SIO41: Talking Free Speech, with Michael Shermer

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is your host, Thomas Smith, and it's episode 41. Thanks so much for listening. I'm very excited today to bring you Michael Shermer, somebody very prominent skeptic and atheist, and somebody who, the reason that I wanted to talk to him so much, among other things, is he's been on Dave Rubin, he's been with Gad Saad, he's tweeted about, you know, a lot of the similar campus snowflake kind of free speech stuff, and he's also, he also, when he was invited to speak with Dennis Prager, he commented on Twitter that, you know, the right is so much more willing to talk than the left. Ever since then, I've been trying to get his attention on Twitter to say, "Hey, I'm on the left."

0:01:16 Thomas: I will talk. I'll talk. And it didn't work. But then just randomly, I tried one more time when somebody tweeted, somebody tweeted at me about like, you need to talk to Michael Shermer and didn't even tag him. And I thought, Oh, I'll give it one more try. And I just tweeted back like, yeah, it's a shame that Uh, you know, and I tagged him. Michael Shermer hasn't noticed me because I'm on the left. I'm willing to talk. And so he saw it and, and, uh, tweeted me and then, and then I got to give him even more credit. His, uh, PR person or whoever it is, I'm not sure his assistant, something emailed me, uh, and like proactively, like found my email, emailed me, said, Hey, Michael Shermer would love to talk. I really have to give him all kinds of credit for that. That is awesome. That's certainly something he didn't have to do. I mean, he, he could have just. I just want to say that that's really, really cool.

0:02:09 Thomas: So in that light, here's the conversation we had, and I don't want to give anything away about it, so I'll just throw it over to me and Michael Shermer.

0:02:27 Thomas: Joining me right now is Michael Shermer. How are you doing today, Michael?

0:02:30 Michael: I'm fine, thank you.

0:02:31 Thomas: I want to say at the outset, thank you seriously a ton for coming on the show. I know that you've made claims that, you know, the left won't talk to you. And, you just have to say thank you for when someone on the left said, hey, come talk. Once you You took notice, which I get it, Twitter's tough to take notice of things. Once you took notice, you accepted. And I think that's really, laudable. That's something I really appreciate. So thank you for that.

0:02:54 Michael: Oh, you're welcome. Well, I mean, open dialogue is the only way we can find out the truth. So, I'm willing to talk to anybody and, and heck, at least half of my beliefs are on the left. So I mean we're probably not that far apart on a great many issues anyway. So but yeah, but the podcast format, it's pretty interesting. I've only really gotten on board with this the last year or so. Because I've for 25 years been doing mostly mainstream media, you know, where you get your six minutes on TV or your seven minutes on the radio. And, you know, you really can't get into any depth at all. But with podcasts, you can actually talk and people listen.

0:03:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, probably not.

0:03:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:03:29 Michael: And I think the general public, in fact, is pretty sick of media interviews. They can see how shallow they are. And I think that's why you guys are growing in popularity of millions of people listening to podcasts. I think it's great. Right.

0:03:43 Thomas: Yeah, I totally echo that. I think, I think it's totally true. I'm glad we're here with a more of a longer form thing where we're not just doing a sound bite and then cut you off or have you in one of 16 boxes on the TV screen or something like that. So yeah, yeah, they're terrible.

0:03:52 Michael: Right. Oh, gosh. I mean, those those CNN and Fox panel shows are just painful to watch. It's just odd. Oh. Anyway.

0:04:04 Thomas: So all right, but so that being said, I think you're right. I want to emphasize that, yeah, I'm sure we agree on a whole lot, and I, you know, I, I'm glad you're here to talk it out because there's some, I think there's also some significant disagreement that we can get into, and we can talk it out, but but starting with stuff we agree on, overall, I, you, my biggest complaint of late has been people drumming up an awful lot of, well, honestly, support and uh and gigantic Patreon accounts and all this stuff in the name of the war on free speech.

And to me, this campus war on free speech is sort of like the War on Christmas. It's, it, there's... there's little things here and there that people make a huge deal about and use it cynically to It's been But anyway, let's talk about what we agree on. I mean, You tweeted, and I think you've talked about the Charles Murray incident at Middlebury, for example. I mean, absolutely, to me that was completely egregious. That's an assault on free dialogue, on free speech. And I get it. And I get little examples like that. There's others. But there's other places where I think people are making a gigantic deal out of nothing, like this Ann Coulter business. I think you tweeted a little bit about that.

0:04:59 Michael: Yeah.

0:05:18 Michael: Yeah. With people like Ann Coulter and Milo, I don't know either of them personally, but I can't really tell what they really believe. It's like the Alex Jones thing. Oh, it's all a show. Oh, okay. So which parts do you believe in, which are just part of the show? So, you know, and once you go down that route, then I can't take anyone like that seriously because I don't know if they're just making it up for fun or they actually believe it.

0:05:30 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:05:43 Michael: So in that in that case, you Know, I don't know what all that means. And also, I pulled back a little bit after the Milo Berkeley thing when the L.A. Times published an article saying that most of the damage, property damage was done not by Berkeley students, but outside agitators like paid professional troublemakers. And I don't think we know who those are.

0:06:01 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Right.

0:06:06 Michael: I mean, if they're supportive of the left, if they're right-leaning plants or what, I don't know. Because back in the 60s, I'm trying to remember if I get the story straight on particular names, but it was somebody from the right was sending in agitators to make the left look worse, even more violent. So that got me thinking, I wonder if some of that's going on, although it's, it's enabled by the fact that there's so many students that are agitated and out protesting that they can blend right in with their hooded, you know, their face covers and hoods, and then cause trouble.

0:06:46 Thomas: Right.

0:06:46 Michael: And that does make the left look even worse.

0:06:50 Michael: And also, you're not Chapman University where I teach. I don't see any of this. You know, I've had freshman students now for seven years, and I've never met even one that's remotely like that. So it could be that most students are not into all this protesting and anti-free speech, disinvitation at all. It's just a handful, a small minority, and they're making everybody on the left look bad. That's entirely possible.

0:06:55 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:07:16 Thomas: Well, that's certainly my view, and I appreciate hearing you talk about the actual facts of Berkeley, and that's good because I'm skeptical, you're skeptical. I think that that's great to try to get to the bottom of what's actually happening because there's a ton of misrepresentation, and I've covered it extensively on my show.

But yeah, there's black block protesters who come in, hundred people, anarchists who cause a stir, maybe some of them are students, who knows, but the students were mostly peacefully protesting, which I think, you know, I would think we'd both agree as a fine exercise of First Amendment rights. And it's been overblown to this gigantic snowflake student message. And with Ann Coulter, I mean, I thought, maybe you've gone back on this, I'm not sure, but I thought I saw you tweet about her, you know, Being disinvited and all that, and it's just not what happened. Like, there's so much misinformation about it. Would they, the school, you read the details of the lawsuit that was filed on her behalf, the school offered numerous times and places where they would cover security and make the talk happen, and she and the group, the Republican groups, and her refused to go with those times and places. And so therefore they said, okay, well, we can't secure this, so you can't do it. And

0:08:29 Michael: Right.

0:08:29 Thomas: I think that's an awful lot different than how it's being portrayed. Would you agree?

0:08:32 Michael: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, for surer. Uh, yeah, again, you know, these things happen and unfold in real time, and when you're on Twitter you're supposed to respond, so I do, I try to do that. I have a social media director now that kind of encourages me to get more actively involved, so you know, I jump on there, okay, bam, bam, bam, and then, you know, three days later it's like, okay, well, like even this morning, even just right now, um, there was an article about the University of Arizona, where I just was doing a free speech speech thing with Dave Rubin, actually. And so this article, here it is, posted, "University of Arizona is hiring social justice advocates to police fellow students for bias incidents." And as I'm reading this going, holy moly, it sounds like the Stasi, East German Stasi.

0:09:18 Michael: You're supposed to turn your fellow citizens in when you catch them. And they actually give part of the job description, "Position aims at increasing understandings of oneself through critical reflection of power and privilege, identity and intersectionality, systems of socialization, cultural competency, and allyship," goes on and on with all the kind of buzzwords. So then it provides a link to the actual job description where you could read it. So I clicked on that, and when you click on it, it says, position "This position is currently closed. We're in the process of reviewing the title and responsibilities." But so it's like, okay, so now I don't know what is actually going on, and I already tweeted

0:09:54 Thomas: This is my experience every time. Almost every one of these inflamed stories is something like that. I can bring up another example from an article you posted recently. You know, it's the one with the attack on free speech. I have it up. I can pull it up on the campus where the racist incident occurred with the bananas that were being, you suspended with the N-word on them and stuff like that.

