American Thought Leaders - Peter Boghossian on Ivy League Cover-Ups: Harvard Plagiarism Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“There are people—a non-trivial number of people—who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied, they have cheated on their PhD, and that is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels.”As professor of philosophy at Portland State University, Peter Boghossian was known for challenging orthodoxies. Today, he uses his distinct “Street Epistemology” method to teach communication and critical thinking.“There is something about giving people the tools to ask really good questions. But not only are we not giving them the tools so they don’t have the questions, but they’re force-fed one answer, and particularly to moral questions. And the consequence of that is it becomes an ideology mill, where the goal is to replicate the dominant ideology—whatever is morally fashionable,” says Professor Boghossian.He is known for his role in the Grievance Studies Affair, where he co-authored a series of intentionally fraudulent papers that were published in well-known academic journals, exposing the corruption of scholarship in a number of disciplines belonging to the humanities.“My guess to you is, you’re looking at 7-to-9 percent of dissertations in the humanities that are plagiarized. If I’m wrong, it’s not because there are fewer, it’s because there are far, far more,” says Professor Boghossian. “We have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it?”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

There are people who teach in the academy, many of whom have tenure, who have obtained their credentials fraudulently. They have lied, they have cheated, and that is an extraordinarily serious problem on multiple levels. As professor of philosophy at Portland State University, Peter Boghossian was known for challenging orthodoxies. Today, he uses his distinct street epistemology method to teach communication and critical thinking. He is known for his role in the grievance studies affair when he co-authored a series of intentionally fraudulent papers that were published in well-known academic journals, exposing the corruption of scholarship in a number of disciplines

of the humanities. My guess to you is you're looking at 7 to 9% of dissertations in the humanities that are plagiarized. If I'm wrong, it's not because there are fewer, it's because there are far, far more. We have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse.

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they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Peter Boghossian, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. You've been talking a lot about academic corruption, notably the plagiarism wars, I think is the term that you've been using. So let's start with this plagiarism thing, because basically it's being described as actually a weapon now that's going to be used by the right to attack the establishment. So tell me about this. You're laughing. I'm laughing because, well, first of all, if you didn't plagiarize, you have nothing to worry about. And for the record, I had my dissertation run and it's clean. So the idea that somehow this is a vast right-wing conspiracy to weed out what?

To weed out what? People who have obtained their credentials fraudulently? Okay. Well, what would it matter if it was a right-wing conspiracy? Any kind of conspiracy. Like there are people, a nontrivial number of people who have who teach in the academy many of whom have tenure who have obtained their credentials fraudulently they have lied they have cheated on their PhD and that is an extraordinarily serious problem on

multiple levels makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. Right? But somehow, somehow, it doesn't seem to be like people are treating it as seriously as you and I would. That's because they don't understand the depth of the problem. They don't understand the severity of the problem. And they don't understand. I mean, look, Claudine Gay, $900,000 a year, president of Harvard. She got caught for plagiarism in an egregious way. She kept her job for $900,000. She no longer president, but she kept the $900,000 a year post at Harvard University.

That's shocking. That's shocking. Well, because there's other criteria that are more important to these administrations. Okay. Yes. And the minimum bar to get in is it's assumed when you have your PhD that you went through a process, a rigorous process to get that, and you did not commit fraud to obtain that credential. If you committed fraud to obtain that credential, then we can have a

conversation about what should happen. It's a little bit off topic, you know. Should you lose your PhD? I mean, as a minimum, you should lose any academic appointment you have. I think that's a minimum. This is at the most, arguably the most elite university in the world, almost definitely in the top five universities in the world, and you have somebody who has obtained their degree fraudulently still in a position of authority. Well, it's, as you're I think suggesting, it undermines the whole system, but the whole system is already undermined. Correct.

You're right. It further undermines, it further delegitimizes a system that's already not legitimate. Don't hire college graduates, especially from the elite ivies. In the, I'll use the term woke, in the woke worldview, okay, everything is politics. Everything is a power play. And the means of getting there seem to be discretionary, right? So you can kind of imagine how this sort of situation arose. Yeah.

Think about the first thing that you said that caused me to laugh, that this is a right-wing conspiracy. Can you imagine saying that we need to keep people who have obtained their credentials dishonestly, they've cheated, lied through fraud, that we need to retain those people in service to some other ideology? That in and of itself should completely delegitimize the whole institution. So my viewpoint has developed through many interviews including some with you in the past. Thank you.

