Kill Bill (67) | Pardy, Haskell, Kay | EP 234

Yeah, I look at these things. I looked at them 10 years ago, and I have this curse. I can see where things are going, and I think, "Oh, this is going in this colossally stupid direction." And it can't be the case that it's really going to get to that point, is it? And then it just happens over and over and over and over. And this bill is the most. This makes Bill C-16 look like child's play.

Exactly.

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Hello, everyone. I've brought three people together with me today to discuss Bill C-67, an Ontario bill that is entitled "Racial Equity in the Education System." Barbara K is a columnist for the Canadian newspaper National Post. She also writes for the Epoch Times and Western Standard online. David Haskell is at Wilfrid Laurier, operating primarily within the field of sociology of religion, but makes occasional forays into communication studies. His teaching and research focus on religion in Canada and media in Canada. Bruce Pardee is executive director of Rights Probe and professor of law at Queen's University. He spearheaded resistance to and the ultimate repeal of the Law Society of Ontario's Statement of Principles policy that required Ontario lawyers to attest to their ideological purity to maintain their license to practice.

So, I brought these people together today, invited these people to come together today to discuss this bill which the Conservatives in Ottawa, to their great discredit, are supporting. So, Barbara, maybe we'll start with you. You wrote an article a little while ago, a couple of days ago, in the Epoch Times, trying to alert Ontarians and Canadians, particularly, let's say, in the center and on the right, to the degree that those exist in Canada, to the purported, to what you see as the dangers of this bill. So, why is a bill that's hypothetically aimed at something as awful as racism? What concerns do you have about it, and why?

Well, this Bill 67, which is heading for third reading before a final vote, is billed as an anti-racism bill. It's going to give anti-racist instruction to children in the educational system. But the bill is, in fact, pretty well a clone of the programs in the United States that are being resisted all over the place because it depends entirely on critical race theory for the ideas that are in the program and for the rules that are going to govern it. It basically calls itself anti-racism, but in fact, it is a very racist program because it deals in a group identity group framing all questions of victimhood in terms of identity groups. It says that it's going to oppose anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Black racism, and anti-Asian racism, plus anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, but in fact, they do not include anti-Caucasian racism because that is going to be the one race racism that is not only going to be allowed but encouraged according to critical race theory, which I know, Jordan, you've spoken about many times.

The basic hypothesis that we're pursuing in this discussion is that under the ages of something as ethically admirable, let's say, as the absence of racism or even promoting the absence of racism, what this bill actually does is bring in a whole set of ideas that have virtually nothing to do with racism per se under the guise of a moral endeavor and make it both likely and necessary that people abide by this particular propagandistic ethic in order to be teachers in Ontario schools and certainly to be promoted.

So, I'll just detail some of the details of the bill so that people are aware of this. For example, performance appraisals shall include competencies related to a teacher's anti-racism awareness, whatever that is, and efforts to promote racial equity. New subsection 301 7.11 requires the minister to establish policies and guidelines with respect to promoting racial equity in schools, and boards must establish and implement racial equity plans. The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario will have to have a member who will be an expert in racial equity in the post-education center, and that all members must have a proven commitment to racial equity or take anti-racism training.

There's a variety of additional details that are relevant. What we're discussing today is the fact that all of this means that the education system, in the narrow and the broad sense, will be oriented towards a set of policies that are radically left in their orientation by necessity, and that there will be punishments put in place for failure to adopt that ideological standpoint. And this is a supposedly conservative government who's bringing this in.

The problem with the bill, I think, is that the word equity is used 54 times in this bill, but you don't ever see the word equality. The problem, even amongst politicians who are supposed to understand the philosophy guiding their own party, is that they seem to glaze over with the word equity because it sounds a lot like equality and it sounds like a good thing. Equity is predicated on the idea that if there are any differences in outcome between any groups imaginable, so those could be groups defined by gender, they could be groups defined by race, they could be groups defined by sex, if there are any differences in outcome of any sort, that that's not only indication of a profound and systemic bias characterizing whatever domain is being questioned, but that it's incumbent upon all the members of that domain to regard themselves as prejudiced and biased and to view the non-equal outcomes as evidence of systemic bias. That's the tie-in to critical race theory, let's say.

So, what's wrong with the proposition? That's precisely what the problem is with it. I'm very happy for Bruce to amplify on it because he understands it much better than any than I do.

“Well, that's obviously not true, but let me just contrast two different ideas.”

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Anti-racism, which this bill promotes and insists upon, and non-racism. Those two things sound equivalent, but they're opposites actually. Non-racism is the attitude that your race doesn't really matter and that you should be treated as a human being, and that the same rules and standards should apply to everybody, notwithstanding the group that you belong to. Anti-racism is the opposite. Anti-racism insists that your race is fundamentally important and that being white means that you are both privileged and probably racist, and that is an ideology, and that this bill intends to make that ideology compulsory inside the school systems and inside the universities.

So, let's add some more details that are useful here. Any person who is going to be a teacher now has to successfully complete any prescribed examinations and training in anti-racism in order to be issued a certificate of qualification and registration. So, that means you have to abide by this political ideology which is even regarded by moderate leftists in the United States, and certainly by centrists, as radically left in its fundamental orientation.

It also means that colleges that provide such training must be undertaken by all the institutions that are going to train teachers, so it is an attempt to capture the entire education system and subserve it to the purposes of a given ideology. And what ideology? In one fell swoop! And that ideology involves claims like the idea that all of the institutions that characterize the West—certainly countries like Canada—are fundamentally racist and oppressive in their orientation and their aim, and that any attempts to constitute an argument that might dispute that are, in and of themselves, indications of exactly that racism.

And, it's interesting to note how disparaging this approach is to everybody. On the one hand, it allows and promotes racism against white people, but at the same time, it disparages, insults, and patronizes people who are not white, as though they are not really capable human beings on their own and must be counted according to their group and compensated for whatever wrong or victimhood they have been subjected to.

So, it is bad all around. It is disrespectful of everybody, and essentially it makes not being an activist a matter of professional misconduct.

