Well Whiskey coma why Don't from Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot
com. This is the three Whiskey Happy Hour with your bartenders Steve Hayward,
John Yu and power Lines International Woman of Mystery Lucretia gott a giving w where
you're being in loud down and low. Well, Hi everybody, and welcome
to an irregular edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, which really should probably
today be called the two Whiskey Happy Hour because it's just me and Lucretia and
we didn't even get together and tape in the usual way. Lucretia is indisposed
this weekend, and John Yu is back giving a lecture and Philly Cheese steak
procurement tour in the East and was also unavailable to record at any of our
usual time slots, So what I have instead is last weekend, Lucretia and
I gave the keynote address for Animal Girls annual gathering she calls comment or con
and it's her friends who are fans of her Friday column and various other acquaintances
of hers invitation only, and Lucretia and I were asked to give observations on
the current scene. My talk was called is it going to get worse?
Before it gets worse? And Lucretia complimented it with some thoughts on the future
of free speech. Now. We're both were recovering from a cold, so
my voice was a rasby then and still a little bit raspy today. But
in any case, without further ado, we're going to just get right into
it. We had a few of our usual sound irregularities, and you can't
completely hear all the questions from the audience, but I think you'll enjoy it
nonetheless, So without further ado, here we go. Well, look,
Susan, it's really a thrill to be here and important. I think it
just so happens by coincidence. I received today the latest circular from the Centers
for Disease Control. Their latest finding is that conservatism cannot be spread by casual
contact. So you know, we need gatherings like this, and more power
to Susan for doing this, and I hope we do more. I bring
you greetings from power Line Central, now offering pornography to go with our content
moderation. If those of you follow the comment drama about this, we'll be
familiar with this episode. Who knew you could get around our content moderation screens
by simply acting out your expletives that are otherwise banned from the comment threat new
possibilities for interpretive dance. And you know, it took us several days to
get that solved, during which time John hinder Rocker and I were doing wellness
checks on Scott Johnson about every ninety minutes, because you know, we feared
he was going to have an aneurysm at anymore. But I do mean that
a mild defense of some of our screens, which are sometimes too aggressive.
You think about the commonplace acronym POS, which usually means piece of you know
what. Now, the problem is now when lucreci uses POS, we sort
of know what she usually means by it. But if you're in the commercial
world, you'll know that POS can also mean point of sale and so true
story. Someone actually posted a comment one day that talked about our POS White
House. Now, if you're an automatic content screen, is that is that
referring to Biden family corruption or the gray matter between his ears? It's sort
of not entirely clear, And in this case, it's really a problem when
you think about it. I've been saying for years that it's much better to
have a crook in office than a liberal, because a crook cannot steal as
much as a liberal can give away. Now we were, well, No,
the problem now is that we have both in the White House at the
same time. So we're doubly screwed. Right, Okay, someday we're going
to fix all this. We are a year into a very expensive web redesign
that's gotten nowhere. We have all kinds of technical problems that you don't see
on the actual visual page, but lots of things are breaking and not working,
and I don't know why it's taking so long. But we're not the
only people having this problem, it turns out. But I won't bory with
that. Let's see what else to add here before we really get going.
Oh, Susan of course announced that the general theme for this year's conference was
what election? By which I thought she meant, or the meaning I decided
to run with was this is my disposition is to try and take a long
term outlook in a short run time. In other words, we tend to
follow the election cycle, the twenty four hour news cycle, and so we
both are much more interested in longer term forces that a lot of the short
term problems and trying to fix things in the short run is often ineffective and
counterproductive if you don't grapple with the longer term problems. So I'll just limit
my rank punditry to just saying very briefly that really, there's only two things
I don't like about the Biden administration. It's domestic policy and it's foreign policy.
Other than that, it's pretty good, right, sons, And I
am tempted to say, of course, right now, I'll say more about
this going forward, but we'd live at a time to twist that old liberal
cliche. Let's give war a chance. All. That's all we are saying,
right, it'd be nice if victory were in the American vocabulary. That
seems to be a problem. Not only has the Bide administration one more common
Susan. Sorry, not only has the Bide administration been appeasing Iran, but
for all their tough talk on China, I'll bet they'll be appeasing China before
long too. And the problem with appeasing communist China is two hours later,
you feel like you have to do it all over again. Okay, Sorry,
yes, you're probably right, Okay, but what impeccable timing, Susan
to have this conference at the beginning of World War three, that's terrific timing.
And I did propose to Susan. I mean, the title is will
it get worse before it gets worse? The main focus I thought this is
some weeks ago, but it's of course obviously still even more salient over the
last events of the last three six hours, is to talk a little bit
about the wider meaning of October seven and its aftermath, a date that I
think will live in history along with December seventh and September eleven. And my
first opening interpretive frame is what I call my first law of insufficient paranoia.
And the first law of insufficient paranoia is, no matter how bad you think
things look, you will invariably find out when you look, things are even
worse than you thought. And what October seven revealed this part, I think
is obvious to everyone here, is that anti Semitism is not only back,
but it's back bigger than ever. But it's more. No, it was
never gone, but I think there is something new now. I think it's
more than just the old ethnic resentments which was ugly enough all by itself.
