College of Psychologists vs. Jordan B Peterson | Mikhaila Peterson | EP 322

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion; probably 80 percent of Scriptures memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johan Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

If this is what's going on with colleges, and if they're controlling working professionals so that the working professionals have to work in a way that isn't truthful, I mean how do you even fight? How do you fight back against that? At what point do you just stop playing in that game? You know, when people have asked me that too, "Why don't you just give up your license?" And I would say, "Well, because I wouldn't be giving it up. I would be allowing it to be taken away from me." Like if I decide in a year that I don't want to be a licensed clinical psychologist because the whole damn profession has become corrupt, that's a whole different issue than letting this pack of Craven commissar cowards utilize the complaints of random people online to justify their own envy and desire to prosecute, and then fold in the face of that opposition. It's like I'm not going to do that.

The only thing you have in a complex situation is the truth; that's all you have. That's why you have to abide by the truth, you know? Because when things get complex around you, all you have there that's solid ground is the truth. And so the reason you abide by the truth is so that you can say what you have to say about what you've done and who you are, and you can do that under impossibly difficult circumstances. And possibly that will sustain you through that.

[Music] Thank you. Hello everybody watching and listening on YouTube, and perhaps on The Daily Word Plus platform. I'm having a discussion today with my daughter Michaela. I asked her to interview me, I suppose, about what's happening in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the moment on the professional front in relation to me. The Ontario College of Psychologists, which is the board that regulates the practice of psychology in Ontario and hypothetically protects the public interest, has levied a series of what are in essence lawsuits against me for unprofessional conduct pertaining primarily to my social media communication.

And so they have decided in their wisdom that I am to be required to undertake a series of re-education lessons designed to ensure that I communicate in a manner they deem appropriate. I have told them that there are no circumstances I can imagine under which I would be willing to do that. And the next step is to bring me before a public disciplinary hearing and then to suspend my clinical license. I'm making all of this public because I think people need to weigh in on whether I'm an alt-right Nazi, harmful, you know, bastion of intolerable political thought with a troll-like army of pathological followers, or whether the college itself is a corrupt nest of social justice vipers hell-bent on envy and revenge, using the tiny fraction of people who are complaining to put forward their own brand of personal pathology and vindictiveness. And well, I'll make everything public except for that which I can't do on legal grounds and let everybody decide for themselves. That's the plan, because I might be wrong, and I guess if I am, I need to learn how.

In any case, Michaela is going to talk to me for 90 minutes, and we're going to walk through some of this, and maybe you'll find that interesting, and maybe you won't. Why would you care? Well, that's I guess what you'll figure out if you listen to the talk. One reason might be, it's my opinion that the regulatory boards that govern professional conduct in Canada, particularly in the U.S. as well, and in the West more broadly, have become so corrupted by the woke ideology that the professionals you depend on in moments of crisis for legal advice and medical advice and psychological counseling, some of which can be life and reputation saving, they can no longer be trusted because they're being required by the professional bodies to lie to you in the service of this warped, radical leftist ideology that's now become what would you call it? Mandatory for right speakers, wherever they might exist. And so that's why you might want to listen and decide for yourself whether you think that might be true.

So anyways, onward with the discussion, and thanks Michaela for agreeing to do this.

Hey guys, I'm coming on my dad's channel to interview him because he's dealing with some serious things right now, like usual, kind of like usual. So first off, how are you? How are you doing, Dad?

Well, not too bad. I've been preparing my public response to the decision of the Ontario College of Psychologists to require me to do mandatory social media communication retraining. They have the College of Psychologists, which is the regulatory board for the practice of psychology in Ontario. There are a variety of regulated professions: medicine, dentistry, teaching, architecture, psychology, that's not all of them. And these regulated professions have a board that's appointed by the government whose mandate is to protect the public from unprofessional behavior on the part of the members of the regulated professions.

People can submit complaints to those bodies if they believe that they've been treated unprofessionally, or unethically, or otherwise inappropriately by a college member. So a member of the relevant profession, and the college has been after me non-stop with complaints since I rose to public prominence in 2016, although not once before that in the 20 years that I practiced as a clinical psychologist. So this isn't the university that's after me like it was in 2017, 2016.

This is the College of Psychologists which has started pursuing me in 2016 and has never let up. Now what happens is that anyone, anywhere, can submit a complaint about me for anything I've done or said, hypothetical or otherwise, and then the college can, and that doesn't matter if they're a client of mine or ever have been, or if I've had any dealings with them, or even if they're the person who has hypothetically been harmed by my behavior.

And the college has decided to pursue a sequence of such complaints even though it's in their power to dismiss them as vexatious or frivolous, which is what I asked for, on the grounds that my social media communication has caused harm to people. And so they've essentially taken out what are the equivalent of more than a dozen lawsuits against me. And I say they're equivalent to lawsuits because the penalty for being found guilty of such misbehaviors is quite serious. It can involve re-education, public apology, or even the removal of my ability to practice or to describe myself as a clinical psychologist.

Of course, it took me about 10 years, all things considered, to get licensed. It's a very difficult process, and I'm not inclined to give it up lightly. In any case, they have been after me to a tremendous degree in 2022. I think there were 13 or 14 complaints, each of which culminated in one of these lawsuits. I'm represented by legal counsel; there are so many of them that they're difficult to keep track of. I probably went through 400 pages of documentation this week. And you asked me how I'm doing?

Well, you know, first of all, I found it extremely difficult to keep my rage under control because a tremendous amount of my time is being wasted. It's extremely expensive. The allegations are not only utterly preposterous but entirely political in nature, and then I was also afraid of it. You know, the first complaint came in 2016 in December, at the same time the university was after me, and at the same time the Canadian Revenue authorities were after me for a mistake they admitted making six months later. And you remember that was an extremely stressful time, and I was accused at that point of inappropriate personal conduct in relationship to one of my clients. All of that was dismissed, by the way, without hesitation.

Although the college did decide at that point, because they needed to decide I was guilty of something, even though I wasn't guilty of what I was of what I was most seriously accused of, they decided I hadn't handled my email properly at that point, when I was getting thousands of emails a day, and that that made it difficult for my clients to get a hold of me, even though I had given every single one of my clients my personal phone number and could contact me by text, which is something, by the way, that psychologists never do, you know, for obvious reasons.

So in any case, it's been a continuous stream of investigations and legal defense since then. I found that kind of accusation of serious personal misconduct unbelievably stressful. In 2016, it certainly contributed to me becoming ill, and then I didn't really want to revisit it, you know? And so I started going through all that documentation last week so that I could lay out everything that's been levied at me, and you know, I went through all that stuff from 2017. Even talking about it now makes me shake to some degree.

