Canceled Math Teacher Speaks Out | EP 248

Okay, so now you can imagine what's happened. He was on Pleasure Island, and everything went to hell fundamentally. So he jumped into the water to escape from that, and that's equivalent to plunging into chaos. Chaos was an escape from pathological tyranny.

And now, he's tried to go home. So this is the psyche in its search for maturation runs into an obstacle, which is the tyrannical element of the great father that it cannot cope with. It trots home, runs home. It's a defeat. A typical part of a hero's story is the initial defeat of the hero when he encounters usually either the terrible great father or the terrible great mother.

So, this is a retrogressive, Jung would call this retrogressive restoration of the persona. It's sort of like maybe you're a well-adapted adolescent, and you live at home, and you're a happy adolescent, and everything's good at home. Then you go out to try to be an adult, and you fail. When you come back home, you try to act like a happy adolescent again, but you're not.

What you are, in fact, is an unhappy adult. If you move back to the happy adolescent mode of being, then it's false and pathological. You can't go home again. Another typical motif in literature.

Now, the cricket. I can't tell you everything about this story; I can tell you a couple of strange things about it. One is that the cricket is Jiminy Cricket, right? And the initials of Jiminy Cricket are JC. Jiminy Cricket was a common southern American mild form of cursing; it's the equivalent of Jesus Christ.

You might think, and of course, the cricket is Pinocchio's conscience. So then you might ask yourself, why in the world would a pejorative, mildly pejorative term for Jesus Christ be applied to a cricket who's guiding a puppet into the water to rescue his father from a whale? Why would any of that happen? And the answer to that is you know why, but you can't say why.

You can't say why you know or what it is that you know, but the mere fact that it makes sense, and it does, is an indication from a Jungian perspective that you're operating at an archetypal level. You understand this.

So, I could say, here's an example of why the cricket is a bug. Well, things bug you, right? We say that things bug me. Well, you should do something about the things that bug you because that's your conscience calling to you. It's destiny, in some sense manifesting itself as an unconscious impulse.

That really bugs me means if you can, you should do something about it because you think about it. Man, there's a lot of things out there that might bug you, but lots of them don't. But some of them do. Well, why do those bug you and not the other things?

Well, that's a complicated question, but one potential answer to it is that there's part of your psyche that's oriented towards further development. Jung would call that the self, and that's like the totality of everything that you could be. It's a strange sort of entity, in some sense, because it's partly potential, and it's potential that expands across time.

But the way that your potential totality calls to you in the present is by placing things in front of you that are your problem. They announce themselves as your problem, and they do that by bothering you. So then, if you pick up the task of fixing the things that bother you, then you find the pathway to further expansion of your personality.

And that's what's happening with Pinocchio. Now, one of the things that's really interesting about the Pinocchio movie that makes it incredibly sophisticated is that despite the fact that the cricket is an avatar of Christ, so to speak, the cricket has things to learn just like Pinocchio.

And so that's very cool because it's so sophisticated. It means that you do have a conscience that guides you, but until you establish a dialogue with it, both you and the conscience are immature. You have to establish a conscious dialogue with it and then interact together in a manner that propels your development across time.

And that'll stop you from being a marionette of forces that would make you a braying donkey who does nothing but slave away in salt mines. So, okay, so Pinocchio goes home—that doesn't work. And that's where we're gonna start here. I mean, obviously, this is starting to bother you as this year. You buy into it to begin with, and you're enthusiastic about it to begin with, and you attribute that to, well, the mechanics of the initial education, let's say.

It's a group phenomenon. It capitalizes on empathy, and it sounds benevolent, certainly. In fact, it's the very essence of benevolence in some sense. So, it's going to be seductive, regardless of whether or not it's correct. But you become uncomfortable with it. Well, the first thing you're uncomfortable with is that you were implicitly asked to produce a falsehood in relationship to your own identity, which was—yeah, when you were asked the question about what you liked about being white.

And you said that what you said wasn't right, exactly, or wasn't correct, wasn't true. It was something that you whipped up on the spot because of the demand of the situation. And you remember that, so obviously that's significant. I think I was just meeting what I thought was an absurdity with an absurdity, you know?

Like, I felt the question was a little bit absurd. It's sort of like a hot—the premise, right? The premises, what do you call it? Like, how long have you been beating your wife kind of question, you know? So the premise of whiteness is you're supposed—you have to accept the premise in order to answer the question. I really have never been comfortable with the premise.

Period. Because I don’t think that it— you know, right? It takes a lot of presence. It takes a lot of presence of mind when you're asked a question to question the question, especially when you're the student and it's the teacher that's, so to speak, it's the authority figure that's posing the question.

Because you immediately have to rebel, and you have to do it in an extremely sophisticated way. Yeah, and you know, this could get back to the school, and I might not have passed the class. And, you know, I'm white, so that would have been problematic. And why are you—why? And that might have had job repercussions or, you know, promotions or whatever.

You know, you just realize that to question this question—mandatory. Yeah, and to question the question in these circumstances is—you know, the risk of that is so much greater than the triumph of dismantling the question that you're just not—you’re never gonna—and you may see, you may even fail at dismantling the way.

