The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 248. The Adventures of Pinnochio and Free Speech Part 2/4

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

The right to speak is critically important to allow our civilization not only to thrive but to survive. In part 2 of this compilation, we examine the power of free speech and potential responses to censorship. After a lecture excerpt on the “initial defeat of the hero,” we transition into podcast clips on hate crime laws, the idea behind 'No Safe Spaces,’ and the events that lead Paul Rossi, a NY private school teacher, to take a stand against seminars on "white dominant culture" being taught as gospel. After that, we travel across the pond to speak with Andrew Doyle about the hate crime laws recently passed in the UK Parliament. —Links—Watch the full Paul Rossi episode: https://youtu.be/ysQBegyQP8A& Andrew Doyle episode: https://youtu.be/aoH1g5GYhPw—Chapters—[0:00] Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, & the Initial Defeat of the Hero[4:36] Paul Rossi: starting to bother you[10:26] There's no such thing as a conversation[15:19] Losing his job[17:30] Aspects of "white dominant culture"[30:52] "Healing resources"[32:27] A kafkaesque series of meetings[38:59] Conscience as a mirror of the divine[40:52] Andrew Doyle: why hate crime laws in Parliament matter[48:52] Western institutions: power-hungry & tyrannical[56:09] Damage without intent[57:48] Prager & Carolla: The Motivation Behind 'No Safe Spaces' [59:44] Defining far-right vs. far-left#FreeSpeech #WhiteCulture #Conscience #Pinocchio #Parliament

Okay, so now you can imagine what's happened. He was on pleasure island and everything went to hell, fundamentally. And so he jumped into the water to escape from that, and that's equivalent to plunging into chaos. And so chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny. And now he's tried to go home. So this is the psyche in its search for maturation, runs into an obstacle, which is the tyrannical element of the great father that it cannot cope with, and it trots home, runs home, it's a defeat. Typical part of the hero story is the initial defeat

of the hero when he encounters usually either the terrible great father or the terrible great mother. So, and so this is a retrogressive, you would call this retrogressive restoration of the persona. So it's sort of like maybe you're a well adapted adolescent and you live at home and you're happy adolescent and everything's good at home. And then you go out to try to be an adult and you fail and then when you come back home you try to act like a happy adolescent again. But you're not. What you are, in fact, is an unhappy adult. And if you move back to the happy adolescent mode of being, then it's false and pathological.

You can't go home again, another typical motif in literature. Now, the cricket, I can't tell you everything about this story. I can tell you a couple of strange things about it. One is that the cricket is chimney cricket, right? And the initials of chimney things about it. One is that the cricket is Jiminy cricket, right? And the initials of Jiminy cricket are JC. And Jiminy cricket was a common Southern American mild form of cursing. It's the equivalent of Jesus Christ.

And so you might think, and of course, the cricket is Pinocchio's conscience. And well, so then you might ask yourself, why in the world would a mildly pejorative term for Jesus Christ be applied to a cricket who's guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale? Why would any of that happen? And the answer to that is, you know why, but you can't say why. You can't say why you know, or what it is that you know. But the mere fact that it makes sense and

it does is an indication from a union perspective that you're operating in an archetypal level. You understand this. And so I could say, here's an example of why the cricket is a bug. Well, things bug you, right? We say that. Things bug me. Well, you should do something about the things that bug you, because that's your conscience calling to you. It's destiny in some sense, manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse. That really bugs me. Means, if you can, you should do something about it because you think about it, man. There's a lot of things out there that might bug you, but lots of them don't, but some of them do.

Well, why do those bug you? And not the other things. Well, that's a complicated question, but one potential answer to it is that there's part of your psyche that's oriented towards further development. Jung would call that the self. And that's like the totality of everything that you could be. And it's a strange sort of entity in some sense because it's partly potential and it's potential that expands across time. But the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem

and they announce themselves as your problem and they do that by bothering you. So then if you pick up the task of fixing the things that bothers you, then you find the pathway to further expansion of your personality. So, and that's what's happening with Pinocchio. Now, one of the things that's really interesting about the Pinocchio movie, and that makes it incredibly sophisticated, is that, despite the fact that the cricket is a avatar of Christ, so to speak, the cricket has things to learn just like Pinocchio. And so, that's very cool, because it's so cool, it's so sophisticated,

because it means that you do have a conscience that guides you, but until you establish a dialogue with it, both you and the conscience are immature. You have to establish a conscious dialogue with it, and then interact together in a manner that propels your development across time. And that will stop you from being a Marianette, a force that would make you a brain donkey, does nothing but slave away in salt mines. So, okay, so Pinocchio goes home, that doesn't work, and that's where we're gonna start here. I mean, obviously this is starting to bother you

as this you buy into it to begin with, and you're enthusiastic about it to begin with, and you attribute that to, well, the mechanics of the initial education, let's say, it's a group phenomenon. It capitalizes on empathy, and it sounds benevolent, certainly. In fact, it's the very essence of benevolence in some sense.

So it's going to essence of benevolence in some sense. So it's, it's, it's, it's going to be seductive regardless of whether or not it's correct, but you become uncomfortable with it. Well, the first thing you're uncomfortable with is that you were implicitly asked to produce a falsehood in relationship to your own identity, which was when you asked the question about what you liked about being white. You said that what you said wasn't right, exactly, or wasn't correct, wasn't true. It was something that you whipped up on the spot because of the nature of the demand of the situation.