0:09:55 Michael: Oh

0:10:16 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, so there's a whole hubbub made, and you shared it, about the, this is an attack on free speech because the Washington Post wrote a column, and and there's Eugene Volokh, I think is his name, he's often on the forefront of these, and he's saying that this is an attack on free speech. And the article you shared was from thecollegefix.com. And it's such a, making a mountain out of a molehill, because I can't believe that someone like you, and I'll just ask you, I mean, it's not as though you would defend students' right to hang bananas and write the N-word on them in campuses, right? I mean, sure that's speech, but like, there's

0:10:15 Michael: Right, all right, okay. Okay.

0:10:27 Michael: All right. Yeah,

0:10:56 Thomas: Gotta be a line of campus safety, right?

0:10:57 Michael: Now that, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'll give you my general thoughts on this because, you know, the individual incidents, it's always hard to say. So in general, my concern overall is the left-leaning political bias in the academy. It's pretty overwhelmingly left, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, not so much in economics in economics and engineering and physical sciences, but like just in today's Wall Street Journal, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan College, who also happened to be my doctoral advisor for my Ph.D. at Claremont Graduate University, he actually has a call for affirmative action for conservatives on campus, and he's actually, as the president Wesleyan, doing a call for hiring more, not only bringing more conservative and libertarian speakers, but actually having more teachers, professors.

0:11:02 Thomas: Sure.

0:11:50 Michael: So that's going to take a few years. But he says the ratio on his campus of liberal professors is 28 to 1, liberal to conservative, 28 to one. So given what we know about confirmation bias and all the other cognitive biases, I mean, there's no possible way that... But that, that strong leaning toward the left is going to give students a fair shake of what the rest of the world actually thinks, because it's pretty, it's split pretty 50 50 in America. So you go from there out in the real world, and you can't believe anyone would vote for Trump. I mean, "I don't know a single person that voted for Trump" well, that means you're in the bubble, because, you know, 63 million people voted for Trump. And if you don't know one, then that means you've been holed up somewhere, and those are called college campuses. That's my concern.

0:12:40 Thomas: But we're both in a bubble. I mean, it's not as though Trump supporters know all of us. I mean, it's two bubbles happening. And I think that what I think I object to most in this is how much this deflects away from the very legitimate threats to free speech that Trump and Republicans in power are right now. So I see, you know, people like you and like Ruben and others, every story they share, and every, everything they argue against and make fun of and target is 19-year-olds crying about something when the real threat to free speech, Trump is literally trying to, you target in on, on journalists and allow, you know, not allow that he's, he just tweeted the other day about getting rid of even having a, you know, Sean Spicer having anyone speak to the press. I mean, unprecedented threat to, to actual free speech.

0:13:14 Michael: Yes, right.

0:13:31 Michael: Well, that's never going to happen, of course. I mean, he can shut up and stop talking, but the press is going to cover him nonetheless. There's nothing that any president could do at this point to halt the American press. No way. I mean that's in the First Amendment. So I'm not worried about that. I'm worried more about just the lack of balance there. And so you look at some of these sites like FIRE or now the Heterodox Academy, which I'm a member of, Jonathan Haidt, whose liberal creds are as solid as anybody's, and yet he's concerned about just the number of incidences of disinvitations, the lists of microaggressions, things you can't say. And so, yeah, it's a spectrum, right? So hanging a banana and using the N-word, yeah. Of course, that is not cool. I mean you're a real dick if you're doing that. Don't do that.

0:14:17 Michael: You know, and that, it, so that's on one end, and yeah, I, I don't know if we need a law, but something like it's pretty strong.

0:14:22 Thomas: Well, But All the Only line in that Washington Post column to go back to, that is, for university administrators the challenge is to address that legitimate pain with sensitivity and make crystal clear that racist signs, symbols, and speech are off limits. And then your Whole side of this Explodes on that one sentence, talking about, like, that's going to fundamentally threaten free speech just because they're saying, here's what happened. Someone did the most racist thing that you could imagine, touching virtually every horrible stereotype from our country's troubled history in one, because there was a new, I think it was a black student leader of some kind was elected, and that's why it

0:14:23 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. I

0:14:58 Thomas: Happened. And this whole site is exploding by one sentence, about one sentence on the Washington Post, as though it's going to be... I mean, it's such a victim mentality.

0:14:59 Michael: See. Yeah. Everybody Yeah. Yes, it's true, everyone does that, absolutely. But, but the, um, again, like the Charles Murray incident, you know, I know Charles pretty well, and, you know, he's a super nice guy. This is just sort of a gentlemanly, only this is like your father. Okay. And, uh, you know, if you actually read, I mean, when you actually read the bell curve, which I did back in 94, we did a whole issue of Skeptic on the bell curve. We had a, I hosted a conference at Caltech on race and IQ. And uh, you know it was pretty explosive even then. Um, and, but, but we didn't have the internet back then to, to, you know, just dispel it and stuff. But I've debated Charles, um, a couple of times on moral progress.

You know, he agrees that, you you know, on the big swath of things, you know, abolition of slavery and torture and civil rights and civil liberties and women's rights and so on. Yes, those are all good. But he kind of complains about, you know, kids these days, you know, music's not as good and people don't dress as nice. It's kind of on that level.

And, you know, so to see the sort of the crazed look in the eyes of these students yelling and screaming and shouting when he's just standing up there, this sort of gentlemanly old guy, you talking about sociological data.

0:15:21 Thomas: It's like all of our racist... No, I'm just kidding. Right.

0:16:15 Michael: He wasn't even talking about race and IQ. That's the kind of thing that worries me. And there's been a lot of those incidences. And like Heather McDonald, yes, for sure, she's on the right. Charles is a libertarian.

0:16:27 Thomas: What's this one? Heather McDonald?

0:16:29 Michael: Heather McDonald's with the AEI, she's the one that wrote the Blue Lives Matter about the killing of cops. And also that she coined the term the Ferguson effect, that cops are now staying in their cars rather than getting out because they're going to be videotaped. And so crime rates are going up in certain cities where with smart policing, where you go and park a car and you get out of the car, the cops at this corner and you stand there and look intimidating or, you know, the sort of shadow of enforcement crime goes down in those corners and then crime goes out in those cities. Well, they're not doing that anymore because they are afraid of being filmed if they get out their car, get out the car. She's the one that kind of calls attention to that. And when you meet Heather, I mean, She's like this frail little tiny woman who's just soft-spoken, and they're screaming at her like she's Hitler. That's the kind of thing.

0:16:29 Thomas: I'm not... Yeah.

0:17:16 Michael: It's like, calm down, everybody. Really. And also, and then you see things like Ben Shapiro, the young Jewish man who speaks for the Young Americans Foundation, sort of the capitalist Republicans group.

0:17:29 Thomas: Right. That's one of the groups that invited Ann Coulter to Berkeley.

0:17:32 Michael: Now, he's – yeah, that's right. So they finance a lot of these things. They bring in Dinesh D'Souza, Ben Shapiro and others. And Shapiro is a pretty sharp guy. You know, I didn't know what to make of him. I watched a few of his talks. A few points I agree with, I completely disagree with.

0:17:46 Thomas: He's incredibly transphobic. I think he's sure he's just a sharp guy, but his viral video about where he goes on a transphobic rant about how they don't... It's a mental disorder we need to treat. I mean, it's... Anyway, I don't know what you're gonna say about him, but yeah.

0:17:58 Michael: Yeah, he's completely wrong there. There. And on other points as well, like I'm pro-choice, he's pro-life. But as an example of this, I can't refute his arguments against my pro-Choice position, then how strong is my position? Because this guy's pretty sharp and he's got some pretty good pro-Life arguments. So I better be able to, I should listen to this guy, take close notes and figure out what's my comeback, what's MyPosition. And maybe MyPosition is not as strong as I thought it was. When you You face the person on the other side that has the best arguments on the other side.

So that's the argument for free speech, of hearing somebody you absolutely disagree with, which is why I forced myself to read both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, because I know I'm going to find some stuff I agree with and some stuff for sure I don't agree with. And it kind of forces me to think through my positions. Like, am I really solid on this one? Like gun control. I used to be against gun control, just kind of as a general libertarian, you know, just more freedom, less government control.

Well, then I started looking into it. It's like, holy crap, this has really gotten out of hand. You know, we got to do something about this. And then when you read the gun control advocate positions, they're so modest. They're so, you know, just gentle, like background checks.

0:18:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:10 Michael: So crazy people don't buy guns. And, you Know, maybe we shouldn't have AK-47 assault rifles designed nothing for nothing but killing people.

