https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8zVzbUInPT4
So, I know that you had an argument, but I can’t remember with whom at the moment about the distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. And you just, yeah, yeah, and you just mentioned Mill’s capacity to argue. One of the things I wanted to talk about that with you a bit, because see, I don’t really think there is any difference between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry, partly because what we’re doing right now is inquiry. And I worked as a scientist for decades, and 90% of the creative work that I did, apart from my reading, was dialogue with students. That’s where the ideas flew and were generated, many of the ideas that we tested experimentally. There isn’t any, you can’t distinguish freedom of inquiry from freedom of speech as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I think the freedom of speech is actually a precondition, like it is for most things. It’s precondition, yeah, you think that, okay, so I don’t think there’s any real difference between speech and explicit thought either, because it looks to me like thought is the internal, I mean, this isn’t exactly a brilliant realization, but it’s worth thinking about, is that we think with the words that we use to communicate to others. We don’t have our own private language, we use public language. We’re speaking to ourselves when we speak. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are the same thing, as far as I can tell, and so yeah, you think that as well. So why did this argument, who was it with, first of all, why did this argument, what were the grounds for the distinction between freedom of inquiry and speech? The argument, and we talk about this in the book, is the attempt to distinguish academic freedom from freedom of speech. The inquiry argument was a little bit more amical-y, and she has a good point, but she doesn’t actually think they’re all that different. The bigger, more pernicious development that your listeners need to understand is that there’s been an attempt among academics to distinguish academic freedom as having nothing to do with freedom of speech. There are completely distinct ideas. Stanley Fish wrote that they’re not even vaguely related, and Fish is comparatively good on this stuff compared to Michael Barabay and Jennifer Ruth, who wrote a book called It’s Not About Free Speech, who really took this argument that Robert Post and Fish were making. They wrote a book about that. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Yeah. Since they’re using speech to make the argument. So, you know, how? Basically, because this, and it comes from, in my opinion, a very simple dilemma. A lot of the academics on the left who are anti-free speech, part of the anti-free speech movement, have a dilemma that academic freedom is, you know, here’s the big Boolean circle of freedom of speech, and here’s academic freedom. Your academic freedom protections are part of freedom of speech by any basic understanding of it. It’s freedom of speech with rules relating to discovery of truth, but also in America, it’s the First Amendment. Academic freedom is protected as part of the free speech clause of the First Amendment, but they don’t like that because they want to argue for speech codes and they want to argue for speech restrictions, but still hold on to their academic freedom and have their cake and eat it too. So they have to make these ridiculously strained arguments that these are entirely distinct ideas. And meanwhile, the reason why I keep on bringing up the Barabay and Ruth book is because these are members of the American Association of University Professors. They have fancy positions there. And what they argue in that book, at the time of some of the greatest calamities of academic freedom that we’ve seen in the modern era, more professors getting fired than any time since the law was established in 1957, that they’re actually arguing for, you know what we need right now? We need less academic freedom and we need to restrict it. We need to make a carve out no academic freedom for quote unquote white supremacy. And meanwhile, you know, they might want to try to argue that we don’t need the CRT white supremacy, which is basically anything you want. They could try to make the argument that maybe we mean just saying that the races are superior inferior to each other. Now, of course, you have the academic freedom to argue that too, but then they have a whole chapter on CRT being great in the book. Like it’s it’s that’s the book where they Nicholas Christakis and Erica Christakis at Yale. They basically say they had it coming because they were provocateurs because they defended free speech of a student back at Harvard. That’s their entire argument. When my friend Mike Adams, a conservative who killed himself in 2020 after being canceled, they actually refuse to mention that fact that he actually killed himself after being canceled until a footnote. You have to read the back of it. It’s a it’s a contemptible book. Obviously, I protect the right to publish it. But I want people to be aware of this ongoing attempt by academics to create this not so clever argument that academic freedom has to be protected, but it has to be entirely in the hands of these particular kind of elites who want to deny it to everybody that they don’t like. And by the way, also want less free speech in the rest of the country. We’re facing the threat of a government shutdown later this month. And yet again, the administration will ultimately deal with it the same way they always do with more spending. More spending equals a lower value of the dollar. Protect your savings by diversifying into gold with the help of the Birch Gold Group. And here’s the best part. When you open a gold IRA with Birch Gold for every ten thousand dollars you spend by December 22nd, Birch Gold will send you a free gold bar. Just text Jordan to 989898 to claim eligibility before Black Friday. Birch Gold can even help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold for no money out of pocket. And you still get the free gold bars. With an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied customers, you can count on Birch Gold to help you navigate transitioning an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold. Don’t let your savings become a victim of the further devaluation of the dollar through more spending. Text Jordan to 989898. So that suicide death that you described, that’s worth dwelling on for a minute or two. I know probably 200 people who’ve been cancelled now, which is a fair number. And I would say almost everyone I’ve met, virtually everyone I’ve met will just shut the hell up. And if they do talk, they’ll apologize. And that’s like 99% of the population. And then there’s 1% about that will speak up. And then 99% of them, if they get mobbed, it’s like a near fatal illness. Right? It’s like a 10 year divorce case or, or seriously like a near fatal