Okay. For decades now in the Academy and then further in industry and in various institutions including government, there's been this strong selection process of people who through coded language and ability to write a certain way and ability to demonstrate their bona fide in, I'll say, glibly wokeism, getting positions of merit, positions of power, and there's a disproportionate number of these people. Not getting positions of merit. Getting positions of authority.

Positions of authority. Okay. That's right. That's right. And so here we are, right? So I would expect, based on everything, that probably there's a heck of a lot of this cheating going on. That's the question, right?

That's the million-dollar question. So here are the questions. What percentage of dissertations in the humanities are plagiarized? I don't know. I can take a guess. What percentage of dissertations in certain fields are plagiarized? The best thing that we have now is called turn it in, but there are too many false positives and false negatives. So there are tools being developed to analyze plagiarism,

and very soon, within eight months, is the best prediction that we're going to know in mass how many people have committed fraud. So my guess to you is you're looking at 7 to 9 percent of dissertations in the humanities that are plagiarized. If I'm wrong, it's not because there are fewer, it's because there are far, far more. But the 7 to 9 is a very conservative estimate. And my next guess to you, educated guess, would be that there would be in fields with the word studies in them, gender studies, any member of the grievance studies. They would be in black studies, anything with the word Chicano studies, indigenous studies.

But again, that's a guess. That's my prediction. I don't know. But I want to say something that gets lost in this conversation because someone is saying, well, you know, maybe it wasn't intentional or there was a mistake okay people who would say that tend to be younger and the reason they would say that is because they're working on screens they're moving text when Claudine Gates is just when I wrote my decision you're talking about taking a

book copying from the book onto the computer that's not merely pasting and copying text. There's a level of intentionality with that. So when I give the figure of 7% to 9%, I mean, could be independently adjudicated. We could bring someone in, and they'd be like, wow, that is a clear instance of plagiarism, like Claudine Gay, and not, as Harvard tried to say, duplicative language. It's plagiarism. It's cheating.

She cheated. The other thing I have to, obviously, the elephant in the room here, I suppose, when we talk about the Grievance Studies Affairs, Sokol Squared, you and, just to remind our viewers, you and two others submitting these false papers because you kind of cracked the code of what you thought could get published

in these various blank studies journals. Your ability to do that and figure out that there is a code was that these aren't actually genuine areas of scholarship in the first place. They're all fraudulent. So I'm really glad you said that because that's also lost in the discussion. I'm just going to use the figure 10%. It's not that just 10% of the people have cheated to obtain their credentials. It's that there are entire lines of literature that are fraudulent. So that's a deeper level of fraud. And then there's another level of fraud that we haven't talked about, is the universities protecting the people either through making it more difficult to find those

dissertations, pulling off the names of people on DEI websites. Now do I know that's because they don't want them to search? No, I have no idea, but it's certainly a rather remarkable coincidence since the Cline and Gay scandal. I don't know that. I can't prove that. But causally it's extraordinarily suspicious. So the institution wanting to protect people who have committed fraud is another level of fraud.

So that's like another story. So you have plagiarism as one, entire bodies of literature that are corrupt, institutions protecting people who cheated. There's really no, there's no politic or polite way to say it, nor should there be. So you have, and then you have other things that we can talk about, like citation cartels, et cetera. But those are the three areas of corruption. Well, to me, there's a fourth area. Please. The fourth area is the administrators. Because in many, I think this is a trend in every single university, almost, right, almost, is that the number of these administrators has grown, in some cases, beyond the faculty. It's not, again, 100% clear what they administrate.

However, they're very dedicated to maintaining the structure and the ideological structure that exists. That's my observation. That's correct. That's certainly been written about somewhat. Correct. Right. So, you know, that's what I'm trying to say. It might not be the academics that are trying to do this.

It might be this other group which has built an empire, so to speak, and wants to keep the empire. No, that's absolutely correct. It is the administrative staff. It is DEI boards. The DEI board is kind of the engine, the weaponization of the ideological capture. So there's no question that that's true. So there are layers and layers of corruption. I've been screaming about this since 2015. I did something in 2017, did the Grievance Study in 2018. Everyone thought we were, you know, crazy people. The problem with the Grievance Study stuff, it was too early.

If we did that later, it would have had, excuse me, it would have had far greater of an impact. But the fact of the matter remains, we have endemic corruption in our academic institutions. The only other question is what to do about it. I would say for a few of us that the Grievance Studies Affair was very valuable. Thank you. I appreciate that. Chris Ruffo told me. A lot of people have told me that it changed their lives in the sense of trust in the institutions, the institutions' ability to discharge its primary mission, that primary mission being changed as a consequence of ideological capture or takeover. So I don't think people can quite grasp the severity of this. You know, 50 percent of papers in psychology, it's called a replication crisis, cannot be

replicated. So you have clinicians going into clinical settings on the flip of a coin with whether or not what they've learned is effective. We have to be able to have a source of trust. We have to have some gold standard for something we can trust. And we don't have it. We don't have legacy media. We don't have legacy institutions.

