00:05:04.140I have read sections of this piece over the years.
00:05:07.860It's, I can't place it on the timeline where it lands in relation to the Oberlin sandwich0.95
00:05:14.000story, which I think of as like the totemic example of campus culture bullshit.
00:05:19.060But this was after a wave of scare stories and really a lot of these aging middle-aged dudes grasping around for like ways to substantiate the feelings that they had.0.74
00:05:33.220They couldn't really come up with that many firings and they couldn't actually find places where people were having their speech suppressed.
00:09:18.940I mean, to be clear, this is the entire premise of the book, right?
00:09:22.360it's built around the thesis that these ideas are spreading on college campuses and that we
00:09:27.420should all be worried. Every other part of the book relies on this being true. You know, if the
00:09:32.720argument is, well, look, I think that modern college students have a slightly different view
00:09:39.500of what harm is relative to myself. That's not a book, right? No one's going to buy that book.
00:09:45.040You need them to believe that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, right? And that is the
00:09:51.300first untruth that they start off with the untruth of fragility they call it what doesn't kill you
00:09:56.900makes you weaker now again no one believes that um nor did they provide even one example of anyone
00:10:04.360saying anything like this really nothing they don't even bother they just skip straight to
00:10:10.520the debunking yeah that said i will say like the thesis here is relatively clear they're arguing
00:10:15.920that like sometimes injuries of various types, physical, mental, emotional, can actually make
00:10:21.500you stronger. And therefore, efforts to insulate yourself from harm can be counterproductive at
00:10:29.020times. Sure. They lead off with an analogy about peanut allergies. Oh, this fucking thing. This
00:10:35.140is like a weird right wing substack trope that like peanut allergies are fake or something.
00:10:40.460It is. Yeah. The prevalence of peanut allergies among children more than tripled between the mid 90s and 2008. Some research has shown that it was likely because parents and schools were avoiding nuts in case any children were allergic, which in turn prevented immune systems from developing resistance. So allergy rates went up. Right.
00:11:03.400So in the analogy, the peanut is racist comments and you have to build up your immunity to
00:12:26.600What Haidt Lukianoff bailed a lot of this around is the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy, which involves exposure to things that that bother you, that that can trigger you, etc.
00:12:39.580So what they're saying is, look, the way that we treat a lot of trauma is by exposing you to things that trigger those traumas.
00:12:48.400And so children are sort of doing the wrong thing.
00:16:54.080they point to a 2017 study where 58% of the students said that they agree with the statement
00:17:01.020that it's important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant
00:17:06.900and offensive ideas. Got them. That same study found that 92% of students agreed with the
00:17:13.640following statement. It is important to be part of a campus community where I am exposed to the
00:17:18.420ideas and opinions of other students, even if they are different from my own. Right. They don't
00:17:22.960mention that statistic i had to go pull it out of the study but keep in mind they are writing a
00:17:28.440whole book about how students are increasingly rejecting the ideals of like the free exchange
00:17:34.420of ideas right while the data that they are selectively using shows that students actually
00:17:40.120overwhelmingly embrace those ideas and they're not giving you any comparison to other societal
00:17:44.560groups right if this is something about elite liberal colleges then you should compare it to
00:17:48.900other colleges if this is something about how colleges are coddling students then you should
00:17:52.620compare that to non-college educated students and you should probably also compare that to older
00:17:57.040people like how many boomers think that it's important to be exposed to other ideas that's
00:18:01.600the problem with these books and these articles is they always present you this data in a vacuum
00:18:05.200on to untruth number two always trust your feelings this is the yoda untruth once again
00:18:13.540i have to preface this by saying that no one actually believes that you should always trust
00:18:17.140your feelings no one thinks that i have never witnessed a single person even in like the depths
00:18:21.520of social media sincerely say that facts don't trust my feelings much of the chapter centers
00:18:27.440around the supposed epidemic of campus speakers being disinvited based on their controversial
00:18:34.340views love it they say that this is the product of students acting emotionally and they pose the
00:18:40.800rhetorical question should a student saying i am offended be sufficient reason to cancel a lecture
00:18:47.840This one, this is such a funny example to use for this, because this is the opposite of students saying to trust their feelings. This is students saying these ideas are intellectually invalid.