Like, your little rebellion may lead nowhere, and you may be wrong, you know? Which is the hesitation that anyone would have with an objection—just that you might be wrong. And so, of course, you're just going to fall on that side of the equation. I mean, that's what I did. Some people don't, but that would— you know most people do.

Yeah, and no wonder, right? It's hard not, like you outlined a bunch of reasons why it's difficult to, you know, come up with exactly the right response at that second. It's not like it's a question you're prepared for, right? Right, and you know, I think students do it all the time, you know? Because there's tremendous social cost to challenging any of the assumptions of our anti-racist programming or the manner in which it's delivered.

What are the costs for the students? Um, social—you know, social appropriation. You could have, you know, teachers write recommendations for them if they get a reputation. There's a fear that it could affect their applications. Students have come to me with, you know, concerns and examples of papers that they wrote, say, you know, on taking a position that went against the orthodoxy, and they've, you know, suffered a great hit from it.

And I've asked them, like, are you sure it just wasn't a good paper? You know, are you sure? And then, like, no, I actually cited this, this, and this, and I just took it. You know, and so I think they're real. I think that they're real, and there's actually been, you know, stories that they've brought to me that are, you know, someone defends capitalism or something, and then they have a big talking to after class or something like that, which is just—well, yes.

I mean, how could you possibly defend capitalism while you're going to a $55,000-a-year private school, right? Right. I mean, what's the probability that your parents are capitalists? A hundred percent. Very high. Very young. So, basically, you're being set to task because you have the goal to defend the very attribute of your parents that enabled you to go to the school in the first place, and that, of course, enabled the school. Right.

And it's such an ironic thing that both the administration and most faculty have such contempt for the very thing that makes them have a job. You should be talking about ideas based on what makes ideas sound or unsound—not the person who's saying them. So, I was seeing situations where, you know, white students would make a claim, and then that claim was discounted by someone else because of their privilege, right?

They're making, of course, the white supremacist assumption that there are such things as ideas and that they can be ranked in terms of quality and that the purpose of discursive speech is precisely to do such things, and etc., etc. Yeah. And so the whole solipsistic nature of it—I was like, this is— you can't even have a conversation. This is not—a way to have a functioning—you’re not preparing people to function in a truly diverging world of ideas.

It's not—well, it's worse in some sense. The claim, fundamental claim, is that there's no such thing as a conversation. There's just different discourses of power. There's no conversation. Conversation assumes ideas and the free flow of ideas and the irrational individual actor and the capacity for logos and the individual as the central unit and so on and so forth.

People who hold the critical race position, let's say, don't—it's not that they avoid confrontational conversations; they don’t believe that there’s such a thing as a conversation. It's not part of the system, so it's a fundamental dispute. Yeah, no, that's true.

I mean, and then the little things—like I remember talking to a colleague about a new hire, and she said, I said, well, what’s he like, this new guy? And she said, well, he's like you, he's like me. Well, what do you mean by that? And she was like, oh, he's white. I was like, okay, all right. You know, this is not a person that’s a total stranger either, and I kind of walked away and like, really? So, okay.

And you know, I also—I also hear the objection to my objection, which is, you know, see how it feels, white man? See how it feels to be treated as your race. That is, it’s a—you know, she might have been trying to teach me a lesson in some sense, like now you know how it feels. But that's not, you know, okay, that's—that's a point that you're making, but that's not—that's not a healthy thing, and that's not good because it doesn't actually reduce the sum total of misery in the world.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Alright, so you're starting to feel disquiet, and you actually make this known. Yes, and I make it known in 2019. I make it known in 2020. I talk to the assistant head, I talk to the head of the school.

You're married? I’m recently married. I've been married over a year—just over a year. Do you have any children? No children, no children, but you are married. Okay, so I’m just wondering what you have resting on your jaw. Exactly, yeah.

And I didn’t—you know, I have to say that, you know, not having kids is a huge part of why I feel like this is happening—that I've been able to stick my neck out. And, you know, I'm not— I don’t judge anyone for balancing their duty to the truth and their duty to their family in whatever way that works for them because both of them are important or to put things at risk. You know, that’s a personal choice, and that's—I can’t speak to any of that, but I think that definitely not having mouths to feed and having some savings from my previous job and things—being smart with my money and not spending it unwisely as I have done a decade and a half ago—but I think that helped me to do what I'm doing.

Alright, so how are you being treated by the administrative officials to whom you're registering your objection? Are you doing that in writing? Are you doing that in person? You know, mostly in person. And, you know, I'm not writing anything official. I'm in the grumbling-in-my-beard phase, I guess. I'm in the griping phase where I would go and I would say, you know, this is wrong. Like, why can't we teach, you know, a broad range of viewpoints? Why do we always have to teach this ritualistic thing that's just a litany of, you know, basically far-left ideas?

Some of the administration were very sympathetic—like, even overly so. Like, I remember talking to the assistant head; he pulled down a copy of Jonathan Haidt off the bookshelf and was like, I’d love to teach this in my class. I really want to make this happen. I want to teach, you know, more than—I was sort of—or maybe just modeling it or humoring me or something. But he had the book, he had the book. That's right, and he knew the book, and he knew where it was on his shelf.

