SIO48: What's Really Going On at Evergreen College?

Transcript

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

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 48, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Today, I'm going to be speaking about the events at Evergreen College and doing my best to get to the bottom of it in a skeptical way. A lot of people have asked for my take on this. I resisted it a little bit because, I'm interested in broader politics and world events and everything. After looking into it a little bit, I opened that Pandora's box a little bit, and now I just can't help but want to do my best to set up the factual record in a way that might help people to make decisions how they feel about it. Let's get right over to that.

0:01:14 Thomas: I need to say this. Skepticism is not easy. Getting to the bottom of things is not easy. You know what is easy? Having a pre-formulated agenda and fitting facts into that agenda. That's incredibly easy. It's satisfying. It feels good. Oh, we were right all along. Oh, I was right. Here's another example. And nowhere was there a better indication of this than in Tucker Carlson's segment with Bret Weinstein, where the title is Campus Craziness.

It is a segment that the Fox News people focus on a lot because they They need a villain, and they need a reason to feel like they are victims, and my contention is that the campus craziness is a great way to appeal to an older, whiter audience that thinks the darn kids need to get off their lawn and is a good way to keep them fired up about the other side, and nothing fits better into that mold than some videos of some students yelling at a professor, and better yet, when you can get the professor professor on to talk about how the students have lost their minds. That really fits a predefined agenda well. I wish I were able to do that.

And it's something that's depressing me a little bit about the state of our conversation these days, is that that will always have such an advantage. It's such an advantage to be able to take a preformed narrative and just fit the facts into it. It's so much harder to do this research.

Now, look, my goal for this episode is to do the very best that I can to give you an unbiased, to the best extent that I can, representation of the facts, to actually dig into what's happened at Evergreen and allow you to come to your conclusions.

0:03:01 Thomas: I'll let you know when I'm giving you my opinion, but that's what I want to do. And it doesn't mean being perfectly in the middle all the time, but it at least means digging into the facts. And that's something that Rubin and Tucker Carlson just don't bother to do. They are content to let something fit their storyline. And a lot of times it goes the other way too. So a lot of times the other, the easy way out for the other side is to come up with the anti-storyline. No, campus craziness doesn't exist. Everything's fine, and fit everything into that narrative. I mean, it's just as wrong, really, if that's what you're doing. If you're starting from the conclusion and working the facts in, that's just as unskeptical. And my goal today is to do my best to be skeptical and try to start from scratch and dig into this and see what we find.

0:03:52 Thomas: So in order to do that, you don't start with Bret Weinstein. You don't start with his appearance on Fox News or his appearance on Rubin, because if you did, here's the impression you would get. So here's what's going on at Evergreen, according to Weinstein and Tucker Carlson. In fact, let's play a little bit of it. The Carlson segment is pretty short. Let's see what it says.

0:04:12 Clip: Time now for campus craziness, and tonight the title is not an overstatement, it really is crazy. Consider Evergreen State College in Washington and Olympia. Every year the school holds a day in absence, and years past non-white students symbolically left campus and attended anti-racism events. This year student activists demanded that all white people leave campus or else. Bret Weinstein refused. He's a professor at Evergreen State, and he called the race-based demand, quote, a show of force and an act of oppression. In response to that, here's what happened.

0:04:45 Clip: I'm talking all about some racist. I did not. I did. Useless. You're useless. Get the history could pivot in the direction of the values that you are standing here for. Yeah. Resign. What? Resign?

0:05:08 Thomas: So from this little tidbit there, you get the idea that all that happened was black people tried to demand that white people leave the campus, and one lone hero, a Weinstein, decided to stand up against this nonsense. And from there it all went haywire and he was threatened with violence. That's what you would get from this interview. And that's just not true. So first and foremost, this is a bit of starting in the middle because there's more to go back and talk about. But I'm going to start in the middle to correct the biggest misconception that's basically dominated 90% of the online conversation, and that is this idea that white people were demanded to leave campus. That's just not true.

0:05:53 Thomas: As always, I will provide my sources. I'm not going to read the whole email. This could take forever, so I'm going to read the important passage here. This sentence is very indicative. On day of absence, you can choose how and where to participate. You can choose how and where to participate this year. We will have full day on campus education and social program designed to address issues from the perspective of people of color. At the same time, off campus at the Unitarian Universalist Church there's an address we will host a full day program focusing on allyship and anti-racism work from a majority culture or white perspective. Due to the capacity limits of the space, 200 participants, we are asking those members of the Evergreen community who wish to attend the off-campus day of absence program to commit in advance by completing the registration form.