We don't have the ACLU. We don't have Scientific American. That's gone woke. Like, we have to have something we can trust. And we don't. And ultimately, we have no one to blame but ourselves we have brought the situation upon ourselves we could have done innumerable things to stop this a simple thing viewpoint diversity as

Thomas Holt says I believe that you believe in diversity when you put a Republican in the sociology department. Yes, it's funny. Right? So we all know the absurdity of the situation. And I don't say that as a Republican or a conservative. I say that echoing themes in the history of Western intellectual thought that, you know, you need people who believe the things. John Stuart Mill has talked about this, who teach it. So for example, I used to teach atheism at Portland State University, and I always had people come in to argue the other side of it. I had Phil Vischer from VeggieTales. I had Phil Smith from a conservative Christian university

who had the philosophy department come in and talk. I had people who come in about aliens. I taught science and pseudoscience class. I had Nick Pope come in. I had a guy, Marc Sargent. Flat earther, right? Yeah, Marc Sargent who believes the earth is flat. So there is something about giving people the tools to ask really good questions, But not only are we not giving them the tools so they don't have the questions, but they're force fed one answer,

particularly to moral questions. And the consequence of that is it becomes an ideology mill where the goal is to replicate the dominant ideology, whatever is morally fashionable. And this is wholesale ideological capture of our institutions. I mean, it's remarkable. You know, I want to go back for a moment to the cost of plagiarism.

And it's actually very interesting because in the end most people aren't in the academy. You've used an example of a fire department before, and I wonder if you could reprise that for me, because I thought it was very apt, and it makes you think about it a little differently, actually. Sure. So you're right. Most people aren't professors of philosophy or anything else, for that matter. So when you say plagiarism, they're like, okay, cheating, but so what? What, why should anybody care about that? Okay. Think about it in terms of the fire department. You are the superintendent of the fire department. You find out that 10% of the people, I'm just throwing that number out there, you find out

that some percentage of the people who are currently on the fire department have cheated on their fireman's exam, their fireperson's exam, whatever the word is. You have to make the assumption that there's some lawful relationship between passing a fireman's exam and an ability to put out a fire. If there's not, then there's literally no point of the fireman's exam. It's completely pointless. So the idea is that passing the fireman's exam credentials you to be more likely to put out fires than the people who did not pass the fireman's exam.

And I think that that is an eminently reasonable assumption. If not, then we should systematically think what's on the fireman's exam. Okay. Instead of thinking about plagiarism cheating in the academy, think about it like cheating on the fireman's exam. You're the superintendent of the fire department. You find out that a non-trivial number of people have cheated on the fireman's exam. What should you do? Well, I would, you know what I would do in this case, actually, I would get them to take the exam again and see if they can pass it. I think that's what I would do because I wouldn't want to, you know, we need those firemen, right?

Okay. What would you do in terms of facing the public? A public face, what would you, would you give it, would you issue a statement? Would you, what would you do publicly? Well, I would say, you know, there's been a terrible, you know, something terrible has happened and we need some accountability and we're gonna solve this problem and make sure that we always run these tests properly in the future meanwhile with these people we're gonna you know we're gonna run them through again because it's important to keep the fire department active and you know because we want to put out fires correct correct okay yes. Okay. There's an underlying assumption. Yes. Correct. So it serves

a public good. Okay. So the first order of business, you said accountability. We have to hold people accountable and we have to hold ourselves accountable in public institutions to discharge the mission of the public institution or else the whole city will be on fire. We won't be able to put out fires. The second thing is we have to be transparent as public institutions in particular about if there is a scandal and a certain percentage of people have cheated, the way to regain trust in the fire department is not to hope that it won't be picked up by the New York Times or whatever, or Substack. The way to regain legitimacy and trust in institutions is to

be honest with people. There's a problem here. We're going to root it out. I personally wouldn't have had that solution, but that's fine. We don't know exactly who this is. This is where the analogy breaks down because you actually would know who it was. But we don't know exactly who it is, but we're going to retest everybody. And if you fail the fireman's exam, you're not going to be a fire person. And the consequence of that is I want to assure the citizens that the fire department is perfectly situated to do what is in the interest of the public good. We were perfectly situated to discharge our primary mission, which is to put out fires. And currently we cannot do that because people have obtained their credentials fraudulently. If you did that, yeah, people would be upset or what have you. But that's the way, that's a mature, responsible way in a democratic society.

