Michael Peter have you read the coddling of the American mind I have not because I'm a millennial and I can't handle challenging [Music] ideas today we're talking about the coddling of the American mind uh a book about campus Culture by Jonathan height and Greg lukanov finally a couple middle-aged men complaining about what the kids are doing The Bravery when I was doing background research for this book I ended up becoming kind of fascinated with the origins of our modern campus culture discourse oh if you go through all the op-eds and think pieces you can actually sort of see that at some point during the first half of 2015 there was a wave of writers suddenly talking about the hyper sensitivity of college students there is a March 2015 New York Times article about safe spaces at Brown University that gets a ton of attention and we'll talk about it a bit later Vox publishes a piece titled I'm a liberal professor and my liberal students terrify me National Review publishes a piece comparing modern campus culture to both m theism and the Salem Witch Trials now we're talking I love a good the college students are snowflakes and that's why they're just like Hitler I love that I hate it when the kids exaggerate and you had uh Jonathan sh writing a piece about the the new political correctness for New York Magazine oh I don't know that this was caused by anything as much as it's just sort of the momentum of the discourse but it's probably worth noting that in January of 2015 the Charlie eddo shootings happen I don't want to get too aggressive with my causal diagnosis here but I do wonder whether a discussion of free expression migrated into the realm of American campuses and that's sort of what made really made this take off or Peter the college students are just terrible and we noticed someone's got to talk about the kids so to give you a little taste of what this discourse was like at the time I'm going to send you a bit from that Vox piece the piece is by a professor writing under the pseudonym Edward Scher he is purportedly hiding his identity due to his fear of retaliation from students he writes about an incident where a student complained about a lecture of his in 2009 and the student called him like a communist just based on some pretty bland liberal takes about the recession okay and he tells the story of how Administration sort of quickly realized that the complaint was [ __ ] they rolled their eyes a little bit and they disposed of it and that was that so now you can uh read this uh okay he says in 2015 such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness or even acceptability of the materials we reviewed in class the complaint would Center solely on how my teaching affected the students's emotional state and if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class professional consequences would likely follow I love these where it's like I've made up something in my head and gotten mad about it my wife has a friend who absorbs way too much True Crime content and as a result is convinced that there's like a real risk that she's going to get murdered right this is the academic equivalent of that right where they are like reading these little anecdotes about students gone wild and getting Professor is fired and they're like oh no I'm going to get fired um no probably not man relax and all of this is probably based on you reading other articles about people also imagining a Multiverse where they get fired yes it's just like a bunch of arch conservatives like pooping back and forth forever so that's a little taste of the discussion that's happening uh this discourse carries on throughout the summer of 2015 enter our authors Jonathan height and Greg Lucano height is a social psychologist lukanov is a constitutional lawyer for fire the foundation for individual rights in education a group that's very invested in uh free speech on campus right that basically exists to promote this moral panic and make this seem like a problem worthy of national concern in September 2015 they write a lengthy piece for the Atlantic titled the coddling of the American mind how trigger warnings are hurting mental Health on Camp do you remember this piece I have read sections of this piece over the years it's I can't place it on the timeline where it lands in relation to the Oberland sandwich story which I think of like the totemic example of Campus culture [ __ ] but this was after a wave of scare stories and really a lot of these aging middle-age dudes grasping around for like ways to substantiate the feelings that they had they couldn't really come up with that many firings and they couldn't actually find places where people were having their speech suppressed so they landed on trigger warnings right it's just like something nice that teachers started doing for students like no schools required them this was like the only way they could cast students as totalitarian right and they just like leaned into it even though it makes no sense hey and lukanov what sets their piece of part is that most of the discourse to this point has centered around professors uh professors are worried about oversensitive students getting them fired yeah Heiden lukanov purport to be focusing on the students themselves saying that the psychology of modern students is counterproductive to their own mental health because what we're really in it for is to help the students be better even though we've dedicated our entire careers talking about how the students are full of [ __ ] and too weak so that angle combined with I think their ostensible expertise in Psychology and Free Speech law lands them a book deal and in 2018 they published this book The codling of the American mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure I wonder if there's anything else that might have set up that generation for failure there's any uh economic trends no it's definitely the trigger warnings the first section of the book is about the bad ideas that they believe are spreading on College campuses which they very dramatically call the three great untruths so let me I will send them to you oh okay I guess I guess I knew that the word untruth was a word yeah if only we had a a three-letter shorter word for such a thing the opposite of Truth um okay it says one what doesn't kill you makes you weaker two always trust your feelings and three life is a battle between good people and evil people yeah so my question to you Mike is have you ever in your life encountered a person who believes a single one of these things I was just about to say this doesn't sound like it's a list of hegemonic ideas this sounds like it's a caricature I'm deep in like leftwing weirdos in my life yeah same and I have never met anyone who who believes that you should always trust your feelings