to the if this holds

it suggests a way in which universities maybe sort of exacerbated some of the

polarization and political divides by leading 20 year olds 21 year olds to be

way more certain of the truth of their political beliefs than they have any right to be you have a couple of

hypotheses about radicalization in academia uh

what are they well you know to some extent it's just very

very simple the there's a going back forever there's a very small

minority of far left and far right people in any like national survey in the states it's typically but

10 more left are on the far left and far right you know any given survey might i

might find six percent or eight percent or twelve percent but i ballpark it as around ten percent on the fringes

okay fine at ten percent it's 10 can still do a lot of damage you know my understanding

for example is the bolsheviks never had more more support than about 20 of the russian population so a highly organized

small minority can do a lot of damage i mean you have small examples of that here i mean i

think the capital riot was not typical of american republicans but it was a

very bad thing and i think the sustained violence that we had in the name of social justice in the places of places

like seattle and portland was also a very bad thing but again i don't think that was that certainly wasn't most of

the social justice protests and it's not the most most of the people who supported black lives matter

okay so you don't so so the radical fringes can do a lot of damage on their own but within academia remember

if academia is we can ballpark it as entirely left i mean at the point that you're 90 95 98 99

it's like the other two or three or five percent hardly matter so it's just ballparking it you know if it's all left then just off the bat you can double the

fringe number i mean if the fringe number is 10 and academia is otherwise um representative of the left there

should be about 20 now once you get 20 you're having a you know sort of almost a critical mass of of of activists at

you know people activists and extremists but it's but the evidence is it's actually considerably higher at least in the

social sciences and humanities it approaches 40 percent and i suspect that

what's going on there is a lot of self-selection people

learn that these fields you know uh hold certain

values far left values and world views and if that appeals to you it's like oh wow

here's a bunch of people who think just like i do i want to go into you know philosophy or anthropology or sociology

or whatever it might be so you have a powerful self-selection effect and then

you have a critical mask this then produces scholarship

that seems to vindicate a sort of far-left worldview and then

whether it's other scholars or mass media or anybody else can then point to

the scholarship as vindicating this worldview when in fact it has elements of a ponzi

scheme that self-selection hypothesis lee that you know

uh academia starts out being a little bit more left-wing therefore more left-wing people are attracted to it

they feel comfortable around their peers they feel comfortable around the sorts of ideas that are being discussed so it gets bigger and bigger and bigger

something just doesn't quite smell right about the sort of arbitrariness of that about the idea that if you you

rolled the dice on history it could easily have gone the other way and you might have academic institutions that are

overwhelmingly conservative it's it reminds me a little bit of the question about why isn't there as much

good right-wing comedy as there is left-wing subversive comedy you know people often ask this and the simple

answer is i don't really know but i don't think it's an accident and i wonder whether or

not there's something about the the left that is what more curious more

interested in the kinds of things that social scientists talk about more willing to subvert dominant power

structures and to ask critical questions and things like that like what else is going what else could be going on that

could explain the paucity of conservatives in social sciences yeah no i mean that's all of that is completely

fair and there's it prop is probably true to some degree

and the degree to which is currently not completely clear so

i'm hesitating because i have reservations about the work but some work shows for example that

people on the left are more score higher on the personality dimensions no politics involved

hypothetically um openness to experience and so the idea is people are more open

to experience are more intellectually curious and more likely to be drawn into you know fields that promote the

life of the mind like academia or science or social science so there may well be some

so i have reservations about that because sometimes i suspect

that perhaps unintentionally politics are embedded in some of those measures

so in some versions of the openness to experience questionnaire

one question goes something like i like to spend time visiting

uh uh uh art museums or something like that some i like to visit the museums and

exhibits or concerts or museums okay so what does that have to do with

politics well in the states it does because in the states the the uh some democrat republican

um a huge de-marker of

a republican and conservatives whether you are

whether you live in a rural or an urban area so the american cities are

overwhelmingly democratic even when they're in heavily republican states the cities are overwhelmingly democratic the

rural areas even in very democratic states are overwhelmingly republican now none of this is absolute always but it's

like oh really a lot now if you live out on the farm you don't have lots of opportunities to go to

museums they need to ask about your your openness to nascar and the crawfish

museum down on the bayou right right so that's my reservation with the

measure but but let's put my reservations aside and say okay we can just take it at face

value the uh liberals people on the left actually are on average more open to

experience than our conservatives those differences are still not gigantic they're small to moderate and

they they might they might play to some degree into differential self-selection into

fields like academia or science but those differences are so small

i i they can't possibly explain a skew of like 95 percent to you know three

percent a political and two percent conservative it can't possibly explain a skew of 20

or 30 to one it just it can't do that work okay so let's let's assume that that maybe those factors of openness and

curiosity give the left an initial leg up in uh the humanities at universities

and then and thereafter uh your phenomenon of self-selection comes into play and it becomes a snowball a

snowballing effect where a conservative would just feel so alienated and would just find the ideas to be so uh

closed-minded or repugnant that they don't want to go into that into that field in the first place yeah now you know what's not clear

though is if you go back far enough you know this there's some data going back a hundred years on

the political skew of academia so and you would think then

that if they it you know if there's something about people who happen to be on the left that

differentiates them from people who happen to be on the right that would somehow make academia more appealing to

people on the left you should have a big split a hundred years ago and you don't have that sort

of big split 100 years ago so it kind of you know we don't really know

also the measures of left right that are available from 100 years ago are probably not as good as they are now so

let's just talk about the consequence of this though lee as well because one thing that you say that i think is interesting is that the this imbalance

in academic institutions means that there is a bias towards the way that

particular ideas sound or can be labeled in the sense that if something is perceived or can couch itself in the

garb of social justice or issues that are dear to the left's heart then it receives less scrutiny and if

something can be tarred or tarnished with the label of being in opposition to social justice it will be pilloried

regardless of the the credibility of the of the ideas they're in can you elaborate on that how does that work

well i mean it works i mean it works in all sorts of ways so one of my favorite

i mean i was just listening to a podcast there's a um a book that jeff just came out called the genetic lottery

uh by uh paige harden and uh she's a you know a psychological

geneticist you know studies her admiral heritability and intelligence and all sorts of other

traits and and uh in the book she argues that people in

general but the left and particularly academia in particular really needs to take seriously the fact that all sorts of

like really valued and important life outcomes um have a genetic component

doesn't mean they're only determined by genetics doesn't mean other things don't matter and she kind of frames it

as the genetic lottery because she positions she explicitly it positions herself

and the demeanor of the book on the left that is you know

winners of the genetic lottery you know you can view that as sort of in some sense the ultimate form

of privilege because of course you didn't choose your genes yeah i didn't choose my genes and so it is the sort of

the height of an unearned advantage now uh she was on jesse singles uh

uh uh blocked and reported podcast and

there's maybe a two to three minute segment where she said she says

and i'm paraphrasing um because she was very sensitive appropriately for people misquoting her

and mischaracterizing her because she is sort of on thin ice to some degree because the academic left hates this

genetic stuff and she's like well you know this is the science and you kind of you know you're going to be way better

off accepting the world as the science chose it to be than just being in denial about

this stuff but her views have often been mischaracterized um and so she you know

as as many of us who have had our views mischaracterized uh feel where you know

pisses us off to have people say we said things are already things we haven't said but she makes a point and over

about a two or three minute segment of saying she purposely positioned this

as uh you know and and and flagged herself as on the left as part of team

left um uh because she was she wanted the book to get a hearing and

that if she didn't do that people would have just turned it off and now to me and i think she's right about it i think

her analysis there is dead on the book has been i think overall very well received i think it deserves to

have been well received but that's not my point is that she had very good intuitive

antennas as to how the political biases in the field works so you can't just come out and say you know intelligence

really has a very large genetic component if you do that you're going to be denounced as a eugenicist and a nazi

but if you say look you know i'm an anti-racist i think we need our policies for you know wealth redis

wealth redistribution there's too much inequality privilege you know they're too many privilege people who've come