Afterwards, I could hardly stand up. I like just about fainted three or four times, and you know, had a real hard time keeping myself composed. It's very off-putting to, let's say, to have attempted to conduct myself extremely carefully in my professional occupations as a professor and as a clinical psychologist for decades, you know, to have stepped very carefully. Of course, I never had any behavioral accusations levied against me at Harvard or the University of Toronto or as a clinical psychologist in the 30 years I was a professor and 20 years of private practice, and then to be accused of serious personal misconduct.

The essential claim was my seductive behavior as a therapist, and the evidence offered was that when I was offering my advice, I would spend my wedding ring, which was apparently some Freudian indication that I was, you know, sexually interested in a particular complaining client. Now, I don't particularly blame her. I mean, had she not had her problems, she wouldn't have come and seen me, you know? But the college has a tremendous gavel to wield, a tremendous hammer, and to have that brought down on you is no joke, you know?

And I've known a lot of people now who've been investigated for that sort of thing by mobs, let's say, of one form or another, and it's very, very hard on them. So when I revisited all this, it was really—and I'd probably been avoiding doing it to some degree, you know? Although we had to wait until we moved forward with our legal challenge before we could make any of this public, there was still an element of avoidance.

And no wonder, you know? It really lit me on fire again when I was going through this stuff. But one of the upsides was, you know, I reviewed and organized the complaints that are levied against me now, the accusations for which I've already been sentenced, essentially. And the upside of it was that, well, these accusations are so incredibly preposterous and political that it's almost incomprehensible, you know?

I'm literally being—well, the requirement is—so the college has decided after pursuing these complaints that I don't know how to regulate my behavior properly in my social media communications, and so I need to be taught by their experts how to conduct myself appropriately. And so I have to undergo a series of courses, one-on-one coaching sessions with their deemed experts, and they're going to tell me how I should craft my words and what I should say and what I shouldn't say. And I am required to pay for that; it's about 250 dollars an hour, which, you know, in our current circumstances, isn't a concern in and of itself, but you can understand that for many people, yeah, that would be tremendously burdensome.

And the person who's teaching me is going to submit regular reports to the college, and they're going to decide when I've learned how to be the sort of person I should be so that I don't bring disgrace upon the profession and harm people. And so the claims of harm are absolutely unwarranted. Not a single person who submitted a complaint in this latest round is a client of mine, although half of them falsely claimed to be so. They're stable people, their complaints, anyways—well, I think some of it is they're probably confused about how they're required to identify themselves in the complaint form, to be fair.

Okay, or they're just unstable people who spend their time complaining about celebrities on Twitter. Well, that's the other office—that's what you're doing with your life; you're probably not the most stable person, yeah. And so anyways, I've gone through all these complaints, and so here's some of them. I retweeted Pierre Poliev, who's counted as leader of the opposition when he was criticizing the mask lockdowns. I just retweeted him and I said essentially that I agreed with him; that's a complaint. They actually listed that. That's one of the complaints—that's insane.

Yeah, they listed the fact that I criticized Justin Trudeau on multiple occasions. There's a complaint that at one point the police in Ottawa were threatening to act with Children's Aid to take the children away from the truckers in Ottawa and apprehend them on the grounds that their parents who were involved in the protest were endangering them. And I tweeted and said, "I'm not so sure that we should get the police involved in taking away the children of protesters, and we should think about this." And apparently, that makes me a untrustworthy advocate for child—advocate for children who face childhood sexuality.

Oh my God, the mandatory reporter as a psychologist. And so if it comes to your attention that someone has been abused, you're mandated to report it. And so apparently, I'm now untrustworthy in that regard because I didn't want the police to conspire with idiot social workers in Ottawa to apprehend the children of protesters. And so that's another example of my reprehensible behavior.

I'm being called out for the fact that I objected to Ellen Page's surgical mutilation at the hands of her physicians and her consequent advertisement of her new torso on social media. And I'm also required to submit to this media retraining education because I objected to the Sports Illustrated cover of that relatively overweight young model. And there's other complaints, but that's the bulk of them. And so at least half—oh yes, I criticized—I tweeted out to Jacinda Ardern that I was coming to New Zealand with my army of all right-wing trolls, you know, which was clearly a joke, and that's also a complaint because I guess that sort of joke isn't funny when you're dealing with woke progressives like Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau.

So, oh yes, I counseled people to commit suicide; that's another one. So wait, wait, you should—somebody should describe—oh yeah, describe that.

Yeah, yeah, well, somebody had tweeted out their idea that the planet had too many people on it, and this is not a statement I am very fond of because every time I hear someone say that, I think, "Okay, who exactly are these excess people that you're referring to, and who gets to decide that, and how do you know that when they decide that something terrible won't happen given that these are excess people, and isn't it okay if I question the humanitarian intent of your motives for making such a reprehensible comment?"

So I tweeted to someone who made an argument like that, I tweeted and said, "Feel free to leave at any time," which is obviously an ironic joke. But some bloody social worker in the United States decided that that was a, like, an incitation to suicide, and so blindly about that.

And yeah, and so, and that's, I think that's all the complaints. So let's review this. Not a single one of them was levied by a client of mine, present or former. Not a single one of them was levied by anyone I had actually said anything directly to, private or public. There's no evidence whatsoever of that. I've produced anything regarding harm because no one has stepped forward to claim harm who is directly harmed, so it's third-party indirect supposition of so-called harm to someone they don't know, and that's the level of evidence that the College of Psychologists is willing to accept as critical, you know?

Now when they responded to me, they said that I've brought disgrace to the profession and caused undue harm to people, and I responded—I’ll make this public too—with about 40 questions about their methods. So here's one: "Well, before I submit myself to this media training re-education because I'm bound by the ethical standards of my profession, I'm not willing to go get educated unless there's evidence that the contents of the educational program are directly related to the practice of my profession and that there's evidence that undertaking such re-education actually makes me a more competent therapist. Do you have any independent documentation that these experts that you have hired and foisted upon me have anything approximating genuine expertise?

And do you have any evidence whatsoever that such training programs are effective?" And of course, they said, "We don't have to answer questions like that." And I asked them, I said, "You know, there's some evidence that I've done some good in the world. About seven million people bought my first public book, and I have 50 million subscribers on the three main platforms we operate on social media, and lots of people seem to come to my lectures when I am out publicly speaking saying that I've really helped them in their lives, and that's thousands or hundreds of thousands or possibly even millions of people.

And so I think I can stack up a pretty good plus all the students that I taught at Harvard and the University of Toronto and all my clinical clients who, by and large, were pretty damn happy to be working with me and vice versa. It's like how do you calculate the harm-to-benefit ratio? And, you know, what evidence do you have that I actually constitute a sufficient threat to the integrity of the profession that you're willing to bring the second harshest actions you have in your arsenal against?" And the answer to that was, "We don't have to answer questions like that."