or what doesn't kill you makes you weaker Peter I live in Seattle these are my people this is my world I have never in like the deepest darkest Crystal yoga Instagram comments seen anybody Express anything like this you know the idea that college students are in a bubble super prominent but I don't remember any time in my life where I was exposed to more different ideas than college right just sort of by the nature of it the people who are in bubbles are like the 48-year olds watching Fox news every night freaking out about this stuff yeah yeah or reading the Atlantic right and also I mean we talked a couple weeks ago about how Clash of civilizations is still one of the most commonly assigned books on College syllabi like the idea that every kid goes to college and just immediately goes into like the gender studies program just completely ignores the fact that a ton of people go to college and go into like stem fields or into economics that's the thing is like there is so much rightwing ideology are ENT they Etc I uh I learned from a podcast called five to four that law schools are actually quite conservative if you're familiar with that sounds like a cool cool podcast that people should subscribe to with handsome co-hosts I mean to be clear this is the entire premise of the book right it's built around the thesis that these ideas are spreading on college campuses and that we should all be worried every other part of the book relies on this being true right you know if the argument is well look I think that modern college students have a slightly different view of what harm is relative to myself that's not a book right no one's going to buy that book you need that you need them to believe that what doesn't kill you makes you weaker right and that is the first untruth that they start off with the untruth of fragility they call it what doesn't kill you makes you weaker now again No One Believes that um nor do they provide even one example of anyone saying anything like this really nothing they don't even bother they just skip straight to the debunking yeah that said I will say like the thesis here is relatively clear they're arguing that like sometimes injuries of of various types physical mental emotional can actually make you stronger and therefore efforts to insulate yourself from harm can be counterproductive at times sure they lead off with an analogy about peanut allergies oh this [ __ ] thing this is like a weird right-wing substack Trope that like peanut allergies are fake or something it 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 from developing resistance so allergy rates went up right so in the analogy the peanut is racist comments and you have to build up your immunity to racist comments otherwise you'll end up being allergic I mean look I am not allowed to sit in Judgment of anyone else's tryhard metaphors L mine be judged but it's both a totally asinine metaphor because like human biology does not work the same as like exposure to ideas but then also it's kind of a perfect metaphor because if somebody says hey I'm allergic to peanuts and you're like oh somebody didn't get enough as a kid you're just a huge [ __ ] [ __ ] and if some teenager who's like a member of a minority group is like hey uh don't say slurs around me and you're like can't handle it baby you're just a prick This research on the heritability of IQ Q is produced in a facility that also produces racism yeah the reason that you know this is a terrible analogy is because you can easily just craft the opposite analogy right like what about seat belts seat belt use was promoted and mandated by law injuries and fatalities went down right ipsofacto being cautious is good and effective right nobody's talking about building up their car crash immunity such a stupid [ __ ] analogy I can't even believe it that's unbelievable what hi High lukian failed a lot of this around is the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy which involves exposure to things that um that bother you that that can uh trigger you Etc so 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 and so children are sort of doing the wrong thing they're doing this backwards and it's like okay I I hear you in like this narrow sense but we're talking about control old therapy settings not like the discourse online or whatever the [ __ ] or like you know the discourse on college campuses right if somebody has Arachnophobia you shouldn't just like go and put a tarantula on them and be like you're welcome the the place where the analogy totally breaks down is that being exposed to bad ideas is not inherently worthwhile being exposed to like flat earth right or like Sasquatch is real that doesn't do anything for you intellectually because those ideas are [ __ ] wrong and because you only have so much time to entertain so many ideas maybe we should narrow it down to some interesting ones right yeah yeah yeah this entire discourse is based around stripping all of these concepts of all of their specificity and saying just platitudes like being exposed to challenging ideas is a good thing well it depends on which ideas they are right so it's like they don't actually believe this cognitive behavioral therapy and their belief in it is sort of a big underlying theme in the book it's their basis for the whole Cod concept right we're being too soft on the kids they need to be exposed to bad unpleasant things sometimes because that's how you learn to resist them the primary example that they use of this type of thing is from Brown University in 2015 where there was a debate held on campus concerning rape culture and some students organized a safe Space Room on campus with like soothing music blankets cookies coloring books Play-Doh and people trained to handle trauma I I poked around on this from what I can tell the anecdote is true this this safe space existed as described and some students at least one student involved made a comment that was sort of like I needed the safe space because I was being bombarded with a bunch of ideas that went against my closely held beliefs conservative media latches on to that quote which is just one kid who was like 19 talking off the cuff to a reporter yeah and and they're like look these kids are literally wrapping themselves in blankies to avoid ideas they don't like but then what's so weird to me is like why isn't this a challenging idea that the conservatives need to be exposed to I thought we were into challenging ideas that's a challenging idea like let's have blankets and Playdoh and therapists for kids that are rape victims the whole point is that these people want to boost certain conservative ideas right but they don't feel super comfortable defending those ideas directly so they shift the discourse into what hear them out