from privileged backgrounds have taken over the you know everything that counts and that's why you need to pay attention

to my book well then you can get some people to listen to you and i think she's right about that but that but that tells you how academia works

well i mean look the progressive might say uh academia works that way because

uh the the right wing in many western democracies has gone careening off the rails and what used to be your

grandfather's uh you know right-wing party of eisenhower or or even george w bush or something is

now a bunch of crazy people who deny climate science who are skeptical of vaccines who are uh you know who don't

believe in the institutions of democracy who would just as soon steamroll an election as as look at it uh you know

and so of course yes we're going to give more intellectual credibility to things that that seem like they're from the

same side of politics talk to us in 50 years when uh when we've got eisenhower back and you know and the left is all

the ones trying to steal elections so so this is the thing for me

and this is i realize this is both not really that effective and and very unsatisfying for

most people when you're talking about the science

for the most part you should be taught i believe you should be

talking about and should be able to talk about the science without having to worry about you know

whose political acts is it sharpening you shouldn't have to worry about that

because if something is true it's true because it's true it's not true because you like or dislike trump

it's true on grounds that establish whatever the thing is as actually being

true and we should and i i think i will just never i will go to my grave dying on this hill we should be able to have

conversations about the evidence on its own merits without wonder without

worrying about well this is going to give you know sucker to people who are really

evil however there is another great paper that is not yet published but is posted on a like

one of the public archives um uh that

examined a lot of the dynamic that your question asks about

um and so it one of the things it shows

which is consistent with with lots of other stuff is that people exaggerate

the beliefs of their ideological or you know tribal opponents

so that's a problem in and of itself so when people think well you know if we just talk about this it's going to give

support to you know the horrible people over there they aren't thinking about horrible people over there and there are

horrible people over there they're just not most of the people who are over there but

one of the reasons for that dynamic as per this paper and i think this is probably right

is that even though extremists are relatively small minorities on each side

people are very reluctant to call out or condemn or distance

themselves from the extremists on their own side

and so there's probably two reasons for that one is they're afraid of being ostracized themselves i mean as you saw

that with all the republicans who said no the election was completely reasonable you know have all been like

driven from the party frequently so you see that on the on the right

and you know and on the left you see uh you know academics who say the left has gone too far there's cancer culture this

is like yeah this is bad you know get themselves into trouble so you know you see this on both sides

so there's fear of the extremists on one side but but

probably even more powerful is fear of giving unintentional support

to the other side so if i say you know if i admit that they that there was a you know a lot of sort

of damage and some deaths that resulted from a minority a relatively small

minority of black lives matter protests that can undercut support for black

lives matter and you know we're going to go back to 1950 and you know the country is going to reinstitute jim crow

uh so people because of that dynamic people are unwilling to

condemn even when they're just kind of reasonable you know kind of moderate or reasonable

on the left reasonable reasoned on the right and very uncomfortable with their extremists they are very they rarely say

so so what that does is seed exceeds the rhetorical space to the

extremists so when people on the other side think about their opponents what

they see disproportionately are the extremists so you can't really blame them for

exaggerating the other side's views because most of the sort of public discourse is taking place on the

extremes as someone who spends uh much of my career nitpicking my own side and

pointing out the flaws in my own allies opinions i do think that that just on a

psychological level that world view is deeply mistaken because you know nothing gives greater credibility to your

opponents than pretending that there are no problems on your own side and nothing is likelier to build a bridge to your

opponents and to make them more reasonable than by acknowledging your own side's flaws yeah i just had david

frum on on my podcast and uh and during the migrant crisis uh after the you know

during the syrian refu syrian war and the refugees pouring into europe he was

asked about far-right parties in europe and he was he made the point

you know they're terrifying but if if the only people who talk about securing

the borders are fascists then fascists are going to win elections so you know the left has to figure out a

way to have have difficult conversations about the things that it hasn't necessarily gotten perfectly uh

perfectly right so where does this where does this leave us all

lee i mean because i'm interested one thing that i always feel when i talk you know when we

talk about things like this is are we really just upset because

i guess for one of a better word cultural progress is moving faster than we'd like

like you know you talk about the norms around what you can and can't say and let's set aside for a moment the

question of just pure science right so let's say that if there's just a study that says something perfectly impartial

and [Music] about you know genetics or iq or something like that then we can tolerate

those but we all know that there are lots of spheres where the science is a little bit more culturally influenced they're all kinds of interpretations in

the 1950s or the 1920s and just just open a newspaper from that era and you

are your eyes pop open at the casual racism and sexism that was understood just to be truth right women aren't you

know women aren't good at work uh you know black people are lazy or mexicans are lazy or whatever it is and

people just thought well these are just these are just impartial facts i mean these are not judgment calls these are now they're incredibly offensive things

to say similarly there are things that we say today that we regard as being true that will be regarded as horrendous

in 50 years um you know is the quibbling about what you can and can't say just us being old

curmudgeons i i would

i mean my answer to the simple question is no i don't think it's just us being old curmudgeons

i do think

look i'm an academic at it and in academia deals with ideas it also deals

with evidence and so the the

only way that i know of to vet the meaning

and implication of ideas and evidence is to have robust

almost you know short of personally threatening people

i might have some other limitations but almost unfettered ability to discuss

the meaning of those ideas and that evidence um and so you know i used to

i used to believe uh that

science um trumps or is

prior to issues of politics and justice because once you bring politics and justice and you know

risks skewing and distorting the science but i don't believe that anymore um and the

reason i don't believe it they're very heavily influenced by alice drager alex trager had his famous book from about 10

years ago rachel's uh the uh daley galileo's middle finger yeah she's great she's completely great

um and and she argued that the search for truth actually has to be based on justice and

what she means by that or at least what i took away from my discussions with her

on that is that you need you know bedrock protection of individual human rights

free speech free association free inquiry academic freedom

and because if you don't have those you don't have the ability

to truth seek it when the truths when the

truth lies in avenues that some

groups for political reasons consider forbidden

you end up with forbidden truths and so so

that's because of that in that sense the search for truth you

know of which science is one you know one avenue it's not the only

way to search for truth but yes presumably most scientists think that's what they're doing

um but that has to be built on that sort of bedrock protection of

free speech free inquiry open inquiry and academic freedom because if it's not you you can't pursue the truth you you

can pursue the truth if it fits the you know the dominated ideological agendas but if it doesn't

which if it doesn't then you're at risk of all sorts of personal consequences yes and what kind of a

truth is that that's not a truth worth pursuing if it has to be hemmed in by some stalinist some precepts talented

doctrine right yeah i wonder i wonder if this then brings us back to the conversation

earlier about denunciation versus criticism that that maybe what's unique about this

moment that isn't just uh old curmudgeons uh sitting on their porch railing at the kids these days uh having

different mores than they do maybe what's different is that shift from criticizing ideas to denouncing

people who dare to speak those ideas or you know criticizing racial slurs to denouncing people who

merely refer to the existence of those racial slurs even if they never use them in anger that the the targeting of

individuals is is is new perhaps and maybe the cowardice maybe the as you said earlier

the intensity of the mob is new and thus the cowardice of the people in positions of power to fire

uh people who explore unpopular ideas is is new i don't know

i i do i do think it's it's new what's what's unclear

is whether it's a wave that will receive recede not receive that'll calm down

and bat and back off and that you know society sometimes ebbs and flows in these ways

um or it's the new normal and i think it's just too early to tell whether it's the new normal i am

concerned i don't know that i'm right but i am concerned that enough young people

you know sort of teenagers through like graduate students are being socialized into a world where

this is the new normal this is like what you do when somebody holds a belief that

you oppose whether it's you know viscerally or any other way um what you do is denounce

them that's what you do um and if that is the case then that's a very dangerous

development i think on the other hand it may be that there are enough people

sort of sick of this and going you know and that it's gonna eventually you know the mobs will be rebuffed and

ignored and you know and that may happen i hope something like that happens i

don't see it happening anytime soon i you know my the perfect example for

this is dorian abbott so during abbott is a geophysicist at uni university of chicago who was denounced for opposing