Yeah, I was just going to say, what we might want to look at is, we're talking that teachers are going to have to receive training, so let's just look at that for a moment and say, well, what kind of books are they going to read in order to become anti-racist? Right now, the most popular, the most well-selling or best-selling books are "White Fragility" by DeAngelo, and I can't remember her first name, and then there's Robin DiAngelo, and then there's Ibrahim Kendi, who actually has a book called "How to Be Anti-Racist."

Now, what people will find interesting is we keep saying that anti-racism is in fact racism, and I want to give a quote from Kendi's book. Now, this book is "How to Be Anti-Racist," and he says this: "The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination." What these ideas are saying is discrimination is a good thing if it's applied to the group that is the oppressor, and in this case, it's going to be white kids at our public schools.

Right now, it's all predicated— that's all predicated on acceptance of the idea, and this people have to understand. This— that the fundamentally appropriate level of conceptualization of all human beings is their group identity, not their individual nature. And so, it's okay to punish one group for its past crimes because the group is the proper level of analysis, and that's an absolutely anti-Western idea. It's the most profound, perhaps, of anti-conservative ideas, that's for sure, but it's also a profoundly anti-liberal idea in the classical sense.

No group guilt here. There's no presumption of innocence. Right? If you're a member of an oppressive group, then you're guilty, and if you're a member of an oppressed group, then you're a victim.

That's right, right? And that's what's—that's what will be taught in our classrooms. Right? And so, let's go ahead, Barbara.

Well, I was just going to say that although these ideas are borrowed from American writers and influencers, I have the idea— it doesn't say so in the bill, but I'm morally certain that a lot of the intense discussion and a lot of the blame-laying is going to focus more on Indigenous matters because the Indigenous settler history is, not the equivalent in fact, but it is the equivalent in terms of the moral narrative in Canada as slavery was in the United States. The moral original sin of Americans is slavery, and Canada's original sin is colonialism.

So, I have the idea that it's going to be not just white but settler privilege that's going to be emphasized. And one of the things that always bothered me about that was that in the United States, slavery was in fact a practice that was something that all Americans—I mean, not all Americans, but the Americans who had slaves—they were American citizens. They were people involved in a practice that we now consider odious. But in Canada, the whole residential school system, or the way that Indigenous people were treated in general, was always a function of the government or the institutional people in charge of the residential schools, the churches or whatever. No Canadian citizens were ever involved in abusing Indigenous peoples or in setting policy, for that matter.

So, for that to be made an equivalent kind of sin—that you're a settler, you're settler stock because you're white—this is something that has kind of taken on, you know, this idea that the residential schools were a genocide and that all of Indigenous history in Canada, and it's an ongoing genocide from the point of view of our prime minister. This is a narrative that I think if you're going to push back against in these classrooms, that too will be considered racism, and that actually I find a very disturbing kind of concept. David, Bruce, any comments?

So it might be worthwhile just to note how extreme this is in terms of its dictation of both attitude thought and speech inside schools, inside universities. Once you understand what it is, you might think, "Well, how? How can this be?" It's completely contrary to the whole idea of having schools and universities that engage in thinking, and challenge, and debate. One of the reasons why it's so extreme is that it comes to us from critical theory.

Now, Jordan, you mentioned critical race theory, and that's absolutely what it is. It's critical, it's mandatory critical race theory in the schools and universities, but critical race theory itself, of course, is a sort of an independent branch of critical theory, and that's a larger idea—essentially an anti-Western ideology which regards all the features and values of the Enlightenment as inherently evil, if you like, and to be rejected. Even very basic ideas like evidence, and consistency, and debate, and pluralism—all those things are essentially out.

You can see that rejection in the bill. The bill basically says that if you wish to debate the validity of anti-racism, then you are on thin ice. There's even an offense included in the bill which says that if you disrupt or attempt to disrupt the proceedings of a school or a class through the use of racist language, then you are guilty of an offense.

The problem is that what they mean, or going to mean, by racist language is language that denies the validity of the ideology that they're promoting. So, for example, and who knows exactly, but here's a possibility: if you insist upon debating the validity of anti-racism in a classroom by saying, "No, I believe all lives matter, and I believe all people are equal regardless of their race or color," then you might very well be in violation of this provision.

So, we should delve into that a little bit more too. The fundamental claim of the critical theorist types is that we use a particular kind of instrumental narratives to structure our perceptions and actions, and that that instrumental narrative is essentially predicated upon the use of power. That would be the arbitrary use of compulsion to demand the compliance of other people, particularly in relationship to their group.

So, that what Western culture is in its essence and the attitudes and actions of everyone who composes that culture is nothing but the attempt to utilize arbitrary power to extract excess resources from other people through compulsion to hoard it for the purposes of that group, let's say. And that all claims about equality of opportunity or sovereignty of the individual or even existence of the individual, for that matter, or individual responsibility—all of that where the conservatives operate—that's nothing but justification for the arbitrary use of power and compulsion.

Even to make those arguments—so this is one of the things that's so pernicious about the free speech debate. The critical theorists don't engage in debate about who should have free speech and should and who shouldn't. Their claim is that the whole idea of free speech is nothing but the attempt to add a moralizing layer to the will to power that exploits. All of this language that we see in this bill is derived from that theoretical background.

Yes, now I, you know, I'm putting myself in the place of the audience who's listening to us speak, and all of us have been steeped in critical race theory for years. We've been looking at it and saying, "What a terrible thing it is," and I'm trying to picture how people could get a hold of this. Maybe the example is what we entered in on. So here we have this bill that really will promote division in our school system, and the conservative— the progressive conservatives of Ontario, who are ostensibly supposed to be conservative, all voted in favor of this bill. Even, there's another party, we have now the Ontario party, Rick Nichols is the sitting MP. They have a specific policy platform against this kind of stuff. Even he voted in favor.

So what's going on there? What's going on there is that the wording is just beguiling for everyone. For us to try and explain is so difficult because the left has really commandeered the definition of words. When someone sees anti-racism, they think "Of course I want to be anti-racist." So perhaps let's give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the conservatives were just fooled. I know that this fella, Rick Nichols on the Ontario party, was fooled. He had no idea that this bill actually will promote racism in our schools.

