Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
The Professor Everybody Shuns 2

Chapter 2
Psychology Professor Resists “Gender Identity” Crowd 17

Chapter 3
What Jordan Peterson Actually Does 29

Chapter 4
Are the Tolerant Millennials the Least Tolerant of All? 43

Chapter 5
Women’s Studies, Feminism, and the University 52

Chapter 6
The Cult of Diversity Must Never Be Questioned 67
 Introduction

American culture has a few depressingly familiar rituals. One of them is the
solemn apology.

“Please forgive me, O left-wing guardians of allowable opinion, for I have

expressed an unapproved thought.”

It’s awful to watch someone debase himself like that.

Which is what makes it all the more thrilling to encounter someone who
stands his ground, refuses to apologize, and tells the thought controllers to
take a hike.

That’s exactly what the professors in this collection did.

Each one of these people has experienced or chronicled what goes on at the
mental institutions we laughingly call universities.

And each one has refused to apologize for telling the truth, being normal, or
whatever other made-up offense got the shriekers riled up.

Note: one of the chapters that follows is not like the others. Since Jordan
Peterson was coming into prominence because of the gender pronouns issue,
and since there’s a lot more to the man than that, I thought it might be nice
to highlight the actual work he does in his professional life.

One more thing these professors have in common: they’ve all been guests on
the Tom Woods Show, my libertarian podcast that releases a new episode
every weekday. I hope after reading this you’ll join the tens of thousands
who make the Tom Woods Show a part of their daily routine.

Tom Woods
TomsPodcast.com
Harmony, Florida

1
 Chapter 1
The Professor Everybody Shuns

Michael Rectenwald, a professor at New York University and a lifelong

Marxist, found himself systematically shunned after starting a Twitter
account critical of Social Justice Warrior excesses at NYU and other
campuses. This conversation is from episode 1244 of the Tom Woods Show
(September 21, 2018).

WOODS: Since you’ve been a guest with me before, let’s try to summarize
quickly what happened to you at NYU, so then we can get into this meaty
stuff in your memoir about how you became Michael Rectenwald.

RECTENWALD: The reason I started the Twitter account was that I was
becoming so alarmed and annoyed by what was going on in terms of social
justice taking over the university. One of the big things that really irked me
was that in the fall of 2016 NYU established a bias reporting hotline, which I
thought was really pernicious. And also there were a lot of speakers being
shut down, Milo Yiannopoulos being one of them. And a number of other
things, like a lot of talk about safe spaces and trigger warnings and a lot of
defenses of those practices, especially trigger warnings. And then a lot of
identity politics in the hiring and promotion and other processes that were
really alarming and annoying, and also quite damaging, I think, to the
university’s credibility and its teaching mission.

So I started tweeting from an anonymous account; it’s called

@antipcnyuprof. That is still the handle. And I called myself the Deplorable
NYU Prof. And you know, there are two parts of a Twitter account: the literal
handle and then the name. My name was Deplorable NYU Prof. The account
was replete with a Nietzsche icon. And I just started tweeting things about
what I saw happening on campuses, NYU and elsewhere.

2
And before you know, it, I was contacted by an NYU student newspaper
reporter who wanted to make sure I was really an NYU professor, and if so,
would I do an interview. And I agreed, but I wasn’t sure I was going to go on
the record as myself. After the interview was over I decided to go on the
record as myself, because I thought: what I said has to be said. And then all
hell broke loose. I was put on a paid leave of absence almost immediately. A
committee calling itself the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group attacked
me roundly, and really, that attack by that group, an official committee at
NYU, really set this table for everything that would follow.

WOODS: Let me back up a bit here, because when you were called into
whatever dean’s office, the dean leans forward and says, “Now look, this
doesn’t have anything to do with your Twitter account or that interview”
And you thought to yourself, Yeah, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that you
called me in.

RECTENWALD: Right.

WOODS: And then the impression was given that, really, we’re just
concerned about your mental health, and you probably need to go take a break
— as if they thought, well, gee, is there one more Stalinist box we haven’t yet
ticked off here at NYU? Ah, let’s accuse him of mental illness!

RECTENWALD: Right, exactly. Yeah, when I got into the dean’s office, he
shakes my hand and comes very close to me, about six inches from me, and
says, “I just want you to know this discussion has nothing to do with your
Twitter account and the publicity you’re getting” And I said, “Oh” — I was
surprised, but I didn’t believe it, quite frankly. And then he says, “And if you
don’t mind, with your permission, I’d like to have the head of human
resources join us” And she was waiting just outside the door. I had no idea. I
hadn’t seen her. And then I said, “Of course” What am I going to say, no?
And then that discussion ensued in which they said that people were
concerned about me and that some saw my interview and Twitter account as
a cry for help.

WOODS: [laughing] I mean, in a way, it is a cry for help — against these

very people.

RECTENWALD: Exactly. It’s a cry for help against the very forces that I’m
3
now facing. And they sort of made it like it was an ultimatum, an unclear
ultimatum, nevertheless. I’ve been called a liar for this, and this really irks
me beyond belief.

WOODS: Let me summarize it for everyone. What they’re saying is, What a
drama queen that Rectenwald is. We never forced him to go on leave. We just
had two extremely highly placed people at the university whom he would be a
fool to oppose, who have much more power than he has — and normally every
leftist in the world considers power relations in negotiations like this, except
we won’t consider them in this case....

RECTENWALD: Right.

WOODS: ...and we told him we thought it was a good idea for him to go on
leave. It was purely voluntary.

Again, how Stalinist can these people be? Does every word that comes out of
their mouths have to mean its opposite?

RECTENWALD: Exactly. It was really, really very, very Kafkaesque or

Stalinesque. They said that I lied about this, because a medical leave of
absence isn’t legally, by necessity, voluntary. But as you said, the power
differential was so great, and I was coerced into it. And then of course, all
these leftists believed NYU over me, which is very ironic in my mind,
because here are people that would oppose massive institutions, and
especially what they would call it, the corporate university, which NYU is the
prototype for. And they would always oppose them. But not in this case,
since I was making comments that they didn’t like. It’s very interesting. The
left is full of opportunism today, I think, but that’s another story we can get
into.

WOODS: There’s so much there. Let’s go back now and talk a little bit about
your evolution. What I want to do is get into some of the ideas that you
came to accept. You studied under Allen Ginsberg. You knew some pretty
influential people back in the day.

RECTENWALD: Yes.

WOODS: And in fact, I believe you say in the book that you believe Ginsberg
4
is one of the people whose ideas you think ultimately contributed to
postmodernism.

RECTENWALD: Oh, yeah.