That's how institutions should function. It is not, well, you know what, we're going to hide the results of the exam so no one can find these people. We're going to keep this guy on and an extreme salary. For Claudine Gay, for example, when they did an internal investigation of whether or not she plagiarized, she was found innocent before the investigation was even – so you're not going to go to nepotism and cronyism and you're going to say, you know what, we've conducted this. There was a terrible thing.

You're not going to lie, in other words. You're going to be completely transparent to the public. So if you think about it in terms of fire departments, it just becomes much more clear what you need to do to earn the public trust. But the other thing is this is not particularly complicated. Somebody cheated, right? Someone cheated, and you need to fix the problem of their cheating. And fixing the problem of the cheating doesn't mean keeping people who cheat in those positions. That's insane. If you wouldn't do it for fire departments, why would you do it for anything else? Of course you would root out corruption. It's a right-wing conspiracy because you want to root out corruption for people who teach

at elite universities who have obtained their degrees fraudulently? You want to put a stop to that? You want to root that out and you're a right-wing maniac? You're in some kind of cabal because you want to expose cheating at top universities? Are you kidding me? Anyone who would make that argument is so morally compromised and damaged that it should immediately cast suspect—be suspect on any position that they offer. You're thinking about the plagiarism scandal.

You did mention this sort of—there's been a lot of lack of replicability, a lot of lack of replicability among various scientific studies in psychology. It's not just psychology. It's in biology. It's all over the place. John Ioannidis did this great, has a whole paper. So documenting that is scary detail. But anyway, it's how our health agencies have been behaving. When I was thinking of the fire department I just can't I couldn't help but think and we're you know we're here at this FLCCC you know conference together I was wondering you know Peter Boghossian unexpected guest. I don't have any medical credentials I never talk about

COVID I don't pretend to know things I don't know no one should go to me to there for their COVID advice. Well but but I it makes perfect sense that you're here now doesn't it? Because we're talking about transparency. We're talking about rooting out corruption. We're talking about not being nepotistic. We're talking about all these things which are, I'd say, kind of applicable to this whole area here.

So it serves everybody's interest to root out corruption. It serves everybody's interest. So out corruption. It serves everybody's interest. So here's a way to think about it. You use the word woke. I love the word woke. Some people have a problem with it. You can call it critical social justice if people like the word woke. It is a universal solvent that destroys everything it touches. The moment it gets in, it destroys it. United Airlines has announced that it will seek more diverse pilots, more diversity in pilots, and that means people of a very specific race, usually African Americans, sometimes Native Americans.

If I lived in a sane world, I would not have to ask you this question, but we do not live in a sane world. What factors other than merit should go into the selection of a pilot? Well, the answer is none, literally zero, because every time you include some exogenous factor, then by definition you're decreasing the meritocratic requirements to successfully complete the objective, which is to land the plane. So, by the way, just parenthetically, you can also think about corruption and fraud and cheating in terms of pilot's exams, right? You would do the same thing if you're heading Southwest Airlines, for example, and you found out that a certain percentage of your pilots cheated on their exams or lied about how many flight hours they had in the air.

Corruption is only in the interest of people who are corrupt. So these are going to be the plagiarism wars then? We are in the beginning of the plagiarism wars. I predict 7 to 9 percent of papers in the humanities will be plagiarized. I predict that in a very short period of time, I'd say eight months is my best guess, if you have a Ph.D., you will need to have some kind of evidence or proof that that has not been plagiarized. And it's pretty easy to get. It's not particularly complicated to get.

I also predict that if my prediction is incorrect about the number of people, it's not fewer than seven to nine. It's significantly more than seven to nine. Again, I'm talking about cases of black and white plagiarism, and we're going to see. I also predict that you're going to find things in the STEM fields. Harvard recently has been targeted quite a bit for data fraud the top scientists at cancer institutes I think you're going to see more and more of this stuff become mainstream

and the consequence of that is that there will be a further loss of legitimacy in our institutions fewer and fewer people are going to trust the institutions and why should they? they're filled with cheats and liars and there are whole disciplines that have gone off the rails until those disciplines forward moral conclusions.