And I had like 40 questions like that, none of which were answered. Their answer basically was, "We can do whatever the hell we want, and we're telling you, you better go get re-educated or you face a disciplinary hearing." That's the next step, is that I'd have to face a disciplinary hearing, and what I'm going to do for that—I do believe they videotape that, and I'll take the videotape and put it on my YouTube channel, and people can decide for themselves, which is exactly what I want to have happen in this situation. Like you and I talked about, our strategy here is, you know, and I have been unbelievably angry about this, so it's been very hard for me to control my anger, you know?

And I know that's not right, and that my desire to seek vengeance is inappropriate, as is the desire in general to seek vengeance, right? But it's very difficult to read through these allegations and to face this waste of my time, and the stress it puts on us, to me and your mother and well, our whole family, without being outraged at this, you know?

And a lot of the battle for the last couple of weeks has just been to keep my temper under control. But you and I, we talked through this, and I talk through it with your mom and with Julian, you know, about the fact that our attitude in general has been just to tell everybody what's going on as clearly as we possibly can. And I want to make it all public. I'm preparing a document today redacting all the names of the complainants which I have been provided with by the college, by the way.

I'm going to redact all their names and that identifying information. That's also ridiculous. Just this just isn't set up very well. Like you'd think that if you were a problematic psychologist, you shouldn't be provided with the people's names that complained about you. That doesn't seem—yeah, well, I don't know what to make of that. And it's also problematic that people can levy accusations that bring down the heavy hand of a bureaucratic organization and bear absolutely no personal accountability to that.

Like, but in a sane society, that would have been Canada up until about five or six years ago. People didn't weaponize the colleges, generally speaking. You know, professionals weren't afraid of their regulatory bodies because generally the only people who complained were either people who were clearly disturbed, you know, in some fundamental sense, or people who have legitimate reason to believe that they had suffered harm as a consequence of unprofessional behavior on the part of a lawyer or teacher or physician or psychologist.

But the radical leftist types have figured out how to weaponize these investigative boards, and the boards themselves have become staffed pretty much uniformly with social justice-oriented, politically correct, full-compassionate, narcissistic commissars, and they do everything they can to make life miserable for anyone who doesn't share their political opinions.

I mean it's actually almost beyond comprehension to me that I'm engaged in a battle in my country of Canada where I have to defend my right to practice my profession as a licensed psychologist. And I would say especially with my educational pedigree. I mean Jesus, I was a professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto; I trained clinical psychologists, you know? And the fact that I have to defend my right to conduct my own profession because I retweeted a tweet from the official leader of Canada's Conservative opposition party and criticized Justin Trudeau and have made, at least upon occasion, conservative political pronouncements, the fact that that is now—has now made me subject to heavy-handed punishment and investigation by a government-sponsored regulatory board?

It's, I just—it's absolutely incomprehensible, and so that's also, I would say, difficult emotionally because I just can't believe it's happening. Like what the hell? This is insane. And so I mean, and it's—you know what the other thing I think too? It's so strategically foolish on the part of the college. I mean it's one thing to go after me for, let's say, saying something not so pleasant about Ellen Page or about the swimsuit Illustrated model; at least you could have an argument about whether or not I was using undue force in my argumentation on those grounds, you know?

But to hold me for engaging in what are clearly political conversations is—well I don't even know what to say about it. I can't believe it's happening; it's beyond comprehension to me. And so, you know, that makes me think, well, you know, is it just me? You know, because people tweet out at me, "Well Peterson, you always seem to be in trouble with one authority or another; maybe it's just you." It's like, where there's smoke, there's fire, you know?

And I can understand why people think that way, and if something happens to you repeatedly, you have to start wondering if it's you or the situation. But the way that I'm dealing with this, the way that we've dealt with this as a family right from the beginning, is just to make it all public, right? And to allow light to be shown on the situation and to derive our conclusions, mostly as a consequence of watching the broad public response. And I'm trying to do exactly the same thing here. Like you know, I'm a very guilt-prone person, and when someone comes after me with accusations, I'm very likely to assume that there is a core of truth in them.

And, but I also believe that I have the right to defend myself, and one of the ways of doing that in this situation, this is why we're having this conversation, is like I don't believe—I don't have faith that I can expect fair treatment at the hands of this board. And I also don't have any faith, partly because I've talked to a bunch of my legal friends, I don't have a lot of faith in the Canadian judiciary.

I mean people have told me—law professors have told me now that they see continually Canadian courts who are extremely activist in nature dispensing completely with such niceties as common law precedent when they're rendering their judgments. And so yikes, I certainly don't believe that the College of Psychologists will treat me fairly. I have seen them treat very few people fairly, and I don't believe that even if we push this forward on the judicial front—which is our plan at the moment—like implementing a challenge to their ruling for example on Canadian constitutional grounds, because at least in principle we have the right to free speech and freedom of conscience in this country.

I don't think we do—yeah, yeah, in principle. Yeah, the protection has turned out with the Canadian Charter of Rights is an unbelievably weak and poorly written document that provides Canadians with almost no protection for their rights whatsoever. It was definitely a giant step backwards in relationship to the English common law tradition, and we're now subject to an extraordinarily badly written document whose fundamental propositions can be superseded by the government any time they think there's a sufficiently dire state of affairs.

So I'm making it public, and people can decide for themselves. I'll release every bit of correspondence between the college and me over the next few days, you know, redacting out the identifiers. And you know, I've been on your website—I’ve been ambivalent—yeah, yeah, I've been ambivalent about that too because part of me thinks, "Well, these people who are complaining to me, they shouldn't get to do it anonymously and hidden away from any consequences of their accusations."

But I believe that I'm legally and, hypothetically ethically required to maintain privacy even in the face of these what are essentially legal attacks. And you know, like I said, I'm ambivalent about that because I don't see why I should be made public in such a manner without my accusers having to bear the weight of some responsibility for weaponizing this bureaucracy against me. Now whatever, it doesn't matter. That's because I'm not going to do it because you've been harming people on Twitter, and they're saving people from your harm.

Yeah, I—that's the rationale exactly. Well, you know, it's also been difficult to formulate a defense because I'm not even sure—and this is, I think, part and parcel either of the ignorance of the college or their incompetence. I can't even tell what I'm being accused of. So for example, one of the complaints submitted as evidence was the entire transcript of my three-hour discussion with Joe Rogan. And so, you know, and I said all sorts of horrible things on that.