right they don't want to have to get into a conversation about rape culture so what do they do they move a step away from that conversation and say well the real problem is that you won't engage with the conversation it also does overlook the real very real problem of sexual assault on college campuses right like it's very odd to sort of look at the phenomenon of Campus rape and be like these are the people I'm singling out for criticism I think it's a way of indirectly rolling your eyes at someone's trauma right right because maybe it's true that some of those students or all of those students are not processing the trauma in a healthy way by creating a safe space that looks like this maybe that's true I'm I'm not a psychologist I don't know obviously uh Jonathan height thinks that that's true but that's not the shape that the discourse took right the discourse was sneering right if you sincerely believe that they're reacting to trauma right that's not an empathetic response to say the least it's focusing more on what is annoying to you personally than what is a problem societally I mean yeah there are 20 million college students or so in this country right and if you want to find a handful of examples of them doing something stupid you easily can but it doesn't prove a trend and when they do try to use actual data to show a trend you can immediately see that the argument is weak right they point to a 2017 study where 58% of of the students said that they agree with the statement that it's important to be part of a Campus Community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas got them that same study found that 92% of students agreed with the following statement it is important to be part of a Campus Community where I am exposed to the ideas and opinions of other students even if they are different from my own right they don't mention that statistic I had to go pull it out of the study but keep in mind they are writing a whole book about how students are increasingly rejecting the ideals of like the free exchange of ideas right while the data that they are selectively using shows that students actually overwhelmingly Embrace those ideas and they're not giving you any comparison to other societal groups right if this is something about Elite liberal colleges then you should compare it to other colleges if this is something about how colleges are coddling students then you should compare that to non- colge educated students and you should probably also compare that to older people like how many Boomer think that it's important to be exposed to other ideas that's the problem with these books and these articles is they always present you this data in a vacuum on to untruth number two always trust your feelings this is the Yoda untruth once again I have to preface this by saying that no one actually believes that you should always trust your feelings no one thinks that I've never witnessed a single person even in like the depths of social media sincerely say that facts don't trust my feelings much of the chapter centers around the uh supposed epidemic of Campus speakers being disinvited based on their controversial views love it they say that this is the product of students acting emotionally and they pose the rhetorical question should a student saying I am offended be sufficient reason to cancel a lecture this 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 yes but you only feel that they're invalid yeah you feel based on your review of the literature right on your reading they're sort of like operating out of this framework that being offended is like inherently irrational or emotional right right it's reasonable to be offended by Nazis or by pedophilia or by someone who's like killing puppies one of the things that changed my mind on this was I believe it was New Yorker article that actually interviewed one of these oh so scary campus activists who was protesting a speaker and 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 there's a huge difference actually between just like a random person comes to talk on a campus on like a Wednesday night you can go or not go versus to get your diploma you have to actually sit through a speech by I think it was condalisa rice that they were protesting and like when college campuses invite speakers to talk they are conferring some of their Prestige onto the speaker if somebody says oh I'm I'm regularly invited to give talks at Harvard that is some Prestige that that person is using right and 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 this person does not deserve it also you're if you're just a 22-year-old without access to power you only have so many opportunities in your life to scream at Lisa Rice and I think you got to take them I've sent you a chart from the book that shows disinvitation attempts by year oh [ __ ] off I know this chart I know this chart very well oh I love this chart good God tell me what you're seeing tell me what you're seeing so okay this is a chart that tracks disinvitation attempts by year and source of criticism over time so it starts in 20 2000 and it goes to 2017 and starting in 2008 you can see the lines diverge where the leftwing disinvitation attempts start spiking and the right-wing disinvitation attempts stay flat so what I'm supposed to be learning at a glance from this chart is it like wow the left the left has really gone off the rails look at all these disinvitation well so the bottom line is that in 2016 there were 42 attempted disinvitation so if you look at the numbers that has approximately doubled in the span of a few years huge on the other hand these numbers are unbelievably insignificant it's like you think that the leftand access is some sort of truncation like it means like 42,000 right like 4200 or something it's like no no it's it's [ __ ] 42 42 disinvitation attempts that's right right who [ __ ] cares there are in excess of 4500 degree granting institutions of higher education in the United States if each of them hosted 20 speakers a year which is an extremely low estimate that would mean that for every 2100 or so speaker invitations you're getting one attempt right to disinvite a speaker right that's 20 speakers per college per year yeah if it's 100 then we're talking about less than one in 10,000 right these are unbelievably minuscule numbers this is this is one of the weirdest things about the the quote unquote data in this book is that like if you actually look at it it doesn't illustrate their point it illustrates exactly the opposite if there's tens of thousands of speakers being invited to campus every year a lot of those people probably are really controversial and a lot of them probably just give their talks and everybody goes home and like maybe there's a a tense Q&A the mismatch between