Interview with the grievance studies hoaxers

All right, well I'm talking today with Dr. James Lindsay, Dr. Peter Boghossian, and Dr. Helen Pluckrose and they're all famous or infamous depending on your perspective as the authors of a series of hoax articles that were published in what purport to be academic journals in the last year. Following up work done by Sokal, how long ago was that? Now it's got to be like 25 years now. Right, right.

So we've all assumed or you've always said that the situation hasn't improved. So the first thing I'm going to do is have each of you introduce yourself and then we'll launch right into a discussion about the... let's call it the scandal. Dr. Lindsay?

Yeah, um good to be here. So I have a background in mathematics and physics. My PhDs in math. I left academia in 2010 and have been studying mostly religious and moral philosophy and psychology since. Then I got wrapped up in this idea. I kind of was the, I guess, epicenter of the project. I did all the submissions and managed all the emails and all of that. And then Peter and Alan filled in all of my weaknesses.

So we spent, you know, about 18 months working on this—a year really ten months writing papers. Then there is the getting ready to go public. So, that's kind of who I am and how I got into this. I’m just a lapsed mathematician who gives a lot of concern to how we produce knowledge and what academic standards are and should be.

So what did, why did you leave academia?

I wish I could say that it was like this prescient thing. I saw the writing on the wall that it was going mad and I wanted out, but really it was just a number of personal responsibilities and commitments that led me to now want to pursue employment where I didn't know where I would be placed from, you know one postdoc to the next. It was family commitments primarily.

But you were still interested enough to continue while with this project—interested enough in the academic world.

Yeah, I never really wanted to stop researching or reading and thinking and coming up with new ideas. It's very difficult to do mathematics without some institutional backing. Math is hard as some people have noticed. So I didn't have the resources necessary really to pursue mathematical research independently, but I found that I could, you know, dig into philosophy and I could dig into psychology, kind of on my own—not professionally, of course—but enough to get an idea of what I was looking at in a philosophical sense to answer questions that I was really deeply interested in.

Mostly the question that drove me probably from about 2011 forward was, you know, what do people really mean? What are they talking about when they say the word God? And so I really got involved in talking about their thinking about religion. That's what led me to religious and moral psychology—trying to understand why people believe things that they do and why they manifest their beliefs in certain ways. Ultimately, because I was, you know, that kind of a guy, I just wanted to find out what the...

I figure I live in the southeast US. It's a really religious area. People talk to me about their belief in God all the time. I hear it constantly at different levels—from the, you know, "yeah, there's I kind of believe" level all the way to the borderline insane level of conviction to very implausible propositions level.

And I wanted to understand. I know the people talking about ideas like God mean something when they say the term. It's something very, not just do they mean something—they mean something very important to themselves. And I wanted to figure out from a perspective that didn't rely upon the religious—theology or the religious mythology or narrative—what they were speaking to as articles within the material world.

And so I became very interested in that and spent a number of years reading and writing about it. And by the way, the kind of culture war, if you want to call it that, progressed at seeing what was happening to people. I was interested in Sam Harris, for example. He was certainly one of these people. You see these people get called racist or sexist for what seemed to be nothing and you try to dig into it again with the interest in meaning of words. I kept seeing these references back to these, you know, power dynamics and sociological definitions that they only see racism or sexism as structural entities that allow basically people of... people to be considered racist or sexist just because of their identity.

By just by virtue of being, say, a white male you could be racist and sexist. You inevitably are. That's exactly, exactly so. That's what led me to get curious about the grievance studies canon, ultimately.

I see. Okay, Peter, okay, let's hear from you and tell everybody who you are and what you're up to.

I'm currently teaching philosophy at Portland State University in the philosophy department and I am up to... James Lindsay and I just finished a book, How to Have Impossible Conversations, that will come out probably in 2019 from Da Capo Press. And I don't know what I'm up to now because I may be looking at a career change very soon.

So we will get into that later, but the university filed charges against me. They found me guilty of not seeking IRB approval and the investigation is ongoing for the falsification...

Oh! So we better have quite a conversation as well about IRB approval; that's another rabbit hole we can plunge down because that's another catastrophic catastrophe that the university has inflicted upon itself over the last two decades. So that's something that's become increasingly politicized so it's very difficult to understand how you could get IRB approval for a satire, or why you might need it.

Yeah, okay. Okay. Good Helen, let's hear from you.

Well, I'm the member of the group who isn't a doctor. I'm a lonely MA, but I have a background in literature and early late medieval early modern studies. I'm interested in how women used the Christian narrative to get authority and autonomy for themselves, sort of 1300 to 1700. So I'm looking at how this changed before and after the Reformation—how the narratives changed.

I left at the end of my master's. I was intending to go back and do my PhD in medieval manuscripts, but it's just got... I keep going earlier and earlier, because it is so difficult to get away from the ideology. I'm interested in medieval manuscripts, but not overwhelmingly. I want to look at social history, but it's so difficult to do that because there is a pressure now to do so anachronistically: to read it through gender ideology of today.

So I have to accept that the reason I was going to do medieval manuscripts is because I can translate and transcribe and this is something objective that I can do. I can produce an edition of texts which aren't readily available and explain them, and that's the only real way that I'm able to look at religious writing by and about women in any objective way. And it isn't really what I want to do, so I stepped away for a year.

And in that year, I started writing about post-modernism, about feminism, about liberalism and ideology. And then they just got to be so much to do with that. But I haven’t gone back at all, so I'm involved in writing about what's going on right now and so that is where I'm now.

I see. Well, it's interesting because you talked about your belief that women in the mid-stages of development of the Christian Church were using the ideas to actually liberate themselves and to... Yeah, for example from Marjorie Kemp to Amelia Lanier and we're looking at very different ways in which, you know, within the Catholic narrative, for example, women would say, "Well God speaks directly to me. He is the ultimate patriarch, so that gives me a certain authority."

To disagree with a patriarchal church if I think it's fair with my husband. And then later, after the Reformation, there was a slightly different emphasis in which women, you know, everyone could interpret the Bible and that includes women. So there was a different kind of authority there too. So that's generally been what I've been interested in.

There's slightly different ways that women have approached biblical texts, biblical narratives and yes, and used them to challenge our mainstream interpretations and make some pretty good arguments. Well, Amelia Lanier certainly did—Marjorie Kemp mostly screams.

Okay, why are you guys telling us what the genesis of this project was? Let's outline the project itself—the sequence of papers that you wrote—and let's talk about the genesis of that as well. So I want to take that one.

Okay? It's really kind of interesting. I don't know if your audience would know this, Jordan or not, but all three of us, you know, were writing a bit within what might have been considered the new atheist vein and working within that. And I was working on a book trying to answer my big kind of early 2010's research question: What do people mean when they say God?