Yeah, I know everything that entire podcast was harmful. Yeah, yeah. So how do you defend yourself against that, you know? I mean, I think they were objecting primarily to my comments about climate change models and the apocalyptic conclusions that have been derived from them, and you know, complaining that I'm not a scientist—bloody well, I am a scientist, by the way. I have a hundred scientific publications, and that's a lot. And I can read a scientific paper and understand it, unlike those who are accusing me or the people who sit on the college, by the way.

And so I'm perfectly capable of understanding a scientific paper, and I believe, and many scientists who are very solid scientists like Richard Franzen of MIT who has a pedigree that's absolutely impeccable agree with everything I said. And so now that doesn't mean it's right; that’s not my claim. But my claim is that I'm not going off, you know, with a half-loaded gun here, and I don't say things lightly. But anyways, it's not easy to figure out exactly what I'm being accused of.

And so, you know, so the upshot is essentially that I either submit myself to this media retraining program—absolutely with their experts—yeah, well that's not happening. There's just not a chance that that will ever happen. I can't imagine a circumstance under which I would be willing to do that. I mean, I can't imagine how I would possibly sit through such a thing.

That sounds, you know, something I said I should just record it and put it online, and be able to understand yourself 30 seconds in there. Yeah, well, I don't know if I'd like to put any educator through the horrible process of having to come and try to re-educate me either because I can't see how that would go particularly well for them. Yeah, so yeah, I'm not sure who would end up re-educated in a situation like that, but I have my doubts that it would be me because people have been trying to re-educate me for a long time, and it really hasn't worked that well.

So and that's generally because I don't say things that I haven't investigated right to the bottom. So in any case, it's very stressful, this, and I've spent, you know, hundreds of hours just trying to organize the arguments that have been marshaled against me and understand what the hell they are. You know, part of the process that's punitive, and the bloody activists know this, is that as soon as you have complaints levied against you, you're basically snowed under by the obligations of what's essentially a serious lawsuit.

And you know, you might say, well it's not a lawsuit, it's just an investigation. It's like, well, the college itself suggests that once one of these investigations is levied, that the person being investigated acquires legal counsel. So they know bloody well, right, that this is essentially a criminal or quasi-criminal investigation, or at least it has that element of process about it. And the social justice warriors who are utilizing these colleges have figured that out, and they're perfectly willing to use third-party bureaucracies as cudgels to enforce their oh-so-compassionate narcissistic worldview and to be censorious.

You know, when you see this on Twitter too, as I've made this public, there are good thinkers everywhere who are saying, "You know, I got what I deserved," even though it isn't obvious exactly why I deserved it. And I'm perfectly happy to see this happening, and you know, that shows you what kind of motivations a large percentage of the population has. You know in Eastern Germany, a third of the population were KGB informers, and so there's a very large swath of the public who would be perfectly happy to see anybody who doesn't share their political views punished harshly for their audacity.

And I think that's particularly true of radical leftists in relationship to anything that's centrist or conservative. And it's very interesting; like, every—you know, I don't only say conservative things, although in the current political climate, I suppose I am more conservative. But every single complaint that's been levied against me is because I uttered a conservative perspective. And so, you know, the probability that that's merely a consequence of chance is vanishingly small. It’s one half times one half, 12 times, and that's a pretty damn tiny number.

So the idea that this isn't politically motivated is preposterous; conceptually, unstatistically, yeah. I feel like we've had a lot of people reach out to specifically from Canada that are working professionals, like doctors. I've spoken with a lot of them, who’ve had generally former patients decide that they didn't like what they were saying on Twitter specifically, so conservative doctors, and they're like, "Oh, I don't like what you're saying on Twitter," and then sending complaints to colleges to get their licenses.

So I don't think this is just happening to you. I think we've talked to a lot of people. Oh, it's not that it's happening to me, which means what? Like, what profession does that mean you can't exactly trust to tell you the truth anymore?

Well, you certainly can't trust physicians or psychologists because they're mandated with regard to affirmative care now. So for example, if you—can't assume that if you take a child of yours who's gender dysphoric in for professional evaluation that they're going to get any evaluation at all because psychologists and physicians are mandated to do nothing but agree with the gender dysphoric individual. And so—and lawyers are in the same situation as well. Is that they're not—for example, a while back the governing body of the legal profession in Ontario mandated diversity, equity, and inclusivity requirements in relationship to hiring, even on small law firms in Ontario with the clear implication that if you didn't buy the DEI social justice warrior political line that your law firm was no longer in concordance with the dictates of the professional governing body.

Now Bruce Pardy, a law professor at Queens, fought that back forthrightly with some success, but I've had discussions with all sorts of teachers and nurses and lawyers and physicians—all these people—Canadians need to know this—all these people are so terrified—a good proportion of these people are so terrified of the regulatory bodies that there isn't a hope in hell that they're going to be able to tell you the truth when you're in the middle of a medical, educational, or legal crisis.

And so, you know, and Canadians are in a real bind because, you know, for 175 years, it was okay in Canada to basically put trust in the public institutions, educational institutions, and professional colleges, and even the political parties. You knew what they stood for, and generally, they played the game straight. And that's flipped completely upside down in the last seven years, and that's a terrible, bitter pill for Canadians to swallow, and most of them don't even know it's happened because their primary sources of news, like CBC, is completely corrupted by its 1.4 billion dollar a year payoff from the federal government.

CTV isn't much better; most ordinary people have no idea where to get news. And so, they're faced with this terrible conundrum, which is, well, either things have gone badly sideways, especially toward the left in Canada, or the people complaining, like me, let's say, or the truckers for that matter are misogynist, racist, alt-right-wing Confederate Nazi bigots. And it's a hell of a lot easier to buy the latter than the former, and no wonder.

But the unfortunate truth is, well, people can decide that for themselves. We'll walk through this again; I retweeted Pierre Poliev. He's the leader of the opposition in Canada, and because of that, I'm being investigated by my regulatory body. My public reputation is at stake, and I may no longer be able to practice or describe myself as a clinical psychologist, and that's how it is. And it isn't just Poliev; it's also the fact that I criticized Trudeau and I criticized an Ottawa city councilor, and I made a joke at Jacinda Ardern. And it's not just fluke that every single one of them is on the left, and that's how we are in Canada.

And it's not like I don't have some sympathy for the left. You know, I like Russell Brand; he does what he can to stand up for working-class types against corporate overreach and corporate-government collusion to produce a kind of fascist oppressive overreach in relationship to the working class. And I understand perfectly well that there's a need for a left-wing political voice to stand for the working class and especially perhaps against the depredations of monopolistic capitalists, but that isn't what's happening on the left in relationship to the sorts of things we're talking about in the least.

So, well, so—and it's going to be very hard for Canadians to wake up to this reality. I see no evidence whatsoever that they've woken up yet. Oh, not at all, not at all, no.