0:19:16 Thomas: Well, and also maybe just allow us to collect data because currently they can't even collect data nationwide on gun deaths. You know, it's like it's that level of.

0:19:24 Michael: Right. So I'm again, youknow, so there I'm on that, younow, I switched positions on that. That's, that's kind of not a libertarian position. You know the same thing with climate change. I was a climate skeptic. Then I looked into it, changed my mind. And, you know, so now I'm not sure libertarians think of me as a fellow brother in arms.

0:19:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:19:42 Michael: But I don't care because, you Know, really, the more we avoid the labels, the better, because the labels come with a lot of baggage. Like if you're an X, I know that it means you believe these 12 things. Well, but what if I believe eight of the 12? You know, am I still an X? And so let's go through each of the twelve rather than the label.

0:19:53 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Well, there's a lot we agree on. But I think what's tough for me is how much we can agree on a lot of principles right now about free speech and about, yeah, there's students who certainly go overboard. And then apart from that, there's still such an undue focus on such a small group of students. You said yourself, it's not at your college. When I was at college, it wasn't at my college. I'm not that old. And it's not in most colleges, but a vocal minority make people look bad. Look, a lot of people at Middlebury wanted to hear Charles Murray speak.

Uh, and then a small group of people stopped it and they shouldn't be allowed to do that. They should be disciplined and we can all agree on that, but there's, there's sort of this movement to throw out the left. I mean, on Sam Harris's show, he said, you know, and he's, he's somebody who in, in our circles and certainly my circle of listeners is hugely influential. And he said, as a result of this election, the left is gone and we need to throw away the left and start a new party. And it's like, it's such a overwhelming overreaction to what seems to me to be such a small minority of people who aren't even in power, by the way. The

0:20:36 Michael: Right. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:21:06 Thomas: Far left is on college campuses, sure. Let's critique that where we can. I agree with you about, I think, pretty much everything you've said, almost. I agree on trying to get more viewpoint diversity. I have no problem with that. I don't mind, you know, sure, more Republican professors, all that. But the alt-right is in the White House. Like, it's such a much bigger problem, and people like Rubin are pretending to be the left who's fed up with the left, and then he just parrots Trump. Lines like he just parrots the Trump agenda from his gigantic platform now, and it's disturbing, and it's frustrating.

0:21:42 Michael: Right. Yeah, I'm not sure the, we have a big article on the alt-right coming out in the next issue of Skeptic in a couple of weeks and and the links to Trump. It's part of it. It is for sure. But it's not the whole thing. There's, you know, there aren't that many of them, like, OK, so we got the so-called regressive left that we're talking about now. And maybe the alt-right is that, is the, you know, the the comparable on the on the right.

And maybe we'd make the same argument you're making now. Now, they're not actually that big. And most conservatives do not identify with the alt-right. And our article goes into the history of it. And they never really – they're not new.

Back in the 90s, when we were debunking the Holocaust deniers, it was Willis Cardo and these whole sort of far-right, they weren't called alt-right then, but they were into this kind of national identity, racial identity, what's called blood and soil, that the heart part of a of a people is in the blood and the soil, your race, your, you know, where you were born and all these kinds of things.

0:22:39 Michael: It's so kind of 1920s and 30s Nazi kind of thing. And I think they're pretty small, too. I think, you know. Trump, it's it's hard to predict. I mean, it starts to start to understand the phenomenon. I think people will be discussing it for decades. You know, the the election and how it happened and what Hillary did wrong, what he did right or whatever. And, you know, I don't have any special insight on that. I think the alt-right thing is a small part of it. I think he was at Liberty University this morning. And I think evangelical right, just the elected one of the least religious people in the history of the country. But, you Know, he knows how to say the right thing at the right venue to get those people to rally the troops. And and then I think, yeah,

0:23:22 Thomas: Yeah, but the the people he's putting in power are not like him. Yeah, I agree that he I don't even think he's religious like but but he's put Jeff Sessions has got to be as a libertarian. Jeff Sessions has got to disgust you. He is re-upping the war on drugs. He's going to cause so much trouble. Everybody, point to Trump himself, sure, and say, oh, he's not that religious. Everybody he's putting into power is an ideologue. I mean, they're the most religious right there is. And it's not just as though the alt-right and the alt-left cancel out. The right as a whole is so much more extreme than the left. Like the left, when Democrats are in power, There's no national laws about trigger warnings going into effect. I mean, none of this far left stuff is in the mainstream Democrat agenda. It's not true for Republicans. The mainstream Republican agenda is incredibly anti-gay, anti, you know, Trump is rolling all this stuff back and it's so frustrating to see such an undue focus on this far left.

0:23:33 Michael: Yeah. Very. Oh, totally. Oh, Totally. Oh, it's terrible. Terrible. It's terrible. Yeah.

0:24:25 Thomas: And as far as you mentioned, Liberty University, which is interesting. That's one of the points I often bring up and I wish more people would. People on sort of your end of this conversation are constantly harping on colleges. Nobody talks about the fact that right-wing universities do this so much worse. Liberty University, you cannot even watch rated R movies. And if you're a teacher, you have to sign a pledge that you will exhibit a biblical lifestyle and be an example. Like there's no academic freedom in that. There's no great freedom of expression.

0:24:54 Michael: No, no, of course not.

0:24:56 Thomas: And nobody talks about that. We talk about how the left ruins universities. Go ahead.

0:24:57 Michael: Yeah, yeah. Well, we used to talk about it all the time. I mean, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you know, that's what the whole new atheist movement was, you know, just pounding away at Christians and Christianity.

0:25:11 Thomas: Yeah, it kind of died down a little bit, didn't it?

0:25:13 Michael: And it died down. You know, yeah, that is right. These things kind of come and go in waves. Okay, so who is the guy from Breitbart? I'm just lost.

0:25:20 Thomas: Milo?

0:25:21 Michael: No, no. The other guy, the Trump district. Yeah. So He's kind of reduced to sitting at a chair next to the men's room or something. I mean, he's out. So I was encouraged by that. The Sessions thing, yeah, that's pretty bad. Um, you know, so I, you know, again, it remains to be seen, uh, you know, we're stuck, stuck with Trump for four years. Well, all right, so let's, you know, so Dems need to push back and they are, I, I mean, Adam Schiff was on Bill Maher last night and, you know, he comes across like a really reasonable guy and they're doing their best. Bill Mauer was telling me he was too much of a nice guy and

0:25:22 Thomas: Oh, uh, uh, Bannon? Steve Bannon.

0:25:58 Thomas: Yeah,

0:25:58 Michael: Needs to be a needs needs to need to be tough ass. Yeah, well, okay, actually, that's probably true. Because, you know, politics is pretty, you know, hard, hard scrabble game. And, you know, Trump obviously knows how to play it.

0:25:58 Thomas: I watched it. I love that show. Right. Yeah, the Republicans have been playing it better, really, because they're, in my opinion, they're less principled. They're willing to be the first ones to do something unprecedented, and then the Democrats are like, oh, that's the rules? Okay, we'll follow those rules. You know, when it comes to the Supreme Court, you know, with Merrick Garland and all this stuff.

0:26:11 Michael: Right.

0:26:30 Michael: Yes. Right. Exactly. So, I mean, you have to win before you can get your principles in place. So, you know, that's one of the aspects of the political situation, you know, that you have to, you have to learn. I can't, I just can't imagine even wanting to go into that as a profession. But, you know, a lot of people do and we need it. So, we got to put, try to put the right people in there uh what I was what I'm going to say oh yeah so then another thing I was thinking about um you know, like I'm a big fan of Bill Maher and and others who criticize Trump followers and that, you know, the sort of Hillary's deplorables, the flyover country, and then I was talking about that recently uh in sort of light of Jonathan Height's ideas about moral foundations and how people define themselves, and also Charles Murray's idea of the coming apart, you know, that there's You know, there's a cognitive elite, you know, that kind of run the country. They run Wall Street. They run Silicon Valley. They're smart. They're rich.

0:26:58 Thomas: Yeah, me too.

0:27:28 Michael: And there's everyone else. But it's not that they're dumb. And so a lot of them, maybe they don't like Trump that much, but they didn't like the other candidates or their guy didn't win. So they're sticking to the team. Well, pretty much everybody does that. And those people in the flyover country, they know when they're being insulted. And and they know when the joke is on them. You know, you watch Bill Maher. He makes fun of, you know, conservatives. OK, they know they're being made a fun of fun of and they don't like that. And so one response is is Trump like, OK, fuck you. We're putting Trump in there. I'm pulling the handle for Trump just to stick it to you. You know, I think that's one of maybe a dozen different factors that put him in the White House. And all of those combined, you know, we have to look at again in 2020 for the next election.

