TRIGGERnometry - What’s REALLY Happening on College Campuses - Rikki Schlott

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Rikki Schlott is an American journalist who writes for the New York Post. She recently co-authored ‘The Canceling of the American Mind’ with Greg Lukianoff, and has previously worked for his organisation FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.) Check out the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1668019140 Sponsored by Raycon Everyday Earbuds. Get 20% Off + Free Shipping at HTTPS://BUYRAYCON.COM/TRIGGER Sponsored by: ExpressVPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They put us all in separate, completely segregated groups in order to have our affinity group conversations because we apparently are not able to talk about race with people that look differently from us. I mean, it's grotesque what is happening on these campuses. They're in such a left-wing environment that the last frontier of something that actually feels like they're being edgy, that they're being transgressive, that they're pushing the bounds is cheering on a mass slaughter of citizens in, in a foreign country. Who cares about your poops?

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by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Ricky, welcome to trigonometry. You've obviously co-written this brilliant book, Cancelling of the American Mind with Greg Lyciana, also a former guest of the show. But one of the things, before we talk about all of that, we really wanted to talk to you about is campus culture and everything that's happening at American universities.

Because, dare I say, it's become kind of front-page stories in the last few weeks, it's fair to say. So tell us your story about being a college student, writing about it, and how that relates to what I think the rather bemused and frankly shocked public have been seeing. on the TV screens and social media in the last couple of months? Yeah, absolutely. So my origin story in this field is an op-ed that I wrote for the New York Post while an NYU student still about how free speech was endangered on campus and just decided in

the depths of the pandemic that it was an existential enough point in time where I was willing to kind of volunteer myself to be canceled as a result, which certainly happened. I have been removed from a lot of group chats as a consequence of that, but, you know, it happens. And so I wrote an op-ed about that that kind of launched me into a column at the New York Post, and now I'm a columnist there. But definitely saw this stuff all with my eyes and saw the writing on the wall of what has happened over the past couple months on campuses. And in the process of writing about that, I ended up interviewing Greg Lukianoff, who's my co-author of this book, The Canceling of the American Mind. and that's how we first met. And then that we, I mean, we couldn't have asked for more perfect timing for the Ivy League to just absolutely self-detonate as our book was coming out.

So I think it's definitely been an interesting and challenging time to be a free speech advocate and someone who does defend speech whether or not I agree with it. But also certainly a time where I think that honestly, the reason that American campus is, and especially elite campus, campuses are the ones that are melting down right now is precisely because they've abdicated their responsibility to foster an environment where free speech can flourish. And statistically, consistently, you see if you ask students, FIRE does this survey of colleges across the country and has student sentiment. And one of the most contentious issues that people felt for years they couldn't discuss is the Israel-Palestine conflict. And I think, I mean, it's no surprise to me that Harvard seems to be the worst offender right now in terms of like just egregious anti-Semitism

that's frustrating on campus. And it's not a coincidence to me that they were literally the lowest ranked school for free speech in Fires rankings. They had a zero score out of a possible 100. And I think literally, I think they actually had to round it up because they deducted so many points that it was a negative score ultimately. So zero is generous. And it's no surprise to me that If you have a school where you can't have civil conversations with people with whom you disagree, then things go underground. They fester. They become more extreme.

And then all of a sudden, when there's a moment of social unrest and tension, they rear their ugly heads. And you have Harvard students coming out in favor of Hamas. So I think it's no surprise to me that the schools that have lost that North Star of free speech and civil expression are the ones that have the most egregious and shocking things. happening on their campuses right now. And Ricky, you mentioned that you said you saw it with your own eyes. What kind of things are you talking about that you personally experienced while a student? Yeah. When I was at NYU, I think it was just so one way or the highway politically, whether that

was explicitly said or just implicitly felt. Statistically, even at NYU's campus, I think it's something like roughly two-thirds of students say that they're self-censoring. And, you know, the other third are just probably in the popular political milieu on campus. But when I was there, I mean, freshman year, one of our professors tried to have Milo Yianopoulos come to campus, which obviously a provocateur, but someone who has the right to speak. Just to talk to 25 freshmen about offensive Halloween costumes. And it ended up being shut down after Bill de Blasio warned the school about threats. And I mean, like, even the mayor came in to help and shut down,

speaker my freshman year. I thought that was egregious. I also came from a boarding school called Lawrenceville, which was kind of like a mini college. So by the time I got to NYU, I knew what to expect. I had been kind of, I'd been canceled in high school. I had seen just how woke and crazy academia was. And so I was bracing when I arrived there. And my freshman year, I show up in New York in a very progressive city with randomly assigned roommates. And a bunch of people I don't know and I decided to start hiding some of my books under my bed, honestly, because I was so afraid of the social repercussions of being outed, God forbid, as a Jordan Peterson reader or a Thomas Soul reader. So I think just from day one, it was the self-censoring

and sitting on my hands and anyone who even, I mean, I remember one time there was a kid in a class, a philosophy class who wanted to say something politically, I guess, unpopular. It was a debate about abortion that we were having, like a philosophical debate. And he, he wanted to, like, present a pro-life position. And he started it just to say, I'm going to play devil's advocate here. And it was literally, like, hissing and sneering. It was just one way or the highway, even if you preface it, that this isn't even my own opinion, but can we consider the other side? So I think, just from day one, it was a fraught environment if you don't think in a very specific narrow way. Ricky, it doesn't surprise me that young people behave in this fashion and this manner.

Young people have always gone to the extremes. That's how they are temperamentally. But my question to you is, the moment he went, look, I'm just going to play devil's advocate and I'm going to push back on your idea just to challenge the argument and see how robust it is. And it got hissed. What did the professor do at that point? Did they step in? Absolutely nothing.