00:18:57.460Yes, but you only feel that they're invalid.
00:19:01.300You feel based on your review of the literature.
00:19:18.420It's reasonable to be offended by Nazis or by pedophilia or by someone who's like killing puppies.
00:19:25.120One of the things that changed my mind on this was I believe it was a New Yorker article that actually interviewed one of these oh so scary campus activists who was protesting a speaker.
00:19:34.760And what the protester said was that a lot of these speakers are invited to give commencement speeches and other things that are mandatory for students.
00:19:42.680There's a huge difference, actually, between just like a random person comes to talk on a campus on like a Wednesday night.
00:19:49.000You can go or not go versus to get your diploma.
00:19:52.500You have to actually sit through a speech by I think it was Condoleezza Rice that they were protesting.
00:19:56.440And like when college campuses invite speakers to talk, they are conferring some of their prestige onto the speaker.
00:20:04.040If somebody says, oh, I'm regularly invited to give talks at Harvard, that is some prestige that that person is using, right?
00:20:11.060And it's actually quite reasonable for members of this institution to say, like, I don't think that our prestige should be shared with this person.
00:20:21.080Also, if you're just a 22-year-old without access to power, you only have so many opportunities in your life to scream at Condoleezza Rice, and I think you've got to take them.
00:20:30.700I've sent you a chart from the book that shows disinvitation attempts by year.1.00
00:22:02.100There are in excess of forty five hundred degree granting institutions of higher education in the United States.0.98
00:22:09.840If each of them hosted 20 speakers a year, which is an extremely low estimate, that would mean that for every twenty one hundred or so speaker invitations,
00:22:20.600you're getting one attempt right to disinvite a speaker right that's 20 speakers per college per
00:22:27.360year yeah if it's a hundred then we're talking about less than one in ten thousand right these
00:22:33.540are unbelievably minuscule numbers this is this is one of the weirdest things about the the quote
00:22:39.780unquote data in this book is that like if you actually look at it it doesn't illustrate their
00:22:44.960point it illustrates exactly the opposite yeah if there's tens of thousands of speakers being
00:22:49.340invited to campus every year, a lot of those people probably are really controversial.
00:22:53.040And a lot of them probably just give their talks and everybody goes home. And like,
00:22:57.580maybe there's a tense Q&A, the mismatch between left-wing disinvitations and right-wing
00:23:03.740disinvitations. The most obvious explanation for that is that there is now a huge media apparatus
00:23:10.500that exists almost exclusively to freak out about left-wing disinvitations. So of course,
00:23:17.960you're going to have more reports of disinvitation attempts because there's like hotlines and shit.0.96
00:23:23.360Not just that, but this is a time in which this sort of, oh, liberal college kids are trying to0.91
00:23:31.120cancel speakers, that discourse picks up. What that results in is conservative student groups
00:23:38.620trying to troll liberal students by engaging with speakers who they know are going to0.60
00:23:45.060cause a shitstorm yeah yeah that's a good point by the way did you catch the last sentence
00:23:49.800in a little paragraph describing the uh the chart oh god asterisks show where the solid line
00:23:56.260would have been had milo yiannopoulos been removed from the data set this what this data set is so
00:24:04.020small that they had to control for milo yiannopoulos for the protest against someone who's
00:24:10.940like genuinely extremely odious and like deserves to be protested. So all of these things are like
00:24:16.160feeding into one another to drive these numbers up. And you still only get to 42. It is very funny
00:24:23.020to me how much time conservatives spend whining about the marketplace of ideas behaving like a
00:24:28.380market. Did I ever tell you that I was disinvited from speaking at a school? Because of your tweets,
00:24:33.340Peter, I would disinvite the shit out of you if I saw your tweets. No, the five to four crew was0.98
00:24:37.720once invited by a student group to speak at a law school. And I will, at the request of the student
00:24:44.020who thought he would get into trouble, I will not name the law school. We were invited and then the
00:24:48.600student came back in a panic saying, I raise this to administration for approval. And not only did