0:28:14 Michael: You know who the down is going to put up there knows how to, you Know, play those games because that's how it works.

0:28:20 Thomas: Yeah, well, I guess, I guess what overall point were you trying to make with that? I mean, are you, is it, mm-hmm?

0:28:26 Michael: Well, that it's OK. Yeah. So it's back to the is it the alt right in the white house? No, I Think that's a small part of it. I think there's a huge swath of Americana, but you know 63 million people pulled the handle for Trump. OK, so maybe three million are alt-right crazies, but the other 60 million are kind of just mainstream regular folks, people that we would meet and like and just chat with. And they're just normal people that really aren't big racist bigots. But if they

0:28:30 Thomas: Well, I just I don't think the, I don't think the data backs that up, to be honest with you. No, there's just something that came out, I could try to pull it up, that racism was the biggest predictor of whether or not you, you voted for Trump. I mean, I think that there's racism

0:28:54 Michael: Think, you know, like what race or racism, racism, race. I mean, I mean Trump got the same number of white black votes that Romney got. Yeah, I think that's what it was. So it wasn't like he was a bigger draw for whites. He had the same número of whites. I think more Hispanics than, than Romney God, but you're talking about, what's the measure of, of what's metric for measuring racism? Cause the, like the general polls that I track in my book, the moral art and And that Steve Pinker tracks in The Better Angels of Our Nature is that, you know, since the 1950s, we've become a lot more tolerant, that conservatives today are more liberals than liberals were in the 1950S, just in terms of their attitudes toward blacks, women, gays, and so on.

And so let's pull back and look at that for just a second while you're looking that up. I mean, as late as 1967, interracial marriage was illegal. Illegal. Legal. You know, it took a constitutional, a Supreme Court vote to overturn that. That's not that long ago. And yet here we are, no one even talks about it anymore. Pollsters don't even ask.

0:29:20 Thomas: Yeah, which is amazing.

0:30:06 Michael: In 1959, I have the data here in my book, you know, 4% of Americans agreed that it's okay for blacks and whites to marry. In 1959 4%, you know now it's no one, even asks anymore. Cause pretty much everybody says, yeah, whatever, dude, who cares? And, and it's the same way for, gay marriage. So it's as recently as 2015 now. It's barely talked about. By 2020 or so, it won't even be an issue. No one will even discuss it. By 2025 or so pollsters won't even ask because it'll be so mainstreamed. And so to that extent, who is it that's racist, bigoted, and so on, when pretty much everybody has shifted toward the liberal end of the spectrum spectrum on social values, uh, racial attitudes, attitudes toward women, gays, Jews, and so on, you know, but,

0:30:53 Thomas: Well, I mean, that's a really optimistic view. Certainly no one would deny we've made progress, but I think Trump, if anything, and I've got the study, it's essentially, I can send you the link, but the claim is that, and it shows the graphs to show the highest correlation, hostile sexism and acknowledgement of racism were the highest predictors for whether someone voted for Trump, more so than economic. Dissatisfaction. So it kind of fights back against that narrative that it's a bunch of coal miners.

0:31:22 Michael: But so when I'm asking, how do you know what somebody's racial attitudes are? I mean, I mean

0:31:26 Thomas: It says acknowledgement of racism, so I'd have to dig into the questions, but I wonder if it's even... I

0:31:31 Michael: As a pollster, you walk up with a clipboard and go, do you dislike blacks or like blacks? Oh, I dislike blacks. Thank you. Boom. I mean that, you know that's not how those polls are taken. And so I'm not sure what the source of the data is. I mean, yeah, please take your time.

0:31:44 Thomas: Will take a second here to see if I can find an example question, but... Because

0:31:48 Michael: I mean, we're just running an article in the next issue by Carol Tavris, who's skeptical of the implicit association test, the IAT, which allegedly shows everyone's a racist. But there's, because it's all unconscious. You don't know that you're, you don't know you're a racist, but you are. And, but these tests often require these real subtle subtle manipulations of how the protocols are run, how you respond, and the timing of the response, and so on. It turns out there's some deep methodological problems with this test, ferreting out alleged bigots, and not just racists, but anti-fat, anti-gay, anti handicapped, anti poor, it's like pretty much anything across the board. Almost everybody has A bigoted attitude, and that just doesn't gel with what's happened in the last century, uh, in social progress

0:32:38 Thomas: Well, I think it's certainly true that Every, a lot of people, there's... there's still plenty of well-established science on biases that are, that we're not aware of. I mean, doesn't, I think that it's a caricature to say that the left thinks everybody is going around calling people the N-word. That's not, I think, I think you, I would agree with you that we've made enormous progress on that front. Trump has certainly, there's... there's been an increased epidemic, epidemic of racist being more comfortable being open about it. But for the most part, yeah, that's not socially as acceptable as it was. But there's all kinds of unconscious biases that affect women, people of color, and there's stuff we have to... It's difficult to...

Combat. I can give you the the questions that they asked. So to determine sexism they asked the following questions. Women are too easily offended. I guess that's agree or disagree kind of thing. Many women are actually seeking special favors such as hiring policies that favor them over men under the guise of asking for equality. Women three, women seek to gain power by getting control over men and four, when women lose to men in fair competition they typically complain about being discriminated against. And then for race, the three are white people in the US have certain advantages because of the color of their skin. Two, racial problems in the US are rare isolated incidents. And three, I am angry that racism exists.

0:32:40 Michael: Sure, Okay.

0:33:56 Michael: So people that would score in the direction of of indicating that they're racist or sexist, then we're more likely to vote for Trump. That was the study. Yeah. All

0:34:04 Thomas: Yes, it was far more of a predictor than economics.

0:34:06 Michael: Right, well, Okay. I haven't seen that. I'll take a look at that. I mean, It Could That could be. I mean, that, you know, social science is what I do. A lot of the social science is good, some of it's not so good.

0:34:09 Thomas: Yeah, sure. I'll send it to you. Yeah.

0:34:17 Michael: As we've seen in the past couple years, a lot, lot of this stuff's not replicable. So, you know, you have to look at them one at a time. And yes, of course, there's still a lot of these issues. What I find particularly interesting is the accusation that there's a lot OF racism and sexism in the academy, in departments that are run by women, blacks, and so on, or men who, white men who are super liberal. What's going on here? If there's still a bias, are they behind closed doors, just not actually acting the way they say they believe? In other words, they're still more likely to hire a white male than a woman or a minority, or is it something else? I've been trying to get my, oh,

0:34:58 Thomas: So what are their complaints? Just for example, like what are, what are the student complaints in this situation when you say complaining about racism? Do

0:35:07 Michael: That. Well, you see these statistics, these about the number of departments in which women are still a small part of it, mostly the STEM fields, engineering, physics, physical sciences and engineering and math. Like at Caltech, for example, I've been associated with them for a quarter century and they really are trying to find more women to hire and they've Been doing way better. But it's still, I can't remember what the latest percentage is, but in the physical sciences, engineering and math, it's still predominantly men. And it's not for lack of trying. I think I think it's probably just takes, you know, like two generations where you have to get those girls that typically leave math and science classes in eighth grade to stay and keep going. And then you'll see the results, you know, a few decades down the line, something like that.

But even like when I had Lisa Randall on our Science Salon, you now, she's big. She's a giant. She's a huge successful scientist at Harvard. And she says it still goes on even at Harvard and and so I asked her this question. Like, are you telling me that, you know, Harvard is one of those liberal campuses in the country behind closed doors.

0:35:28 Thomas: Hmm.

0:36:16 Michael: These liberals aren't actually doing what they say should be done. And she said, well, it's complicated. But, you Know, yeah, there's still a lot of bias. Like, OK, wow.

0:36:25 Thomas: Yeah, well, I mean, it's certainly not my view that that

0:36:27 Michael: And those aren't those Trump supporters. Those are your guys, your team members.

0:36:28 Thomas: No, of course not. It's certainly not my view that people that liberal people in the academy are behind closed doors trying to be racist and sexist. I think that a lot of that is a People are looking at the end result, which is usually unfair. There's no women in certain fields. It's usually something that you or I would both agree that's not the outcome we want. I don't think the two of us are going to disagree about that. I mean, I have more women in STEM fields.

0:36:57 Michael: Well, wait a minute. Wait, wait. Maybe we will. What is the outcome we want? Well, I would say open opportunity for everybody. Regardless – so if we –

0:37:08 Thomas: So that's where it Gets complicated. So what if we find out, which is my belief, that a lot of why women are discouraged from STEM fields is negative stereotypes that they get exposed to early on, that women aren't good at math or science, when it turns out they actually are. Like, there's that study where if you tell women, if you present them with negative stereotypes about how they will perform in math and science right before they take a test, they do worse.