It hasn't added ideological dimension that I'll say more about going forward. My key
proposition for everyone here and actually anywhere, is that the Gaza war, and
however much it may widen, is not just Israel's fight. It's all of
our fights. And I think this is also I think, obviously I want
to really focus in and crystallize it, is that the hatred that's directed at
Israel than the Jews right now is meant for all of the rest of us
too. I mean, you know, when you hear crowds shout death to
America, which is now being chanted in some streets in America as well as
in too many classrooms, we should believe the people who say this. I
have to say, I think it was on Wednesday of this week I get
on Twitter and I see one of the five things trending was death to America,
and I thought, all of this again, right, but there it
is. We should take it seriously. That's point number one. The second
thing is I'm amazed that no one has pointed this out before now, and
I haven't had a chance to write this up yet. But cast your mind
back to what was that five or six years ago when you had a handful
of young men with their tiki torches from Peer one in Charlottesville, and their
chant was, Jews will not replace us. And I kept wanting to say,
I've gotten news for you for the Asians, but never mind. But
the point was is what it was like one hundred and fifty of them,
And I don't want to overstate it, but these are kind of losers.
Really. I mean, I'm sorry, I just have to be blunt about
the matter. But you would have thought that this was the worst outrage in
the history of humanity, at least ranking up with a crystal knock right.
And part of it was it was sheer opportunism by the media and the left
in President Trump's opponents, because of course President Trump waited in his comments grossly
distorted and taken out of context. President Biden is still lying about them.
I'm just going to assume you all know that story, but I'll skip over
it if you don't, and you can look it up. And suddenly now
much worse by much more serious and dangerous people, as being said every day
in countless places across America and across the world, and nobody is praising a
similar intensity of fuss about it. That's, I mean, the hypocrisy of
the left, the bad faith of the left. All this is I'm pretty
obvious, so I'll reach state my thesis, which is the hatred of the
Jews. We're seeing so dramatically right now. It's just a part of the
compre intensive hatred for our civilization by the cultural left that dominates many of our
cultural institutions around the world. You know, my late friend, Sir Roger
Scrutin described it as what you call the culture of repudiation. Find something that
works, that's been successful, that's great, that's beautiful, and the left
wants to tear us down, wants to tear it down and destroy it.
You can call it nihilism too, if you want. That's simpler and more
straightforward. But President Trump was obviously right when he said, don't think this
is gonna stop, but taking down the statues of Confederate generals, it's gonna
spread elsewhere. He was absolutely right about this, and he gets no credit
for it at all from anybody. A couple more comments and then I'm gonna
toss it to Lucretia, who I make sure haven't interrupted me yet. I
did, you just didn't notice. Winston Churchill wrote this in the last volume
of his volume six of his World War Two memoirs, quoting them here,
No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages
in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding lights of modern
faith and culture. So there Athens in Jerusalem. That's precisely the problem for
the cultural left. They hate Athens every bit as much as they hate Jerusalem.
And the United States may be a poor substitute for Athens these days,
but it's going to have to do. We're kind of the best there is
in the grand scheme of things. And if you take a longer, look
back for a moment, I'll give you my own synoptic history of the last
thirty five forty years. It is now more clear than ever. But it
was becoming evident to me as early as at least twenty ten, if not
earlier, that the end of the Cold War was not a great victory for
the liberal tradition understood correctly, the liberal tradition, I mean, or even
democracy, still less Western civilization itself. The left went to ground, They
went into hiding, and they reinvented itself or themselves, and they re emerged
with new labels for old dogmas, but intended to say, you know that
the phrase it's often used is cultural Marxism, and that phrase is not wrong,
but it's also not exactly right in this sense. Marxism was at least
based on a rational theory. In other words, it is a theory you
could argue with. Its successors are not based on any appeal to reason and
objectivity at all. There's no theory behind it. So it's actually worse than
Marxism. It's displaced reason as a ground for argument, in the ground for
being. So I like to say that actually is one of our teachers said
this years ago, racism. You're this everywhere. What does racism really mean?
It means any opposition to the program of the left, that's all.
It means. A ditto for diversity. They did it for all the other
jargon. You can hear a pardon my cough, where both of us fighting
off the latest bug from a Chinese laboratory. I'm negative for COVID, but
I'm still got a cough, and she's got a similar malady. The Chinese
are testing out on US. And so when you come back to for a
moment, the new anti semitism, as I say, it's not just the
old ethnic stereotypes, bad as they are. But now there's this ideology of
settler colonialism. You may have heard this, you're following this in the press.
And of course colonialism is just a derivative of old fashioned Leninism. And
there's not even a historical argument here. It's one thing to challenge in various
ways, the you know, the Bow for Declaration, the mandates of the
League of Nations, the UN partition settlement of nineteen forty eight. That's not
really happening at all. It's now just settler colonialism. Therefore you're unjust your
oppressors. And of course the architecture of this argument is the premise assumes the
conclusion that you want to generate. So it's very tautological and you can't argue
with these people at all. So how did this happen? It happened in
plain sight. You know, the dean of the law school at Berkeley,
who's been very nice to me, into John Yu and he's an old fashioned
free speech leftist and a purist about the matter. But if you've seen the
news. He had a dinner for students disrupted at his private residence last week,
and several weeks ago he wrote an article of The Los Angeles Times saying
nothing has prepared me for the depth of anti semitism I'm seeing in America now.