So well, so we'll see what happens when we make all of this public. The next step for the college is to haul me in front of a disciplinary board and, you know, rake me over the coals personally, and I don't imagine—I’ll accept their dictates when that happens. I can't imagine any circumstances under which that would occur. And then the next step is to publicly announce my refractory nature. They've already defined me as a repeat offender, by the way, highly likely to re-offend.

Well, you are high; that's their terminology—it seems like accurate terminology to me. Yeah, well, yeah, I know—well, if the offenses are defined as saying what I think publicly, then it's pretty much certain I'm going to re-offend. But it's a hell of a terminology to be pasted with, you know? Repeat offender with a high likelihood of re-offending, you know?

So, do we have a timeline about how long this is going to take? And do you—what do you think the percentage—what do you think the likelihood is that they'll take your license?

Well, I don't see what choice they have because the next thing—look, what I would like from them—because I might as well make it clear—I want every single one of them to resign and to apologize to me.

Well, that's not going to happen; they can't resign.

Seems highly unlikely. Yeah, it seems very unlikely. And I don't know if they're going to—well, they could resign, but if they don't stop—what if they just said, "You know what? Out of 15 million people, 12 complaints isn't that bad given they're about tweets, and we've decided to stop investigating you." What if they just said that?

Well, I don't see how they can do that without admitting that the whole bloody thing was a scam to begin with because if it was just one complaint, they could say, "Well, you know, we've reconsidered, and we may have acted too hastily." But when you do it 13 times, you know, three times is a pattern; 13 times that's pretty much a decision. And if you have to announce publicly that you were wrong 13 times, you're probably so wrong that you're not fit for the job.

[Music] So the alternative is I'm going to make this public. I've already told them essentially to go to hell, although I did it politely. And now they have to drag me in front of a disciplinary hearing, which I will make unbelievably public. And so—and then because I won't move in that regard, as far as I can tell, I don't see that they have a leg to stand on.

You know, not only am I being accused in the vast majority of the accusations of having unacceptable political beliefs, but half the people who complain claimed they were clients of mine. So procedurally, this is also a nightmare for them as far as I can tell because at minimum, they should have inquired in relationship to these claims that the complainants were clients of mine; they should have noticed them that they weren't, and they should have required them to re-initiate the complaint process without falsehood. And they didn't do any of that repeatedly.

And you know, that's particularly germane because if the complaint is levied by someone who was a client, the college is obligated and also tends to take those complaints much more seriously and to facilitate their movement forward. So I think they've demonstrated such a brutal level of incompetence and corruption that I can't see that they have any way forward except to continue to pursue me or to resign en masse. And they're not going to do the latter.

And so I, you know, and this is a dreadful—you know, I've met people—Douglas Murray is a good example—I've met people in my voyage through this weird political landscape who really liked this sort of fight, you know, who are up for it. And this is not a criticism of such people; we need people like that, you know, who are capable and willing to have a scrap. Now the danger of that is that you have more scraps than you should, you know, and that you might be inclined to take pleasure in it when you shouldn't.

But I'm not that sort of person. I hate this; it just, it really—I find it really, really difficult. I like peace. I mean part of the reason I engage in conflict is because I—it's paradoxical in some sense. I really want peace. And so if I have a problem with someone, I want to address it right now, 100 percent, to the bottom to get it the hell out of the way so we don't fight about it for the next 10 years, you know?

And your mother and I have conducted our whole relationship with that, yeah. You know, it's so funny; we had a date the other night upstairs, you know, and she comes upstairs, and this has happened probably the last three days we shot, and she always has three things to say to me before the date starts. And what she does, though, is she tells me some of the things that are on her mind that are maybe interfering a bit with our relationship, and they're minor things, like I think the last thing is we were discussing how to clean the sink, so we were both happy about it. She wasn't exactly happy with how I was cleaning the sink, and you know, and then it was out of the way, and then it was completely out of the way, you know?

And then we had a very peaceful time together because there wasn't anything boiling away on the back burner. And when you and Julian were home, you know, we conducted our family life the same way; if we had a bloody problem, we were going to have a discussion about it right now and get to the bottom of it and fix it so that we didn't hate each other.

And so I don't like—and I never liked those conversations. I find them very stressful. I'm too high in negative emotion and too high in agreeableness to enjoy that sort of thing. That's my, you know, the detrimental consequences of my feminine temperament to the degree that I have that, and it's quite the degree actually. I suppose that's partly what tilted me toward being a clinician in the first place, right?

So, and you know, it has its advantages because I do feel the pain of other people quite deeply, but that also makes it very hard for me to fight, even though I'll fight when I know the consequences of not fighting is more fighting. So yeah, well, that's a paradox, you know?

But it isn't because I enjoy it, and yeah, you know, I tried to let the college know through backdoor channels that it might be reasonable for them to consider not doing this because the consequences of making it public would not be positive for their—in my estimation—for the people involved. And I don't want to bring public pressure to bear on people without necessity because it's very unpleasant to be at the center of that kind of focal attention unless you’re narcissism bully people hide behind this pseudo-government organization and pressure people. I think if they get negative feedback, then they have more than that coming to them; even being in Canada is unpleasant now.

I feel like the political landscape has ruined the country, and it's because of people who hide behind, well, or just hide in anonymity and pressure other people for being harmful bureaucracy. Yeah, so whatever. They shouldn't be bullying.

Yeah, well, they're not also bullying you; like obviously they're—we've had other doctors reach out to say that they're being pressured. Their license is being pressured because of their conservative opinions on Twitter. That's not what these regulations are for. I talked to one of my great friends this week, a physician as well as a lawyer, and I suggested that maybe the three of us write an article for the National Post about the state of regulatory bodies in Ontario and in Canada more generally, in the West more generally.

Because I thought maybe a one, two, three punch might be more effective, you know? But my friend said that—and he's a very brave man and also very, very careful in what he says and does—he said his financial house wasn't in sufficient order to initiate that battle yet. He wants to do it, you know, but he still has—but the point is that even though he's a very brave man and he's made a lot of public statements already, he's intimidated enough by the College of Physicians so that even though he knows that this would be politically effective, he feels that he's not well defended enough yet to take this on fully.

And you know, I can understand that. One of the things that made me able to do this from the beginning when the university came after me was that I had three independent streams of income, right? You know, as a professor, I had a clinical practice, and I had a pretty successful business.

And so I could lose any two of those without, you know, being destitute and putting my family at risk. And I'm still in that position now, which is also partly why I'm willing to do this publicly, you know? Because I don't want this precisely to be about me because that's just annoying. I want to shed light on the fact that this is a, on my belief that this is a universal problem of public concern in Canada and elsewhere. And I can do that because the worst thing the college can do to me is—well, the worst thing they can do is suspend my license and make a public statement that because of my refusal to comply with their dictates, I'm no longer acceptable as a licensed clinical psychologist.