And you remember that. So obviously that's significant. I think I was just meeting what I thought was an absurdity with an absurdity. You know, like I felt the question was a little bit absurd. It's sort of like the premise right? The premise is what do you call it? How long have you been beating your wife kind of question? You know, so the premise of whiteness is you're you're supposed you have to accept the premise of whiteness is you have to accept the premise in order to answer the question. I really have never been comfortable with the premise period because I don't think that it, you know, I understand. Right, and it takes a lot of presence.

It takes a lot of presence of mind when you're asked to question, to question the question, especially when you're the student and it's the teacher that's so to speak, it's the authority figure that's posing the question because you immediately have to rebel and you have to do it in an extremely sophisticated way. Yeah, and you know, this could get back to the school and I might not have passed the class and you know, I'm white so that would have been problematic and why you and that would might have had job repercussions or promotions or whatever. You just, you realize that to question the question. Mandatory.

Yeah. And to question the question in these circumstances is the risk of that is so much greater than the triumph of dismantling the question that you're just not, you're never gonna, and you may even fail at dismantling the way. Like your little rebellion may lead nowhere and you may be wrong,

which is the hesitation that anyone would have with an objection just that you might be wrong. And so of course you're just gonna fall on that side of the equation. I mean, that's what I did. Some people don't, but that's, you know, I think. No, most people do. Yeah.

And no wonder. Right, right. It's hard not like you outlined a bunch of reasons why it's difficult to come up with exactly the right presuppons at that second. It's not like it's a question you're prepared for. Right, right. And I think the students do it all the time

because there's tremendous social cost to challenging any of the assumptions of our anti-racist programming or the manner in which it's delivered. What are the costs for the students? Social, you know, social appropriate. You could have, you know, teachers write recommendations for them if they get a reputation that there's a fear that it could affect their applications. Students have come to me with, you know, concerns and examples of papers that they wrote, you know, on taking a position that went against the orthodoxy and they've, you know, suffered a great hit from it. And I've asked them, are you sure it just wasn't a good paper? You know, you sure.

And they're like, no, I actually cited this, this, and this. And I still, you know, and so I think, I think they're real. I think that they're real. And there's actually been, you know, stories that they've, that they brought to and that there's actually been stories that they've brought to me that are someone defends capitalism or something, and then they have a big talking to after class or something like that, which is just... Well, yes, I mean, how could you possibly defend capitalism while you're going to a $55,000 a year private school? Right, right. I mean, what's the probability that your parents are capitalists? 100% very high, very. So basically, you're being set to task because you have

the goal to defend the very attribute of your parents that enabled you to go to the school in the first place and that, of course, enabled the school. Right, and it's such an ironic thing that both the administration and most faculty have such contempt for the very thing that makes them have a job. You should be talking about ideas based on what make ideas sound or unsound, not the person who's saying them. So I was seeing situations where white students would make a claim and then that claim was discounted by someone else because of their privilege.

And that- Right, but you're making of course the white supremacist assumption that there are such things as ideas and that they can be ranked in terms of quality and that the purpose of discursive speech is precisely to do such things and etc etc. Yeah, and so the whole solipsistic nature of it, I was like, this is, you can't even have a conversation. This is not, this is not a way to have a functioning. You're not, you're not preparing people to function in a truly verigated world of ideas.

It's not the word. Well, it's worse in some sense, that the claim, fundamental claim, is that there's no such thing as a conversation. There's just different discourses of power. There's no conversation. Conversation assumes ideas and the free flow of ideas and a rational individual actor and the capacity for logos

and the individual as the central unit and so on and so forth. People who hold the critical race position, let's say, don't ... it's not that they avoid confrontational conversations. They don't believe that there's such a thing as a conversation. It's not part of the system. So it's a fundamental dispute. Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, and I, and then the little things, like I remember talking to a colleague about a new, about a new hire. And then, and she said, I said, well, well, what's he like? This new guy. And she said, well, he's like you. He's like me. Well, what do you mean by that? And she was like, oh, he's white. And I was like, okay.

All right, you know, this is not a person that's a total stranger, but either. And I kind of walked away and like really. So Okay, and you know, I also I also hear the objection to my my objection, which is, you know, see how it feels white man, see how it feels to be treated as your race. That is, it's a, you know, she might have been trying to teach me a lesson in some sense. Like, now you know how it feels. But that's not, you know, okay, that's a point that you're making. But that's not a healthy thing. And that's not, you know, okay, that's that's a point that you're making. But that's not that's not a healthy thing. And that's not that's not good because it doesn't actually reduce the sum to the world. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

All right. So you're starting to get field disquiet and you actually make this known. Yes, and I make it known in 2019. I make it known in 2020. I talked to the assistant head. I talked to the head of school. You're married. I'm recently married. I've been married over a year, just over a year.

Do you have any children? No children. No children, just over a year. Do you have any children? No children. No children, but you are married. But I'm married. So I'm just wondering what you have resting on your job. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

And I didn't, I have to say that not having kids is a huge part of why I feel like this is happening, that I've been able to stick my neck out. And, you know, I'm not, not, I don't judge anyone for, for, for balancing their duty to the truth and their duty to their family and whatever way that works for them, because both of them are important. for them because both of them are important. Where to put things at risk, you know, that's that's a personal choice. And that's I can't speak to any of that. But I think it definitely not having mouths to feed and, you know, having having some savings for my previous job and things, being smart

with my money and not spending it on wisely as I had done a decade and a half ago, but I think that helped me to do what I'm doing. All right. So how are you being treated by the administrative officials to whom you're registering your objection. Are you doing that in writing? Are you doing that? In person, mostly in person, and I'm not writing anything official. I'm in the grumbling in my beard phase, I guess.