diversity equity and inclusion programs now your diverse di type programs

as far as i can tell overlap about 80 90 with affirmative action like they're more or less synonyms they're not

completely synonyms but they're very synonymous if not identical um at least how they're being

implemented um and california in november 2020 which is one of the most

left states in the united states and which is majority minority that is the

white people are in a majority there is no racial ethnic majority in california anymore that state voted down

affirmative action that is you know whatever 10 15 years ago it voted to ban

affirmative action in hiring remember lords and admissions also

and they brought it up again in this last election and it lost again so when the

most left or one of the most left states in the country votes against affirmative action

debating the appropriateness and worthwhile and merit of

diversity equity and inclusion programs seems like this is like a conversation we should be having rather than

threatening somebody with punishment or or ostracism you know so

so that captures that cat well so he he's an interesting story

because they they it actually happened to him twice once at university of chicago

where he teaches um and there was a mob there was a sort of grad student uh you know initiated mob eventually brought

some faculty and maybe some alumni into it um but university of chicago is

generally regarded as not being one of the institutions that's super woke right as being one of the whole

sort of so chicago has this statement you know the chicago academic freedom statement

that's you know uh um just a resounding affirmation of that freedom but that

doesn't mean the faculty are not heavily woke right those are two different things

there's like the institutional policy versus the faculty or the in this case it was the

grad students but the resolution was you know he was in all sorts of hot water eventually

one of the editors at quillet returning it wasn't claire but it was one of the people under claire

organized a counter petition in support of ad

and within a week had like 8 000 signatures saying this guy should be allowed this is ridiculous and then a day or two after they submitted it the

president of chicago came out with this you know this this again sort of resounding affirmation of

academic freedom didn't mention abbot didn't mention the the physics department or just were committed to

academic freedom and then it all died down but then a few months later he was invited to give this very prestigious

talk at mit and a mob at mit formed because in in

the interim he had published like an op-ed in newsweek opposing dei programs so this triggered

another mob who denounced him called for him to be disinvited and the the powers that be

caved and he was disinvited and to clarify his transgression here just for

people who aren't too in the weeds about what diversity equity and inclusion means and how affirmative action is

implemented in american colleges or not like what is the substance of what he's saying that people found so objectionable

well so the proponents would argue that they are designed to provide representation to

groups that are previously underrepresented in the academy right so take things like race race and

sexuality and ethnic background into account and religion maybe when you're when you're hiring people or letting

students here that's right that's right and he's basically saying that that shouldn't happen so it's less about his his quibble is less with these sort

of uh like diversity classes that and training where you might have to go and learn about how to be welcoming and

inclusive in the workplace to people from different backgrounds and more about who gets

a leg up yeah i think it's mostly about i mean he has some alternative and one of the

essays i've used to us is that that you know basically argues for merit-based you know decisions um yeah

he also comes out very strongly against bias and taking action against discrimination and you want to hire the

best people but you don't you know he would argue that you don't engage i mean

i don't know if he ever uses the term reverse discrimination but the way you overcome bias is by being unbiased by

evaluating people based on their accomplishments not by by uh purposely taking whether it's race or

sex or anything else into account that would be his argument and there's not you know my only point is there is an argument to be had there this is like

you know uh it's a fairly mainstream american view there's a slew of um

pew surveys that ask people whether they support affirmative action

in college admissions and in hiring and vast majorities of americans

including black respondents and latino respondents huge majorities oppose affirmative

action so that this is a forbidden position in academia is just ridiculous

it's just yeah he may be right or wrong and again i'm not sure i i'm not evaluating his position on the

merits that's not what i'm doing right now what i am all i'm saying is that it is a position

that you know should be able to be debated in academia and if it can't be debated you know when people get

sanctioned by in this case being divided by having to fight off a mob you know even though nothing actually happened to

him in chicago the whole experience of having to fight off a mob is a miserable experience so if there's anyone else in

chicago who might have been considering contesting the way in which chicago is

doing dei they have probably learned from abbott's experience you know what maybe i just

better keep my mouth shut so what i'm hearing you say is that the the center of gravity of people who work

in academia has has drifted off to the left and with it that has dragged the uh

what are they what do you call the the sort of envelope of acceptable ideas there's some jargon the overwritten window

so the overton window of of ideas that are regarded as being acceptable and polite company has therefore shifted

which means that the whole conversation at university humanities departments has has

has diverged from what as you say a majority of black americans and uh

latino americans think is normal normal disciplines normal opinions to have

so how could a student who's listening to this or watching this or someone who is you know

not in a position of power but is sort of tangentially in the orbit of these conversations and of this

culture what what would your advice to them be and how can they

make themselves useful uh boy that that is a uh that's a

wickedly good question it's it you know it really

that so varies from person to person and posit you know position to position you know for it for a young person who

doesn't have you know a lot of power or status you know or whatever an 18 year old or 19 year old

early in college you're you're happy to just get through college and get your grades

just you know i would avoid the mobs just avoid the

mobs just you know if when you see a mob forming don't assume that they're right

don't assume you know that you know even your your friends are saying things that are actually true

there are so many cases where people have been denounced and then the truth has turned out to be way way more

nuanced and complex or even wrong than when the denunciation started

and it's just a terrible way to conduct a society even if they're right

so just if if that's your position that you know just

don't just don't do that just just don't do that that's so that's if you're in that kind of position if you're in a

higher status position it's sort of a mirror image of that

resist the mob you know i mean if a person did something

that before the mob existed that you would fire them for and you found out about it because of

the mob well that might be different you know like if if you had an a priority standard that if a person crosses line x

you know your job is at risk well then it doesn't matter that there's a mob it's it's it's that the person crossed x

but if you don't have that you know if you don't have standards of professional conduct and you just have a mob calling

for somebody's head like just just like tell the mob to go fly a kite

yeah i mean one of the best examples of this is is this david shores who's now kind of a pretty influential

voice on the left i mean he's quite bluntly a democratic party activist i think he is

self-described as sort of a socialist or a democratic socialist she's pretty far left his twitter account self-describes

as i try to elect democrats so and he was fired you know this is summer

of 2022 in the heat of the social justice black lives matter protests of 2021

2020 what 2020 yeah 2020. um he tweeted out an

article and you can't make this up by a black sociologist at princeton

showing that peaceful protests win more people over to your side than

do violent protests his co-workers were triggered by this

that he was denounced they claimed he made them feel unsafe

and that is a quote he made them feel unsafe and he was fired

and it's like for tweeting a sociology article

i mean this is just i mean we could have an entire other hour-long conversation about safety couldn't we i mean the idea

that he's making you unsafe because he's insufficiently supportive of uh

anti-racist protests that themselves have become violent but you know the greater violence is the

structural white supremacy of the united states and because he is not expressing sufficient fealty to the idea of

overturning the white supremacist structures of american governance and policing he is therefore directly making

you unsafe like in this room right now that's right that's right the tenuousness of the tendrils of like

connective tissue between you know a person's safety and an idea have become

remarkably thin but um lee there's a lot there's a lot for us to noodle on there thank you so much for articulating all

that um it's lovely to have you on permission to think uh in collaboration with uncomfortable conversations my my

podcast uh thank you thank you again it's wonderful thanks for having me it was a great conversation

Jon, it's fantastic to talk to you. Thanks for being part of this conversation. My pleasure, Josh. How nice to see you again.

You've got a piece in the Atlantic recently where you compare us to Babel, or as Americans call it, Bable.

What's the analogy? Ever since around 2014, I felt like something changed.

Something just changed deep in the matrix of the universe.

And I've been struggling to figure out ever since, things started going crazy and weird on campus and then in other parts of society.

And I love metaphors, I cram too many metaphors in everything I write, but I came across the

tower of Babel story, or Babel. And most people know, "Oh, people built a tower and God knocked it over because the

humans were arrogant." But if you read the story, there's a key line in there. God sees them building the tower and he says, "Let us go down and confound their language

so that they will not be able to understand one another." And when I reread that line, I thought, "Oh, my God, that's it.