And I don't want them to do that because I believe that I earned my license and am also a good advocate on the clinical front. I don't want to be in a position where faceless bureaucrats motivated by a political agenda and whatever envy and resentment they carry in their dark and nasty little hearts have the opportunity to strip me of something that I spent a decade of extremely hard work earning.

But, you know, if I—if they do strip it from me, well, first of all, that's not going to redound to their credit. Second, I can probably get licensed in a jurisdiction like Florida.

That'd be satisfying.

Yeah, a creepy little club of psychologists that are just telling people lies anyway. If the entire profession is being forced to not tell their clients the truth, then maybe it's worse than that.

It's worse than that, Michaela. The bodies that govern the training programs for clinical psychologists in Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, has increasingly moved to make it mandatory for universities that offer clinical psychology training to do that under the rubric of social justice or face the suspension of the accreditation of their programs.

And that's also happening in medicine. You—you, everyone listening, you bloody well better listen to this, people, because we're entering a situation where the universities themselves are required to ensure that your physicians and your psychologists are of a particular political stripe, which essentially means radically left—not just left, but radically left—like social justice, full woke, critical racist theory, oppressive patriarchal narrative, feminist left-wing, or their institution itself will not be allowed to train physicians or psychologists.

And I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory, and well, go look it up for yourself and see if it's true, because it's true right down to the last word. And so if you Canadians think you're going to be served well by craving political ideologues who are primarily selected to be physicians on the basis of their political purity, you've got a bloody another thing coming. That didn't work out so well in Eastern Europe, let me tell you; it's not going to work out very well for us either.

And so part of the reason I'm willing to make this battle public is to try to alert people to the fact that we're a hell of a lot farther down this road than we think. You know, I went through Eastern Europe for four months this spring, talking to people there. I had the privilege of meeting, you know, 30 or 40 people in each country who were political or cultural leaders across the political spectrum, including leftists who'd be mobbed like mad by their own compatriots.

And every single one of the people I talked to, virtually without exception in Eastern Europe, said something like, "Do you know what happened here between the end of the Second World War and 1989 when we were dominated by the Communists? Do you know how awful it was here?" That was particularly true in Albania. "Do you know you people in the West are walking down exactly the same road? What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you notice?" And this included the socialists in those Eastern European countries, you know, who remember the tender mercies of the radical leftists and the fact that, you know, one out of three people in most of those countries, even if they’re within your own family, were government informers and where the joke was, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us," and where people spent hours in bread lines and fought over terrible little rat hole apartments as they were quasi-starving to death, unable to ever tell the truth or speak.

Yeah, that's not good.

No, no.

And that's why you're in Florida.

I know; Florida's great. It's weird. People here are weird, but it's good weird. It's free weird.

Yeah, it's not stifled.

Yeah, well, so Ronald, right now. I hate it.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know how you felt going back there, and I don't know—I've got lots of friends in Toronto, but it is not the same Toronto as it was in 2015 or 2016. You go there; it's kind of like California. You can feel the weight of silence in that place.

Yeah, well your mom and I have been back here for a month; you know, we're pretty worried about coming back because we've faced a fair bit of resistance in our neighborhood. Like I'm probably more unpopular in some sense in Toronto and more particularly in my neighborhood than I am anywhere else in the world.

Yeah.

And so it was somewhat worrisome to come back to Toronto. Very worried. Sun moved out of our neighborhood in part because it was uncomfortable for him to be there, even though that's where he grew up, thanks to the machinations of certain neighbors. It's been hard on your mom too because I come downstairs.

Well, the other day when I was going through what happened in 2016, you know, I came downstairs; I could hardly stand up. A lot of the symptoms I had over the last couple of years came back, and that's really pretty frightening for me and for her to see, you know? I had to sit down on the floor five or six times. It sounds like—this sounds like PTSD.

Well, who knows, you know what it is? But I recovered fairly quickly, dude, you know, an indication of my return to health. So, but it's hard on your mom too because I'm [ __ ] as can possibly be after going upstairs and wrestling with this material. And you know, we had a big conversation this week about how she should be involved because I don't want to drag her into this, and you know, and she doesn't want to blame me for being entangled in it, and we don't want to stress our relationship, you know?

So I don't know how much to protect her from this and how much to share with her. You know, I thought, well, maybe when I'm writing out my college defense, I should go to a hotel room and, you know, grapple with it there, because I'm much more irritable at least for some period of time after confronting all of this. Like it's calmed down a bit now that I've got my argument, you know, in order. I've looked through all the material. There isn’t any snakes left under the carpet to bite me, and so I think I'm through the most demanding part of it, although God only knows what's going to happen as this unfolds because there's always the possibility I'll make a mistake while I'm defending myself too, you know, because I could easily do that because it's so complicated.

But, you know, your mom and I are on the same page in relationship to this, which is, you know, she believes that if I just say what's happening, if I do my best to tell the truth without adornment and to try to keep my volatile temper under control, that this will turn out the way things have turned out for us in the past, which is it'll be rather dreadful in the short term but resolve itself somewhat favorably in the medium to long run.

But that's easy to say when the medium to long run has made itself manifest yet.

Yeah.

This also might just be something that's happening that no one can really get out of, and by that, I mean, we've seen what direction the universities are going in. So you can fight back against that, but basically, at the moment, going to get a university degree seems like maybe not the best idea if you end up in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt being taught by ideologues and then being taught information that won't lead to a job. Just seems like a scam, right?

And if this is what's going on with colleges, and if they're controlling working professionals so that the working professionals have to work in a way that isn't truthful, I mean how do you even fight? How do you fight back against that? At what point do you just stop playing in that game?

Well, that, you know, people have asked me that too. "Why don't you just give up your license?" And I would say, "Well, because I wouldn't be giving it up; I would be allowing it to be taken away from me." Like if I decide in a year that I don't want to be a licensed clinical psychologist because the whole damn profession has become corrupt, that's a whole different issue than letting this pack of Craven commissar cowards organized behind the scenes utilize the complaints of random people online to justify their own envy and desire to prosecute and then fold in the case of that opposition. It's like I'm not going to do that.

Now, you say, "Well, what do you do?" And I think the only answer to that is I think in the only thing you have in a complex situation is the truth; that's all you have. That's why you have to abide by the truth, you know? Because when things get complex around you, how do I deal with this politically? How do I deal with this personally? What do I say in this terribly complex situation?

All you have there, that solid ground, is the truth. And one of the things to reflect upon in relationship to that is that's also why you have to live honestly, you know? Because it's very hard to tell the truth if you're simultaneously worried that the evidence of your past misbehavior, your past deceitful misbehavior, is going to come to light.