00:24:53.880they say no, but I might be in trouble here for even suggesting it. Oh, wow. Okay. So they said
00:24:59.460like hard no, like really no. So, you know, just to sort of like circle back on some recent
00:25:05.380developments in my life disinvited from campus fired from my job yeah all for speech related0.94
00:25:11.580things where is my fucking tucker carlson two minutes right but then this to me this is like0.87
00:25:18.200so revealing of the entire thing is that no one actually cares about people being disinvited from0.98
00:25:24.820fucking campus talks no offense but like you have a podcast that goes to tens of thousands of people0.93
00:25:30.100your views are widely accessible. This is a minuscule component of whether or not speech0.99
00:25:37.720is free, especially now at a time when anyone can set up a social media account, anyone can set up
00:25:43.520a Medium account, anyone can self-publish a book. Speech has never been freer in literally human
00:25:49.980history. So it's like I care so much about free speech that I've made it my entire career as
00:25:56.620these guys basically have. But I also care so little about it that I only care about this
00:26:01.740extremely narrow slice of, quote unquote, censorship. They've chosen the one place
00:26:09.160that conservatives can claim oppression. I just remembered that I was also once
00:26:15.000invited to speak at a law school on the condition that we not make fun of any professors.
00:26:21.640And we had like no plans to, but we just said no as a matter of principle.
00:26:25.020Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's fair.
00:26:28.100All right, let's let's move on to untruth number three. Life is a battle between good people and
00:26:34.740evil people. Something you hear all the time. That's something I learned at a drag brunch.
00:26:38.180This one is about what Hyatt and Lukianoff say is students tendency to place people0.71
00:26:43.320in one of two categories, either good or evil, and then act accordingly. And that
00:26:49.320is sort of their framework for a discussion of identity politics the kids are too into their
00:26:55.960groups this is one of the weakest parts of the book it lacks both anecdotes and data
00:27:02.040and they say that there are two types of identity politics shared humanity identity politics which
00:27:09.220appeal to shared morality and use unifying language and were embraced by martin luther king
00:27:16.020jr okay and common enemy identity politics which involve mobilizing one group against another
00:27:24.580and were embraced by adolf hitler again this chapter is a critique of students who supposedly
00:27:32.280act like everyone is either good or evil and the authors are like okay so you have two types of
00:27:38.940identity politics the martin luther king jr kind and the hitler kind there's two kinds of
00:27:45.62019 year olds the two genders martin luther king jr and hitler like do we really need to invent
00:27:53.820cute subcategories of identity politics to distinguish between mlk and hitler yeah isn't
00:27:59.720the operative distinction that one was against oppression on the basis of identity and one was
00:28:06.000for it isn't this also the argument against social change throughout history was that like you're
00:28:12.240doing it wrong right i would be fine with this if you asked me oh my god it's john gray it's like
00:28:18.480if you asked me could you not be racist rather than would you not be racist but like that is
00:28:25.380not how social progress works at like any point in history it's hard to parse this and engage with
00:28:31.560it seriously because like you're pointing out that it's unserious right right now there are
00:28:35.520parts of this chapter that i think are like relatively inoffensive they talk about the
00:28:39.780dangers of groupthink and tribalism and how mentally categorizing someone as a member of
00:28:45.400the outgroup can lead to unfairly characterizing their actions and their intentions. But what they
00:28:51.860do not do is provide any data or research showing that this is like a demonstrable problem among
00:28:58.700college students in particular. You know, obviously like tribal thinking, pretty prevalent across
00:29:03.840society. So given the thesis of the book, the obvious question is whether the younger generation
00:29:09.880is more susceptible to this stuff. They don't even try to address that. It's also very funny
00:29:15.180to criticize 19 year olds for being too fragile and then immediately be like, when you call me