0:06:48 Thomas: I'll summarize thusly. So, as you heard Tucker Carlson say, he got it half right-ish, probably less than half right, when he said that the trend used to be that people of color would do a day of absence from the campus as a form of protest to show how valuable they are, and et cetera, et cetera. That's a cool thing. They decided this year to reverse it: workshop for people of colour be on campus, and we'll have a little workshop for people, I suppose, who identify as white off campus. Here's the thing to keep in mind. This this was not a mandatory evacuation, a demand that white people leave campus. The space where they were holding the event for white people only holds 200 people. The university is 5,000 students, roughly.

0:07:35 Thomas: They never intended for, and that's just students, so they never intended for all white faculty, students, everybody to leave the campus. That wasn't a demand anybody made. If I were a white student or faculty member, I would think, oh, it's interesting that this demonstration has been done in reverse for years and years past, something like 20, 30 years they've done this tradition. Well, this is an interesting take on the tradition. Yeah, how about in a show of solidarity to people of color, I'll volunteer to do the off-campus portion of this. And then keep in mind, the next day of the Day of Presence, that's when everybody comes back and then and everybody's on campus. So it's sort of, it's an interesting thing. It's like, here's separate workshops based on if you want to be an ally or based on if you are a person of color, and then we come together for the next day and have workshops together.

0:08:25 Thomas: Makes sense to me. Seems reasonable. But that is not how this was represented on Tucker Carlson in front of millions of viewers. You heard him say all white people leave campus or else. That's what you heard him say. And a professor, the person who's supposedly the victim here did not correct that point of fact, allowed that misconception to be broadcast to millions of angry old white people. So here's how the storyline, the Victim Narrative for Weinstein was crafted. And it's very frustrating to people like me who prefer facts to alarmist victim narratives. So what they do is they never actually show you the first email. All these YouTube channels, this Fox News, this Rubin, they never actually show the original email that I just read you, where it's like, well, you may attend 200 people.

0:09:13 Thomas: It's not at all any sort of demand. Then they skip to the reply email, which I will read you part of, which he writes from the assumption that it's a mandatory thing. I'm going to read you this. I might do it in its entirety because it's important. "Dear Rashida, when you at first described the new structure for day of absence at a past faculty meeting where no room was left for questions, I thought I must have misunderstood what you said. Later emails seemed to muddy the waters further while inviting commitments to participate. I now see from the bold-faced text in this email that I had indeed understood your words correctly. There's a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles, the theme of the play that this is based off of, etc., etc., and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away."

0:10:06 Thomas: The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force and an act of oppression in and of itself. You may take this letter as a formal protest of this year's structure, and you may assume I will be on campus during the day of absence. I would encourage others to put phenotype aside and reject this new formulation, whether they have registered for it already or not. On a college campus, one's right to speak or to be must never be based on skin color. The last paragraph is where he offers to do his version of like a racism workshop based on biology because he's a biology teacher. Look at how much distortion there is in that. And by the way, an important thing to keep in mind about this entire exchange. I will document more later, but this demonstrates Bret Weinstein, the professor, his tendency to insert himself to these conversations in emails to all staff and faculty and students.

0:11:05 Thomas: So, I hate to use this because this is a loaded term, when but that is what some people would consider mansplaining or whitesplaining. It's like this person, Rashida, has organized, has given an email talking about this event, saying, "Here's what's happening, here's what's going on, here's what we're going to do," and then Bret has decided he knows better and is going to email everybody about what a bad idea this is, and by the way, he's going to misrepresent it several times.

Like when he said "one's right to speak." No one's being denied their rights, and the first thing that he described, where he said there's a difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves, that's exactly what's happening. It's a group deciding to voluntarily absent themself. It's just white people instead of people of color. For once out of the 30 years or whatever they've done this. Do you see the victim mentality there? There's a huge victim mentality coupled with a white-splaining that I find personally to be pretty annoying. That's, of course, my personal opinion. You can form your own. There's an email back from Rashida that I'm going to read a key sentence of. As usual, find it, the sources and the links in the show notes if you want to read the entire thing.

No matter who you are, participation is and has always been a choice. Every year, there are POC, people of color, and white people who choose not to participate for various reasons. We are asking people to register for off-campus programming because space is limited. No one is being forced to attend either event.

0:12:38 Thomas: Okay, I went a little further than one sentence because I realized she explained it pretty well. This is all voluntary. But here's how this storyline developed. They just took that middle email from Weinstein, everybody on the interwebs, on YouTube, Fox News, Dave Rubin, all this. They've taken that email and they've said, and Christina Hoff Summers, by the way, too. They've taking that email, and they said, look at these students, the video of students calling him racist. So there's videos of students calling Weinstein racist. And they've says, look this email, find the racism, you can't find it, you're an idiot, we win, essentially. That's been the, that's everywhere that is the narrative. But there's more to it than that. And there always is. And this is where now I want to issue a bit of a challenge to you guys.