I was writing a book called that. I eventually titled, Everybody is Wrong About God, and Peter called me one day while I was working on either the book itself or the research for it—I don't recall the specifics at the time—but he called me one day and said, "You know, dude, I think I'm going crazy. I keep trying to tell people something that's as obvious as can be to me, and somebody has to believe I'm not crazy. Everybody thinks I'm nuts. Please tell me I'm not crazy."

And so I said, you know, what is it? And he said, "I look at the way people in gender studies use their scholarly canon, the way they produce that, the way that they refer to it, the fact that it seems disconnected in a literal sense from what's going on in reality and feels like it's their Bible—it feels like it's a holy scripture for something, but I don't know exactly what this is."

And so, we got curious about that scholarly canon kind of from that point. It wasn't long after that that the infamous feminist Glaciology paper came out, where a few four or five researchers published a very well-funded study showing—they're claiming to show that glaciology is inherently sexist all the way back to its roots—back to, you know, the intrepid explorers of mountains and polar regions and all this, so it's justified by being a big tough guy in the 19th century or whatever, and that apparently somehow this masculinist bias hangs over it.

And so the answer to this is to put feminist art projects as part of glacier science, and (...)ology as part of glacier science or else it's racist and sexist. And I mean, I remember reading the paper lightly at the time and thinking, there's no way this is real.

And Peter and I had a phone call. We started looking at new peer review on Twitter at the same time. Oh, you should never look at that. Oh my gosh!

So we've actually got two issues here then. Let's say now all the sudden because, yeah, there's the issue of what's going on in the social justice-oriented academic disciplines and then there's a deeper issue of how people view the world individually and collectively, yes through the lens of a belief system and the probability that that belief system will take on something approximating the trappings of a religious movement.

Mm-hmm, yes!

So that's a deeper question. I mean, one of the things that I discussed continually with Sam Harris when we had our series of debates was the question of the inescapability of something approximating the religious framework to orient people in relationship to action in the world. All right, like I happen to believe that a framework like that is inescapable. The question is not whether you're going to have one; it's which one you're going to have and what is it going to be rooted in.

And I mean, one of the things I think that both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky warn people about in the late 19th century was that—what this isn't a quote from either of them, but it's something approximating someone else whose name I don't remember—He who believes in nothing will end up believing in anything. And there’s something in that that's extraordinarily deep as far as I'm concerned.

All right, so you were interested in religious phenomenology and then you guys started to see that, as far as you were concerned, a variety of different quasi-academic or academic movements were taking on the trappings of our religious—they were starting to look religious in their approach and in their application of their beliefs, right?

On the social justice end of it, right? Community, for example, was definitely engaging in... of course they had their unique vocabulary that they speak to one another in and identify one another by, which is kind of like an ecclesiastical vocabulary, but if social justice, and then they were definitely involved... what they call political correctness is in practice virtually identical to what you see with people carrying blasphemy.

So these parallels started to stick out at the same time. The way that we started looking at the real peer review Twitter account in the way that they seem to be producing our knowledge that they could then refer to virtually replicates special revelation. They came up with their ideas; they believed that they came from some morally backed source of goodness, and put them forth. And then they were morally vetted and given an epistemological status they didn't deserve as a result.

Okay, what do you think the sources...

The source at the time I had no idea, but now after having done the project I think the source is actually what I've come to call a postmodern mythology that our social reality is conditioned upon the use of language and representation and it's all done in service to power dynamics that underlie how society works. Those power dynamics are trapped up in identity and mediated primarily through language and media.

Okay, so I've identified the sources of that—not only me, obviously—but I've identified the sources of that belief with the French postmodernist movement fundamentally. Other people trace some of it back farther to what's essentially something approximating a Marxist doctrine, which is a doctrine of... which is a doctrine of power relations, I would say.

Sure, you have any criticisms or further comments on that? Let's call it genealogy, genealogy or...

Lynn? Helen?

Good, yeah, I largely agree with the idea that we had quite a profound epistemic shift in the late 60s with the rise of the postmodernists. I disagree with people who cry and kind of relate this closely to Marxism. I think it's clear that they have a common ancestor and that they have certain ideas in common, but if we conflate Marxism and postmodernism too closely, we are not looking at the really profound differences in epistemology in which Marxism was really trying to continue a modernist project. It was totalitarian; it was objectivist mostly and it went sort of in a straight line.

And the... if there is a word for the extremes of Marxism, it is totalitarianism; if there's a word for the extremes of postmodernism, it's disintegration, its fragmentation. So we're looking now at something very different—something very intangible that is coming in, and it's saying we cannot access an objective truth. Everything is created in discourses, empowers us in systems of power.

Okay, so why in the world is power and privilege them? I mean, it still seems that the postmodernists are willing to assume that the pursuit of power is, first of all, obvious that everyone's pursuing it, but it's also okay for those who don't have it to pursue it. So it's not as if they've abandoned the idea as far as I can tell of a linear narrative towards some end. The end seems to me to be power.

And so why is that justifiable from the postmodern perspective, given that linear movement and meta-narratives aren't justifiable? Because of this change that happened in the late 80s, so when Circlo, for example, he did his hoax. What he was looking at was this quite sort of pure post-modernism—this very sort of intangible idea that's an objective reality can't exist; that we can't grasp anything; that everything is a construct.

But what happened in the 80s gradually was that this... Just after the prolific amounts of writing, it just kind of fizzled. Because once you've disintegrated and dismantled absolutely everything and it's all in a mess on the floor, you have got nowhere to go with this.

So we started seeing then the rise in materialist feminism first of all and then within sort of critical race approaches, intersectionality in queer theory, in post-colonialism particularly. We started seeing a change towards, “Okay, so everything is a cultural construct, but we can't address anything if we don't accept that a certain group of people in a certain place at a certain time experience certain things.”

So what we’re looking at now is an objective reality that oppression and systems of power exist, but already... everything else is socially constructed. So the funding that construct has power, yes, it is objectively true that power is benefiting straight white men and disadvantaging women of color, trans women, etcetera.

So this was the change that happened then so now it's politically actionable, and this... I mean, Kimberlé Crenshaw brought this most explicitly when she said it’s politics applied to postmodern theory.

Okay, so we want to get this straight because it's very, very important. So you just... you distinguish the postmodern movement from the Marxist movement because the Marxism... Marxists were still moving in a single direction and you considered that still part of the modernist project. You equated Marxism and post-modernism insofar as they both adopt, let's say, an oppressor-jared.

Yes, although many other things do too, and often that's quite warranted. I mean, the American Revolution, for example, was an oppressor-oppressed revolution. Power and power differentials exist; the issue is not there are other realities that might be considered exactly... history is whether that we're seeing and truly it...