0:37:09 Michael: Yeah, they don't do as well, right? Yeah,

0:37:34 Thomas: Yeah. And what if that's what's going on? So what I think It is, is there's these negative outcomes that are the process, sorry, they are the product of complicated factors. You and I will, I think we will both agree, as we've just said, that I don't think it's people plotting behind closed doors in institutions. I think that's absurd. I don't, if there are people who believe that, I think they're wrong. You know, I'd be happy to argue with them. But they're seeing these outcomes. And they're seeing that maybe they don't know what to attribute it to.

And so they think there's some closet, you know, racism or sexism in the academy. Maybe there are individual examples of that, but for me it's it's a complicated problem that has a lot of different factors that are implicit bias that are through through a lot of different, you know, areas too, like it might be in high school, might start in high school, might not even be a problem with colleges, but by the time you get to college the the the sort of the stereotypes are already in place or they've already had their effect, so it's a difficult problem, so people are grasping for solutions and maybe they don't have the right solutions, but that doesn't mean there's no problem there.

0:37:34 Michael: I know. Yeah, right.

0:38:38 Michael: I was just looking up Jonathan Haidt's slides. He just gave a talk that he posted in which he – okay, there's several slides where it looks good, it looks bad, it's hard to say. So like these are the number of PhDs, women versus men. So health science, yeah, health science is like five to one over men. Public administration, two to one women over men, social behavioral sciences, it's almost two to ones. Biology, women slightly ahead of men, same thing with arts and humanities, slightly more women than men. In business, they start to fall behind. Physical sciences, half the women as men. Math and computer science, like four times as many, three times as men as women. Engineering, it's like five times as many men as woman. So his question is, do you see institutional sexism here or free choice? That's what's on his slide. Do you see, is this institutional sexist or free-choice? So if you're going to say, well, it institutional sex is, and then you'd have to say where men are being discriminated against in health sciences, education, public administration,

0:38:53 Thomas: Well, I think you tweeted that, yeah.

0:39:41 Michael: Social behavioral behavioral sciences and biology and that women are being discriminated against in business, physical sciences, math, and engineering.

0:39:47 Thomas: I think, yeah, and I think that's dodging the question, and maybe, maybe there are, maybe there are some people who we can say are approaching this the wrong way and saying, yes, this is institutional sexism, and then ignoring any other discrepancies where there's more women than men, and I would say they're probably wrong. I think that that dodges the fact that there's a whole lot of non-institutional but but still prevalent sexism going on in these fields. And you know, I would love a way to address it.

And I don't think we address it by trying to pretend it doesn't exist because here's a field over here where there's more women than men. Like I, I just, I, I often see this as an attempt to, to make, to say, there's nothing to see here. This, there's, there's no problems, you know? And, and especially when, when you bring up the, the moral arc and the fact that yes, we have gotten better as a whole, but to people who are still suffering, uh, it's, it doesn't. Can be sometimes a little insulting to tell them that as a way of deflecting away from what might be legitimate grievances.

0:39:50 Michael: Okay. Okay, yeah.

0:40:49 Michael: Oh, for sure, because sometimes this stuff still goes on, I suppose, even in the academy, but giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Like I had Lawrence Krauss on our, we hosted Lawrence Kraus for our salon. And, you know, he's at Arizona State University. Huge, huge.

0:41:03 Thomas: Yeah, I just spoke to him on the show.

0:41:05 Michael: Oh, you did? Okay, yes. Well, great.

0:41:05 Thomas: Yeah, I love Lawrence Krauss.

0:41:06 Michael: He's a good friend. So he's, again, liberal creds, solid as could be, and his university is doing everything they can to hire more women and so on and so forth. And his statement was the dean handed down our marching orders to us, equally qualified, two candidates, one's a woman, you hire the woman. OK. All right. So let's say that these discrepancy in these numbers are not due to people behind closed doors doing bad things, racist and so On. Let's say it's something else. Maybe it's what you think, which is maybe, and I mentioned, in eighth grade or so, women are discouraged from continuing on in STEM classes.

0:41:11 Thomas: Yep.

0:41:41 Michael: Or is it something else? Is it they're just not interested in physical sciences, math, and engineering, and they are more interested in medicine, biology, chemistry, social sciences, and so on? Is it just an interest thing versus, you know, in other words, if we don't have perfectly equal outcomes, does that mean a difference in interest or still a bias of some kind?

0:41:40 Thomas: I you and I can agree that Saying that we must have perfectly equal outcomes. Otherwise there's outright racism and sexism. I don't, I think that's stupid. I don't, I think that's a simplification, but, but, but I think there's two ends of the spectrum where people are minimizing the problem altogether. And by the way, why can't we just do our best to try to encourage women to get into STEM fields? Because I think that, yeah.

0:42:16 Michael: Yeah, OK.

0:42:27 Thomas: And I think that we need to call out if, when there's a study that points out implicit bias, to to recognize, okay, maybe this is going on, maybe we need to make an effort in our lives to make sure we're not perpetuating that if at all possible, because it might, I I don't think it's just in the institutions, I think it could be in everyday life, and I think that that could be why you see women aren't interested in these fields. I think it's, I think it's absolutely true that women are not interested as much as men in some fields, but I don't think that makes it necessarily okay. I think if they're being discouraged because of bias, then naturally they're not going to be interested in those fields. But

0:42:26 Michael: We should. We shouldn't. And they are. People are really.

0:43:02 Michael: Yeah.

0:43:02 Thomas: I think we... I don't want to spend as... I want to maybe go on to other topics because I think we probably probably largely Agree on that. But one thing that I want to talk about, I meant to bring up, is another study I looked at that I can send you if you're interested, from George Mason University, which I think really combats a bit of the storyline that here on, on college campuses, because, uh, the idea that liberals, there's a bunch of liberal crybabies on college campus. Uh, it's true that, that college campuses are overwhelmingly liberal, but there's a study done that, uh, that I uncovered that I think is really interesting from George Mason University, where they had students at that university, which is a liberal university. They had them write a counter-autitudinal, uh, essay, a couple of them actually, which means obviously, writing, uh, an essay from the perspective of someone you disagree with. And

0:43:03 Michael: Yeah. OK. All right. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah sure.

0:43:49 Michael: OK,

0:43:49 Thomas: So they had liberals and conservatives do it. They had people with more or less, you know, party affiliation. They they had a couple different ones. One was on tuition increase and they picked that so that it wouldn't be partisan. So it'd be kind of a, uh, an issue that none of them would probably most likely agree with, uh, to kind of as a, as a baseline.

0:44:04 Michael: All right. Right.

0:44:07 Thomas: But then when they switched to a partisan issue, they found, and it's kind of interesting, they did two versions. One where they had to write, you know, Republican if you're a Democrat, Democrat if you're Republican, kind of counter-attitudinal essay. One where they were randomly assigned, so they felt like they had no choice, and another where they were asked to volunteer, so they felt like they had more of a choice. For some reason, it's kind of fascinating.

Republican kids who were given a choice in the one where the more seemed like they had a choice displayed incredible cognitive dissonance and had a really hard time doing it, and liberals didn't. And when they weren't given it, the other interesting thing is the group that had the easiest time was Republicans who weren't given a choice. Somehow they were able to just do it when they didn't feel like they had a choice. But when they had a choice, and I think that if some of the storyline that your side of this is talking about were true, I don't think that would be true. I think we would see Democrats have an impossible time as students, liberal students have an impossible time writing this essay, and conservatives who are, you know, more open-minded on free speech or something, they would be able to do this,

0:44:50 Michael: Yeah.

0:45:13 Thomas: And it's the opposite of true.

0:45:13 Michael: What was the study I tweeted recently? Because I thought it was at George Mason University. Also, maybe it was somewhere else. Asking students if they'd be okay dorming with somebody of the opposite political party, and Republicans were like three times more likely to say yes than Democrat students. But I can't remember if that was George Mason. George Mason is not really a liberal campus, though. I think they're more kind of libertarian, or at least, Well, at least their economics are.

0:45:30 Thomas: Right. Oh, really? They, the study presented it. Maybe, you know, the study was at George Mason. I assume that's where they asked the people, but they said they did it on a liberal campus. So they represented either themselves as a liberal campus or they did it on another campus. But yeah, I mean, that's interesting. It's certainly, can at least show, and you can look into it, but it at least does fight against the common strawman.

0:45:48 Michael: Yeah. Okay. Right.