0:13:23 Thomas: If you're interested in seeing this in doing research for this, I have been absolutely blown away by the fact that it is nearly impossible to find the student's point of view on this. Do a Google search for Evergreen college and tell me what you find. Do just a Google search, and then do a YouTube search of Evergreen college, and then tell me, scroll through them all until you find a video that A, is against Weinstein and that's never, no, I can't find any, any video that's really against Weinstein and then B, find a website or post that's at least telling the entire story, and the answer to that one is it's possible to find, and I have found a few sources, but they are incredibly difficult.

0:14:10 Thomas: Probably takes an hour of looking. I mean, I've done an overwhelming amount of research on this. I am pushing the limits of my MacBook Pro and how many Chrome tabs it can keep open at once. No joke. I think it actually crashed because of this. It is difficult to find these sources. And just forget for a moment which side you're on. Pretend you're on neither side, look at the dynamics of that. Even merely having the information at hand to evaluate for yourself is virtually impossible on the internet. Think about how that must feel to students on the other side of this. On one hand, you have students whose voices are nearly impossible to find. If not their voices, even just a documentation of the events that have transpired in the past couple years at Evergreen, which I'm going to go over, even that is immensely hard to find.

0:15:03 Thomas: And then on the other hand, you have Bret Weinstein, who, by the way, I believe should be held more accountable as a professor than an 18, 19, 20-year-old student should be in general. I believe they are more responsible for their actions because professors are more educated. They're in a position of power. They are being paid. Whereas students are learning, they're younger, they are the customers. I hold the faculty and administration to a higher standard than I would a random 18 or 19-year-old student. But look at how that looks.

Weinstein can distort the facts in an email, in a campus-wide email, can insert himself into that conversation, decide who's right and say, I'm protesting this, and distort several of the facts of the actual event, and then can go on Fox News and do a bit of an interview tour where millions of people are going to see him and cheer him on. And as a result, students and faculty alike have complained that as a results of his Tucker Carlson interview, they are getting outed by white supremacists and threatened. So even regardless of who you view is right, even if you think Weinstein is right, look at the dynamic there, the immense difference in power. Do it yourself. Search a neutral term. Just search Evergreen college and try to find an account that tells the student side of the story. I'll wait.

0:16:35 Thomas: Hit pause. The ratio has got to be a thousand to one, just based on the fact that I have a thousand tabs open, and one of them is even telling the full story. It is such an uphill climb. So what I wanted to try to do was find some sources that happened before this became known in the wider sphere, so that they wouldn't merely be giving me their storyline that they've tried to fit the facts into. So I did a search. One thing that's really great about Google is you you can search a given time frame. So I did a search of Evergreen and racism, and I made the dates before this whole Weinstein thing, kind of searched around in there to try to find what the background of this campus attitude is.

0:17:23 Thomas: And what I came up with is the only, really the only source that reliably gives me another point of view on this. Again, never disregard what you think is right or wrong, even merely getting and hearing and reading the other side on this is so difficult, and it's just the Cooper Point Journal, which is the student newspaper there. The student newspaper, by my reckoning, is virtually the only place where you can get any info to the contrary, and it's remarkable to have essentially more mainstream media on one side, or at least, if not mainstream, media with a wide reach, Fox News, Rubin, Joe Rogan, all of that on one side, millions of viewers and listeners. And have virtually no regard for digging into the facts.

0:18:11 Thomas: They just all take Weinstein's version of events and question it very little. And then on the other hand, we've got a student newspaper that has documented this throughout the last couple of years, that has multiple sources for facts, that's actually showing the other side of the story. So when looking for actual journalism, the Cooper Point Journal does a better job than these far more popular sources, which is depressing. And by the way, other sources for the other side were a professor or two wrote some op-eds or blog posts, and that's how I was able to find the other site too. So here we go. And by the way, it makes sense that no one but the student newspaper would care that much about what's going on on campus prior to this becoming national news. I'm not saying that the mainstream media should have been focusing on what's going on on a campus, but once this became widespread news, media sources with a wide listenership, I think, had a responsibility to dig into it more.

0:19:10 Thomas: So anyway, here's an article from October 12, 2016, so before the election was even finished, and it talks about an already present racial tension on campus, and it talks about two incidents in particular that have inflamed the student population and faculty. The first is an incident described in better detail on another article that I will also link. It says the student was assaulted during an incident where a man was caught tearing down queer friendly posters in the Evergreen library and then got in a physical altercation with a police officer when confronted. It was when this man was running from the police that he hit an Evergreen trans student in the the head, causing a severe concussion. Now, here's the complaint of the students.

