- Good evening, everyone. Hello, thank you so much for coming and welcome to this Spiked
US Unsafe Space Tour event, "Is the Left Eating Itself?" My name's Tom Slater, I'm
deputy editor of Spiked, the online magazine. I'm also coordinating
this Unsafe Space Tour and I'll be moderating this evening. Thank you all for coming. Also, big thank you to
the New York Law School for hosting us, being just about the
only college on Manhattan who would have us after the antics we've been getting up to in the previous couple of days and also to Nadine
Strossen who is a professor here at New York Law School former president of the ACLU,
great defender of free speech who's hosting tonight, there we go. (audience applauding) So, she's hosting us tonight even though she's not actually here, but nevertheless she's with us in spirit, so is the left eating itself? So, at Spiked, we're a left-wing
radical humanist magazine and we've always stuck up for free speech, no ifs and no buts and
as a result of that, you often find yourself
defending the right to speak of people who you either vehemently disagree with
or downright despise, but what's been quite interesting
is that whilst seemingly even about over the last
10 years you could say that generally speaking the
sorts of speakers on a campus or more broadly who would find themselves protested against subjects
of calls for censorship tended to be conservatives right-wingers through to downright reactionaries, things seem to be changing
over the last couple of years. So, not only does it seem
that the bar for censorship, for what is beyond the pale on campus seems to be getting lower and lower, but even avowed left-wingers,
progressives feminists even, found themselves as subjects of protests and calls for censorship from campus activists, and a number of those people are actually on this panel tonight, but even beyond that
you don't have to go far to look for examples of it, whether it's the feminist
Germaine Greer being picketed for her views on transgenderism or someone like Slavoj Zizek who is protested at the Left Forum here in New York last year for some colorful comments
he'd made previously about the refugee crisis so that's really what we
want to look at tonight, that dynamic if indeed it does exist and have today's young radicals
abandoned freedom of speech, are they turning on their forebears or is something else going on? Are they simply holding previous generations of progressives
to a higher standard and indeed is this all just
a little bit overblown? Are these unrepresented groups of students who for whatever reason universities and institutions are capitulating to, so that's the sort of thing we're going to be getting into tonight and I'm delighted to be
joined by what is to my mind the perfect panel to discuss this. So, I'm going to introduce them in the order in which they'll speak. So, first up, my immediate
left is Brendan O'Neill. Brendan is the editor of Spiked. He's also a columnist for
Reason and The Spectator and the author most
recently of A Duty to Offend and most potently for this evening, he was banned from the
University of Oxford in 2014, a debate on abortion where he was due to make the pro-choice case on the basis that he, as
a person without a uterus, their words, wasn't sufficiently credited to contribute to that debate, so be interesting to hear from Brendan. Speaking after Brendan, on
his left is Laura Kipnis known to many of you I'm sure. Laura is a feminist essayist and academic. She's a professor of media studies at Northwestern University
and the author of many books, but most recently Unwanted Advances which really builds on
a lot of her critiques of what she called
sexual paranoia on campus and her writing on this subject has not only earned on
protest at Northwestern, but also some pretty shocking
Title IX investigations which I'm sure we heard a
little bit about as well, so it's fantastic to have Laura here. Speaking after Laura,
we've got Angus Johnston. Angus is a historian of student activism and student government. He's a professor at the
City University of New York. He's contributed to many
publications, Rolling Stone, the Chronicle of Higher
Education, Inside Higher Ed, you might see him on MSNBC and C-SPAN and he regularly speaks on
campus and is a very staunch AND passionate defender
of student activism, past and present, so it'll be fascinating to see
what Angus has to say tonight and then finally on my far left, we've be hearing from Bret Weinstein. So, Bret is an evolutionary theorist and a former professor of biology at Evergreen State College, the reason he is former is the fact that as many of you all know, he was at the center of
a big national news story when he criticized an
anti-racist protest on campus which was asking white student and faculty to stay away from the day, as a result the subject
of a lot of protests and calls for his resignation. So, our speakers are going to speak for about five to seven minutes tops. We may have a little bit
of discussion on the panel, but as quickly as possible, I'm gonna throw it out to you guys for your questions and your comments and that's how we'll go for
the rest of the evening. So, Brendan, do you wanna kick us off? - Thanks, Tom. My answer to the question
is the left eating itself is no for the simple reason
that what we have on campuses in the US and the UK today is not left. This hyper racial consciousness, this insistence on female fragility, this paranoid philistinism, so that books are defaced
with trigger warnings and everything from tabloid newspapers to sexy pop songs can be banned, this disavowal of your own autonomy, your own adulthood and you're
pleading with bureaucracy to provide you with psychic comfort, this use of racial phrases like white men as if all white men
have the same privilege, as if class, the building
block of left politics, was irrelevant or such a small thing that it didn't bear talking about, none of this is left, none of this is what I
understand to be left. In fact, it has far more
in common with the politics of reaction than it does with
the politics of the left. It is a replay in my view
of the carnivals of reaction that greeted the rise of
Enlightenment thought, the birth of mass democracy, the liberation of women
and ethnic minorities from second-class oblivion. In my view, today's campus
agitators better resemble the reaction against those progressive radical leaps forward for
humankind than they do the progressive radical
leaps forward themselves. They are not left. I know this sounds like semantics, but it's incredibly important
that we get this right. I know they call themselves left, but North Korea calls itself
a democratic republic, people lie and more importantly people use progressive phrases to
disguise reactionary agendas and is a longstanding
historical phenomenon and that is what we face on campus today, the dressing up of the new reaction against Enlightenment thought
as something progressive. I think what we face on campus today and across many institutions in the west is something far worse
than left on left battles, we face the slow-motion agonizing death of Enlightenment thought and the return of reactionary ideas, just on why I think they are not left-wing and we really must stop
calling them left-wing, just a few examples. The first thing is that they,
this new campus radicalism, completely grates against
the idea of universalism which is one of the key
ideas of left-wing politics from the French Revolution onwards, the idea of the common man, the rejection of the biology
or the politics of race and the politics of division in favor of emphasizing common interests, the new radicalism completely
grates against that, it does it through always emphasizing the fragility of black students, the culpability of white students who benefit from historical privilege and therefore are culpable
for the crimes of history. When I visit American campuses, I'm really shocked by the politics that is on offer to students, it's either black self-pity
or white self-loathing, that seems to me to be the only options in radical politics on campus today, a highly racialized hyper racial politics and it's really emphasized in
the phrase stay in your lane, don't ever dare to mix too
much with the other race or offer too much
solidarity to the other race 'cause you're getting above yourself you should stay in your lane. You can also see in the way
in which this new radicalism completely grates
against the idea of class as I was saying earlier their
use of the phrase white men, this amorphous phrase you
know white men are bad, of course all white men are bad, even the white men who historically helped to develop the Enlightenment
and radical thinking and so on, they're all
bad, they're all the same, and they all enjoy privilege, it's complete negation
of the idea of class, the key dividing line in modern society and the foundation stone
of left-wing politics. You can also see the way it's not left in the way it demeans women
and ethnic minorities. Women are presented as fragile, as requiring Victorian style
chaperoning through daily life, they couldn't possibly
negotiate the ups and downs of public life and student
life and sex life on their own. You think that's left-wing, can you imagine Rosa
Luxemburg or Frida Kahlo, famous communists who had affairs with all sorts of people, shrinking if someone
offered to buy them a drink or if someone touched them on
the shoulder, it's ridiculous, this is not left. They demean ethnic minorities, too, with their acquiescence to
the idea of microaggressions where everyday conversation
is presumed to be hurtful to certain minority groups, or their champion of the
removal of certain statues, or the renaming of certain buildings, I've heard radical students talk about the environmental menace
of statues of old white men as if ethnic minority
students are incapable of walking past a statue without being wounded by it. It is not left to push such
a demeaning racial view of certain groups in society. And in fact what it does, it actually reinvents the
biological determinism of the old racial politics, but in the language of
historical determinism, they are wounded by history, so in so many different
ways, this is not left, this is a reactionary liberal politics and in my view it has far more in common with the old reactionary politics, particularly the reactionary politics that emerged in the aftermath of the development of
Enlightenment thought and there was a famous reactionary, 18th century French philosopher
who hated the Enlightenment. He thought it was the worst
thing that ever happened. His name was Joseph de Maistre, his famous line was, "There