I'm in the griping phase where I would go and I would say, this is wrong. Why can't we teach a broad range of viewpoints? Why do we always have to teach this ritualistic thing? That's just a litany of, you know, basically far left ideas. And, you know, some of some of the administration were very sympathetic, like even overly so. Like I remember talking to, um, he says in head, he pulled down a copy of Jonathan Hade off the bookshelf and was like,

I love to teach this and my god, I really want to make this happen. I want to teach more than I was, sort of, or maybe just modeling it or humoring me or something. But he had the book. He had the book. And he knew it with a book and he knew where it was on his shelf. I know. So, like, then in public or the, in front of the community,

you're not saying nothing about it, right? So I think there's a tremendous amount of preference falsification still going on there, you know. Well, you outlined why. I mean, you lost your job. Yeah, so, you know what, sir. These are high stakes games and you make a mistake and a mistake. You veer outside the realm of acceptable behavior, let's say. And what happens? Well, you

get disproportionately punished for it. And there's a moral element to it too, which is, well, there's no bloody way someone like you should be teaching. So not only did we fire you, but we're right to do so. Yeah. And, you know, that's very hard thing to withstand, which is something I also want to talk to you about. I mean, you know, confident though you may be, or anyone may be, when your institution sheds you and surrounds that with accusations about the nature of your character. If you're not a complete psychopath, it tends to strike you to your heart.

Because there's always the possibility that you're wrong. Right, right. But I really knew I wasn't because, you know, coming out, there was this meeting and I referred to it in the article from ASA, the self-care through an anti-biased lens meeting, which is what kicked off the whole past two months for me. It was a meeting where students were ostensibly going to learn how to take care of themselves during the pandemic, how to manage their emotions, how to take deep breaths and cope with things. And in that meaning, after some mind-relaxing exercises, like meditation and stuff, they put up the white supremacy, you know, aspects of white supremacy culture slide.

And that's different than the pyramid or that's different than the pyramid. And this is, you know, that's elements of white supremacy. Right, right, it's actually, you know, there's different forms of it, but essentially, you know, it's fairly common in this thing as as you know. And...

Yes, so here's some professional and transactional relationships, versus relationships based on trust, care, and shared commitments, protecting power versus sharing power, culture of overworking, versus culture of self-culture and community care, competition and struggle for limited resources versus collaboration and working to share resources. That's all white dominant culture. So, yes, yes. And so some of the things that were on this particular slide were objectivity, individualism, either or thinking. Right, right.

And I know that one. There was, you know, the thing that ranked me the most was right to comfort. Because, you know, how are you giving a self-care workshop where the 200 kids that are in there and this racially segregated workshop are challenged that they might not, that having, imagining that you have a right to comfort

is associated with a, you know, a genocidal evil. Kenneth Jones and Tima Oak and dismantling racism workbook 2001. God only knows what that is, but it's everywhere. The characteristics of white supremacy culture, perfectionism, which is an element of conscientiousness, which is a fundamental trait, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either or thinking. Notice this is all written in words. By the way, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, which seems to be run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict, progress is bigger

and more objectivity, right to comfort. Yeah, it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items, it's incoherent at every possible level of analysis, as well as being, it's impossible to parody. Yeah. Yeah, and I saw it, and I had been thinking for a couple of months prior to this because there had been some meetings that really upset me, and I was thinking, well, and my head of school had actually said that if I was in I was thinking, well, and my head of school had actually said that if I was in an appropriate forum, I should feel free to ask questions. By this point in the meeting, I think maybe 30 minutes in before this popped up, other faculty had been saying things

in the chat area of the Zoom meeting. Is that anonymous? Is that anonymous in the zoo? No, it's, they were, so they were under their own names. Yeah, under their own names, yeah. And so I thought, well, why, you know, when the facilitator had mentioned that, if you looked at this slide, I think she said, I think she said, you know, you might have some white feelings. And I said, I just kind of blurred it out.

I didn't, I didn't blurred it out angrily. I didn't flirt it out. I, I don't think I was too upset. Of course, you know, I, I don't know how it was perceived, of course, but I said, well, what do you mean, but what is a white feeling? What is a white feeling? And I, you know, what came back was, I think she said something, the defensiveness was a white feeling. I said, well, these feelings can belong to people of any race.

And I think that it's, I don't know whether it's, I don't understand why it's being attributed to a particular, the white people. And that kind of opened the gates a little bit and kind of broke the ice, I think, because in the chat, other kids started to ask questions. There was a debate about whether I should be allowed to ask the question. There was a question, you mean the question about the white feeling question. I see. There were also some, there was a lot of capitalism bashing in the chat, and I said, you know, I believe capitalism is anti-racist since it's done more to

to lift people of all races out of poverty than any any alternative. And, you know, I wasn't monopolizing the chat. I was dropping in little things. And there was a lot of activity in the chat. And then the facilitator actually went with me. And she explained stuff, her perspective on it. And I thanked her. And she moved on some more. And I think I asked another question. But as she said later, in a meeting about the meeting

in front of the whole faculty, she felt that I was asking out of curiosity, didn't I wasn't on a rant or saying it to be antagonistic. I think some of my faculty members felt that I was, but the facilitator herself didn't feel that way. So, and she was the one I was talking to. So, I think that definitely counts. That's quite remarkable, I would say, because it's very difficult in a group like that when