leftwing disinvitation and right-wing dis invitations the most obvious explanation for that is that there is now a huge media apparatus that exists almost exclusively to freak out about left-wing disinvitation so of course you're going to have more reports of disinvitation attempts because there's like hotlines and [ __ ] not just that but this is a time in which this of oh liberal college kids are trying to cancel speakers that discourse picks up what that results in is conservative student groups trying to troll liberal students by engaging with speakers who they know are going to cause a [ __ ] St right yeah yeah that's a good point by the way did you catch the last sentence in a little paragraph describing the uh the chart oh God asterisk show where the solid line would have been had my Milo hopis been removed from the data set this this data set is so small that they had to control for Milo yopos for the protest against someone who's like genuinely extremely odious and like deserves to be protested so all of these things are like feeding into one another to drive these numbers up and you still only get to 42 it is very funny to me how much time conservatives spend whining about the marketplace of ideas behaving like a market did I ever tell you that I was disinvited from speaking at a school because of your tweets Peter I would disinvite the [ __ ] out of you if I saw your tweets no the the five to four crew was once invited by a student group to speak at a law school uh and I will at the at the request of the student who thought he would get into trouble uh I will not name the law school we were invited and then the student came back in a panic saying I raised this to Administration for approval and not only did they say no but I might be in trouble here for even suggesting it oh wow okay so they said like hard no like really no so you know just to sort of like Circle back on some recent developments in my life disinvited from campus fired from my job all for speech related things where is my [ __ ] Tucker Carlson uh two minutes right but then this to me this is like so revealing of the entire thing is that no one actually cares about people being disinvited from [ __ ] campus talks no offense but like you have a podcast that goes to tens of thousands of people your views are widely accessible yeah like this is a minuscule component of whether or not speech is free especially now at a time when like anyone can set up a social media account anyone can set up a medium account anyone can self-publish a book speech has never been Freer in literally human history right so it's like I I care so much about free speech that I've I've made it my entire career as these guys basically have but I also care so little about it that I only care about this extremely narrow slice of quote unquote censorship they they've chosen the one place that conservatives can claim oppression I just remembered that I was also once invited to speak at a law school on the condition that we not make fun of any professors and we had like no plans to but we just said no as a matter of principle yeah I think that's fair I think that's fair um all right let's let's move on to untruth number three life is a battle between good people and evil people something you hear all the time that's something I learned at a Drag Brunch this one is about what hey and lukanov say is students tendency to place people in one of two categories either good or evil and then act accordingly and that is sort of their framework for a discussion of identity Politics the kids are too into their groups this is one of the weakest parts of the book it lacks both anecdotes and data and they say that there are two types of identity politics shared Humanity identity politics which appeal to Shared morality and use unifying language and were embraced by Martin Luther King Jr okay and common enemy identity politics which involve mobilizing one group against another and were embraced by Adolf Hitler [Laughter] again this chapter is a critique of students who supposedly act like everyone is either good or evil and the authors are like okay so you have two types of identity Politics the Martin Luther King Jr kind and the Hitler kind there's two kinds of 19-year olds the two genders Martin Luther King Jr and Hitler like do we really need to invent cute subcategories of identity politics to distinguish between MLK and Hitler yeah yeah yeah isn't the operative distinction that one was against oppression on the basis of identity and one was for it isn't this also the argument against social change throughout history was that like you're doing it wrong right I would be fine with this if you asked me oh my God it's John Gray it's like if you asked me could you not be racist rather than would you not be racist but like that is not how social progress works at like any point in history it's hard to parse this and engage with it seriously because like you're you're pointing out that it's unserious right right now there are parts of this chapter that I think are like relatively inoffensive they talk about the dangers of group think and tribalism and how mentally categorizing someone as a member of the outg group can lead to unfairly characterizing their actions and their intentions but what they do not do is provide any data or research showing that this is like a Dem monster problem among college students in particular right you know obviously like tribal thinking pretty prevalent across Society so given the thesis of the book The obvious question is whether the younger generation is more susceptible to this stuff they don't even try to address that it's also very funny to criticize 19-year-olds for being too fragile and then immediately be like when you call me racist you're being like Hitler you guys are totally Hitler right now the last thing I want to add in this section is that like a lot of what they are ascribing to like a new desire among young people to punish their opponents frankly I don't see a lot of evidence that it's not basically 100% social media yeah a the ability of some college kid to like cause a ruckus on campus is now way higher than it was when I was in college yeah B someone who is on the right is being constantly exposed to the excesses of the left because social media accounts are taking that content filtering it boiling it down and throwing it at their face Peter imagine if there was social media when we were in college one thing that I think the younger generation doesn't understand is how often Our Generation talks about how glad they are that social media didn't exist When We Were Young no [ __ ] dude oh my God this is something I think about all the time my uh my libertarian phase has been lost to history uh I when you said your libertarian phase I like