And I thought you're a smart man, or maybe not, but he
is not paying attention these ideas, this noxious ideology that has expanded the reach
and fervency of anti Semitism and anti Western civilization. It was incubated on college
campuses starting more than a generation ago. And I'll end with this, and
do you want to know it before? You want to just make one point.
He's not my boss, so I don't have to be as nice to
museum. Excuse me. I think that you need to go one step further
and not just say that he didn't notice these things happening around him, He
didn't notice the pernicious effect of things like the ideology of colonialism and oppressor and
oppressed and all of that. He participated in it, He advanced it,
he promoted it, and turned down or stopped or thwarted every attempt by anybody
few as they were, to say, wait a minute, these people These
people are not oppressed. These students are not oppressed. These students that have
made it into one of the finest law schools in the world and probably on
full ride scholarships, etc. Etc. Are not oppressed. But refusing both
before and now to punish these students for what they deserved to be punished for
being wrong, being unwilling to listen to argumentation, and instead relying on the
fact that their little feelings were heard and they were triggered, and then you
know all that kind of nonsense. He never stood up to it. He
would, Okay, better than most law school deans would say. We're gonna
have free speech. We're gonna let people, We're gonna let those racist conservatives
like Heather McDonald make their speeches. But but we're not going to punish appropriately
give the appropriate consequences to those students who protest and try to shut her down.
And that's I'm really not picking on you on that point, but I
think it's an important one. I think that because it leads us to be
thinking about are their opportunities here which I'll I'll leave alone and I'll let you
go back to your fall. Well, we can come back to that because
I did leave out of my notes, but yes, my summary is universities,
but also cultural institutions, museums. What was it? The Art Institute
of Chicago filed fired all their volunteer docents two three years ago because that wasn't
the They weren't diverse enough. This is absurd. So our culture institutions and
especially education that followed the path of least resistance, which is always to give
in. And so suddenly they're shocked to see these virulent ideologies in their mists,
which they never took seriously. They never thought, well, this is
sort of harmless, yeah, sort of left wing and crazy, and I
don't think it's right, but guess what, there are real consequences for tolerating
this and letting it happen. And so here's the switch that flips, so
to speak. And then I'll pitch one proposed remedy that I'm gonna let Lucretia
dissect. An earlier generation of political scientists at Berkeley weren't so crazy. One
of them was one of my intellectual heroes heroes, Aaron Woldowski, who died
almost thirty one years ago now and Jewish, and he was actually sort of
a moderate liberal, but he hated the radical left, and he saw starting
in the sixties what trouble was going to come from it. So in nineteen
ninety two he said, I see the rise of campus anti Semitism ahead of
us, and a strange thing has happened. He pointed out what everyone knows
that you know your history. Jews are always considered to be one of the
most prominent minorities that faced substantial discrimination in America, never mind overseas, you
know, denied admission to elite universities, not hired for elite law firms,
investment banking houses and so forth, clubs, right country clubs and so forth,
and they were always regarded as a discriminated against minority for all the historic
reasons. People know. Suddenly, Waldovsky said, they've been de minoritized.
Why is this happening? Well, he was he could be kind of funny
and sarcastic, but his famous essay about this, this is now fifty two
years ago. He said, Well, the left looked up and saw that
Jews were associated with Israel, Israel's beating Arabs in wars. But Arabs are
part of this sainted Third World class of oppressed upon people by Western civilization and
colonialism. Therefore Jews joined the oppressor class, he said, just like that,
he says, he said, it took Christians a thousand years to get
from being a reviled minority to do an oppressor and inquisitorial class in Europe.
The Jews have done it in twenty five years. And he said, those
clever Jews, right, He was right, But he's got his finger on
something here, and he saw us all laid out in front of everything he
foresaw is what has happened, and no one took this warning to heart.
And so here we are now. My last point and the setup, Lucretia
is an awful lot of our friends are saying, what's the remedy for this?
Well, really, what happened to Gene Chimerinsky's backyard that went beyond the
limits of the First Amendment and protected free speech? We need to be champions
of free speech. That's where we ought to fight back against these dogments.
I think that is catastrophically wrong and inadequate. And Lucretia's going to tell you
why and what to do instead, Steve, so I'm going to begin by
saying that this is I think something that's very hard for conservatives who believe in
principle, who believe that in a society ruled by free, fair, evenly
applied institutions, Conservatives believe that they recognize the benefit of that. They recognize
that it's been salutary for hundreds of years in this country to have institutions where
you're sometimes the winner, sometimes the loser, but those institutions applied mostly over
history, fairly objectively, that you're the electoral college loser in these elections.
Give you an example, forty years ago, when I started teaching, I
would talk about why the electoral college was important because it gave more power to
places like California, and I meant it, but of course, you know,
things change over time, and I assume you understand why. I don't
have to go into why that doesn't make any sense anymore. But I've never
argued against the institution of the electoral college. That's the way conservatives are.