You know, David, since you mentioned the Ontario party's platform, I actually think that their policy with regard to teaching, what they have to say—speak in our audience. I think might be interested to know. What would be the opposite? What would be a curriculum that taught that racism was bad and all these things were bad, but that had a curriculum that was fair to every student? They actually spell it out, and what they say is in their platform, they would make it illegal for any teacher, school administrator, or any school board official to teach, disseminate, or promote materials to students that explicitly or implicitly state:

1. That males and females do not exist as separate biological realities because of course, gender is included, subsumed under the racist umbrella.
2. Will not be allowed to state that any individual, by virtue of his race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.
3. That will not be allowed to state that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual's race or sex.
4. And you can't say that an individual, by virtue of race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.
5. Finally, that any particular Canadian province or Canada itself is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.

These are all the things you won't be allowed to say, and that I think is—if you asked most Canadians, "Do you think that sounds fair?" they would say, "Yes, that's exactly what we—."

We might want to point out that the entire educational system that's associated with classical Western values is the most successful manifestation of the most fundamentally non-racist ethos ever developed. And that ethos insisted that each individual, regardless of their group membership, was of intrinsic worth and characterized by natural rights and that it was to their advantage and to the advantage of all others that no arbitrary barriers be put forward against them as they manifested their attempts to take their place in the world in a manner that was reciprocally beneficial to everyone around them.

And there isn't an ethos that's more fundamentally non-racist than that one, and it's time for conservatives and liberals alike to start to stop being apologetic about that.

Agreed. Agreed.

Yeah, can we just add, just to dive back into critical theory for a moment, Jordan, picking up what you were saying earlier. So, I believe it was James Lindsay who is an American critic of social justice and critical theory—he, I think he was the one who coined the term the "iron law of woke projection." You were talking earlier about critical theory characterizing Western society as essentially based upon a power relationship and nothing else, abuse of power relationships in which everything that happens really is a search for power underneath the surface.

So, what is happening here is that the woke—the critical theorists, the critical race theorists—are actually turning Western society into exactly that, and this bill is an example of the simple application of power to insist upon an ideology and to essentially cast out, or cancel, or accuse a professional misconduct of those people who will not go along with the story. That's a pure power play, and there's really nothing else in it. It rejects the idea that there might be another point of view. It rejects the idea of pluralism. It rejects the idea of debate, and it's—this is called neo-Marxism for a reason, and the reason is that Marx was the one who came on board and said, "Look, Western society is a power struggle."

But he emphasized the economic struggle between the upper and lower classes, and the critical theorists ditched that particular struggle in favor of the struggle over identity politics in between different—but they use exactly the same language and the same conceptualization.

And I want to reiterate a couple of things; add another detail. So first of all, here's another detail from the bill: The Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities Act is amended to add a new section which sets out anti-racism and racial equity requirements that apply to every college of applied arts and technology and every university that receives ongoing operating funds from the government for the purposes of secondary education. So in that one section alone, which is only a small fragment of this bill, we now have a demand from the most radical of the radical leftists, possessed by critical theory and also critical race theory, that every single educational institution in Ontario at the highest level that receives ongoing function will now be mandated to accept that ideology.

Now, I just can't—I just can't forgive the conservatives for not noticing this. This is appalling! Like if there's—if they're that blind, we're in real trouble because you shouldn't be that blind by this point in time. If you haven't gotten on to the fact that equity doesn't mean equality of opportunity, which is what everyone wants it to mean, then you have been asleep at the switch for like 10 years.

Well, things are falling apart around you.

Yeah, at least.

At least, yes. At least ten years. Yeah. And to see it written by an NDP member, right? This bill, didn't that clue them in?

Yeah. Let's talk about her for a bit. That should have been an alarm bell right there. The drafter of this bill had been the head of equity at Laurier University and had drafted the sexual violence policy under which Lindsay Shepherd, who many people will remember in 2017 for having shown her students a balanced discussion in which you featured Jordan on gender pronouns, and shown that segment of that panel discussion to her class was invited in to be interrogated in a session with several members of the administration and staff faculty.

But they told her that she was transphobic because she had breached the sexual violence policy, which this individual who wrote this horrible bill, you know—and as you say, that conservatives could let this pass is really terrible. One of the terrible things about racism, as they understand it, is that the offense of having said or done something racist is judged not by your intention but by the person who claims to be offended.

So much for the presumption of innocence.

Exactly. Just so we know what's at stake here, right? The new ethic is—it doesn't matter what you intend. All that matters is the impact on the person claiming victim status. They don't even have to demonstrate that in any important way that they were in fact victimized by the claim or demonstrate any. And let's delve into that for a minute because one of the things that's in this bill that's so cute is also the establishment of the necessity of putting in boards of inquisition to work to which students can apply if they ever feel that they have been offended in any manner by anything that anyone says.

Now let's make two things clear: there, people do say offensive things, and I do believe that there's such thing as hate speech because speech can be pretty vicious. That's not the point here. The point is, is that there are now boards of inquisition set up at all educational institutes in Ontario if this bill passes that anyone with a grudge can weaponize against anyone they want, and if you don't think that will happen, you're a fool because it happens all the time.

And it's happening more and more at the college level, at boards for physicians and psychologists and at the law society. And this is going to make the establishment of those inquisitorial bureaucracies, which are basically extrajudicial structures—right—operating outside the normal judicial system without the presumption of innocence. It's going to make the establishment of those mandatory.

And so, again, I can't believe that conservatives could be so ungodly blind. It's and categorically surreal.

One of the—and again, I'm just trying to bring this back to the common person and say how do—how does this work? And maybe a way to understand it is when you think the word is going by its traditional definition or what you think it should mean, it simply doesn't. So when we see equity, all of us think, "Well, equality." We think that we want to see people have equal opportunity, but it doesn't mean that. But related to anti-racism, anti-racism means, "Yes, you should discriminate against one group in this way." It's whites.

But not only that, as Bruce has already suggested, it's very racist toward people of color because it suggests that you have to rig the game in order for them to succeed, and that in and of itself is the height of racism, but also denies them the agency.

I've been thinking about this in regards to the—so there are claims from the critical theorist types, for example, just so everyone knows, that the concepts of merit and excellence are in themselves racist in the same way that the concept of free speech or individual sovereignty is racist. And so I think, well, of all the demoralizing things that you could possibly tell people who are—let's say, on the margins of society, the most demoralizing thing you could possibly tell them is that excellence, the idea of excellence, or the idea of merit is nothing but a plot conjured up by your oppressors to subvert you.

