The other way in which I do agree with my
fellow panelists that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the
sliver of the population that might be... I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly
whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent
people who gravitate to the alt-right, internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized
in that way, who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the allusion from The Matrix. When they are exposed the first time to true
statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in The New York Times
or in respectable media, that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity,
and they're immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are
unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent
conclusions. Let me give you some examples. Here is a fact that's gonna sound ragingly
controversial but is not, and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist
ones. If you doubt it, then just ask yourself the
question: Would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea? Would I rather live in West Germany in the
1970s or East Germany or in the 1960s? I submit that this is actually not a controversial
statement, but in university campuses, it would be considered flamingly radical. Here's another one. Men and women are not identical in their life
priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests. This is not controversial to anyone who has
even glanced at the data. The kind of vocational interest tests of the
kind that your high school guidance counselor gave you were given to millions of people,
and men and women give different answers as to what they wanna do for a living and how
much time they want to allocate to family versus career and so on. But you can't say it. A very famous person on this campus did say
it, and we all know what happened to him. He's no longer, well, he is on this campus,
but no longer in the same office. Here's a third fact that is just not controversial,
although it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit violent
crimes at different rates. You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Look it up on their website. The homicide rate among African Americans
is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans. And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist
Database, and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist
acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups. If you've never heard these facts before and
you stumble across them or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme
conclusions, such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent,
that we all ought to be Anarcho-capitalists and do away with all regulation and social
safety nets, that most terrorism in this country is the fault of Muslims. These are unwarranted conclusions because
for each one of these facts there are very powerful counterarguments for why they don't
license racism and sexism and Anarcho-capitalism and so on. The fact that men and women aren't identical
has no implications for whether we should discriminate against women for a number of
reasons. One of them is for any traits in which the
sex is different, and two distributions have enormous amounts of overlap, so that you can't
draw a reliable conclusion about any individual from group averages. Number two, the principle of opposition to
racism and sexism is not a factual claim that the sexes and races are indistinguishable
in every aspect. It's a political and moral commitment to treat
people as individuals, as opposed to pre-judging them by the statistics of their group. Third, we know that some of the statistical
generalizations about races and sexes change over time. So, what is true now may not necessarily be
true in 10 or 20 years. These are all reasons why you can believe
that the sexes are different and be a very strong feminist, why you can believe that
differences between the races exist and be very strongly opposed to any form of racism. In the case of, say, rates of violent crime,
it used to be, go back 100 years, the rate of violent crime among Irish Americans was
far higher than among other ethnic groups. That obviously changed. There's no reason that that can't change in
the case of current racial differences. In the case of terrorism, the majority of
domestic terrorism is committed by Right-Wing extremist groups, not by Islamic groups within
this country. Of course, through much of its history Islam
was far more enlightened than Christendom. There was no equivalent of the Inquisition. There was no equivalent of the wars of religion
in the classical history of Islam. Finally, in the case of the fact that capitalism
is really a better system than Marxism, every successful capitalist society has regulation,
has a social safety net, and, in fact, some of the countries with the strongest social
safety nets are also the countries that are most market-friendly, that have the greatest
degree of economic freedom. These are all reasons why you can believe
all of these and not necessarily drift toward extremist positions. In fact, why you can be a Progressive, a Centrist,
a Liberal, even a Leftist, and believe all of these because you're exposed not only to
the facts but how to put them in context. Now let's say that you have never even heard
anyone mention these facts. The first time you hear them, you're apt to
say, number one, the truth has been withheld from me by universities, by mainstream media,
and, moreover, you will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed,
shouted down, assaulted, all the more reason to believe that the Left, that the mainstream
media, that universities can't handle the truth. So, you get vindicated over and over again,
but, worst of all, you're never exposed to the ways of putting these facts into context
so that they don't lead to racism and sexism and extreme forms of Anarcho-Libertarianism. So, the politically correct Left is doing
itself an enormous disservice when it renders certain topics undiscussable, especially when
the facts are clearly behind them because they leave people defenseless the first time
they hear them against the most extreme and indefensible conclusions possible. If they were exposed, then the rationale for
putting them into proper political and moral context could also be articulated, and I don't
think you would have quite the extreme backlash.