WOODS: If we can abstract from your experience for a minute, I’d like you
to explain — because you even say in here that Jordan Peterson doesn’t quite
get postmodernism right. You say that he sometimes calls it neo-Marxism,
and that it is anything but that. So I’d like you to explain for normal people
these three things: postmodernism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.

RECTENWALD: Let’s start with critical theory, since chronologically it’s the
first of the three. Critical theory was founded by three neo-Marxists, or
basically by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, as they’re called.
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse are the three
major players. It is a school of criticism that started to see culture as
extremely influential and powerful, because, in their minds, the working
class had effectively failed the mission of Marxism. Tas such, they started to
look for explanations for why that was the case, because, according to
Marxist rationality, this should not happen. It should not happen that the
working classes actually are sort of attached to the system and that, in fact,
especially in the United States, they seem to be very happy. This is in the
‘50s. So they looked to culture, and they started seeing culture as this
dominating force that was inculcating this propaganda into workers and
brainwashing them, etc.

They also initiated a critique of the Enlightenment, of Enlightenment

rationality, which, in my mind, is the beginning of the postmodern turn
towards this kind of critical and skeptical and anti-rationalist eventuality
that is really the beginning of postmodern theory. But they weren’t
postmodernist per se; they are neo-Marxists, and they’re neo-Marxists
because they’re no longer looking to the working class as the agent that will
overthrow everything. They start looking for different constituencies, and
they start to look at identity politics as a possibility in the case of Marcuse.
And he’s really foundational for the New Left, which starts to cobble
together different constituencies as the hope for overthrowing capitalism,
because no longer do they see the working class as the agent that’s capable
or really interested in doing so.

5
And that was really a blow to the whole Marxist enterprise. The problem was
that most workers — American workers — didn’t want it. They saw what
was going on in the Soviet Union, and they wanted no part of it. And these
intellectuals just couldn’t figure this out. So they ascribed it to the power of
culture to brainwash the workers. A very influential essay called “The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” is a very key, pivotal
text regarding this. They inaugurated two schools of thought: critical theory
and media studies. So media studies from the very beginning is Marxist.

Then you said postmodernism. Postmodernism is a very large umbrella term,

under which several theories of postmodern theory are contained.
Postmodern theory is now not a consistent, uniform set of beliefs or a
systematic approach. Rather, it is a whole slew of sometimes self-
contradictory ideas. Post-structuralism is one of them. But postmodern
theory is characterized generally by a rejection of what they call master
narratives; that is, those types of systematic approaches that explain or
pretend to explain all of history — like Marxism, for example. So it starts off
as a rejection of Marxism. Secondly, it has a focus on language. This is where
deconstruction comes in. I can talk further about that. And third, it is highly
relativistic. It’s about relativism in general. It’s against positions that say this
is true, this is objective. So it’s anti-objectivity and pro-relativity. That’s
postmodernism in a nutshell.

Post-structuralism is a school of thought, or an approach, to be more precise,

an approach that fits well beneath the postmodern rubric. It is a
postmodernist theory. And post-structuralism is — it is the most
unbelievably difficult movement or approach to explain. Just generally, it’s
against structuralism, which tried to explain everything in terms of
universals that went across cultures. Post-structuralism claims there are no
universals at all. Everything is arbitrary. Everything is peculiar. History has
no trends. Everything is merely a peculiar occurrence that’s specific to itself.
So they speak of things like historicity, which means a historical moment
having its own peculiar specificity. It is focused on language. It thinks that
language, for example, is utterly arbitrary, and has no relationship to what it
signifies. This is a very big point, because it accounts for the skepticism it has
about attaining knowledge, in particular scientific knowledge. Science is very
much critiqued, because it’s all based on language, and language has no
necessary connection to what it refers to. So that’s those three in a nutshell.

6
WOODS: All right, that was a yeoman’s effort there, because that was a
difficult assignment I gave you. Now let me run by you something somebody
in my private Facebook group said about this. In there there’s generally
hostility when you use the term postmodernism. But I’ve got a handful of
people who say, Now, hold on a minute. It’s true that there are some nutballs
who employ it, but if we take it to mean simply looking critically at so-called
meta-narratives, this can be a healthy attitude.

So this fellow says, “For example, we in this group” — in my group — “we’re

all libertarians. And well, don’t you look askance at the meta-narrative by
which the state must be the central organizing principle of society? And
there are many, many corollaries of that, all of which you also disagree with,
so you as a libertarian look at the world through an entirely different meta-
narrative. And so in a way, you are imbibing the spirit of postmodernism. So
there’s no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater” How would you
answer that?

RECTENWALD: Ah, well, this is belying the fact that this is a very slippery
slope, because what happens is postmodernism leads to an utter
fragmentation, such that there are no truth claims that can be made
whatsoever, because everybody has their own peculiar positionality and their
own truth, and therefore no truth trumps any other truth, and therefore
there is no truth. And the other thing is it’s a self-refuting statement that
there are no credible master narratives or meta-narratives, because
postmodernism is a meta narrative [laughing]. It’s a meta-narrative that says
there are no meta-narratives, so it’s self-refuting.

But the bigger problem is not that logical self-refutation. The bigger problem
is the endless fragmentation of standpoints, such that we can’t make claims
about anything in the end. There are no truth claims that can be made,
which aren’t relativized by virtue of being damning next to somebody else’s
truth point. And this leads to complete, utter fragmentation and eventually
what I call epistemological solipsism.

WOODS: You wrote widely in journals where people share these sorts of
worldviews. So you’re not coming at this really from the point of view of an
outsider, although today you more or less think of yourself as an outsider.
But you were very much part of this.

7
RECTENWALD: Right.

WOODS: What happened to you at NYU, and the way people treated you,
that would make me stop and think, Well, gee, everybody who shares my
worldview is acting like a Stalinist apparatchik.

RECTENWALD: Yeah.

WOODS: Maybe there’s something screwy about the worldview. I’m not even
sure I would go that far. I don’t know what I would do in that situation. It
would be so bewildering to me. But it couldn’t have just been that one
moment that led you to rethink things. So I want to know: during your
career, were there little moments where you said, “Well, this is kind of
screwy,” or, “That’s kind of oddball”

RECTENWALD: Oh, yeah, all along. All along. First of all, let me just make
one last comment about postmodernism and Marxism. This is very little
known, but there’s a huge contingent of Marxists who despise postmodern
theory, and they totally eschew it and they totally condemn it. I was one of
those. So it’s not as if I was breaking with everything at once. I had already
broken with things like postmodern theory.

WOODS: Well, what is Marxism if not a meta-narrative?

RECTENWALD: Right, exactly. And postmodern theory was born as a

philosophical explanation for the failure of Marxism in the 1968 student
rebellion in France. This is what’s very little known, that in fact postmodern
theory was born as a result — it’s the philosophical rebuttal, if you will, to
the Marxist explanation for society and social change and historical change.