0:19:56 Thomas: This was reported and a bit whitewashed because all that was reported was that an officer was assaulted, not that this was potentially a hate crime with someone tearing down queer-friendly posters and then running into and knocking down a trans person. None of that was recorded in the police report or in the campus email, and it was not written about in the newspaper. So trans people looked at that as a bit of a silencing of what had happened here. The other incident has taken place in 2015 and into 2016, which is the posting of White Lives Matter flyers across campus. And this has been identified and associated with the white supremacist group Identity Europa with slogans like protect your heritage and such as that.

0:20:48 Thomas: So this has happened on the campus. On the campus, a white supremacist group has been posting White Lives Matter flyers, and there was a curious response by one of the administration members. Wendy Endress is her name, and she made a statement, and this is another reason why campus tensions have flared. She said the implied message of the flyers can be interpreted as biased against the Black Lives Matter campaign and not necessarily black people. It's nuanced and requires some assumptions about intent. That's a weird response. Now, I will say that she later apologized for her reluctance to actually address the fact that these were racist posters, but that was part of the equation.

0:21:35 Thomas: And later there was a community member in an online forum for the school called Greener Commons that propagated blatantly white supremacist messages, according to this article Cole again, everything will be in the links. They articulated, it says here, they articulated a belief that white Europeans are unfairly prosecuted, disseminated a long list of disturbing anti-Semitic propaganda, actively attempt to mobilize like-minded students, and stated that anyone who disagreed was owed retribution by a white collective.

And it took several days, it says, for the college to remove the posts and account from the Commons after a significant amount of shocked community response. Other allegations were that in the student union there was a disabled student of color who was constantly interrupted, and when this student had to take a breath because of their disability and had to pause, motions were introduced in interrupting that student and moving on to other business, stuff like that. So there seems to be, based on the student newspaper, again, published long before this controversy erupted, there seems to be growing tension and dissatisfaction racially at some of the responses by the administration and the on-campus attitudes. Now, here I think it's important to say something about Evergreen in general. Evergreen is an incredibly progressive campus. So that means a couple of things. A, it's absurd to do, as a lot of people have on the internet, to take the incidents at Evergreen and the attitudes at Evergreen, and apply that to colleges nationwide, and to say that it's somehow representative of the campus attitudes everywhere.

0:23:23 Thomas: Because this is a liberal arts college, it is incredibly progressive, and I've seen people online describe it as a hippie college, that kind of thing. And as such, it's a bit different being a liberal arts college and being incredibly progressive. It's a bit of a different campus vibe than you might expect from, I don't know, a bigger, more popular mainstream university in America. So because of this, I think it's all the more shocking to people that there have been some of these racial issues and bad responses from faculty. So as a result of this protest and unrest, the college did try to take measures to improve the situation. They redid how the bias incident response team would respond. They tried to make sure that complaints of any sort of racism or bias-related incidents would be taken more seriously, dealt with promptly, that kind of thing.

0:24:18 Thomas: And also there was discussion on hiring procedures to ensure more diversity and equity in the hiring of staff. And this is from what I can find roughly when maybe the Bret Weinstein aspect of this story began, because Bret Weinstein took it upon himself to decide that this policy was not good and to write a series of emails to all faculty and staff, which I think also were eventually made public to students, why he thought this policy wasn't good. And basically, the argument comes down to this. Students and this new committee that wanted to improve equity and diversity among on the campus and in the staff proposed that that be part of the process, that they pay a mind to the equity of people of color and all that in their hiring.

0:25:10 Thomas: Doesn't mean that that's the criteria, doesn't mean go find person of X race or whatever, what have you, but that it's a factor in the decision-making process. And Bret Weinstein has a huge problem with this, and again, as he does, he emailed everybody about it. And here's from an InsideHigherEd.com piece that says this. In an interview, Weinstein said he believes that there are many things colleges can and should do to attract diverse candidates, it's for faculty jobs, but he said the proposal at Evergreen State subordinates all other characteristics of applicants to one thing. He said that in the sciences, for example, the rationale for faculty positions is to teach science, not to promote equity or diversity. "The most important thing is that the person in front of the room knows something about the subject and has insight in teaching," he said.

0:26:00 Thomas: Now, listen to that language there, and this is where I think it starts to get a little bit problematic, because what it really sounds like he's implying there is that if you prioritize people of color in your hiring process, that you'll result with someone who doesn't know anything about the subject they're teaching. Now, that that's not literally what he's saying, but when he says, "Okay, this quest for diversity is bad because what matters is that the person in the front of the room knows something about the subject," there's a strong implication in there. And I don't think it's unreasonable for students to take offense to that, because there's more potential teachers and professors in this country than can possibly be hired.