00:29:20.840racist, you're being like Hitler. You guys are totally Hitler right now. The last thing I want0.96
00:29:26.080to add in this section is that like a lot of what they are ascribing to like a new desire among
00:29:35.240young people to punish their opponents. Frankly, I don't see a lot of evidence that it's not
00:29:42.120basically 100% social media. A, the ability of some college kid to like cause a ruckus on campus
00:29:50.120is now way higher than it was when i was in college yeah b someone who is on the right
00:29:58.380is being constantly exposed to the excesses of the left because social media accounts are
00:30:05.580taking that content filtering it boiling it down and throwing it at their face peter imagine if
00:30:11.340there was social media when we were in college one thing that i think the younger generation
00:30:14.800doesn't understand is how often our generation talks about how glad they are that social media0.97
00:30:21.420didn't exist when we were young no shit dude oh my god this is something i think about all the time0.95
00:30:26.640my uh my libertarian phase has been lost to history uh i when you said your libertarian0.97
00:30:34.280phase i like flash back to like one month in law school yeah and then you met other libertarians
00:30:39.960that's basically what happened to me it's like oh no oh it's aphiophilia oh interesting
00:30:45.820you know like when you first are exposed to libertarianism coming from a left-ish perspective
00:30:52.860you're like maybe i can do libertarianism without the racism and then you like absorb the literature
00:31:00.100a bit and you're like no you're like no that's their whole thing that's actually you actually
00:31:04.240can't that's they're coming at this from the other direction they're only trying to do the racism
00:31:09.460maybe that's a good segue into the next portion of this book um the first section again was sort
00:31:16.860of the untruths and this is this next section is the bad ideas in action the untruths in action
00:31:23.280and they lead off with intimidation and violence oh in some ways not the most objectionable part
00:31:29.440of the book but there are some pretty dark sides to this chapter they describe a series of violent
00:31:36.340or semi-violent reactions to campus speakers, all occurring in 2017. They talk about the UC
00:31:43.260Berkeley protests related to Milo Yiannopoulos, which started off with a group of peaceful
00:31:50.220protesters and then devolved when a smaller group of mostly non-students turned violent.
00:31:56.820There's only anecdotal evidence that any of those people were students. And the authors sort of harp
00:32:02.240on that anecdotal evidence, which mostly consists of some tweets. They described the Middlebury
00:32:07.620College protest of Charles Murray, the bell curve author, and Professor Alison Stanger,
00:32:14.940who was there to moderate. That occurred in March 2017. There were a bunch of students that showed
00:32:21.340up to disrupt the speech. When Murray and Stanger left, they were accosted by activists. Her hair
00:32:28.520was aggressively pulled and the car that they were in was pounded on until officials cleared
00:32:33.700a path for them to leave. So I don't want to downplay these incidents, but it is worth noting
00:32:38.900that in both cases, the evidence shows the violence was driven by outside groups, organized
00:32:43.880anti-fascist activists, not students themselves. So the author's attempt to characterize the violence
00:32:51.280as like reflective of student ideology does not feel honest. They also talk about Heather
00:32:57.620mcdonald an anti-black lives matter writer who spoke at claremont mckenna college in april of
00:33:02.5802017 um in that one protesters attempted to shut it down from what i could tell no actual violence
00:33:08.640occurred um so maybe they were running low on spicy anecdotes here right and then they get
00:33:15.820to charlottesville oh what so in august 2017 unite the right rally in charlottesville attracts a
00:33:22.580bunch of neo-nazis and other alt-right types right there's peaceful protests of the rally
00:33:27.980and there are also outbursts of violence most notably a right-winger drove his car into a
00:33:34.980crowd of peaceful left-wing protesters killing a woman named heather hire they do condemn the
00:33:41.520violence that killed heather hire but what's very telling is that the authors do not use this as an
00:33:46.440example of the rights intolerance towards alternate viewpoints and peaceful protests
00:33:51.280Instead, they quickly pivot to saying that the left used Charlottesville as an excuse to shut down speech from the right.