flash back to like one month in law school yeah and then you met other Libertarians that's basically what happened to me like no oh ailia oh interesting okaya you know like when you first are exposed to libertarianism coming from a leftish perspective you're like maybe I can do libertarianism without the racism and then you like absorb the literature a bit and you're like no you're like no that's their whole thing that's actually you actually can't that's they're coming at this from the other direction they're they're only trying to do the racism maybe that's a good segue into the next portion of this book um the first section again was sort of the untruths and this is this next section is the bad ideas in action the the untruths in action and they lead off with intimidation and violence oh in some ways not the most objectionable part of the book but there are some pretty dark sides to this chapter they describe a series of violent or semi violent reactions to campus speakers all occurring in 2017 they talk about the UC Berkeley uh protests related to Milo yannopoulos which started off with a group of peaceful protesters and then devolved when a smaller group of mostly non students turned violent there's only anecdotal evidence that any of those people were students and the authors sort of harp on that anecdotal evidence which mostly consists of some tweets they described the Middlebury College protest of Charles Murray the bell curve author uh and uh Professor Allison Stanger who was there to moderate uh that occurred in March 2017 there were a bunch of students that showed up to disrupt the speech uh when Murray and Stanger left they were accosted by activists her hair was aggressively pulled and the car that they were in was pounded on until officials cleared a path for them to leave so I don't want to downplay these incidents but it is worth noting that in both cases the evidence shows the violence was driven by outside groups organized anti-fascist activists not students themselves so the the author's attempt to characterize the violence as like reflective of student ideology does not feel honest they also talk about Heather McDonald an anti-black lives matter writer who spoke at Claremont McKenna College in April of 2017 um in that one protesters attempted to shut it down from what I could tell no actual violence occurred um so maybe they were running low on spicy anecdotes here I don't know and then they get to Charlottesville oh what so in August 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville attracts a bunch of neo-nazis and other alt-right types right there's peaceful protest of the rally and there are also outbursts of violence most notably a right- Winger drove his car into a crowd of peaceful leftwing protesters killing a woman named Heather H they do condemn the violence that killed Heather H but what's very telling is that the authors do not use this as an example of the rights intolerance towards alternate viewpoints and peaceful protest instead they quickly pivot to saying that the left used Charlottesville as an excuse to shut down speech from the right and they spend the rest of the chapter talking about that oh my [ __ ] God you have this like entire book committed to the idea that these that liberals especially are engaged in an unprecedented level of censorious conduct on campus and 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 I thought that this was like the moral low point of the book this 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 but 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 right right you have presidents of universities you have heads of student unions saying hey don't send death threats to this person don't throw bottles at this person like we condemn what happened right and then when you have these outbursts of right-wing violence you have them celebrated by right-wing leaders right like Kyle writtenhouse is a [ __ ] celebrity on the right Trump rather famously did not particularly denounce what happened to Heather haer right so that's that the Trump comments they even mention critically this is when Trump famously said they 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 indorsement of this violence you have absolutely nothing like that on the left nothing they just have no argument that this represents any kind of culture they me mention a report from fire the organization that lukanov works for Jes they gloss right over this and try to handwave it away but very few students report that they might actually participate in in violent actions like this 2% said that they would be willing to disrupt a guest speaker event by making noise during the event 1% said they'd be willing to use violent action to disrupt it right it's like whoa whoa whoa whoa like what you're saying is that there's like a violence problem and one% of people are willing to engage even theoretically in violence right this is such a classic pattern of the other articles about this that I've read where they cite this overwhelming culture of violence that is like taken over the left and you know they're about to install authoritarianism and all the slippery slope stuff and 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 yeah one anecdote where violence almost happened another anecdote of right-wing violence that is far more severe than anything the leftwing people did and a public opinion poll that shows 1% of college students say that they're okay with violence right which brings us to the next section uh the next chapter titled witch hunts and they cite the sociologist Albert bergerson as saying that witch hunts have three different characteristics one they arise quickly and dramatically two they charge the target with crimes against the collective and three the charges are often trivial or fabricated okay I guess it never quite hit them that this book and the broader reaction against campus culture kind of fits this description pretty nicely literally a Witch Hunt yep yeah going after 19-year-olds with blue hair but fine they kick it off by comparing uh atrocities in mouss China to modern-day campus culture War [ __ ] oh [ __ ] off this is a quote as historical events the two movements are radically different most notably in that the red guards were responding to the call of a totalitarian dictator who encouraged them to use violence while the American College students have been self-organized and almost entirely nonviolent uh yet there are similarities too for instance both were movements initiated by idealistic young college students fighting for what seemed to be a noble ideal the fact that one of them was top down and like killed hella people and the other one is bottom up and didn't do anything yeah there are some differences one one is a a massive totalitarian