We recognize that those institutions built into our constitution, most of the ones that
have evolved over time, most of them have been salutary. Freedom of speech,
the First Amendment is one of those. Call it institutions, one of
those principles better word that all of us believe should be applied fairly and equally
under the Constitution. Why because we believe that its freedom of speech is good
for its own sake, We believe that it advances the interests of Republican government
for all the reasons. I know, you all know, and so conservatives
tend to be very pro First Amendment. You know, we're all scandalized by
the stories we hear recently, not just what Steve was just talking about about
pro Palestinian terrorists coming to a private person's house and threatening and doing this and
that, but also just the idea that our government it has been censoring social
media, Our government's been actively involved in keeping real information, real facts,
real truth away from citizens for its own partisan purposes. All of those things
really rankle us because we do believe in free speech as a means to the
pursuit of truth. And that's where I kind of want to take us and
have us think about it for a moment. And I'm here. The first
thing I want to say is this is going to sound just a little bit
radical, a little bit controversial, but the First Amendment, freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, is a means to an end it is not
the be all and end all. It is not. It's a very difficult
thing for us, for you know, who've grown up in the society not
to see the First Amendment as the most sacred of all principles. But it
is in fact a means to an end. It is not a natural right.
It is a means to protect our natural rights. And the question is
it's a hard question. It's a really hard question, a question I don't
always have the answers to. Neither does Steve. We've talked about this many
many times. But can you legitimately under our constitution curb the speech of a
radical Palestinian rum to the cy pro terrorist and at the same time not curb
the speech of say, those what did you call them losers in Chancellorville or
her speech? Except when you say it depends on whether they're suppressing. We
know they're suppressing speech all the time. We know that, of course not.
Yeah, they're not punished for it. They're not punished the same way.
For instance, at the January sixth pert testers are being punished. Most
of us would probably be happy if they would do to the people who went
into Chimriinski's house, put them in solitary confinement for months, and you know,
all of those things, we probably have a little bit of shot and
for it. About that, I know I would I'm not a very good
person, that's why. But anyway, I would be very happy. But
it's here's the problem. The moment conservatives stand on principle on these things,
with the environment we're in today, we lose. We lose all the time.
We lose on college campuses, we lose even when Trump is in office
and not the corrupt Biden administration or anybody else. We lose because the left
does not take the principle seriously, and therefore they don't limit themselves to the
purposes for which the First amend was given to us. In fact, they
use the First Amendment as a cudgel, as a hammer to promote their vision
of I don't know who knows what their vision is. I don't have an
answer for that. But whatever that vision is, they see that as the
be all and end all. Part of that I think is simple. And
many of you I know understand this because I've talked with many of you about
this, if you know, on comments and so forth. They believe in
the will to power. They don't see human nature, they don't see God,
they don't see the natural law history, the natural law principles that have
guided our country until recently, as any limitation on what they can do.
And they push, and they push and they push. We have had people
whose sexual orientation was somewhat different than the average person. I'll leave it at
that, since the beginning of time. But never in the history of the
world have we had a complete denial of this sexual reality of human beings shoved
in our faces and being forced to accept that reality every single day everywhere you
go. Why destroy Western civilization, destroy the understanding of human nature, destroy
any limitation on what human beings can do. So back to the First Amendment,
what do we do about that? Do we continue? And I don't
not sure I know fully the answer to this, because you have all sorts
of prudential considerations when you start saying, well, maybe we should in fact
put those people in jail. And it's not just a matter of say what
the Supreme Court has told us. You have a right to speak only where
you have a right to be. Some speech does not deserve First Amendment protection,
and it's not because people's feelings are hurt. It's because the speech does
nothing to advance the pursuit of truth. There is nothing in any Palestinian protesters
talk that is anything close to the truth and all it does. I've talked
about this on the podcast before. My university, for all of its faults,
actually did in fact put these two professors on leave, on administrative leave,
paid of course. But to early childhood professors at the beginning, right
after October seventh, who somebody happened to be recording it with their phone,
but they spent the entire two hours in the classroom just spewing all this hatred
River to the sea, the Palestinians genocide. I don't have to tell you
all the usual nonsense to early childhood professors. At what point do we say
that we have raised generations with so much propaganda by our commitment to academic freedom
that there may be no going back. I don't know what the answer is,
Steve, Well, let's say a couple of real world cases, some
from the other end of the spectrum. Because I I We're in pretty strong
agreement about this, which is this is a rare thing if you listen to
us. I always like a joke that if you think it's hard to argue
with lucretia, try agreeing whether it's nearly impossible. You always find something wrong
in yes agreements, like a you know, a detense contract lawyer. There's
two old cases on my mind that bear on this, and then i'll make
the point about universities. First, go all the way back to nineteen seventy
eight for a moment, and the Supreme Court heard the famous case of the
Nazi Party that had applied for a parade permit in Skokie, Illinois, which
was denied initially by Skokie. They said, First Amendment, we have a
right to march, and the Supreme Court said, yep, First Amendment.
It's you know, you can't censor speech, and you know you can time,
place, and manner. But they're entitled to a permit if they meet
the city's conditions. Now, why did they want to march in Skokie.