And that therefore, if you strive in a meritorious way towards excellence, that you're doing nothing but identifying with the oppressor. And you think—think about the black music scene in the United States. I always think about that because the black culture in the United States has been so absolutely brilliant in its musical innovation and it's changed the entire culture of the United States and the entire culture of the world.

And to tell—to, for me to think about someone like Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong as something other than a manifestation of individual merit in the purest sense, in the purest and most redeeming sense, is to me utterly appalling and shaming. And then to deny that this same movement towards excellence in a given domain to individuals on the margin is the worst thing you can do for them, being put forth under the guise of compassion and benevolence; it's sickening.

I agree, and conservatives should be ashamed of themselves for being so goddamn dumb.

I completely agree. Very infantilizing. It's very infantilizing to speak of people from other backgrounds or other races as without moral agency or without the ability to compete on their own terms against the people of other races.

I agree with you, Jordan.

Go ahead, Bruce.

Well, I was going to say that it's also ironic tragedy because the things that the ideas that would protect and promote people who are not privileged are things like merit. I mean the idea of having standardized tests for entry into universities, for example, is the thing that gives people who are not wealthy, not privileged, not connected, the opportunity to prove what it is that they can do.

The irony here is that everything is upside down. In order to understand this, you just have to take your assumption and flip it upside down about what racism means, about what privilege means. Essentially, this is a program that protects the privilege of all those people who are yelling about privilege. If you take away the merit idea, then you pull the rug out from underneath all those non-privileged people to be able to show that they are deserving of getting a spot, getting a job, getting a, you know, having—

Well, Adrian Wooldridge wrote a whole book on the idea of merit in the West, and he showed historically, which I think is extremely interesting, that the alternative to merit per se as a, let's say, as an index of selective value, it has been dynasty and nepotism. So, dynasty means that your hereditary family connections dominate what are the most important determinants of how you progress up the ladder, or it's callous and crass favoritism.

Now, the utopians might say, "Well, we could scrap merit and we wouldn't revert to nepotism or dynasty," but we certainly would instantly because that's what happened throughout history. And so we already have—also, we already have— we already—we've already reverted to that.

I think we've all—once merit is on the way out, you've got to have some other way for picking people, and those—the ways that are left are nepotism and favoritism. And there's got to be some criteria for what that is, but it's got nothing to do with the individual. It's got everything to do with who your people are.

And I mean, look at the impact of this already. We have Asian students who are applying to the elite schools like Harvard who now can't get in—not because their SATs weren't through the roof—but because for the means of diversity they’re now excluded.

Yes. We should also point out that in these hypothetically white supremacist societies, many people who aren't so easily what would you say categorized as white seem to be doing just fine.

So, Indian immigrants, for example, do extremely well in the United States, and East Asian immigrants do extremely well. In fact, both of those groups of people, although I hate to speak in the language of groups, do better economically than the native-born Caucasians who are hypothetically the epicenter of racial privilege, and that's a big what? A stick in the throat of the critical theorist types.

And they can't adjust their theories to account for that. Go ahead, Barbara.

One of the things you're not allowed to say is that these groups, one of the reasons that they do get ahead is because they usually have strong family support and a strong work—values of work—work ethic.

Yeah, well, they promote conscientiousness.

That's very based.

Exactly, from attraction. But you see, you're not allowed to say that because if you talk about strong families and you talk about how important fathers are, for example, that is considered racist because that's like suggesting— well, it's both misogynistic and racist because it's like suggesting that single mothers can't do exactly the same work in bringing up productive and strong, you know, confident children as a united family—a two-parent family.

And it's also because it's a sore point when you talk about race, it also needs—it also means that you validate the oppressive institution of patriarchal nuclear marriage, which is obviously nothing but a manifestation of men's desire and willingness to dominate women.

And I mean nothing but because these theories are always nothing but, right? So let—and Bruce, you talked about projection. I always think of the critical theorist types as manifesting a Freudian—an unconscious Freudian confession in relationship to their own motivations, is that people who believe that power is the fundamental principle that governs social relations do they either believe there's some saintly exception to that, or that is actually what they believe.

I've been thinking about this technically, you know, and social relations based on power? Actually unstable technically speaking. They don't work in chimps; they don't work in rats; they don't work well for psychopaths who are almost always failures and never constitute more than 3% of the population.

And you're much more likely to advance in a stable manner if you play reciprocal games with other people, reciprocal mutually beneficial games with other people. And I think that's the fundamental principle that animates Western society in its best sense. And then sometimes that's corrupted by power, and that's a very different claim than it's power itself. It's the fundamental ethic.

Right.

Well, it just reminds me of that very well-known saying: you know, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So if all you've got left is power, then you have a corrupted society.

And that's where—also think about what that does. Let's say, okay, you accept the doctrine. This is—and I want to remind the listeners this doctrine we're discussing is the doctrine that is now being mandated for acceptance across all Ontario institutions of education. Right?

Okay, so the doctrine is: nothing governs the social relations between people at every level except the will to power, and that's arbitrary use of arbitrary compulsion. So, Bruce, that means you and I, if our interests differ, we can't engage in productive dialogue about that because there's no such thing as productive dialogue, and what that means is that if our interests aren't aligned momentarily, I have to treat you as an enemy, and I have to assume that all you're using is your will to power, and I have no other option but to respond in kind.

And I cannot think of a more corrosive, cynical, and better way of looking at human beings than that. Can you imagine the psychological impact on students if this is what they are getting? A daily dose of this?

So imagine that, like, I imagine you are a student. You're a student who comes into the classroom, and you're a student of color, and you come in without this indoctrination, and you think, "I can be whatever I want to be." That's what you're thinking. And then slowly over time, you're told, "No, the game's rigged against you." You can't—you can't be what you want to be. And perhaps you begin to believe that.

And you would be able to speak to this more than I, Jordan, but I have to imagine that there's some psychological principles out there related to whether or not you think you can succeed. And if that doesn't have a self-fulfilling prophecy to it?

Well, look. Imagine that you're told as a young person—so a young person, a young Black guy, for example—you're told that you've been propagandized into believing that there is such a thing as agency and freedom by people who are using those concepts to do nothing but exploit you.