Yes, and whether it's reasonable to reduce everything to a single dimension of motivation. So the postmodern project collapses into its own nihilism and something emerges out of the ashes and that's the assumption that a transcendent reality does in fact exist, but the only defining feature of that transcendent reality is the existence of power and the existence of power differential, and identity—and that's associated with identity.

Okay, but then the question becomes just... there's a question that goes underneath that, even, which is, well, why is it... Why is it that that is accepted as the fundamental reality? Because there's no rationale for that in post-modernism itself, in fact, they should criticize that.

They do, they do very much. And this the argument that goes on repeatedly with the old-style postmodernist saying, "This isn't post-modernism." And so we tend to call it applied post-modernism, John R. Stowe, we call it thePomide cluster because it's just a set of ideas about identity, about power, about privilege, about language, the importance of language and hierarchies and things which have come from post-modernism.

Which have got politicized and then within activism have got convinced into kind of user-friendly chunks and further bastardized. So we can't take this away from post-modernism; it didn't come from anywhere else, but neither is it the... that there are pure sort of deconstructive or post-structuralist or any of that whole sort of massive range of theory that it existed from the late 60s into the mid-80s. That's... that died. It's gone. It's fragmented itself as it is always bound to do.

So to drive to your question about why or how they justified this change, I'll just say we called this set of disciplines or approaches grievance studies for a reason: it's about grievances. It's the politics of grievance. So they feel aggrieved; therefore, they feel justified in trying to disrupt power they see that exists and to claim power for themselves. It's social revenge. That's what they’re... that's what their animus is. That's their moral justification for continuing to fragment and to chase the very thing they say is, you know, the great corruptor of man, which is power.

If this is true, I do. I have some sympathy with that claim. It doesn't matter that there are philosophical incoherencies within the structure, within the intellectual structure at all. What matters is that there’s an animus and a motive, and the motive is fundamentally something approximating revenge.

Why would you say... why would you say revenge and not justice? Like, and this goes to another issue: just obviously all three of you opposed this movement and we've already decided in this discussion that it's something like the Revenge of the Marginalized, but the marginalized could well object. Well, this isn't revenge. You only see it that way because you're part of the privileged power group and it's actually a search for… it's a search for genuine justice.

You're and also most of the marginalized on social justice-oriented that—that's what we have to remember. This is speaking on behalf of women and racial and sexual minorities. Most members of every group do not ascribe to it. They're politically diverse. So that's one of the reasons that that the claim for the pursuit of justice is invalidated.

It's that there's no evidence whatsoever that the activist types who dominate these disciplines are valid representatives of the communities that they purport to stand for. And in fact, if you surveyed the communities themselves in any reasonable manner, then the communities indicate their lack of agreement with this way of looking at the world.

Yeah, yes, okay. Okay. And of course, there is also the complicating element that nearly always appears that you do have kernels of truth on both sides of that discussion. There are legitimate questions of justice that are being tied up into this and then there are legitimate reasons to see it as being motivated primarily by something approximating revenge or grievance or reparations or something like that and they get intertwined.

And as you were mentioning with any time you're working with post-modern epistemologies, there's no reason to expect consistency. They reject consistency as a bug in the system. They're unrepentant about being inconsistent, so that's no small point. And I think for people watching, that point needs to be punched home.

So Jim, could you speak to a little more about that?

Well, yeah, it's um—the idea that you would be consistent is one of the ideas that would be caught up in the Western philosophical tradition, as they would phrase it. It's caught up in the exam tradition that was bred of white and male power, and so that needs to be disrupted because that power inherently, from the perspective of this worldview, that power inherently corrupts.

But more importantly and inherently, always acts to preserve and maintain and legitimize itself.

Okay, so the demand for consistency becomes itself an act of oppression against me. That's all seems reasonable to me.

So look, so here's a peculiar thing and it's an observation of something approximating, let's say, a Freudian notion of projection. The people who are pushing this viewpoint aren't legitimate representatives of their communities in any real sense of the matter and they push a particular viewpoint that has very little academic credibility as far as I'm concerned.

And it is primarily concerned with political activism and with the obtaining or the justification of obtaining power. Now we could assume that this is being done on behalf of the people who are putting forward the doctrine and so to me, see, I've come to understand that part of the reason that people cling to their belief systems is because they have...

Their the reason they have the moral authority to occupy the hierarchical position that society has granted them is because they're regarded as experts in a belief structure and if the their claim to that expertise is questioned, and their moral justification for occupying their position is eradicated, and it's the position that gives them purpose in life and that protects them from uncertainty and anxiety.

It's not the belief structure itself, you see it's very fabric that they're experts in the belief system and that justifies their position in the hierarchy. So they put forward this claim to continue justifying the fact that they occupy—and very perversely—and this is the for any projection is very perversely the very positions of power whose existence they criticize.

This would be the university professor claims in particular.

That seems reasonable to you or is there something wrong with that line of...

Comports actually with what I, from reading John Haidt, for example, who talks about psychosocial evaluation and the way that human beings do that with one another, how we identify where we stand in our social and moral hierarchies and how we... where we position ourselves and others.

And that one of those three dimensions he named divinity. And so that would be the part you're speaking to. So we gain status and the hierarchy through our closeness of kin. So if you and I are friends, you rank me higher than I probably deserve because that’s how humans do. And we gain status by reputation and that’s why we care what Michael Jordan thinks about politics, and we gain status by our moral standing which is what John Haidt called divinity.

And of course, he explored it primarily in The Happiness Hypothesis with regard to his trips, I think, to India and seeing traditional religion and then comparing that directly against so-called weird societies in Western democracies.

And I think that what we’re actually seeing in a lot of these cases is we’re seeing partly at least, people are acting out what often gets completed with religion, in fact, is that they're acting out the need to fulfill or participate in that third dimension of psychosocial evaluation.

Although in secular societies we throw out the explicit religious structure for it and we have to find it in other ways.

So that's what you're actually talking about. They occupy a moral expertise that moral expertise gives them standing within the prevailing moral and social milieu, and then that defines their place in the community, both in terms of prestige and in terms of hierarchy.

So they're basically acting out precisely what they're accusing all other disciplines of doing—irony?

Oh, yeah, and the difference is to see, the thing is the difference as far as I’m concerned is that if you look at a discipline like engineering, which I think is perhaps as close to the polar opposite of this, this might be managed.

One of the things that engineers do is look at the world in a certain way, but another thing they do is build bridges.

Exactly, right. That's right.

There's an objective real-world direction there—there's philosophy and their beliefs that results in something of tangible and universally recognized benefit to the community at large and something that can fail.

And that's right, right. Right, also that's very important.