0:46:00 Thomas: And yeah,

0:45:59 Michael: Goes both ways. Yeah. Yeah, that could be. And that makes sense sort of in Jonathan Haidt's model of moral foundations that conservatives are more steadfast in their beliefs about family, flag, nation, and the certain values that are non-negotiable. And my dog Hitch agrees completely.

0:46:09 Thomas: Yes.

0:46:20 Thomas: Uh, is that Hitch after, after Christopher Hitchens?

0:46:22 Michael: That's right. Yeah, I named my dog after Christopher Hitchens. Is that crazy or what? Yeah, all so like there's studies showing that, know, like the number of books about travel you have in your library is a proxy for more open-mindedness and liberal Attitudes toward other countries and people, you know, things like that. Conservatives definitely are different than liberals in that regard, and we like those, those values of tolerance and openness to experience, measured by the Big Five personality there of. What matches, what I liked about Jonathan's work, is as a liberal, he's willing to recognize that those values on the right also have certain credibility for them. They're real, they count, and we may not agree with them, but, you know, a good portion, half roughly, the country does. You know, what is it, respect for authority, you know, family, you sort of hierarchy, these sorts of things that, you know, we tend to scoff at as liberal, social liberals, but they actually do have some value in the world we live in.

0:46:22 Thomas: Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I,

0:47:28 Michael: So anyway, that made me think of that, that, you know, that could very well be that studies kind of make sense in that regard.

0:47:33 Thomas: I, yeah. Well, and I take that message that we can't simply disregard these things that are important to half the country. I get it. I think that this election was truly a special occurrence that I, I mean, I, for one, of course I, you know, I would have supported Hillary versus any Republican because I think the Republican agenda is terrible and just any, you know, blank robot or something that's a Republican versus Democrat. I'm going to support the Democrat because of the outcome, because by the way, The Supreme Court, for one, I mean, that's a huge, you talked earlier about, you know, gay marriage will soon, they won't even ask. There's a different history we could, or a potential future we could discuss, which is. A couple more justices leave during Trump's administration and we get horrendous originalists like Gorsuch, two more in there or something.

0:48:21 Thomas: And all of a sudden, I don't even know that Roe v. Wade is safe at that point. I mean, there's definitely, there's definitely, it's not a given that that progress will be sustained forever, I don't think.

0:48:31 Michael: Well, let's just address that for a second. If Roe v. Wade was overturned, it would go back to the states. So what would be your concern about it going back to the states?

0:48:40 Thomas: A lot of states that would completely screw over women. I mean, are you telling me you're not too worried if we repeal Roe v. Wade?

0:48:47 Michael: Well, no, I'm just sort of a point of discussion. I mean, given where we are now that, you know, there's so many restrictions because of, you know, sort of grassroots activism, yeah, yeah. No, I'm 100% behind women's reproductive rights. I would not be in favor of that. But I don't think the overturning of Roe v. Wade would necessarily be a catastrophe. It'd be bad, but maybe not as catastrophic as we might think. And yeah, well, maybe I'm blindly optimistic. I don't know. Even because, you know, I'm 62, right? Right. So I've been voting since Nixon. And, you know, every election that I've since I've been an adult, just to pull back and get the bigger picture about Trump, you there's always hue and cry from the side that didn't win. You know, this is it. It is really catastrophic. You know. We're going

0:48:53 Thomas: Yeah. And it's terrible. Oh boy, I don't know about that one.

0:49:32 Thomas: Sorry,

0:49:32 Michael: To hell. And yes,

0:49:33 Thomas: Can I clarify, because I was going in a specific direction with that, and I just don't want to start you down the wrong path. When I said that, I meant under the guise of normal republicanism, like, oh, going with our guy or whatever. I don't think that works in such a truly historically awful candidate who was caught on tape saying things that would disqualify anyone else, and people still cheered him on. I mean, the number of examples of him just being truly awful makes it, I think, far different than any candidate we've ever had.

0:49:56 Michael: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. It's true. It does seem historic. But historic, I guess this will be a test of my thesis in the moral arc, you know, that things are getting better. I mean, I've never, I always said it was three steps forward, two steps back. Okay, so maybe it'll be three forward and five back. I don't know. But I, you know, I think there's a lot of ruin in a nation is what Adam Smith once said about, you know, people that are saying doomsday about their country. You know, countries can survive a lot. I think I think we still have a lot of checks and balances. I'm I really don't think, you know, we're heading for doomsday or anything like that. But we'll see. I mean, if you know if maybe

0:50:21 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, but I mean, doesn't that ignore the people? It's not, it might not be doomsday, but it sure is going to be a living hell for a lot of people. I mean, it's kind of, what about people who've already been deported and separated from their families, which you've seen examples of?

0:50:50 Michael: Maybe maybe we'll say, you Know, it's not. Well, yeah, there was a 60 Minutes piece last Sunday. It was very disturbing. This was not one of the bad hombres.

0:51:00 Thomas: Yeah. So it's not great for those people.

0:51:06 Michael: No, no, absolutely not. You're right. That's true. Absolutely. I mean, that's right.

0:51:09 Thomas: I got to get to what I think is maybe the most contentious thing, the place where we'll disagree most, which maybe I should have led with, I don't know. But identity politics, because you tweeted something that I really got to scratch my head on. I just don't, I don't understand where you're coming from and maybe it's a chance to talk it out here. In response to a New York Times piece. That talked about Richard Spencer leading Trump rally supporters, you know, in a Nazi salute. You retweeted it and you said, this is what identity politics leads to. If you identify by color and push for non-white identities, white identities will push back. Stop it. I mean, are you standing by that? Because, I mean, that... Sure.

0:51:40 Michael: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, I'll tell you why I am. Let me find my quote that I'm using in my book that we use in our alt-right lecture. As a scholar, Walter Russell Mead observed, "The growing resistance among white voters to what they call political correctness and a growing willingness to articulate their own sense of group identity can sometimes reflect racism, but they need not always do so. So. People constantly told that they're racist for thinking in positive terms about what they see as their identity, however, may decide that racist is what they are and that they might as well make the best of it. The rise of the so-called alt-right is at least partly rooted in this dynamic." So I guess my point was that, in and the long run, it'd be better if we just treated people as individuals instead of members of a group.

0:52:35 Michael: And that's kind of where we began when, when I was in college, that was sort of the emphasis, like, let's get away from all this. But then, you know, with affirmative action and then the government asking you to tick the boxes on the forms and so on so they could collect data, you know, it kind of forces the mindset back into, OK, we have to treat you as a member of a group. Which group are you in? I don't want to be a member. I'm an individual. You can't judge me based on my group. But that's where that kind of leads to. And that's my concern about that. And that of the rise of the alt-right and support of Trump is that these people think that they've been told you are a bunch of racist bigots and that we're dividing everybody up into blacks and whites. And they're sitting there going, well, I'm white, so up the hell with it. OK, I'm pulling the handle for my guy. And I think that's where that leads. That could lead to. It's one of the concerns I have.

0:53:24 Thomas: Can I paint a little bit of an alternate light on this to show you why I think this tweet is so offensive and I honestly, I'm very puzzled because you seem like a reasonable guy and I just can't believe it. When you look at the history of this country, it's not as though identity politics was invented yesterday. White identity politics pre-exist, pre-date black identity politics. And so when you look at people of color who have been struggling in this country to get, of you course, we've, people you have made progress. We're not going to deny that again. Their progress has been made. But when you look at the history of having to fight tooth and nail for their rights and the constant persistent white identity resistance to it. White identity politics, as I just said, is not a new thing. It predates black identity politics.

So when you tweet this, it looks like, okay, well, even though white identity politics has dominated the country for most of the history and just now, you know, in the last 40 years or something, people of color have been able to make some progress. It's now incumbent upon people of color to stop complaining so much. In order to, you know, then maybe this

0:53:27 Michael: Yeah, absolutely.

0:53:46 Michael: That's true. Yeah.

0:54:33 Thomas: White racism will, will die down a little bit. Can you see how bad that looks?

0:54:39 Michael: Yeah, I guess when you put it that way.

0:54:42 Michael: Yeah, so for sure, I mean, I've, in my next book I have a whole section on that's, that whole sort of blood and soil, utopian, why utopias can never be achieved, you know, this goes back centuries, really trying to engineer societies. And yeah, for sure, the sort of "right white is right" movement, you know, far predates anything we're talking about now. I close my chapter with this quote from Sohrab Ahmari in his book, The New Philistines. I think that also captures this. "Having been told for decades that the promise of universal rights is a lie, that group identity is all there is to public life, that the Western canon is the preserve of privileged dead white, and that identitarian warfare is permanent."