That's what's happened to us." We can no longer understand each other. Now, the world was never such that, "Oh, we all understood each other perfectly."

But there were shared understandings. There were things that most Americans could believe, like Osama bin Laden attacked us

at 9/11. Most of us believed that very quickly, but that doesn't happen anymore.

And so that's what I was trying to get at, that something has changed. We're fragmented into our little bubbles and we can't understand each other anymore.

Let's chart that change. You talk about the first decade of the 21st century as being a time of techno utopianism,

where the idea about the internet was, "How could you have tyrannies anymore, when the demos can all talk to each other?"

This is going to be a utopian time where there'll be no more misinformation because the system will correct itself, because everybody will be able to override sources of misinformation

and communicate with each other directly. And you point to 2011 as being maybe the high point of that, you had the Arab Spring, you

had occupy Wall Street. These were these organic networks that really brought out the power of social media.

And in the decade or so since, what's happened? That's right. First, let's back up even before 2011, because 2011 is the pivotal year but only recently

have I come to realize, those of us who were conscious in the 90s, it really did a number

on us because [inaudible]. Really makes you feel old when you say those of us who were conscious in the 90s, because

you just made me ... I was like, "Wasn't everyone?" And then I realized, "Oh, there are human beings walking around this earth who are fully

grown adults, who were born in the 2000s, yes." You call them young people, that's [inaudible]. We call them children but perhaps young people is more polite fit for it.

I went to college in the 1980s and I was very much a child of the Cold War.

And when I was a kid, it was like, "Oh, my God. Overpopulation and pollution."

And the 70s was a gloomy time, and the 80s was not much better.

And then suddenly, the Berlin Wall falls and the Chinese want democracy, at least for a

little while. And the economy is booming and the US actually runs a surplus.

We have had the gigantic budget deficits except for a few years in the 90s, and peace breaks

out in Israel in the ... It's like, "Wow." Is decade of incredible optimism.

And tied in intimately to that optimism, were two trends, democracy and technology.

The 20th century was this giant referendum between democracy and tyranny or authoritarianism.

And we won, we totally won. We totally kicked their asses, complete victory.

We had the phrase, the end of history, not that nothing would happen but that the end or ultimate aim or goal or direction of history is towards liberal democracy.

We all believed that by the late 90s. And then this miracle thing called the internet comes along and it links everyone together

and it brings education. And so the incredible optimism of the 90s, it was a joy to be alive then.

And then it goes on to 21st century, which gets darker. We have 9/11, it's not quite so optimistic. But the early days of social media, it was a continuation of this techno democratic optimism,

reaching as I say in the essay, reaching a high point in 2011 because that's when you have the Arab Spring.

And that's when we really felt ... That was the last shoe to drop, was the Arab world. There was no democracy in the Arab world.

And, "Wow, all it takes is Facebook and before you know it, there are going to be democracies

in Baghdad, in Iran and everywhere." And then you want to occupy when, "Oh, we're going to finally address inequality."

Oh and then the final point, I just learned this recently, is that 2011 is when Google

translate becomes available on all devices, which it's a little footnote in history but

if you think about the Babel story, humanity's divided, we can't talk to each other. Because the key thing about Babel is everyone spoke one language before God destroys the

tower. And what God does, is he creates this multiplicity of languages so we can't understand each other.

And in 2011, "Oh, my God. The curse is lifted. We can literally talk to people through a different language."

That's what I was trying to convey in the first part of the Atlantic article, this long, long human history of division and war and tribalism bursts into flowers in the 90s and

reaches its culmination in 2011. And God says ... The line is something like, "And this is only the beginning of what they

will do." And that's the way it felt. This is only the beginning but [inaudible] the end. And just to clarify for anyone who might be adverse to religion, we're speaking in metaphors

here about what we can take from the tale. You are not a creationist or a literal religious side. No, that's right.

Yeah, I'm a naturalist. I'm a social scientist. I'm one that's rather sympathetic to religion.

Sam Harris and I used to be enemies and then we became actually friends who disagree on

some of these things. I'm quoting, I'm quoting a character in a book.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. And Jon, there's something else that's going on around that time, which is that these social media companies that we're all just signing up to for the first time in the later 2000,

the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they start innovating in interesting ways.

Facebook comes up with the like button, which it didn't previously have. And you make the point that your Facebook feed used to just be a reverse chronological

list of anything that your friends had posted. There was no tweaking it, there was no putting in front of you things that might agitate

you more or that might entice you to click them or like them or share them. There was none of that stuff. You didn't like and you didn't share anything, you typed in www.facebook.com on a web browser

because we didn't really have smartphones yet, and you saw what all of your friends were doing.

And then Twitter introduces the retweet button at the same time as Facebook introduces the

like button. You see those things as pivotal, why? They're absolutely transformative.

And I didn't realize this until I teamed up with a guy who actually knows about technology, Tobias Rose-Stockwell, who's worked in Silicon Valley and he's writing a book now called,

Outrage Machine. I invited him to help me write an article for the Atlantic in 2019, where we explored,

what is it about social media that has made democracy go haywire? And it was from Tobias that I learned about just how transformative those change ages

were in 2009. Because if you go back to 2003, 2004, when I think MySpace and Friendster are founded

and Facebook is 2004, there was no newsfeed. It was just, "Look at me, here I am.

Here are photos of me. Here are links to my friends, my favorite bands." It's self presentation but it's not harmful, it's definitely not harmful to democracy,

and you can link to other people's pages. And that's what it was originally, it was just a way to connect people.

And then I don't remember what year the newsfeed comes in but that's where things start to get darker because now it's not about, "Hey, look at my wedding photos."

It's, "George Bush said this or that." Or something like that. The newsfeed is an innovation that pulls it away from human connection and now brings

it more into current events, public events and posturing around them.

But even still, what you're getting is what your friends post, no algorithms and you can't do anything with.

You read it. And in 2009 though, just as Facebook has now achieved total dominance, before then there

were several platforms. By 2009, it's clear Facebook is winning. It completely dominates by number all the other platforms combined by then.

Facebook introduces the like button so that now you can say that you like certain posts.

And at the same time, Twitter introduces the retweet button. It's not just that you like a post, you actually can say that, "Here, I like it so much I'm

sending it out to everybody who follows me." And then because you now have two different measures of engagement and of course, Facebook

copies everything. They copy the retweet button as their share button. And now, Facebook has so much information, not just about the links you clicked on, they've

always watched that. Now, they have lots and lots of bits of information as a user clicks, clicks, clicks, clicks on

likes and shares. Now, they use algorithms to feed you more of what is most likely to develop engagement.

And there was no nefarious purpose here, I don't think. They want to keep you on, magazines want to keep you reading so you can look at their

ads, and same thing with Facebook. But the net effect is that what the algorithms find out on their own, is that what most engages

people is what makes them angry. And so that is really the turning point, where social media is not about connecting people

who are pursuing their own goals of connecting, and it becomes much more about hooking people

on through emotions that make them generate content that makes other people click and

like and retweet, so that you get everybody in a mutual cycle of outrage.

And that's the beginning of the end. Now Jon, a few years ago, which feels like a lifetime ago and also feels like yesterday,

you and I did a tour of Australia and New Zealand when you came out here and we had a series of conversations that I guess, this was just before the pandemic.

Was this in 2019 or ... That's right, it was. It was July, 2019. Yeah.

And you were a ghost of Christmas future in a way, saying, "I have seen the opposite of

the promised land. It is not a good place, you don't want to go there. You don't want to find your society and your culture torn apart by where these technologies

could potentially take us and where the decay of democracy could take us as a result."

And I suppose if you'd parachuted us into this scenario three years later, my first

question would be, what has happened? Have things gone better or worse than you'd feared in recent years?

Yeah, pretty much everything has gotten worse, and sometimes more quickly than I expected.

Yeah. I just looked this up. It was great fun traveling with you.