is no such thing as man." He said, "There are French men, "there are Italian men,
there are black men, "there are white men, there are poor men, "there are rich men, "but
there is no such thing as man," and whenever I hear student
radicals crying about white men, black people, women, and everyone having different
ideas and different views and the needs of control
public interaction to protect people's feelings, I always hear the echo
of the anti-universal, anti-progressive, anti-radical cry, "There is no such thing as man." I think what we have to recognize is that on campus right now, we face something far
worse than left versus left or left versus right or the alt-right coming
in and stirring things up and left-wing people
crying as a consequence, we face a generation
that has been schooled to reject Enlightenment thought, schooled to reject due process, schooled to reject a freedom of speech, schooled to reject the idea of autonomy and encouraged to see
themselves as fragile and weak and requiring bureaucratic,
therapeutic scaffolding in every area of their lives, that is not left, that
is the opposite of left, that is the opposite of radical, and it needs to be challenged by everyone who seriously considers themselves
to be a left-wing person. - Thank you, Brendan. So, Laura, your thoughts, please. - In answer to the question posed, I'm also going to say provisionally no I thought I was gonna be
the first one to say no. If by left, we mean
broadly anti-capitalist and if by eating itself, we mean broadly the free
speech on campus issue which I take to be the subtext here, I'm saying no though for a while, even recently I might have said yes, so let let me briefly describe my journey. I don't come to punditry, that is the task of delivering oracular pronouncements in
public especially happily. I'm a left-wing feminist who wrote some controversial things about sexual politics on campus because I find the
direction of campus feminism also at the moment conservative leaning and indeed paternalistic, some people tried to shut me up by bringing me up on Title IX complaints. In fact twice, so I wrote
about the experience of people misusing the Title
IX process to shut people up and later about other misuses
of Title IX I learned about and found myself plunked unexpectedly into the middle of the free speech debates and on the receiving end of
a bunch of speaking invites from various groups with
a pro free speech agenda. As someone whom others
have tried to shut up, I should naturally endorse
the free speech agenda, both out of self-interest and because politically, I favor freedom and disfavor authoritarianism. I could easily use my allotted time to rant about campus
authoritarians and so on instead for this occasion, I'm gonna try out the
role of the anti-pundit and speak about the value
of negative capability which was Keats's phrase
for the usefulness of intellectual confusion and uncertainty and the ability to think
two opposing things at once which is parenthetically
what the political situation of the moment demands of us, I believe. To take a rigid unequivocal
position or positions in the midst of political disarray in which the democratic experiment looks increasingly imperiled, in which calling your opponents fascist is no longer hyperbole is
to risk being an idiot. When events are unfolding faster than the adequacy of our
language to describe it, I suspect our positions should be provisional and lightly held. In that spirit and against
my own self-interest, let me try on the
anti-free speech position espoused by certain segments of the left, but at its best version rather than a shrillest or its stupidest which is what I think an intellectually honest
interlocutor wants to do, occasionally entertain the possibility that your deeply cherish
principles might require retooling in response to changing
circumstances or new information. As a leftist myself, that
is an anti-capitalist, I have to start by acknowledging the correctness of the premise that there's basically no
such thing as free speech, there's no free marketplace of ideas because some idea mongers
have more purchasing power than others or a better position
in the idea marketplace. Markets don't produce
equality and never have. In fact, they produce massive
inequality, look around, check out some wealth and
income distribution data. In this context, I do
find it difficult to deny that the free speech argument
is a comforting illusion, a cover for the fact the
powerful interest determine who can speak and who gets
heard and by how many. Will net neutrality last for another five minutes by the way, but I suppose that's the
subject for another discussion. Here's a personal example
closer to our topic. As a supposed free speech advocate, I myself have been the beneficiary of numerous speaking invites, sometimes with quite
nice honoraria attached, to events where there are not infrequently lavish catered dinners
where you get served expensive things like filet mignon because I came to realize
the free speech agenda is a well-funded one
with various foundations, often libertarian conservative ones funneling money from donors whose politics align
in uncomplicated ways, i.e anti-regulatory economic policies with this idea and not other ideas. The other ideas don't
get the filet mignon. If you're Black Lives Matter or antifa, you're probably lucky to get bus fare. As an anti-pundit, I
also have to acknowledge that there's no credible
absolutist position on free speech. When John Stuart Mill
said back in the 1860s that more speech was the
solution to bad speech, there were certain structural
exclusions he was ignoring. Did freed men and freed women have access to the marketplace of ideas? No because to have access to free speech, you have to be able to represent yourself, to be part of the discourse, it's not a birthright,
it's a political right, that in the case of
historically underrepresented populations has to be fought for which brings us to identity politics, which I take to be the other subtext of the question we've
been asked to answer. As a leftist that is in favor of a politics of redistribution, how can I not be on the
side of identity politics because I have to recognize
that access to resources depends first of all on the ability of marginalized groups to be represented. There are better and worse versions of identity politics. Let's pick the best one. Nancy Fraser's formulation
about recognition versus redistribution is useful here. We need both, that doesn't mean bowing to the language of microaggressions, it means that you only have to look at wealth and income distribution patterns to know that identity isn't
a meaningless category nor has race somehow been transcended. Okay but here comes a contradiction, I promised you some. Look I fully believe there is
a fatal anti-intellectualism sweeping American campuses
that has to be addressed and much of it revolves
around identity politics and campus cultures
that increasingly favor feelings over intellect. When I see videos of
demonstrators at Evergreen or Wesleyan saying they
don't need to read books because we know what our
experiences have been and shouting down faculty, I, too, wanna blame identity politics, but that's to be as
simplistic as the students who want to shut people up
who offend or trigger them instead we on campus and I
mean faculty have to help students get over the theory
versus experience dichotomy and understand that experience in itself, by itself is meaningless. The only way to make sense of it is with distance and retrospect. At the same time, all speech and all ideas don't have a place on campus. There are intellectual
standards to be maintained and principles to uphold
and most importantly, the most important one is that campuses are inclusive places not venues to debate whether blacks are
Muslims or trans students deserve social equality, those debates have been settled. If student Republicans want to invite alt-right and edgy neo-fascist speakers, they can invite them to off-campus venues. If it were 1932, would
we invite Joseph Goebbels to campus to debate whether
Jews and homosexuals should be removed from Germany on the principle that good speech will obviously trump bad speech and all ideas deserve a hearing? No, and campus presidents
should not be doling out hundreds of thousands of
dollars in security costs to protect idiots with ignominious ideas that are opposed to our core values. The Goebbels analogy
isn't very far-fetched at the moment as we know. We have white supremacists
running the executive branch, we have fascist gangs with
guns terrorizing cities and mowing down those
who get in their way. African-American voting rights are being systematically clawed back and yesterday I read in the Times about a white 18 year old student at the University of Hartford
boasting on social media that she tried to poison
her black roommate. Yes, I know all the invite
Milo to campus arguments, who do we want to appoint as
the idea gatekeepers et cetera, but if fascists and
racists want to exclude certain identities from the future, these aren't ideas, they're threats, and we have to start
making that distinction. The time to stop inviting
fascists to campus is right around now and as a bonus, maybe the
antifa would stay home, too. - Sorry, Laura, if I could ask you to, just final thought for a moment. - Okay, this is my final thought. Do I contradict myself, maybe so. Do I know how these ideas
would work in practice, no. Do some of our comrades fail on the negative capability front? Do they have excess certainty? Are they maybe a bit too quick on the pronouncements
and denunciations, yes. Are they too quick to play the role of authoritarians and censors? Not exactly new tendencies as we know. Yes again, but let's be
tough minded and generous and take them at their best. - Thank you very much, Laura. I should say now, Laura, if you're expecting filet mignon tonight, you're gonna be bitterly disappointed, but Angus, your thoughts, please. - Thank you. I have a feeling, well, I don't
know what Bret's gonna do, but so far were three for three on answering the question no, but I really mean it actually. I really really mean it We're obviously in a moment of incredible crisis as a country. I will confess that I find the idea that white male is a useless
or amorphous category a little confusing in a
time when Donald Trump is the president of the United States, an aficionado and a maestro of
white male identity politics. This is a moment in history when the politics of white male identity have been not only
ascended but weaponized. That doesn't mean that
every white male is evil, I hope that that's not the case, but it doesn't mean that