WOODS: You had what turned out to be a horrific experience, not just with
the way they dealt with your Twitter account by forcing you out, but then
also the subsequent treatment and the shunning and the blocking you on
Facebook, you know, like you’re back in high school. It’s that silly. But I
think there were probably people in the communist world who, even when
their comrades turned on them, were still true believers.

RECTENWALD: Yes, that’s right.

8
WOODS: In your case, you say: look, I was on the left; I’ve never, ever
thought of myself as a libertarian, much less a conservative.

But yet, by the end of this book, I have a tantalizing sense that maybe you’re
one of these rare people who’s made a late-in-life ideological transformation.
And I just feel like I want to say to you that, if I had been a serious scholarly
leftist and then I started looking around seriously at alternative intellectual
homes, and I encountered the conservative movement of Rick Santorum and
Bill Kristol, I think I’d pluck my eyes out.

RECTENWALD: [laughing]

WOODS: So I hope this has not been remotely a temptation for you. But I’m
curious to know about where you would place yourself today.

RECTENWALD: Well, I do place myself as a cultural, social and somewhat

economic libertarian. It’s the only thing that preserves individual rights, and
there are no other kind of rights. I don’t believe in group rights, because
groups always override individual rights, and therefore nobody has any
rights. Really, the only thing that protects individual rights is libertarianism
as a social, cultural, and even economic movement. Nothing else comes
close. Nothing else can ensure it. And I think that the United States, where
we are today, is on the verge of throwing away the best experiment that
we’ve ever had in history for ensuring such rights.

WOODS: Now, listen to what you’re saying, Michael Rectenwald. Listen to

yourself saying those words. Those are words that would have come out of
your mouth over your dead body thirty years ago, right?

RECTENWALD: That’s right.

WOODS: So tell me, who are you reading these days?

RECTENWALD: Well, I mean, I’ve read von Mises. I’ve been reading Hayek.
I’ve been reading just really broadly into the economic criticism of Marxism,
because I did reject it first of all along ideological lines in terms of the
political totalitarianism that is inevitable. And then I started to go also then
into the critique of the economic system, and I found that also to be
completely faulty and also antithetical to what it claims to do. And I talk
9
about that in the book.

WOODS: There is an economist — if you were to promote him, you’d get in

even more trouble than you are now — named Hans-Hermann Hoppe who
has a very interesting article on Marxism where he says: I actually think that
the primary claims of Marxism are correct. It’s just that they’ve misidentified
who the villains are. So I do believe there’s systematic exploitation in society,
but I believe it’s carried out by the state, and I do believe there are classes in
society, but they’re defined by the state. It’s the state versus everybody else.
And then he goes through and says that when you put it through this filter,
it’s not so bad after all.

Back to your immediate situation: I can’t imagine getting to the end of my

life and saying, “Oh, doggone it, all right, let me open up Das Kapital and
start going through it.”

RECTENWALD: [laughing]

WOODS: I just can’t imagine, after I’d fought my whole life in the other
direction, you know?

RECTENWALD: Right.

WOODS: That must be really, really difficult.

RECTENWALD: It was very disorienting at first, I’ve got to say. It was like I’d
come out of Plato’s cave, and now I was looking around with glaring sun in
my eyes.

WOODS: Yeah.

RECTENWALD: So it was very tough, but I got through it. I just had to
muscle my way through, and also, quite frankly, to have faith that I was
heading in the right direction. And I did believe that, and I still do.

WOODS: That’s tremendous. But on the other hand, you must encounter a
lot of people who are anti-leftist who just really have no idea what it is
they’re opposing. They couldn’t tell you what a postmodernist is if their lives
depended on it. Does that frustrate you at all?
10
RECTENWALD: Well, yes, it’s become too easy to dismiss things that they
don’t really or have never really investigated, frankly. And I hear this all the
time, and it’s frustrates me, because some of these people that are dissing
postmodern theory don’t even know what it is. So I would think that you
really have to know what it is before you can reject something like that. But I
want to say that also, as a Marxist, though, I was always fiercely
independent. So I was always trying to carve out a more libertarian leftist
position. And I did run into trouble with that almost all the way, but then it
just reached more or less a crescendo. And that’s when the tipping point
happened.

WOODS: Did you ever read an article that Eugene Genovese wrote back in
1994? It was in a periodical called Dissent. And it was called “The Question”
The question was: what did you know and when did you know it about the
crimes of communism?

Now, of course, there are plenty of Marxists who, even at the time, said, “I in
no way endorse what’s going on in the Soviet Union. This has nothing to do
with what I support” But as you well know, there were people — I mean, the
Foner family clearly did cheer on the Soviet Union. Try as they may to
pretend they didn’t, they certainly did.

RECTENWALD: Yeah.

WOODS: So some of them did have to pretend the atrocities weren’t

happening or were being exaggerated. There was a big controversy that
developed over Genovese’s article. They all jumped on Genovese, because he
was saying, Look, I’ve been a Marxist for many years, and I feel like all I have
to show for myself is piles of corpses. I guess people could respond that none
of that was real Marxism, but man, the consistency of every time that M-
word comes up, horrible things happen.

RECTENWALD: Yeah, every time. Every time it’s experienced. The

interesting thing I’d like to point out here is that these kind of texts only
became visible to me after I made the turn. They were somehow occluded or
obscured from my vision. And there are many such texts that many Marxists
do not know about, because they’re somehow shielded from them by virtue
of the tunnel they’re put in intellectually, such that they don’t look left or
11
right around these things. There are blinders on, ideological blinders and
blinkers that make it almost impossible to see these alternative viewpoints
and to see these texts. Because one’s whole reading diet is dominated by a
certain predilection and a certain end, a telos, and therefore one doesn’t find
these things. I never had heard of The Black Book of Communism, for
example, until after I left the movement, and then I read it and I was like,
“My God.”

WOODS: Yeah.

RECTENWALD: Ninety-four million — and that’s a credible number —

people killed. And it didn’t start with Stalin; it started with Lenin, and it
started within a year or less after the revolution, of already sending people to
the concentration camps, shooting them in the back of the head, things like
that — or the front. The main thing is that terror was endemic to the whole
process from the beginning, always, every time. And I had no idea that even
Leninism was always misrepresented in many Marxist texts. Many. And
academic Marxism, in fact, sanitizes the whole thing. Somebody like Fredric
Jameson, you never even get a clue of what happened under Stalin or Mao if
you read Jameson.

WOODS: I’d like to know about the status of your academic life these days.
I’d like to know about your colleagues, and I’d like to know about your
current scholarly and writing interests.