We did our act in Melbourne and Sydney and Auckland. And I just looked at my slides, the little mechanism that I did for my talks was I said,

"I am the ghost of British inspired secular multicultural liberal democracies yet to come." ... from the Christmas carol warning.

What I've seen happening as I've been studying universities, is that these weird problems that I wrote about with Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind, they broke

out in American universities in 2015, and pretty much simultaneously in Canadian and

UK universities, the safetyism, the shouting down of speakers who students thought were

offensive or violent or dangerous. All these things hit America, Britain and Canada at pretty much the same time but they

seem not to be as bad in Australian New Zealand, at least what I knew from a distance.

Now, when I came down and visited you, I realized actually, you have all the same trends, they're just a couple years late, which is what often happens down under.

And so the gist of my talk was, "We're all very similar."

Our countries that descend with British institutions, which I believe are the best in the world, travel in Latin America, thank God we were colonized by Britain, not Spain or Portugal.

I'm a big fan of British institutions. And I was warning like, "We've messed it up in America."

We're much more polarized than any other country, much more polarized than the other Anglosphere countries.

And so the question is, is it going to hit you all the same way just three years later? Or is America uniquely bad, we have unique aspects?

And I'm not sure what the answer is. It's clear that things are ... From what I hear from heterodox academy members, like

Alan Davison for example, what I hear from them is, "Wow, things are getting worse. You have all the same trends."

And I believe that's what the Atlantic article's about. All of our institutions are getting stupid at the same time for the same reason.

That's at least my diagnosis but I'd love to ask you, do you have the sense that this craziness, this outrage, this inability to listen, is it just getting steadily worse

in Australia? Well, I think it's worth picking apart a couple of things that we might be talking about that

overlap a little bit. One is the corrosive effect of misinformation and the siloing of people's opinions that

social media can create, so that the person who only ever hears or sees things that reinforce

their prejudices that either make them pander to what they think is true and demonize things

that they don't think is true, I think that is having an equally corrosive effect. It's harder and harder to talk across the boundary line of political and cultural divides.

Then there's what you just alluded to, which is in places like universities and in media institutions, there's more and more of a mob mentality against anyone who expresses an

unpopular opinion, especially if that unpopular opinion smells or sounds a little bit like something ... For example, a right wing person might say or heaven forbid, a racist might

say. If it contravenes a conventional, progressive notion, then the sky falls.

And of course, then we can also talk about the way that social media reinforces that because the social media, Twitter mob then puts enormous pressure on CEOs and hiring

managers and things to fire people for having tweeted a stupid joke that could be misinterpreted or something.

And then I think there's a third component, which is what it does to our heads. And this is another area of your specialty, to be constantly curating our own existence

and pawing at these screens and judging ourselves in comparison to other people, and trying to find our tribes and our sense of connection online.

If we separate those three things, I don't think there's as much cancel culture in Australia.

There are fewer examples of people being fired for having said something that upset the Twitter

mob, but I do think that there is an equally dire scenario in which people who surround

themselves by information that panders to them and reinforces what they want to believe,

careen off into their own channels. And it's becoming harder and harder to stitch together the fabric of democracy and the fabric

of trust. Right, right. Okay, that's very interesting. That's very helpful because if you suppose that we're just little information processing

centers and then we get social media, the siloing effect and the misinformation effects

would be similar all around the world. But if we focus now on the moralism part, on the mob mentality, the elements that really

look like a fundamentalist religion, and there's been a lot of writing in the United States,

John McWhorter being the best of them all from the beginning. He was one of the first to say, "This is exactly like certain strains of Protestantism, except

without any of the good parts." And so if you see this as a religion, then I think we can see there's two reasons why

this religion is much more intense than the United States. One is that even within the United States, there have been maps drawn based on what part

of England the people came from. America has different values, and so the Puritans who settled in New England, who then moved

across the upper Midwest, they were the most moralistic and intense. Whereas those who settled in the Atlantic region, like Virginia, I think they came from

Southern England and they weren't as morally intense. They were more about commercial interests.

America is very different, based on where in England they came from. And I'll just go out on a limb here and say, if the initial group of Brits in Australia

were convicts, that could certainly become less like a Puritan ministers thundering about

fire and brimstone. That's less moralistic, I would think. Yeah. And Jon, this predates social media as well.

I remember during Nipplegate, when Janet Jackson exposed her nipple at the Superbowl, Australians

would say, "Thank God we were settled by convicts and not Puritan.s"

Or during Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky and those sorts of things, those things don't

carry the same level of outrage here as they do there. But I am interested in your thoughts about what it's doing to our sense of ... And we

should probably define this as well because not everyone is as online as we are, but when you talk about John McWhorter's idea of this being a new religion, John McWhorter's a linguist

at NYU. Is he at NYU or Columbia? At Columbia, he's at Columbia. At Columbia, sorry.

And his theory is that basically, the new progressive racially aware, what one might

call woke consensus, which sees societies like Australias and Americas as being irredeemably

racist and built upon white supremacy, and tries to filter all controversies and all

social relationships through a prism of equity, diversity, inclusion, everything is either

sexist or not sexist, racist or not sexist, that's the context that he's talking about this being basically a UN falsifiable religion rather than a rational view of the world.

Is that a fair ... Yeah, that's right. That's right because it really does map on to many aspects of Protestantism.

He talks about all the rituals of confession and original sin, which is whiteness.

My main book, the main book where I wrote about my own work, was called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

And my argument is, we evolved to be religious. We evolved to have all these mechanisms that bind us together in order to compete with

others, that's why we have religion. We wouldn't have religion if we didn't have group selection in which groups were competing

with groups and sometimes killing them or at least out competing them.

I think religion is built deeply into our minds, and it's secular liberal societies that are the exception that we have to understand.

The normal state of affairs is to be religious. And then the interesting question is, what happens when you take people who evolved for

intense animistic small scale religion, and you take out God, what happens? Do they just become rationalists?

Do they become scientific type people who just want to follow the evidence? Or is there a God shaped hole in the heart of every man, as Pascal said, more or less?

And I think Pascal was right, there is a God shaped hole and people will fill it no matter

what. And so this is I think, John McWhorter's analysis. And I have literally 30 other essays that have made this analysis.

The similarities between woke culture and religion are overwhelming. Andrew Sullivan, so many people have made this.

It's really hard to miss it.

And my view as someone who's interested in both biological evolution and cultural evolution, is that institutions that evolve over time do tend to be ... What's the word?

Made kinder and gentler. The institutions evolve and certain forms of religion are pretty functional.

In the United States, people who are involved in churches tend to have better mental health, they tend to be more charitable. There are all kinds of good things that happen.

Whereas if you have an institution that comes out of nothing, that just appears on the scene

and is untested, it's likely to be pretty inhumane. And so that's what I think a lot of this is going on, is we have the evolution of a fundamentalist

religion, which is incredibly inhumane. Not because the people in it are bad but because they are in a sense, inventing a new religion

against its evil enemies, which they see as racists primarily.

And it is evolving not based on what works but based on who gets the upper hand in terms

of prestige, what's prestigious? It's a mess and it's messing us all up. And this wouldn't have happened if not for social media, social media's made things so

viral, things can spread so quickly. That's a messy statement of what I think is going on in the post Babel era.

That's interesting. You've got a collision basically, of this new secular religion in which people are jockeying

for positions on a hierarchy of almost oppression or righteousness right, to take the title

of your book. You've got as you mentioned, the confession where when someone gets called out by the

mob for having told the wrong joke or done the wrong thing or having hosted a panel on which there wasn't a person of color or whatever the transgression was, we all know now they've

released a statement, "I'm deeply sorry, I'm taking some time for myself to look into myself. This is a time for me to listen, just do ... "

"I'll try to do the work, I'll try to do better." Yeah. "I'll do the work." Exactly, right.

It's a cleansing, it's almost quite a religious cleansing. And then on the other hand, you're saying you've got the social media dynamic, which

is creating an explosive pressure cooker in which that can happen. I'm still interested in what you think is actually going on between why is social media

weaponizing the secular religion of wokeness so effectively? How?