you know the implicit ethos to be able to say something that's questioning without having anger build up as a motivation, right? Because you need something to break through your resistance. Yeah, so to be able to say it without upsetting the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I mean, I was passionate, but I wasn't, I wouldn't think I was like enraged or anything like that. Um, it's, you know, I was trying to modulate what I was really

upset I was, was the, was the either or thing because I was like, well, if either or thinking is a, is a characteristic of white supremacy, well, then the or thinking is a characteristic of white supremacy, well, then the Ebrim Candies got to be the whitest person in public life, because his entire philosophy is so mannequin. I mean, anyway, but I didn't say that, of course, because I would have been inflammatory. But what I really wanted to do, I've been thinking about an opportunity, because I wanted to model for the students that you could ask questions that someone who was a teacher or someone who was an authority figure could ask a question and it was okay.

And how did the students react to the question? It was phenomenal. I mean, I was really gratified and that they confirmed that my, it confirmed that I had just doing the right thing because things came out in the chat. They started to ask a broad range of questions. I received a transcript later and it was like night and day. Kids were asking questions like, well, I don't feel like I'm ignorant just because I'm white.

Or I don't like to be reduced to my race. And then faculty joined in. So several faculty members also started to ask questions. You know, and I don't think the point was that they even people even necessarily wanted their questions answered in the forum. They just wanted to ask them. I got, you know, I don't know what your question is till you ask. Exactly. Like, that's why I think intent is so, is kind of a silly thing, because you never really, it's only an ex-post facto explanation.

If you're called on it, I think like a true question, there may be no intent. Like it just bubbles that of you, if you're truly in a conversation, I'm not thinking about, okay, I'm not, it's not like I'm plucking this little thing out of the inside of my head,

and like, well, I intend this to be, that's not communication, that's. Not if it's not like I'm plucking this little thing out of the inside of my head. And like, well, I intend this to be, you know, that's not communication. That's not if it's a genuine conversation. No, you don't have time for that in a genuine conversation. No, yeah, of course not. And so, you know, but I was really gratified. I was on a natural high from the experience. Um, why? Well, because I felt that I had done something good.

Like it was just self-evidently good to me. Like, when I reflected on it, this is a positive thing. Now, one of my colleagues got very upset with me, with my influence on this. And because at one point, I did say, you know, why, you know, I don't identify as white must I internalize societies, delusions about me, which is, you know, like,

it's kind of like the neutron bomb to this entire police system. But I was on, I was on, I felt like it was something I wanted to put out there, so the kids could see it and, you know, understand, you know, that maybe this is a point of view, you know, I felt like it was something I wanted to put out there. So the kids could see it and, you know, understand, you know, that maybe this is a point of view, you know, and not saying I'm right. I'm asking a question. And, you know, the feeling was that this was, you know, anti-racism one of them. Some defense.

Yeah, like I could not morally obligated to accept these characterizations, right? Which is kind of the whole point of anti-racism is that you're not obligated to accept arbitrary racial categories that are unrelated to the task at hand. Yeah, it should be. But then a colleague got upset with me and said, kind of got him as high horse and said, I can't believe that I may be misparaphorizing here. And if I am, sorry, but he said, I believe,

I can't believe that a member of one of my colleagues doesn't understand that we are white, that we are white since birth, I am white since birth, that this has carries with it implicit biases that are unavoidable, and we must affirm that, you know, and that's who we are and that's who I am. And I just kind of interrupted him because I felt like he was kind of making me look.

I don't know, he's being kind of a jerk. So I interrupted him and said, you know, I'm sorry, you're stereotyping yourself. I think it's sad. And that kind of was a very awkward moment because it was in front of students. And he said, he expressed his dismay. And I remained silent. And then after the meeting, I said, I apologize to him.

I said, you know, that was unprofessional. Was it? Well, you know, I, I understood, I felt it. I felt that there might have been a better way that I could do it. Maybe way till he finished and then asked, you know, to respond. I, I'm, I'm also suspicious of my own, you know, because I, I have been somewhat oppositional. I'm not exactly like a Mr. Go-long

and get a long guy with this stuff that I don't always have the best reality check on my own behavior. And so, you know, I was just saying, well, okay, if I did cause offense, then, you know, I feel like it's okay to apologize, and there probably was a better way for me to do this. And so I did apologize and, you know, thought about it. You know, nothing against that, nothing wrong with that. And then you accepted. And, you know, I figured that was, that was it. And there was a lot of processing after the meeting. I think that went on for hours afterwards. My phone died. It was on my phone. And so when I went home,

you know, I logged back into the meeting and people were still there talking. for hours afterwards. My phone died. It was on my phone. And so when I went home, I logged back into the meeting and people were still there talking. So I talked with them. But I underestimated the effect of this because apparently some of my comments, you know, were leaked or made or transmitted to other people that were in the meetings, people that were in the the BIPOC meeting, you know, particularly my, my and BIPOC is a black and indigenous people of color. So they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they received different content. And why was it separate?

Um, curiosity. Ah, the rationale as I could, as I can understand it, is so that the groups that have been marginalized won't be exposed to, you know, they'll have their own thing so that they're not exposed to the, I think the incents, possible incensitivity of the oppressors. It's the best I can understand the rationale. But it wound up happening anyway, because it would be rude of me to point out that that's somewhat paternalistic. You know, just as an observation. That's a good one. Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally well. I guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture, though paternalism. Well, I guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture though paternalism.