RECTENWALD: Yes, that’s great, thank you. I have four years remaining on
a five-year contract. The committee that will decide upon my renewal will be
drawn from the faculty that shuns me. Almost 100 percent of them shun me.
I have about 100 colleagues, and there are probably two that say hello to me.
The rest utterly shun me. People won’t even get on an elevator with me.
They act as if I have some sort of leprosy that might be contagious, or that I
am so vile morally that I can’t even be admitted to the same passageways as
them. Therefore, my office was moved to the Russian department.

WOODS: [laughing] Oh, man.

RECTENWALD: The ironies are so poetic, it’s unbelievable. I mean, it’s as if

I was like a Russian bot and fixed the election or something. I’m in the
Russian department in an office that’s completely isolated. I have no
12
contacts. Even in the Russian department, they must have been told: do not
speak to this guy.

WOODS: That is unbelievable. Could you imagine if one of their people

were treated like this with one-tenth of the intensity? We would never hear
the end of the white privilege and the oppression. We’d never hear the end
of it. Never.

RECTENWALD: Right. I am completely quarantined. They put me in this

office with metal bookshelves and must have instructed everybody in this
department: this guy is anathema. Do not speak to him; do not talk to him;
do not say hello. Because I am completely non-personed over there. And I
kind of like it in a way, because I don’t have to do a lot of nonsense
committee work, which is all kind of busywork. Most of the time nothing
comes out of these committees except more committee meetings, meetings
on meetings on meetings. You know the drill. And, you know, I like the
independence because I don’t have to answer to anybody. I mean, it’s as if I
don’t even work for the university. I just teach classes and nobody says
anything to me about anything. I’m not told to go to meetings. Nobody’s
telling me anything. I’m basically completely a free agent in a weird way.

WOODS: Oh, that’s great. You don’t have to do committee work and stuff.
That’s great.

RECTENWALD: Not at all.

WOODS: Because who would want you on a committee?

RECTENWALD: That’s the problem. I can’t do any committee work, because

no one will allow me on any of the committees.

WOODS: [laughing] Look, I know I shouldn’t laugh at this. It must actually

be quite difficult to endure it. It’s just the sheer malevolence of these people,
especially when they’re the ones who preen about showing off their superior
morality 24 hours a day.

RECTENWALD: In the comments about my book on Amazon, somebody hit

it right on the head. There were two ways this could have been avoided: one,
I never speak out against these issues and I go along with the herd and
13
nobody knows what I really think; or two, they could just have accepted that
other people have different views, and they didn’t need to condemn me
officially and then drive me to the margins of society.

WOODS: Yeah.

RECTENWALD: But no, they had to do it this way. I blame that committee
for all of this, that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group — which, in my
mind, is of course the Conformity, Inequity, and Exclusion Group.

WOODS: I had a guest a couple of years ago, April Kelly-Woessner of

Elizabethtown College, who’s done work arguing that the millennials are the
most intolerant generation of all. This seems to be paradoxical, because
aren’t they the ones who are so open-minded toward all different types of
groups? But she says toleration really is not about how you feel and act
toward people you already like and agree with.

RECTENWALD: Right.

WOODS: The real test of toleration is: how do you treat people you disagree
with? And yes, you can find some nasty people on all sides, but I find in
general it’s just much, much worse coming from the left. Incredible nastiness
toward people — hence their treatment of you, somebody they don’t agree
with, and you are absolutely like an unperson.

RECTENWALD: Unpersoned, entirely. I’ve said this before: I feel like Julian
Assange, in a way. I’m sort of quarantined away in an embassy, almost, you
know? I am allowed to leave, but I really have to be careful, because I mean, I
walk down the street and literally if they see me, they’ll cross the street to get
off the sidewalk that I’m on. It’s really unbelievable.

WOODS: It is unbelievable. I get to New York quite a few times per year. I
think you’ve earned a free lunch. You’ve earned lunch on me.

RECTENWALD: Oh, great. I would like to take you into one of my classes or
so. I think that would be fun.

WOODS: Yeah, that would be interesting. And plus, I’d like to walk through
campus and see what happens.
14
RECTENWALD: That would be curious. You will see that I’m not
exaggerating. It’s probably worse than what I’m saying.

WOODS: Wow.

RECTENWALD: I don’t know what these people say about me behind my

back. I know what they said about me on email, and it was despicable.
Unbelievable. And I felt like writing back to the head of the Diversity, Equity
and Inclusion Group and saying, “Is this the kind of civility that you were
referring to, that I should have abided by” These people called me everything
in the book. I mean, unbelievable. You know, I was basically called a Nazi. I
was called alt-right, misogynist, Satan. I was called Satan. I was called “short
pants, white boy” I was called “fragile white male” I was being pelted with
racist and sexist epithets, even as they said I was the racist and sexist.

WOODS: But the idea that they would call you fragile! Not one of these
people has the emotional wherewithal to withstand what you’ve been put
through, and you’re the fragile one?

RECTENWALD: Right, isn’t that hilarious?

WOODS: Yeah, unbelievable. Let’s see. Obviously we want to get people

following you on Twitter. I’m going to link to both of those accounts,
because you have to account. So is one of them more professional than the
other one and one’s more fun?

RECTENWALD: Yeah, I save the Dr. Rectenwald one for my students,

mostly.

WOODS: Okay.

RECTENWALD: The other the other one is @antipcnyuprof, one word.

WOODS: Okay, so if you’re driving around and that’s too much to

remember, I’ll link to that at TomWoods.com/1244 for the episode today.
And then your website, which is MichaelRectenwald.com.

RECTENWALD: That’s right. It’s MichaelRectenwald.com, and then there’s

15
another website for the book itself: SpringtimeForSnowflakes.com. There
you will find a lot of the media coverage, samples of my other interviews,
and also other writing on social justice and PC authoritarianism.

WOODS: Excellent. Well, the only thing that surprises me about this
situation — I’m not surprised at how you were treated or how any of it shook
out, but I am surprised that you’re not more of an Internet celebrity, given
what’s happened to you.

RECTENWALD: I’m more of a writer than I am a speaker. I think that my

writing is just much better than what I do in oratory. So I haven’t really done
the YouTube channel bit, although I’m being told I’ve got to do it. I mean, I
love writing. I’m a writer. I think this last book is a piece of literature. I’m not
boasting, but I think it’s a literary work. And that’s just what I like doing
better. So if I haven’t become an Internet celebrity, it’s largely because
writing is my thing.

WOODS: Well, thanks, Michael. I hope you continue on this path that
you’re on. We’re all cheering you around the country. I know it’s hard to
perceive that when you’re surrounded by enemies, but you have more
friends than you have enemies. They’re just more scattered.

RECTENWALD: I’ve felt that, and I really appreciate it very much.