whiteness and maleness and all of that are
topics that we need to be thinking about and engaging with and the idea that that we
can have a universal left is one that I find very
appealing in a lot of ways, but you don't get universalism
by erasing difference, you don't get universalism by pretending that there are no distinctions
to be made between us and you don't get
universalism by pretending that we are not all
oppressed in different ways and along different axes, that the way that we can build a left that speaks for us all is to build a left that speaks for us all and that speaks for each
of us in our specificity and speaks to our specificity
in the various ways in which we are being run roughshod. A left politics in the United
States in the 21st century has to be a coalitional politics. It cannot be anything other
than a coalitional politics and so from that perspective, my concerns about the
concept of free speech are in some ways similar to Laura's. Although, I take it a little bit further and say I'm somebody who's been beating a very big drum for the free speech rights of left-wing students over the last year or two or several ten and I have not been given
a single filet mignon for that position. There's a lot of folks who are really, really into free speech who are relatively quiet when we're talking about the free speech of rowdy students on campus and I think we do have a
difficulty here that goes back to the way in which we
conceptualize civil liberties. I'm an ACLU guy. I'm a 1st Amendment absolutist guy and as I was growing up, thinking about the concept of free speech, the place you would always go with Skokie, that was the example that
you would always give, that if you really were for free speech, you had to be for the free
speech of the Nazis in Skokie and the way that that was formulated was that to be for free
speech means to be most of all for the free speech of the
people that you hate the most and the people that you
hate the most are the Nazis, so that's where you go. I think that's wrong. I think that to be for free speech means that you have to be
for the free speech the most of the people who's free
speech is most under attack. If the people that you hate the most are relatively privileged in terms of having the ability to avail themselves of their 1st Amendment rights, then they're not the people that you need to be supporting the most, the people you need to be supporting most are the people who are
the most under attack. It is very easy to defend the people that we really really hate who
are the exact opposite of us, it's a lot harder to defend the people who we really, really hate
who are kind of like us, the people who are sort
of, kind of on our team, but we think are completely messing it up, that's the people that's
really hard to defend, that's the people it's really hard to be in solidarity with. Do I have like a minute left? - Two minutes. - Two minutes, excellent, great. I won't use them both. We talk a lot right now about the Free Speech
Movement at Berkeley in 1964, particularly when Yiannopoulos
was coming to campus and he was being thrown off campus and people were rioting against him, everybody was talking
about how all of this was a betrayal of the principles of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. I'm a historian of student activism. I believe powerfully in that
moment and that movement. It's one of the places that
I think of American students as being truly heroic, but the crucial moment, the
crucial historical moment in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was that speech that Mario Savio gave, the most famous speech in the history of American student activism, the cornerstone speech of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, literally a speech that
has been inscribed in stone and the peroration of that speech, the climax of that
speech is this paragraph. There comes a time when the
operation of the machine becomes so odious, it
makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and
you've got to make it stop, and you've got to indicate
to the people who run it, to the people who own it
that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented
from working at all. This is not the language of
a man who wants to sit down and debate the people
who he is opposed to. This is the mountain not
the language of a man who is insisting that the
people who are oppressing him need to be given a forum. This is a language of a
man who is putting his body upon the wheels and upon the
gears and upon the levers and I think that we on
the Left need to make at least some sort of an effort to reach out to the people
who are also on the left who are putting their
bodies upon the wheels and upon the gears and upon
the levers right now, thanks. - Thank you, Angus. And Bret, your thoughts, please. - My professorial instincts are kicking in and I feel like I should try to synthesize what I've been hearing and
challenge a few things, but I'm gonna try to stick to the plan. the plan is to address the question is the left eating itself and I think there are a couple of ways that we can answer this question. One is yes, another would
be yes, of course it is. I mean, that may be my lived
experience speaking here, but it seems so transparently obvious that is what is going on that I feel inclined really to move on to
the more interesting question which is why is the left eating itself, but that does mean that I have to address some of what's been said here. How can we disagree if
it's so obvious to me that the left is eating itself, then how am I sitting
on a panel with people who are obviously
well-spoken and informed, maybe more so than I am who disagree and I think in part it's going
to come down to definitions which could be a very
semantic dry discussion were it not for the reason that the definitions are in flux and so I think we should
probably get there soon enough. For the moment, what I
want to do is suggest a kind of approach to
understanding why this really is the left that is attacking
some of us who all our lives would have called ourselves leftists and the first thing I would
suggest is that we may have a basic problem with the
game theory of progressivism. It is quite possible
that what is taking place is that the left has a bad
actor problem that arises out of some of the fundamental
assumptions of progressivism and I don't mean to
strike a negative note. I do think it is possible
to structure a left that would be more or less
immune to a bad actor problem, but what I'm witnessing in
the present are bad actors that have control over the entire dialogue and that is a very dangerous situation. So, the first thing that I recognized a bit before things went
haywire at Evergreen or at least went haywire publicly was that the people I was talking to and most of the population at
Evergreen is pretty far left, but I recognize that there
was a hidden dichotomy between two populations within the left, one of those populations
earnestly wishes equality and there can be some
debate over what it is that is being equalized, but virtually everybody
on the left would say that they are for equality of opportunity, then there is another
population that does not wish equality of opportunity, what it wishes to do is to
turn the tables of oppression and the problem for us is that
when these two populations are intermingled they sound alike until the point that you reach something like equality of opportunity and we are nowhere near that point. At that point, they would clearly diverge and you would discover
that some of the people who had been pursuing some
nominal version of equality were really about some
radical version of inequity with new people at the head and I do think that
that's what we are facing and the most confusing
aspect of it is that the people who are
earnestly seeking something like equality of opportunity are unaware that they have signed up with something unholy and un-American. One of the consequences of this dichotomy, the bad actors having taken
control of the movement is that they have begun
to erect structures that lead a lot of people to sign up before they really know what it is that they're signing up for. Across the dialogue of
the left at the moment, you'll find words that once upon a time had a definition that you might have struggled a little bit to resurrect it, but you could have figured out what words like equity probably meant and those words have taken on very different meanings in the present and they're actually part
of a larger structure. So, we have what I would
call linguistic booby traps. We have policy proposals
on college campuses and elsewhere that are
actually Trojan horses, that are described as pursuing one thing, but actually serve a
function other than the one that is on the title page and then we have stigma that is playing an incentivizing role or
actually more correctly, a dis-incentivizing role so people like myself, who stand
up against policy proposals that put my institution in
jeopardy, find ourselves faced with a social penalty for having done so. It seems funny in my case, they came after me with the
accusation that I was a racist and then it turned out that
there were a lot of people who could tell you that wasn't true, so it backfired on them a bit, but in fact none of these
stigmatizing concepts really depends on being accurate, the most important thing that
they do is they isolate you and that is a means to an end. These are not logical arguments
that are being deployed, this is leverage that is being
wielded against individuals that are considered troubling from the point of view of the movement and I would argue that the best way to conceptualize what
this movement really is is to understand that we
don't get to listen in on most of the actual dialogue that results in the structuring, what we listen in on is the
public face of this movement and the movement is
really properly understood as an insurgency that
privately has decided that it is entitled to disrupt the functioning of certain things that it regards as quote
unquote problematic and that once it has decided
that you are problematic, there are no holds barred if you recognize it as an insurgency and you stop listening to what it says it is attempting to accomplish, it will be much clearer
what is taking place. So, maybe that's where I should leave off in light of the the differences
of opinion on the panel, probably the best thing we can
do is try to hash them out, but please consider thinking
about this as an insurgency engaged in an action that
it understands far better than those of us who are
looking on from the sidelines. - Thank you, Bret. Now, I want to go out to