I know, so like—but, you know, then in public, you know, or in public—in front of the community, you're not saying nothing about it, right? So I think there's a tremendous amount of preference falsification still going on there, you know?

Well, you outlined why—I mean, yeah, you lost your job. Yeah, so you know these are high-stakes games. And right, you make a mistake, and a mistake—you veer outside the realm of acceptable behavior, let's say. And what happens? Well, you get disproportionately punished for it. And there's a moral element to it too, which is, well, there's no bloody way someone like you should be teaching. So not only did we fire you, but we're right to do so.

Yeah, so, and you know, that's a very hard thing to withstand, which is something I also want to talk to you about. I mean, you know, confident though you may be, or anyone may be, when your institution sheds you and surrounds that with accusations about the nature of your character, if you're not a complete psychopath, it tends to strike you to your heart because there's always the possibility that you're wrong, right?

Right. But I really knew I wasn't because, you know, coming out there was this meeting, and I referred to it in the article or my essay, "The Self-Care Through an Anti-Bias Lens Meeting," which is what kicked off the whole past two months for me. It was a meeting where students were ostensibly going to learn how to take care of themselves during the pandemic—how to manage their emotions, how to take deep breaths and cope with things. And in that meeting, you know, after some mind-relaxing exercises like meditation and stuff, they put up the white supremacy, you know, aspects of white supremacy culture slide.

And that's different than the pyramid, or this is different than the pyramid, and this is, you know, this is elements of white supremacy, right? Right. It's actually— you know, there's different forms of it, but essentially, you know, it's fairly common in this, in this thing as you know.

And, yes, so here's some professional and transactional relationships versus relationships based on trust, care, and shared commitments. Protecting power versus sharing power. Culture of overworking versus culture of self-care and community care. Competition and struggle for limited resources versus collaboration and working to share resources.

That's all white-dominant culture. So, yes, yes. And so some of the things that were on this particular slide were objectivity, individualism, either-or thinking, right? Right? And I know that one—there was, you know, the thing that wrangled me the most was right to comfort because, you know, how are you giving a self-care workshop where the 200 kids that are in there in this racially segregated workshop are challenged that they might not— that having—imagining that you have a right to comfort is associated with a, you know, genocidal evil? Kenneth Jones and Timo Oaken, "Dismantling Racism Workbook," 2001.

God only knows what that is, but it's everywhere. The characteristics of white supremacy culture: perfectionism, which is an element of conscientiousness, which is a fundamental trait. Sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either-or thinking. Notice this is all written in words, by the way. Power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, which seems to be run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict. Progress is bigger and more objectivity, right to comfort.

Yeah, it's quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items. It's incoherent at every possible level of analysis, as well as being—it's impossible to parody. Yeah, yeah, and I saw it, and I, you know, I had been thinking for a couple of months prior to this because there had been some meetings that really upset me, and I was thinking, well, and my head of school had actually said that if I was in an appropriate forum, I should feel free to ask questions.

By this point in the meeting, I think maybe 30 minutes in before this popped up, other faculty had been saying things in the chat area of the Zoom meeting. So, you know, is that anonymous? Is that anonymous in the Zoom? No, it's—they were so—they were under their own names. Under their own names? Yeah.

And so I thought, well, why— you know, when the facilitator mentioned that if you looked at this slide, I think she said—you know, you might have some white feelings, and I said—I just kind of blurted out—I didn’t—I didn’t blurt it out angrily. I don’t think I was too upset, of course; you know, I don’t know how it was perceived, of course, but I said, well, what do you mean? But what is a white feeling? What is the white feeling?

And I—you know, what came back was—I think she said something that defensiveness was a white feeling. I said, well, these feelings can belong to people of any race. And, you know, I think that it’s—I don’t know whether it's—I don't understand why it's being attributed to a particular—the white people.

And you know, I had that kind of opened the gates a little bit and kind of broke the ice, I think, because in the chat, other kids started to ask questions. There was a debate about whether I should be allowed to ask the question, which question? Do you mean the question about the white feeling question?

I see. There was also some—there was a lot of capitalism bashing in the chat, and I said, you know, I believe capitalism is anti-racist since it's done more to lift people of all races out of poverty than any alternative. And, you know, I wasn't monopolizing the chat; I was dropping in little things, and there was a lot of activity in the chat.

And then, um, the facilitator actually went with me, and she explained stuff, you know, her perspective on it, and I thanked her, and you know, she moved on some more, and I think I asked another question.

But I really, as she said later in a meeting about the meeting in front of the whole faculty, she felt that I—you know, I was asking out of curiosity. I wasn’t, you know, on a rant or saying it, you know, to be antagonistic. I think some of my faculty members felt that I was, but the facilitator herself didn’t feel that way.

So, and she was the one I was talking to, so I think that definitely counts. That's quite remarkable, I would say, because it's very difficult in a group like that when you know the implicit ethos to be able to say something that's questioning without having anger build up as a motivation, right? Because you need something to break through your resistance.