Right, right, exactly. You know, one thing I want to touch on a little bit is a lot of people have been using, you know, chat GPT and similar models, you know, AI models to do all sorts of work. And, you know, I actually use them to help with a few things that I do. But some people have, I think there was one example of someone submitting a legal brief that was written by ChatGPT, which had made up references and things like that. That's how they

got found out. I mean, this is a whole new realm. And I guess what I'm trying to get at is if we live in a society where this, you know, sort of the integrity of our work means a lot less than getting the credential and any means can be used to get the credential, you know. Yeah, the legitimacy of the credentialing mechanism itself is undermined. Correct. But even more than that, I just want to speak to that Chattipi thing because that really bothers me. What bothers me is not in the context of this conversation that it's bad for institutions or corruption. It's that it prevents you from learning how to write well.

You know, the invention of the calculator did the same thing, prevented people from just adding quickly, adding numbers in their head. I would urge people, you can use chat TPT forever you want, but don't use it to write. But that's another thing that the advent of various AIs are going to make it more difficult to root out cheating. And the problem is that there's such an ideological movement in those universities that many of those decisions, my fear would be, would not be made honestly, would not be made sincerely. They'd be made on ideological grounds. They'd use those as a kind of witch hunt for one's ideological enemies.

Well, I mean, but this is the argument, right, that's basically being made by people who are, let's say, backing Claudine Gay. Because I've seen these discussions happening online. They're saying, well, this is just the right attacking its ideological enemies. You've spoken to this already. But that assertion will always be forevermore thrown. Because that's the way of thinking. Everything is just politics.

Okay, two things on that. First of all, the left overwhelmingly dominates the academic institutions. Greg Lukianoff's FIRE, F-I-R-E, has done great work on that. And it's by discipline. Some disciplines are well over 95%, left-leaning, et cetera. And there are very few. There may be more conservatives, but there are very few people who are conservatives who are openly willing to admit they're conservative.

So, okay. If the situation were reversed and the right controlled the academic institutions, I guarantee you the same criticisms would be there. This is a left-wing witch hunt. They're just out to do this ideologically. It occurs to me that using AI to create dissertation would be kind of like hiring someone to do it for you. It would be kind of similar, right? Well, they do.

There are PhDs in India. Right. So you can go to a paper mill and pull a paper, but that's easy to find. Or you can spend, I don't know what it is now, but the last time I looked, it's like $3 more a page or something. It's not a lot of money. And you can have a PhD, and they're usually in India, write your papers custom for you. And people have done that for fun. There's literally nothing you can do. I mean, pedagogically, you can change it in the classroom. You can only require in-class exams. So that will change things. And then, of course, but you have to defend your PhD.

Defending it would be less of a problem, I would imagine, than writing it and data collection and doing the literature review, etc. So we're back to, you know, we need a morality that enshrines meritocracy, right? I mean, that's kind of what we're saying here, right? Because we're not there anymore. No, we're not. And it came in sheep's clothing. It came under the guise of equity. Equity is the enemy of meritocracy by definition.

I mean, you can just look at acceptance rates at Harvard, since we're talking about Harvard. If you only drew from the top 10% of Harvard applicants, over 51% would be Asians, cold climate Asians. Whites would drop a little bit. Hispanics would plummet. And African-Americans would go from 13 cold climate Asians. Whites would drop a little bit, Hispanics would plummet, and African Americans would go from 13% to 0.9%. That's a whole separate conversation among the questions there, what really is the problem

if half of the graduating class or the class that matriculated in is Asian? And what role should diversity, racial diversity play? And who should racial diversity apply to extremely, like Jaden Smith, wealthy African Americans? Or should it apply to white poor people? Who does that apply to? So I think those are questions worth considering, but we're nowhere near having that conversation. I mean, we can't even kick people out who have blatantly cheated. How on earth are we going to have that conversation? Right. Or if you are concerned that certain demographics are not doing well or not doing

well enough or not represented enough, how to actually help them do better? Because you could do that. I mean, it's a very complicated system where many African-Americans are in school systems that are failing or poor because of the tax code that they're in. How do we assure them a public education at the first rate while maintaining a meritocratic environment across all K-12 systems? James Lindsay has co-written a book, The Queering of the American Child. He just asked me to blurb that. I think there's a lot of answers in that book to this question.