No, absolutely nothing. And I think that's one of the consistent issues was that there was just no leadership from the professors because they're afraid for their jobs. And especially, I think that there's an element when you arrive on campus and you're taking those earlier classes and you're more likely to be with an assistant professor and an adjunct professor who does not have career stability like a tenured professor does. Your first few classes as a freshman or a sophomore are probably going to be taught by someone who is existentially terrified of their students, like Twitter mobbing them or shitposting them. And I think that really sets the tone for the rest of the academic experience. I mean, I had, I have, I had professors who would blatantly disparage political candidates or or Trump supporters and in context in which it just wasn't even relevant. Like there, there were, there were so many failures in terms of leading a classroom where, where a professor's politics shouldn't be obvious or where different viewpoints are explored, that, I mean, it's unsurprising to me that kids are, like, allergic to the concept of even devil's advocacy.

Ricky, can you point, can you give us certain examples, like the most ridiculous or egregious ones? Just to highlight your argument, because there'd be people going, well, what do you mean by that? Examples of things that have happened in, yeah, when you were in school, like, examples of, yeah, go for it. I mean, I can rewind back all the way to like the first moment when I think I was 14 and realized that there was something up with the system and that there was an ideology that I disagreed with. I just couldn't put my finger on it. And I don't think the word woke was yet in the popular vernacular. But that's what I would call it now, which goes back to my boarding school days freshman year where they, during holidays, they don't like having kids, you know, we're very close to New York. So they don't want us to have a long weekend and go and cause trouble. So they keep us busy. during holiday times. And on Martin Luther King Day, we had to come in to have this thing called Community Day. And I still remember this so well. I mean, I was grown up, I grew up with

believing in the ideal of colorblindness and was raised to not see immutable differences as something that were intractable. However, I got there. They bring us all into the auditorium And the school administrators, the headmaster, comes and give us a speech. And then they say, okay, white kids go to the gym. And the Asian students, ironically, are going to go to the math and science building. And they put us all in separate, completely segregated groups in order to have our affinity group conversations. Because we apparently are not able to talk about race with people that look differently from us. And I still remember sitting with my still best friend who's an Indian American, Vanya,

and she ended up in a different building from me. And I'm thinking, I'm sitting next to my best friend here, who I'm now being segregated from. And that was like the first moment where I realized just how absurd things were getting. And then from there, which I think is even potentially worse, we had to pick from a group of seminars. And 14-year-olds, by the way, captive audiences at this point in time. And some of the options were like Bruce Lee and Asian masculinities, gender inequality and the difficulties of being a woman, like deconstructing the big black male in American society. So I think even from the point that I was 14 years old, I was just steeped in this environment where apparently that's the institutional viewpoint of my high school on Martin Luther King Jr. Day where like segregation and all these completely backwards concepts. were pushed on us as ultimate truths. And I mean, just from day one of being a young adult and becoming politically aware,

that was the sort of tone that was set. And I think NYU certainly picked up on that as well. And I'm curious to ask you this, Ricky, because I'm guessing you don't have kids. And many of the people watching this will be more likely to be your parents' age than your age. And a lot of them will be asking them a question, you know, I'm a father now and I sort of play the movie forward and wonder, what did you talk to your parents about this? Did you tell them and what was their response?

Because I guess a lot of people will be wondering if your kids encounter this sort of stuff at school, what do you do? Yeah, I absolutely did tell my parents about it. And they were outraged, frankly. I have moderate conservative parents. But I think that the most important thing that my parents did to make sure that I didn't,

end up going down these rabbit holes or buying into this was they definitely taught they counterbalanced it with different viewpoints but they never enforced an ideology on me and I can only imagine being a parent right now and feeling like I want to like hammer in home like just fundamental classical liberal values into my kids head and I think that those are those should be apolitical but you know I might want to push the opposite viewpoint on my kid because I'm terrified about what happens eight hours a day when they're in school. I completely understand that. However, that I worry that there's going to be some like serious mass backlash as a result of that. And a lot of kids who are going to get even more seduced by by left wing ideology if their

parents are trying to hammer home a different vantage point. I think just from day one, I mean, we have a chapter in our book about parenting. And I realize that it's tone deaf for me as a non-parent to be giving parenting advice. However, my co-author is a parent. And I think one of the most important things that we wanted to hammer home is to teach epistemic humility from day one and to have conversations at the dinner table where someone does play devil's advocate

and to push forth the possibility and the humble reality that we all may be wrong at any point in time and every person that you meet knows something that you don't. And I think that as long as you can instill those values without overplaying your hand and trying to force an ideological valence on your kids, that that's the best way to inoculate them against this stuff. And did you or your parents attempt to communicate with the school about some of these things that you were seeing and going through?

Was there any opportunity for you to say, actually, guys, I'm not sure two sets of drinking fountains for people of different skin colors is going forward, exactly? No, we didn't do anything at that point in time because we were just kind of guppies in the system and I was a freshman. But yeah, I mean, I think that the only thing that I did start to do is by the time I was 21 with my first op-ed, I think, at the New York Post. And that was when I decided, you know, I'm not going to make any institutional change by showing up to some administrator who is going to be likely hostile to my viewpoints anyways. but I can hopefully affect some degree of change in my modest way by speaking out and actually talking about the issue. And I found even at NYU, which is obviously a super progressive school, I was shocked by how many people came out of the woodwork to support me and who messaged me or DM'd me.