0:26:46 Thomas: That's one of the biggest problems right now for anyone with a PhD looking to teach somewhere. There just aren't enough positions. And the idea that prioritizing people of color will somehow result in a lowering of quality of the expertise of the professor in question, I mean, that's what borders on racism there. I don't think it's intentional racism on Weinstein's part. I think it is implicit. I think it's an implicit thought in his mind that, hey, if we start to prioritize people of color, we're going to get some real shitty professors at this school. That's what it strongly, the most important thing, I'll quote him again, the rationale is to teach science, not to promote equity or diversity. The most important things is that the person in front of the room knows something about the subject and has insight in teaching.

0:27:35 Thomas: Again, if given a near limitless supply of potential faculty, prioritizing ones of color will not result in a lowering of quality of the teacher. And looking at the national statistics where 84% in 2013, which is the latest data I can find right now, 84% of professors are white. And once again, given that there are probably way more applicants than there are possibly positions, it doesn't strike me as that unreasonable to want to prioritize people of color so that it doesn't remain an old white man's club, essentially. And in another quote in a piece that Weinstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal, we start to see a bit more of the problematic attitudes in that Weinsteins expresses.

0:28:24 Thomas: Quoting Weinstein, "This presented traditional independent academic minds with the choice. Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of critical race theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan's shortcomings and be branded as racists. Many of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park." So, again, you see where Weinstein presents things like diversity training and prioritizing people of color and hiring as letting the descendants of critical race theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences.

0:29:13 Thomas: Bounds of permissable thought, as though that's what's going to happen. So that strikes me as somewhat of an exaggeration. Here's how I look at this particular component. It's true that I imagine Weinstein probably has some good points here. I've seen him criticize these things. I don't really feel I am an expert on diversity policy of colleges, but it looks like what happened was the faculty voted on a bunch of these items and he was in the minority. The faculty voted, let's do this. Let's for more equity in hiring. Let's go through some mandatory diversity training. Let's do a lot of these things that will make this college a more acceptable place for people of color. And it's fine to disagree with that.

0:29:59 Thomas: It's totally fine. But he disagreed and he lost. I mean, the faculty outvoted him. And according to him, a lot of the people who voted for these measures secretly didn't want to. And they told him they would vote with him, but they didn't want to be looked at as racist. Okay, sure, but the fact is that people voted and it didn't go your way, and you can do what you want within that process to push against this.

I mean, you can speak to the administration, you can encourage other faculty to to re-vote next year or something, and and overturn these policies. But this is a very liberal college, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But this is is a very liberal college, and he was on the losing side of this vote, and it's as Simple as that. He can always try to transfer to a less liberal bastion of a college if he wants. And what's more, the president has said that he can still voice his opinions about this. There's nothing wrong with him voicing his opinions on these policies, but I think he should acknowledge, and what I'm trying to communicate in outlining this, is how much he's taken it upon himself to mansplain and whitesplain why everybody's wrong about this in a very public way to students and faculty, that I think is looked at by people of color as once again trying to dominate the conversation. Switching into my opinion mode, of course, I'll gladly recognize that this is my opinion.

0:31:31 Thomas: What people of colour in this instance, in the student body, and some of the faculty are trying to do is take measures to increase equity and diversity. And what Weinstein is doing really can be looked at, and I think a compelling case can be made for this, as trying to still control every bit of the conversation. Notice how he said in that email that I read earlier where he talked about how demanding white people to leave campus is a hostile act and all that. Notice, notice how he was fine with doing a racism talk on his terms. As long as he got to control the conversation, could do a racism talk from a perspective of evolutionary biology, then he's fine with it. And I think people of color on the campus are just like, "Look, man, we're tired of you controlling this conversation."

0:32:20 Thomas: It doesn't mean you don't get a voice at all, but it does mean you're not in charge of all of this, especially when, once again, the faculty voted against him. So then we fast forward a little bit to May 14th, and there was an incident during which two black students were brought in for questioning late at night and held by campus police into the early morning. According to this article, again, in the Cooper Point Journal that I'll link, the students were not made aware that they were not legally required to go with the police and were escorted to be questioned by their resident director. This incident culminated with a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of the students when their personal information was accessed and their mothers were contacted the morning after Mother's Day around 2 a.m. And mixed in with all this, I've seen student complaints in these videos that the campus police were not responding to people of color.

0:33:11 Thomas: But in this instance, a white person called and instantly, according to these students, two black students were brought in for questioning. So there's a perception among students, and I can't really tell you how justified this is. But to give the background, there is a perception among these students that the campus police is being a bit racist and is not responding to students of color. And when a white student calls about an incident, all of a sudden they're really harsh and detain two black students and interrogate them through the night, that kind of thing. So to step back and sort of look at the big picture going on here, we've got mounting racial tensions on campus due to several events, alleged hate crimes, white nationalist group flyers, police allegedly not responding to people of color's calls and detaining people of colour.