And so the reason you abide by the truth is so that you can say what you have to say about what you've done and who you are, and you can do that under impossibly difficult circumstances. And possibly that will sustain you through that in, you know, in circumstances where if that's not possible, you're just going to get crushed, you know?

And people might say, "Well, being investigated by your professional body isn't exactly a life-threatening event, and you're just whining." It's like, look, for all you people who think that this is such a walk in the park, I'll tell you two things. Number one, I've known about 200 people who faced this sort of thing now, and every single one of them, every single one of them, with the exception of those people who like a fight, right—of tiny, tiny minority of people, maybe one or two in that entire 200—they reacted as if they or someone they loved had contracted a life-threatening illness.

I've known people—very stable people, extremely elegant, polished, educated, well-positioned, well-supported people—who literally ended up in psych wards because of the pressure that was brought to bear on them by the accusatory mob. And so those of you who think this is a cakewalk, you just bloody well wait till your neighbors show up on your doorstep with pitchforks and torches, and you just see what that's like for yourself.

So you better watch yourself very carefully if you think that the people who are complaining about being mobbed are just complaining because they can't take it, yeah.

Well, that you also hear—you hear about—I mean that—that's a silly thing to think too. You hear about university students who you can get bullied online. It's not life-threatening, but it is life-threatening to some people; it can make some people suicidal from stress.

Well look, there's two great classes of fear, Michaela. There's only two. One of them is death—death and physiological and psychological disintegration. So you could think about that as the terror of biological vulnerability; that's one class of fear. The Second Great classifier is fear of social exclusion.

And part of the reason is that historically, if you're socially excluded, you're dead. So they're the same fear, you know, because your social inclusion protects you from dying, right? You work with other people, you cooperate with them, you play with them, you eat with them; you're dependent on their labor, you're literally sustained in your life by your social desirability and your inclusion.

And so if that's taken away from you, your reputation is solid or shattered; people shun you. Not only are you lonesome and isolated, but you're really in trouble. And your nervous system reacts to that as if it's a mortal threat, which it is.

And so, you know, one of the problems with online culture and the culture of anonymity—you know, people have been pointing to this and saying, "Well now, are you sorry that you've gone after anonymous trolls? Because look at what happens if you're not anonymous." As I think, "No, I still think you people are cowardly, and most of you are narcissists, and you don't have the courage of your convictions."

And the problem of anonymity is that the anonymous denouncers get the upper hand, and they're—the research is clear on this. I just talked to Dale Paulus this week, the developer of the idea of the dark triad and the dark tetrad, and there's a huge body of research that's emerging showing that online trolls, especially the anonymous types, are much more likely to be—this is fun—narcissistic.

So that means they want social status; they believe they deserve social status and that they should get it without earning it. Machiavellian, which means they'll manipulate other people instrumentally to get what they want independent of the consequences for that person. Psychopathic, which means they're predatory and parasitical; parasitical meaning they're perfectly willing to use your work as means for their sustenance.

And this is the new part of the dark tetrad, which has expanded it beyond the triad—sadistic love, which means taking a positive delight in the evident suffering of others, not only failure to experience that suffering, so that callousness—that might be part and parcel of, you know, being disagreeable and tough—but actually experiencing a positive delight in the suffering of others; that's what lol means, right?

L-o-l-l-o-l-zed, the plural of lol—laugh out loud—and to do something for the lolls is literally to do it online so that you can watch other people squirm and suffer, and that's sadism. And so Paulus has been just, you know, investigating ordinary dark tetrad behavior and looking at its contribution to online behavior. It is certainly the case that, you know, some of the complaints that are levied against me by the Ontario College of Psychologists were just submitted to the college as tweets, so they just used the college tagline @CPOntario to point—oh my gosh—to one of my tweets, and that was the complaint.

And so these people who are willing to use their anonymity to inform and accuse have the upper hand in a virtualized society, you know? And that's another reason why I've—you know, I've had some moral doubts about whether I should just make all of this public, like every bit of the documentation, everything the college sent me, which would include the identifiers of the complainants.

But—and I'm still not sure that in the most fundamental manner that's not the appropriate thing to do. But, because I'm not sure, and because, at least technically, my understanding at the moment is that that's not—that I wouldn't be abiding by the dictates of the college, I'm still more than willing to play by the rules, and those rules might be right, you know?

I'm—I still—I don't know what to do with that because under normal circumstances, I can understand why the anonymity of the complainant publicly would be maintained, right? Because it stops people who have a legitimate grievance from being intimidated by those against whom they have the grievance. But those rules only apply when people aren't weaponizing the colleges.

And as soon as the colleges are weaponized, when you can manipulate bureaucracy into being a club for your viewpoint, then what constitutes ethical behavior on the part of the defendant starts to become murky, and that's also part of what makes this stressful.

Yeah, well, I think it just ignoring the people who actually did the complaints is the right way to go because they don't matter. And if they weren't there, somebody else would be making the same kind of complaint—it's a college issue, right?

But that's a weird argument, right? Because—and you may well be right, and that's obviously what we've decided to do too—but there is a part of me that also thinks, "No, you know, any given individual can cause a lot of trouble if you set out to do that."

And the idea that you shouldn't be responsible for your accusations is questionable, especially when what you're essentially doing is levying the equivalent of a legal charge.

Yeah, I think that's the right option. It also, I think, just on a more selfish level, I think it'll be easier given the fact that this is going to be a battle for a while, and it might end; it might end badly. I don't know how it's going to end. I don't trust Canada.

It would be better for you emotionally not to be involved in a personal way as much as you can. So, like, forget who the people who made the complaints are, even though they're probably despicable human beings. There's tons of despicable human beings out there.

Better to just ignore them and tell everybody what's going on and ideally have a backup plan. Like if they do come for your license, can you just—I mean, I assume getting a license—yeah, well, it's hard to know, you know? It's hard to know if it's better to ignore them.

There are lots of psychological studies about what people do to cheaters in games, and people are so motivated to punish cheaters that they'll give up some of their own privileges for the right to do so, and some of that's actually salutary. Well, look Michaela, if you let the cheaters get away with it, they dominate and take everything.

That's the psychopathic niche; that's why it even exists biologically is because you can get somewhere with exploitation. And you particularly get somewhere with exploitation if the people you are exploiting don't object. And so you actually have a moral obligation to object, you know? To not let people get away with breaking the rules.

When people come after me, well, they can't just be let off the hook, right? So it's very—but we look, I think we've walked this through quite appropriately, is that no, I should really be concentrating on the college and not the individual complainants; I should be concentrating on the college in a way that has broad public significance because this shouldn't just be about me; it's about a broader social problem that we should use the truth and public exposure, transparency, to mount the best defense, and we should all keep our heads while doing so.