This was still during lockdown. So we weren't yet in person with classes. But people that, you know, I'd like someone who was in the next storm room for me that I would never have known. I thought had similar political views with professors. like literal heads of departments reaching out and emailing me and finding me in the school directory. But the thing that was so chilling to me is even though I had so much positive reinforcement, almost every single one of those messages or conversations ended with, by the way, just don't tell anyone that we talked about this, which is terrifying because I think cancel culture

and a liberalism thrives by making all of us feel alone and isolated, even when there are people around us who, if somebody were to take that first step and actually say something, you'd realize that there are other kids in this classroom that feel the way that I do. But we've all been sitting on our hands and feel entirely isolated and like we're on some ideological island when that's not even the case. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything. you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and all birds continue to

trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into, sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. Ricky, it's a great point, but when you were talking to me about the 14-year-olds being taken and, you know, these ridiculous, you know, brusely and the Asian male or whatever it is, there's put, it really, it really, gave me far more empathy for young people who have imbibed this ideology than I had before, because I'm thinking, it ain't their fault. It ain't their fault. If you do this to young people and you start basically hammering this home, then what do you expect? Yeah, I mean, it isn't their fault, and especially in a context like that, a boarding school where these kids are away

from their families besides, like these teachers step up and effectively become parents and educators at the same time. I mean, it's no wonder. And it starts so young. And I mean, that was shocking to me at that point in time. But that would have been like January of 2015. So almost a decade ago, roughly. And this is, I can only imagine, I think that was just kind of the, the, we were very cutting edge, perhaps at my boarding school with our neo-racism. But I mean, that's one way of putting it. Yeah. But I, you know, it makes me think I'm fortunate to have had at least the beginnings of my, my upbringing in a time where we still did say that that colorblindness is an ideal to strive towards. And I had friends regardless and didn't even, it never even really would

have occurred to me as a kid growing up in New Jersey that that there is some sort of like immutable difference between us aside from our appearance. And I do remember that time. And I grew up in that the last days of that era. And for kids who don't remember that and will never remember it, because they've only grown up in the, like, apparently Affinity Group, neo-segregationist era, that to me, I mean, it's scary. I feel fortunate that at least I remember a different time. Yeah, and Ricky, you dropped out of college. Is that correct? Yes, I did. I dropped out of NYU, yeah. You sound like you're an interrogation. You dropped out of design. That's correct. No, but I was just wanting to explore, was it because you were doing a law degree?

And you were, you know, you were a straight A student to use British vernacular. What was it about the experience where it made you go, you know what, I just can't do this anymore? I don't see the value and the purpose of this. When you think that actually what you've done your entire life is work to get to the point of having a 4.0 grade average and go to an amazing college and study law. Yeah, I was headed to law school. I had just bought an LSAT prep book when the pandemic happened. And I had gone down that path, not because I had some specific, like, burning passion in law, but because I seemed to have the academic skill set that that would be the most logical step for me afterwards. And I think even, like, in the culture of schools like NYU, like undergraduate isn't even enough. Like everyone's getting a graduate degree and on to the next thing. And so I was very much in that achievement loop and keeping my head down and frankly trying not to ruffle feathers. I felt acutely having been in a liberal arts program that the risk, if I were to actually voice my viewpoints, that my 4.0 could be dinged as a result, I think were legitimate. Maybe unfounded, I never really tested the waters while I was there.

But I felt stifled by the environment, but kept my head down, just kept trudging through. then the pandemic happened and I decided that paying six grand per course for Zoom school is absolutely absurd. They didn't even, they didn't even cut our tuition at all whatsoever. And NYU is one of if not the most expensive college in America, which it's just exorbitant and ridiculous. And anyways, they decided not to do anything with their billion plus dollar endowment to actually relieve the financial situation for students. And so my mom at that point in time said to me, like, I'll help you float financially through one semester if you take a leave of absence. And we were hoping at that point in time that perhaps the world would be

normal enough to go back to college. But she said, just promise to do something interesting and to like use the time while. And I said, you have my word. And then I just think it was such an existential moment of feeling like if I, if I continue to lie about my own viewpoints and play the game just to succeed to end up in a career path that I'm not particularly passionate about, but I'm actively betraying my beliefs and these burning passions for free speech and for more conservative values as well. That, I mean, it would just be fundamentally dishonest to continue down that path. So I started writing for the New York Post at that point in time and had been really fortunate that the Post offered me a full-time job. I'm now full-time with them,

also that even having met Greg and working as a fellow for fire during that time period as well, he changed the degree requirements that fire had. They actually did not until they hired me allow anyone without a college degree to start working for them. And I think that that pandemic moment where a lot of kids pulled back from school, there were so many kids who took leaves of absence or delayed or took a gap year that they never would have otherwise. I think once a lot of people pulled out of that system and the achievement loop, they started to really critically engaged with like, what am I actually paying for here? And at the same time, we had the hot mess of student loan forgiveness and the Supreme Court weighing in. And I think that it was just really a

moment where a lot of young people, myself included, looked up at the millennial generation above us who were crippled by debt. And, you know, a third of American colleges produce a graduating class where the median graduate earns less than the average high school graduate in America. So this, I mean, the system is just so fundamentally broken. And I think that there's a, now a generation of young people who are able to hit pause long enough to actually question the value and to force some market pressure. I mean, I'm not anti-hire ed, but I'm anti-hire as it is right now. And so I've just kind of like conscientiously objected from. participating in and paying into a system that stifles people and bankrupts them and

indoctrines them with like gender studies degrees so well right I think there was a time when going to college or university as we call it here was something that was not available to most people and partly because of that if you got into a college or university you were probably going to do a very beneficial degree you were going to get a massive grant your premium, it was going to be academically rigorous, et cetera. But then at some point we sort of decided that everyone needs to go to college and you have this proliferation of all these Mickey Mouse degrees. And then you are, as you are talking about, ending up on huge amounts of debt.