00:33:59.620And they spend the rest of the chapter talking about that.0.99
00:34:04.380You have this like entire book committed to the idea that liberals especially are engaged in an unprecedented level of censorious conduct on campus.1.00
00:34:12.980And then they glaze right over the fact that in all of the modern campus culture wars, the only person to be killed was a peaceful left wing protester.
00:34:23.280I thought that this was like the moral low point of the book.
00:34:26.040This is the thing with these kinds of books is that like they want to cast one kind of random anecdote as indicative of a larger culture and another kind of anecdote as just like a random lone wolf event with no further significance.
00:34:41.440But, like, they're doing it exactly wrong because if you look at the incidents where left-wing protesters went too far, those incidents are almost unanimously denounced by the left.
00:35:09.260Like Kyle Rittenhouse is a fucking celebrity on the right. Trump rather famously did not particularly denounce what happened to Heather Heyer.0.99
00:35:17.120Right. So that's the Trump comments. They even mentioned critically. This is when Trump famously said there were very fine people on both sides. So the authors talk about that briefly without acknowledging that what they're saying is that from the very top of the conservative political establishment is implicit endorsement of this violence.
00:35:36.780You have absolutely nothing like that on the left.
00:36:18.680This is such a classic pattern of the other articles about this that I've read where they
00:36:22.720cite this overwhelming culture of violence that is like taken over the left and, you
00:36:28.880know, they're about to install authoritarianism and all this slippery slope stuff.
00:36:31.660And then once you boil it down, what we've basically got here is two anecdotes in which people who were not college students behaved in an indefensible way.
00:40:42.300Height and Lukianoff leave this out of the book.
00:40:44.040i presume to make it look like wax's colleagues were maybe unfairly assuming that her statements
00:40:50.200were racist when in fact she was openly endorsing the idea that white european culture is superior
00:40:55.800all she did was say that one race was superior to another and these kids is that what racism is
00:41:03.080these days folks they also left out some controversial portions of the original essay
00:41:07.780like she claims that the birth control pill has contributed to social decline um you know they
00:41:12.940They omit that, presumably, so that the reader does not have to do a double take and think a little bit about who they're defending.
00:41:19.980A good sign when you're drawing attention to a real societal problem is when you have to constantly lie to get people worked up about it.
00:41:27.880Their claim that no one substantively addressed her arguments is also just an outright lie.
00:41:33.640Several of her Penn Law colleagues provided detailed rebuttals to her statements about like the measurable impact of cultural values, which Height knows because one of them, Professor Jonah Gelbach, engaged Height in a blog debate on the subject shortly after it happens.
00:41:49.880Oh, wow. They even quietly drop a citation to his rebuttal at the end of the very sentence
00:41:56.660that claims Wax's colleagues never rebutted the substance of her claims. Transparently dishonest.
00:42:03.140As someone who was very familiar with this whole situation, I was like, no fucking way.0.98
00:42:07.380So were you one of the campus activists at the time, Peter?0.95
00:42:09.940No, no. When I was at Penn, racism was allowed and OK. I will say this about Amy Wax at Penn. First, she is one of those nightmare professors that everyone fears because she genuinely revels in making students uncomfortable.
00:42:29.120If a student was doing poorly during like a line of questioning from her, she would be far more likely to stick with that student.0.68
00:42:38.560Most professors move on because they want productive discussion.
00:42:48.380At the time, although unbeknownst to administration, she was engaging in debates on a couple of blogs about race.
00:42:59.660You know, she was having these really weird conversations that basically were about how she believed that black students in her classes and in her children's classes when they were growing up tended to be more disruptive, lower performers, etc.
00:43:13.380As this this whole sort of debacle unfolded in 2017, she made the claim that no black student has ever finished in the top of her class and that she was unfamiliar with any black student at Penn finishing in the top 25 percent of the class, something like that.