And so to the degree that you believe you have agency, that does nothing but provide evidence that you're a pawn in their game. Okay? So that's what they have to contend with—that demoralizing and bitterly distrustful view of the world.

And then imagine that you're a young white guy, and the whole notion is your entire culture and all the institutions that that make it up—including marriage—are nothing but the manifestation of the patriarchal desire to oppress throughout history. And to the degree that you have any ambition whatsoever at the individual level, that's not ambition that's laudable, that has nothing to do with you wanting to act as a moral agent in the world; it's nothing but that corrupt will to power that's capable of atrocity, and you should squelch it if you're moral.

And I see tens of thousands of people around the world, people that come to my lectures, for example, who've been utterly demoralized by these propositions—like hurt to the core, wounded to the bone—and now we're going to make it mandatory because we're too stupid to notice what's right in front of us.

There was a study done in 2019 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that looked specifically at what happens when you teach people about anti-racism, especially one of its concepts, the idea of white privilege. And what they found was that it did not make people more sympathetic to poor people of color, Black people, but what it did do was make people a lot less sympathetic to disadvantaged whites.

So, the only thing that this kind of teaching does is actually create greater animosity to the disadvantaged white person, which to my mind, if you know that and we have studies that show that, that in and of itself should be enough to say we can't do this to our kids.

Speaking of David, speaking of not doing this to our kids, you would think that parents—some parents would be very concerned about what their kids are learning, concerned enough to mobilize and to get to coalesce into activism groups. In the United States, there's a lot of headway being made by parents who are fed up with this kind of stuff.

There was a tremendous success in San Francisco recently by parents—not parents, but people in general in San Francisco, which is an incredibly progressive city. I think there's something like 6% of people vote conservative in San Francisco. And yet this school board that had three people were recalled by a petition drawn up by the parents, because they couldn't stand the direction it was going in. It was exactly this direction, and they lost their jobs.

It was considered, I think, 70% of people voted to get these people off the board. Sorry, the mechanism—I forget. But it was considered quite a victory for the anti-CRT movement. And, in the United States, there is a real movement headed up by this Christopher Rufo. Jordan, I'm sure you know him. You've probably talked to him or followed some of his work. He has been doing great work in helping groups to organize parents, and there's now, I don't know—I began my talk, my column with the numbers were—sorry, the numbers were that, yes, in 37 states, 87 curriculum transparency bills have been filed by legislators in 37 states since the beginning of 2022 and introduced in 20 or more states.

So, pretty soon, you're going to start seeing—and you already do in Florida and other conservative states—you're going to see pushback against this. And they're not going to be allowed to treat—I've been talking to a lot of conservative types. Well and Democrats for that matter too, by the way—who are concerned that their party is being pulled far too far to the left about the dangers of critical race theory and critical theory and diversity, inclusivity, and equity, etc.

And there is a wider degree of awareness about such things in the United States. Our conservatives in Canada are falling far behind the curve.

David, in order to—in relationship to your discussion of studies, we did a study at the business school in Rotterdam, and we used a program that helps people make a future plan. And so imagine—so you have to lay out what you'd like in your life in seven different areas—seven important sub-areas like intimate relationships and friendships and career and education, etc. And we looked at four-year previous performance in the business school, and we looked at the relationship between race, gender, race, sex, and performance.

So, what we saw with the Caucasian women were doing the best, followed I believe by the non-Caucasian women, and then Caucasian men, and then non-Caucasian men. And they did this program, which was an agency program, right? So it's predicated on the idea that you could, in some sense, chart your own course. And the consequence was that within the next year, if I remember the study exactly, the non-Caucasian men had caught up to and exceeded the highest performing Caucasian women.

And we did the same thing at Mohawk College, although Mohawk never adopted the program, and curses on them for failing to do so—a 90-minute plan that was agency-based dropped their dropout rate among the young men 50% in the first year.

And so we've been using that program online, but it's a testament to the utility of personal agency, and we could say, look, different people face different barriers as they progress through life, and some of those are arbitrary prejudices, that's for sure. But that doesn't mean that failing to insist that personal agency is still a redeeming reality and also that you really have it at your disposal if you're willing to use it. Our cultures just aren't that corrupt. People with agency can make progress.

Well, on that show, that's what the immigrant literature certainly shows in the United States. Absolutely. When you look at—for example, I mean, they're always held up in studies the Nigerian Blacks in America and in Canada. I mean, they outperform the white population.

Similarly, just last year, it was the first time in the history of the Bureau of Statistics in the U.S. that Asian women now make more, on average, than white men in the U.S. But when you dig into that and you look at the culture, you have parents who are saying, "You can make it. You can do this. This is a country where there is a level playing field." And that kind of self-talk or talk from parents really makes a difference.

Right. But you see, that level playing field, though, that's being threatened—right? Because you will—by anti-racism. That's what I mean by anti-racism. By the idea that you will not, in fact, be treated as an individual but treated by the system as simply a member of your group.

I mean, let's just circle back for a moment to the word equity, and describe it in equality terms, right? There are two different competing and opposite ideas about equality. The traditional one, the classical liberal idea, is simply that the same rules and standards should be applied to everybody without regard to who you are, but without regard to your identity, right?

So, this is the equality of treatment under the law concept—the idea that like cases should be decided to like, and we don't care what race you are. We don't care what sex you are. It doesn't matter. The same legal rules are going to be applied, and justice should be blind. The competing idea, which is substantive equality, or if you like equity, is the idea that the same rules and standards should not be applied to every individual, but they should be changed depending upon the group that you belong to.

And once that idea gets incorporated—and by the way, it has been incorporated into Canadian law over the past 40 years, and this bill will incorporate it into every classroom from K to 12.

That's absolutely true, but my point is that the groundwork has been laid. The groundwork's been laid already, and we are in a really bad spot. And this bill is a terrible, terrible thing and needs to be defeated. But it's not a sudden thing.

It is shocking, but not surprising.

Well, so let's go back to the issue of why the conservatives, let's say, had the wall over their eyes. I mean, they didn't pay any attention to the fact that it was someone who regards herself as a democratic socialist, to say the least, penned this bill. Like, that was an alarm bell, especially given her previous activities. And then there's all the equity language.