Enjoyed this chapter? I release a new episode of the Tom Woods Show,
full of great information like this, every single weekday. Subscribe for
free on iTunes or Stitcher and join the tens of thousands who have
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16
 Chapter 2
Psychology Professor Resists “Gender Identity” Crowd

Jordan Peterson, bestselling author and professor of psychology at the

University of Toronto, has become an international sensation. This
conversation comes from episode 773 of the Tom Woods Show (November 2,
2016).

WOODS: In introducing you I didn’t give too much detail, because I thought
it would be much better for you to tell the story. You’re in Canada; you’re at
the University of Toronto where — as far as we understand in the United
States, political correctness is worse than it is here. You are enduring rather
an interesting ordeal because of a line in the sand, in effect, that you drew.
I’d rather have you tell the story. You’ve been a distinguished scholar for a
long time, but when did you become this celebrity surrounding the cause of
anti-political correctness? What were the circumstances, and how long has
this been going on?

PETERSON: Well, it’s been going on for a full month in Canada. I released
some videos on my YouTube channel, Jordan Peterson Videos, between
September 27th and the first days of October. One of them detailed out my
opposition to some new Canadian legislation called Bill C-16 — which is
already law in many Canadian provinces, by the way — that
adds gender identity and gender expression to the list of protected groups in
the Canadian Human Rights Act in the Criminal Code, making
discrimination based on those two categories hate speech. And also
objecting to the University of Toronto human resources department’s
decision to make so-called anti-racism and anti-bias training mandatory for
their staff, advised by a group called the Black Liberation Collective, which is
in my opinion a reprehensible group that will not disavow violence in their
demands for social transformation. And then third, detailing out what I
called the PC game, which was my attempt to summarize the mental
17
algorithms that the politically correct activists use to simultaneously
oversimplify the world and put themselves in a state of moral superiority.

So I released those videos, mostly because I was upset, and have been for
some time, about the galloping march of political correctness through
the university campuses and through society at a broader level. I wanted to
articulate my concerns about that occurring. And it’s ignited an absolute
firestorm. It’s been major news in Canada now for a month, a month
straight. And so even this weekend, for example, there were a number of
columns in Canada’s major newspapers and television coverage, as well as an
explosion of continued interest on YouTube, where young people seem to
get almost all of their political information.

I should correct just one thing you mentioned, though. Political correctness
isn’t as large a phenomenon in Canada yet, I think, as it is on American
campuses. Partly what I was objecting to at the U of T was attempts to make
it as dominant here as it is already in places like Brown University, for
example, or Yale or Berkeley or New York University, where it’s really gotten
out of hand.

WOODS: I guess what I had in mind when I said that was that some of these
ideas have the force of law.

PETERSON: Yes.

WOODS: There isn’t a First Amendment tradition that’s as strong as the US

has in its First Amendment to the Constitution. We don’t see that as much
in Canada, so they can get away with these human rights statutes, so called,
that can criminalize certain kinds of speech. We haven’t quite gotten there
yet.

PETERSON: Well, but it’s happened in New York City, you know? In New
York City, if you don’t use someone’s preferred gender pronoun, which is
whatever gender pronoun they want you to apply to them, you can be fined
$250,000 for mis-gendering someone. And New York City has already
protected 31 different gender identities, so-called gender identities. So the
legislation is on the march in the US as well.

WOODS: You’ve said that you will not use gender neutral pronouns, which
are these crazy pronouns that look on paper like they’re unpronounceable,
18
and if somebody comes up to you and says I would like you to use these
pronouns in referring to me, you’ve refused to do it. And this is one of the
things that’s gotten you into trouble, because the claim is that you’re going
to cause these people undue mental distress by this impertinent refusal of
yours.

PETERSON: Yes, well, there’s multiple claims. One of them is that I’m
producing an unsafe campus environment. The other is that I’m violating the
policies of the Universities of Toronto. And the third is that I’m breaking
provincial law. And I already warned in my video that even discussions of the
sort that we’re having right now I think are potentially illegal under the
Ontario statutes, and are soon to be made into law, federal statutes, because
the law also instantiates a very particular conception of human sexuality
in the most fundamental sense.

So the law is predicated on the proposition that biological sex — if it exists at

all, because one of the opponents that I’ve been debating recently on
Canadian television said that the scientific consensus was that biological sex
didn’t exist. But in any case, if it does exist, it is functionally independent
from gender identity, which is your felt sense of what gender you are, which
can vary from moment to moment or day to day. And on top of that, there’s
something called gender expression, which varies independently from
gender identity and biological sex. And gender expression as near as I can
tell is little other than fashion choice, because the Ontario Human Rights
Commission, which details out many of the policies surrounding this sort of
legislation, describes gender expression as the manner in which you do your
hair and dress and decorate yourself. And so as far as I can tell, criticizing
someone’s fashion choice has now become a hate crime in Ontario.

And so one of the big problems with this is that the claim that these things
vary independently — gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, and
even sexual preference, which I didn’t add to the list — that’s a radical social
constructionist claim, and that’s a particular kind of doctrine of human
development that insists that the profound differences that we see, for
example, between men and women are nothing but constructs of
socialization. And that’s a very weak theory from a scientific perspective,
because the evidence that, say, personality differences and differences and
interests between men and women have a biological foundation is I would
say overwhelming and irrefutable. Yet the legislation is moving in the

19
direction of making this radical social constructionist claim the official
doctrine of the land.

I’ve been trying to warn biologists, especially evolutionary biologists and

evolutionary psychologists, that the social justice warriors are going to come
for them next. But faculty members, I wouldn’t say that they attend very well
to their own self-interest. That’s a charitable way of putting it.

WOODS: Well, it seemed to me that it was a combination of your general

opposition to bullying in academia, and the fact that this particular kind of
bullying is so anti-science. And the funny thing is that a lot of people who
would identify with the politically correct crowd claim that science is their
banner when it comes to global warming or whatever — why, they’re on the
side of science! And yet here what you’re saying is that they are so
preposterously not on the side of science that it’s almost not even debatable.

PETERSON: The social justice warrior types are not on the side of science at
all. They’re perfectly willing to use scientific arguments when it fosters their
ideology, when it supports their ideology, but they’re not allied — I wouldn’t
say they’re allied with the spirit of scientific inquiry at all. I mean, one of the
fundamental historical sources for, let’s say, political correctness is
postmodernism, especially the writings of Jacques Derrida.

Although it’s not always easy to figure out what he’s talking about, Derrida
has made extraordinarily radical claims about things as fundamental as
human categorization. For Derrida, the only reason that people use
categorization schemes is to exclude and oppress in the name of power. He
has also famously said essentially that there’s nothing outside the context, or
there’s nothing outside the text. His supporters deny that he meant what he
meant when he said that, but basically his position is that of a radical
relativist, that everything is interpretation and there’s no such thing as
objective facts.