Yeah, so, to be able to say it without upsetting the—yeah. I mean, I was passionate, but I wasn’t—I don’t think I was like enraged or anything like that. It’s—you know, I was trying to modulate what I was really upset. I was—that was the either/or thing because I was like, well, if either/or thinking is a characteristic of white supremacy, well then Ibram Kendi's got to be the whitest person in public life because his entire philosophy is so Manichaean.

I mean, anyway, so—but I didn’t say that, of course, because that would have been inflammatory. But, um, what I really wanted to do—I’ve been thinking about an opportunity, because I wanted to model for the students that you could ask questions—that someone who was a teacher or someone who was an authority figure could ask a question, and it was okay, and—and did.

And how did the students react to it? It was phenomenal. I mean, I was really gratified, and that they confirmed that my—it confirmed that I was doing the right thing. Because when things came out in the chat, they started to ask a broader range of questions. I received the transcript later, and, you know, it was like night and day. Kids were asking questions like, well, I don’t feel like I’m ignorant just because I’m white, or, you know, I don't like to be reduced to my race.

And then faculty joined in, so several faculty members also started to ask questions, you know. And I don’t think the point was that if people even necessarily wanted their questions answered in the forum, they just wanted to ask them. You don’t know what your question is until you ask. Exactly. Like this, this—that’s why I think intent is so—it’s kind of a silly thing because you never really—it’s only an ex post facto explanation if you're called on it.

I think, like, a true question, there may be no intent; like, it just bubbles out of you if you're truly in a conversation. I'm not thinking about—okay, I'm not—it's not like I'm plucking this little thing out of the inside of my head and like, well, I intend this to be, you know, that's not communication. That's not—if it's a genuine conversation. No, you don't have time for that in a genuine conversation.

No, yeah, of course not. And so, you know, but I was really gratified. I was on a natural high from the experience. Why? Well, because I felt that I had, you know, I had done something good. Like, it was just self-evidently good to me. Like, it just—when I reflected on it, this is a positive thing.

Now, one of my colleagues got very upset with me with my influence on this. Because at one point, I did say, you know, why—you know, I don’t identify as white—must I internalize society's delusions about me? Which is, you know, like it's kind of like the neutron bomb to this entire belief system. But I was on—I was on a, you know, I felt like it was something I wanted to put out there so the kids could see it and, you know, understand, you know, that maybe this is a point of view.

You know, I'm not saying I'm right; I'm asking a question. And, you know, the feeling was that this was, you know, anti-racism some defense. Yeah, like I could do. They're not morally obligated to accept these characterizations, which is kind of the whole point of anti-racism, is that you're not obligated to accept arbitrary racial categories that are unrelated to the task at hand.

Yeah, it should be. But, you know, then a colleague got upset with me and said—kind of got on his high horse and said, you know, I can’t believe that—I may be mis-paraphrasing here, and if I am, sorry—but he said, I believe, you know, I can't believe that a member of our—you know, our one of my colleagues doesn’t understand that we are white, that we are white since birth. I am white since birth. That this carries with it implicit biases that are unavoidable, and we must affirm that, you know, and that's who—that's who we are and that's who I am.

And I just—I kind of interrupted him because I felt like he was kind of making me look—I know he’s being kind of a jerk, so I interrupted him and said, I’m sorry, you’re stereotyping yourself. I think it’s sad. And, you know, that kind of was a very awkward moment because it was in front of students. And he said, you know, he expressed his dismay.

And I remained silent, and then after the meeting, I said—I apologized to him. I said, you know, that was unprofessional. Was it? Well, you know, I unders—I felt it. I felt that there might have been a better way that I could do it—maybe wait 'til he finished and then asked, you know, to respond.

I’m also suspicious of my own, you know, because I have been somewhat oppositional. I'm not exactly like a Mr. Go-Along-and-Get-Along guy with this stuff, that I don't always have the best reality check on my own behavior. And so I'm, you know, I was just saying, well, okay, if I did cause offense, then, you know, I feel like it's okay to apologize.

And there probably was a better way for me to do this, and so I did apologize. And, you know, I thought about it—he accepted and, you know, I figured that was—that was it. And there was a lot of processing after the meeting, I think, that went on for hours afterward. My phone died—it was on my phone. And so when I went home, I logged back into the meeting, and people were still there talking, so I talked to them.

But I underestimated the effect of this because apparently, some of my comments, you know, were leaked or made or transmitted to other people that weren't in the meetings—people that were in the BIPOC meeting, you know, particularly my mice, is it black and indigenous people of color? So they were having their separate meeting of faculty and students where they received different content.

And why was it separate? Curiosity. The rationale, as I can understand it, is so that the groups that have been marginalized won't be exposed to, you know, they'll have their own thing so that they're not exposed to the, I think, the insensitivity of the oppressors, that's the best I can understand the rationale.

But it wound up happening anyway because I suppose it would be rude of me to point out that that’s somewhat paternalistic, you know, just as a—yeah, you know, observation. That's a good one.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally. Well, I guess that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture, though, paternalism. Yeah, so, and I guess it's—as long as it's in a good cause, then I guess it's forgivable.