0:34:03 Thomas: We've got a lot of that going on. And we've got one part of the administration that wants to help, that wants to make things better, to move forward, to address some of these racial concerns. Concerns and that element of the administration outvoted Weinstein. And then we have him wanting to maintain dominance over the conversation, in my view. And that's what's really problematic here. Now, that's one side of the ledger. On the other side, we have a lot of students doing really stupid things and saying really stupid things, and being angry, and yelling, and forming groups, and trying to get into forced meetings with the president, doing a lot of things in protesting that might border on unacceptable, might border illegal.

0:34:50 Thomas: There's property damage, there's carrying around bats, which I think was a response to the allegation that the cops were not responding to people of color when they called. So these students kind of formed their own little, I suppose, security militias in response to that, and some of them damaged property and did things, again, that are not really acceptable and to varying degrees ought to be punished if they're caught. And in the heat of this, we have students saying and shouting things that are regrettable and embarrassing and getting captured on video. And so I want to state unequivocally that I don't defend all the actions of the students. If I'm slipping into analysis mode here and opinion mode, I don't defend all the actions of the students.

0:35:36 Thomas: I think there's a lot of regrettable behavior. I think the most egregious of which is their treatment of the president. We haven't talked about the president of the university, and I think we should now. The president is George Bridges.

And what is interesting about this guy is I discovered in this research that he actually, actually, back in August 2016, when the University of Chicago did the thing where they gave a dean's letter saying there wouldn't be any trigger warnings or safe spaces in the university, he wrote a letter and published it in the Seattle Times saying that, hey, actually, safe spaces and trigger warnings are valuable. This is a very, very progressive guy.

And I would say that ultimately, my conclusion of all of this is he comes off looking the best of anybody here, in my opinion. Opinion. I think what was the most absurd to me is the videos of protesters reacting to his hand gestures. So he was trying to engage with the protesters when they sort of locked him in a room, he and this other administrator eventually, and they had a meeting. It was like five hours long. But to George Bridges' credit, to Bridges's credit, he wanted to engage with them and he volunteered for such a thing.

And when he was mocked for his hand gestures by a jeering crowd of angry students, he responded by saying, okay, well, how would you like me? I will hold my hands down. I will not move my hands. And he showed incredible control and incredible patience. And in the end, I'll link it, they issued a very thoughtful response to all of the student demands.

0:37:17 Thomas: And they are taking drastic measures to try to meet these student demands, to an extent that I'm, frankly, I'm amazed by. The one thing he's held firm on is any call to fire staff, like the calls to fire Weinstein or this officer that allegedly was rough with some students. Any calls to hire staff of any kind, he said, "We do not fire people as a result of calls to fire people. That's just not how it works." He held firm that he said, "What we will do is we We will investigate, and claims of this kind of malfeasance will be investigated more vigilantly," stuff like that. So I'm incredibly impressed with how Bridges reacted to this and what he did. And it's still pending, but given the statement that he released in accordance with their demands and how he plans to address all their demands, I'll be curious to see what happens going forward.

0:38:13 Thomas: I think that'll be a key indicator of overall which side you want to come down on. I mean, if the protesters accept these measures, for the most part, they're not able to get every single demand. Some of their demands are kind of ridiculous. But if they're willing to take his olive branch and take the measures he's willing to put in place and work from there, I think that'll be actually a pretty positive overall result of a very negative and at times angry and bitter protest. There's a lot going on here, but I want to say that one thing is clear. As I've said, a lot of the student behavior was reprehensible, the shouting was rude, it was harassing, and that's certainly something that, again, anyone who crossed the line, anyone who damaged property, if they were caught, I believe they should face the consequences of that.

0:39:07 Thomas: But I think this comes down to a philosophy of protesting in general when it comes to people of color in this country. I think the key thing for white people like me to reflect on is what this should look like. Is there always going to be a demand that an oppressed or wronged group demonstrate in a perfect way, that they act in a perfect way, especially when we're talking about a group of kids, essentially, just in college, just out of high school, kids who, and this is pent up, this is the result of a couple years of events in their mind, are we always going to expect that they will react perfectly? And what happens when they don't?

0:39:53 Thomas: Because there are fools on every side of this. There are reactionaries on every side of it. What happens, just hypothetically, forget this group, if a group has been objectively, we'll say hypothetically wronged, and they start protesting, and they become rude, and they yell, and they do things like try to corner people, and they do some of these things you're seeing in these videos, what does that mean to you, I guess? If you're someone who's on Weinstein's side of things, maybe, does that mean that they're no longer, they don't get to have valid concerns? Does that mean, or is it more like, in my view, you still try to deal with the issues and you still trying to evaluate in the fairest way that you can while recognizing that people are flawed and, again, anyone who broke the law, anyone committed acts of violence, I believe they very much should be held accountable for that.