And so the anti-science, politically correct types regard science itself as part
of the oppressive patriarchy that they are basically sworn to overthrow in the
name of radical egalitarian, not opportunities, but outcomes. There’s
nothing about them at all that’s scientific. They’re anti-science right to the
core, far worse than the Christian fundamentalists, who are really only upset
that evolutionary biology seems to exist in contradiction to their avowed

20
Christian literalist traditions.

WOODS: I’m glad you clarified that, because up to now I haven’t really
heard any real discussion of the actual reality of these so-called gender
identities. It’s just been taken for granted that people have them, and so
you’re just bigoted if you deny them.

PETERSON: No, no, no. Look, the best research, the most interesting
research that has been done on this has been done by personality researchers
who concentrated on cross-cultural comparisons of the personality
differences between men and women. Now, the personality differences
between men and women on any individual trait are small to moderate in
size, but if you add them up across all the traits, there’s not that much
overlap between men and women. So you can segregate men and women
into their biological sex on the basis of their personality with perhaps 80% to
90% accuracy.

But you might say, well, that’s okay; that doesn’t prove that those differences
are biologically predicated. But here’s the kicker: if you do a cross-cultural
comparison of personality differences between men and women and include
many countries in that comparison, which is something that’s been done
with tens of thousands of people now by multiple researchers, what you find
is that the biggest personality differences and differences exist in the
Scandinavian countries, where precisely the largest attempts have been
made to render the societies gender neutral. So what’s happened is that as
the Scandinavian countries have pursued those policies, the differences
between men and women have gotten larger, and now they’re larger there
than they are anywhere else in the world. And no serious researcher disputes
that, by the way. They’re very, very solid studies.

WOODS: So why is it then that, if the scholarship runs completely against

these people, why is academia completely silent? In other words, the
relevant professors — I don’t care what the sociologists say — where are the
relevant professors? Have they all just been bullied into silence?

PETERSON: I think the biological types are pretty apolitical. They tend to
concentrate on their scientific work. I think most of them are relieved that
they don’t have to attend to this sort of hyper-political nonsense that’s
invaded most of the rest of the campus. But what they don’t understand is
that they’re next on the chopping block, so to speak.
21
And then one of the things that I’ve observed about university faculty is that
— and this may be just true of people in general, and it probably is — I
wouldn’t say that an excess of bravery is one of their cardinal features. I’ve
noticed for many years that in our faculty meetings, despite the fact that
we’re protected by tenure, the probability that we will oppose in any
meaningful sense any of the university administration’s reasonable and
unreasonable requests that are put on us is extraordinarily low. And I mean,
the silence from the faculty across Canada and even the United States with
regard to what I’ve been experiencing has been absolutely deafening. I mean,
I’ve received at least a thousand letters from people supporting what I’ve
been doing — and by the way, very few letters criticizing it. I think I could
count them on the fingers of two hands. But faculty are definitely not lining
up behind me to help support their freedom of speech.

And it’s really appalling, because one of the things that I’ve noted, for
example, that even among my senior graduate students and the PhD
students that I’ve produced, there is an increasing reluctance to do such
things as discuss gender differences in the classes where those sorts of things
are relevant topics of discussion. I’m a personality researcher, so gender
differences and personality are something that I know a fair bit about, but
my students are increasingly afraid to have discussions about the profound
biological differences between men and women because it’s
not politically correct. And believe me, it’s a small step from being unable to
discuss the biology of masculinity and femininity to being able to discuss
anything that smacks of biological influence or biological determinism.

So I hope the faculty wake up, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that. The
universities are very much infiltrated or dominated by Marxist,
postmodernist, social justice warrior types. I think one out of five social
scientists identifies as Marxist, for God’s sake.

WOODS: Did I read somewhere — and I’m sorry I was reading it a bit in
haste — that as a result of what you’re doing there is a debate about the
subject of gender identity? Did they mean that you’re provoking debate, or
there’s a literal debate that’s going to be held?

PETERSON: This is what happened. The university wrote me these two

letters, which I’ve detailed on my website, by the way, so people can go there

22
and listen to them, because I read them and also formulate a response. But
in any case, after I got the second letter, which basically told me to stop
talking about these things — it started out with a ringing defense of free
speech and ended with a request that I silence myself — I thought about it
for a while, and then I went and talked to the dean who was one of the
signatories of the letter.

And I spent some time with my family before I went to the meeting, sort of
meditating on what the desired outcome would be. I have a technical way of
thinking about desired outcomes that I formulated over many years of
thinking. So if you want a good outcome, the outcome should be good for
you, and it should be good for your family, and it should be good for the
people that you know and for the broader society all at the same time. That’s
a good optimal definition of “good” And I thought, well, the best possible
outcome for this would be that the university host a debate on the relevant
issues, because obviously there’s something to be discussed here given the
insane interest that this series of events has produced.

So I suggested to the dean that the university take the moral high ground
and say that we’ll have a public debate on the issues that I’m raising,
specifically about the inclusion categories in Bill C-16, and that hopefully
we’ll be able to scare up some opposition, some people on the other side who
will be willing to take the opposite position and that we’ll livecast that on
YouTube, host a public debate and livecast it on YouTube. And the
university agreed. The dean went off to talk to the president of the university
and to some of the other people involved, and they agreed to host a debate.
I’m going to see the dean again at 2:30 today to see if they’ve found anyone
who will debate me and to figure out when this is going to be held, but it
should be within the next week; that’s the plan.

WOODS: Can I make a prediction about this debate?

PETERSON: Sure.

WOODS: ...having had some experience in this area. There will be people in
the transgender community or whatever who will protest the very existence
of the debate —

PETERSON: Oh, yeah.

WOODS: — because they’ll say: it denies my right to exist.

23
PETERSON: Yes, yes. Well, the thing is it’s become increasingly clear as this
debate has progressed in Canada and I think online that the fact that it’s
focusing on gender pronouns is in some sense almost incidental. There are
much larger issues at stake here, and I think that’s become clear. But we’ve
also had preliminary discussions about such things as security, and we’ve
already worked out some general principles for security, which is that all the
fire alarms will be guarded, because the counter-protesters for this sort of
thing like to pull the fire alarms. It’s happened many times on the University
of Toronto campus. And that there’ll be a very low level of tolerance for
uncivil outbursts during the debate. Because both sides are going to be
represented and there’ll be room for questions for both sides at the end of
the discussion, we’re going to do everything we can to ensure that this
debate proceeds without colorful, untoward interruptions that will just stifle
the discussion.