And I'd like to talk briefly about the weaponization of guilt because one of the ways these ideas are put forward is by accusing people who oppose them of the most heinous motivations and say— and that will happen certainly in the aftermath of this conversation—is that the reason that we oppose this bill is because we are essentially racist.

And you know, if you're a decent person, and a bunch of people come after you and say you're a racist, dear prejudice, especially if you're conscientious— and conservatives tend to be that— you're going to examine your conscience, and you're going to feel set back on your heels because you know how often you, a bunch of people, come and accuse you of something that's absolutely not true.

And so conscientious people fall over themselves to step backwards because they're willing to take some responsibility when accused. All it does is allow the people who are pushing these ideas forward to do it without any opposition. And you know, I was thinking about this a lot. So, say, well, we're all the beneficiaries, to some degree, of our arbitrary talents and the advantages we've been given, even by history. The right way to respond to that is by living a responsible, productive, and reciprocal life.

And trying to make good use of, you know, what you've been granted by grace, that's the proper mode of atonement—not to wallow in guilt and then let ideologues tromp all over you, which is exactly what's happening right now.

You mentioned the Conservatives again, and I was thinking about back in 2020 when George Floyd was thinking—the tragic death of George Floyd—and we had Doug Ford come out and say that, you know, Ontario, or Bruce, or Barbara might remember better—I think it was Ontario, or maybe it was Canada—was systemically racist. At first, he said no, but it was at that point that I realized that something's going on within the Conservative Party where they've—they're imbibing at the critical race theory tap.

Sure!

Yeah, well, I think it's part of this weaponization of guilt.

Go ahead, Bruce.

No, I'm just going to say, listen. The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has not behaved like what they claim to be for a long time. I mean, you can identify nearly anything. You can include their draconian COVID policies. You can even include the way that Doug Ford stripped truckers of their licenses without due process. You can identify just about anything.

But you could say—go ahead.

No, no, go ahead, Barb.

Well, I was going to say you could say that about the—I mean, the federal Conservatives are no better. They voted for the conversion bill, which would allow—which would insist that every child that questions—that has any question at all about their gender identity should only be affirmed, and that shouldn't doctors would be criminals! Right?

And if they looked into any other, you know, yeah. So, and criticism for women?

I'd like to comment on that for a sec, Barb, if you don't mind, because I've thought about that in relationship to therapists because the mandated requirements for therapeutic conversations are even more astringent. Therapists neither affirm nor deny. What therapists do is attempt to have truthful conversations with people about confusing situations.

And so, if I all of a sudden, as a therapist, am mandated to affirm all the choices of my clients, then I'm no longer a therapist. What I am, instead, is a cowardly advocate for whim. And, now that's law.

Yes, and the Conservatives—all voted for it. You could—I am sure, I am sure that under Bill 67, it will be considered— they’ll call it racist. I mean, anti-racist to deny that biology exists on a spectrum.

If you say, "I don’t believe that trans women are women," that will be hate speech, gender-wise. It’ll cover a variety of, you know, or if you say, "I don’t think that male rapists who claim to be female should be in female prisons," that might be deemed racist. Anything that—any of the mantras that go along with any of the ideologies that are presently, you know, so—

The federal liberals and federal Conservatives are just as bad as the provincial ones. I think what we're witnessing here is a revolution that's over. They've won, and this is mopping-up operations.

Putting these bills in place is simply, you know—everybody's lying around on the battlefield too exhausted to put up a fight anymore, so it's like, "Okay, now—we're—here are the actual laws." Here are the laws that are going to make sure that what we want, entrenched, is going to stay there forever, unless, you know, and in that respect, the U.S. has something that we do not, which is an actual political opposition.

You know, can it—but go ahead.

Yeah, I'm just saying that we are seeing—if we're saying that the battle's over, we still see the guerrilla fighters.

Oh, yeah—right.

Yep. And I mean, let's get back to this notion. We do have some parties that are trying to gather support for common sense, and whether it's federally with the People's Party—and they're demonized, right? The mainstream media hate them, so they don't get any kind of fair coverage—but now, at the provincial level, we've got a party like the Ontario Party which is putting forth the kind of ideas that would actually bring unity and harmony.

But again, they'll be villainized because the media is totally on board with this particular agenda of critical race theory as well.

That's right, and I don't know. I'm just going to say that the Ontario Party has zero support, and the PPC, People's Party, couldn't even field—they couldn't even, you know, get Maxime Bernier into office. So, and I agree with that, and a lot of the pushback in this—in the U.S. you see coming from parents themselves, like in Virginia, for example.

And the real question, I think, in this circumstance with Bill 67 is whether a critical mass of parents, once they find out what this really is, as opposed to what it appears to be, if they would respond by saying, "You know, no way! Like heck! You're not educating my children in a system like that." And, you know, that really remains to be seen: how many parents in Ontario would respond in the same way as a lot of parents have in various places in the U.S. and say, "This just won't do," as opposed to going along with the purveyors.

Canadians have been able to trust in the fundamental integrity of their social institutions for most of our 150-year history, and so the default assumption has been, "Well, people generally know what they're doing if they're leading us," and "They're not leading us down the garden path."

And the problem with bills like Bill C-6, Bill 67, and getting people to understand it is that they also have to simultaneously swallow the fact that our fundamental institutions, educational and political, have become so compromised and so cooperated by derivatives of a narrative so radical that even most Democrats on the left reject it out of hand.

Well, who's going to believe that? You know, it's a lot easier to think that the four of us are, you know, right-wing conspiracy theorists and that this is all nonsense. And in fact, it's easier for me to believe that sometimes than to believe the alternative. But I read this bill, and I know what equity means and I know its ideological derivatives and the underlying idea system.

So, yeah, I've said before that our biggest obstacle is disbelief. People don't believe it. People don't believe that what we're describing could actually be true. It's just so far out of the zone of what they consider to be normal life, normal civilized life in this country, that it's very hard to take in . . . unless you've sort of seen it for yourself in front of your own eyes over and over again, and you're forced to admit that it's actually happening.

So media research is one of the things I do, and this isn't my work, but there's a guy named Zach Goldberg. He's out of Georgia State University. Anyway, Zach looked at what was going on in mainstream media related to coverage of race and race—the word race, the word equity, the word anti-racism—it's gone up by a thousand percent in the last, well, he's marking from 2013 and 2014.