Okay now, okay, next issue. So now the first issue, first of the next two issues, say is why is it that you three found yourself in the position where you decided to take this on as a critical project and why is it that so few other academics are doing so?

I don't have good answers for why so few academics are doing so because I don't want to just blatantly call people cowards that I don't know.

But you don't get treated well for fighting!

Let's dig into that a bit.

Okay, because I think cowardice is one—or fear.

And let's not... let's go with fear. And let's also note that the fear is well justified!

Very just, yeah, that's correct, right.

Well Peter, you're in a great position to speak to that because what's happening to you?

Yeah, so I don't know if you want to go down the path of what's happening to me, but... I think you're right. Our mutual friend Brett Weinstein said to me that academia, when we had a conversation about academia, is self-selecting for cowardice. And I think it's a process that people go through before they have tenure where they're afraid to buck the system, afraid to challenge ideas. They're afraid to question because they won't get tenure.

And then once they do get tenure, then they won't make it a moat climb.

Now, that sort of... the same thing happens in corporations at the middle manager level; like it's not a disease that's endemic to academia.

Well, it's not, but it's one variable in a suite of variables that we have to take a look at. The other one is the culture in which the cultural milieu that Jim spoke about in which people are terrified to be called sexist, racist, bigots; they don't challenge those… I’m even hesitant to say the things they don’t challenge, but I'll say it like race and IQ or trans issues. Transform issues if you teach an ethics class. People won't really dig into those issues in a substantive way.

But I think that there are many factors, but not just one... it's just you that people will come up to Jim and myself and I haven’t spoken explicitly to Helen about this and they’ll thank me.

They’ll thank me, “Oh, thank you so much! Oh great, can you do that publicly?”

No, no! The same thing happened to me!

So I think Peter, we should talk about what's happening to you because look, we talked about fear. We can talk about cowardice. We can talk about justifiable fear, because there's no pleasure in being isolated and mobbed and undermined and fired, right?

So the apprehension of that is not merely cowardice; it's... it's realistic! And I'm not underestimating the potential role, the additional role of cowardice, but... and there's another issue too here, and I've been thinking about it's like to me, many of these postmodern activists' propositions are so fundamentally absurd and so academically weak that most serious social scientists and pretty much all serious STEM types—the STEM researchers have just ignored them.

You know, they thought they were beneath contempt. You know, a brilliant postmodern activist idea like intersectionality, or like patriarchy theory, or like white privilege—all you have to do is spend an hour thinking through those things critically and you realize that there's absolutely nothing whatsoever to them methodologically or conceptually.

As Jim was saying, you know there can be a kernel of truth in things, but when they are theoretically built up... I mean, obviously, there are societies in which white people are regarded more positively on average, but this is something that can be measured empirically, which can be looked at, which can be talked about. And we don't actually have that; we have imaginary knapsacks and talk of complicity and epidemiological environments in which white people literally can't understand what's going on.

So we get it, and we get a big mess and it's... the kernel of truth is in there, and so that gives them the opportunity to kind of retreat to this sensible space where they’ll say, “But there is racism and that there is sexism.”

Well, yes! Of course there is! But what you're doing here with these theoretical concepts is not looking realistically and reasonably at that problem of univariate reduction, right?

It's like, okay, well racism is a problem, sexism is a problem, we’ll say—and well, any form of discrimination that isn't associated with the hypothetical outcome of the project is a problem. But there are methods that everyone who is a decent social scientist knows to measure those and to estimate the proportion of the variance in the outcome problem that those issues are accounting for, and the postmodern activist types do absolutely none of them!

Yeah, they wouldn’t... they wouldn't pay attention.

Yeah. What you said, I mean, why would they? Because they don't care about their agenda; they're driven in there. They're not truth-oriented.

So there's gonna be no point to even think like that. Well, they also can't—they don't have the method without the training knowledge, exactly.

So that also provides additional impetus for being motivated to criticize those because it's a lot easier than facing the reality and the consequences of your own ignorance.

And because... Let’s talk about what's happening to you, because I want to know about the cost that you're buried for this and then we'll go back to why you guys decided to do what you did.

So PSU, like many college campuses, has become an ideological community, and I've demonstrated that I don't fit that mold and I suspect that they're gonna go to great lengths to get rid of me. So what's happened is I've been found guilty of not seeking IRB approval and—

Okay, you should tell the viewers what that means and provide some background detail because it's okay.

Okay, so IRB approval is... it's called Institutional Review Board, and whenever you do an experiment on human subjects, human beings or animals, by the way, you need to go through the IRB and you need to get permission, and you detail exactly what it is that you're going to do, and they say to you, “Well, you have to change this. You have to do this. Don’t do this,” etc., and then they give you permission.

Okay. Now these... systems, just a little more background, these systems were originally set fundamentally to monitor relatively or potentially dangerous medical experimentation on human beings, but they've expanded their purview so that now it's impossible for anybody who is an academic in any institution to even interview people without seeking permission from a very vast and rigid bureaucratic structure that's easily politicized, yeah.

They came out of... and they do exist for good reasons, the Nuremberg Trials mainly, etc., etc. and people were... and that envelope as has... the number of experiments or the number of things that are caught under that umbrella continues to increase.

We can talk about the ethics of the IRB more generally, but in our case, or particularly marketing, though, the IRB has no... Jim and James and Helen don't fall under the auspices of PSU's IRB, so they can't be sanctioned. I, however, allegedly can be sanctioned.

So I've been found guilty on that first charge, which...

Howard, why now?

Look, let's tell everybody he published a sequence of papers. How many papers in journals, how many—so we wrote 27 of them were accepted and four were published.

On the cusp of publication, for example.

Okay, let's get it straight. These are satirical publications that were published in hypothetically serious academic journals. And now Peter, you’re being gone after for not seeking Institutional Review Board permission to publish studies that didn’t exist.

Yeah, two things—that’s the first thing I’ve been found guilty of, and it’s escalated to the provost and the president of the university.

And I believe that the provost is a former gender studies scholar and on the names of those people just I’ll let that sit there. I do—I do I can't pronounce the president’s name, to be blunt with you.

And the provost is new, provost. I'm not avoiding the question; I just don't... maybe that’s fine, we can always put that in the description of the video.

So, what are you guilty of exactly? Because these studies didn't exist; now they've decided that the journals, editors, and reviewers are the human subjects that we were studying.

So not the studies themselves, but go up one level of meta to the fact that we were studying the culture of journal review and publication. So the editors, who are not anonymous, and then the anonymous peer reviewers are considered to be the human subjects of our—I see, so that's supposed to be distinguishable from you thinking and writing about the things that you encounter in your own life, for example, which is also what now supposed to be subject to IRB approval?

Yeah, so okay, so there's a lot of moving parts to this.