Queering is not gay. Queering is just like looking at something with a particular lens that makes it normative, which was once not normative. And so there are answers in that book. The question is, the perennial question, are the people who need to read it most going to read it? Yes, well, I had the same thought. But my point is that the purpose of education has been subverted, perhaps, is the best way to describe it. That's the case that the book makes. To give people, the purpose of education now is to give people a critical consciousness to remediate oppression as opposed to give them critical thinking skills or teach them how to be less wrong more often

or teach them how to participate in civic life or teach them how to be entrepreneurs or teach them other, you know, character values, although that's a little tricky in and of itself, but it's to develop a critical consciousness so you can find, for example, we know that racism occurred, it's the ordinary everyday state of affairs, how did it occur? It's from the Brazilian educator Paulo Ferreira. In this interview, we might get very depressed. You know the same things we've been talking about today applying to medical schools. Correct. Right. This new generation of doctors. Who didn't get in through merit. Who got in

through some other characteristic. Medicine medicine pilots and and also have been taught in a way as we just talked about that doesn't prioritize being a good doctor as the key correct reason how that's health equity right so I mean that's another example you know we've talked about firefighters we've talked about pilots right doctors and takes on perhaps a whole new level, I don't know, of meaning. We live in a democracy. We've done this to ourselves. So we're living what we deserve.

If you don't like it, speak up. Change it. Don't be a coward. Be forthright in your speech. Actually physically attend meetings. Don't be held hostage by the small number of people. Last time I looked, around 8% of the people are actually true believers. But they are hyper-vocal,

almost universally under-accomplished, online constantly, threatening people, hurling epitaphs at them, Nazi, grifter, whatever it is. And enough people have capitulated to that to give a group of dyspeptic morons a voice in society. So you get what you deserve. If you don't like it, fight back about it. That's a—dyspeptic morons is a new moniker. I haven't heard that before. I think I just made it up. What does dyspeptic mean?

I don't know what that word means. Like when your stomach is upset. It's like you have dyspepsia. Pepto-bismol, I see now. Okay, anyway. But you're not one who's typically prone to ad hominem, in my experience. I think it hinders a conversation, which hinders an intervention, which hinders people being willing to change their mind. I'm remembering, I think the first time a conversation, which hinders an intervention, which hinders people being willing to change their mind.

I'm remembering, I think the first time we interviewed, actually, we talked about, you know, one of my, frankly, favorite books of the last several years that I've read, which is How to Have Impossible Conversations. Yay, thank you. That's very kind of you. Yeah, with James, who we've talked about already. Thank you. Incredibly important. It becomes more important, it seems, as we continue into this. And you have a lot of great ideas in there. How do we talk to people, because they're all around us, that are not on the same page and might be fear, it might be just ignorance, it might be I'm just busy with what I'm doing.

I'll suggest a different question. Okay. How do we listen to people? You listen to people by asking questions, repeating back what they said to you, making sure that you understood it, trying to figure out and honestly reason if the confidence, that's street epistemology. That's what we go around the world and do, my nonprofit, Natural Progress Alliance. We go around the world and ask people basically, does the confidence you have in a belief, is that justified by the evidence that you have for that belief? And the only way you can do that at all is to listen to people and understand where they're coming from. So we need more listening. The problem is, again, social media is a problem. A lot of, I don't know if we use the term anymore, loudmouths. We have a lot of people who exert disproportionate influence in certain public spaces.

And so as a general rule, it takes a different skill set to deal with those people. We're talking about the people in the center. We're talking about people who are afraid. We're talking about people who know what a woman is but are terrified to say. So we're talking about reaching people in the center, reaching people on the fringes, be it I don't really like right or left, but on the fringes in this particular axis of right or left. That's a different skill set, but it still starts with listening. You know, you just reminded me of something.

I want to probe you a little bit on this. Not physically. No, definitely not that's a good I'll take I'm keeping my clothes on in this room so you know I can't help but remember Justice Jackson please define what a woman is and just improvising here a little bit, but, and she says, well, I'm not a biologist. Right. Right. Can you provide a definition for the word woman? Can I provide a definition?

No. Yeah. I can't. You can't? Not in this context. I'm not a biologist. There's this deference to expertise. I've encountered this in numerous situations and people sort of avoiding responsibility for COVID decisions they made, for example? I mean, multiple areas. This kind of deference, but maybe in a way when it's convenient, highly convenient to do so to authority.

And I'm wondering if you've thought about that, if you've noticed that, and if you've thought about it. Yeah, quite a bit. We need experts in this society. We have to have experts. But the people who, whether they occupy a position of authority or a position within an institution, they have to actually have earned those positions through some kind of meritocracy,

so they actually are experts. And so the idea that we demean expertise entirely is just total nonsense. The question is, how do we create systems that guarantee that the people who are credentialed are actually experts? That's the question. And to do that, you cannot have any value coming into the system other than merit, period. Here's a little philosophical tidbit for you. The closer an activity is to reality, the more expertise is demonstrable. So playing a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language, doing jujitsu. Here's the other thing.