And here's the interesting thing: when you look at other sociological data during that time, racial tensions, in terms of other societal measures, were going down. The United States had a Black president, and so it was actually getting better. But if you read the news, particularly the more left-leaning—so he looked at New York Times, he looked at the Washington Post—it was saying exactly the opposite, and people were being convinced.

And in particular, he found—Mrs. Goldberg's work, again—he found that those people who were over-liberal persuasion were even more convinced that we were going to hell in a handbasket in terms of racial division.

Yeah. Well, his work pointed out that as these press institutions got—started to hire recent graduates from universities who had been indoctrinated into this theory, they started using that language in their articles, and that seeped into the popular culture.

So it wasn't that racism became worse in the domain of real interactions, and then people noticed. It was that the journalists, educated at high-level institutions who were hired by these hypothetical news sources, insisted that this was the case and started to introduce that doctrine into the entire culture.

And well, with this bill, for example, being a late consequence of that, well, we can actually transpose that onto universities. So one of the—there was a guy, Paul Calstad, out of Texas A&M, and what he showed was that the news media drive the perceptions in the culture, and then the culture kind of becomes what the news media said it was.

Well, that's going to happen with these kind of bills as we pass them provincially. You'll have students who never thought about racial disharmony who suddenly—that becomes their only thing on their mind. And it will just cascade.

The other thing we might want to point out is that this kind of propaganda is really easy for incompetent people to teach because you only have to master about two principles. So the first principle is, well, let's say there's nothing that motivates human beings and their institutions except the naked desire for power.

Okay, and then the second thing is, is that people should be categorized by group, and that doesn't require much differentiated thinking because who cares about all those pesky individuals? And then the third thing you have to accept is that the world is best construed as an eternal war between oppressors and those who are victimized and exploited by them.

Now, master those three things, you can teach everything you need to teach about diversity, inclusivity, equity—all of that. It's a substitute for actual knowledge. The fourth thing is you've got to keep moving the goal post because for revolutionaries, the revolution can never end. I mean, they're not in it for it to end; they're in it to keep it going because that's what's exciting for them.

So, in other words, what was racist 50 years ago or 20 years ago would be a racist action or somebody saying a terrible thing or the N-word or whatever it is. Now, since that's diminished now, they've moved the goal post so that it's—well, it's unconscious, yeah.

You're not seeing—oh, it doesn't matter if you don't see the racism, then there's these microaggressions, and there's what's in your mind. It used to be an action. You used to have to behave in a racist way.

Now they're telling you what's in your mind, and so you don't have to act at all. You can be—what's even worse than that? It's worse than that, Barb, as you pointed out before because you don't even have to be prejudiced. You just have to be perceived as prejudiced by someone, that's it.

And that actually—because there's no soul there, there's no individual there. All you are is the consequences of your actions. And you think, could you come up with a principle of justice more appalling than that? Is that none of us are going to be judged again on our intentions but only by the worst consequences of our actions?

Unbelievable.

Barbara has reminded me, and she said it really eloquently, of the idea of concept creep. So, concept creep—it was Nick Haslam, a guy at the University of Melbourne—came out with this around 2016. And he was basically saying that the definition of negative terms has expanded.

So that's where you get—now racism is equal to any kind of disparity. So if you see unequal outcomes, that is de facto racism, which is crazy. There are many reasons why there might be different outcomes, of which racism is probably the least in our society.

But now, according to anti-racism—and this is really one of their key tenets of their faith because it is like a religion—they say any disparity is evidence of racism, and when you've got any suggestion to the contrary, it is racism.

Yes, I agree, unless the disparity goes the wrong direction.

That's right, right? Right? Because, yeah, that's the weird thing—that's the thing about this. It's also so peculiar because certainly the success of Asians, in particular, in, let's say, the United States and Canada puts the poses a significant challenge to the domination theory. It's like, well, so, you know, Asians are increasingly treated like honorary whites in this regard, let's say.

Well, they're white adjacent.

They're white adjacent!

Right, exactly.

Right, right.

And Jews.

And Jews are considered hyper-white.

Hyper-white!

Because they used to be victims, and now they're victimizers.

There's a trap here, though. There's a trap, and the trapeze—it is a trap.

Well, the real trap is to try and work this out rationally in a way that assumes it's rational and assumes that it's consistent because those are the two of the things that have been rejected. If things are not consistent, if they're not rational, they don't care about that; that's not the point.

The point is to achieve what it is that they have in mind.

All right, so let's go back to critical theory and post-modernism just for a minute, right? So there's post-modernism suggests that there is no such thing as objective truth. Right? True truth, truth is personal. And, you know, I could live with that because the logical extension of that idea is, well, that everybody makes up their own truth.

So if you think that you're a certain kind of person and you want to believe that, that's fine. And if somebody else doesn't agree, then that's fine too because they have their truth. But the thing is that that idea that truth is subjective is not carried through. What they basically say is, you know, there is no truth except our truth, which you will comply with under penalty.

And that's what this bill is doing. This bill says, "Oh, by the way, here's the truth. You will do it or you will be cast out." And not worse than that—worse than that—you will do it or you will be cast out, and we're going to insist that you participate in the process by which your children are led to think this way.

Yes, right? Yes. And that's a lot of that has been rejected by parents in the U.S. It was that—that just went too far. They would accept this to some degree for themselves, but parents wouldn't accept it for their children.

Well, they're accepting it here and there. Something—I thought the rubber would hit the road with gender. I thought that parents would rise up when their children were, you know, shown the gingerbread figure and unicorn—

Yeah, the unicorn!

And, and girls aren't really—well, girls can be boys if they want, boys can be girls. And I mean, I thought, "Whoa, whoa, parents will never accept this."

And a few parents didn't, but on the whole, as you say, people don't want to be shunned. They don't want to be isolated, and they're afraid to stick their heads over the parapet, especially Canadians. We don't have a tradition of it, and I fear that this fascination with niceness will be the death of us culturally because, you know, at a certain point, it is too late to turn back.

And I think once this bill is passed, that is a sign that, well, this is the permanent—in Ontario, the passing of this bill is, in some sense, the permanent defeat of a classically liberal or conservative ethos because it is—it is the capture of the education system.