So we need to break it down. I want to continue with the... excuse me, guilty of not seeking IRB approval, that can include term up determination from my current position.

And I just want to speak to that before I talk about the data fabrication charges, so I don't agree with the decision, but I definitely understand the pressures that they have on them to do something.

Who knows what’s happening? Russia’s pressures from a—who these activist types are a very tiny proportion of the population.

So—and when we're talking about pressure, what exactly do we mean?

Well, there was an anonymous hit piece by 12 or 11 of my colleagues published in the student newspaper, the Portland Vanguard, and they may be a small representation.

It's unclear to me—In academia, I don't think they’re a small proportion of the population. They are a large, and I think that they wield institutionalized power and have weaponized things like Title IX against people they don't like.

So there's that. But I do want to say I don’t really know what's happening behind the scenes; my guess is that this group is extraordinarily vocal but with their face, with no as a decision for what kind of university they want to be.

Is it one that uses power to support freedom of inquiry and pursue the truth, or do they want to protect social justice at all costs?

And the fabrication of data thing is interesting because that’s an ongoing—a currently ongoing investigation and again, those are very, very serious charges.

Let's look here too, like there’s a very big difference—let’s get this very clear—between a self-admitted satire which had historical precedent and which has ethical justification even if you don’t agree with the justification, and data fabrication.

Data fabrication occurs when you put data forward and you claim that it's a truthful representation of a real-world situation.

And obviously that's distinct from satire in comedy. Everyone understands that distinction.

Well, the idea is that those rules were put in there for very good reasons and that is people wouldn't use that to advance their careers and they wanted to hide the results so they don’t want anybody to see what it was.

So the problem with that is it would, as Sokol wrote, that it would contaminate the research lines in perpetuity.

So what the success of our project depended upon: it being revealed so that no longer applies, and the idea that we would somehow—not only have I not benefited from this, but this has come at a tremendous cost to me so, yes, it's, in my opinion, a grotesque abuse of what it means to fabricate data.

And it may be interesting to see... It'll be interesting to see what happens. It’ll be interesting to see when it goes to court.

Okay, so, so... well, yeah, tell me about the proceedings when it goes to court. What kind of court is it going to?

I don't know. I mean, first let me even take a step back from there. So if you look at the timeline of events when this occurred—and I have that off the top of my head—but the—when I was found guilty from the IRB, there's been a series of not seeking IRB approval.

There is a series of a time when the university president could just end this just like that. You can say, well, we're going to put a letter of reprimand in your Wiener; we've decided you've already done this.

They can... ominous kind of awkward.

Who found you guilty?

That was the IRB in the day. That was December 14th.

I see. So the IRB is policing its own policies here.

Yeah, so that was it for the IRB charge. The open data falsification charge is open and still being investigated.

And that actually started, I think, like two or three days after we went public. He got an email and said, “You've been summoned to a meeting,” but we were all in Portland together at the time, and I was over the IRB which purports to be an ethics committee doesn't have any problem with the ethics of policing themselves.

No conflict of interest, clearly.

There's something appalling about that, and it's not surprising because there's plenty of calling about the institutional review boards.

Guilty, it’s been escalated to the president. And again, the president could just decide, just like that, you know, we're just gonna put a letter in this file of reprimand and we're gonna move on.

And I think that the whole problem would be ended except my guess is that there are a lot of people crying for vengeance right now against me, right?

So they want to hang you out to dry as an object lesson to people who would dare to do the things that you threw?

Because I'm a heretic and I'm a blasphemer and I have attacked their canons and there has to be some price that’s paid for this. That's my guess on their thinking.

And then the fabrication of data charge, again, that's a very serious charge.

Data... and those rules are put in place for a reason. I don’t think a court would find...

I mean it would be if, see, when this goes to court or if it does, even go to court, the idea that this was fabricated either for personal gain or that would have to not be revealed at some time and that the future lines of literature would be contaminated and polluted, it's just... it's just not true.

And I think that...

Well, they also... clearly, it's a career-ending charge, so that's partly why it's being brought against you, right?

Data fabrication—there isn’t anything worse...

Well, there isn’t any. The same thing worse within the domain of science than you can do that you can do than that.

And it's really unfortunate and preposterous because the data fabrication occurred intentionally in the sense that we wanted to find out if they could detect because we suspected from the very beginning, as we were kind of discussing earlier, that these people who largely work in humanities are not equipped to do social science.

But that's ultimately what they're basically doing, and so we wanted to see if they could detect utterly ridiculous data or data that were clearly cherry-picked or data or conclusions, I should say, that were drawn from data that aren't warranted.

And so we wrote papers that included, in this case, for example, a dog park paper, just transparently ridiculous data.

In fact, the first draft of that paper even... we knew the data were so bad that they were probably going to ask to see it.

And we thought, okay, so we...

So you go through the papers then. So, so why don't you go through the papers that have been published just briefly and say, yes, they are and... and tell us why they're transparently ridiculous because that's also attention, right?

Yeah, yeah, the dog park paper was the first one we had accepted in February, and it chronicles—it's a feminist scholar, putatively—that's chronicling dog rape culture by examining dog humping in Portland dog parks.

And then draws conclusions from that using black feminist criminology as a tool to conclude that it would be appropriate to train men as we train dogs, if only it were politically feasible.

So we have to come up with metaphorical equivalents and that it concludes that oppression of dogs based on perceived gender is real.

And the reason that that was allegedly concluded was we claimed that humans intervened and broke up gay dog rape much more frequently and vigorously than they broke up straight dog rape.

And the peen... it's already a bit weird.

These things—the paper included, for instance, the detail that the scholar sat in the dog park for a thousand hours over the course of a year— but never in the heavy rain—and observed and then examined, personally closely examined—the genitals of just short of ten thousand dogs, which if you've been to a dog park, you've probably realized the same people bring their dogs almost every day.

It’s there's not 10,000 dogs in any dog park in a year, but never mind.

Develop a reputation for looking at dogs' genitals?

Yeah, I think so.

And then immediately turning to ask their owners, "Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me your sexual orientation?" That’s what the paper says.

It says, "the genitals of 10,000 dogs, and then interrogated their owners as to their sexual orientations."

It includes details that are irrelevant, like whether dogs used the bathroom in the other dogs or in the food bowl, the water bowl.

It talked about, you know, the way people would break up dog fights, like doing jumping jacks and singing!

We thought this data was so absurd that we put in the first draft, which the journal saw, a line that said that we took the data and put it in a recycle bin.

So that they couldn't possibly ask us to produce it because we thought, "Oh man, if they ask for this data, which is so stupid, it's over."

So we said that we recycled the data, which is already its own research mis-practice, and no problem.

You know, the journal was like, "Just write it up!"