the audience very quickly, but first I've just like to
offer you the opportunity to come back on some
of each other's points, so if I could ask just make one point, even though I'm sure
there's plenty of things that people want to respond to, so we'll go down the panel one more time before we go out for
questions, so Brendan? - Yeah, I want to defend
free speech for Nazis because the idea that
you can have free speech, but not for Nazis is such a
profound contradiction in terms, that's not free speech,
that's licensed speech, that's speech that you are licensed, that is speech you are licensed to enjoy so long as you are not a Nazi,
that's not freedom of speech, that is the end of freedom of speech. The second you push someone
outside of freedom of speech, that's the end of freedom of speech. I have to be really really honest here. I'm disappointed to hear someone, even someone who has been sucked into the Kafkaesque censorship
of modern day campus make the case for silencing certain voices and there are two basic reasons why you have to have
free speech for Nazis. The first is if you argue for
any kind of speech control, the idea that it will just be limited to people you don't like is crazy. History tells you that's wrong. It's never happened. In Britain in the 1930s, there were lots of very
positive, inspiring working-class uprisings against fascists and some on the left, some
ill-informed people on the left asked the government to pass
public order legislation to prevent fascists
from gathering in public and the government said,
"Yes, okay, we'll do that." Guess who it was used
against time and again, this public order legislation. It was used against the left. It was used against communists. It was used against socialists
whose marches were banned, whose gatherings were banned, you are signing your own death warrant when you support censorship of anybody and that's such a grave folly. The second reason you should
support free speech for Nazis is because the only way
and this is a cliche, but is a cliche because it's true. The only way to challenge prejudice is to confront it head-on
in the public realm and destroy it with argument and reason. There was an era in
which Nazis were arrested under a kind of hate speech legislation. They were punished, they were fined, that was in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Nazis were arrested for
what they published, they were punished, they were
fined for what they published. Do you know what they did
as a consequence of that? They milked it, they presented
themselves as victims, they won more support among the public and among the racist
sections of the public by presenting themselves as
the victims of authority. If you censor Nazis, you help Nazis, that's what history tells us. - Thank you, Brendan. Laura? - Well I'll just respond briefly to that. I mean, I understand all the
points that you're making because I could make them myself, but you're speaking of
a very abstract level about ideas and theories and I guess I'm talking
about from the point of view of somebody on campus who works on campus and teaches and has classrooms of students who are not snowflakes, but oftentimes have personal circumstances that lead them to feel endangered
by political circumstances or by threatening language the first generation to go
to school, people of color. In the classes I teach, you have like one or two students of color facing like a roomful of white kids and I mean those are real circumstances and faced with real people, so I guess that's partly the experience that I'm speaking from. but at the idea level, I
applaud what you're saying. At the reality level
which is where I live, I think it's more complicated than that. It's easy to come up
with the pronouncements, I guess is what I would say to that. I just wanted to say
something I thought, Bret, you were saying was
incredibly interesting, but it veers toward a kind
of conspiracy level to me that I would have question marks about and I think that one of the things that we haven't talked
about that I'm very aware of is there's some sort of propensity
toward purity on the left and this idea of clean hands and that I think is kind
of part of the phenomenon that you're describing, sort of that it's less conspiratorial, but that there was a sort
of psychological propensity for the sort of all-or-nothing
kind of politics that we're seeing. So, I mean, I think that what we need are more descriptions
that are not abstract, but also kind of take into account the sort of psychosexual issues
around say purity campaigns in the way that on the
Frankfurt School approach, the authoritarian personality, so I mean I just think
that that's what's kind of lacking from the description
which otherwise I think is actually quite, I mean I've been there, too,
and believe the description. - [Tom] Thank you, Laura, Angus? - Just want to say two things
about freedom of speech. One is that I think this question of does free speech and free
debate work to defeat fascists and that kind of thing, I think
that's an empirical question and I don't think it's
sufficient to say that in the Weimar Republic
they persecuted Nazis and then there were Nazis and so therefore you have to
have free speech for Nazis, I think we need to do look at it in a little bit more complexity. I think one of the things
that I would look at is the question of whether
the tactics of antifa are working right now and I think there is a case to be made that they are successfully
disrupting the organizing of a lot of these white
supremacist groups, that the white supremacists are having a hard time getting together and one of the things that they need is they need to be
gathering in public spaces, so that they, the Nazi-curious among us, can connect up with them in
real space in face-to-face and if we make it harder
for them to do that, then it is harder for them to recruit. Now, is that worth it? Does that mean that we shouldn't do it? Well, that comes back to the second thing that I wanted to say, is that when we're
talking about free speech and protecting free speech, we need to be very, very
clear on what we mean because Milo Yiannopoulos
does not have a right to speak at the UC Berkeley campus and I say that as a 1st
Amendment absolutist. Richard Spencer does not
have a 1st Amendment right to speak on any campus and again I say that as a
1st Amendment absolutist. The American campus is a place where, it's a community and it's an institution. It is not a place where anybody
has an equal right to speak. Fascists are like vampires, they can't come through the
door unless you invite them in. They don't have a right
to come onto your campus. This is what Richard Spencer
has done in the recent past, is he has scoured the nation for campuses, public campuses that have a policy that say that anybody may speak, that's not a 1st Amendment
thing, that's a policy thing. They have decided to open
their doors to anybody who wants to spend the
money to rent a room. It's basically like renting
a room at a Holiday Inn and they do this to raise funds. I'll be done in a second, but they do this to raise funds. They do it to be nice to
people in the community who might not have a place
for the knitting club to meet and so what Richard Spencer does is he engages with this
policy in a parasitical way and what campuses are doing in many cases is they are changing that policy. Texas A&M did it. Richard Spencer wanted
to come and they said, "Okay, well, we're going to
close our open door policy." Nothing to do with the 1st Amendment. His 1st Amendment rights
weren't violated there, but if you look at the media coverage and the public debate around
all these fascists on campus, you will see it framed in
a very unsophisticated way as if what were in play
was the 1st Amendment and that is very frequently not the case. - [Tom] Thank you, Angus, Bret? - So, I wanna respond to a couple things. Laura, to the issue of whether
conspiratorial thinking is the right way to look at this, again this may be colored by my experience but I did face a conspiracy, the details of it are emerging slowly. Friends on the campus
are beginning to discover that what in fact happened, what explained 50 students
that I didn't know suddenly accusing me of racism and then posting their accusation online was actually motivated by forces that had decided I needed to
be removed from the campus because I was an obstacle
to something called the strategic equity proposal
which was a Trojan horse, so I'm not saying it's
always conspiratorial, but if you doubt that there
is a conspiratorial element, look up the word ally and then look up the word accomplice and you will find openly discussed within this pseudo progressive movement, this illiberal left, is the idea that the ally relationship is not the peer relationship that you would discover exists if you looked it up in a dictionary. The ally relationship is a
relationship of subordination and so this is a real problem. Ruling out conspiracy
would just be a mistake, I think because that element is there which doesn't mean that we should leap to see it every time it's a possibility, but it is something that
occurs a certain amount. With respect to the issue of free speech, I must say I am also now being
invited by lots of people who are interested in having
free speech absolutist and I am a free speech absolutist, but I also am left feeling a bit flat by the idea that this is really fundamentally a free speech issue. I mean for one thing the 1st
Amendment was built around the founders' fears of
governmental oppression and the greatest threats
to our free speech are probably not
governmental at this point. So, does Richard Spencer have a right to speak on college campuses? Turns out legally he
does if they're public. Should that make-- - If they have an open door policy which they don't have to have. - He can go onto a public
campus and he can speak and if they rent-- - Plenty of public campuses
have closed borders. We can get into the nitty-gritty, but let's say that your
college has a policy whereby, a public college has a policy
whereby you can rent space, then Richard Spencer has as much right to rent that space at a public
college as anybody else does and you can't bar him, so in order to bar him, you have to eliminate the
policy that allows that and then there's the question of the truly public space on the campus which it's very difficult
to bar such a person from, but my basic point would be there's a second reason that
we shouldn't be so focused on narrow free speech rights here which is that stamping
out the speech of those who have abhorrent things
to say isn't going to work. The reason that those