00:43:31.200And like the dean immediately put out a statement being like, that's just not true.
00:46:40.960I love how in these stories, like the structure of these stories is like he was accused of being racist in a later op-ed for Stormfront.
00:46:49.720Now, if you listen to that story closely, and that's the story that the authors here tell, you might have noticed a slightly weird little fact.
00:46:56.660I said there were two months between the initial comments he made and the student protest.
00:47:02.480That is not how angry mobs tend to work, right?
00:47:59.740what they're protesting is what they believe to be the mistreatment of black students by police
00:48:05.440and campus administration. Sort of circling back, this book is about ideas and how students are so
00:48:13.300coddled that they can't even tolerate different ideas. But when those ideas are directly wrapped
00:48:20.240up in material differential treatment, are students not allowed to protest that? Are they
00:48:25.200not allowed to say hey i think that's racist right what are you saying these students are
00:48:29.780doing wrong here right i don't know how you can see it any other way other than height and
00:48:34.300lukianov are saying that there are certain opinions that students should not be able to
00:48:39.060voice freely right right that's all that's all there is to their position didn't weinstein like
00:48:44.160get did he get fired or something there was some like lawsuit eventually right he became like this
00:48:48.600huge murder he and his wife um who was also a professor there sued and uh they settled and0.93
00:48:55.540resigned again they get a big payout it's like what what's the actual fucking like downside here0.92
00:48:59.720right nothing if you're if you're a conservative or a quote-unquote progressive making a conservative0.76
00:49:05.800turn the absolute best thing that can happen to you is to become embroiled in a campus controversy
00:49:11.800like seriously dollar signs in your eyes as soon as it starts to happen yeah book deal podcast yeah
00:49:18.340All right. The next section of the book is about the social and political circumstances that have brought us to this point. And they start off with political polarization. I actually think their discussion on this is pretty unobjectionable other than being derivative.
00:49:32.140What I do want to talk about is one piece of the chapter subtitled Outrage from the Off-Campus Right, which chronicles some of the ways in which these stories about left-wing campus outrage get fed into the right-wing media ecosystem and then turn into right-wing outrage.
00:49:50.040So they returned to Evergreen State College, where the comments by Brett Weinstein supposedly sparked outrage.
00:49:57.480Again, he was on Tucker, and there was backlash from the right.
00:50:01.940But here is where they actually describe some of that backlash.1.00
00:50:07.620Multiple students are doxxed by right-wingers online.
00:50:10.640Their identities and contact information spread across right-wing social media.
00:50:14.660Hundreds of threats of violence are received by students, including by like text messages by, you know, like literally dozens and dozens and dozens of text messages by from random numbers being received by individuals.
00:50:27.040The neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division posted video of themselves walking around campus at night, putting up posters that say, join your local Nazis and black lives don't matter.0.99
00:50:40.140You might notice that this is considerably more severe than anything you've heard about students from this, either this ordeal or any other ordeal they described, but it is tucked away within a subsection of a single chapter in the middle of the book.0.97
00:50:58.880Just bizarre and frustrating how much right wing violence directed at left wing speech is treated like a side plot here, given that like every time it's described, it's far more serious than any of the anecdotes about the conduct of the left.
00:51:14.060The right wing stuff seems like organized and like kind of top down to like this would all be coming from Tucker and various other right wing websites, none of whom presumably are like condemning this after the fact.
00:51:24.580Right. I mean, they seem to just categorize it as like, well, this is not stemming from campus, so it's not what our book's about. I guess in a total vacuum, that might make sense. They're like, well, we're writing about campus culture. But when they're just talking about how like these students were mean to the university president and then it's like Nazis with masks put up signs around campus and like, you know, spray painted swastikas and shit.
00:51:48.400Are you really just like pretending that the first thing is worse than the second thing?0.95
00:51:53.820It's like if they're just saying that, like, oh, it's in a different category.0.98
00:51:56.440It's like, well, then you should have written about that fucking category.0.99