nation state right and the other is a small group of nonviolent student activists this is like me comparing you to Ted Bundy and being like well Peter didn't kill anybody and Ted Bundy did but there are similarities look I have brown hair too I get it I get it I get the comparison it's time for a little case study as I've mentioned nearly the entire book a collection of anecdotes many characterized in ways that feel flagrantly dishonest one of those is about University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Amy W wa I thought it would be worth exploring this one because I happen to know a good amount about the controversy and part of that is because I took a class with Amy wax when I was in law school at the University of Pennsylvania no way really I do consider myself a bit of a subject matter expert on this [ __ ] lady so in August 2017 wax and another law professor wrote an opinion piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled paying the price for the breakdown of the country's Bourgeois culture oh yeah the pece argued that many modern social problems could be traced to the decline of Bourgeois values such as hard work and getting married before having kids my God the most controversial line was all cultures are not equal or at least they are not equal in Preparing People to be productive in an advanced economy oh she claimed that this was about culture and not race but many people read it as a pretty clear racist dog whistle the story that height and of tell is that the next week a collection of students alumni and Pen law faculty condemn the peace they characterized this as a Witch Hunt and argue that none of these people addressed the substance of wax's claims but what they inexplicably leave out is that almost immediately after the oped was published wax did an interview with the daily Pennsylvanian the pen student newspaper where she touted the superior of anglo-protestant culture and said quote I don't shrink from the word Superior and everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans whoa holy [ __ ] so the dog whistle is just like a whistle yeah he and lukanov leave this out of the book I presume to make it look like wax's colleagues were maybe unfairly assuming that her statements were racist when in fact she was openly endorsing the idea that white European culture is superior all she did was say that one race was Superior to another and these kids is that what racism is these days folks they also left out some controversial portions of the original essay like she claims that the birth control pill has contributed to social decline okay um you know they they omit that presumably so that the reader does not have to do a double take right and think a little bit about who they're defending a 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 their claim that no one substantively addressed her arguments is also just an outright lie several of her pen law colleagues provided detailed rebuttal to her statements about like a measurable impact of cultural values um which height knows because one of them Professor Jon o gilach engaged height in a blog debate on the subject shortly after it happens oh wow they even quietly drop a citation to his rebuttal at the end of the very sentence that claims wax's colleagues never rebutted the substance of her claims transparently dishonest as someone who was very familiar with this whole situation I was like no [ __ ] way so were you one of the campus activists at the time Peter no no when I was um at Penn racism was allowed and okay um I will say this about Amy wax at pen first she is one of those nightmare professors that everyone fears because she genuinely Revels in making students uncomfortable if a student was doing poorly during like a line of questioning from her she would be far more likely to stick with that student most professors move on because they want productive discussion human dignity if she got the sense that someone was out of their depth she would just Hammer them continuously she loved it God at the time although unbeknownst to Administration she was engaging in debates on a couple of blogs about race yeah you 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 as this um 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 pen finishing in the top 25% of the class something like that and like the dean immediately put out a statement being like that's just not true that's that's just not true it is very funny to me in these books about the campus kids are so terrible whatever all of the anecdotes are basically like this this person who is famously a piece of [ __ ] experienced consequences first they came for the pieces of [ __ ] when I first read that like she was embroiled in controversy it just felt so affirming I was like you mean the [ __ ] worst person I've ever met all right case study number two Evergreen State College oh [ __ ] off this this is close to home for me I know many people who went to Evergreen and I'm Vaguely Familiar with this isn't this the like it was like a white Day of Silence something something all right so Progressive college in Washington state students don't receive grades but instead narrative evaluations of their work they don't have Majors but design their own course of study this has become like such a Trope on the right like this they love [ __ ] on this college and like every time I want to defend it I do remember the person who I know who majored in outdoor recreation at and it's like okay well look that that is a [ __ ] major but I majored in political science so uh are are they out of control perhaps but are Majors real no you can't tell me that majors are real there is an annual Evergreen State College tradition called the day of absence where students of color would stay off campus to raise awareness about their contributions to campus life in 2017 it was proposed that the tradition be inverted and white students and faculty be asked to remain away from campus a reportedly well-respected and Progressive at the time Professor Brett Weinstein harshly criticizes this idea he speaks out and says that there is a difference between students of color voluntarily removing themselves and then asking another group to go away which he describes as quote a show of force and an act of Oppression in and of itself now according to height and lukanov the day of absence comes and goes without incident but a couple months later students protest outside of Professor Weinstein's classroom many shouting him down and calling him racist they then march on the administrative buildings and confront the University president and some others the confrontation is a is aggressive there's video of it the students are being pretty hostile toward the president making weird demands like that he