https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HzZ9h7bM6QE
So yeah, my name is Christine Van Gaan. I’m currently the Ontario Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We work on issues of lower taxes, government waste and accountability. And oddly enough, this is the third time in six months that I’ve done a speech or talk publicly about the issue of free speech. And specifically free speech on campus. I think that this is a defining topic and mood of 2017. And oddly, support for free speech is increasingly falling along partisan or ideological lines. Now CTF, we at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, we deal exclusively with fiscal and economic issues. And you would think that that subject, government debt, generational debt and balanced budgets, you know, you would think that that’s non-controversial, but not so on university campuses. Our student group, Generation Screwed, has been kicked off of campuses, had room space denied, and we were even told by one university student union that we may need to change our name, Generation Screwed, because screwed is oppressive. So while we may not have encountered the kind of blowback that some of the speakers today will have received from universities, it just goes to show you how little it takes to trigger university administrators and students on campuses, and just how restrictive and ham-fisted they can work, how they can act when restricting speech. So with that, I will introduce our speakers. Our first panelist is Gad Saad. He’s the Professor of Marketing at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He’s the holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Science and the Darwinian Consumption. Sorry. He is also quite well-known for his popular YouTube channel, The Saad Truth, a channel that has garnered over four million views. Yeah. So everyone, please welcome Gad Saad. Our second panelist is, they’re not sitting in the right order, but I’ll introduce, this is the order in which they will present, it’s John Carpe on the far end. He’s the President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, an organization that he founded to defend the constitutional freedoms of Canadians through litigation and education. He has a BA in Political Science at Laval University in Quebec City and a law degree from the University of Calgary. So please welcome John Carpe. And our third panelist is Jordan Peterson, seated in the middle. He’s a Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto and a Clinical Psychologist with two main areas of study, the psychology of belief, including religion, mythology and political ideology, and the assessment and improvement of personality, including the prediction of creativity, academic and industrial performance. So everyone, please welcome Jordan Peterson. And we’re going to begin with remarks from Mr. Saad. Thank you very much. All right. So apparently a food restaurateur here in Ottawa caused me some food poisoning, so even the restaurateurs are trying to stifle my famous speech, because I almost didn’t make it to the session. So what are some strategies for stifling opposing opinions? If you live in a dictatorship, then of course you just kill the intellectuals. Those who oppose you, you get rid of them. If you are unable to implement such a strategy, then you perhaps have some hate speech laws or some campus speech codes. And of course what flows from that is the third way to stifle people is to create an environment that is sufficiently ominous that people engage in self-censorship. This picture right here is worth a thousand words. It basically says, we condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people’s feelings. What I’m going to do for the rest of today’s lecture is simply read to you first person accounts of emails that I receive. I receive these and they’re innumerable how many I receive, where either students, professors, parents are writing to me to document the stuff that they are facing on campuses. And the best way to actually show you this is to just read a bunch of them. So bear with me as I actually go through about seven or eight of these. The clock by the way is not working, so I don’t know how much time we have, but I’ll assume we’re okay. So here is student testimony example one. I’m a 47 year old white male who because of an injury made a choice to return to school. Sadly it looks like my path through university is going to be interrupted. In the first year to maintain full time status, I’m forced to take another social justice Black Lives Matter course. The challenge is students are not allowed to challenge or question the course content because that’s considered disrespectful and may disrupt someone’s safe space. I believe I am a respectful student with good attendance and whose marks average in the mid 80s. That said, after a few weeks of the one sided syllabus, I’m considering dropping out of the program and leaving school entirely. This academic world is a little too much for me. Testimony two. Today we had a panel discussion on the Quebec City shooting with two historians and two sociologists where I was told with solemn moral righteous tone that there is no such thing as good and bad immigrants. My heart was racing and my teeth were clenched. Sorry. And grinding listening to this. Finally, despite my heart beating out of my chest, I asked the question, how do you, the panel, interpret Charlie Hebdo, the Danish cartoon, ISIS, Salman Rushdie and the Bataklan shootings? The denial of individual responsibility and complete disregard for any value based interpretation was off the table. I think I screwed myself because I’m pretty sure my professor is, let’s say, quite suspicious of me now. Because this person aired his opinion, he knows that he’s in trouble. I just feel really alone, but the thought of restoring strength, tolerance and diversity of thought to the university really keeps me going. Today just really proved to me that I’m up against and how alone I am. What can I