Yeah, so I guess it's well as long as it's in a good cause then I guess it's forgetful. Yeah, okay, so that was how long ago that meeting? That was February 24th. Oh, yes, okay, so things are starting to Yeah, that this year and that was referred to after the fact as the events of Wednesday, like they couldn't even really, it was sort of like 9-11. They couldn't actually, they had to come up with a euphemism for it, I guess. So the events of Wednesday, and so they had meetings about the events of Wednesday.

And Wednesday. Well, the Office of Community Engagement coupled with Dean of Student Life. And there are Dean level positions that exerted a lot of effort and energy because I did not make their lives easy to address the things that were said and raised in the meeting, not just by me, but by lots of different people. On students, students spoke up as well and faculty. me put by you know lots of different people and students students you know

spoke up as well and faculty and so what I found it so interesting because the day after the meeting there was an email that was released that said healing resources you know healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened. And the first healing resource on the list was a CNN interview with a poet named Damon Young. And Damon Young in this interview said things like, we need to get rid of all of capitalism. We will have to do a carpet bombing, not a carpet cleansing of society. And it was incredibly

radical statements that were, I would imagine, would be frightening to many people. And that was listed as a healing resource as well as the like- Well as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people. Well, yeah, I guess. And then things, there was the Robin D'Angelo article that said, you know, white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable. How can we become more uncomfortable? Also, you know, really kind of, I would just say racist characterizations of white people in these links, things like, you know, all white people have never had to be guests in this country. And like the Irish, for example, they were really white

to begin with though. So yeah, yeah. And so I found this very ironic. And then I had a series, I had two meetings. I had a meeting with my head of high school and the assistant head. And I had a meeting with the head of the whole school. And then, you know, I, the head of the meeting with the head of high school, They called you in at that point? Yeah, I mean, they, they, What's happening around you is this is growing? This is this is this. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of agitation.

There's meetings about meetings. There's student diversity council meetings. There are, there's just a lot of agitation in the community, I would say, and meetings about meetings. So some of the things that would happen would be in the week in the end as the week continued. There was a faculty meeting about it. I had some advisory circles, circle practice was taken away because they felt that it would be the students would be upset if I was a part of it. So the. The environment is what? away because they felt that it would be the students would be upset if I was a part of it.

So the deal is what? Well, it's a practice that we've started this year where activities where you put up a slide and you talk about an issue and then everyone has to go around and speak one by one about a question and then you kind of do it around twice. And then, you know, this is to sort of manage discussion. And I've done a couple of these. So you're not your persona non-grat at this now because you're toxic influence on the students. Right. Right. And so, you know, I got an presence. I got an email saying, you know, under current circumstances, following yesterday's meeting in your role and what transpired, you know, I've asked you to recuse yourself. Then, you know, there were subsequent meetings, there was a faculty meeting.

I think at that faculty meeting, a colleague said, well, this is, this could be terrible. This could undo everything we've ever talked to them, which I thought to myself, please, please. I hope so. But the, and there was, how are you reacting to all this? Well, I'm on a natural high. I mean, I know that I feel like this is something that I've finally done to open

up something like some daylight. And I, all of this churn is going on around me, but I'm going about my day. I'm teaching my classes. I am, you know, I did feel the need to address my classes. So I said at the beginning, I am an anti-racist. I want you to feel safe, and then I would just sort of teach the class. And then I was told not to address it with the class, with anyone in the classes.

With regard to teachers and students in private and public institutions, high schools, junior highs, elementary schools, in your state and across your country. What do you see this, if anything, what does this indicate? Well, I have hopes, you know, I feel that if students can, if the type of If students can, if the type of, you know, willingness to ask a question, it in response to some of these, you know, what I consider to be in Doctrineation, frankly, at other schools. And you think that's hiding in other schools?

Yeah, I mean, I, it's no question because of the, the calls that I've received in the conversations I've had with people all over Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey. Their parents are very concerned with their children. They've seen it because of the pandemic through the Zoom classes. They've witnessed what's being taught to their kids. And they're very, very concerned. And they have specific receipts to bag it up. And they're sending me curriculum.

So, you know, I have, this is not simply a rarefied independent school problem. This is happening at, you know, school boards and districts all over the country. A lot of it's spurred by the George Floyd killing and the reaction to it. I believe it was taken as an opportunity to redress that with misguided. Yeah, an opportunity for what? It's like I'm trying to figure out, I keep trying to figure

out because I've been concerned about this for a long time. And I still can't get to the bottom of it. It's like I don't understand exactly, I know there's a resentment element to it, but I can't understand exactly what's driving this. And it's despite the fact that it's clearly the view of a very small minority of people, perhaps 5%, that's what the surveys seemed to indicate. I cannot understand why it's making the headway that it's making at the rate that it's making and what it's really aiming at. What do you think about that? What's your sense? Because obviously it's bothering you. Yeah, I think I have a sense why and maybe it's a theory.