You can't fake it. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. You can't fake it. So you can't fake it. So in activities like gender studies you can fake. Anything with plagiarism you can fake that. You can just plagiarize. Activities that align with reality and have corrective mechanisms within them cannot be faked. Now, you can, of course, put a black belt on your waist. I can give him a black belt on the waist, and we can throw him in a jiu-jitsu studio, and you'll see what will happen to him in like literally 10 seconds.

So you cannot fake a genuine expertise. So we need, there is such a thing as expertise. We need experts. But it comes down to creating institutions that we trust so that when they do produce experts, they are actually experts. So Kevin Bass is this guy who's been studying for his PhD and, you know, looks like it's been in jeopardy for, you know, doing a lot of truth telling online, I think a big reason for it. But one of the things he did recently, which I thought was incredibly fascinating, was he looked at all sorts of

different professions, both academics and more sort of professional white-collar professions, also blue-collar professions, and over time, over decades, what the political orientation of those people in those professions was. And he did, I think, you know, eight white-collar, eight blue-collar. And the fascinating thing is the white-collar professions all went hard left and the blue-collar professions stayed a reasonable distribution like what you might have expected however many years ago, okay, something like that. In general, the more applied something is, the more conservative the person. Within any field you can think of, applied epistemology and philosophy, for example,

more conservative people tend to go into conservative, not merely politically, but kind of dispositionally as well, but also politically, tend to go into more applied fields and more applied sub-disciplines within their field. Okay, that's fascinating. I hadn't heard that as a hypothesis before, but the observation is that there's kind of a war Because if the left has captured the elites, which I think many people would argue convincingly at this point, it would make sense that those people that will always be more on the right, according to your hypothesis, would be targeted then. Yeah, I think so.

I also think we have created a managerial class. I resisted talking about this for a long time, but I really am starting to come around to the idea of an elite class. and moving funds and overthrowing governments. But I mean a managerial class within our institutions that thinks that they know what's best. They think that they have the best interests. And I think the overwhelming majority of these people are sincere. They actually do think that they know best. They're not acting under nefarious purposes to hurt people or what have you. And I think that it's creating an incredibly dangerous situation in which they're taking over the universities, education, colleges of education, teaching kids in K through 12, certifying the teachers who teach kids.

These are all more or less a managerial class. Why is this so dangerous? Well it's dangerous because the interest of the managerial class is not necessarily the interest of everyday people, not even working class people. Just because a group of people has a certain value, that doesn't mean that everybody else should adopt that value. And if they don't adopt that value, they're immoral. But when you control the institutions, you can certify the people who teach people so

that you can replicate that ideology so that they too so that so they're using the institutions as a way to replicate the ideology you didn't believe that this these people existed before no it's not that i didn't the elites it's not that i didn't believe that they existed but i didn't believe that they exerted a radically disproportionate interest a radically disproportionate interest, a radically disproportionate degree of influence that I now think that they do. We're in the United States, but Brexit was an example. None of the elites thought it would pass. Virtually none of the elites thought it would pass. And it was overwhelmingly, again, I think the managerial class is just the best way to describe that, which is somewhat different from the elites.

Interesting. Well, you know, just what comes to my mind right now is just that famous C.S. Lewis quote, like the people who torment you for your own good are the worst. That's not exact words, but something similar. Well, okay. So we can do, have good conversations. And I'm going to recommend your book again. I've recommended it many times. Thank you very much. Because I think there's, I certainly learned a lot from it. We talked a little bit about institutional reform. At this conference, we've talked a lot about parallel institutions. I see FLCCC as kind of a nucleus of parallel health system, so to speak.

That's a big thing we haven't talked about, but we probably should. What does it mean to create a parallel system and a parallel architecture to that system? So it's not just that you're creating a new university. How do we create accrediting bodies that decide which universities become quote unquote legit or accredited?

So you're talking about literally building new systems. So there are two things. Either you build new things, which I'm in favor of, full disclosure. I'm a founding faculty fellow for the University of Austin, so you build new things. Or you do nothing to the existing infrastructure, academic infrastructure and come what may or you actually attempt to move people, students in particular, from one university system, the legacy institutions, either out of colleges or to vocational schools or to the new institutions that are being founded. But I'm not Pollyanna about this. To be sure, these institutions

are going to take time. We talked about peer-reviewed literature, making new bodies of literature. Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist, is trying to do that now with the Journal of Controversial Ideas. So people are trying to do new things, but these are expensive and slow and they take – in some cases they can take decades. So what do we do in the meantime when we have people in legacy institutions who are teaching kids that sex is a sign at birth or you could change your sex? Have you ever spoken to young people? I was giving a talk fairly recently and there was a young person, I don't usually pick on young people, but I asked her