Now, you’re right already. I had a debate on Canadian public television that’s
been watched by about 100,000 people now. And even the people on that
program who posed their viewpoints against mine expressed misgivings
about the very existence of the debate. That’s this idea of no platforming,
that it’s unreasonable to give an opposing viewpoint, even airtime, and
certainly not to speak with people who do hold an opposing viewpoint,
because all that does is give them a platform to parade their contemptible
views. Well, that just shows you exactly how much respect the social justice
warrior PC types have for free speech. To me of course it’s just an indication
that their arguments are ill formulated and they’re too damn cowardly as a
general rule to stand up and actually subject their algorithmically
oversimplified beliefs to the harsh light of public criticism. But there’s always
a rationalization for that.

WOODS: Let me ask you something about people who have actually
undergone gender reassignment surgery.

PETERSON: Yeah.

WOODS: Now, there’s no necessary connection between that and the idea
that there are 31 gender identities or whatever. That could be binary, right?

PETERSON: Well, that’s an interesting thing, because I’ve received a lot of

letters from trans people, and without exception — I guess “a lot” would be
24
ten, but given how many trans people there are that’s quite a few. The
genuine trans people and not the transtrenders or the gender benders as
they’re sort of called now, they actually don’t have any objection to the idea
of gender itself; they just want to be the other one. So if you’re a male-to-
female transsexual, generally you want to be called “she” That’s the whole
point. And so the people who want these strange designations are a tiny
minority of a tiny minority.

You know, up to 70 of these categories have now been generated. It isn’t

even obvious to me that some of those categories have any members. And I
don’t believe that the people who formulated the legislation in Canada
thought for a moment that we would go from two genders to 70. They were
thinking more like 2.1, and maybe thinking that people would learn to use
“they” instead of merely “he” and “she” But it’s pretty obvious that the
number of categories has multiplied to the point of self-evident absurdity. I
mean, even one of the professors at University of Toronto who is gender
non-binary wanted to be referred to as “they” I debated they on CBC News
the other day — that’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News — and they
said that in order to keep track of the gender pronouns of their friends, they
had to use their cellphone.

WOODS: Ugh.

PETERSON: Yeah, exactly. And so I said, well, look, do you really think that
legislating that people speak in a manner that requires electronic memory
aids is really a tenable solution?

WOODS: Is there anything that’s been written that explains that there’s
nothing to this crazy 70 genders thing, that this is just made up and there’s
no scientific basis for it? Is there anything that just goes through that?

PETERSON: No, I think that it’s so new that it — I mean, it’s very difficult to
formulate a scientific opinion on the nonexistence of something.

WOODS: (laughing) Right.

PETERSON: Right? I mean, I can certainly send you a link to the papers
detailing gender differences in Scandinavia. In fact, I can do that for you. I’ll
send you an op-ed that I wrote, and it contains the references. So I can do
that right away.

25
WOODS: Well, in the meantime I want to know just a quick thing before I
let you go, because I know your time is unbelievably precious these days.

PETERSON: Yes, it’s crazy.

WOODS: I just want to ask you, not about anything having to do with
scholarship or the substance of this stuff, but rather about how your life has
changed. I understand that somebody glued your office door shut? What
kinds of things have been going on?

PETERSON: The first thing that’s worth pointing out is several thousand
people have commented on my YouTube videos and also written me letters,
but I would say 95% of those have been extraordinarily supportive. And
there’s been a petition with 10,000 names delivered to the university and
another one with 5,000 names, two separate petitions supporting what I’m
doing. And so although I’ve been subject to, say, the sanctions that
the university has placed on me, they’ve also agreed to have a debate, and
the vast majority of public opinion directed my way has been
overwhelmingly positive. And I should also say that it has also been
overwhelmingly thoughtful. Of the thousand letters I’ve received, I would
say 600 are two pages long, and the citizens who wrote them put an awful lot
of thought into them. And they’ve also sent them to the university.

And increasingly in Canada, especially over the last week or so, the press has
moved to a position where they’re supporting what I’m doing. Canada’s
perhaps most famous journalist, Rex Murphy, wrote a devastating article for
the National Post over the weekend, taking the university administration to
task and calling for the resignation of the U of T president for failing to
support me in this endeavor.

I was very nervous for a while, and so was my family, about potential threats
to my livelihood, although I am buttressed against that in various ways
because of my other activities. But the attention has been sufficiently
overwhelming, so I’ve basically been doing nothing for the last month except
responding to journalists, essentially.

But I’m not feeling oppressed by this. I don’t like to think of myself as an
oppressed victim. I think it’s a mistake for people to think of themselves that
way, and it isn’t self-evident to me that this is a fight I’m going to lose. And I
already decided when I made the videos that I was going to pay the price for
26
speaking out instead of paying the price for not speaking out, because I
know what the price for not speaking out is. I’ve studied totalitarianism and
authoritarianism for a very long period of time. I wrote a book called Maps of
Meaning back in 1999, which has become kind of a minor classic on the
topic, that is a psychological analysis of religious belief and its hijacking by
radical ideologues. I’ve studied The Gulag Archipelago and the Soviet Union
and Mao’s China and Nazi Germany intensely for decades and learned the
most terrible things.

But one of the things I’ve learned is that you speak your mind because it’s
people speaking their minds that keeps individuals stable and sane and
keeps societies secure and flexible. And I’m not mouthing the words of left-
wing ideologues. That’s why I won’t say the gender-neutral pronouns. I don’t
like left-wing ideologues. I don’t like ideologues at all. It’s been nerve-
wracking, certainly, but that’s okay. It’s also forced me to sharpen my
arguments and brought the debate before the public, so so far so good.

WOODS: If people want to follow your travails as this unfolds, would the
best place be — I can see you have Twitter, and you have YouTube. Should I
link to those? You have a professional website, but you’re probably not
dealing with this stuff there.

PETERSON: No, I would say it’s the YouTube account — that’s Jordan
Peterson Videos — and the Twitter.

WOODS: Okay, we’re going to link to both of those at TomWoods.com/773.

Well, I’m going to let you run. I really, really appreciate your time, and best
of luck.

PETERSON: I’ll send you those references too, okay? I’ll send you those
references, and you can post those, and people can read the damn papers for
themselves.

WOODS: You bet. I’ll put them up on that same page. Thanks so much, and
good luck.

PETERSON: You bet. I’ll send those very soon.

Enjoyed this chapter? I release a new episode of the Tom Woods Show,
full of great information like this, every single weekday. Subscribe for
free on iTunes or Stitcher and join the tens of thousands who have
27
made the Tom Woods Show their daily dose of liberty education.

28
 Chapter 3
What Jordan Peterson Actually Does

Since Professor Peterson had to devote so much time in 2016 and 2017 to the
gender-pronoun issue, I thought it was an injustice that he rarely if ever got to
discuss his professional work. I sought to rectify that in this conversation,
from episode 800 of the Tom Woods Show (December 9, 2016).