And, you know, we employ some young people despite our better wishes. And, you know, a lot of them sort of will go to a trade college, get a qualification where they've actually learned how to do something. And then they will go out into the real world. because studying four years of history even, which is a sad thing to say, or whatever else it might be, it's just not going to translate into a meaningful career, but will translate, as you say, into a lot of debt. So I guess I'm wondering is, if you had kids now of college age, what would you be saying to them about going to college? Yeah, I think I really admire my family's ability to have allowed me to take that risk.

my dad didn't go to college. My dad is actually 86, so I'm a very late addition to the Schlaught family. Yeah. And so he comes from an era where it was still a select few number of people and they would become lawyers and doctors or whatever career path or professors themselves. But you had to, if you were going to opt into that system, have some sort of conception of what you want to do with that degree at the end. And I think if I were raising a child right now, or if I had a kid a few years younger than me who was asking whether or not it's worthwhile to go to college, I mean, I think there were tremendous benefits to the two years that I had at NYU. I'm not saying that there was no value for me. I mean, one of the greatest ones was learning how to actually be a functional adult in a city.

I think that urban colleges have that advantage for a coddled generation. That's one way to grow up a little quicker. But I would say, I would guide my child to find their passion earlier. And I think the problem that the American school system as it exists right now has is that we do so much generalized learning all the way up through your first two years of college. You don't even have to declare a major until junior year at NYU. And I think that unless you can verbalize what path you want to go down or how you want to use that degree or how you think you might want to explore using that degree. If there's not like a clear line and trajectory, I don't think it's necessary. And I think that, I mean, we're seeing Tesla, IBM, Google, like tons of major

companies that are dropping degree requirements because they've rightfully realized that there are enterprising young people who've dropped out of the system. But I would say, like, find a path or a plan and explore that early and use summers to do apprenticeships or, you know, be grifty and LinkedIn, DM somebody who works in the field and say, can I shadow you or can you tell me about it? Because I think that it's really a mistake to say, even when 18 year olds arrive on campus, you have to do two years of a liberal arts degree before you even, like, decide whether you're going to be a chemistry major or a history major. Like, I think that we need to get kids on practical pathways earlier.

And that would also allow for some of these completely impractical degrees and departments to wither and suffer a little bit more than they are right now, I think, as well. I think it's a really great point, Ricky, because I think there's a lot of people who go to university because they don't know what they want to do.

And it's a way of putting off adult life for four years so they can go and hang out and drink and experiment And look, sometimes, like in my own case, you know, that's how I developed a love of comedy, a stand-up comedy, and I've read a lot of books, and great. But it's not worth the gigantic sums of money that people are paying, particularly under the American college system. I think it's going to come to a point, hopefully, where people go, maybe go to college a little bit later, and they go, well, you know what, I've always wanted to be a lawyer,

and I've always wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer. So at the age of 25, I kind of know now what I want to do. I want to do this. And if somebody wants to do medicine and they've always wanted to be a doctor, great, be at 18. But wanting to go to college because you don't know what you want to do, I think we really have to accept that that is done. And actually, young people need to be cancelled, counseled.

Yeah, let's cancel young people. Just get rid of them. young people need to be counseled against that because what they're doing is they're going to, like you said, you come out with a degree which is practically useless and you're in horrendous amounts of debt. Yeah, absolutely. And another thing I would add to that is I think that gap years are, I mean, far more common in Europe than they are here in the US. And taking that time off when I did was the best decision of my entire life, like hands down. It was the first time where I could pull away from reading the material that was prescribed to me by professors and teachers and actually

read for passion and learn out of passion and explore things on my own. And that was when I read John Stuart Mills on Liberty for the first time, which ironically I later ran into a philosophy professor that I'd had at NYU. And we had read his utilitarianism, but not on Liberty. And I said to him, I read this book and it just like hit me like a ton of bricks. It just clarified the importance of of freedom and free speech and how profound it is and how I need to protect it because it's, it's such a small sliver of human history that we've had this realization. And like, why didn't we learn about this when we did when we read about John Stuart Mill and we did utilitarianism? And he goes, I haven't read it. Like, oh, so that's what I'm paying for. And NYU apparently is a philosophy

professor who's not read John Stuart Mill's on Liberty. No wonder free speech is withering at NYU. But having that time away to actually explore my own interests and have the intellectual freedom and autonomy to do that was so clarifying. And I really would say my number one piece of advice actually, the more than I'm thinking out loud right now for parents that have kids that aren't sure about their path right now is some time off is great. And I mean, I think that you should be productive and ideally like looking for a job and to have some responsibility. not just an extended vacation. But I think that we've not allowed young people to just kind of take a breath and look around and say, okay, what actually do I want to do?

Because they're worried about SATs and then LSATs and the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, without ever pulling back and looking for their passion. And Ricky, and draw a line for us from the stuff we've just spent 20 minutes talking about in terms of the decline of the graduate premium, the fact that you're probably not getting as good in education as you might have done, it's costing you more, et cetera.

And the woke kind of domination of college campuses and school campuses and the fact that administrators are lean in that direction, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a culture of self-censorship that you mentioned. Draw a line from that for us to what we have seen post-October 7th, where you have pro-hamas protesters on college campuses. and particularly what we've seen as we're recording this in the last couple of weeks of the year, you know, I think it's presidents from several very, very established colleges in the U.S. being asked about whether calling for the genocide of Jews's harassment

and saying, well, it sort of depends on the context. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT's code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no? If targeted at individuals not making public statements. Yes or no? Calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus. But you've heard chance for intifada.