do? I’m reaching out to you in the hopes that the Godfather, that’s yours truly, would be able to help direct my future research project since most professors and required courses I have to take seem to be run by social justice warriors feigning intellectualism. The reason I’m contacting you is because as an honors cognitive student, part of my requirements is to complete 12 credits worth of individual research. However, because of purely political reasons, I’m apparently a violent, misogynist, racist, Trump supporter. I have not only lost my job at a prestigious behavioral neuroscience laboratory, I hid the identity at YYY, but my name has been removed from the publication on research I personally conducted and the lead researcher told me that he would never work with me again. This is not North Korea. This is Canada. This is the US. Help. I’m a fourth year student in a five year teaching program. I’ll be heading to YYY next year for my one year of Teachers College. Only recently have I realized the radical left wing messages embedded in virtually all of my classes and I know that it will only get worse at the school in question. What can I do about this? How do I stand up for the truth without risking my career as an elementary school teacher? Thank you. Let’s move on to some faculty. Those were all students. I very much appreciate your courage to fight the cancer that is taking over American academia. People like me feel cheated in their attempt to pursue a 10 year track career. It only takes a glimpse to the job offerings that the Modern Language Association publishes each year to understand what is expected from recent graduates like me. It is political activism and I refuse to mix that with my academic interests. I will save you my long stories of dealing and suffering career wise from politically correct nonsense from the directions of feminism, gender ideology, trans extremism, and Islamophilia. I am trying to keep a lid on things for now as my wife is a very promising academic but hasn’t secured a position yet. I know that if I started voicing my thoughts and arguments on social media, she’d be completely cut out of the academy. If she does secure a 10 year track spot, I’m off to the races and you and others would see that I’m an ally to take notice of, seriously. I’m more than happy to transition out of philosophy at this point which has become a virtue signaling competition. As a fellow professor who has been frustrated by the discourse within academia on issues such as political correctness, moral relativism, and social justice, I’d like to thank you for speaking up the way you have been from within academia. While my training and research is further removed from social issues than yours, I have nevertheless been frustrated by the conformism and group think I see and hear around me. I see otherwise very reasonable and capable people abandoning reason and cowering to the narrative of the regressive left on many social issues. These are all things which I would like to get involved in once the 10 year decision is behind me, about one year to go. As upsetting as it is, one fears expressing unpopular social ideas prior to tenure in the meantime, please keep fighting the good fight for freedom of speech and against thought policing and orthodoxy. Almost done. I won’t read this whole one, but basically this person writes to me thanking me for my conversation with Sam Harris, agreeing with some of the issues that I raised regarding some issues dealing with Islam, but then look at the bottom, he says, if you decide to mention this information in your videos, I would ask that you do so without mentioning my name. I do not have tenure yet. This is from a parent of a high school student. I recently received an email from my son’s school district that they are going to be screening a film called I’m Not Racist, Am I?, as an in school field trip at the end of January for high school students. I did some preliminary research on this and I’m absolutely appalled at the content of the movie. Based on the descriptions, the trailer and additional material surrounding it, it appears to be a feature length film pushing the agendas of white privilege, institutional racism, and white people are the problem. It scares me beyond belief that they are attempting to force these ideas on developing minds. And now, of course, the usual request that they be anonymous. For reference, my son is a junior at XXX. I have included the original email as well as the PDF of the communication that was sent out. If it is something you feel you should be shared with others, I only ask that you keep identifiable information for my son or myself out for our safety. This is not North Korea. For his safety. I’m sure you understand. So, to conclude, freedom of speech is everything. And I should know, I come from the Middle East. I escaped that which you don’t want to have replicate here in Canada. So, no more language police, no more thought police, no more echo chambers that shun intellectual diversity, no more identity politics, no more culture of offense and the ethos of perpetual victimhood, no microaggressions, no trigger warnings, no safe spaces, and no cultural appropriation. Science, reason, and logic trump, trump, ideology and feelings. Thank you very much. Is it okay to move this away? Thank you very much. Good morning. My thanks to the Manning Centre, Manning Conference for inviting me to speak to you. I’m very happy to be here. Good morning. My thanks to the Manning Centre, Manning Conference for inviting me to speak with you this morning. It’s a great honour to be on the same panel with Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Saad. Free speech in Canada is not dead, but at Canadian universities it certainly is on life support. Each year the Justice Centre releases the Campus Freedom Index, most recently with a new website, www.campusfreedomindex.ca, where you can very easily and quickly look up your own university and see what letter grade, ABCDF, has been assigned