https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hW51iM0hW78
Hi everybody. I’m in a little Airbnb in Manhattan a few days before this the event that I’m going to talk to you about. I’m here to talk to Jonathan Haidt today so that should be good. Anyways I wanted to tell you about an event that’s coming up on November 11th called the stifling of free speech on university campuses and it’s going to be held at the Canada Christian College which is at 50 Gervais Drive in Toronto and it’ll start at 1 p.m. I’ll put all that information in the description of the video. We’re going to talk about the state of free discussion on campuses and this event has actually mushroomed into something that was far beyond its original borders let’s say because of because it was scheduled for August 22nd and had been canceled by Ryerson University and I’ll tell you why that is as I go through this video. So first of all I’m going to tell you who’s going to be there. So this is actually organized by Ms. Serena Singh who’s a former social worker and a newly hatched political and social commentator. You can find out more about her and her views and her work at a channel called Recovering Social Worker on YouTube. Serena has served as a social worker in the child welfare system which is a really rough place to work for many many years and has been disturbed deeply about the rising tide of political correctness in social work in particular because social work is a discipline that’s been almost entirely corrupted by in my estimation by political correctness and so because of her concerns she decided to speak out and also to organize this event so that’s been very challenging as this is the first thing of this sort that she’s done. So the panelists include Dr. Gad Saad and Dr. Orin Amatay and myself and I’ll tell you most of you know about Gad Saad I presume some of you know about Dr. Amatay as well give you a little background information about them so Dr. Saad is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal and host of the YouTube channel the Saad Truth and he’s the author of a couple of books The Consuming Instinct and The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption and he’s also served as the editor of Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. Dr. Amatay, Dr. Orin Amatay is a clinical psychologist, a media consultant and a lecturer at Ryerson University in Toronto he’s host of the podcast The Real Reality. I actually served on his PhD Defense Committee a number of years ago but a while back he invited me to talk to his class at Ryerson University that talk was recorded and was released as an incendiary discussion at Ryerson University. It’s garnered about 400,000 views on YouTube and I’ll put a link to that in the discussion as well and so those are the three people that are going to be speaking at the panel as well as me. The panel discussion was originally slated for August 22nd but was cancelled by Ryerson University so the irony of that was not lost on us because what that meant was that there was a panel on the suppression of free speech at university campuses that was actually cancelled by a university so but that’s only you know that’s just an example of all the odd things that have been happening everywhere recently I would say administrators there quote prioritized safety unquote over free speech in light of recent events they were referring to the Charlottesville meeting and the tragedy that occurred there I guess they had their reasons to be concerned the BBC covered the cancellation and quoted the administrators who were responsible for the cancellation as follows there is often attention at universities resulting from our commitment to be a place for free speech and our commitment to be a place that is civil safe and welcoming in light of recent events Ryerson University is prioritizing campus safety said university spokesperson Michael Forbes in an email Mr. Forbes said a part-time instructor had rented a room on campus to host the event but after conducting a standard safety review the university decided that quote Ryerson is not equipped to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward well you can make of that what you will I think that Ryerson who had agreed to host the talk could have decided that long before one or two days before the event but in any case it was cancelled we would have got about two or three hundred people at the event if it would have gone forward in Ryerson and there was some organized opposition to the event which basically claimed that it was being run by Nazis and neo-nazis that was actually what they posted on their Facebook site although they took that down after it became publicized that that was the sort of symbolism that they were using to object to the event and then in the aftermath of their successful campaign to have Ryerson shut it down to involve multiple phone calls to the administrators and so forth they scheduled a post cancellation rally where about a hundred or so might have been up to 200 people came out at Ryerson and had a celebration party while waving around banners that prominently displayed the hammer and sickle so that gives you some idea of who was behind this and then later the same people shut down a comedy event which was entitled of something approximating a free speech comedy event and that was rescheduled as well for November 4th which I think is two days ago I think it’s the 6th today yeah and they disrupted that as well so we expect some level of disruption at the November 11th event and are organizing security to minimize the probability that it will be either disrupted or shut down but you never know what’s going to happen we’ve sold about 950 tickets so far the other thing that happened recently and I think this is a good indication of the kind of opposition that we’re going to be facing is that my neighborhood was postered with a number of posters claiming that I was a risk to the to the neighborhood I think they were entitled community safety warning describing me as a well as a reprehensible person and funnily enough the photograph they used with of me which was actually one where I appear quite angry was taken from a free speech rally where the same sort of people showed up in opposition and they took the microphone and and shut down the PA system blasted white noise so in order to make myself heard I had to speak very loudly and that’s the picture they took to indicate what a public safety menace I am so anyways that’s the sort of people that are opposing this so I’m encouraging you to buy tickets all you can get them at brown paper tickets I’ll put the link in the video description I would also say though if you’re planning to come and you’re an advocate for the sort of thing that I’ve been doing and dr. Amate and dr. sad and Serena as well I really would like to emphasize the necessary necessity for calm and and detachment and there’s going to be if the protesters are there I suspect they’ll be quite provocative I wouldn’t put it past them to plant provocateurs in in the crowd to cause trouble and the last thing I want and any of us on the panel want is for anybody to be hurt or for anything stupid to happen you know disruptions are one thing and we certainly don’t want them but we don’t want anyone hurt and I would like to implore all of you who are coming to support us who are just interested in this issue to maintain your cool regardless of level of provocation it’s unbelievably important because in the social media climate that we have right now the misbehavior of any single individual has ramifications that can echo far past what would normally be the case and so it’s of extreme importance for everyone who’s in favor of let’s say free speech and in favor of supporting the endeavors that that a number of people are are engaged in to assure that free speech remains a priority in our society and on campuses that no one behaves badly again regardless of provocation keep your damn cool okay because it’s really important it’s crucially important we have good security as far as I can tell we’ve done our best to vet them and all of that but this is this just isn’t the time or place for anything untoward to happen so anyways we’d like to invite you to come you can get tickets as I said at brown paper tickets I’ll post that there’s still the venue is somewhat expandable so although we’ve sold approximately a thousand tickets which is of course is about five times as many people as we would have originally talked to that’s pretty funny too because you know this is another reason to maintain calm is just because the protesters show up and even if they cause trouble that doesn’t mean that they’re obtaining any more than a local trivial victory the medium-term and long-term consequences of them shutting us down at Ryerson is that we’re going to talk to five times as many people at the Canada Christian College the reason we picked the Canada Christian College is because well first of all it was a large venue but more importantly we believe that they they the people who run the college would have enough courage to withstand pressure from activist types who mount phone call campaigns to have this shut down and that they wouldn’t shut it down no matter what and that’s definitely proved to be the case so thank you very much to the people at the Canada Christian College for having the courage to host this to begin with and also the courage not to shut it down so I’m also going to link in the description of this video a number of the news stories that were published in Canada and to some degree internationally about the original shutdown so anyways I’d like to invite you to come it should be an interesting event Gad and Orin are good speakers they’re well informed Serena has a variety of very interesting questions ready for the panel discussion I think it could be an excellent event and hopefully it will go smoothly and even if it doesn’t hopefully people will have enough sense to maintain their cool and react intelligently and not respond to provocation because that’s the best way forward in this particular situation so thanks very much you