I've heard chance, which can be anti-Semitic depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. So those would not be according to the MIT's code of conduct or rules? That would be investigated as harassment, if pervasive and severe. Ms. McGill, at Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no? If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.

Yes. I am asking specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment? If it is directed and severe or pervasive, of it is harassment. So the answer is yes. It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. It's a context-dependent decision.

That's your testimony today. Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context. That is not bullying or harassment. This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms. McGill. So is your testimony that you will not answer yes? If it is, if the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment. Yes. Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?

The speech is not harassment. This is unacceptable, Ms. McGill. I'm going to give you one more opportunity for the world to see your answer. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be harassment. The answer is yes. And Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the judge...

genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? It can be, depending on the context. What's the context? Targeted as an individual. Targeted at an individual. It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of anti-Semitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no? Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct. Anti-Semitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct and we do take action. So the answer is yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates

Harvard Code of Conduct, correct? Again, it depends on the context. It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board. Saying, well, it sort of depends on the context, which, by the way, as a free speech advocate, you might say is accurate, but not when you contrast it to the things that have been considered harassment or microaggression on college campuses for the last decade, including asking people where they're from, wearing a sombrero for Halloween, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, I can, just to put some meat on the bones of your last observation there, when I was at NYU, they give us our ID cards for the first day of freshman year.

And on the back of it, it has 911. It has the campus police phone number, direct line, which is really important in New York. The student health center and another like emergency hotline. and then the bias response hotline. So you could literally call and report a peer or a professor who says something that you think is offensive or biased against you. And an example that they published a report from NYU of the ways that people had used it in the past. And someone had called to report that the advertising, we have a bunch of posters up of students and it's NYU and like, you know, just those kind of stage shots that they come and take in class. classrooms. And someone had called to report that they were not diverse enough to reflect the

student body and decided that that was a use for the hotline. So the threshold of things that, speech that is beyond the pale or, or the precedent that that free speech is just not an issue or a thing that the school cares about has been so deeply set to the point where they've created a snitch culture hotline for kids to report their professors. I mean, Jonathan Haight has had talked considerably about how that affected him as a professor at NYU. That's the sort of world that October 7th and the resulting protests, like this is exploding on campuses where free speech has so fundamentally been abdicated as a value. And I think that part of it to draw a line to what we were talking about earlier that I don't think enough attention is really paid to is

the student loan situation here in America and the fact that these schools can continue continuously take money from teenagers who don't fully understand the deal that they're signing into, federally backed student loans that they have no responsibility to actually make sure pay off in the end. These schools are so drunk on their own power. They have guaranteed money that they can just raise the tuition with impunity. I mean, the financial literacy in America is absolutely absurd. We don't let kids buy a beer at 18 or 17, but we let them sign away their down payments to some like money-rich institution with an endowment that could afford to send them through college easily. And that sort of drunk on power system where free speech has just been totally pushed

to the wayside for decades, and provably so based on student surveys, faculty surveys, how many professors have been fired, which just in the past decade is more than 200 fire has tallied. The foundation for individual rights and expression is fire. My co-author is the president of fire. And they've found that there were over a thousand attempts to fire or sanction professors

as a result of their speech just in the past decade alone. These numbers outstrip McCarthyism. So we had the spectacle at Capitol Hill recently of the presidents of MIT, of UPN, and of Harvard showing up and all of a sudden, like, hiding behind the valence of free speech in a way that's entirely hypocritical because it's, you don't just suddenly discover free speech when it's convenient for you. And that's obviously what we're seeing. I mean, if they had set the precedent all along that different viewpoints were allowed on campus, then I would say, okay, like maybe in some instances, some of these fringe cases are legit.

legitimately free speech. But when we're at a point where, like, there have been professors fired for the most absurd and atrocious things that are or who have, I mean, there's an example that we have in the book of a professor who sent a tweet, kind of equivocating COVID lockdowns with slavery. And he ended up being squeezed out of his position and ended up killing himself in the downfall of being canceled on this university campus. So if that was our attitude to free speech historically, I mean, just to see them suddenly be like, oh, no, actually, free speech is the bedrock of Harvard. And it's just, it's, it's unbelievable and so fundamentally defies the foundation that's been laid for the past several decades on American campuses,

which is that protectionism is more important than free speech. And why do you think it's happened? Because, as you say, I mean, in my opinion, actually, there is a college campus environment I can see in which calls for genocide. It might be considered harassment or not based on a particular context. You know, you could say the college campus is a place where freedom of speech is most important because young people go there to indulge different ideas. and some of them might be quite extreme,

but what we need is a robust exchange and debate. And if we have that, we can tolerate a little bit more than we might tolerate in a public institution that employs people primarily or whatever. But we not only haven't had that, as you say, we've had this far more restrictionist attitude prior to now. What do you think is different in this instance

where suddenly this is the issue, like the 300 movie, they're prepared to make a stand? right here to the death, which seems kind of quite unusual. Or anti-Semitic. Yeah. I was going to let her say it, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, I have a theory on why this issue has taken so,

or gotten so much attention on college campuses. And I think that what's happening is that when you're a young person who wants to be transgressive and edgy and push the envelope, and you come out and decide, you know, Donald Trump was just elected. And so let's protest on campus to demonstrate. And then, you know, the administration cancels classes so that you can do that. It's like, oh, that's not really that edgy. Like, you just got, the university just sanctioned your viewpoint.

Or you want to protest for Black Lives Matter and post the Black Square because that's the edgy progressive cause. But then the university president's in your email and validating your viewpoint and standing behind you and saying, good for you. or you protest Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal. And then all of a sudden, you know, the school is issuing a statement for some reason about Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal. Like nothing that these kids could do in the name of progressive causes was actually edgy or pushing buttons or or ruffling feathers in any meaningful way. They were just coddled and and cheered on.