Well, that's forty years ago. Forty five years ago. A lot of
Holocaust survivors lived there. They didn't pick Skokey by accident. Now, I'm
perfectly fine with saying they have a right to speak under the First Amendment,
but Skokie has an equal right to say, we know what you're doing.
You go march someplace else. Point number one, point number two. Similar
cases in the late nineties, a pair of consolidated cases I forget their name,
one out of Minnesota won someplace Else. Supreme Court struck down statutes banning
cross burning, and Arizona's native daughter, Sandrea O'Connor wrote the typically confused at
Ooray opinion. Well, guys, this is free expression. It might chill
artistic for expression. I mean, after all, they burned across in Mississippi
burning. We wouldn't want to stop Hollywood filmmakers from depicting that an historical movie,
would we, Moron, Look when someone burns across in a black neighborhood
in Richter. That's what the other part of the case was. That's not
a state of speech like the Nazis and Skokie. It is a tempt at
intimidation that comes pretty close to verbal assault things that there is some grounding in
the law. Now, this is very delicate, I understand, because the
if you want to make the objection, doesn't that'll give room for the left
to push their hate speech documents. Yes it does. That's why we're both
hesitant about the practical applications of this. But that's why, at least for
the moment, I think that more universities ought to wake up and say,
you know, your department in Middle Eastern studies, it's an ideological cesspool.
We are closing it down and all of you guys have to find jobs someplace
else. That's not that's not a First Amendment bile. I'm shouldn't you know?
That would just be common sense. And I don't expect much of it
to happen, unfortunately, but we can hope it is seldom see if maybe
a little more racing for the moment. Oh, phography, are you trying
to shut down power line? Just so you know? I love it in
more in the morning or something. And I'm sure many can do this too.
And I'm reading through some blogs to just clear my head over my coffee
in the morning. And the I turned on the comments because it was an
interesting piece, and oh and I made I sent it to Steve and I
said, I'm really sorry for doing this, but do you know this is
on yours your lot? I mean, I was, it was awful,
But that being said, it's not that I'm a total period. I grew
up in Iowa. So maybe I am. But if you look back at
the court's history of trying to decide about pornography, and you know, it
went from pornography doesn't deserve constitutional protection to well, how can we define pornography?
It doesn't deserve constitutional protection, but artistic expressions, as you were just
talking about in the field of pornography. I'd like to tell this story about
the Devil and this Jones if you don't have that classic pornography film. It's
of course a morality play. You know, she's a nun, she never
sins, but she commits suicide and then she goes to hell and the devil
provides her with the opportunity to at least earn her eternity in hell, and
that's where the rest of the story goes. So there's obviously not a lack
of literary or artistic value in that. But of course it's pornography. It's
meant to be pornography. It's meant to appeal to the most period interests.
Okay, why is that a problem. I'm sure that some of the early
writers Miller versus California until forth Roth, they couldn't have imagined the ubiquitousness of
pornography to the point where today there's a growing trend on young men where they
would rather not be in a relationship because no young woman can meet the fantasies
that they are imbued with by their daily hours long partaking over an apathy.
Did we as a society have any reason to worry about that? Again?
Sound like an when they invents nod over the Internet? Who were really in
trouble? Yes? And I do want to would be oh god, the
sniffer and chief. Yes, right, yeah, it sounds well. I
mean, what do you think do you think? Gee, all of us
like to think that we're very open minded, we're very twenty first century thinkers.
You know, we're not pred We're not Who are we to tell somebody
else what they can't and can't watch on their internet feed and so on?
But the destruction that is written on society is untold, and there's more and
more and more studies coming out all the time bout Okay, So where does
that take us? Do we really want to say all of a sudden that
you're going to restrict pornography? It's a very difficult problem, right, How
would we do it? What would we do. Steve, what would you
do how you stopped pornography on power line? So you're a hero today?
Yeah? That was that was relative. Well yeah, uh, you're sure
it's an expedient. Yeah, at the end of that. You know the
way I usually run that suggestion because I have my economist friends always say well
that something's bad, just tax it, And I say, so, murder
is wrong, therefore let's raise the marginal tax rate on murder. Now that's
not really how that, you know, how we should do wrong, right,
that's not what we should do. These questions at well, I'll start,
they're not exactly the very beginning, but to do a little bit of
classroom for a moment, suddenly those old questions and play those republic about the
necessity of censoring music and poetry, all of a sudden those questions look not
sort of frivolous and strange antique anymore. And students, by the way,
they always hate those passages in the republic when we teach them. But that's,
by the way, the hardest thing now between not just protout, but
you know, the smartphones, and it is clearly I think Jonathan Height is
right about this. It's rewiring kids' brains, they have shorter attention spans.
We know in classrooms it's harder to get kids to read and concentrate on reading
material, you know, really smart ones. And we've noticed this just in
the last ten years. It's gotten so much worse. Just being AI is
that for the last maybe fifteen years, because of texting and so forth,
students became absolutely completely and totally illiterate, unual to write a complete sentence,
at least when they had AI played us for them. We didn't. Yeah,
right, I did just last week. Actually, this will seem off
the point, but maybe not. It's gotta started beginning somewhere. It was
a famous argument by the late Great Wilbar Kendall, which was hugely controversial sixty
years ago. Maybe Athlens was right to have executed Socrates. Well, I,
well, there's a threat to the stable order there. But part of
the argument was not sort of cet a ship that he didn't have a chance
to speak. He had a complete chance to speak. He was not He
didn't persuade anybody, and by the way, he consented to living here.