Yeah, okay, so that was—how long ago? That meeting? That was February 24th. Oh, yes, okay. So things are starting to—yeah, this year. And that was referred to after the fact as the events of Wednesday, like they couldn't even really—it was sort of like 9/11; they couldn't actually—they had to come up with a euphemism for it, I guess. So the events of Wednesday.

And so they had meetings about the events? Well, the Office of Community Engagement coupled with the Dean of Student Life—and there are Dean-level positions that exerted a lot of effort and energy because I did not make their lives easy—to address the things that were said and raised in the meeting, not just by me, but by, you know, lots of different people and students—students, you know, spoke up as well—and faculty.

And so what I found so interesting because the day after the meeting there was an email that was released that said healing resources. You know, healing resources that will help you come to terms with what happened. And the first healing resource on the list was a CNN interview with a poet named Damon Young.

And, um, Damon Young, you know, in this interview said things like, you know, we need to get rid of all of capitalism. We will have to do a carpet bombing—not a carpet cleansing—of society. And it was incredibly radical statements that were, I would imagine, would be frightening to many people. And that was listed as a healing resource, as well as long as the carpet bombing only targets the malevolent people.

Well, yeah, I guess. And then things—there was a Robin DiAngelo article that said, you know, what white people need to be made or kept uncomfortable. How can we become more uncomfortable? Also, you know, really kind of, I would just say, racist characterizations of white people in these links. Things like, you know, white people have never had to be guests in this country. And, uh, like the Irish, for example—they weren't really white to begin with, though.

So, yeah, yeah. And so I found this very ironic. And then I had a series—I had two meetings. I had a meeting with my head of high school and the assistant head, and I had a meeting with the head of the whole school. And then, you know, I—the head of the meeting with the head of high school—they called you in at that point?

Yeah, I mean, what's happening around you is this is growing. This is this—well, yeah, there's a lot of agitation. There's meetings about meetings. There's Student Diversity Council meetings.

Um, there are—there's just a lot of agitation in the community, I would say, and meetings about meetings. So some of the things that would happen would be in the week—in the end, as the week continued, there was a faculty meeting about it.

Um, I had some advisory circle practice taken away because they felt that it would be—the students would be upset if I was a part of it. So the investigation is what? Um, well, it's a—it's a practice that we’ve started this year where activities—where you put up a slide and you talk about an issue.

And then everyone has to go around and speak one by one about a question, and then you kind of do it around twice. And then, you know, this is to sort of manage discussion. Um, and I’ve done—

So, you're persona non grata at this now because of your toxic influence on the students, right? Or, right? And so, you know, I got an email saying, you know, under current circumstances following yesterday's meeting and your rule—and what transpired—you know, I've asked you to recuse yourself.

Um, then, you know, there were subsequent meetings. There was a faculty meeting. I think at that faculty meeting, a colleague said, well, this could be terrible; this could undo everything we've ever taught them, which I thought to myself, please, please, I hope so.

Um, but, uh, and there was—how are you? How are you reacting to all this? Well, I'm on a natural high. I know that I feel like this is something that I finally done to open up something, like some daylight. And all of this churn is going on around me, but I'm going about my day. I'm teaching my classes. I'm—you know, I did feel the need to address my classes, so I said at the beginning, you know, I am an anti-racist.

Um, you know, I want you to feel safe, and then I would just sort of teach the class, and then I was told not to address it with the class, with anyone in the classes, with regard to teachers and students in private and public institutions—high schools, junior highs, elementary schools—in your state and across your country.

What do you see this, if anything, what does this indicate? Well, I have hopes, you know? I feel that if students can—if I—if the type of, you know, willingness to ask a question—in response to some of these, you know, what I consider to be indoctrination, frankly—at other schools.

And you think that's happening in other schools? Yeah, I mean, it’s no question, because of the calls that I've received in the conversations I've had with people all over Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey. You know, their parents are very concerned with their children. They've seen it because of the pandemic through their Zoom classes. They've witnessed what's being taught to their kids, and they're very, very concerned, and they have specific receipts to back it up.

And, you know, they're sending me curriculum. So, you know, I—this is not simply a rarefied independent school problem. This is happening at, you know, school boards and districts all over the country.

A lot of it spurred by the, you know, the George Floyd killing and the reaction to it. I believe it was taken as an opportunity to, you know, redress that with, uh, misguided.

Yeah, an opportunity for what? It's like, I don't—I keep trying to figure out—I've been concerned about this for a long time, and I still can't get to the bottom of it. It's like I don't understand exactly. I know there's a resentment element to it, but I can't understand exactly what's driving this and why it's—despite the fact that it's clearly the view of a very small minority of people—perhaps five percent, that's what the survey seemed to indicate.

I cannot understand why it's making the headway that it's making at the rate that it's making and what it's really aiming at. What do you think about that? Like, what's your sense? Because obviously, it's bothering you.

Yeah, I think I have a sense why, and maybe it's a theory. It's not just my theory, but it's—I’ve seen it in other places or hinted at in other places. I think when you sort of, you know, over the past few decades, you have a gradual leaching from the soil of society of sort of a moral sense, a moral tradition, moral grounding in, you know, long, long religious traditions.