It's not just my theory, but it's, I've seen in other places or hinted at in other places. I think when you sort of, you know, over the past few decades you have a gradual sort of leaching from the soil of society of sort of a moral sense, a moral tradition, moral grounding in, you know, long, long religious traditions essentially, when they depart from the public sphere, it leaves a kind of vacuum. And, you know, wokeness is a way to sort of paint by numbers, moral righteousness, and it gives people the sense that they're good people. I think people have an almost, you know, I don't know whether it's evolutionarily based, but they have a need to have a moral character and sense of themselves. And if and if something comes along, which is going to offer that and give

you that thing, well, then there's a tremendous hunger for it. So people will adopt it quickly. And so you can have a very small percentage of the population that's pushing it can have a real powerful, outsized influence. Do you have a traditional religious belief of any sort and are you a practicing religious person? I am a really good question. I was raised Catholic and I, you know, was, I've lapsed. You know, I have a joke that I use sometimes, you know, I'm so lapsed, I'm prolapsed. But basically, I, I, you know, was a functioning agnostic than atheist. And, um, but I, I don't feel like I really need a lot of God, but I do need to have something, which is like a conscience. I guess I believe in a conscience. I believe in some

little mirror of the divine which sort of is in me. It's not like above mirror around me, but it is within me. And so it's sort of like a reflective thing that I can and it's sort of reactivated, I guess, as part of this whole experience. So I can take in the world and the world of reality, but I can reflect it against something which is not of this world. I don't know how else to describe it. And then that's pretty good. What comes back.

I'm satisfied with that answer. You know, like what comes back is something that I should attend to. It's something that is, it is something important. And that is the, you know, and now that I feel like I have that or on awareness of that, you know, it's just like, you know, ah, you know, okay, like I've got, it's been there. Exactly. Thank God. I want to say thank God, but I don't, I don't know, I don't know that there's a God with a cap of G.

I just know that there's something which is, which is not of this world, but is in this world. My point, my principal argument at the book is that absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better. And in fact, by promoting free speech, you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about. So recently, the Scottish Parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors. And I'd be interested in your feeling about that. Now, you said, I believe in this book, if I remember the statistics

correctly, that there have been 120,000 incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in Britain in How Long. Since it's been over the last five years or so. It's worse than that. The statistic I quote is between 2014 and 2019, there are 120,000 recorded incidents of non-crime. They call them non-crime hate incidents, and this is something which is now routine in the UK. I mean, obviously, I'm going to be talking about the UK and the US and Canada is a very different kettle of fish, I'm sure. And I'm sure a lot of the people who are watching won't be familiar with with the problems we have in the UK Of course, we don't have constitutional protection for free speech. We don't have a first amendment

We don't have anything like that. So we are particularly vulnerable and at the moment unfortunately in the UK the police who are Trained by the College of policing who do issue very specific guidelines about this and anyone can check this because if you go to the government's website on hate crime and hate speech They make very clear what they're talking about what they say is that there are five protected characteristics and these fall into race gender sexuality gender identity and disability I think I might miss quote that but there's one missing but anyway there are five protected characteristics and if A victim and they do use the word victim rather than complainant, if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics, then it qualifies as a hate crime if it's criminal,

if it's not criminal, if it's just speech or something like that, it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident. Police will investigate that. They will It qualifies as a non-crime hate incident. Police will investigate that. They will record that. And although non-crime incidents don't lead to prosecution, they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take. We call it a disclosure and barring service here. So it can affect your employment prospects.

And is that without a trial? That's recorded without a trial. Of course, there's no trial. So you get a quasi criminal record. You get something flagged up when you're a particularly if you're applying for a teaching job, say something like that where you're working with children, it's very important. And you get this thing flagged up. So it does have serious ramifications. But even beyond that, we have hate speech laws, which are encoded into the public order act,

which is one example. But the other, the main example is the Electronic Communications Act 2003. In this country, and I do quote the statistic in the book as well, we have roughly 3,000 people arrested a year for offensive things that they have said online. That's, that's, so in other words, nine people a day, roughly, the police in the UK are arresting. And people in the UK will be familiar with this because if you see the Twitter accounts of various police forces, various police departments across the country, they often put things out like, you know, make sure you don't say anything offensive or thoughtless online or we will be knocking on your door.

They say these very kind of frightening things. There was a recent police display outside a supermarket in the UK. It went viral this image. It was then next to a big digital billboard and the slogan on the billboard was being offensive is an offense. And this was flanked by police officers who were socially distanced, but they were there and their masks, which made it seem slightly more sinister. They got in a lot of trouble for that because people were saying, well, being offensive surely isn't a crime. But actually, the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime and they were acting on that basis. They'd obviously hadn't just concocted this billboard out of nothing. They'd really considered what it should say.

And more to the point, actually, they were right. In this country, you can go to prison for jokes, for offensive remarks, and people have gone to prison, have been arrested routinely for causing offense. And of course, the notion of offense is incredibly subjective. In fact, the legal stipulation in the Communications Act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is, quote, unquote, grossly offensive. Well, I don't know how you define that. I wouldn't know how to define it. No, no. So who defines it? Is the real question as far as I'm concerned? I mean, I've looked

into this legislation to some degree. And one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offense, which has become a subjective reality. If, and you can understand why that might be, to some degree, because how would you define hate? And how would you define offense without, especially the latter, without making recourse to someone's subjective experience.

But then, of course, well, we'll delve into that in a moment. I should start with the hard question, I suppose, which is, well, clearly people can say hateful things, and those things can be damaging psychologically. And physiologically, I suppose, if people are stressed enough, and the borderline is very difficult to identify. Why is it that people shouldn't just assume that you're a mean loud mouth and that they shouldn't pay any attention to you at all because you're concerned about this? I mean, which is, that's the general criticism of critics, of hate speech, let's say. And so why in the world,

aren't we aren't the people who are putting this forward just trying to make the world a nicer place? What's the big problem here? Well, I think a lot of people do assume that I'm a mean loudmouth. I think they assume that about most people who defend freedom of speech. But and I'm sure the latter part of your question is absolutely right. And so far as I imagine a lot of the people who are skeptical about free speech are in fact trying to make the world a better place. I don't think that's mutually exclusive. I mean, the problem here is that the legislation as it currently stands here means that, for instance, if you say something critical about me, and I perceive that it was motivated by hatred towards me on the basis of my sexuality, for instance.