not use his hands while speaking students are purposefully blocking off the exits so faculty can't leave Professor Weinstein goes on Tucker Carlson to voice his concerns and things escalate right-wing media goes ballistic conservative groups are coming to the college to protest tensions exploding all around I love how in these stories like the structure of these stories is like he was accused of being racist in a later opit for Stormfront now 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 I said there were two months between the initial comments he made and the student protest that is not how angry mobs tend to work right yeah so what happened here what happened is that his comments were made in March and there were no protests or anything like that but in May there was a cafeteria altercation that involved two black students and a white student the two black students were removed from their dorms and detained by police in the middle of the night while the white student was not a group of students marched through the halls in protest Weinstein exited his classroom to confront them contentious exchange ensues the students then proceeded to march to confront the school president as I described so Hy and lukanov are narrating a story where these students are angrily protesting wiste's comments that's the whole point they're making right that these students are responding to Mere disagreement with aggressive protest but that is just not true what they're protesting is what they believe to be the mistreatment of black students by police and campus Administration right sort of circling back this book is about ideas and how students are so coddled that they can't even tolerate different ideas but when those ideas are directly wrapped up in material differential treatment right are students not allowed to protest that are they not allowed to say hey I think that's racist what are you saying these students are doing wrong here I don't know how you can see it any other way other than height and lukanov are saying that there are certain opinions that students should not be able to voice freely right right right that's all that's all there is to their position didn't Weinstein like get did he get fired or something there was some like lawsuit eventually right he became like this huge murderer he and his wife um who was also a professor there sued and uh they settled in resigned again they get a big payout it's like what what's the actual [ __ ] like downside here right nothing if you're if you're a conservative or a quote unquote Progressive making a conservative turn the absolute best thing that can happen to you is to become embroiled in a campus controversy like seriously dollar signs in your eyes as soon as it starts to happen yeah book deal podcast yeah all 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 what 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 okay so they return to Evergreen State College uh where the comments by Brett Weinstein supposedly sparked outrage uh again he was on Tucker and there was backlash from the right but here is where they actually describe some of that backlash swastikas show up on campus multiple students are doxed by right- wiers online their identities and contact information spread across right-wing social media hundreds of threats of violence are received by students including by like text messages uh by you know like literally dozens and dozens and dozens of text messages by from random numbers being received by individuals the Neo-Nazi group Adam wafin 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 holy [ __ ] you might notice that this is considerably more severe than anything we've heard about students from this either this ordeal or any other ordeal they described but it is tucked away away within a subsection of a single chapter in the middle of the book right just bizarre and frustrating how much right-wing violence directed at leftwing 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 the right-wing stuff seems like organized and like kind of toped down too 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 right I mean and they what 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 if 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 uh put up signs around campus and like you know spray painted swastikas and [ __ ] are you really just like pretending that the first thing is worse than the second thing it's like if they're just saying that like oh it's it's in a different category it's like well then you should have written about that [ __ ] category yeah absolutely and yeah maybe now is a good time to sort of question the overarching narrative here and in the campus culture debates generally which is that the left in particular is trying to suppress speech that it does not like on campus Jeffrey saaks a political scientist tracked instances of professors in the US being fired due to political speech from 2015 through 2017 and found that more professors were fired for Liberal speech than conservative speech by a factor of about 3 to one holy [ __ ] now I will float out the possibility that there are just more liberal professors it might be that that's not in and of itself indicative of like a 3 to1 bias right right but the media Watchdog fairness and accuracy in reporting Fair found that the New York Times dedicated seven times as much space to stories about the suppression of conservative speech when compared to stories about the suppression of liberal speech so the next few chapters of the book and we're sort of we're we're rounding the bend here describe an increase in depression and anxiety among young people as well as the increase in recent Decades of overprotective parenting Styles and the decline in unsupervised play by children oh I'm going to have to agree with them on that aren't I oh that bugs me yes I this is [ __ ] this section was sort of often interesting a little more directly in Height's Lane in terms of his expertise now obviously they trying to create a link in your mind between these phenomena which are pretty demonstrably real and supported by data and the phenomena that they describing on campuses which are not but I did feel like I was learning something for the first time in the book I mean I feel like the the percentage of kids who walk or bike to school has gone from roughly 50% to roughly 10% in the last 50 years and like I think that's a genuine like American Tragedy but then there's no real like generational argument to make because that has much more to do with like suburbanization the design of Roads the way that policing has become like much more aggressive on unaccompanied miners like there's sort of specific things there and you can't just be like this generation's too coddled yeah it's very useful to