messages are resonant now has to do with the place we are in history and this is something I
won't drag you into it, I think the biological
underpinnings of this are, but I would say the the soundbite is that tyranny is the
end game of prosperity and what we have is an
era in which prosperity has come to an end and what we have messages which I think Trump played
on cynically to get elected, there are messages that are now resonant that wouldn't have been so 20 years ago and so getting some individual who has abhorrent things to say silenced doesn't reduce the demand for the messages that they are peddling. The reason that these
people are making progress is that people are now
listening for those messages and anybody who deploys them
is going to get a hearing, so the way to approach this is to look at the deeper questions that have put us at a moment of austerity that causes those messages to be resonant rather than the narrow free speech rights which are probably not adequate or useful as a way to think about it. - Thank you, Bret. At this point, I'm going to
throw it out to the audience, I think we've got a
roaming mic going around if we can see some hands. So, panel, I'm gonna take a handful of questions and comments. Please be as brief as you can and then we'll bring it back, so you can respond to anything you hear. So, don't leap in if you
hear your name straight away, but yes, let's take this gentleman here and then if you would just go to that gentleman in
the middle there, shoot. - Hi, I have a question
for Professor Johnston, is this all right, okay. So, you mentioned about antifa working against the public
assembly of white supremacists, but something I've noticed is
that the definition of Nazi seems to be changing very quickly. So, let's say that I get
together with some friends, so let's say that I get together with some friends like three
or four people from this room and say I want to create
a leftist platform that will appeal to people who believe in truth and
free speech et cetera, but that also goes in conflict with some other campus policies, push comes to shove and then
I'm declared a Nazi by antifa. - Well, tell me which policy 'cause you can't say, "And
I wanna also do some other-- - Well, let's not get into the particular policies right now. - Actually, that actually doesn't matter because if they declare me a Nazi, can I finish my sentence, please? - [Tom] Let him finish his point, we'll move around and
then we'll come back. - So, the main thing I wanted
to say is for whatever reason, they have decided that I'm a Nazi and that they decide to come out in force and to prevent me from speaking. So, really, they get to
decide whether I speak or not because they're more powerful than me, because they have more numbers than I do, because they're more
intimidating, is that all right? Let's say for example that they're wrong and we can you decide that
there is an objective way to determine if someone's a Nazi or not, what recourse is there? - Thank you, thank you very much. No one over here. Could I see some hands on this side, you wanna take the mic up there while he's speaking, shoot. - Well, let me just say first of all, the gentleman over there kind of had a similar question to mine, but let me just say first, Brendan, I want you to
acknowledge your accent privilege because we're such suckers for, you started speaking I was
just like he could say whatever and I'm, that accent, forget about it, Angus Johnston, we're gonna
be I guess picking on you a little bit with antifa statement, but yeah to piggyback on this young man over here on the corner. For instance, yeah, who
decides who's a Nazi, you could say they're preventing white supremacist from
mobilizing which of course, I think is something
that's good I would say, but I think about a commentator like Ben Shapiro for instance, he's called this and that, he's stopped from going to campuses and he's having his discussions disrupted. I mean, what about a scenario like that? Who determines who's the Nazi? Some young kids in masks? I don't think so. - Thank you very much. So, we have another one, just here. - My question is for all the panelists and it is what do you
think is a bigger obstacle for a socialist politics
in the United States? Is it fascism and white supremacy or the democratic party? - Interesting and there's a
gentleman in a blue jacket, I think just a couple rows back. Yeah and then we'll come back. - We've heard a lot about what this group of people are doing, what that group of people are doing, and what people are saying, and who's meeting in what auditorium, I think what few people are talking about is why are people so ready to hear some of these messages
and I think that people, and it doesn't matter
which group or whatever that someone wants to identify with, that there's a lot of fear, whether it's fear of sexual assault or fear that some white guy
might do something to me, I don't believe that, but there's a lot of fear going on and while we're spending time talking about who's saying what, what are we actually doing to move people from the space where
they are to a, excuse me, a more ideal space? What are we doing in action because I believe that we can talk about these things all the time, but unless we are actually
putting people to work to actually accomplish something, to move them from the position
where they feel afraid or where they feel they don't have options by showing them the way to leverage the resources that they have, unless we're doing that,
then what are we doing? So, I mean this is for the panel, what are we actually going to do? - Thank you very much. - Can I just say one thing about? - Yeah, sure, by all means, jump in. I mean, I think that we have
principles on the one side and then we have things that we all know are true on the other. I shouldn't say we all, okay, I wouldn't rope you guys into this, but I mean that on campus, there are invitations
going out to speakers for particular political purposes, which is to create divisiveness and particularly, divisiveness
along race lines on campus and to try to create the
message that some people do not belong on campus and others do, so when invitations are
extended to certain groups, I mean, it's with a sort of cynicism and I sort of feel like
the principles are great, but we're also getting played. So, anyway, I think Angus
and I agree about it. I'm not saying don't let people speak and I also fully understand
that somebody like Milo is the creation of the left. I mean, it is the creation
of a kind of suppression of a certain kind of quality and so he's Donald Trump probably. I certainly acknowledge the
sort of dialectic of that, but I also think the reality is yes, let those people speak off campus not on because there are certain values on campus that have to do with inclusiveness and the invites are a direct
attack on that principle. I mean, that's the subtext, that's the thing we all know about them. - Brendan, your response. - I don't understand what's
wrong with having principles especially on freedom of speech. You should have principles
on freedom of speech and also there isn't this neat divide between principles and
practical everyday life, they inform each other and that's the example
I gave, of in Britain, where we have public order legislation that can ban a march and
that came in as a consequence of the refusal of the
left to defend free speech and freedom of association for Nazis. These have consequences. If you give up your principles, it has devastating
consequences in everyday life. I think I disagree, but I think this is entirely
about freedom of speech. I think that is the issue in relation to all of this stuff. I think freedom of speech
is the foundational freedom, it's the freedom that makes
everything else possible, it's the freedom, the right to vote, the right to association, the right to political organization, none of those make any
sense or are even workable without freedom of speech, without the right to say
what you want to publish, what you want to distribute, so the fact that there is a new left or students or society in general that is increasingly uncomfortable
with freedom of speech should concern us enormously and you know in relation to antifa, antifa poses as this
kind of radical lefty, kind of you know like the
International Brigades that went off to fight
the fascists in Spain, do me a favor, the antifa is a bourgeois,
censorious, shrill anti-democratic, anti-working class. For George Orwell, anti-fascism
meant going to Spain and risking your life
to kill actual fascist. For antifa, it means
getting a bus into town and punching a working class
Trump supporter in the face, that's not the same thing. Just the final point I would make is that if you want to see the
danger of censorship, just look at people like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos,
their fame, their power, to the extent that they
have it, their influence, the fact that you all know who they are, even though they don't have any good ideas is entirely down to censorship. The more you censor them,
the more you chase them, the more you create this
culture of fear around them as if these two people
could destroy America, the more you empower them. Censorship empowers the people it censors, it disempowers the audience, ordinary people who are
deprived of the opportunity to challenge backward ideas. Censorship benefits the
censored in many instances. Censorship is a real
blow to ordinary people who don't share these views and would quite like to
hear and confront them. Censorship is a disaster
in every single instance, whether it's been
enforced by the government or bureaucrats at a university, whether it's formal or informal, whether it's state-led or in
the words of John Stuart Mill, the tyranny of wisdom,
whichever area it's coming from, it is a disaster and it will
make life and politics worse. - Thank you, Brendan, Bret? - I wanna come back to this
question about socialism, but first, I want to just
say I agree with you, freedom of expression is
fundamentally important. What I'm concerned about
is that free speech being effectively
synonymous in this country with the 1st Amendment is not adequate to defend free exchange of ideas which is really the important thing and equally important on a
public campus as a private one. So, anyway I would agree with you that the issue of free expression
is the fundamental issue, the 1st Amendment isn't. It's really inquiry and dialogue. With respect to question of socialism, how I think if I understood
the question correctly, how could we effectively make
a socialist program viable, which is a greater obstacle