Okay, I can't believe we're having this conversation! Listen, the more we talk about this, the more ridiculous it gets.

There was the paper where we argued that if straight white... or straight man, I'm sorry, it doesn't matter what their races—if straight men were to anally penetrate themselves with sex toys, they'd become less transphobic and more feminist, which apparently got that conversation.

Either they may not want to have that conversation, but this data was... this conclusion, which was called a truly marvelous paper in an important contribution to knowledge by one of its reviewers.

This paper was published. This paper was based on interviews with 13 men, only eight of whom were straight and, of course, it was all interview data, and it was just people saying the most ridiculous things about their experience of sticking things in their own butts, and then their feelings about feminism and concern for rape culture and in their attitudes about trans people and so on, including one so-called social conservative who was quoted saying he didn’t want to take part in some stupid liberal study about sticking things up his butt.

I mean, it’s almost impossible to have looked at this and not thought, you know, something's going on here, but instead they thought a truly marvelous paper.

In its... that’s a second paper. A third paper was an ethnography allegedly of a 70-some-odd-year-old man who went to Hooters with his Brazilian jiu-jitsu class after workouts and sat there and basically just womanized for hours upon hours.

It recorded something like 10,000 hours or sorry, 10,000 minutes of conversation at the table, which could all be summarized... this was an example of clear cherry-picking of data. The only features of the conversation that were relevant were the way the guys hit on the servers or talked about the servers’ various body parts or, most importantly, how much they enjoyed the fact that Hooters provides them a place that they can go and tell young attractive women what to do in a situation in which they are contractually obligated to fulfill those orders.

Like literally double entendre on the word order: "Please, I would like some beer." That’s an order, so...

That was an example of clear cherry-picking and, of course, deriving ridiculous conclusions. Didn't you guys know while you were doing this that you were going to get yourself in like a boatload of trouble?

I mean, and now I see when you’re talking about it you laugh, and so you still got a sense of humor, which is quite a remarkable thing, but you did this for a long time and like...

Yeah, it’s hard to believe actually that you did manage to do it.

I had some moments, especially where—I mean, we were always aware that there would be a backlash! And then when I started actually signing the transfer of copyright documents to have the papers actually published, I started to feel a little like, you know, we might really get in some trouble for this.

But at this point we’re kind of in deep and might as well carry on and try to finish the experiment. We had intended to try to write papers for twelve months and then spend six to eight months kind of, you know, following up.

The academic publishing process is slow. They do the review, you get it back a couple months later, you have to do edits, it takes maybe another month or two before they accept or whatever, then publication maybe another couple months later, so all... it’s slow.

So we want to do a lot, you know six to eight months after twelve months of writing and that was the intended duration; that we should be wrapping up the project now if we didn’t get busted.

But about late summer, the dog park paper got picked up by some journalists and the real peer-review and got made fun of and we realized we were probably not going to make it to the end of our intended year and a half time span.

So we ended up writing for ten total months, which is a bit of time. And then what a lot of papers still under review, which was really a shame because I’m fairly sure that had to get in.

But I do want to speak to that, Jordan, because somebody had to do this!

Yeah! Because the ideology—the perfect these professors are looking at their classrooms as an ideology now and they're attempting to indoctrinate people and do things about reality that have nothing to do with reality.

They’ve placed an agenda ahead of the truth and it’s corroding our institutions, and it’s eroding trust in those universities and institutions.

And you identified the problem, many people identified the problem, but something had to be done about it beyond identification and calling these people out.

We needed to show that these ideological canons because the way that they were coming to knowledge is just epistemological—to say it's not rigorous is charitable!

So there kind of few pieces to that, right? So you, everybody, as we mentioned a little bit earlier, we touched upon, is now familiar with the idea that racism and sexism don't seem to mean the same thing they meant ten years ago.

You used to be able to say racist and sexist and amend discrimination based on race or sex and it could go in any direction, but now it’s got this power dynamic—privilege plus power stuff.

Everybody's talking about privilege, so that's everywhere—but if that’s one dimension, that it’s impossible to avoid that the sociological or grievance studies definitions for concepts are everywhere. But they’re also two other pieces of evidence.

One that we saw before we started—that would be a paper that was done by Charlotta Stern who documented how insular gender studies is, how they literally took the years since Steven Pinker published The Blank Slate, 2003, until 2015 or 16.

She looked at a bunch of papers, got a sample of those papers, and determined whether or not they incorporated or ignored the information that Pinker had shared as a test, and found that there was an overwhelming amount of just putting the blinkers on and pretending that biology still doesn't exist.

And that human nature is totally a pretense here.

I mean, the reason it’s not a pretense is because as far as I can tell, the people who are in these disciplines know absolutely nothing whatsoever about biology.

No, they don’t want it; the less you know about biology, the more you don’t want to know that, you need a daunting task.

Yeah, I want to speak to that for a moment, if I may. So at my university, there’s a course offered on the philosophy of race and it would seem to me that a minimum qualification one would need to teach that is that one would have to have some kind of degree in evolutionary biology, but that does not seem to be the case.

And I think, again, we’re seeing consistently... you know, race is such an explosive topic, but when you start with the idea that you have the... and then you work backward and cherry-pick the literature, and in this case, it’s extraordinarily easy because you just go to these journals and the canons of literature and then you start teaching that.

So what happens then is the kind of the self-fulfillment of the postmodern condition is that they then manufacture pieces and information that people take as knowledge.

That’s right.

We see that happening in our institutions now and it’s... nobody’s calling them out on it.

So it’s... again, I say that because it’s your point of why did we do this?

Because the public trust in these institutions is being eroded and we’re teaching our kids things that are just not true.

They're just... they’re totally untethered to reality, even though some of these people may be very well-meaning!

And there's always a citation. We learned there's always a cite; all the citations you want to find something that says anything ridiculous about sex toys and anal, taken care of!

There’s questions, power dynamics—using that already—that really is... that is the important thing to sort of realize it about what we did.

I mean, all of that ridiculous stuff that Jim was saying earlier, we were able to say that because there was already something out there which led to it or said it itself.

And so if you're actually looking at what our project is, something that's very important to look at is our references, because to make it... its satellite—some of it, like the dog park, really... yeah, there’s this humorous... there’s a very humorous element in it.

But on a deeper level, what it is is just gathering so much of this nonsense together, citing it, putting it in there, and then kind of making it do whatever it wanted it to do—that was the project.

And it's so your point is that you have embedded literature.

They really—I mean, a lot of some of the academics have said, “Well, we haven’t been fooled.”

Because we still stand by the papers; what you wrote was reasonable because they are indistinguishable.

And that really was the point we wanted to have. We’ve ended up with a really good resource for anyone who wants to know what is out there.