to your university or to your student union based on its policies, based on its practices. We’re trying to follow Dr. Michael Walker’s great dictum, if it matters, measure it. So, annual Campus Freedom Index measures with objective criteria the state of free speech at over 60 Canadian universities. The situation on the whole, it’s very bad. There are far more Fs handed out than there are A letter grades, and the Justice Centre has been involved with over 12 court actions against universities and student unions in four provinces. Fortunately, we have had some successes. A number of years ago, the University of Calgary took it upon itself to censor a small pro-life group on campus and threatened the students with trespassing charges and even with non-academic misconduct charges, with penalties ranging up to expulsion if they continue to express their pro-life views on campus. The students continued with their expression and they were indeed found guilty of non-academic misconduct for having done so. Now, the penalty was not expulsion, it was a warning, but we took the university to court and in 2014, in the case of Wilson versus University of Calgary, we got a court ruling setting aside the University of Calgary’s decision to find the students guilty of non-academic misconduct. So that case is now a precedent that can be used by students across Canada. We also recently, this past summer, sued the Brandon University Student Union, which had banned a campus pro-life club, which of course is significant because if you don’t have the official club status, you cannot participate in clubs day or book a table or you cannot on par with the other clubs rent out a room or hold an event, invite a speaker, host a debate, etc. So we sued the Student Union at Brandon University and before the action got very far, they did settle and they reinstated the club, so another positive result. But universities are very clever. So we’ve got the University of Alberta, which is obviously aware of the precedent against the University of Calgary, so rather than censor speech directly itself, what the university does is it lets the mob censor the expression that is unpopular. So in 2015, the pro-life group put up a peaceful stationary display and there was a huge mob of people came with sheets and towels and banners and megaphones and swarmed it and rendered it completely impossible to carry on any kind of civil conversation or dialogue or debate. Now in spite of the fact that the University of Alberta’s Code of Student Behaviour expressly prohibits interrupting, obstructing, or interfering with university-related activities and events, in spite of very clear provisions in the Code of Student Behaviour, when this disruption and obstruction took place, campus security stood by and watched and did nothing to enforce the university’s own code of conduct. The following year, 2016, the students went back, filled out a form to have another display and the university says, yes, you can put up a display on campus provided that you pay us a security fee of 17,500. So we’re suing the University of Alberta and the court in Edmonton is going to hear our case coming up in June and it’s going to be hugely, for better or for worse, you can’t predict ahead of time if you’ll win or lose, but this is going to have a huge impact on the rule of law because the message that the University of Alberta is sending to its own students and to the whole world is that if you disagree with somebody else’s opinion, you should shut them down and silence them and that’s the message. You know, and it’s tempting, you know, for people who disagree with or perhaps despise or detest the pro-life viewpoint, it’s tempting to, you know, kind of chuckle because, you know, this is being shut down, but it should be obvious to any thinking person if this is the condoned trend, that’s going to cut in all directions and it’s not going to be too long before you’re going to see all kinds of views and eventually even left-wing views, they’re going to get shut down by mobs if this is not fought immediately and urgently. What to do about the situation, I’ve got five recommendations. Firstly, exercise your free expression rights. Freedom is like a muscle. If you don’t exercise your muscles, they atrophy and wither and become weak and useless. Conversely, if you exercise your muscles, they stay strong and get even stronger. So exercise your free expression rights. Do not be intimidated by the name calling. We’ve all heard it, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, et cetera, et cetera. If you self-censor, you are giving ground to the enemies of freedom and… We have to make a commitment to the idea that it’s better to die standing than to live on your knees. Second point, come to the defence of others whose freedoms are threatened. Makes a huge difference, especially if it’s somebody that you disagree with. The Justice Centre takes… We have to take no position on it. We’re not pro-choice. We’re not pro-life, but we’re pro-free speech. So we take no position on abortion. As it turns out, most of our clients are not pro-choice. We’re also acting for the Men’s Issues Awareness Society, which is suing the Students’ Union at Ryerson University. I’m sad to say that in most of these cases, when a pro-life group is getting censored by the university or by the student union, in most cases, they get no help from the university. You can make a huge difference if you see somebody else being silenced or treated unfairly when you speak up. It’s especially powerful if you say, I don’t agree with their viewpoint at all, but they have a right to speak their opinions in a peaceful fashion, and they’re not going to be treated unfairly when they speak up. They’re going to be treated unfairly when they speak up. They’re going to be treated unfairly when they speak up. But they have a right to speak their opinions in a peaceful fashion on campus, and what you’re doing with your censorship is wrong, and that’s very powerful. So we need to do more