to it white supremacy or the democratic party? I thought that was kind of
a cool way of putting it, but I want to level a challenge back, a thought experiment for all those who have some sort of sympathy with the ideals expressed by socialists. I want you to think for a
moment what would happen if they simply faced no
opposition of any kind and were capable of instituting the policies that they favor, do you think it would work? Now of course it would work. Well, I have to say I'm ever
less convinced that it would. Now, I also think that
if we did the experiment on the other side of the spectrum, if we handed power over
to economic libertarians and we allowed them to
deregulate anything, do you think it would work? Absolutely not. So, my point is actually this one, if you're familiar, I wanna be cautious about the
political compass test itself, this is an online test that allows you to diagnose yourself in
a four quadrant model. I don't know how good the questions are at actually placing people on it, but I do think that the
diagram that has two axes, a left-right axis on the X and authoritarian versus
libertarian on the Y-axis, is actually a very useful
way of looking at things and my point would be that
the two libertarian quadrants, libertarian left where I am, libertarian right where the
economic libertarians are, those two quadrants. Once they recognize that
nobody in those quadrants actually knows the
description of the system that we should be building
have tremendous reason to unite because actually we are
agreed about values. We are agreed about the
fundamental importance of liberty and now what we need to
do is have a discussion about how practical interventions might be and what those interventions
we might propose would be. In light of what we now know
that those who architected the ideas behind socialism didn't know, so I would say not to make
it too black and white, but the the enemy of those who
hold liberty as a great value are the authoritarians and the two authoritarian quadrants are actually not united. They don't like each
other and for good reason, so there is great advantage in
putting our differences aside in those two libertarian quadrants and recognizing that
the differences we have are about policy and that none of us have the
right answers on that front. - Thank you, Bret. Before we come back up, Angus, some serious questions about antifa, is the young gentleman over there a Nazi? All that good stuff. - So, let me just out of curiosity, how many people in this room actually personally know
anybody who considers themselves part of antifa or identifies as antifa? All right, cool, more
than I was expecting. I think one of the things
that needs to be recognized is that antifa is not just about punching people in the nose. There's a lot of different
tactics that go into it, some of which are tactics that I think everybody in
this room would agree with. Antifa is about organizing against fascism in a variety of different ways and so I think that it's important to say that there is a spectrum of ways in which you can organize against fascists and that some of them are ones that everybody in this
room would agree with and others of them are ones which probably just about everybody in this
room would disagree with and then there's a bunch
in the mushy middle and one of the things that
I think we really need to do in this country is start
having much more of a dialogue about what exactly we mean
when we talk about free speech and let me just give you one example, protesting against a speaker, when is that an expression
of your free speech rights and when it is that a violation
of their free speech rights? There is no one sentence
answer to that question. At what point does-- - [Man] Oh, no, there is, too. - We're coming back out to you-- - Wait a second, hold on a second. You just interrupted me. Wait, wait, wait, wait. - [Student] You have the right to speak. - Wait, wait, wait, no, wait, listen to what I'm saying, please. You just interrupted me, did you violate my free speech rights? (indistinct chatter) Did you? - [Woman] Didn't stop you from speaking. - Wait, but did you just, right. Okay, so, wait, hold on a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait. This is wonderful. I am loving this so much because I am being prevented
from finishing my sentence by people who feel like I am expressing in opposition to free speech. This is great. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Wait, hold on a second,
give me a sentence, give me one more sentence
to say why I think that you have the right to interrupt me. I'm here, I've got a microphone,
I've got a lot of power. I've got a lot of power in this room, not as much as the guy with the the clock, but I've got a lot of power and so if I have a microphone,
I can speak over you. If you are interrupting
me, I can push on past you. I can wait 'til you're done
and then I can respond. I can get the last word. There's a lot of stuff that I can do and so I would say that when y'all start getting real frustrated with me and interrupting me, you are not at all violating
my free speech rights, you are expressing your
free speech rights, you are exercising your
free speech rights. There comes a point probably
maybe you cut the mic, maybe you storm the stage,
maybe you pull a fire alarm, maybe there does come a point
where my free speech rights have been violated by your disruption, but certainly the disruption
that we just experienced was not a violation my free speech right and so it's not just one sentence thing because it's complicated. There is a mushy middle - [Man] Hold up, hold up. - [Woman] Excuse me, you like antifa, I'm just doing what they do. - And I'm gonna do what they
do and tell you to be quiet. - Can I just say one thing
and then we'll move on? This room of civil
libertarians is the first time I've ever been interrupted as a speaker, so that's wonderful. (Tom laughing) - Excellent, well on this note, we're going to go back out
to the audience, not to you, that gentleman over there
in the blue shirt please and there's a gentleman in
the white shirt down here will be next, yes, please. - I feel like there's been something very like omitted from
your general conversation and in general around the
surprise kind of like reaction to the fact that these kind of politics are prevailing in our present and why. I mean, we kind of have
that ready-made answer, we know that over the past decades, I mean, we can time scale it differently, that the left has been in
decline in this country, globally in general,
the two parties in power don't offer contrasting programs. They don't offer different
rights, they really don't. I mean, they're all part of
a bureaucratic nanny state that's been increasingly
developing means of control to keep productive
population relatively happy in a period of capitalist
crisis that has been going on basically since the socialist uprisings in the early 20th century, so I feel like why is
that not being discussed? Why is the absence of politics that are allowing for this as if it's a matter of the left, as if the left is somehow
real in the present because I'm the leftist and I'm a member of a socialist party and a member of a study group, kind of like you know
lots of things I've done over the past decade as a leftist, but I also acknowledge that
I'm in no position of power, you say you have a lot of power because you're the microphone, I have the microphone right now, I don't feel empowered. As a leftist, I feel disempowered relative to the social
situation that were part of, so I just feel like you guys need to comment on that,
the decline of the left. - Good, point well made. Gentlemen here and then who
on this side wants to speak? Someone in the middle
there in the gray shirt and we'll go to you first. - So, I think the the kind
of pace of indignation at the moment is blistering and it's really hard to
kind of keep up with it, but I also think it's really corrosive and I'm interested in whether or not you think a model established by Shelby Steele in
White Guilt is relevant. So, if you think of an oppressing group, you know acknowledges
the the sins of the past that creates the loss of moral authority and then there's this power dynamic between the oppressors and the oppressed and there's stigma that goes with it and I think Bret, you kind
of alluded to this a little, I wonder if you think that model is true because I sort of thought it was true until I looked at the kind of
Weinstein sex minister scandal because there I think
there is a kind of loss of moral authority which
sets this thing up, with of course the exception that actually this loss of moral authority is largely an invention
and kind of hysterical. So, I wonder if the left has gone from being aligned to historic
causes that had substance to really being nothing
but hysteria these days. - Thank you very much. This gentleman just there and then we'll go to that lady there and then we'll come back, yeah? - I heard an idea today that
I hadn't thought about much which was that the right
hates ideas and philosophies and the left hates people and when people talk
about Richard Spencer, they don't seem to hate his ideas as much as they hate him and it seems that kind of animus seems to bind the farthest
of the right and the left and I just want to hear if
you have an idea about that. - Thank you very much
and just down here, yep? - Thank you, I just by the
way I want to thank you for coming to the United States and for doing this tour of yours and I've been following Spiked
Online for a long time now and I've been following especially what you've been through, Bret, since it broke, the news broke. One of the things that seems to me that, well, there are two things that's not being talked about. We're talking as if the only
fascist threat is on the right and nobody is really
confronting the reality that I think Brett brought it up in terms of the
authoritarian-libertarian divide, that on the left we're getting as much of an authoritarian push as anything we've ever seen on the right and the other point which is included here is that I'm hearing you
talk about generalities regarding free expression. free speech, but my background, I happen to be the daughter
of Holocaust survivors and I've made it into my dotage having to like really be aware of everything going on around me and I'll tell you the truth that I'm much more concerned
with the anti-Zionist, antisemitic activities on the far left than I am from these, I got aware of the right
since I was old enough and you know I don't see
them as this huge threat so much as the overreaction
and the anger that feeds into the sort of I