They can look at our references; they can look at the arguments if they enabled us to make; they can look at how the reviewers, what they rejected us for, what they accepted us for, what they pushed us to do.

There’s a very clear pattern, but because it is so complicated and so few people have taken the time it would take to read all of our papers, to read all of the comments, to follow up our references, it's not always clear that what we're doing is putting it right in the canon.

That is the other issue, and that has to do with the motivation of other academics not to be bothered with this, let's say, is that the statistic that I'm most familiar with is that about 80% of humanities papers get cited zero times.

And the problem is that even to go after very bad ideas in an academically rigorous way is actually an extraordinarily daunting task, and it might be daunting in direct proportion to the appallingness of the ideas.

So for example, if you're grading out a very bad undergraduate essay, it's way more difficult to grade a D paper than it is to grade a B paper because a D paper has so many errors in it, you don't even know where to start, right?

The words are wrong, the sentences are wrong, the sentences aren't organized in the paragraph, the paragraphs are chaotic and disjointed and the whole thing makes no sense, and you actually have to...

There isn’t a level of criticism that can’t be applied to a very bad paper, and so it’s absolutely exhausting intellectually apart from the danger that it poses personally.

And so, you know, before we assume that it’s mere lack of character on the part of our fellow academics that is stopping them from taking a stand against such things—although I do by the sort of entrenched cowardice idea that emerges as perhaps an inevitable consequence of participating in a structured hierarchy—it's that there are many more reasons why this has flourished, including the inappropriate, what would you call it, subsidization of these viewpoints for the last fifty years.

Yeah, I think that’s right, it's really, really painstaking to pour through these papers, and as a person, you know, with a commitment to science and a background in science, it wasn't just even painstaking.

I actually went into some pretty dark places—I have dark psychological places. I remember reading the—so I mentioned reading the glaciology paper earlier, the feminist glaciology—but I didn’t read it in depth when we first found it, but when we started to do this project, I wanted to emulate it and write one about feminist astronomy.

You do it?

Yeah. And I read the thing in tremendous depth and with great care, taking notes all the way through and, you know, preparing so I could write a facsimile, and I shut down.

I mean, I just almost locked myself in a room by myself for three days in a dark depression. I had to talk him down because he just got so despairing, and he was just quoting bits to me.

Look at this; how can this be?

Look, the same thing happened to me when I was writing 12 Rules for Life.

I wrote a chapter called "Don't Bother Children When They're Skateboarding," and it's about the discouragement, let’s say, of primarily of young men as a direct consequence of this— the kind of rhetoric that we're discussing like that made me unbearable to my family for about three months because the more I studied it, the more...

Well, it has a really fragmenting and chaotic effect going on you psychologically.

And I’ve also seen this manifested in my students who, you know, who undergo this kind of activist indoctrination. It’s such a... it’s such a corrosive and cynical view of the world that all we're... we’re all in it in our groups and that all the groups are fighting one another for power and that that’s a fundamental transcendent reality.

It’s just...

Yeah, now imagine the sort of person who looks at that as an epistemological and moral virtue and who teaches that to their students—who attempts to indoctrinate their students into these—they don’t even rise to the level of being false in terms of these morally dangerous ideas, and then they think that there are better people as a result.

And then they think that if somebody calls them out on it, they’re evil.

Okay, so let’s look at this too. When Haidt and Lukianoff wrote The Coddling of the American Mind (wonderful book), they pointed out as the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association should have that all of the safe space and doctrines and trigger warning doctrines and that sort of thing, and the speech codes, for example, that are increasingly forbidding even sarcasm are exactly the opposite of the approach that you would take if you were a trained psychologist trying to produce people who are more resilient.

You actually make them weaker and more anxiety-prone, more anxiety-prone, more depressed and more hopeless, and I think the evidence for that's absolutely clear.

And I think it’s appalling that it wasn't clinical psychologists or psychiatrists who pointed it out, and so it is that these doctors are being put forth for the benefit of those who formulate the doctrines and that the students are sacrificial victims in that process.

Yeah, there’s one... here’s one more piece that I think is important, it goes back to what Jim said about not seeing that a contradiction is problematic because the whole idea of contradiction is white science or Western science, and that...

What...

That’s problematic is that we found that these folks don’t really value discourse and dialogue, and so they don’t really value having ideas challenged and questioned.

That’s not their reason for teaching these ideas in the first place.

And if I may give you a quick example, here’s me. Well, in state university wants to include ER... has included at this point a course on Native American philosophy, which I think is a great idea, and somebody in the audience asked a question.

And the question was—I went to a presentation—and the question this individual asked was, “Well, what do we do as settlers, as colonialists, when we want to question or challenge these ideas in the Native American philosophy?”

And the presenter said, “You know, I’ve struggled with this; it’s very difficult for me, but the bottom line was it shouldn’t... it should be exempt from tools that we have used for other disciplines, you know, the dialectic, you know, challenging.”

And so that, first of all, that places me in an almost impossible position. What am I supposed to do—say, you know, why is it exempt? What should play by the rules every other philosophy?

Because then I become the god who hates Western, eight indigenous people who age into this phosphate and then on the tool of the patriarchy—which gets back to what you were question or asking before is what do we have this silenced in academia, and what’s the problem of it?

So I think part of the problem is that these folks don’t value discourse; they don't value dialogue; they don’t value open expression.

They view that—and again, there’s a paper for this—they view that as a type of violence, words are a type of violence, this type of form of violence, and so then... their students develop brittle epistemologies because they’ve never heard the other side of the story.

Right? And they develop them just when they should be developing resilience.

Exactly, correct.

And, yeah, it is a litmus test. I always ask folks who are gender studies in my class or studying in the grievance studies fields, why isn’t Martha Nussbaum’s criticism of Judith Butler taught?

And I don't hear a single... single student that says, “Yes, I've learned about that in my classes.”

Well, they don’t teach that because they have a prevailing moral orthodoxy and they want to indoctrinate students with it.

And they’ve kind of hijacked the administration and, as I said before, they’ve weaponized offices of diversity inclusion, etc., to punish people who are heretics and who question or challenge this.

Okay, so we’re gonna run out of time. We run down to about ten minutes here, so I want to, here’s a question that I want to bring to all three of you.

I think one is why in the world should anybody outside of academia care about this? That’s the first thing.

Great question, and a very careful answer to that and the second is for each of you, what's been the personal consequence of this and would you have repeated it if you knew what the consequences were going to be?

So let’s start with the first one. Why in the world should they... why in the world should anyone care that some half-witted academic journal published an insane paper by three renegade academics about what? About dog rape? Of all the absurd topics!

It’s so surreal that it seems virtually incomprehensible. Sensible people should avoid it.

So what's the answer to that?

Well, go ahead Helen.