mother if I could ask her a question and I started listening to questions in which she used the phrase assigned at birth and many of the ideas from queer theory. There is no natural kind of order of things. You can queer the fact that you have certain genitalia and that accords to your description if you're assigned sex at birth and that's an arbitrary relationship right it's capricious you might as well just assign somebody something else so we're now in a state in which people are going to these institutions and they're learning things that are just completely false and they're going through teacher

training programs and they're teaching teachers to teach kids things that are completely false sex is not a site you cannot change your sex that's just teacher training programs and they're teaching teachers to teach kids things that are completely false. Sex is not a – you cannot change your sex. That's just completely false. We can have a reasonable conversation about whether gender is performed and you can change your gender. I mean I personally think you can if you buy into the idea of gender.

But you can't change your sex. That's total nonsense. But yet so we have – that's just one example of we have kids now thinking that that's true and ultimately they grow up and then they influence public policy. They get into positions of authority. There's a kind of nihilism. Yeah. Right. That's because I mean think about people tearing down statues. Think about people subverting democratic processes. Small groups of, I would say, thugs are doing just that. They're taking the law into their own hands. A great example of this is in the city of Portland, Ted Wheeler, he, him, his is the mayor of Portland. And Rene Gonzalez,

the city commissioner, his car was firebombed outside of his house by Antifa. Have you heard about that? I think I have heard about it. So I haven't seen it anywhere. As far as I know, the governor didn't say anything about it. As far as I know. No, it's not widely reported, but I do think. So us not turning into Banana Republic would, I think, be job number one of anybody in authority. Rene Gonzalez is an inveterate leftist.

He's not like he's some far-right guy. But when everybody is an actual communist, when someone is just a hardcore Democrat, they look like they're on the right, right? That's the Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist left-pole thing. So we have to call out and we have to maintain a kind of vigilance that the structures and the systems that we've created, these are tenuous things. You don't just build this ex nihilo out of nothing. This has come because literally people have died to give us.

My grandfathers were in the war. So the idea that you can just be callous with this inheritance of Western civilization if you think that way you are in for a very rude awakening. And the thing that you can do most of all is to not be a coward is you can speak up. And when you do speak up one of the things you realize is that people will respect you more and not less because you're forthright in your speech and you spoken up but key to that is also that you have the disposition to change your mind so if someone presents you with evidence about kovat or experts or planes or firemen or plagiarism or

whatever it is you have to say okay well you know I thought this I've looked at the evidence I've changed my mind is. You have to say, okay, well, you know, I thought this. I've looked at the evidence. I've changed my mind. And then you have to still be open to change your mind. But the key there is to not be a coward. It's a simple prescription. You can just sort of internalize that, right? Be honest in your speech.

Be forthright in your speech. But make sure before you do anything, you listen, that you understand what somebody is actually claiming as opposed to what you think that they're claiming. And the other thing I would say that nobody, very few, very few people do that you understand what somebody is actually claiming as opposed to what you think that they're claiming. And the other thing I would say that nobody, very few, very few people do is physically go to meetings, like literally physically show up. People don't show up to meetings. When you go to these meetings, this is a very small number of hyper far left activists at

these meetings. And it appears as if their voices have a disproportionate weight. And I'm not even talking about if you're on the right, if you're on the center, if you're on your left. You want to have a better world and you want to have a better society, you have to show up to board meetings. You have to show up to your kids at school. You have to just show up to these things. And that alone will help move the needle.

Educate yourself. Speak openly and honestly. I mean these are not complicated. These are time immemorial prescriptions for dealing with any kind of lunacy or mass psychosis. Peter Rogozin, Found a little courage and participate. I mean that's what I'm getting. And Peter Rogozin, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Peter Rogozin, Thank you. I appreciate it. Can I say one more thing. Peter Rogosian, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Can I say one more thing? Absolutely. So if the fear is that you will lose your friends as a result of speaking honestly with them about something, you're probably right. But why would you want someone as a friend if you can't speak openly and honestly with them? The quality of your interactions once you start having what Aristotle calls virtue friendships,

where you're actually honest with people, will give you more fulfillment and satisfaction in your life than literally anything else you can do. It's the best thing you can do for your whole life is to be a person of virtue and have friendships with people of virtue. And the only way you can have those friendships is if you're honest about what you say. And we're living in a society right now where the zeitgeist is, it prevents people from speaking openly and honestly. Fantastic advice.

Thanks. Thank you all for joining Peter Boghossian and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.