But that's a—that's a well—there's no better strategy than that, but it's a tightrope to walk, that's for sure. And the other problem is, Mick, it's so easy to slip off this, you know? It's like when I've been in the most tendentious interviews that have been directed at me, Helen Lewis comes to mind in particular; every single comment that some of these journalists have made is a trap, right?

And the trap is, I think I could goad you into saying something that would be impulsive and aggressive enough to blacken your reputation permanently; and therefore to destroy your life in some fundamental sense just so that it would redound to my moral credit. And if you all listening think that I'm being paranoid, you go read Nelly Bowles' apology for what she did as a New York Times journalist.

Yeah, and you tell me that this isn't true because she came right out and said that's exactly what she did when she worked at the New York Times. Now she thinks she's learned better, but I would say if you already went that far in that direction, you have an awful lot of learning to do. And I would be very hesitant to claim you've now learned your lesson and are a good person; you know there's some things that it takes a long time to come back from, and that's certainly one of them.

I would happily destroy someone's reputation just so that my articles got more attention online. It's like, "Oh yeah, really?" And you knew that too; you didn't just do it unconsciously; you did it consciously, and you did it repeatedly, and you did it for the New York Times, and now you're sorry? It's like, yeah, 10 years in a convent flagellating yourself might make you sorry, maybe!

Like I've watched people in my clinical practice try to walk back from significant moral errors; it is not that easy, you know? There's that Catholic doctrine that you can be saved and redeemed no matter what your sin—it's like that's true, but that doesn't mean you have—you don't have to face the consequences of what you've done.

And like, if you want to repent and you've done something seriously wrong, so much of you has to change, that it's almost like you have to die in order to be reborn. So anyways, for those who are listening, that's another reason why you should try to step forward carefully in your life, you know, because you will be called to attend for your misbehavior and it will occur during a period of crisis, and if you're a mess and a deceitful mess, you're going to find yourself in trouble so profound you can barely imagine it.

So anyways, I don't know, kid; this isn't really what I wanted to do on your birthday.

This is exactly what I wanted to do on my birthday.

And we'll keep people updated. We can do another update podcast, and you're going to record anything that happens in the future.

I think that's more than fair; record everything as much as possible and just drink.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, I'm not doing any of this behind closed doors. So enough of that. If it has to be done behind closed doors, you know, unless I'm convinced that there's a real concern for confidentiality—if it has to be done behind closed doors, the reason for that is either there are, you know, justifiable concerns for privacy or a kind of corruption that can't bear public scrutiny.

And since this is a public inquiry as to my suitability to speak publicly as a clinical psychologist, I'm perfectly willing to ensure that the show trial is as broadly attended to as possible. So anyways, I have no idea how this is going to go, Mick. I mean, who do I—I’m going to—oh, I wrote Trudeau. I wrote Justin yesterday and just let him know what was happening.

Yeah.

And said, "You know, turns out that I'm having my professional license threatened because I don't agree with you," which I certainly don't. And I just thought, you know, you might be interested in knowing that this is occurring on your watch. And so anyways, I wrote him, and then I sent that to the National Post, and they said they wanted to publish it as an op-ed. So I added an introductory paragraph and a concluding paragraph just to let everybody know the context, and that's going to be published tomorrow.

And I know a number of reporters who are going to cover this in the next few days, and it will give some international attention soon. And so what do you think is going to happen?

Hmm. I think, yes, I think if I had to guess, I think that they'll say, "You know what? After looking into these, we realize that these are just random people on Twitter complaining, and we're going to throw them out and not pursue you further." I think that's what my guess is.

The alternative is they'd literally take your license, and I think that that's also easily possible. But it would be such a public war, and it just shows that their system is broken. It's obvious that the system is broken if that's what happens. If they take your license for your opinion tweets, it shows that their system is broken.

I don't think that they can let that happen, and eventually, someone will figure out what's happening and say, "Guys, you have to let this go," somebody at the top.

Yeah, what do you think?

Well, I don't know; I don't know. I don't know, you know? Because I keep thinking that, you know, the tide will turn, and this is self-correcting. But everything's self-correcting in the long run.

Yeah.

But, you know, when the Israelites were wandering through the desert, that was three generations. So the long run can be a very long time and things self-corrected in the Soviet Union to some degree, but it took 60 years and, you know, 30 to 40 million deaths. And so things can fall apart pretty damn badly, and if we think we're immune to that in a place like Canada, it's just because we're so sheltered, we're naive beyond belief.

It isn't clear to me at all that a third of Canadians have virtually no allegiance whatsoever to the ideas of freedom of association, allegiance, conscience, and expression. The rapidity with which Canadians, particularly in Toronto, leapt forward to adopt all the restrictions of the master debates was absolute evidence of that. And there's still plenty of people who are more than happy to have their masks on and who I think would wear them for the rest of their lives, especially if they had the extra delight of being able to tell other people that they also had to wear them.

So I don't know what'll happen, kiddo. I mean, what do I think will happen? I think—I don't think that they'll do what you said, at least in the immediate future, because I think they made too many decisions already to backtrack without the kind of embarrassment that shouldn't necessitate resignation.

And so I think what will happen is they'll pray devoutly that I go the hell away, and I'm actually afraid of their, you know, their public hearing, but I'm not, in fact, I'm much less afraid of that because I can represent myself then. I'm much less afraid of that than of anything we're doing presently.

And so I think they'll go through with that; I think they have to. I don't know; there's two endpoints. They resign and apologize, or they walk this through and take my license. Those are the options, so I guess it depends on how badly Canada is going to fall before it corrects itself because I think the universities—I think the universities are dead.

I don't know if the, you know, colleges that are around for doctors—those might be dead too. The classic hallmark of a tyrant is that under duress, they double down. So I suspect what they'll do now is they'll release something like a public statement indicating that my vociferous attempts to defend myself are nothing but my utility of my own proclivity for bullying to bring the weight of my alt-right followers unfairly to bear on this issue.

So they'll play the victim card, right? Despite the fact that I have left them alone 100 percent, and that the reverse isn't true. Now they'll say, "Well, they're just doing their professional duty." It's like, well, I guess that's what the dispute's about; I don't think you're just doing your professional duty.

I think you're a pack of envious scoundrels hiding your own incompetence behind the opportunity to persecute; that's what I think. And so, you know, when you think I'm a reprehensible alt-right bully, it's like, okay, I think you're wrong about that; let's have it out. We'll see what everyone thinks when the dust settles.

So I guess that's where we're at, kiddo.

Yep, and we'll keep everybody posted online. We'll link the article in the YouTube description, yep, and all, and we'll link this document that makes all the correspondence that's relevant and legally appropriate available.