guess mainstream America watching this on the media, wondering who's off control now, so I just wanted to bring that one up. - Thank you very much We're going to come back to the panel now. I'm gonna ask to be as
brief as I possibly can 'cause I want to try and go
out and get a handful more before we come back, so Laura, you got anything
you want to respond to? There is a lot there. Is the left dead? That was my favorite question
from over there, so shoot. - Well, I'm trying to sort through all this myself obviously. I mean, I'm kind of
surprised to hear you say, the last person who spoke that you're more worried about the left when I mean, the right
and the republican party as I said has stripped
African-Americans of voting rights, occupy all the state houses, I mean, taken over the Supreme
Court, the White House, and are executing policy on- - [Woman] Can I just briefly respond? - No, actually, just in the spirit of moving on swiftly, let's. - There's a reality to
these political shifts that I mean I guess I
actually am more worried about and I'm responding to, so it doesn't seem to me that like inviting Richard Spencer to campus, the conversation we have been
having I think divides between whether the free speech
issue is like idea neutral and we have to support the
free speech as a principle or whether the ideas
that are being promoted have efficacy and matter
and affect people's lives, particularly on campus because I'm talking about
the campus situation and how what said, I mean, if
we allow us white supremacists on campus to organize on campus, we are effectively saying
it's okay to create exclusions for other populations and I think that is opposed
to what the mission, I mean what we're supposed to
be about in higher education and so these things I
think are very worrisome. I mean, I take them
seriously at a content level as opposed to, that was the distinction I was drawing between the principles, there are specific things happening that we have to deal with as opposed to the principle about it. - [Tom] Thank you, Laura. - That's as much as I can
come up with right now. - Definitely and Brendan,
your thoughts please. - Yeah, but what you're
describing is licensed speech, it's not freedom of speech and I think it's really
important that we recognize that. I think I agree with the speaker who said that the
overreaction to the right is now more dangerous than the right. I am opposed to Trump. I'm against pretty much
everything he's done so far and everything he said, but Trump derangement syndrome strikes me as a far greater threat
to the idea of democracy, to the idea of open debate,
to the idea of campus debate than Trump himself is. I think the reaction
is incredibly dangerous and it's interesting that you mentioned being the daughter of
a Holocaust survivors, I was at the museum of the history of the Jews of Poland in
Warsaw a few weeks ago and what was really striking, what you really got from
visiting that museum is that fascism is censorship and anti-fascism is freedom of speech because what it had in that museum was all these pamphlets and magazines that people produced in the Warsaw ghetto for which they could be shot on the spot, they had hide them, had
to print them in bunkers, had to distribute them
in the dead of night because they were censored by the Nazis from expressing themselves. Nazism is censorship, that's what it is. Anti-fascism is freedom of speech. If you are attacking freedom of speech, you are not an anti-fascist, that is the bottom line
of this discussion. You are far more like the other guys, you are far more like the guys who threatened to kill Warsaw ghetto Jews for publishing pamphlets. Final point I want to make
on the heckling question, I think the heckling
question is very simple. One of the greatest things ever written about freedom of speech
was written in response to the heckling question, it was a plea for free
speech by Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist
who wrote this piece after a meeting of abolitionists in Boston was interrupted by racists and pro-slavery people and shout it down and he wrote a plea for free speech which is one of the best
and most passionate things you will ever read in
defense of freedom of speech, so that wasn't a 1st Amendment issue, The state, Congress,
government was not interfering with his and the other people's rights. that was a matter of informal
censorship enforced by a mob or as we would now call
them a protest of SJWs, so this question of informal censorship has been around for a long time and if you want to know when
heckling becomes a problem ie when someone is
prevented from speaking, read Frederick Douglass, read the minority groups who struggled for freedom of speech for decades, who you now demean through saying, "Oh, free speech doesn't matter," that's the shocking thing, heroes of mine had their ears cut off, their tongues pulled out,
they were tied to the stocks, they were pelted with eggs,
they were jailed for years for expressing their freedom of speech. The idea that you would now turn against the idea of freedom of speech
is a grave insult to history and to the people who made our lives as nice as they currently are. (audience applauding) - Can I just say one thing? - Quickly if you would. - All speech on campus is licensed speech, only certain people get to speak, only certain students get in
on the basis of their ideas, certain people are allowed to teach on the basis of being
judged adequate to speak. We don't let people like in class say fuck you to their professor, it is already there. There are speech codes and
civility codes in place, so it is licensed speech,
that is the bottom line. - No, but the problem
is if groups of students want to invite someone because they're interested in his ideas and they want to hear from him and there is a rule or a policy code or another group of students
who prevent them from doing so, that's where it explicitly becomes a freedom of speech question. People are being prevented
from engaging in discussion with someone they find interesting. - I think I'm gonna leave
it and move on to Angus, so anything in response to
what you've heard from-- - Well, yeah. I think that one of the things that I very much agree
with that you just said is that the core of free speech rights, if there is a disruption in that way is of the students who invited the speaker because they are the people who have standing to make the invitation and they are the ones who are
most being interfered with and I think that we really do need to pay a lot more attention to
the free speech rights and the freedom of expression rights of students on the campuses, I think about the Irvine
11 a few years ago where students who were
essentially heckling the Israeli ambassador were arrested and charged with crimes for
engaging in protest speech and thinking about the
fact that at UC Berkeley at around the same time, dozens and dozens of students
who were peacefully protesting inside an administration building were woken from their sleep and arrested and then taken all the
way two counties away, so that it would take the
entire day to process them, so that they without actually
charging them with a crime, they could be taken out of action and not able to join the protest that was scheduled to happen
on campus the next day. I'm talking about all the students who have been beaten by campus cops, the vast majority of them leftists in the last few years and I think that the silence of most civil libertarians
on all of those issues has really been profound and if we are concerned that today's generation
of student activists do not see free speech as a central right, I would say one of the questions
that we need to look at is when have we shown
them as civil libertarians that the right of free speech
is one that extends to them and extends to them even when
they're being a bit rowdy and that we are going to
stand up and defend them. If all they see is our
standing up for Nazis, they're not going to
believe that free speech is a real living thing
in this country today. - Thank you, Angus. Hold up and Bret. - So, I wanna pick up this question about the state of the left at the moment which I find fascinating
in the following sense, most popular politician
in the country today by far is Bernie Sanders, that is an amazing statement of fact. It is a heck of a time for the
left to be attacking itself in the way that it is doing it. Finally, people are actually listening to a person with integrity who really is on the left, who has important things to say, why is the left so dysfunctional and I would submit that there are a couple of things in play here. One of them is that we
have a fundamental defect in our political apparatus and that is a positive feedback where if you generate wealth, it doesn't matter how you've generated it, it buys you political power and if you have political power, you can restructure the system, so you generate more wealth, that positive feedback system
is effectively evolutionary and it has resulted in the
capture of the entire apparatus by people who don't agree on much except that they do not want change built around redistribution. So we have and I don't want
to call it a conspiracy because it doesn't even
have to be conscious, what we have is the evolution of something that effectively forbids redistribution and what that means is that the left has been out of power for a very long time and having been out of power for so long, it has lost touch with what
it is supposed to be doing, what it is supposed to be advocating, how it is supposed to
collaborate, all of those things, so one thing that we have to recognize is that we're effectively, I mean, how many times
as things fell apart at Evergreen did it strike me that this is a little more
than a temper tantrum, this is a temper tantrum
that is wielding real power and that's a frightening thing, so in order to fix this discussion, I would suggest that the left needs to A, recognize that it needs
to regenerate the tools of how to wield power
properly and effectively. It has to think carefully and consciously about that question and it should probably
think about revising what it is interested in redistributing and the reason for that
is if we have a discussion about redistributing wealth, we immediately lose everybody
on the libertarian right, they are not interested
in having that discussion. On the other hand, if
you have a discussion about redistributing opportunity, so that it is equally
distributed across society, the libertarian right
is suddenly listening because a truly ideological
libertarian will agree that the system functions better when everybody has opportunity