Essentially, when they depart from the public sphere, it leaves a kind of vacuum. And you know, wokeness is a way to sort of paint-by-numbers moral righteousness, and it gives people the sense that they're good people.

I think people have an almost—you know, I don't know whether it's evolutionarily based, but they have a need to have a moral character and sense of themselves. And if something comes along which is going to offer that and give you that thing, well then, there's a tremendous hunger for it. So people will adopt it quickly.

And so you can have, you know, a very small percentage of the population that's pushing it, can have a real powerful, outsized influence. Do you have a traditional religious belief of any sort? And are you a practicing religious person?

I am. I am. It's a really good question. I am. I was raised Catholic, and I, you know, I was—I have lapsed. You know, I have a joke that I use sometimes—you know, I'm so lapsed, I'm prolapsed.

But, uh, basically, I, you know, was a functioning agnostic, then atheist, and—um, but I—I don't feel like I really need a lot of God, but I do need to have something which is like a conscience. Like, I guess I believe in a conscience.

I believe in some little mirror of the divine which sort of is in me. It's not like above me or around me, but it is within me. And so it's sort of like a reflective thing that I can—and it's sort of reactivated, I guess, and as part of this whole experience.

So I can take in the world and the world of reality, but I can reflect it against something which is not of this world. I don’t know how to describe it, and then that’s pretty good what comes back. I’m satisfied with that answer.

You know, like what comes back is something that I should attend to. It's something that is the—it is something important. And that is the, you know—and now that I feel like I have that or an awareness of that, you know, it’s just like, you know, ah—you know, okay.

Like I've got—thank God it's been there. Exactly, thank God. I want to say thank God, but I don't—I don't know that there's a God with a capital G. I just know that there's something which is not of this world, but is in this world.

My point, my principal argument in the book is that absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better. And, in fact, by promoting free speech, you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about.

So recently, the Scottish Parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors, and I’d be interested in your feeling about that. Now, you said, I believe in this book—if I remember the statistics correctly—that there have been 120,000 incidents of police-investigated speech hate crime in Britain in how long?

Yeah, that's been over the last five years or so—it’s worse than that. The statistic I quote is, between 2014 and 2019, there are 120,000 recorded incidents of non-crime—they call them non-crime hate incidents. And this is something which is now routine in the UK.

I mean, obviously, I'm going to be talking about the UK and the U.S., and Canada is a very different kettle of fish, I'm sure. And I'm sure a lot of the people who are watching won't be familiar with the problems we have in the UK.

Of course, we don't have constitutional protection for free speech. We don't have a First Amendment. We don't have anything like that. So we are particularly vulnerable, and at the moment, unfortunately, in the UK, the police, who are trained by the College of Policing, who do issue very specific guidelines about this—and anyone can check this because if you go to the government's website on hate crime and hate speech, they make very clear what they're talking about.

What they say is that there are five protected characteristics, and these fall into race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, and disability. Um, I think I might misquote that, but there's one missing. But anyway, there are five protected characteristics, and if a victim—and they do use the word victim rather than complainant—if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics, then it qualifies as a hate crime.

If it's criminal, if it's not criminal, if it's just speech or something like that, it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident. Police will investigate that. They will record that. And although non-crime incidents don’t lead to prosecution, they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take—we call it a Disclosure Barring Service here—so it can affect your employment prospects.

Is that without a trial? That was recorded without a trial? Of course. So you get a quasi-criminal record. You get something flagged up when you’re—particularly if you’re applying for a teaching job, say something like that, where you're working with children, it's very important.

And you get this thing flagged up, so it does have serious ramifications. But even beyond that, we have hate speech laws which are encoded into the Public Order Act, which is one example. But the other—the main example is the Electronic Communications Act, 2003.

In this country, and I do quote the statistic in the book as well, we have roughly, uh, 3,000 people arrested a year for offensive things that they have said online. That's—so in other words, nine people a day, roughly, the police in the UK are arresting.

And people in the UK will be familiar with this because if you see the Twitter accounts of various police forces, various police departments across the country, they often put things out like, you know, make sure you don’t say anything offensive or thoughtless online or we will be knocking on your door. They say these very kind of frightening things.

There was a recent police display outside a supermarket in the UK—it went viral, this image. It was them next to a big digital billboard, and the slogan on the billboard was, being offensive is an offense. And this was flanked by police officers who were socially distanced, but they were there in their masks, which made it seem slightly more sinister.

Um, they got in a lot of trouble for that because people were saying, well, being offensive surely isn't a crime. But actually, the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime. And they, you know, they were acting on that basis. They’d obviously hadn't just concocted this billboard out of nothing. They’d really considered what it should say.

And more to the point, actually, they were right; in this country, you can go to prison for jokes, for offensive remarks. Um, and people have gone to prison, have been arrested routinely for causing offense, and of course, the notion of offense is incredibly subjective.

In fact, in fact, the legal stipulation in the Communications Act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is “grossly offensive.” Well, I don't know how you define that. I wouldn't—also, who defines it is the real question, as far as I'm concerned.