0:40:48 Thomas: Students who committed violence should be expelled or whatever the, I suppose, is in the handbook for that, whatever's in their disciplinary procedures for that. That should definitely, they don't get a free pass, I don't think. But for people of color who have not gotten to ever control the conversation, ever in our history, to want to take back the conversation and to react rudely when someone like Weinstein decides he gets to control the conversation. To me, that's somewhat understandable behavior. It doesn't mean it excuses all of it, again, but it's sort of like if two sides have elements of right and wrong on them, how are you judging between them? Because there is no denying, there's no denying and I will argue with anyone who wants to argue with me on this.

0:41:36 Thomas: There's the no denying that what Weinstein did when he misrepresented that email exchange and said and allowed Tucker Carlson and allowed all of these media moguls on YouTube and all this with millions of viewers, allowed them to believe that this was a question of racial segregation, that this was a question of black people demanding white people leave the campus. That is absolutely reprehensible behavior, and it's reprehensible behavior from someone in power. And when you start to look, maybe I'll do this. Maybe I will just give you guys like a laundry list of all the articles that are under this misconception.

There's a billion of them, just search on YouTube, search on Google, everything you see will be "Heroic professor yelled at for just trying to fight segregation." That's like literally one of the headlines. To fight congregation, a voluntary little program for 200 people maximum they want to volunteer for, that segregation? I mean, that seems to me to be obviously wrong. I mean, so if, if we're looking of an accounting of which side is more right or wrong, this seems very straightforward to me. He had all the power in this situation. He misrepresented the email and then he cashed in.

He went and did these interviews. He's gotten a ton of followers and support out of this, and he's made it such that the conversation on the other side is nowhere. It is so hard to find anyone who's giving the other side of this. And there was a letter signed by 50 faculty at Evergreen, which the Google Doc link no longer works.

0:43:12 Thomas: So I can't find it. I can only find it quoted where they presented the link. So it must've been up before it was down. And these professors demanded an investigation, a disciplinary investigation of Weinstein for the fact that he sort of put students and faculty in danger. Because when you go on Tucker Carlson and you feed into this right-wing paranoia of campus craziness, what you do is you attract a a lot of right-wing racist nutjobs to harass people on the other side of things. And that is really, really troublesome behavior from a professor. When I tweeted that I was going to do this episode, someone responded in the tweet and said, does this mean you've reached out to Bret Weinstein for a conversation?

0:44:02 Thomas: And really, I've got to facepalm a little bit. You've gotten Bret's side of this. If you've consumed any news about this situation, it's Bret's side of it. It's like 99% of everything on the internet is Bret Weinstein's side of this, and that's one of the difficult things in this power dynamic, that we have an architecture in this country, a political sort of structure where a white professor like this can cry victimhood and gain access to a vast network of sympathetic people, and the students, you have to dig down into the student newspaper to find any representation of their side of this.

0:44:48 Thomas: And I mean, I would invite anyone to just reflect on that at least, to just reflect on how unskeptical a lot of this inquiry has been, a lot of the journalism has been, and how easily people are able to fit this into their own narrative. But we can fit two things into our head at once. We can say, hey, the protesting went too far at times. The shouting was rude at times, but I want to maybe toss a bit of an olive branch to the Weinstein folks, that crowd, that side of things on this, which is to say that I do think there is a limit to how much we can subscribe to the logic that anything people, people of color, do in the name of fighting oppression is acceptable. Because a lot of the shouting, if you watch all these videos, a lot of the shouting is about that, where they're asking Weinstein a question.

0:45:36 Thomas: He says, "Do you want me to answer?" And they know they just want to scream at him. Or the president, the president of the college, wants to focus on solutions and wants to offer his reasoning or what he plans to do about their concerns. And they don't let him him get to that point because they're so mad they have to yell at him and criticize his hand gestures. Now, ultimately, again, in the grand scheme of things, I fall down on the side of white people have dominated this conversation for hundreds of years very violently and very oppressively, so I'm prepared to err on the other side and to say a bit of shouting and rudeness is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of what you're looking at. But I do want to say that this isn't infinite. And this doesn't allow, there is a limit to this, I think.

0:46:26 Thomas: And right when I start talking about a limit to it, I'm sure people can start writing me off as tone policing or something. But there is a point at which tone policing is acceptable. If a black person just goes and murders a white cop, it's fair to say, that's too far. Like, I am going to tone police you on how you are trying to obtain your objectives. And I know that's a hyperbolic point, but it just is meant to illustrate that there is a line somewhere, and there eventually has to be a place where that line is drawn. And how do we, how do we find that? At a certain point you need civility, and a certain point you do need to respect individuals. So no matter how wronged you might be as a group, no matter how wronged, it does not give you license to abuse an individual person, like the president of the university, for example, to any degree.