Yeah, okay. First, let me share with you an amazing discovery I made this morning, to give you the backstory

and then I'll answer your question. A friend sent me this quote from Jonathan Rauch, who's this brilliant commentator, he's

a journalist, he's a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. And he's gay, he was really active in making the case for gay marriage.

He's center-right, really interesting guy. And he was a great exponent of free speech back in the 90s.

He's really heterodox. Someone sent me an article that he wrote back in 2002.

After 9/11, there was a large group on the left that was basically saying bin Laden isn't

the problem, America is. It's America's fault because America is so oppressive and look what America does.

And so Rauch writes this amazing essay in 2002, this is in the Atlantic.

And he talks about Aaron Wildavsky, who was a great social theorist who had analyzed egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism is generally a good thing but all virtues carried to excess become vices.

And Wildavsky and Rauch are saying egalitarianism had been carried to this extraordinary extreme,

which was bizarre and inhumane by 2002. And here it is, this is an exact description of I think what's going on now.

Rauch speaking about Wildavsky, he concluded that it's many impulses, this is the impulses of the egalitarian left, "It's many impulses, the impulse to regard all whites as oppressors

and all minority members as victims, the impulse to see America as incorrigibly racist and

classist and unfair, the impulse to impose admissions and hiring quotas and then lie about them, the impulse to politicize all academic disciplines, the impulse to snuff

out dissent, were all aspects of a single controlling imperative. That common factor he contended, is egalitarianism, the belief in the moral virtue of diminishing

differences among people of varying incomes, genders, races, sexual preferences and especially

power." That is an exact description of the woke left today, in 2022.

And so that was true in the late 90s, and Rauch and Wildavsky described it in 2002.

It's been around for a while. None of these things are new, what's new is the dynamics.

This is the way the left was in comparative literature departments, in women's studies

departments. It was there in different parts of the left but it was far from dominant on the left.

I've always been on the left and I saw this at university, but not in psychology.

This wasn't in my department, this was just in 7 or 10 departments in the university.

What social media did I believe, is ... I don't know if you ever see ... When you see a city gets flooded, it's not just like, "Oh, there's the city with water."

No, there's sewerage everywhere. Stuff just comes out and everything mixes together when there's a flood.

What social media did I believe, is it knocked down all the walls. With social media, all walls are down, everything is Twitter, everything is the public square.

And this ideology, this extreme egalitarian ideology which had been confined to a few

zones, spreads out. It's very aggressive, it's intimidating. And so it dominates.

Even though most people don't believe it, people on the center left who are really the ones who run the institutions, are so intimidated by the young people pushing this on social

media, they can't stand up to being called racist or sexist or transphobic, can't stand

up to it. That's what I think has happened, social media changed the dynamics, not the ideas.

Can institutions like universities fight back against that or is it impossible? Well, it's possible in theory.

And there's one that did it a little bit, the University of Chicago. Because ultimately, you have to see there are competing narratives, and this brings

us back to Babel. Before Babel, it was possible to have a narrative that was widely shared.

And for example, in universities we had the sense that we were the descendants of Socrates

and of Galileo. That's the guild that I joined in 1987 when I entered graduate school at the University

of Pennsylvania. There's a real sense of annuity in the academic world that we are here to discover truth.

Now, it differs. In the arts, that's not the mission but in most of the university, scholarship is different means of discovering the truth.

And right up until about 2014, that was the governing narrative, that we are scholars and our goal is to discover.

But once the tower of Babel falls, everything is confusion. Everything is babbling.

Everybody is trying to put their narrative in. And what I saw on campus after campus, was the progressive activist, the group on the

left, come in with their new narrative, which is exactly what Rauch just described. It's everything is racist, everything is oppression.

If there's inequality, it's because of white supremacy. And even though this was obviously nonsense, especially a place like Yale ... To say that

Yale was racist and white supremacist, it's about the most anti-racist place you could

imagine. But nobody spoke up to say that, nobody dared contradict it. I've spoken to a number of university presidents, none of them are woke.

They're almost all true liberals but they're terrified. They couldn't say anything. Again, the point of my Atlantic article is after Babel, it's all about intimidation,

it's the dynamics. What most people believe is irrelevant.

It's the fear of speaking up, that's what has made all of our institutions get stupid at the same time so quickly in the last five to seven years.

And there's another thing going on here Jonathan, which you address in your other book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which you mentioned briefly, that you wrote with Greg Lukianoff,

where we're not just talking about this justice mob mentality coming to impose its superior

vision of racial equity on all fuddy-duddy, older, middle-aged straight white guys like

you, but there's also the fragility component here where it becomes more and more difficult

to talk about anything that might, 'trigger' somebody who if they've had ... I don't know

if they've been a victim of sexual violence in the past or something, then you have to have warnings before talking about anything that might even broach the possibility of

discussing sexual dynamics in a way that doesn't pander to them. There's I suppose, a disrespect towards the resilience of one another.

Richard Dawkins says, "I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid ideas."

And I like that notion of robust debate.

That's what my podcast is all about, this is what I'm engaged in. Let's actually have the conversations that are impolite to have because that's the only

way that you grope your way towards the truth. But is there a relationship there between the justice mob, which wants to take down

anyone who makes a sexist joke on Twitter, and the students at university and elsewhere

in society, who don't want anyone to be able to talk about anything that that will offend them?

Yes, there is a connection but what I'd like to do, I definitely want to segue into the

fragility and the depression anxiety but before we do that, I need to say something to close

up what we were just saying about the justice mob. Because what we've been talking about, what I've been talking about here is the pathology

on the left. That's what we've been talking about here. I used to call myself a liberal a while ago, then I called myself a centrist, then I called

myself nothing. Now, I call myself a liberal again but I don't mean left, I mean liberal in the John Stuart

Mill sense, liberal institutions, liberal society.

I'm in a university and I'm writing about the left but let me be crystal clear, if you're

on either extreme, the same dynamics are happening and you are ramped up into a fundamentalism

and an extremism and a use of intimidation that is devastating your society, at least

if you're in the United States. And so just to be really clear about this, the biggest assault on democracy that has

happened in my lifetime and since the Civil War, is that a sitting president tried to literally steal an election when he had no evidence that it ... He literally went around

trying to find ... Nothing compares to what Donald Trump did, nothing compares to a Republican

party that let him do it and that tries to cover it up and lie about it and prosecute him for it.

The only thing that comes even halfway close is the fact that the Republican party would

not let president Obama appoint a Supreme Court justice seven or nine months before

his term ended, and then they rushed through one of their own. To be really clear here, and I say clearly in the article, is we have this weird asymmetry

in that in the United States, the Republican party is insane, irresponsible. They've lost conservatism, they have nothing to do with the tradition of conservatism or

the constitution. The Republican party is an incredible danger to democracy and they are being driven insane

in part by these events. Although for the Republicans, cable TV plays a much bigger role than it does on the left,

Fox News in particular. Cable TV and social ... Yeah but I would also just ... I would also just add that there's a feedback loop that's

going on between the cliqueness of social media and what Fox News is doing. Tucker Carlson's not an idiot, he knows what's going to play well and what's going to go

viral on social as well. If you remove social- You're right. ... the ecosystem, maybe Fox News would be different.

Yes, it is absolutely a feedback loop because yes, the people on those right wing stations,

they know what's going to play well in social media. And if you watch the right wing stations, so much of it is about Twitter, so much of

it is somebody tweeted something. The problem for the Republicans is not just social media, it goes back to Fox News in

the 90s. I want to make it clear, I'm an equal opportunity centrist. In fact, I'm thinking of starting a movement called, We are the 80%, the Middle 80%.

We really can't have a democracy if the outer 10% ... Of course, they're welcome to be in the country but social media has given the two extremes so much more influence, and it

has made everyone in the middle so much more fearful, that this is unsustainable, it can't go on this way.