to access the market, to innovate and to provide superior ideas that can then catch on. So, if we want unity that actually allows the wielding of power, we should rethink what it
is that we are advocating. - Thank you, Bret. We've got about five minutes left and nowhere near enough time, but I'm gonna try and take
as many of you as possible before we bring it back to the panel, so there's a lady at the back there who's had her hand up for a little while and then we'll also take this
gentleman down here for now, so brief if you will, so we can-- - Very brief. Brendan mentioned generational differences and Laura was talking about what would be the appropriate
role for professors in trying to balance students' reaction to their personal experiences versus what they learn academically and Bret was talking about bad actors and having seen some of his videos, I know some of those
were not just students, they were amongst the establishment in the administration and the faculty, so if you could speak a little bit about what the grown-ups in the room are doing or should be doing that would be helpful. - Thank you very much and gentleman here and then there's a guy
who's really going for it at the back there, give him the mic, and then you first. - This questions for Bret. I was wondering if there
were any evolutionary or biochemical explanations for all the hard-line rigidity rigidness that we're seeing with sort
of these political outlets that have become more extreme and fanatic. - Thank you, any hands
over here while we're here, yeah, gentlemen just about there, so you first and then we'll go there. - I was going to ask a question about how can we raise awareness to the issues we will be
talking about tonight. However, there are some
apologists in the room I can tell, Laura specifically. As an evil white man,
how are you going to-- - [Laura] I'm used to not
being liked, it's okay. - How are you gonna talk me down from the tower of telling you that progressivism is a failed ideology. You have this system called
the progressive stack in which there are oppressed
and there are not oppressed and just this week we had
this sign of being plastered around campuses across the country saying, "It's okay to be white," and that was considered racist, so I would like to tell you or ask you, how do you think progressivism
is not a failed ideology? - Okay, quickly, so take this gentleman and I'm gonna come some of ya 'cause I've been ignoring you and then we'll come back. - [Man] Which one? I thought we already have one. - Oh, come down the front here because we got a clutch of
people I've been ignoring because they were at my line of sight, so I'm gonna take these three here, but you've got to be really, really quick and then we're gonna come back. - Hi, thank you, so one thing
I heard from Brendan strongly and to a lesser extent from
Bret was that you believe that there is a coherent
organized movement out there of people who have values and priorities antithetical to your own and the prescription for that is to fight them and not ally with them. What I heard, certainly
what I believed I heard from Laura and Angus, is there a group of people out there who share your values and priorities, but our misguided and mis-educated which is a very different thing and I was wondering if
you could comment on that. - Thank you very much and then
just you two in the row there and then we'll have to
come back I'm afraid. - This is for Laura and Bret. I was student government president at a small college called Middlebury, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, during a complicated time and I was sort of a young person trying to think about these issues. It was very challenging
to find room for nuance and negative capability that phrase really struck
me when you described it and Bret, you mentioned social penalty, and I'm wondering how our young people supposed to work through
these very complicated issues while facing the potential
for social penalty. - [Tom] Thank you and yeah? - On campus, has the educated and conscientious conservative
become an inconvenient truth? I'm referring here to the glaring lack of viewpoint diversity
at leading universities and I'm speaking as someone who has literally been called a fascist for seeing I believe in
objective standards in art. - Thank you very much Thank you for your questions. Sorry, I didn't get everyone
in, but time is short, so panel, can ask you to
take about a minute or so, so you can even respond
to anything you've heard or completely ignore them and just give us your final thought, so let's go the opposite direction now. So, Bret, do you want to go first? - Sure, so I was struck by the question of what are the adults in the room saying and I would say, I don't
like hearing myself say this, but increasingly I think most rooms don't have any adults in them and that's part of the problem and that sounds tongue-in-cheek I'm sure, but really what I mean is that the developmental process that results in truly adult levels of nuance, those processes are broken, and this is going to make them worse, if we make universities into places that are antagonistic to inquiry, then either inquiry is
going to move somewhere else and it's going to have to build
the university system anew or we're in serious
trouble as a civilization because that nuance is simply
necessary to navigating. - [Tom] Thank you, Bret. Angus? - I'd like to respond to what you said about this sort of are
some folks misguided. I think there is stuff that
some people need to learn and I think I think
there is more room for, there is more room for compromise, there's more room for finding community with folks at various
different places on the left than a lot of the people in this room see. I've spoken to a lot of
these folks one-on-one and there is a lot more common ground than is often visible in the media. The other thing that I would say is particularly in terms of campus activists, we're not supposed to
like what they're doing, that's that's kind of the whole thing, that they're supposed to
be pushing boundaries, they're supposed to be going farther. One of the reasons why I am
way more scared of the right than I am of the left is that
Donald Trump is president and the folks who are causing
the most trouble on campus have very, very little power. Now, you may think they have
more power than they should, but we are in a position where the amount of power
that is wielded by the people that I don't like on the left is way, way less than the
amount that is wielded by the people that I
don't like on the right and I really do believe that
there is an immense possibility for real communication and coming together particularly when you're talking to people one-on-one or in small groups and I would encourage
everybody in this room to seek out those opportunities because that's where the
real change happens, I think. - Thank you, Angus, and Laura,
your final thoughts, please. - One of the ways that I got
into trouble on my own campus was by trying to complicate issues that people didn't want
to see as complicated and trying to interject nuance
into some of the discussions, this was around sexual
politics and rape culture and that sort of thing, and I became the subject
of a lot of opprobrium and Title IX complaints, so I feel a little bit like I'm, as I tried to be funny to
the guy who was accusing me of something or another
from the back of the room, yeah, I'm used to being
in a roomful of people who don't like me because I guess I'm
finding myself dissatisfied with taking the easy position and I've used the word principle to you, I mean, I would love to
take the absolutist position because then I get the applause and people would say yeah,
yeah and it sounds good and it's comforting to able
to draw these hard lines about complicated issues, but it started to seem inadequate to me and that's what I actually am, trying to sort my way
through that the responses that I felt easily into
didn't seem adequate to the current political situation and to my own experiences
as a teacher on campus and seeing students having to
confront these sort of issues like white supremacist coming to campus and that sort of thing, so it's lived experience and I'm claiming experience as some special privileged position, but I'm saying it has to factor
into the kind of analysis that we make about the present moment - [Tom] Thank you, Laura. And Brendan. - Yeah, I would just
say in response to that, free speech is the facilitator
of intellectual confusion and doubt and skepticism and debate and conflict and tension, so it's a very, very, very simple idea which is that no one
should ever be censored, but it gives rise to
precisely the kind of culture I think that you want and
which I think we all want. The question of where are the grown-ups, that's the question I think to ask and that's what I was
getting at earlier on, which is that I don't think this is just gangs of radical left students attacking more moderate left students and so on and so forth, it's something more profound than that. It's the playing out of a long term generational loss of
faith by western society and its own founding values and when you raise a whole new generation with no respect for due process, no respect for freedom of speech, to cultivate their own self esteem and protect their own self
esteem above all else, you make monsters, so it's
not entirely their fault. The final point I would end on is in relation to freedom of speech and Angus says if a group
of students is denied the right to invite a speaker, then those students' speech
rights are undermined, but not necessarily the speaker's, those speech rights, the speech rights of listening to speech are the most important
rights in freedom of speech because it's only by having
the right to hear everything and judging for yourself if
it's a good idea or a bad idea that you can be a full rounded
free member of society. Censorship tells you not
to think for yourself. Censorship invites you to be a child. Censorship says you don't
have to hear this thing because we have decided on your behalf that it's not a good idea. Censorship is disempowering,
insulting, paternalistic, and it encourages stupidity. It's very important that
everyone has the right to say what they want. It's even more important
that we all have the right to hear them and judge for ourselves using our free will and
our autonomous thinking, whether they're talking sense or nonsense. - Thank you, Brendan. Let me thank all of our panel. (audience clapping) Thank you very much, everyone. We'll be hanging around for a few minutes, so please do come say hello to us and talk to us about Spiked. Thank you all for coming, cheers.