I mean, I've looked into this legislation to some degree, and one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offense, which has become a subjective reality. If—and you can understand why that might be to some degree, because how would you define hate, and how would you define offense without, especially the latter, without making recourse to someone's subjective experience?

But then, of course, well, we'll delve into that in a moment. I should start with the hard question, I suppose, which is—well clearly, people can say hateful things, and those things can be damaging psychologically and physiologically, I suppose.

If people are stressed enough, and the borderline is very difficult to identify, why is it that people shouldn't just assume that you're a mean loudmouth and that they shouldn't pay any attention to you at all? Because you're concerned about this? I mean, which is—that's the general criticism of critics of hate speech, let's say.

And so, why in the world aren't the people who are putting this forward just trying to make the world a nicer place? What's the big problem here? Well, I think a lot of people do assume that I'm a mean loudmouth. I think they assume that about most people who defend freedom of speech.

I think—and I'm sure the latter part of your question is absolutely right insofar as I imagine a lot of the people who are skeptical about free speech are, in fact, trying to make the world a better place. I don't think that's mutually exclusive.

I mean, the problem here is that the legislation, as it currently stands here, means that, for instance, if you say something critical about me and I perceive that it was motivated by hatred towards me on the basis of my sexuality, for instance, I could phone the police, and that would be recorded, and would appear on hate crime statistics in this country because it's all about perception.

That word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the hate crime legislation, the word perception of the victim. And again, I say victim, not complainant, which suggests a complete disregard for due process, but I suppose we can leave that aside.

But the most common and the most frightening misconception I have found when it comes to people defending free speech is that they are doing so because they want to have the right to say appalling things about people with no comeback whatsoever. And they want to go back to some imaginary good old days, you know, where you could just be casually homophobic and racist and sexist and all the rest of it, and no one would call you out for that.

Now, I don't know anyone who falls into that category, and most people who are advocating for free speech are doing so precisely because they are aware that in countries where free speech protections are meager, minorities tend to suffer the most. And in fact, there seems to be a corollary to me that those who are genuinely for free speech are also for equal rights and protecting the vulnerable in society.

And this perception, which I really find unpleasant—this perception that if you are standing up for this most foundational of principles of free speech, if you're standing up for that, you can only be doing so if you have a nefarious motive. I mean, what a horribly pessimistic view of humanity.

And it seems to be—well, it seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis, for example, that all western social organizations, particularly western, are based on power and are best conceived of as tyrannical. And so if that's your view, why would you not assume that most uses of speech are essentially an exercise of power in the service of tyranny?

But then, why would you assume that the government in control of any particular country isn't part of that tyranny that you're describing? It seems odd to me to be mindful of the potential for tyranny but then to outsource all your individual liberties to the state. It seems contradictory to me.

Well, I guess the way that is elided over is by allowing the hypothetical individual victim to define the offense. This is the problem, though. This is—I mean, the problem I've run into, and this is why partly why I appreciated your book, is that increasingly people are called upon to defend fundamental assumptions that were so taken for granted that virtually no one has an argument that's fully articulated at hand. When no one questions free speech, no one has to defend it thoroughly.

As soon as it's questioned, well, it becomes an extraordinarily complicated problem—the same with gender identity. When it's—when no one's paying attention to it, it's obvious, but as soon as you have to think it through, it becomes a rat's nest, to say the least.

When I was in the UK a few years ago, I saw a number of things that I felt were disturbing. We seem to have accepted the omnipresence of CCTV cameras to a degree that I found horrifying, frankly. I don't like CCTV cameras. I don't like the message they portray, which is that everyone is criminal enough so they should be surveyed all the time, and someone needs to be watching.

I noticed, too, in London in particular, that many buildings had instituted airport-level security so that you had to pass through a metal detector and have your bags checked, etc., while you were moving in and out of buildings. And it struck me as quite horrifying, given that, as far as I'm concerned, Great Britain and its legal and parliamentary traditions are the epicenter, or at the epicenter, of western freedoms.

I mean, you could make a case for France, I suppose, but not a strong one, as far as I'm concerned. Yet this—your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem. And now, on the heels of that, we have this multiplication of hate crime. That's as much a surprise to me as it is to you.

I mean, you won’t have seen all of the CCTV cameras. Believe it or not, they're absolutely everywhere. You can't walk anywhere in the UK without being potentially monitored. You know, I'm not saying someone's watching you all the time, but things are being recorded and digitized.

Yeah, and it's interesting to me because I remember back in the early 2000s when the government was trying to push through its ID card scheme. Broadly speaking, the left was unanimously against it, and they didn't like this idea of living in a society where there's someone on the corner saying papers, please. No one really wanted that.

But we've become very docile and very accepting of the idea that we need to be coddled and monitored by the state. I mean, I know there's a recent debate about vaccine passports, and people seem very blase about this idea that we might have to have our ID embedded and encoded onto a card to get anywhere or to do anything.