The problem on the right I believe, is the Republican party. The problem on the left I believe, is that progressives dominate all the high points

of the culture, the universities, Hollywood, advertising, the arts, museums, education,

kindergarten through high school, everything. Both sides are human, both sides are intense, both sides are moralistic and both sides are

super empowered by social media. Okay, just to be clear, this is not just attacking the left.

This is about both [inaudible]. Now, back to your regularly scheduled question. Okay, so you asked whether it's related to the fragility.

And I think it is in several ways. When Greg and I first ... Greg Lukianoff is the first person who really saw this happening

in 2013, 2014 in his job as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in

Education. He saw this on college campuses, on a few campuses in 2014. He came to talk to me in May of 2014, and I had just began to see some of it at the

university where I'm a professor. And so we wrote up this article in the Atlantic, and we thought that the problem was just for

college students. We thought, "College is doing something to kids, teaching them to think this way."

That was our original hypothesis, and it was wrong because we later found after the article came out in August of 2015, later we found actually, it's not just college students.

The exact same stuff is happening to all kids who were born after 1995 or '96, in other

words gen Z. We didn't have that label in 2015 but by 2017, we knew there's a new generation born around

1996 or later. Gen Z has much, much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self harm and suicide.

I've never seen hockey stick graphs like this, you never see them in mental health where a generation ... The curve in a hockey stick, 2012 teenagers get much more depressed and

anxious. They weren't that way in 2011 and by 2014, they're much more depressed and anxious.

Now I know, or now I believe, that it's the fact that they largely were not on social

media on a daily basis in 2009, they were just beginning to get on. But by 2013, 2014, they were, and especially Instagram for the girls.

We have a generation wide mental health crisis, especially for girls, that begins right around

2012. And then these young people arrive on campus around 2013, 2014, that's what Greg saw, that's

what we wrote about. And what did we call it?

We had a vindictive protectiveness, is what we called it.

Other people call it cry bullying. It's not even the claim that I'm a victim, it's usually the claim that if we allow this

person to speak, this speaker will deny the existence of transgender people.

He will be literally killing them or erasing them, he will be a danger to them.

It was the sense that everyone is fragile and I am protecting these fragile victims.

And you Mr. President of the university, you have to disinvite this speaker. You have to shut this talk down.

It was this vindictive protectiveness. I think that's an answer to your question. I love that term, vindictive protectiveness.

Yeah, cry bullying as well. I haven't heard those, that's fantastic.

I wonder what you think ... As you were just talking there, I was thinking about the retort that I often hear when people hear someone like you talk about something like this, which

is ... Look, free speech goes both ways. Speech has to have consequences as well, right.

You have the right to say whatever you want but you don't have the right to be free from the consequences of your speech.

If you say something that's a white supremacist statement, then I have every right to exercise

my right to free speech, to tweet at your boss and to get you fired.

You can't say what you want and then .... Obviously, I can smell bullshit there but I'm not quite

sure what the best retort to that is. Yeah.

It's an open question, whether something like the first amendment, which says everyone gets to speak and if you want to deny the Holocaust, go ahead.

We're not going to put you in jail for it. Or whether European style laws or Canadian style laws, where you say, if you say certain

things, we're going to put you in jail. I believe certainly before the age of social media, I'm quite confident that our way was

better, that those laws backfire. I'm hopeful that's still true, although I'm not as confident now.

But if I give a talk or if I say, men and women are biologically different and I think

that people should be free to live however they want, and if a person wants to change

their sex, that's fine, they should be able to live as a woman or a man. But I think that it would be different if they're playing on a sports team.

Okay, so I have a right to say that and you have a right to say that I'm wrong.

And you even have a right to call me a transphobe if I were to say something like that, but

do you have a right to demand that Amazon stop carrying my book? Do you have a right to put my name out in public and encourage people to come harass

me and my family? And here, we're not even talking about constitutional rights.

John Stuart Mill was very clear that the issue is not generally limitations from the magistrate

I think he said, from the law. The issue is social he said, in 1859. And so if you have a climate in which I say something and you say something back that's

critical of it, great. But if I say something and you punch me in the nose, and then I say something and you

light my house on fire, I'm [inaudible]. Right. The difference that the progressive or that the [wokesville] would say to that is, punching

you is physical violence, so let's outlaw physical violence, right. Lighting a house on fire, that's an act of arson, let's rule that out.

But that it's part of the big roiling delightfulness and messiness of democracy that some people

will be calling for the firing of someone because that ... Or let's say Spotify and

Joe Rogan or something like Neil Young like, "I don't want to be associated with this person, so I'm going to pull my ... "

All these mini acts of coercion that are amplified by social media, I find it hard to get my

head around what the ... Because clearly, I do have a right to write a letter to your boss at NYU and say that you should be fired because you're a transphobe.

I have a right, right. We don't want to live in a world where I'm thrown in jail for doing that.

But I also understand that when a hundred thousand people on Twitter do that for a bullshit

reason, then you live in an untenable world. Exactly.

Let's distinguish between what you have a legal right to say, and what is conducive

to the benefits of free speech and what is not. And so I would have a legal right to say whatever I thought about gender, and you would have

a legal right to write to the president and demand that I'd be fired or to say that publicly. This is not a question of what you should be thrown in jail for or what I should be

thrown in jail for, this is a question of what norms give us a better society and what don't.

And so if I say, "I believe in Jesus Christ and if you doubt me, you will be thrown in

jail or your house will be ... " Not burned down, you will be publicly shamed and basically shunned from society.

That would be a fundamentalist Christian community that would not reap the benefits of free speech.

I'd say keep the focus on the intimidation. That's again, the point of my Atlantic article.

That's what social media embolden. The metaphor I use in the article is when you tweet, you tweet that somebody is this

or that or they should be fired or, "Come get your boy." ... is a common thing What's that? I haven't encountered that one yet, Jon?

What's come and get your ... Oh, it's somebody says something and then you tweet and you copy their Dean or the president

of the company or something. And you say, "Oh look, your employee said this. Come get them."

Meaning punish him, take them out back, fire him. Wow, wow. And so the issue is not what your legally allowed to say.

The issue is, what are our norms of discourse? And of course, you should be allowed to argue back.

But if I make an argument and you use your speech to get me effectively fired and impoverished

... Because now if there's a scandal, it's forever. You can't get a job again because it'll be online, the record will be online forever.

I would argue that if your response to speech is to get someone shamed, fired, canceled,

unemployable and to bring harassment on that person and their family, I would argue that

that's not literally violence but in terms of the beneficial or harmful effects on our

speech culture and our democracy, it's the same as violence. Most people throughout history would've preferred death to dishonor, being shunned, being ostracized,

being banished [inaudible]. Then the next logical pushback to that Jon, is well, what if you say that Hitler didn't

have everything right but he got a lot of things right and it is true that the Jews have been troublemakers since the dawn of time.

You say something that is really beyond the bounds of reason, beyond the bounds of humanity.

And I think we all agree, there should be a social program for that. I wouldn't want to work in an environment in which a flagrantly antisemitic person was

working. And I think that would probably be just grounds for firing them.

Then the [wokester] well, what's the boundary? Here, I think we have to ... These conversations about where do you draw the line, I find them

to be impossible and unfruitful, unless we specify the institution that we're talking

about. And so a lot of these conflicts have taken place on campus. And so what speakers should be invited?

On campus, our telos, our purpose, our goal, what we do is to find truth.

If some guy were to come ... And you see these people on the street corner sometimes yelling about homosexuality and sin, and Jesus said this, they weren't invited, they have a free

speech right to stand there on the corner and shout that. But if we were to bring them into a classroom or if someone were to bring them into a classroom

to rant, no, they shouldn't be invited in to speak to a classroom. This has nothing to do with our telos, our purpose of finding truth.

But what if there was a scholar who discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, that actually

some of the things we thought about the Holocaust were actually not true and that maybe the number wasn't 6 million, it was four, whatever.