0:55:32 Michael: Many in the West have taken up their own form of identity politics. There is logic to their demand for validation. When culture only rewards the assertion of group identity, black, female, queer, etc., the silent majority will want its slice of the identitarian pie. They can do identity politics too it's called white nationalism so that's what is

0:55:53 Thomas: I would say it's More than just that, though. I think that, that what is another real oversight that of some people is that white nationalism is the only white identity politics. But when you look at the right, I've got a study done by, it was just posted on FiveThirtyEight. I think it's fascinating. The particular chart that I'm talking about is perception of bias differ across party lines and it's percent of Democrats and Republicans who say there's a lot of discrimination against the following groups. So accurate to say that white identity politics is only some far-right nationalism kind of thing going on. The Republican Party in general thinks that Christians are the most oppressed group of any group and over and above Muslims, tied with trans people to be fair, tied with trans people.

0:56:36 Michael: Well, that is, that, that is pretty, sir. Yeah. That's pretty, yeah, that's

0:56:42 Thomas: Christians, whites are more, look at that chart and I'll have this, I always put all my links in the show notes for everybody. For Republicans, Blacks least discriminated against on this list of Muslims, immigrants, blacks, gays and lesbians, trans people, Christians and whites. Democrats look pretty, pretty appropriate there to me. It's Muslims, immigrants, black, gays and lesbians, trans people discriminated against. Christian whites, not at all. That's more accurate. So that's, that's the, the, the frustrating thing about your tweet and that attitude is hold on.

0:56:42 Michael: Pretty bad. Yeah.

0:56:56 Michael: Yeah, yeah. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, so the, it's a, so your point is that those aren't the crazy far right, alt right people.

0:57:16 Thomas: Sure, that white identity politics has just been our politics for most of the country's history, mainstream politics. And when people of color are trying to fight against that, and it's easy for white people who think that the neutral, they think, like, like you and I can agree, Christian privilege, when, when Christians, are when we fight back against Christian privilege at all, it's viewed as discrimination to Christians, they think, "Oh, whoa, why you?"

0:57:17 Michael: Right, right. Yeah right.

0:57:40 Thomas: Why? And it's because they've had it so easy for so long, they think that's the norm. And so it's, it's incredibly offensive to me to, to, to approach it from this angle that just because now people of color, you know, in recent history are fighting for their rights more, that this is some identity politics that we can't have. We need to go back to a neutral thing. There is no neutral, you know, non-identity. I just don't, I think that's a false. Reality, I don't think that that's ever existed in our country, that there's some objective neutral politics. It's all just different identities and people of color are fighting for theirs.

0:57:45 Michael: Right. Yeah that's true. Yeah, that's a good point. Yep. That's a good point I suppose I should probably temper my tweets a little bit more, I suppose I do actually read the articles before I tweet them. Not everybody does that

0:58:28 Thomas: I will credit you for that. I think, and especially when you talked about, I think you talked about the Milo thing early in our conversation about clarifying some of the facts there. I do, I really respect people who are open to the info and the facts and there's so much misinformation. Let me touch on one more thing that I said I would before we started recording, which is Jordan B. Peterson using the free speech war, this kind of war on free speech to really push across a completely idiotic transphobic agenda. This is so problematic, and it's something that people like me are really frustrated about, because while you and I agree on all kinds of, all you kinds of things. I mean, we would take individual examples like the, again, the Charles Murray thing. We would take those, and you and I would agree that those students should be punished. They should be disciplined.

People who are invited on campus by student groups should be able to speak. But Jordan Peterson gets to go on Sam Harris, again, a gigantic platform. He has a ton of listeners and spout nonsense about this Bill C-16, which all it does is add gender identity and expression to the current human rights bill in Canada. Here's why, you know, I can give you like one sentence that tells you how full of shit Jordan Peterson is.

0:58:49 Michael: Oh, yeah

0:59:36 Thomas: He's complaining about all these slippery slope of horribles that's going to happen to him if this goes under effect. His university is already under this law, because all this does is federalize in Canada a law that most of the provinces already have, and he is in a province that already has it. And none of the crap that he spewed has happened.

0:59:55 Thomas: He's already under this law. All it does, and here's the thing, he wants to point to some edge case of, what if someone identifies by a 15 digit number and makes me memorize that number, which no one, no judge would ever go with. I mean, there's still, you have to be reasonable in law. And he wants to push that, go ahead.

0:59:54 Michael: Okay, all right Okay, this is, I mean, this is stuff about the pronouns, right? That's the only thing I've heard him talk about, the pronouns the Z and Zern. Well, anyway I have to say the way he says it, it does sound pretty absurd and he kind of makes it sound like By law, you have to call somebody a Xer and a Z or Xer or Z instead of – but I didn't really look into it. What's the story?

1:00:14 Thomas: Yes. Yep.

1:00:28 Thomas: So. Well, and that's, but that's what's so frustrating is, you know, trans people who are sitting here, some of them, and I think you've already, uh, by something else we said in this conversation, I think you've agreed trans people have a hell of a time. It's, it's not, they're not, they're not, there's a lot of discrimination against trans people, maybe more so than any other group.

1:00:46 Michael: Well, it's the next – yeah, they're next. But they'll go the same way as the gay marriage thing in five years again.

1:00:48 Thomas: Yeah. I hope so. But trans people who are not currently in that utopia that will five years from now, hopefully they'll all be in, who are getting fired from jobs, who are getting kicked out of houses. Yes, that's what the law does. Now, this is what the law actually does. It makes it illegal. It adds gender identity to a list, by the way, that already exists. Race, religion, sexual orientation.

1:00:59 Michael: Okay. Yeah. Are they? Yeah? Okay. Okay. So it's a nondiscrimination based on – okay. Okay. Well, that seems perfectly reasonable. I mean, we already do that with all these other categories. Okay. So what's he objecting to then?

1:01:15 Thomas: Exactly. Very basic non-discrimination that will prevent them from being fired from their job for no other reason but that they're trans.

1:01:25 Thomas: Exactly. So what he does is he looks at the language that says gender expression, and he creates in his mind the worst case scenario, which is somebody's going to decide they're a different pronoun every day in my class and they're going to make me use it and they're going to shut down my way of thinking.

1:01:42 Michael: Oh, I see. Or else he'll be prosecuted.

1:01:44 Thomas: Here's the simple solution to that. You teach actually. How often do you have to use someone's pronoun in class like an individual student? Almost never.

1:01:46 Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Almost. I don't even know. I'm

1:01:52 Thomas: Never comes up. You could just say they. I know people object to they, by the way. They think, oh, it's grammatically incorrect. Big Deal. You're in a position of power. You're a professor. Occasionally you're going to have to say "they." Because like one student out of a billion uses different pronouns. He's crying so much foul. He's like making 30,000 a month on Patreon because of this bullshit war he's fighting when it's nothing in comparison to the protections that trans people will get from being fired, from being evicted based on being trans. And it's incredibly offensive. It's something that is all done under the guise of free speech. And that's one of the biggest problems

1:01:52 Michael: Kind of surprised about it. The other thing that's surprising about all this is we think of Canada as so liberal. I would have thought they've already done all this and that we're usually behind them.

1:02:33 Thomas: I have. Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. They have. That most of the provinces have, you know, it's like, it's like our states, like it's most, if most of our states had this law already, this Canadian Bill C16, all it does is unify it, makes every province have it, that's all it is. And he's already in a province that has it. It's it's absurd.

1:02:38 Michael: Yeah. Okay. And I've never met him. I don't know his politics. Is he a liberal otherwise?

1:02:51 Thomas: Okay. Uh, No, he's he's I I mean, he, well, that that's another thing that people do nowadays is they'll say, well, I'm a liberal, and then their their definition of liberal is libertarian or the true liberal you know

1:02:58 Michael: Oh, yeah. I see. Right, right. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Like I said, it doesn't matter. Okay, there's too much baggage with the label. All right. Well, so, I mean, I just heard him on Joe Rogan talking about myths and all that, and I kind of liked all that what he was saying, and sort of a just yeah now

1:03:07 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna comment on his, on his academic work, I'm not an expert, if it's good, if it's interesting, cool. I just, I mean, really, that's not what's making him his money though, and that's not what's, he's motivating a lot of people who are against trans, trans people and want an excuse, a sort of cover to fight against trans people, and he gives it to them because he, he makes it into this, you noble free speech war that just doesn't exist.