them to have some to be able to point to something for which there is actual data where like you can you can say well look this is an actual phenomenon and so maybe it's related to what's happening on campuses they need something that's a little more legitimate in the scienic community to hang their hat on here also some of these chapters are just sort of like miscellaneous complaints that they they couldn't fit into other parts of the book like they complain about Title 9 gender Equity requirements from the 9s for a bit sure are we just airing out whatever grievances about social justice initiatives that we haven't touched on before yeah the last section of the book is called wising up and it's about the things that we can do at the individual and societal level to address the pressing issues isues that they have raised throughout the book am I supposed to just say slurs to like 17year olds that I see on the street like it's like peanuts kids just eat some peanuts they list out six principles for raising wiser children half of which are practical little tips and half of which are bizarrely abstract conceptual principles okay one is limit and refine device time cool I'm sure another is the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being [Laughter] I love that it just like they've made up this fake thing that kids can't appreciate Nuance anymore and they're like give your kids a Nuance Jesus Christ oh man it's just very telling how half-baked the prescriptive argument here is the one thing that they give as a prescription although it it's vague but I think I should address it because it's the best faith argument they make is that they think that Administration is sort of facilitating students to do this or like allowing them and they they basically want universities to put their foot down which at least makes sense in the context of their argument in the context of their broader case here I don't think that they actually lay out how that would work yeah because the only thing administrators could do is things like Banning protests of speakers which is like far more worrying than the students protesting the speakers themselves what they do is they portray universities as like limply collapsing under the weight of every student protest right like students made these outrageous demands and the university immediately caved and basically they don't want universities to Cave to those demands right and then if you end up looking into it the demands were like relatively reasonable stuff about um you know about like police presence on campus Etc right but I think that's that's what they want they want universities to take a hard line whenever students make an Ask of the university the the university says go [ __ ] yourself you you bunch show [ __ ] hippies but this is like this is what's so weird about the contradiction at the heart of these arguments because it's like you want all of this you know free exchange of ideas but you don't want anyone to act on it what if you invite a campus speaker and that speaker has like Holocaust denial Publications in their past you would actually change your Tac in that case right you've received new information right but it's like to them they they've established disinvitation of Campus speakers as some sort of like [ __ ] front line of like American free speech inherently bad right but it's like sometimes that's appropriate you know I I thought about what about like Sam bankman freed or Elizabeth Holmes right like what happens when they get busted for fraud and you have a pending invitation are you supposed to hear them out right the idea that like discourse is just inherently valuable in every situation is obviously [ __ ] No One Believes it but it it's like the fundamental principle that under that underg a lot of their arguments and they don't actually ever really defend it it's just something that like you're supposed to believe in your heart right oh know free speech is the core of our of a free Society right you big picture I feel like I was kind of disappointed in this book cuz like are you pretending you went in with high expectations it's not that I had high expectations but I guess like I was sort of interested in the prospect of guys with like real expertise in Psychology and law trying to like lay out the case to the of their ability and you know I guess my takeway was if this is the best the other side can do a a book built on a foundation of straw man arguments Reliant almost exclusively on strings of anecdotes rather than data and then frequently misrepresenting the anecdotes there's there's nothing here right there can't be anything here the idea that there's an epidemic of student-led suppression of speech is just a media created fiction and there's no data that shows anything other than a tiny handful of incidents per year whether it's speakers being disinvited or protested or professors being fired and if that's all there is then what the [ __ ] are we talking about why do you think get caught on so much cuz this is I mean this book is really the tip of a [ __ ] Iceberg and like every month there's a new Atlantic article or some cover story somewhere about those stuff so like what do you think is actually going on let me let me read you a quote tell me if you know who this is from the children now love luxury they have Bad Manners contempt for Authority they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise children are now tyrants not the Servants of their households they no longer rise when Elders enter the room they contradict their parents chatter before company gobble up dainties at the table cross their legs and tyrannize their teachers do you know who said that you want me to say Hitler but I think it's Martin Luther King it's Socrates about 2400 years ago Socrates was complaining about the kids yeah and I think that that is fundamentally what's happening here right yeah old folks complaining about the misgivings of younger Generations is a tale as old as time and as you get older there is some part of your brain that gravitates towards this I can't explain it entirely but like watching the younger generation fumble their way through a part of life that we all struggled with to some degree it conjures up these complicated emotions and your soul just wants to say [ __ ] those kids man you know they just don't get it but you don't really hate those kids you hate the younger version of yourself that you see in those kids for not having absorbed the wisdom that you have now and you resent God for not letting you replay that moment yeah and if you can't process all of this you might just have to write an entire book about campus culture I just turned 41 so I'm looking for to this happening to me and eventually telling Tucker Carlson all about [Music] it