0:47:19 Thomas: I mean, had they started hitting him, certainly that would have been, I hope that would've been too far, even though you could tell the same story. You can always stack up against whatever's happening to this president of the university. You could always stack that up against, well, look what the people of color have gone through. This whole guy, look at slavery. Look at, I mean you can always pack that up, and it starts to look like a different thing, but there's a critical point at which individual rights and freedoms and autonomies and stuff like that do need to carry the day. So that is something to think about. But it really did strike me to, again, just do the Google search. Just do a neutral Evergreen College Google search or YouTube search. And just tell me when you can find a single voice of dissent. It is universal, and most of it is predicated on a falsification, on a lie by Bret Weinstein.

0:48:12 Thomas: And I think he should bear a lot of responsibility for that. But just look at the network of support he had access to and how much blind support he was able to get by making it out to be some reverse racist thing where white people were being kicked out of campus, and how unskeptical so many quote-unquote skeptics were willing to be when it comes to that. And I think that puts it in perspective. Even if you are more on the side of these student protesters were being ridiculous, which, hey, a lot of them were, I will agree with you on most of that. But trying to take a big picture view of it, I think you've got a lot of bad actions by 19-year-olds, as I often will say, to try to pick the average age, maybe 19, 19, 20-year-old.

0:48:58 Thomas: Bad actions as a result of a racialized climate on campus and some alleged hate crimes and misdeeds by campus police, stuff like that. You've got those people on one end, and then you've got a professor who misled everybody and cashed in and went on Fox News and these giant shows and has the entire support of the internet on his side. And really, the only wrong that has thus far happened to him is he was inconvenienced a little. He was shouted at a lot. Sure. Not pleasant. He had to teach in a different area. There were some, he alleges there were threats to his safety. He There were threats, threats to, uh, his safety on a given day. They turned out to not be real, but the university was shut down for two days based on someone calling in saying they were going to shoot people on campus, stuff like that.

0:49:47 Thomas: But ultimately he will be fine. He still has his position, and he might have to go through some diversity training or something if he wants to stay at that particular college where he has a position of power. So put it all in perspective and tell me where you come out. Let me know what you think. As always, I'm open to opinions. I'm open to links. I'm open to whatever you've got to throw at me, but my goal is to keep it factual and do the digging, actually do the work. All right. Well, now is the time of the show where I want to apologize for not covering the thing I said I was going to last show. I was going to talk about the terrorist attack and some of the reactions, and I had a lot of that research done. But once I started doing this research, it was a can of worms and something I wanted to talk about. So I didn't. And also, I planned on doing a voicemail segment, but this ran too long.

0:50:33 Thomas: So I think I'll save those. Thanks for those. Or maybe I'll look into... I could also do a Patreon segment for that. We'll see if I am able to scrape together the time to do that. But I want to thank everyone for listening. As always, thanks for keeping an open mind about things. And thanks most of all to my supporters at patreon.com/seriouspod. New supporters this week include Yesero Bartlett, The black numenorean, Clayton Hart, Cameron shaffer, Christopher Hammock, Kristin Mendez, Zach A, Dang Griffith, Marius Thomassen, Brandy, James McKenna, Zach Pritchard, and Thomas's Missing Feet. Thank you guys so much for the pledge. Again, you're the reason that this deep digging and skepticism, to the best of my ability, you're the reason this can happen and be on the air.

0:51:21 Thomas: You really are. And even more so to my top patrons, who I've got to thank today. And they are Matt Garrett, Brian Gareford, Peter Skelton, Steve Sigmund, Adrian Borschoff, Roger Metcalf, Detective Matthew Maxson, Andrew Waddington, John Bodley, Esquire, Ian Ryan, Matthew Vernon, Ray Loves Jenny, Robin, The Zika Baby That Lived, Marcel, The Netsack Zach Heathen, Abseon, Beth Deitch, I believe she gave me a pronunciation correction, so hopefully I didn't mess that up. Beth Deutch, I think it is. Ryan Gardner, Sarah McPike, Sammy, Dan Griffith, Ian Rosano, Jonathan Moyet, Michael Rops, Michael Schaefer of Reason Real Estate, and Hunter Ash. Thank you so very much. Check those show notes if you want to look for links. The number is also in there if you want to leave a voicemail related to this.

0:52:08 Thomas: I'll be curious for the response. Again, I've tried to take what I think is a skeptical view of the facts and insert my analysis where I could, but also, I mean, I leave room if people are far more offended by the student behavior. I get it. I just want perspective. That's all. All right, that's it for this week. I will see you guys next week.