So I think there's something going on there, and it is connected with what you've brought up in terms of hate crime legislation. We've just become accustomed. I mean, you mentioned specifically the problem in Scotland, and seriously, it relates very closely to what you're saying, because the SNP, who are the only really party with any clout in Scotland—that's the Scottish National Party—and it's never a good idea, is it, when you have one political party which doesn’t really have an opposition?

They have a reputation for quite nanny state-ish policies. You know, they introduced a, uh—what was it called? The named person scheme? It didn’t go through in the end, but they wanted to assign every child born in Scotland with a state guardian. You know, they effectively didn't trust the parents to raise their own kids. They have other examples, you know, minimum pricing on alcohol or a ban on two-for-one pizzas because they don't trust poor people not to gain weight.

Um, so all sorts of these sorts of policies. But in this current hate crime bill, which has just sailed through because there's no opposition, uh, Hamza Yousaf, the Justice Secretary, has pushed through. He specifically included an element to this bill which says that they can criminalize you for things you say in the privacy of your own home.

I mean, that to me is—I mean, that's just a given. I would have never thought that anyone in this country would not consider that to be an incredible invasion of liberty. You can make a strong case for Scotland as the, uh, ground zero for many of the developing—many of the concepts that undergird the entire western notion of freedom and to see that emerging in Scotland is absolutely stunningly terrifying, as far as I'm concerned.

You think of Mel Gibson with a face covered in woad shouting “freedom” as he's executed, you know, in "Braveheart." You do think of Scotland as being associated with it. But honestly, Scotland, for some reason—and I don't know what it is, and it might be to do that it's effectively this one-party state—it seems to have this incredible sense, and they’ve really bought into this idea that unless they can police the thought and the thought and speech of their citizens, then they will just run amok.

There's another element to that bill. I don't know if you know about this. There's a specific element on the bill which talks about the public performance of a play, so they've effectively said that they will criminalize public performances.

So say if it can be deemed that those performances were designed to stir up hatred—that’s the formulation, stir up hatred. I'm not quite sure what that means necessarily, but when Hamza Yousaf was questioned about this in parliament, he actually said, well, theoretically a neo-Nazi or someone from the far right could get together with a group of actors and put on a play to recruit people to his cause.

And as I said at the time, you know, I don't know any neo-Nazis, but they're not into amateur dramatics. That’s not their thing. They don’t do that. They wouldn't get involved, and yet he's got this idea in his head that that is a feasible— I mean, it seems ridiculous, but it's not really because the ramifications are quite serious.

And the way it's just gone through without any opposition really, really troubles me. I mean, there have been modifications, I should say, in fairness—in the initial bill—in the initial draft of the bill, they had said that you could be criminalized irrespective of intention. In other words—yes, that was terrifying, awful.

And, you know, if you wrote a play that then stimulated someone to join the far right, then you were still responsible whether you intended it or not. Now, the problem is, you know, with theatrical representation or any kind of artistic representation is sometimes you want to represent the worst aspects of humanity because that's part of drama and literature and all the rest of it.

I mean, you would be—there would be no artistic freedom if that went through. So unfortunately, that element of the bill was modified. Well, and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important—that’s even more catastrophic.

It's always been a miracle to me that our legal system ever became psychologically sophisticated enough so that intent rather than outcome was what mattered, because you have to be a sophisticated thinker to see that someone has done damage to someone else.

But—and so the damage is real and marked and troublesome and costly—all of that, painful. But because the intent wasn't there, the severity of the action is dramatically mitigated. That's a sign of maturity and sophistication to note that, and the fact that it's built into the legal system is nothing short of remarkable.

And then to remove that and to make the felt consequences the arbiter of the reality of the situation is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law as such, as far as I can tell. Well, moreover, it's something that everyone intuitively understands. We all understand the difference between murder and manslaughter.

You know, we all understand that intent actually does, like you say, escalate the severity of a crime. And it's—and it's—it's bigger than that, isn't it? It's because this—like this idea that intention doesn't matter is actually built into so much of this, what we call social justice discourse.

If you think of critical race theory, it's just a given that there are racist structures, and you can be racist without intending to be racist. And I really do dispute that because I think in order to be racist, intention has to be at the heart of that; otherwise, it's incoherent.

To address your question again, I want to prioritize free speech, complete free speech in virtually every case. In our society, there is an alarming counter-narrative that seeks to censor ideas on behalf of various social justice principles.

A salient aspect of the dialogue around free speech revolves around my series entitled “No Safe Spaces,” and I must say that the unique personalities involved in its production, inclusive of respected individuals such as Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager. Their passionate opposition to censorship harmonizes remarkably well with the underlying ethos of the project.

Our respective backgrounds are vastly different—an attribute that ultimately enriches the dialogue and exploration we undertake within the documentary. For instance, I’ve observed that right-wing extremists are often more easily identifiable as opposed to the vast array of leftist ideologies, which can occasionally blur into a more vague collective without a clear threshold.

When scrutinizing these extremist views, it’s apparent that conservative elements acknowledge their ideological boundaries firmly. However, this clarity of demarcation is often not reciprocated on the left.

In conclusion, I believe the ongoing conversations and analyses about free speech, particularly in relation to the present discourse around social justice, are crucial for fostering a healthier societal engagement moving forward.