And the administrators were like catering lunches at places like, you know, we would have all these sit-ins of college. students who would go into an administrative building and in protest, stay there all day long, and then the school is bringing them like burritos and stuff. Like, that's not the cool, edgy thing. You're not pushing the adults' buttons. And in a university campus, like, I mean, it's just so progressive, the environment that all the professors are, they're not these, like, stodgy bow tie wearing classical liberals anymore. They're woke, you know, like nose-piercing sort of types that will champion all the popular progressive causes. So you need the next frontier. And I think

that this is the, it's gotten to the point where progressive politics on college campuses are so extreme that in order to actually do something that that shakes things up on campus or to actually feel like you're speaking truth to power, even if I think it's entirely an illusion that these kids are under. I mean, it's grotesque what is happening on these campuses. This is by no means an excuse. But I think that they're in such a left-wing environment that the last frontier of something that actually feels like they're being edgy, that they're being transgressive, that they're pushing the bounds is cheering on a mass slaughter of citizens in a foreign country, which is shocking to me. But I think the result of just how extreme these colleges are. There's nothing left. There's no new frontier.

And also as well, it kind of maps on the ideology. For instance, if you see Israel as being oppressors and, you know, white supremacists, you know, which they would probably argue that they are. I mean, bless them. But then you could make an argument that what Hamas are are freedom fighters and they're overthrowing, you know, the oppressor and this is morally right and correct. As abhorrent, by the way, as I find those arguments. it kind of maps, doesn't it? You kind of get where they're going logically. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that a lot of this is an outgrowth of the kind of Marxist dichotomy between the oppressor and oppressed class. And if you believe that Palestinians are in the oppressed class, then if you look at things through that dichotomy,

then of course, anything is justified by all means. And I think that's, we're seeing that come to fruition. I think we also are seeing the extremity of what happens when you no longer believe that free speech is a value to uphold, where you no longer believe that words can't wound you, and that speech actually is violence, which we've heard for years on college campuses of people saying that they're wounded by words or that bad ideas are causing them harm. And the logical extrapolation, if you really believe that words are violence, is violence is just as acceptable as speech. And I think that we're seeing kids who really have pushed the frontier of just completely abdicating free speech to the point where they believe that if your words can wound me, then I can fight back with legitimate violence as a result. And we see statistically that the percentage of students who believe that violence is acceptable as a response to speech is non-nobes.

negligible and actually concentrates in these super elite campuses and also another weird wrinkle, which is kind of a tangent. But the schools where the highest percentage of students say that they are, that violence is acceptable in response to speech are almost all across the board super outlier high percentages, women's colleges. So I'm not sure exactly what conclusion to draw from that, but apparently it's concentrated in women's colleges and elite universities. One of the things I think I've heard Jordan Peterson articulate this, particularly about the female psychology.

He sort of talked about how women tend to assess threats a little bit differently. So he talks about how you're either an infant or you're an infant carer or if you're neither of those, then the best thing for a woman to do is to consider you a threat. Because if you falsely think someone's a threat, it doesn't really cost you. you anything. There's a much greater risk in seeing someone who's a threat as not a threat. That's really dangerous. So if you're an infant, you're the oppressed. If you're a caregiver, you are on my team, if you like, right? And everyone else is an enemy. And what do you do with enemies? Well, you avoid them or you destroy them. So this infantilization of people, if you live in a world where

the victims are your infants, it makes quite a lot of sense that you would then use whatever means necessary to destroy the people who you consider a threat to those people. So I've found that quite a persuasive argument. Yeah, that's that's really interesting. And I think also, um, along those lines, the, the idea that you need to be protected from words or so often on college campuses, I mean, I can't come up with an example of somebody shutting down speech or claiming offense that was actually their own group. Like, it's so frequently a, a white student who will be like, well, that's offensive to black people or it's always on someone else's behalf. And I, I do feel that there's a, some aspect of this anti-free speech ideology or the idea that people need to be

protected from speech taps into the female, like, predisposition to be more empathetic and to, like, believe that other people do need to be protected that they genuinely are harmed. And so often I saw my female peers particularly be the ones to put themselves in the position of defending some abstract other rather than an individual and shut down speech as a result. Ricky, one of the things I really liked about your book is that it's written by not someone who's on the right, you sort of describe yourself as right libertarian, but Greg, who is on the left, because this is an issue and we focus on the left and of course the left have gone now. We all know that.

But the right aren't so innocent. And I sometimes look at the right, particularly very much the online right, and I'm like, you're kind of going the same way. Yeah, absolutely. I think two benefits to our partnership were the intergenerational dynamic, because I had lived a lot of what we write about in terms of what happens on college campuses and seen it firsthand, but he had the wisdom of a career as long as my lifetime of actually fighting for people's free speech. But then also, to your point, the fact that we do come from different

parts of the political aisle. And I'm certainly more on the right than Greg, and he's more on the left than me. And what actually matters and what animates this book are the fundamental classical liberal values that we share and that we think should be apolitical regardless of what parties you're in and historically have been a part of the fabric of American society and then just all of a sudden we're completely pushed to the wayside. And, you know, I'm writing this book, I've certainly we write it, we talk about like some of the rhetorical dodges that both conservatives and liberals make. And some of it I realize like, oh, I've kind of done that myself where I turn my ears off if someone's on the left because I just assume that I know what they're going to say, which is