of that, is speak up for others who are being persecuted. It’s high time that universities were stopped from perpetrating a fraud on taxpayers, which they do by going to the general public and to the politicians and saying, we believe in academic inquiry, we believe in freedom of speech, we believe in frank, honest debate as a tool for reaching truth, and they get 13 billion and turn around, and they don’t even honour their own mission and mandate. And that can be stopped by legislation, provincially. Provinces simply have to amend the legislation and say universities are not getting money unless they uphold free expression on campus. So please sign the petition. There’s copies at our Justice Centre booth, and there’s also copies in the back of the room. Fourth point, support the groups that are defending the free society. Don’t assume that the organizations out there that have their booths up, that there’s a few billionaires that are all giving these groups 200, 100 donations. That’s 60% of our budget. So don’t leave it to some imaginary wealthy person, but step up to the plate and support the groups, if you’re not already doing so, that are defending the free society. Last but not least, when you yourself are in a situation where your fundamental freedoms are being violated, whether it’s your freedom of expression, your freedom of conscience and religion, your freedom of association, stand your ground. Do not be intimidated. This is really where the war is fought. Freedom is lost when people cave in and capitulate on fundamental points of principle when they shouldn’t. And I said earlier, it’s a great honour to be on the same panel with Dr. Jordan Peterson. If more Canadians showed the courage and fortitude that he is demonstrating on a daily basis in the face of adversity, we’d be a lot better country. Thank you. Thank you. So I want to recommend a book first to everyone here. It’s called Explaining Postmodernism, and it’s by a gentleman named Stephen Hicks. And you need to understand postmodernism because that’s what you’re up against, and you’re up against it far more than you know or think. And it’s a much more well-developed and pervasive, pernicious, nihilistic, intellectually attractive doctrine than has yet come to public realisation. It absolutely dominates the humanities and increasingly the social sciences in the universities. And what’s happening, you see, someone once said, who unfortunately I can’t remember, it might have been Friedrich Nietzsche, said that everybody is the unconscious exponent of a dead philosopher. And fortunately, the postmodern philosophers, most of them are dead, so that’s a good thing. But that doesn’t mean that their words aren’t continually being spoken by people who are following in their wake, let’s say. And it’s not like any given person is absolutely possessed, say, by the spirit of postmodernism because often they’re not educated enough to know all the details about what it is that has them in their grip. But if you get 20 of them together and they’re all 5% influenced by the postmodernist ethos, you basically have the spirit of the mob that’s a mouthpiece for that particular philosophical doctrine. And if you understand the doctrine, then you understand why things are progressing the way that they’re progressing. And so I’m going to tell you a little bit about the doctrine because it’s not optional to understand this. It’s absolutely crucial to understand this. You can’t underestimate the power of ideas and also the power of words, of course, because ideas are expressed in words. But you see, the postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilization. And I mean completely. So I can give you an example in one term. Jacques Derrida, whose head trickster for the postmodernist movement, regarded Western culture, let’s call it the patriarchy, as phallogocentric. Okay, so phallo comes from phallus, P-H-A-L-L-O. And so that’s the insistence that what you see in Western culture is the consequence of a male-dominated, oppressive, self-serving society. And we might say, well, societies do tend to be self-serving and people in power do tend to act in their best interests. But a tendency is not an absolute. And that’s one of the things that needs to be considered continually. Continually, there are no shortage of flaws in the manner in which we’ve structured our society. And compared to any hypothetical utopia, it’s an absolutely dismal wreck. But compared to the rest of the world and the plight of other societies throughout the history of mankind, we’re doing pretty damn well and we should be happy to be living in the society that we’re living in. So the first thing that you might want to note about postmodernism is that it doesn’t have a shred of gratitude. And there’s something pathologically wrong with a person who doesn’t have any gratitude, especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds. And so if you’re not grateful, you’re driven by resentment. And resentment is about the worst emotion that you can possibly experience apart from arrogance. Resentment, arrogance, and deceit, there’s an evil triad for you. And if you’re bitter about everything that’s happening around you, despite the fact that you’re bathed in wealth, then there’s something absolutely wrong with you. The black community in the United States is the 18th wealthiest community, 18th wealthiest nation on the planet. Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as relative poverty. And relative poverty matters. It’s an important political economic issue and it’s very, very difficult to deal with. But absolute wealth matters too. And the Western societies have been absolutely remarkable in their ability to generate and distribute wealth, as you can tell by just looking around and taking a brief bit of consideration for the absolute miracle that even a building like this represents. So you have to educate yourself about postmodernism. So here’s what the postmodernists believe. They don’t believe in the individual. That’s the logos part. Western culture is fel-logocentric. Logo is logos. That’s partly the Christian word, but it’s also partly the root word of logic. They don’t believe in logic. They believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. They don’t believe in dialogue. The root word of dialogue is logos. Again, they don’t believe that people of goodwill can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas. They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure and practices of the dominant culture. So the reason they don’t let people who they don’t agree with speak on campus is because they don’t agree with letting people speak. You see, it’s not part of the ethos. Okay, so what else do they believe and not believe? They believe that since you don’t have an individual identity, your fundamental identity is group fostered. And that means that you’re basically an exemplar of your race, hence white privilege, or you’re an exemplar of your gender or your sex or your ethnicity, or you’re an exemplar of however you can be classified so that you are placed in the position of victim against the oppressor. Because that’s the game. And it’s a post-Marxist sleight of hand, right? The old Marxist notion was that the world was a battleground between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And that failed to have any philosophical or ethical standing. That argument after the working class actually saw its standard of living massively elevated as a consequence of Western corporate democracy, Western free enterprise democracy, and also as a consequence of the revelations of everything terrible that had happened in every bloody country that ever dared to make equity and the Marxist communist dogma part of their fundamental structure, right? And nothing but murderousness and oppression. And so by the 1970s, it was evident that that game was up. The post-modernist Marxists just basically pulled a sleight of hand and said, okay, if it’s not the poor against the rich, it’s the oppressed against the oppressor. We’ll just re-divide the subpopulations in ways that make our bloody philosophy continue in its movement forward. And that’s where we’re at now. And so for the post-modernists, the world is a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another because they can’t. All there is is a struggle for power. And if you’re in the predator group, which means you’re an oppressor, then you better look out because you’re not exactly welcome. Not exactly welcome. And neither are your ideas. So that’s what you’re up against. I would say it’s time for conservatives to stop apologizing for being conservatives. You know, and… You don’t apologize to these people. That’s a big mistake. Apology, they read apology as an admission of guilt. You don’t apologize and you don’t back down. And for you young people that are out there who are university students, you need to take over the student unions. You need to take them back because they’re absolute snake pits and they have been since the 1990s. And with regards to the universities, I thought at one point that the best thing to do would be to cut their funding by 25% and let them fight amongst themselves for the remnants. Because it would force the universities to decide exactly what’s important and what isn’t. So I would say that humanities and much of the social sciences has turned into a postmodern, neo-Marxist playground for radicals. The scholarship is terrible. 80% of humanities papers aren’t cited once. Once. And so what that means is that they write papers for each other and they sell them to libraries. And that’s how the publishers make their money. No one reads them, but the publishers can print them because the libraries have to buy them. And they’re buying them with your tax money. And so all of you who are sitting here are funding a postmodern, radical, neo-Marxist agenda that has its roots in the university. And your tax money is going towards that. And if you want proof of that, you just go online and look at the websites, especially of disciplines like women’s studies, which is pathological right to the core. But it’s not just women’s studies. It’s all the ethnic studies groups. It’s anthropology. It’s sociology. It’s social work. And most of all, it’s education. And OISE, for example, in Ontario is perhaps, apart from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the most dangerous institution in Canada. It should be defunded. It’s as simple as that. They don’t do the research they purport to do. They’re not interested at all in education. They’re interested in the indoctrination of people as young as they can get their hands on, so to speak. Now, we need to figure out, our society needs to figure out how to stop shunting public tax money to radical left-wing activists. If we were doing that for radical right-wing activists, there would be an absolute storm. But it’s happened incrementally since the 1960s, and it needs to stop. So that’s partly what the conservatives, not only conservatives, but also liberals, true liberals in the English sense, are up against. I mean, what’s happened also as a consequence of this postmodern neo-Marxist intellectual invasion is that the centre keeps moving. It’s moved way to the right now. So if you’re a classic liberal, you’ve become a conservative. And so for all of you who are interested in pursuing the conservative agenda, there’s a lot of classic liberals that you could be talking to. And then finally, with regards to talking to young people, you finally have something to sell to them. It’s not easy to sell conservatism to young people because they want to change things, and that’s not what conservatives want to do. They want to maintain things. Well, now you’ve got something to sell to young people. You can sell them freedom of speech, and you can sell them responsibility. The left is selling them rights. You can sell them responsibility. And I can tell you, because I’ve received many letters of the sort that Gad was talking about, young people are