illness. I know people who’ve lost like 40 pounds. I know people who end up hospitalized. They’re shell shocked. They’re traumatized. No one likes having the mob show up at their door. Now, that’s not exactly true because there’s the odd person. Douglas Murray is a good example of this. They’re very rare. It’s like for Douglas, it’s bring it on. And he’s more like one in 10,000 because most people, even if they will speak, if they’re pilloried for it, they pay a massive psychological price. And it literally is the case that this bloody cancel culture is murderous. And to put that in a footnote doesn’t surprise me in the least because it’s the filthy little secret that swept under the carpet. This is really hard on people. And it’s also interesting, you know, that I’ve really, you know, we talked on the YouTube side about the fact that you as a young man, if you heard that a writer was conservative, you were going to approach them with a certain degree of skepticism. Yeah. And, you know, I’ve noticed too, and I can’t, well, I understand as am I, and I actually can’t shake this. You know, I’ve had lots of reprehensible types of people on my podcast and they’re often people who’ve been canceled. And I tell you, man, every time I reach out to someone like that, a canceled professor or someone who’s run a fall of the mob, there’s a part of me that thinks, well, you know, where there’s smoke, there’s fire and they probably deserved it in some way. Like it’s this horrible little voice in the back of my head. That’s an indication of just how effective savaging someone’s reputation is. Right. You don’t have to throw much mud at someone before they’re permanently filthy. And so, well, and I don’t know what we can do about that. This goes back to our YouTube discussion too, because it is now so easy to do that on social media. And you can do that without suffering any consequences whatsoever. All the bloody weight is on the side of the accuser and the adversary. And none of the weight is given to the defender. In fact, now we’re at the situation, I’ve seen this over and over, where you are accused of being a perpetrator if you defend yourself. Yeah. And I mean, and I’m sensitive to this partially because I had my suicidal depression back in 2007 and it was overwhelmingly culture war issues that led me to it. That, you know, I was hospitalized in 2007 as a danger to myself because I went to the hardware store to get the stuff to kill myself and then had the good sense to, you know, call 911 and, you know, and- Can I ask you how that happened? I don’t want to get more personal than you’re comfortable with, but I have heard these sorts of stories from many, many people, including people as you well know, you would never think these people would have the kind of constitutions that would set them up for that kind of cataclysmic collapse. And the reason I’m saying that is because everyone who’s watching and listening, you bloody well better listen to this. When the mob shows up at your door, it is not going to be a good day for you. And you think, well, I don’t care what other people think. It’s like only psychopaths don’t care what other people think. That’s exactly my response to that. Oh, it’s definitely true. It’s virtually by definition, you know. And so, like, why did it take you out? You’re obviously a free speech advocate. What do you think it was that knocked you so flat? Well, there’s a, you know, there’s a big difference between defending free speech in theory and then doing it in practice. Oh, yeah. That’s true. So, like, going to- you have to remember, because you look at all these free speech heroes that you have, and I was talking about Lenny Bruce before, you have to remember that people hated them at the time and that people are going to hate your guts for defending people for saying, in some cases, genuinely offensive things. Oftentimes on campus, honestly, not particularly offensive things. And so, I’d already been defending it for a long time. And as legal director, basically, my job was to fight, you know, fight all the time. And that’s admittedly exhausting. But then I became president of fire in 2005. And then I had the additional pressure of moving to Philadelphia, where I’m always very lonely. That’s one of the reasons why the headquarters of fire is in Philly and I live in D.C. And, you know, it’s hard to start of a new- to be the head of a new organization, or sorry, take over the reins of an organization. And then I- and so I was fighting culture war battles from six o’clock in the morning until when I went to bed at midnight every night, right after I checked the stats for the website. I was getting really exhausted. And since I live in a liberal bubble, you know, like I remember there was a girl terribly lonely there. And I remember dating a girl who actually literally said, when she was critical of my work, I said, listen, I’m a true believer in this stuff. I’m willing to defend Nazis. I’m certainly going to defend Republicans. And she actually said, I think Republicans might be worse. And we broke up not too long after that. That wasn’t why. But- and so, you know, absolutely horrible year, absolutely ground down, absolutely depressing. Because being in the culture war all the time on this stuff, and particularly back then when I was kind of alone in the respect of just having it be my 24-7 day job, is that the left will love you if you defend someone on the left. And if the principles are exactly the same thing when it’s someone on the right, they will think you’re a bad person who you should not come within three feet of for defending that person. And I actually ran into some of the stuff on the right. Like I remember actually, like there were a couple times because I defended people who’d said- who’d made inappropriate jokes about 9-11. Like I remember like nearly getting into fights a couple times, literally a couple times when I was living in Philly. And it really ground me down and the loneliness and the difficulty. So I reached a point where I was- I could not stop thinking about killing myself. I went to the hardware store to get the stuff. And I had the good sense to call 9-1-1. I went to- I was- you know, I went to the Belmont psychiatric facility in Philadelphia, you know, which was a pretty rough place. Yeah, you might say so. But at the time, you know, like if you told me that this was eventually going to lead to a positive direction in my life, I would have laughed if I could have laughed back then. Because I’m a pretty jokey person. And when I stop telling jokes, you know, something’s really wrong. And that’s when I started learning about CBT. That’s how I really got into psychology. And that’s when I started saying- Oh, so that’s why you- I see. Okay, so there’s the other shoe that dropped. I see. Yeah. And that’s when I started thinking about how we’re modeling cognitive distortions to young people and how campuses were already doing this. But students weren’t buying it. They were rolling their eyes.