unhelpful. And we, we call out our own sides. even though I don't think that I wouldn't go as far as to say that we indulge in some sort of like both sidesism and saying that there's an equivalence. We both agree that the left in terms of cancel culture and moving away from free speech are the worst offenders. However, I am deeply concerned by the fact that a lot of people on the right who I think rightly point out where the left is extreme and a liberal and censorious are attempting to fight that with the, exact same tactics because there's not a fundamental understanding of free speech. And I think also just the, historically, I think it's been so unpopular to be a conservative in public for a while that it's super easy to be a free speech advocate if you're a conservative when it's your side that's under siege. But I think that recently I've been seeing more and more suggestions that

there are a lot of people who've said that they're pro free speech who would rather fight might with might and fists with fists where they have power to do so. And like a lot of the laws coming out of Florida, like anti-CRT stuff that I think cross a line into just, I mean, and the courts agree with me across the line into actually violating First Amendment rights of employers and stuff. And like, yes, I agree that a lot of the DEI trainings that are mandated in workplaces are absurd. And I completely agree with that, that the reason in the context in which these bills were written. But then I also think that it's absurd to say you as a private employer are not allowed to do that in your own company and the government's

going to tell you as much. Or you as a professor are not even allowed to bring up DEI in any pedagogical context. And so I do agree with you that there's a concerning and I think growing strain of a liberalism that is coming up in a reaction. way on the right wing that we really need to caution against. And yeah, it does worry me for sure. Well, let me ask a devil's advocate question then, Ricky. One of the things they might be asking is, well, we've tried your way. We've tried being liberal. And look where it's got us. Why are we wrong? I mean, I think that fighting might with might is just the worst possible thing that we can do. I mean, not only have we seen examples of of just completely unconstitutional

laws that are being passed and are constantly being struck down that are demonstrably not feasible in the American context. But I also, I don't think that we've, that the right has actually fully walked the walk in fighting in a truly classical liberal way against illiberalism on the left. I think that a lot of us and myself, including, included until I started rating a lot of people on the rate have kind of have not fought back or have not raised their hand and said, you know, I have a problem with this or I think that this DEI training is going too far. And I think that a lot of the silence and the idea that we could kind of just go along and get along and not actually exercise our free speech rates in response

to a liberalism is how we end up in this sort of place where we're all on the back foot where people of in self-censoring where too few professors have put themselves out there and students are never going to follow suit as a result. I think that we've not actually really tried what does it mean to fight ideas with ideas when so many people very understandably have coward in submission to this, these squeaky wheel people who want to cancel people and push an ideology. But I think that those who are animated by a desire to fight might with the people, might should consider whether or not they've actually fully fought with words first. And I don't think that we have. I think we have, we're living in a country in America here where it's 80%

of the American public who think that that cancel culture is a problem, who think that political correctness has gone too far. And for some reason, 80% of us, regardless of whether we're Democrats, Republicans, whatever, like a Bill Mar liberal or Fox News watching conservative, agree that this is insane, and yet we're allowing this 20% tyranny of the minority's squeaky wheels to take over and not actually fighting back and speaking up. Well, right. I mean, look at your own example. What should have happened at your boarding school is the parents should have got together and said, you're not going to teach our kids to be racist. That's what should have happened. But each individual parent is likely too afraid to raise it as an issue because they don't want their child to be ostracized. They don't want to be the problem. problem parent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's probably where a lot of the more reactionary type of responses coming

from is from a feeling of powerlessness and a feeling like, well, it's all very well for us to say, you know, you fight ideas with ideas. But what happens when I express an idea and I lose my job? That's not really a fight. That's me getting crushed here. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I'm completely sympathetic to it on the individual level.

I mean, not everyone's going to, like, write an op-ed and then decide to, you know, start talking about free speech on podcasts. Like we, there's only so many, uh, podcasts to do that on. Um, but I would say that, yeah, I mean, I do have a degree of hope, though, in spite of the fact that I think that there is that reactionary illiberalism that's popping up on the right. I do think at the pandemic and it particularly in the realm of education, there's been so much more pushback where parents are exercising their rates and their free speech and showing up it at school board meetings or running for, for, for, school board themselves. And there is, I think, a greater engagement with the civic process and

just a larger conversation. I mean, even like Emma Camp wrote an op-ed and she's roughly my age. I think she was at UVA in the New York Times that called out free speech as an issue as well. And I don't think that was really a conversation that we would have seen published in the New York times pre-pandemic. But now it is kind of part of the Overton window. And I do think that there has been much greater engagement. And I think that that, again, is kind of because society had a pause and enough time to actually pull back and say, like, hey, what is my kid learning in school? Or, you know, just how can I get involved or how can I affect change in a way that I don't think people were as inclined to do pre-pandemic.

And I also think as well, there's other, you know, green shoots that we can see. I mean, Elon has taken over Twitter. And look, I mean, it's gone through turbulence. I'm not denying that. But if you think about how Twitter used to be, I mean, people were saying like men can't be women and they were just getting their accounts completely deleted for saying a biological fact, whereas where we are now, it's a lot better actually. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the sad reality for a lot of people and myself included was that it required, like being shaken from complacency required seeing liberties eclipsed in such a profound way as they were during the pandemic, whether it was like forced lockdowns or vaccine mandates or censorship gone awry on social media. I think that there really was, things got so bad that it was animating to so many people.

And, you know, it's really easy to just kind of forget how profound in the scheme of human history so many of the liberties that we in the West enjoy are. And it requires that like kind of once in a generation moment where they're completely violated as they were in 2020 to get people to actually engage more vigorously in protecting them. And maybe even realizing that they're even there in the first place, which I don't think a lot of young people. fully conceptualize. Ricky, and I was just going to say because the thing that people, because, you know, I kind of get this idea, you know, on social media, Ricky, where you see something egregious and awful. And we all get triggered.