And so that isn't just a battle that's won now; that's a battle that's won for the next 40 years, and it's a mandated victory. So, it's a complete bloody catastrophe—no question!

It's putting into formal legislative terms what has really already happened. I mean, I'm not sure how much on the ground will change. It's just that now it is a statutory mandate and much more easily enforced than it was before.

But the circumstances inside the schools now and inside the universities, it has already traveled a huge distance in this direction.

I think you're missing—I think you're missing one thing, though, Bruce. They'll be allowed to purge!

Oh, yes!

They'll be able to purge the dissenters, and this is what will happen. And you know the dissenter is going to be the person who puts forward empirical evidence, even though it's empirical, but it will somehow be deemed—well, that's racist, for example, let's say that I bring out Statistics Canada data that shows that right now, Asian Canadians make more than Caucasian and Black.

Well, if that offends someone, if that somehow is deemed to be a racist—because remember, racism is in the eye of the beholder, the person who's begrudged—well, maybe now I can be purged for saying something like that. Or maybe now you will be required to be purged.

It's not even an allowance.

So, you understate the danger, right? Is that these boards are set up so that the mandate is that anyone who expresses opinions that can be misinterpreted in any way as not anti-racist in this strict sense, so divulging from the equity doctrine in any way, they have to be punished and eliminated in some true sense.

So, it's a complete rout! It's a dystopia in statutory form!

Right, right. Well, we probably know.

Yeah, well, it is—it is unbelievably gloomy. And to see the Conservatives do this to themselves is something staggering to behold.

I—every day something happens in Canada that I just can't believe would happen, and there it is. It happens. And then the next day something that's even more unbelievable happens, and now we have this bill.

And so, as Barbara pointed out, there are some people who are speaking out. There are people—there's a new group, there's—fair? Fair—it's an organization. I think Barbara has even written about that. I see that there's an Ontario chapter.

I think that slowly—well, I'm hopeful. I look at groups like the Ontario Party, and I look at their policy to try and reverse this. I look at fair, and they're trying to organize parents in a way that will get rid of this critical race theory. And I think that these are green shoots, and it's just getting momentum.

And then, and you know, I'm going to make a connection to current events. I look at what happened with the truckers, the freedom convoy. Who would have thought that such passive Canadians would actually stick it out and go and peacefully protest as they did? And if you saw any of those overpass where people were there cheering on the truckers with their flags, those are just moms and dads— everyday people.

Maybe they'll channel that same kind of energy into the protection of their kids in the school system.

Yeah, and risk having their bank accounts frozen.

Yeah, and if only they had a political party that they could invest all that energy in! The problem is they don't! And any that they do, like the Ontario Party, is not going to grow, though it's going to stay fringe, and it's going to stay very tiny.

So, it's a serious problem. So, let's say—as you said, people should—should go. Go ahead, go ahead, Bruce.

I was just going to say I do agree with Dave that the trucker convoy and the phenomenon that it launched is actually a hopeful sign. You've got—you've got the shoots, as you said, of something coming together—some kind of political realignment or the coming together of an actual opposition inside the population.

You know, whether it will have—you know, maybe able to be sustained and grow remains to be seen. But my goodness, that was the best thing that I've seen happen in this country for a long time.

Yeah, well, hopefully the conservatives at least could be enticed to give voice to some of that frustration in a manner that was actually productive. We could hope that that would happen, I guess.

Every—we should ask people who are listening: call your MLA in Ontario if you're in Ontario. Call your member of the provincial parliament and let them know that you're not happy about this, right?

Talk to people, write to the Minister of Education, write to Doug Ford, tell them this has to stop. And we should underline the point that it's not actually passed yet. It's past second reading. It's going to committee. It will need to pass third reading, so there's time for the MPPs to change their minds on this.

So, it's not actually done yet. If people are trying to get an understanding of this, John McWhorter, who's at I think he's Columbia, he's just written a book. Does anybody know that? Is it "Woke Racism"? Is that what he calls it? I think it is "Woke Racism."

And really what he does is he says why anti-racism—exactly what's happening with this bill—why it is racist, and he takes a lot of time to explain it.

So, that's a read that some people might want to take a look at.

Yeah, it's "Woke Racism," John McWhorter.

Yeah, so, yes, that would definitely be worth taking a look at. And so I want to just close this and sum up, and you guys can make whatever comments you want afterwards.

So, what we're seeing here, to put it bluntly, just so everyone listening knows, is that a doctrine of cultural criticism so radical that moderate leftist Democrats rejected out of hand is now going to be written into the law governing all of our educational institutions in a province in Canada governed by Conservatives.

Right?

Yep.

Now that's going to—that propaganda is going to become the mandated ethos of the entire education system, and it's being done in such an underhanded and morally manipulative manner that the very people that it's being done to the most intensely—and that would be the conservative types—are cowed into participating in the process.

Yes, yes, absolutely!

That's it! That's it! That's all, folks.

All right, thank you for getting together so quickly, everyone, and for being willing to share your remarkably unpopular opinions at some peril to yourselves.

I was loving—you didn't know what was going on, Jordan. But Barb and I, I'm hoping that the Ontario Party will make some headway, and Barb is far more realistic about this, so I was enjoying—it was—I was really enjoying it anyway.

It's good to be in such—it's although unpopular company, in our culture, I consider it an honor to be part of this small band of brothers and sister and all the rest of us who are, as I said to Bruce before we started, I said it’s kind of ironic that everybody who agrees who's on our side, who's a dissenter on this, we all know each other.

And in a country of 38 million people, that's kind of a harsh reality.

Sad—it's a sad reality.

But say not the struggle—not what's even sadder! I feel like Cassandra. You know, I look at these things, I looked at them 10 years ago, and I have this curse. I can see where things are going, and I think, "Oh, this is going in this colossally stupid direction," and it can't be the case that it's really going to get to that point, is it?

And then it just happens over and over and over and over. And this bill is the most—this makes Bill C-16 look like child's play.

Exactly. This is exactly something—it's a hard lesson to swallow.

They really mean it. They really mean it. All of it!

Yep! Yep!

Yeah, beware, Canadians! You bloody well better wake up!

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