That's the argument in the credo, and so he benefits from their laws and
even Socrates said, yeah, the case against me is ironclad. And the
point was is that they had free speech and free expression. And at some
point, though a political order that wants to preserve itself can say enough is
enough. You've had your day in court. As the phrase we used today,
we need to get back to thinking about First of all, I think
we need to get back to thinking in that mode and then figuring out the
practical, difficult steps to bring that into action. So that's about the best
I can do starting off. And I have no idea what those pract people
difficult steps are other than we'll say that. Back to the idea of censoring
poetry sensoring music. There was a meme that was popular a couple of weeks
ago, and it was actually the first set of lyrics were from led Zeppelin
and they were they were charming and beautiful about love and so forth. And
then the second set of lyrics were I think Lizzo won something something, and
they were you to ho, you to hoe, you you you to hoe,
And it was like a page of nothing but that, and it said,
it's not that we you know, it's not that we think that we
don't like your music. Music just sucks, you know, But does that
have on our society? Does that have an influence that we are not capable
of controlling. That is destroying the family, that is destroying respect for women,
that is you know, you could go on and on and on and
on. We know that we need to do something about it. We know
that the pendulum is not going to swing back unless something else is done,
I think is the best way to put it. I just know what that
is. I really don't other than try to do what I can to remind
people of the good and beautiful. Yeah, and that golos everything from No,
it's not true that Israel's attack on Hamas in the Gaza is genocide.
If incense civilian, It's not that I'm convinced there are many, but imagine
there are some are heard in the process. That's war. That is a
totally different thing than what we know happened in October seventh. The Good and
the Beautiful teaches us that I can't call them animals, that sub human things
went in and did unspeakable, horrible atrocities that I can't watch. You know,
They've been all over the internet. I can't watch them. If we
can't make a moral distinction between those two things. We're lost. So we
have to every day we who understand that have to be talking about it.
We have to be we have to turn to the idiots who say, oh,
it's genocide, sister that, and make them listen and get them to
understand. Again. I don't know how it's gonna put it the good and
the beautiful. It's I get that Israel and Jews have a very special history.
But what Steve said at the beginning, he is asked, right,
it's just a matter of time before they come for us. And you know,
and I don't mean that like us versus them. I just mean that
Israel stands for something good and pure and beautiful. They're not perfect. Anyone
in the United States is perfect, but they stand for something good and pure
and beautiful. And we've seen that that influence could be beneficial in the Middle
East. We've seen it with the right support from the United States, the
the abraham Wards, for instance. We've seen that it's not an impossible situation.
But I agree with Speed that this is a part by continuum of ugliness
that starts with October seventh, goes all the way through to protesters showing up
at Erwinchi Moerenci's house, and then years back of tolerating that, I'm good.
That's all right. All I was gonna say is actually do this.
I think, Susan, could I get you to wrangle the mic and we'll
actually not take some audience questions or comments on any subject you want, but
I'll just say on that that uh, the problem of you know, rap
vile rap music. Mike you mild mentor stand Evans. Yeah, well that's
right. He used to say rap music is an oxymoron, you know,
like military intelligence. But just as long as they don't censor, maybe it's
cold outside. I said, wait, we already did that, didn't we.
Anyway, here you picked questioners if you want, you would like to
mister ru Yeah, there, that'll work. Yeah, I want to share
that follow up when your idea that it gets worse before it gets worse,
said, at least you get complete. That's right, man. That's not
gonna last very long, maybe because it's long, and sorry, I'll just
say it's very briefly. I actually this semester for the first time to non
assign students papers because of the AI problem. That's gonna change. There's a
whole lot of universities are thinking very hard about this. I'll leave that aside.
I will say, is it gonna get worse before it gets worse?
One thing that I thought we might break up and I just forgot. There
are a few things happening just in the last month or two that are good
and slightly hopeful, but they're very tiny. So Vanderbilt expelled three students last
week from occupying the president's office. Kolona College, which you know, right
next door to when we went to graduate school, very left wing place,
and their president had students arrested and charged. The new president of Stanford is
from the Business School, a white guy affiliate with the Hoover Institution. This
has to make the lefties on campus going out of their mind. The new
chancellor at Berkeley is from the Business School, the host Business School. It's
a no nonsense place, and although he's not a conservative, he's not a
leftist, and that's an improvement. We had the new provost, actually he's
interim, but the suspicion is he will be made coming up. The new
provost at Harvard is a guy named John Manning. He clerked for antonin Sclee
on the Supreme Court. He's at one of us, and I'm thinking,
what's happening here is the adult even liberals who are totally lost, there are
a few things with out of hand. We need to stop till this diversity
stuff and hire people who are able and who might actually limit the craziness.
I'm not expecting much, but I didn't think would even see that much.