absolutely starving for someone to provide them with a sense of responsibility and say, look, here’s something worth living for, man. You know, you can find meaning in life with freedom, but freedom is a chaotic sort of meaning, right? And freedom isn’t the sort of thing that makes people happy. It’s the sort of thing that makes people troublesome, troubled because freedom expands your series of choices, and that makes you nervous and uncertain. So but responsibility is another not to say that that’s a bad thing. It’s a good thing, but it requires that you that you shoulder the responsibility of the freedom. But responsibility per se is what gives your life meaning, genuine meaning in the face of suffering. And young people are really they’re starving for that. I’ve been teaching young people for 30 years, and mostly what I’ve been teaching them about is responsibility. It’s like your heirs to a great tradition. It’s not perfect, obviously, but comparatively, there’s nothing else like it that’s ever been produced. And it’s it represents a tiny minority of human polities, most of which are are are are run by murderous, anti-social, psychopathic thugs. And that’s seriously. And so what kind of alternative is that? We’ve got this beacon of freedom and wealth in the West that works, although it doesn’t work perfectly. And one of the one of the responsibilities of young people is to find out what’s at the core of that. The great, great core of that, the paramount, the paramount importance of the individual and the divinity of speech, man. That’s something to sell. It’s what our whole culture is predicated on. All right. Well, I should stop there. So thank you very much for the invitation. So thank you very much to all of our speakers. A really insightful comments. I’m just going to lead about a 20 minute discussion, a 15 minute discussion. And my first question is the direction in which we’re going. So there was a poll that was published by The Economist in two issues ago that showed the support among young people for different sets of rights in different countries across the world. And they found that support for the expansion of rights that are considered rights for historically marginalized groups. So the right for women’s equality, right to same sex marriage, right to abortion, things like that, even in countries where those rights are not enshrined in law, have incredible amounts of support among young people. The only exception is the right to free speech, particularly the right to speech that may be perceived as offensive to minority groups in that category. Countries like Britain, Germany and Canada, the support among young people for that right is under 50 percent. So right now we have, we see censorship, self-censorship and real state censorship by people who actually hold the levers of power in government and in institutions. But when these people who right now have less than 50 percent support for the right to free speech are 15 years from now the ones holding those levers of power, where do you see this going? Well the short-term future is very bleak. But I always say you just got to keep on fighting for what is right and exercising courage. And we can’t say what the medium term or long term future is. You know, the history is quite unpredictable. But the short-term trends are terrible. Well I think another thing for people in the audience who are parents is, you know, get your kids out of the public education system and do homeschooling or private school. Make that a priority, you know, even if you can’t afford it, figure out a way. Because this indoctrination into these postmodernist or neo-Marxist type ideas, it just permeates the whole curriculum, whether it’s math, science, social studies, what have you. So that’s something practical. Certainly the students that are now 18, 19, 20, it’s obvious that in high school they’ve never been taught that if there’s an idea that you disagree with, well you come up with reasons why that’s wrong, and you try to use facts and logic to engage in discussion. You get these mobs, you know, I feel very offended by what you said. I feel that way and therefore you shouldn’t be allowed to say it. Where are they getting that from? I mean, that’s coming out of the K-12 education system. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I try to do is to convince both colleagues and students and anybody who’s willing to listen to participate in the trench warfare of ideas. Many people feel as though they don’t have the necessary platform, the necessary testicular fortitude to actually battle. But then they see gentlemen like Jordan Peterson, if I may include myself and a few others, who are on the front lines and then they feel very invigorated. So I think the ship can be turned around as long as people feel sufficiently empowered that they actually have a voice. You could weigh in simply on your Facebook page. You could weigh in at the bar when speaking to someone. Everybody has a voice and everybody should feel sufficiently invigorated and the possibility of lending their voice to the debate. And if we can do that, then I don’t think we need to be pessimistic. If we can’t convince people to do that, then I think it will be an infinite abyss of darkness. So, you know, one way of conceptualizing yourself is that you’re one speck of dust among seven billion. And when you conceptualize yourself that way, you might think, well, what difference does it make what I say or do? And that’s actually quite convenient for you because if it doesn’t matter what you say or do, then you don’t have any responsibility and you can do whatever you want. The price you pay for that is a bit of nihilism. But if you don’t have to shoulder any responsibility, that’s a small price to pay. Another, that’s the underground motivation for nihilism. But the other way of looking at it, and this is actually the accurate way of looking at it, is that you’re in a network. You’re a node in a network. And so you can do a little bit of arithmetic