We all get angry. We all go, this is disgusting or whatever else. But deleting that person's account, doing whatever, and you've made this point yourself, it doesn't make the opinion go away. It just drives it somewhere else. Yeah, absolutely. And we have a chapter in our book, actually. We had the great fortune of having the National Contagion Research Institute, NCRI, allow us to publish a study that they did where they watched as there were mass bands on Twitter, which, by the way, the original, I think it was the CFO of Twitter, said that they were the free speech wing of the free speech party back in the day. And that was an ideal that they did pretty much stay. pretty close to until 2016-ish in the lead-up to that election. But they found that every single time that there was a mass ban or purge of accounts.

And some of them were like really egregious stuff. Like blatant white supremacy accounts and things with like disgusting slurs that none of us would ever dare repeat, let alone think. But every single time that that there was a mass ban and purge, the amount of people who flocked over to Gab, which is like, you know, Twitter for. the right wing and a complete echo chamber goes up in lockstep every single time. And the word ban starts trending on gab every single time. And so rather than allow these gross beliefs, which I think everyone should, you know, be able to block and get out of their, or mute from their own timeline if they so choose, rather than allow them to play out in the, the marketplace of ideas and, you know, maybe be pushed into a corner of Twitter, but, you know, vigorously, uh, uh, uh, uh,

objected to by other people or actually maybe perhaps quote tweeted and then shamed and then someone thinks twice about their their fringe viewpoint. They were pushed into a place where more people, I mean, I don't want to like color gab entirely as some like alt-right neo-Nazi place. I'm not a member of it. But, you know, ending up in an echo chamber where everyone is on the same side of the aisle as you is one way to end up all the more extreme. And even to bring this back to what we're seeing, on university campuses now. And like young people who were growing up with in an environment where they don't be like they can talk about contentious issues, whether it's Israel-Palestine conflict

or whatever, who end up turning to the internet for that dialogue, end up in rabbit holes in all of two seconds. And that's how, I mean, I don't know if you guys saw that TikTok trend of people celebrating like Osama bin Laden's letters, like these woke gen Ziers. I mean, that's precisely what happens. happens when you can't have a conversation, you end up down some rabbit hole, which is so much easier to do as a young person with social media in your hand too. And you can follow down it much faster. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the

same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Seeful terms at mintmobile.com. Really interesting.

Ricky, as we wrap this up before we ask you some questions from our supporters and, of course, our final question, can we bring this home in a somewhat positive way? You talked about snitch culture. Obviously, the book is about cancel culture. How can this be the situation be improved? how can we start to make progress, actual progress? I think that courage is contagious and that there's strength in numbers. And I mean, my experience at NYU

demonstrated that to me as well. But I would say where I see the most hope is the fact that 100% my generation is at the helm of these canceled campaigns more often than not. And they're the squeakiest wheels and they're, you know, shaming their bosses on Twitter.

And I understand my people walk on eggshells around us. However, that is, such a tiny, squeaky wheel tyranny of the minority situation going on. And if you ask the American public from boomers all the way down to Gen Z, what their view is of cancel culture, by far the most negative view of cancel culture is Gen Z. And the most positive view is millennials, which, I mean, it completely fundamentally reverses like older people are a little more down on it. And then millennials are the most gung-ho. But then Gen Z hates it more than anyone else. And that's because we grew up in this age of cancel culture. We were teenagers.

with tripwires around us who felt like we couldn't express ourselves at a point in time where we should be exploring and not having all of our viewpoints permanently attached to us or or college admissions revoked for a tweet that resurfaces years later or a three second Snapchat video. And I think that where I, I'm hopeful not that kids right now have the tool set and the ideological framework to fix this problem, but they have the motivation to. And the problem is we just have not taught Gen Z and I was not taught in my own education, classical liberal values that can supplant cancel culture and the values that underpin a free speech culture that could replace it.

And if we do, I think, give kids those tools, then ultimately I believe that there's enough animation and desire among young people to live in a world where they're not unceremoniously torn down or running the risk of being torn down at any point in that we could actually make a meaningful change. Ricky, this has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. And Ricky, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? This is a real tangent and not fully related.

However, I think that there's just been such an interesting conversation about the birth control pill and how it affects women's psychology and how it affects young women's psychology, especially. And I'm enormously frightened by some data that came out of Europe that showed that the instances of suicide and self-harm skyrocketed when young women were put on birth control and adolescence. I was put on it when I was 14 for acne. When you're 14, you should have acne and not chemically change your body in order to prevent that. But, you know, I have a lot of friends who similarly were prescribed it very young. I think it has meaningful impacts on women's brains and biology.

And I don't think that there's been enough attention paid to that. But there seems to be just the start of a conversation. And so Dr. Sarah Hill has done a bunch of great research. But I think parents should be aware of that with their daughters. Absolutely. And not only that, but there's also terrible it is to say quite a lot of evidence. Alex Jones, who I think is someone I disagree with on most things, was actually not entirely incorrect about what happens when you have a lot of people on birth control,

what happens to the water supply and how that might be affected. other people and other creatures in the environment. So that's definitely something we're, I'm glad you brought up. We've talked about it briefly, I think with Freya India and perhaps with Louise Perry as well. I can't remember, but it's something we will definitely,

oh, and with Mary Harrington, of course. But we'll be definitely talking about more, more about that issue. So I'm really glad you brought up. As am I glad that we're now heading over to answer questions from our supporters that they've already submitted for you. Head on over there and join us for the conversation

with Ricky. You're there. As much as this council culture is brainwashing your minds, do you agree that it is also exposing truths and intentions that we didn't realize were there or didn't see before?