Suppose a scholar found documents that minimized something about the Holocaust, should that

person be allowed to speak on campus? I would say of course, of course. If they're a scholar and they use scholarly methods, then of course they should be allowed

to speak on campus. It doesn't matter if people are offended. I'm Jewish, I would love to see ... I would be perfectly happy to engage with somebody

who had scholarship on Nazis or the Holocaust. Now, there's no point in bringing someone ranting and raving with no credentials.

Let's talk about the institution. Now, your example I think, was in a company.

Let's suppose you are in a company. Now, in a company you do not have free speech rights.

Absolutely not. Of course you can say what you want outside but even still, the company can fire you for

any reason other than race, gender and five other categories. If you're a high executive at Pepsi and you start saying that on your Twitter feed and

that's bad for Pepsi, yeah they can fire you. I don't think they should have to let you rant and rave if you're going to harm the

company. You tell me the domain and I'll tell you what I think about when there should be consequences.

The point about a scholarly person making a scholarly point is also tricky because with

social media, there are so many people you ... There are so many people who have PhDs

and who have illustrious biographies, that some of them are going to be batshit crazy.

And so I alluded to Neil young, pulling his music from Spotify over the Joe Rogan COVID

misinformation scandal. Well, Joe was only talking to scholarly people, Dr. Malone Or whoever this guy was, has a

PhD. He was one of the early founders of mRNA technology. And so it becomes really, really tricky because here's a person in a public platform who has

credentials. He's not ranting and raving but he's saying things that the vast, vast bulk of medical

professionals disagree with, and he's making insinuations and illusions that are conspiratorial

and that are frankly, I believe to be untrue and misleading. On the other hand, in a big boisterous democratic society, there is space for those voices.

I can just see the whole social media edifice, this whole mosaic of little people swarming

to and from and trying to figure out in real time, what is worth paying attention to?

What is worth objecting to and how the objection happens? I don't know if there's an answer to that. I feel like we're muddling towards a hierarchy of a program here.

In other words, don't try to get a person fired for what they have said, if you can

avoid it. Don't try to misinterpret what they say and publicly shame them on the basis of your reinterpretation

of their words. Try to take them at face value and try to interpret them in the most generous possible

way. If everyone was operating on that baseline and all of the people who you objected to, you were able to actually engage with in good faith, then the whole problem evaporates,

doesn't it? The problem is that as you know, we're messy humans and we don't behave that way. Yeah.

Again, I would want to put it within specific institutions. What you just said is actually reasonable in an academic setting, and that was more

or less the way things were until 2015. Not in all disciplines, there were some disciplines in which people are nasty but for the most

part, if I was in any academic setting and someone made an argument and I interpret it uncharitably in a way that was distorting, I would be called out for not getting it right.

But that's not as common anymore. What you said would be lovely and wonderful if all of society did it but I recognize that's

not going to happen in the public square.

To go to your example of Joe Rogan, I think what we need to really distinguish here is

between what would be beneficial in the instance, and then what happens if that becomes the

policy? And so yes, you could definitely make an argument that stopping Joe Rogan from having COVID

skeptics on would slow the spread of the virus if it increased [inaudible]. You could make that argument, maybe it's even right.

And we've done that over and over again. Anybody who suggested that COVID might have come from a lab, was shunned and destroyed

and shamed and literally called a racist. No matter what you do, you'd be called a racist.

And Google hides certain search results. You do certain searches, you won't get the results that you're looking for if Google

thinks that those are not socially valid or valuable. And each of these cases, you can make the case that that's for the good, but what happens

when you do that? What happens when you do that, is people who are on the right or now even in the center,

they know that everything's bullshit. They know that these ... What Jonathan Rauch calls epistemic authorities, we should be

able to trust professors, researchers, doctors, the American Medical Association, we should

be able to trust them but we can't. And I'd have to say, I don't trust the American Medical Association and the medical establishment

as much anymore because of how they behaved in COVID. The use of noble lies, the many demonstrations that they're on team blue, they're on the

left, the democratic team, I think have devastated the authority of the scientific authorities.

Journalism of course, has always been ... People love to hate journalists but boy, the New

York Times used to be much more respected five or seven years ago than it is today.

And so when we lose trust in all of our epistemic institutions, and by we I mean 70% of the

country, people in the middle and on the right, when people lose trust in universities, newspapers,

medical authorities, then we're lost. We're in Babel, we have no authority, we cannot trust our institutions.

I think we paid a tremendous cost by trying to silence people in the name of what we now

think, what we currently think is a moment of truth. I'm so glad you brought it back to trust, because this is a great way to start to wrap

this up, Jon. You talk about when trust is eroded in all of those big institutions, journalism and

the media and the academy and public health and government and politicians, every decision

becomes contested. And so the squabbling ... And then social media empowers that, right.

We can all have our arguments about everything, we all have to do our own research about everything and figure everything out because the truth is ...

[inaudible]. Right. And that reminds me of the three things that you say bind democracy together, a trust in

institutions or the sanctity the institutions. You also talk about shared stories, which you alluded to earlier but the idea of having

a common narrative. And social capital, do you want to just give a brief summary of that as maybe a way to

wrap this up and tie it together? Sure, sure. A large diverse sector democracy is a miracle, it shouldn't exist.

I've heard it said that the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. I don't know if that's really true.

But given everything we know about human history, to have a diverse society that functions as

well as our liberal democracies did in the late 20th century, is a miracle.

And you have to look at what are the forces pulling us together, what you could call the

centripetal forces pulling us to the center, and what are the centrifugal forces pulling us apart?

And traditional societies use shared blood, shared gods, shared enemies, these are the ways the tribes hold themselves together as they battle other tribes.

This is not what we want, this is not what we can have in our modern societies. But having a shared story of who we are that has some virtues in it ... And America, we

especially had to do this because we had nothing else in common. Shared stories, institutions that we respect so that we trust them to resolve disputes

and then we accept the decision. And then social capital networks of trust.

This is what Alexis [inaudible] observed about Americans when he traveled here in the 1830s, that when there's a problem, we get together and we fix it.

We don't wait for the king or the nobles to do it, as they would in France and England he said, because we've had a lot of social capital in our communities.

And my argument is that social media has weakened all three of those. It certainly has shattered any possibility of a shared narrative, that's the Babel metaphor.

It has spread extraordinary distrust in our institutions. There's a lot of research on that now because social media's very good at tearing things

down but it's terrible at building. That's what Martin Gurri says, this brilliant former CIA analyst who wrote this great book

called Revolt of the Public. And then the third thing is social capital.

The idea, back toward the beginning of our conversation, that golden age of techno democratic

optimism, it was, "Wow, social media makes it easy to connect with everybody.

You can have so many more connections. You can keep in touch with your high school friends. It's going to be the greatest boon to social capital."

And it looked it was, it did in the early 2000s, it did. But now it looks like it's turned nasty, like a lot of these platforms, Twitter, TikTok.

All of them start off in lovely places and they pretty soon get much nastier.

I think that's where we find ourselves, we find ourselves having lost the binding, the mortar that holds us together.

And the challenge of the next decade or two is going to be to figure out how to counteract

that. Obviously, we're never going to get rid of social media but how do we change it that's not so toxic?

How do we harden our democratic institutions so that let's say our courts can still function even though people don't trust them?

How can we restore trust in a polarized time? And lastly, how do we prepare the next generation?

Because gen Z, as we just briefly spoke about, gen Z is so anxious, depressed and fragile,

and it's not their fault. We deprived them of the opportunities to work out conflicts themselves.

We're always there supervising, at least in America. Also in Australia, I learned.

New Zealand, they actually let kids out to play more but we've denied kids the very experiences

of unsupervised play in which they practice democratic skills.

I'm worried because these trends are all bad. Odds are we're going to come through it. History is long and it's full of setbacks but it's been a steady upward arc other than

those setbacks. Odds are we'll find a way through this but right now, I think we can expect things to

get worse for another 5 or 10 years. Who knows how long? But I don't think there's going to be any quick turnaround here.

On that optimistic pessimistic note, Jonathan Haidt, thanks so much for being with us.

It's great to talk to you. My pleasure, Josh. Thanks for giving me this chance to rant and lament.