very rapidly and just figure out how powerful you are. You know a thousand people. You’re going to know more than that over the course of your life. But let’s say a thousand for the sake of argument for now. They know a thousand people. That means that you’re one person away from a million people and two persons away from a billion people. And you’re the center of that network. And now the way networks work is that information propagates in a networked manner. So don’t underestimate the power of your speech. Now, you know, Western culture is fel logo centric. Let’s say it. Okay. So we’ll say, yeah, that’s just fine. That’s exactly what it is. It’s predicated on the idea of the logos, that the logos is the sacred element of Western culture. And what does that mean? It means that your capacity for speech is divine. It’s the thing that generates order from chaos and then sometimes turns pathological order into chaos when it has to. Don’t underestimate the power of truth. There’s nothing more powerful. Now, in order to speak what you might regard as the truth, you have to let go of the outcome. You have to think, all right, I’m going to say what I think, stupid as I am, biased as I am, ignorant as I am. I’m going to state what I think as clearly as I can. And I’m going to live with the consequences no matter what they are. Now, the reason you think that that’s an element of faith. The idea is that nothing brings a better world into being than the stated truth. Now, you might have to pay a price for that, but that’s fine. You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it. So if you’re going to stand up for something, stand up for your truth. It’ll shape you because people will respond and object and tell you why you’re a fool and a biased moron and why you’re ignorant. And then if you listen to them, you’ll be just that much less like that the next time you say something. And if you do that for five years, you’ll be so damn tough and articulate and able to communicate and withstand pressure that you won’t even recognize yourself. And then you’ll be a force to contend with. And you don’t get to wait until because I get letters like GAD, SAD gets all the time, too, from faculty members in particular. And they say, well, you know, when I get tenure, it’s like then they think, well, when I’m an associate professor. And then they think, well, when I’m a full professor, it’s like if you’re a professor already, you’re like the most protected person in the history of the planet. You know, and you need well. OK. But what one of the things that that indicates is that it’s almost impossible to provide people with enough protection so that they feel safe to speak. OK. So we’ll address that directly. It is not safe to speak. And it never will be. But the thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that it’s even less safe not to speak. Right. It’s a balance of risks. It’s like you want to you want to pay the price for being who you are and stating your mode of being in the world. Or do you want to pay the price for being a bloody serf, one that’s enslaved him or herself? Well, that’s a major price, man. That thing unfolds over decades and you’ll just be a miserable worm at the end of about 20 years of that. Right. No self-respect. No power. No ability to voice your opinions. Nothing left but resentment because everyone’s against you. Because, of course, you’ve never stood up for yourself. It’s like, say what you think carefully. Pay attention to your words. The prices. It’s a price you want to pay if you are willing to believe that truth is the cornerstone of society and in the most real sense. If you’re if you if you’re willing to take that leap, then tell the truth and see what happens. And nothing better could possibly happen to you. There’ll be ups and downs and there’ll be pushback and there’ll be controversy and all of that. But it doesn’t matter. The truth is what makes the world. The truth is what redeems the world from hell. And that’s the truth. And we saw plenty of hell over the last hundred years, you know, and we haven’t learned a bloody thing from it. It’s like, wake up, tell the truth, tell the truth, or at least don’t lie. That’s a start. And you’ve got to understand that’s a risk. But I will. I have one more brief thing to say about that. So, you know, I said what I had to say back in September. And I’m sure that I could have done it better. And many people have told me how I could have done it better, although it didn’t mean they would actually do it. But. And, you know, my job was at risk, serious risk for about two months, and it destabilized my family. I’ve been very brave about this. So, like, thumbs up to them, man. They’ve just stood by me. But here’s the optimistic news is the university has left me alone completely. I shook hands with the dean two weeks ago. We’re on friendly terms. They don’t want this to go any farther than it has already. The students were tremendously welcoming when I came back to teach in January. I haven’t had a single negative incident at the university. And I’ve received thousands of letters from people all over the world, all of which have been in support. I’ve received two negative letters. That’s it, too. So the people people have an inchoate longing to have the sort of thing that we’re talking about articulated. And so don’t be thinking you’re alone. It’s just that people can’t talk. They’re afraid to talk or they don’t know what to say. And those are real problems. So if you’re reasonably articulate, like, start talking and sharpen yourself up. I mean, the enemy is is a cloud. They’re a cloud of gnats. They’re only courageous in groups. They’re only courageous in mobs. If you stand your ground and don’t apologize and articulate things properly, they’ll disperse around you like they’re not even there. So most of its illusion. So don’t be be afraid, but be afraid of the right thing. And the right thing you should be afraid of is not saying what you say, because that’s the same as not being. And here