I could phone the police and that would be recorded and would appear on hate crime statistics in this country because it's all about perception. That word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the hate crime legislation, the word perception of the victim. And again, I say victim, not complainant, which suggests a complete disregard for due process, but I suppose we can leave that aside. But the most common, the most common and the most frightening misconception I have found when it comes to people defending free speech is that they are doing so because they want to have the right to say appalling things about people with no comeback whatsoever and they want to go back to

some imaginary good old days, you know, where you could just be casually homophobic and racist and sexist and all the rest of it and no one would call you out for that. Now, I don't know anyone who falls into that category and most people who are, you know, advocating for free speech are doing so precisely because they are aware that in countries where free speech protections are meager, minorities tend to suffer the most. And in fact, there is a, it seems to be a corollary to me that those who are genuinely for free speech are also for equal rights and protecting the vulnerable in society. And this perception, which I really find unpleasant, this perception that if you are standing up for this most foundational

of principles, of freedom of speech, if you're standing up for that, you can only be doing so if you have a nefarious motive. I mean, what a horribly pessimistic view of humanity and it seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis, for example, that all Western social organizations, particularly Western, are based on power and are best conceived as tyrannical. And so if that's your view, why would you not assume that most use of speech is essentially an exercise of power in the service of tyranny? But then why would you assume that the government in control of any particular country isn't part of that tyranny that you're describing? It seems odd to me to be mindful of the potential for tyranny, but then to outsource all your

individual liberties to the state. It seems contradictory to me. Well, I guess the way that that is elated over is by allowing the hypothetical individual victim to define the offense. This is the problem though. I mean, the problem I've run into, and this is partly why I appreciated your book, is that increasingly people are called upon to defend fundamental assumptions that were so taken for granted that virtually no one has an argument that's fully articulated at hand. When no one questions free speech, no one has to defend it thoroughly.

As soon as it's questioned, well, it becomes an extraordinary complicated problem, the same with gender identity when it's when no one's paying attention to it, it's obvious, but as soon as you have to think it through, it becomes a rat's nest to say the least. When I was in the UK a few years ago, I saw a number of things that I felt were disturbing. People seem to have accepted the omnipresence of CCTV cameras to a degree that I found horrifying, frankly. I don't like CCTV cameras. I don't like the message they portray, which is that everyone is criminal enough so they should be surveyed all the time and someone needs to be watching. I noticed too, in London in particular, that many buildings noticed too in London in particular that many buildings had instituted airport level security so that you had to pass through a metal detector and have your bags checked, etc.

Well, you were moving in and out of buildings and it struck me as quite horrifying given that as far as I'm concerned, great Britain and its legal and parliamentary traditions are the epicenter or at the epicenter of Western freedoms. I mean, you could make a case for France, I suppose, but not a strong one as far as I'm concerned. Yet, your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem. And now, on the heels of that, we have this multiplication of hate crime.

That's as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I mean, you won't have seen all of the CCTV cameras. Believe, apparently they're absolutely everywhere. You can't walk anywhere in the UK without being potentially monitored. You know, I'm not saying someone's watching you all the time, but things are being recorded and digitised. Yeah, and it's interesting to me because I remember back in the early 2000s when the government was trying to push through its ID card scheme, and broadly speaking, the left were unanimously against it, and they didn't like this idea of living in a society where there's someone on the corner saying, papers, please, no one really wanted that. But we've become very docile and very accepting of the idea that we need to be coddled and monitored by the state. I mean, I know there's

a recent debate about vaccine passports and people seem very blase about this idea that we might have to have our ID embedded and encoded onto a card to get anywhere or to do anything. So I think there's something going on there and it is connected with what you've brought up in terms of hate crime legislation. We've just become accustomed. I mean, you mentioned specifically the problem in Scotland. And, and, and, and seriously, it relates very closely to what you're saying, because the SMP, who are the only really party with any clout in Scotland, that's the Scottish National Party. And it's never a good idea, is it, when you have one political party, which doesn't really have an opposition? They have a reputation for quite nanny state-ish policies. They introduced a,

what was it called, the named person scheme. It didn't go through in the end, but they wanted to assign every child born in Scotland with a state guardian. They effectively didn't trust the parents to raise their own kids. They have other examples, you know, minimum pricing on alcohol or a ban on two for one pizzas because they don't trust poor people and not to gain weight. So all sorts of these sorts of policies. But in this current hate crime bill, which has just sailed through because there's no opposition. Humza Yusuf, the Justice Secretary, has pushed through, he specifically included an element to this bill, which says that they can criminalize you for things you say in the privacy of your own home. I mean, that to me is, I mean, that's just a given. I would have never thought that anyone in this country would not consider that to be

an incredible invasion of individual liberty. You can make a strong case for Scotland as the ground zero for many of that, developing many of the concepts that undergird the entire Western notion of freedom and to see that emerging in Scotland is absolutely stunningly terrifying as far as I'm concerned. Think of Mill Gibson with a face covered in woe shouting freedom as he's executed, you know, in that in Braveheart. You do think of Scotland as being associated with it, but honestly, Scotland for some reason, and I don't know what it is, and it might be to do that it's effectively this one party state, it seems to have this incredible sense, and they've really brought into this idea that unless they