1:03:40 Michael: You said he was transphobic, but if he was

1:03:43 Thomas: That's my words. I think when somebody is putting that much focus on edge cases to fight against a law that largely just protects trans people from basic, you know, discrimination, the effect of it is incredibly transphobic. And he would, I'm sure he would say, oh no, you know, and he has said, I will give him credit for this, he has said, if someone is a trans woman, I will call them she, if it's a trans man, I'll call them he, but he just, he hates the Zerzy, they, pronouns, so much.

1:04:13 Thomas: And the simple answer is just don't use pronouns. Just use their name or say they. It's just, it's such, it's so, it's exactly like the war on Christmas. It's exactly like someone being so outraged.

1:03:43 Michael: Okay yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah right right right yeah yeah Much ado about nothing. Right, yeah, I had a friend that I went to college with, I went to Pepperdine for my undergraduate, he was a high school friend of mine, that, and his name was Duane, and he hated his name, and he changed it to D'Artagnan, you know, from the Three Musketeers, right, yeah, so you know, he just announced one day, I would like you to all call me D'Artagnan. We're like, what? And it's like, Dar, what? It's like, just call me Dar. I was like, okay. So we just did, and it was like, he changed his driver's light, it was like, no, I really, I don't care.

1:04:23 Thomas: Exactly.

1:04:35 Thomas: I like it. Yeah.

1:04:47 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's not that hard. Yeah.

1:04:53 Michael: I mean, it's really not a big deal, tell me whatever you want to call yourself. I guess maybe the concern, I mean, we start legislating stuff, enforcing it, the extreme cases, yeah, okay, but

1:05:03 Thomas: Well, I do a podcast which I'm very proud of with a Harvard Law educated attorney. It's called Opening Arguments and one thing I've learned from him, he's incredible. He knows everything about the law. He's cleared up a ton of misconception about, and by the way, most of the time we're fighting against liberal fake news, I'll have you know. Most of the time we're fighting against Trump can't be, you know, he can't be impeached for this, he can't be impeached for that, that kind of thing. But one thing I've learned from him is that Judges have to be, there's an expectation of laws being reasonable.

He talked about a case that he where the wording of the law was absolutely incontrovertible. That by the wording of the law, his side was going to win. He still had to argue that this is fair. Like he still had to argue like this law won't reach An unjust outcome and that kind of thing. So it's not as though judges are limited to the wording of the law says this, so we're going to throw you in the slammer for accidentally misgendering somebody once. It's just not how the law works. And it's that kind of paranoia about it

1:05:03 Michael: Okay right yeah yeah

1:06:07 Thomas: That people, in my opinion, very justifiably see as transphobic.

1:06:07 Michael: Yeah it's like the laws that are on the book still in certain states against sodomy, but they're never enforced, I mean, you know, how, you're going to know who's going to run around and enforce it, so they're just left there because no one wants to bother to legislate them out of the law books in it, because that's a big pain, so yeah, that's probably what happens to a lot of these things. They just never get, uh, enforced. Except, you know, if you're fired for being trans. Yeah. Okay. That's not, it's not just that it's not cool.

1:06:32 Thomas: Well, yeah. Yeah. And so it leaves you

1:06:38 Michael: It's it, it leaves you that protection, which they should have.

1:06:38 Thomas: That protection. Yeah. Yeah, Well, I'm amazed that you thank you so much for, you know, being willing to listen. And I can I just ask you, what is someone like me, who by the way, again, my overall thing is I'm on the left, I'm happy to criticize real violations of free speech by students and and all that when I can but what is your advice to someone like me who I'm just trying to fight against stuff like this, Jordan B. Peterson stuff like this, where this war on free speech has been used to to push absurd agendas? I mean, what am I to do, because over and above, overwhelmingly these platforms are

1:06:42 Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, totally. Uh, well, yeah, yeah.

1:07:13 Thomas: Going the other way and I can't crack them.

1:07:15 Michael: Right. I don't know. Um, I guess you could be the Snopes of, of the, you know, fact checking. I mean, what's the myth and just hammer away at it. That's, you Know, like it just, here's a chart, here the graph, here what I'm talking about. Here's what actually happened. Like we just did on this podcast where I clicked over to the site. You know, it's not there anymore. OK, so I don't know what's actually going on. You know. And the Tennessee easy is just is just a click and forward without fact checking. So you could be the Snopes fact checker for free speech, alleged free speech violation. And I will talk to, I'll talk to Dave Rubin about you. He should have you on the show and you have a conversation about that.

1:07:29 Thomas: Yeah, I'm doing my best, I'm trying. I would love to. We were supposed

1:07:55 Michael: But yeah,

1:07:55 Thomas: To talk at a conference in Milwaukee. He dropped out. I don't think, you know, I don't think related to me or anything. He said some, some scheduling issues and I was really sad. And that's when I did that Twitter campaign to try to say, Hey, we were going to talk. Now we're, you know, now you dropped out. Can we, can we have a conversation on either one of our podcasts? Haven't been able to, uh, to get through. So any help, I would appreciate.

1:08:14 Michael: I'll ping him on that. I mean, I have a philosophy of, you know, never attribute to malice what can be explained by randomness or busyness or whatever, you know, because I was supposed to do.

1:08:22 Thomas: Oh, oh, of course. I, of course. He's got a huge Twitter. You've got a huge Twitter. I, I, I never thought with you, with Ruben, I'm pretty sure he's seen it because he's addressed it sometimes. Someone asked a question on Facebook, a different story, but with you, you never seen my tweet. You've got a hundred thousand followers or something. Yeah. I'm not, I wasn't, you I was just sad in the tweet that you've somehow saw, which was a miracle to me. I just said, I'm sad that you haven't noticed me because I, you know, I am someone on the left who wants to talk. So thanks for doing so. I really, yeah.

1:08:48 Michael: Yeah, well, we did. You're welcome. That was great. I think we see that this is what clear conversation does. It gets you to a point where you can agree on the facts in any case. And that really resolves a lot.

1:08:51 Thomas: Well, all right.

1:09:02 Thomas: Absolutely. I'm really happy to have had you on. Thanks again, profusely. Thank you for coming on the show and being willing to talk. And by the way, being willing to just look at things and say, oh yeah, that looks, you know, that's a great quality. That's a real rational skeptical quality that I love. And thanks so much for displaying that today.

1:09:20 Michael: Well, I guess if I'm going to publish a magazine called Skeptic, I better do that. Part of my job description.

1:09:23 Thomas: That's right. Yeah, there you go. Not

1:09:26 Michael: All right, Thomas. That's great. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. All right. We'll talk to you soon.

1:09:26 Thomas: Everyone does. Thanks a lot.

1:09:53 Thomas: Wow, well, I can't help but feel a little optimistic after all that. That I've been, I feel like I've been making progress lately, and I'll reference, to Patrons have heard the conversation I had with someone who was a Jordan B. Peterson supporter, I don't know. I haven't decided if I want to make that a regular episode, I guess, chime in if you want me to, it was what I consider a successful conversation.

But I've been talking about this topic so much lately that I just don't want to get too repetitive, so I might just leave it as a patron only over on patreon.com/seriouspod. But anyway, I think it's working because I think, honestly, this guy Jordan B. Peterson has just not been opposed in a significant way, so he's been allowed to spout his nonsense and, and make, you know, he's a smart guy, he's a well-spoken guy, he's able to make his case in a way that appeals to principles that a lot of people agree on, free speech, you know, freedom of ideas, all that kind of stuff, but it's just nonsense when you get to the bottom of it. I have to note, uh, gosh, gad, sad, tried to

1:11:00 Thomas: Testify in Canadian, the Canadian Senate about C16, and, and just go with this Jordan Peterson storyline, this nonsense thing, and he, he got pretty well destroyed by a couple of the Senators, and it was, it was amazing to me. He also, he posted the video, I guess, tone deaf to the fact that he got absolutely destroyed. But anyway, check that out, I've tweeted it and stuff. I think I might, maybe I'll do a little video on it or something. But in, in that he mentioned that Jordan Peterson himself would be testifying this week. So that is something I am absolutely going to keep an eye on, maybe I'll do a video on. I have to say I'm, I'm really grateful that Michael Shermer was willing to come on and talk and seemed open-minded and seemed to change his views on a lot of stuff, which is not easy to do, by the way, I mean, I really, I didn't expect it, I honestly, I was appalled by his identity politics tweet, I thought it was awful, and Thank you for watching.

1:12:25 Thomas: And so I'm, I'm, I'm being cautiously optimistic. Maybe even he'll help me get onto Ruben or something. So thanks Thanks so much to everyone who's listened and made this show possible and supported it over at patreon.com/seriouspod. It sounds like maybe a little progress was made, so I'm cautiously optimistic. Thanks for listening. And as always, I will see you guys on Thursday.