you are suffering away. You might as well be at the same time. At least then there’s something to you. So. So one of the other things I wanted to ask your opinion about is what role do provocateurs play in the debate over free speech? So the example of the day is obviously Milo Yiannopoulos. Are these champions of free speech or do they undermine public support for the right? Or are they simply self-interested people who are hijacking a right in order to promote themselves and their own interests? And obviously, is this a new phenomenon or is this something that is is is age old? There are all of those. Milo is a classic example. He’s an amazing person. I mean, he’s he’s a contradiction. He’s a walking contradiction. You can’t pin that guy down, right? Like, what is he half Jewish, half English, gay, provocateur, Catholic, who’s who’s who’s really who’s who loves black guys and who who who is it who appeals to American Republicans? It’s like, what are you going to say about something? Somebody like that. It’s like he’s a he’s a he’s a trickster figure, archetypally speaking, you know, and he’s he’s a provocateur and a comedian. And the funny thing about comedians, they’re like jesters in the king’s court. The jester was the only person who could tell the truth because he was beneath contempt. And that’s the role that comedians and provocateurs play. They’re poking, they’re poking and laughing and making fun. And, you know, Milo Christ even dresses like a what do you call those harlequin? You know, he’s a trickster and trickster figures emerge in times of crisis and they point out what no one wants to see. And they say things that no one will say. And you can say all the terrible things about him. He is a provocateur. He’s an egomaniac. He’s a he I don’t think he’s narcissistic, but because he has the real capacity for self reflection. But and he’s brave as can be. I mean, and he’s unstoppable on his feet. He just amazes me. I’ve never seen anyone ever. I don’t think and I’ve met some pretty damn smart people. I’ve never seen anyone who can take on an onslaught of criticism and reverse it like he can. It’s bloody amazing. But he is all those things you describe. But, you know, the times call forth the speakers and we’ve called forth Milo. And yeah, well, and that tells you what our times are. So Milo’s been on my show and he’s supposed to come again soon. He’s exactly the things that Jordan said. At times he he has an ability to depart from truth. You’re speaking. That’s right. So, for example, when he says things like there is no such thing as lesbians. Well, I appreciate his provocateur nature. But then it’d be nice to stay closer to the truth. But to the extent that he is getting a lot of young people engaged, probably more than Jordan and I could, you know, in our lifetimes, a lot of people are associating to him. And so his central message is truly important. So even if once in a while he makes a departure from truth, I’ll grant him that because his greater raison d’etre is quite important. So I certainly support him. I just add that it’s the so-called extreme speech that pushes the envelope and that ends up in the long run being fundamentally transformative. The top question to ask always is, you know, is it true or to what extent is it true or why is it not true? Truth is always the thing to think about. We should never be concerned with whether something is, quote, extreme or not, because that changes from year to year, from decade to decade. I mean, you think, you know, in 1969 it would have been extreme to advocate for gay marriage. That would have been an extreme position with less than one percent support. And today in many quarters it’s considered extreme to say that gay marriage is a bad thing. So extremism changes from year to year, decade to decade, month to month. There should never be a criteria for your speech. Is it extreme or not? That’s not the right question. The question is it true or false? Is it right or wrong? Those are the questions to ask. Okay. Really quickly, one final question. Part of the debate that we have when we talk about free speech in universities is, is a university a public institution or is it an institution of higher learning? No one would dispute that the Manning Centre is free to invite, disinvite or not invite anyone that they want to come to this conference to learn and to train. But because universities are recipients of large amounts of tax dollars, are they more of a public institution that is required to provide a bigger forum for free speech? And where do you draw that line when organizations that receive large amounts of charitable tax benefits are freer to disinvite or not invite or not host? You don’t have to give a platform to someone whose speech you disagree with. But when do you when you’re the recipient of public monies? I think in the current context with the universities receiving 13 billion dollars a year from taxpayers, in that particular context, I think that they don’t have the right to behave as a private institution like Trinity Western University, which gets no government funding. That’s very different. If Trinity Western University said we’re going to ban the expression of atheism or Islam on campus, say, well, it’s a private institution as long as they’re upfront about that, that when you go there, you know that pro-Islamic or pro-atheist speech is outlawed and you still choose to go to that university. But ironically, what I’ve heard from people currently and in the past that are attending Trinity is they do have Muslims and atheists and gay people there. And it is a healthy, vigorous intellectual climate. But in response to the question, if your private institution, you can invite or not invite, you can do whatever you want. But for the universities, because they’re holding themselves out as supposedly in favour of academic inquiry and free expression, they should be required to honour that commitment that they’ve made to taxpayers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.