The university is our source of knowledge production. If we look back through history, when our cultures were Christian, the new knowledge about this was coming from the universities. When we had the scientific revolution, when we went into the enlightenment, this was coming from the universities.

These things don't stay in the universities. We have seen it is coming out.

And what is essentially happened with the kind of identity studies that we’re looking at is that it has been made directly actionable by activists.

It has been tagged on to the end of the civil rights movements and liberal feminism and gay pride. When those movements have started to see diminishing returns and people wanted to continue, then it’s tagged on to the end of that to a society that’s just seeing the end of empire, the end of Jim Crow and is geared towards social justice, and it is... it is seeded here.

So it’s also a warning to the corporations, because it is permeating the HR department.

It's like... think something this insidious is going to stay in the universities and don't be thinking that you can import 2% of it without importing the other 98%.

Yeah, people leave university and they join these industries.

Also, there’s pressure on corporations to comply with the reigning moral orthodoxy.

I mean, I don’t think that the average business owner or the average person in the street knows anything about Foucault or Crenshaw or even thinks much about this, but it is in the air now.

And it is affecting... it is affecting everything, and we do need to take it seriously without sort of having a moral panic.

We need to look at it calmly and empirically and address it as it actually is.

Yeah, and what should we do about it? That’s the next issue because that’s a podcast.

Yeah, okay fine. That’s another podcast.

And the final question for all three of you is—and maybe one at a time—would you do it again?

I would. Yeah, I would definitely do it again.

Okay, so we know that you're an unrepentant troublemaker.

I am definitely an unrepentant troublemaker! I've also found like... my one great talent in the world, and I feel like it—I’ve made my own life obsolete now!

Okay, I can be a wonderful bullshit artist if anybody is looking for one!

Okay, yeah, I would definitely do it again. It's worth the risk!

I think it needed to be done.

Helen, let’s ask you next, and then we’ll get let Peter have the last word because he’s the one that’s got the most on the line at the moment.

Yes, yes, I would do it again! I mean, I was imagining all sorts of things—from being arrested under sort of hate speech act to being physically attacked—because I have an uncommon name.

I’ve had an awful lot of online abuse; I've got some persistent stalkers. But that has essentially... I probably won't get into a PhD program in my own country, though somebody in Germany has offered, bless her! But it has been—it's been quite necessary for survival.

It was worth doing and I would do it again!

Okay, Peter.

It had... it had to be done. There’s a crisis in the universities. There’s a crisis with knowledge production; there’s a crisis of confidence.

This may come at a heavy price to me and I have had to weigh out my family obligations, helping put my son through school, you know, being a part of... I’m married, so being in a relationship in which I economically contribute to the house, but this had to be done.

Someone had to do it, and if I am a consequence of this, then so be it—it had to be done.

Yeah, well, Peter, there are a bunch of us who are not particularly inclined to let you be a sole sacrificial victim!

So if your university wants to get too stupid with you, then, um... let’s assume that they’re going to be consequences!

I sincerely appreciate your support from the bottom of my heart. Thank you!

Yeah, well, enough is enough.

So, well, look guys, it was really good talking to you, although I think that you’re quite the surreal bunch of troublemakers and perhaps exactly what this crazy situation requires!

And well, I hope that—I hope, Peter, that things work out for you properly over the next few years.

It's gonna be a tough haul for a while, there's no doubt about that.

So, well, are you getting any student support at your university?

Yeah, I'm getting a lot of student support at the university, but you know, I have to be blunt with you; I've... people have threatened to attack me. A few weeks ago, someone spit at me.

My colleagues literally, well, walk down the corridor, they’ll turn their heads.

It’s... it has seemed to be—I mean, I want to be blunt with you—it is a concern for my safety in Portland when I leave the house now, yeah.

And I now been threatened on more than one occasion by people and I'm concerned.

Do you find the threats credible? I mean, I know every threat is upsetting, but like are you actually in the situation where you have some apprehension about leaving your house?

Or are you able to put that aside?

I don't have any apprehension about leaving my house; look, you know, I wake up in the morning and I read emails and tweets, people telling me how stupid I am and what a bad person I am—a homophobe and a racist.

All right, that doesn’t do anything to me.

But when I walk out in the street... I was out at a bar a few weeks ago, or maybe a few months ago—I don’t need no lifetime lines—but you know, someone came up to me and he started harassing me.

I fortunately was with my jiu-jitsu coach, John Biggins, and he’s a black belt in jiu-jitsu, and he immediately pulled up the chair beside us and I kept saying, "Let’s talk. Let’s have a conversation."

No! He followed me in the bathroom! I came out of the bathroom; finally, I looked—I don’t know what’s happening; I don’t know why you’re so upset, but I’m happy to talk to you—and he said, “I don’t want to talk to you, Peter. I want to hurt you.”

That's pretty... that’s pretty serious!

Yeah! And then it happened again on the street when I was surrounded about a week and a half ago by people. I assume they’re Antifa or people clearly wanted to hurt me, so you know, I am concerned.

I am concerned.

Look, I mean those four people who have been through... it’s very hard for people how to be true that sort of thing to understand just exactly how distressing that kind of occurrence is—not only good things happens, but because it could happen again, and it could become more serious.

So I'm really sorry to hear that.

I didn’t realize it didn’t come to that— that’s... that’s no laughing matter.

I appreciate that, and threats on your door, left on your door, and there’s leaflets and notices... oddly, that kind of stuff doesn’t bother me; it’s when it’s in the physical world where I feel...

Someone... I mean if someone tells you they’re gonna hurt you, you should take their word!

Yes! Definitely, when it’s that direct and when it’s that in-your-face, so those threats are credible. That’s a real... that’s a real danger.

So that’s... that’s... well, look, I'm really sorry to hear that, and I'm also sorry to hear that you’re paying a substantiative price for that!

I'm going to do what I can for what that’s worth to try to make sure that people hear about this and that you’re not in it alone, because I think you guys are like comedians, you know? You’re canaries in the coal mine and whatever happens to you is going to happen to a lot of other people if it’s allowed to happen to you, so it can't be allowed to happen to you.

That's what it looks like to me.

So thank you for supporting, yeah.

All right, guys, well, thanks a lot for talking to me. All it was, it was stupidly interesting talking with you.

I know that’s a hell of a thing to say. You know, it’s so ridiculous, you couldn’t invent this in a bad piece of fiction, and it's so sad that this is the sort of thing that we have to occupy ourselves with when there is serious work to be done, so... maybe...

All right, well happy new year! I suppose hopefully this will be a watershed year and things will get more intelligent from here on in.

Yeah, I'm sure hoping that’ll be the case!

Me, too. Thank you!

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time, and I'll let you know when this is all coming online. Okay?