There have been a lot of commentary kind of across the war, and not
just on more conservative sites, about how destructive the absolute diversity, equity and
inclusion of agenda has been for medical schools. I have a friend whose son
is dating a young Native American woman who's going to medical school on you know,
a chigal scholars should have went on and there are no graded tests anymore,
none zero. They are all past fail. One of the one of
the bad things about that is I'm sure if you you have at a medical
school. It used to be that those those MCATs leading to the different tests
all the way through medical school. If you did well, you buy a
residency. Now medical students have to go get a cyber degree from my college
in order to be competitive for the very few numbers of residencies that are out
there. They have to do extra because they no longer have test scores that
differentiate them either going into medical school or getting out of medical school. Who
wants to go see a doctor you know and you'll never know, Go ahead
and find another one. Season. I'll just say that there's a politically incorrect
joke going around, which means I'm gonna tell it. It's just going forward.
What you're gonna want to look for is an Asian doctor with a Jewish
name and Joe. Yes it is. Yes, Oh, you don't have
joke? Okay, sorry, quick question. I was out of the room,
as I warned you, so you may have touched on it. So
we're talking about invitations and free speech or on so called free speech. How
would you ask you a Crucian Lucretia specifically handle someone shouting Allahu at Alcabar and
in it, because mean that's an interest to challenge is yeah, it is.
Well, my first past is they can't yell that at a crowd of
theater. But I sort of hate to go to the time and place of
rationale. But in that case, I think it's very important. You know,
the original freedom of religion of ensuring in our Constitution. How do I
put this was also a means to an end. It was a means to
an end that recognized that the Judeo Christian tradition was tied with a synthesized with
the West. You know, the Athens and Jerusalem, that what we understand
as morality, and what we understand the Ten Commandments, all those things that
define how we really live or should live, I should say in Western civilization.
That's if you look at the family Father's support for freedom of religion,
it's much more along the lines of what we don't want to do is force
people to believe something they don't believe. But at the same time they were
very much supportive of Judeo Christian sects. They believe that they shouldn't the government
shouldn't choose between them, that they should have full freedom and people should have
full freedom. When you get into the Muslim religion, I may it be
careful how I say this, but there are very many elements of it that
don't synthesize with Western civilization. If you don't believe that, you can see
it throughout the world, you can see it in this country. Do I
think that means that we should discriminate or persecute Muslims. No, but it's
a hard problem. It's a hard question to answer. If somebody comes in
this room and shouts, ah, black bar, we're just gonna going uh
right, it's ard. It's used to be heard by it here. But
there are times because some was carrying was right, yeah, yeah, part
of hearing the time. Yes, absolutely a murderer, you know, a
guy walks in and says that and then murders half a dozen people, which
just happened more than once. We know, we don't. We've not seen
in recent years anything similar to that from either the Judeo or the Christian tradition.
Carry but only time to place prescriptions. But I think there may be
a parallel here we worked with if you go back to the original fighting words
doctrine of the Supreme Court from the Chaplinsky case in nineteen forty two, they
arrest the guy because he's about to start riots, and uh, the Supreme
Court upheld their arrest and condition and there's a public safety strut there. So
again, the circumstances are all important here. But if someone is saying is
outside a Jewish cultural center Jewish, it starts yelling that or other contexts.
That's not an actual expression of piety. That's a provocation intended to stir up
trouble. And it's hard. I'm not saying it's a simple, but not
not be beyond our grasp to start saying we're capable of making those kinds of
discriminations if we work at some and we should, I would just I would
just add one one more thing to it. We're also at a place where
we honestly expect the law to be able to handle all of these things for
us when fat it is in many ways the lack of a culture that used
to recognize acceptable versus unacceptable behavior. Again, somebody wants to believe in the
Muslim religion and you know, is peaceful about it and a to themselves,
and you know otherwise follow us the laws and so forth. Most of us
don't have a problem with that. What we are seeing today, of course,
is that you will see that religion preferred in many ways over more traditional
religion. Shall we call it? Why? Because that's what the left wants
to see for the reasons that Steve just outlined quite fairy. He was very
clear, where do we get where do we stop the idea that pornography should
show up on power line. Where do we stop the idea that someone could
walk into a Jewish senior citizen center? And y'all a la hu akar?
Is it always mean a legal answer to it? Or is it a cultural
answer? And that's when it becomes even more difficult in my opinion, because
again, conservatives there the generous people. They don't want to be as despite
what lesson about us all the time, they don't want to be the ones
censoring. They don't want to be the ones uh, discriminating or persecuting or
any of those things. They they they sort of a live and let live
and sometimes to our detriment. Uh, it's not that hard to discriminate between
conduct and speech and and and that's where we move. We we went over
the whole line. Yeah, that's a great I do agree with that.
That's that's the court's understanding of it. But that it's not the course of
understanding of for body or flat not like olie. It doesn't bother bother me
particularly, But that's conduct, it's not speech, it's expression. That's how
the courts does it. And you know the ex they but they they've gone
off the demands to want by discriminating, because you know, frankly, I
I I went to Stanford Law School. Stanford Law School, they had the
people who shut down a federal judge. They didn't for they didn't about the
school. Yeah, and if they had, if they had. The woman
the other day who Makersfield? Was it? You said, who went Vadersfield
and threatened the city council and they arrested her and helped her on a million
dollars long? And if you looked at social media everywhere you saw the poor
thing bawling her eyes out in your orange jumps ahead for maybe against people's lives
in the public forum. How could you? The more we do that,
the more I think we change the culture. I think that that's true.