can police the thought and speech of their citizens, then they will just run a mock. There's another element to that bill. I don't know if you know about this. There's a specific element on the bill which talks about the public performance of a play. So they've effectively said that they will criminalize public performances. So say if it can be deemed that those performances were designed to stir up hatred, that's the formulation, stir up hatred. I'm not quite sure what that means necessarily, but when when Humza Yusef was questioned about this in Parliament, he actually said, well, theoretically a neo-Nazi or someone from the far right could get together with a group of actors and put on a play to recruit people to his cause. And as I said at the time, you know, I don't know any neo-Nazis,

but they're not into amateur dramatics, that's not their thing, they don't do that, they wouldn't get involved. And yet he's got this idea in his head that that is a feasible, I mean, it seems ridiculous, but it's not really because the ramifications are quite, are quite serious. And, and the way it's just gone through without any opposition really, really troubles me. I mean, there have been modifications, I should say, to inferness in the initial bill, in the initial draft of the bill, they had said that you could be criminalized irrespective of intention. In other words, yes, if you were terrifying, awful. I mean, you know, if you wrote a play that then stimulated someone to join the far right, then you were still responsible whether you intended it or not. The problem was,

you know, with theatrical representation or any kind of artistic representation, is sometimes you want to represent the worst aspects of humanity, because that's part of drama and literature and all the rest of it. I mean, you would be, there would be no artistic freedom if that went through. So fortunately, that element of the bill was modified. Well, and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important is that's even, that's even more catastrophic. It's always been a miracle to me that our legal system ever became psychologically sophisticated enough so that intent rather than outcome was what mattered. Because you have to be a sophisticated thinker to see that someone has done damage to someone

else. And so the damage is real and market and troublesome and costly, all of that, painful. But because the intent wasn't there, the severity of the action is dramatically mitigated. That's a sign of maturity and sophistication to note that. And the fact that it's built into the legal system is nothing short of remarkable. And then to remove that and to make the felt consequences, the arbiter of the reality of the situation is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law as such as far as I can tell. Well, moreover, it's something that everyone intuitively understands. And it's bigger than that, isn't it? It's because this idea that intention doesn't matter,

is actually built into so much of this, what we call social justice discourse. If you think of critical race theory, it's just a given that there are racist structures and you can be racist without intending to be racist. And I really do dispute that because I think in order to be racist intention has to be at the heart of that.

Otherwise, it's incoherent to me. Why were you motivated you guys to do no safe spaces? And what exactly is it examining? It's examining free speech, which alone, I mean, first of all, everybody involved in it, the directors, the writers, the producers were fantastic people. People I really admire and adore. And originally it was with me and then very early on they said, would you like to do

with Adam Corolla? And I don't know if your viewers are able to perceive this, but we really do adore each other and respect each other. And so the thought of doing this with Adam was, I was excited and it turned out that I had every reason to be excited. It's a great chemistry that we have. Just to hear Adam describe how different our backgrounds is, is worth the price of admission,

which he does at most of the time when we go public. Adam, why don't you give a brief review of how different our backgrounds are? Well, first are similarities. We're both over six foot and that's where it ends. Dennis is, you know, a New York, he's an East Coast guy. I grew up in North Hollywood, California. Dennis is a scholar. I was put on academic probation at a junior college. Dennis likes symphonies. I like prog rock. He likes Gaffiltefish, I like Philly Cheese Stakes, where does it end, Dennis? Well, a lot about the religious difference. Oh, yes.

He's a very religious Jew, essentially atheist slash pagan. Okay. So let me ask you another question. So when I look at political surveys, I see that there's a very limited number of people on the right that you could describe as extremists. And there's a very limited number of people on the left who appear to support the more extremist leftist propositions. And so I do believe that in some sense it's more difficult for people on the left to draw distinctions between acceptable leftist ideas than it is for people on the

right. I mean, on the right, you draw the line with claims of racial superiority. On the left, there's obviously trouble brewing on the extreme, but defining exactly where it is and drawing a border around it seems to me a relatively complex task. And well, you asked me why I got in trouble. I mean, I got in trouble because I said, well, I'm not sure where to draw the line, but that particular law, compelling speech with its implicit theory of identity,

that's gone too far as far as I'm concerned. But, you know, the fact that that caused so much trouble, I think, is indication of the fact that it's difficult to draw the line. And so, well, I'd be interested in both your comments about that. Well, I think you're on to something with the extreme part of the right wing party is pretty definable. And I think most reasonable people agree that the farthest right, you know, Jews shooting laser beams into

the, into the sky and shooting down satellites or whatever crazy stuff comes out of Q and on or sort of far right stuff, racial things of that nature. I think we can all agree that that's pretty definable and that most people on the right will not cross that border. Will you buckly help with that, wouldn't you say? I would, but on the left, I feel like there's a much greater sense of, well, we don't agree with AOC, but we're not going to say anything about it. Or we're not going to define it or the squad. So there's a much more, you know, I live in California, most everyone I work in Hollywood, everyone's on the left. Their thing is sort of like, we don't like what Gavin Newsom is doing, but he's still our guy.

And, you know, we'll go on. Well, that's part of this difficulty with drawing borders. Like I've had conversations with Democrats about the idea of equity, for example, which is no go zone as far as I'm concerned because of its connotations of equality of outcome. But they insist, generally speaking, that most of the people who are using the term equity are really using it as a proxy for equality of opportunity. are really using it as a proxy for equality of opportunity.