I have for that. That was a wrap up pride to move backwards into
what you're talking about, the social evolution, just to complicate it further.
One of the biggest steps was the invention of the birth control pill, because
rather in dramatically changed the social role of women and how they could get along
in mixed results. Right, yes, yeah, what's uh? Maybe the
only intelligent thing the lake. Senator John Hines ever said, person who gave
us trees they would mind. Soon said why is this still works today?
Why is social security going broke? Well, two reasons, he said,
people are living longer and the pill works. So yeah, that's there's a
lot he said about that. Of course, next year maybe someone else Susan.
Yeah, okay, yeah, judge. You know, it's interesting talking
about Muslims and it's holding up and there's a there's a giant in the room
we never talked about, and that is a lot of people not seeing people
in this room because a lot of us are hard live in a state of
fear about Moslems. When this Edie Baga Seril said, look, get their
hteens and kill you. A lot of us can leave it. And so
we give them that. Socials we don't say, shut up, you don't
say as long we don't say it, you can't say that about my Jewish
friends. We let them do it because we're afraid of that. Those are
the first that is stopping stop be afraid. Yeah. Although just a small
point of fact is that the woman in Maka s Field is actually Indian,
I mean Indian Indian, not American Indian. But I think that that mentality
is spreading, you know, there's if he is to the census of the
people champing from the river to the sea would be a lot of middle class
white kids and forum students from all over the world. Okay, do you
want to add that question here? Sorry? Can I if I expanded a
little bit on your point about culture? One of the things that strikes me
when I look at the news today, and you can think of a number
of different illustrations when we have people, for instance, on a Philadelphia the
subway when they're filming a woman who's being raised, and we had fathers and
men who, for instance, if everyone knows who Ridley Gains is, she's
not a warrior on the front from the trends insanity. And you have men
who think it's perfectly fine for a full intact now to be wandering around in
a woman's locker room in an intimidating fashion. Who can all in all of
these examples? And my point is, and I don't think this is nostalgia
that we used to be in place in our culture and these types of moral
distinctions were commonly understood and raptified despite our political differences. There was not only
a social stigma, but there was a social policing of these types of things
that simply appears to be beyond our capability. Now when I watch these mini
mallists who are camping out at whatever private property owing to university, and yet
somehow how the administrator lacks the ability to figure out how to get rid of
them, like you'll be expelled and arrested that are going and they can't figure
that out. So my question is, do you have confidence right now this
room is accepted. You mean, we're an exceptionsness, but within our culture
we have both the moral and the political will to say we will no longer
accept this. I'm not a proponent of mob violence, but I can tell
you right now that there's some advantage in a community telling someone you're gonna understand
if you walk around in my guard's lockerroom naked, you're not gonna come out
of that very well, that does exist anymore. My question is, because,
as bright Mark would say, politics is downstream of culture. Are we
a culture that anymore can enforce objective truth and morality in a way that will
allow us to see our way through this? Tell me anything that that there
are a lot of people be on this room who see it exactly the way
that you do. I honestly think that many of those people, for whatever
reason, are Trump supporters. I think that right now we're finding ourselves run
by elites who when the gentlemen said that we're afraid of Muslims, I'm less
afraid because like you, I'm r I'm less afraid of what some Muslims goun
will do to me. If you know, if he thinks that I'm being
too you know, my head is uncovered or whatever, then I am what
would happen to me in my job or something like that. I'm not truly
afraid, but that a university would punish me for pushing back on an active
vibance by a student who was Muslim and was offended because I wasn't wearing a
heat gap or something. Those kinds of things happen with elites. They don't
happen with normal human beings who still love this country, who still would follow
some creep in address into the bathroom, who followed this little girl into the
bathroom whatever it might be, and beat the you know what out of him.
Most there's a lot of people like that, and the elite want you
to believe through the media, through et cetera, et cetera, that that
those people don't exist, or if they do exist, you know they're the
losers from Charlottesville. I think we fight that that. I think we recognize
what we have in common with the good, solid, middle class Americans who
still love their country, still love their God, still love their family,
still want to make a decent life for themselves. There are a lot of
people like that, and that's probably the only thing that gives me hope.
Steve gets all excited and when they're said, no, I'm not gonna tell
you this time, he gets all excited. As to I in a university
administs straighter falls out of the mold when you know they're not just this strident
leftist ideologue inclusion and the delonging, you know whatever else is in their title.
We we both jump up and down with the excitement. But that's not
really where it's gonna change. It's gonna change when we go back to the
point of understanding that in America, it's actually the people in the world,
and the people I think, for the most part, have really good sound
sentiments, They have good sound beliefs. Say they're patriotic, like I said,
they love their good. They love their family, and I think that's
where our hope is. I think that's a uh if you ever get received
a really good place, Okay, Ricochet join the conversation.