WOODS: We had a great conversation the last time you were here, and
everybody really enjoyed it on our end. I want to talk about a completely
different topic with you today, but it would be silly not to acknowledge that
things have transpired since we last spoke. And when we last spoke, you
mentioned that there was going to be a debate on your campus surrounding
some of the issues that have been at the root of the controversy, and that
debate has taken place. Was there an official resolution? What was the exact
nature of the debate, and how did it come out?

PETERSON: Well, I was facing two interlocutors, I suppose, who were

challenging my interpretation of the Canadian legislation that I was
objecting to, and I would say they relied mostly on ad hominem attacks and
also on attempts to minimize the seriousness of the legislation. Since I’ve
made an issue of this, there’ve been a number of lawyers on the radical left
side of the spectrum, who claim that I’m exaggerating the dangers of the
legislation and that it’s nowhere near as punitive as it actually is.

About 150,000 people or more now — might be up to 200,000 by now —

have watched the debate online, and I would say that the consensus running
about 20 to 1 is that my opponents discredited themselves during the debate,
and to some degree I suppose so did the university, because the university
insisted upon pulling three politically correct stunts during the debate. The
first was thanking the native communities upon whose land the university is
now founded, which strikes me as hypocritical, to say the least, as well as

29
politically correct; then announcing that there were counselors standing by
in case any of the live audience members of the debate were too upset by the
proceedings; and at the end by announcing a trans remembrance day
celebration, even though the event wasn’t supposed to be, let’s say, hijacked
for commercial or otherwise private pursuits. So anyways, if people are
interested they can watch the debate at Jordon Peterson Videos. That’s all
live there.

But at least the university held the debate, which was the right thing to do as
far as I’m concerned, and I think it did help get these concerns aired more
thoroughly, and they need to be aired very thoroughly, because they’re very
damp and mildewy. And since then, attention to this issue has proceeded
apace. It’s been crazy. I think my son and I tried to count up the newspaper
coverage; so far in Canada and increasingly around the world now, there
have been 180 newspaper articles and four million views on related issues,
something like that, at least on YouTube. It’s really been an onslaught, a
crazy onslaught.

WOODS: I know you’re not the pat-yourself-on-the-back type, but you

should pat yourself on the back, because we wouldn’t have been having this
discussion in the first place if it hadn’t been for one professor who spoke up
and said: I’m not going to go along.

PETERSON: Yeah, well it’s certainly produced a tremendous response, and I

am very pleased about that. I mean, I’m getting hundreds of letters of people
who’ve been silenced in one way or another, from people who’ve been
silenced in one way or another by the politically correct authoritarians, and
it’s certainly provoked a tremendous discussion online and increasingly in
the United States. I was on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Monday, and —

WOODS: I heard it was excellent.

PETERSON: Well, people seem to be pleased with it, and lots of people are
watching it, and so that’s all to the good. That’s all to the good, as far as I’m
concerned. I hope that people are awake and paying attention, because
what’s going on in our political culture is very — it’s not good. It’s not good
at all. So it would be good if people were awake and ready to respond
properly. And I guess that leads us into the next topic of our discussion, eh?
What might constitute a proper response.

30
WOODS: Right, indeed. Well, first of all, let me tell people, this being
episode 800, I’m going to link to that video of the debate directly on the
show notes page, TomWoods.com/800. I want to talk about the main topic
of our discussion today, but first I would ask what comes next for you,
because that is the question that’ll be on a lot of people’s minds.

PETERSON: Well, it looks like I’ll be teaching my undergraduate courses as

usual in January. I think the university, although they sent me two warning
letters, they seem to have decided that they’re going to leave me be, which is
wise. It isn’t self-evident to me that that would have been their decision had
there not been so much public attention brought to this issue, but there was,
and I am going to be continuing with my undergraduate teaching. Now,
what that will mean in terms of student response is difficult to say. I have no
idea if there’ll be demonstrations or that kind of thing when I start teaching
again, but I’m not particularly concerned about that. I can probably handle
that. So to some degree it might be business as usual, but I’ll find all that out
in January when my undergraduate classes start again.

WOODS: Did you tell me that you were part of Heterodox Academy?

PETERSON: I’m not officially part of it, although I had made tentative steps
towards joining it a couple of months ago even, before all this started. I have
talked recently with Jonathan Haidt. I mean, he’s done some excellent work
with regard to combating political correctness very carefully and also
empirically and rationally, so it’s definitely something that I’m interested in.

I’m also very interested in continuing my educational efforts online, on

YouTube, and with podcasts, because the potential reach and consequence
of using those social media platforms is really unparalleled. So that’s going to
be a very interesting thing to continue to investigate. I’m converting a lot of
my YouTube videos to podcasts right now and hope to have them up
relatively soon.

WOODS: Well, I want you to know that I’ve done 800 episodes of this
podcast, and then I have a weekly podcast where I’ve done another 63. If you
need any help, I would be really glad to offer my pro bono services. If you
just have a question here and there, a tech problem or whatever, a strategic
question, I’ve been through it all, so drop me a line.

PETERSON: Okay, well, that’s very helpful, and I may well do that.

31
WOODS: All right, let’s talk about self-authoring over at SelfAuthoring.com.

PETERSON: Sure.

WOODS: I thought: this poor guy who’s done all this great scholarly work
doesn’t get to talk about a lot of it these days, because he has to talk about
all this other controversial stuff. Let’s talk about some of the things you
actually do for a living as part of your work. And SelfAuthoring.com of
course will also be linked at TomWoods.com/800. Start off by telling us in
brief what self-authoring is.

PETERSON: Well, it’s a tenet of modern sophisticated psychology that

people’s identity, which is sort of the toolkit that they use to operate in the
world, it’s a toolkit of perceptions and skills, let’s say, has a narrative
structure, a story-like structure. And that’s part of the reason why we
naturally like stories so much, because when we go watch a story or listen to
one, we’re learning about how someone else sees the world and acts in it
successfully or unsuccessfully, and we can derive the relevant conclusions
from that. So if it’s a comedy, we watch the hero make his way successfully
to his conclusion, and if it’s a tragedy we watch someone fail in a painful
way, and we can derive useful information from both of those story types.

Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, was very much convinced that people
acted out stories in their lives and that you needed to become aware of what
your story was, because maybe it was a tragedy and you’re acting out a
tragedy, and maybe if you became conscious of that you could decide that a
happier ending would be something more in keeping with your desires. And
a lot of what happens in psychotherapy is a dialectical process or a dialogical
process between two people that’s designed to help the person who’s seeking
counseling get their stories straight. And that often means an evaluation of
the past to understand why things went wrong, not so much to experience
an emotional catharsis, as Freud insisted, but to derive wisdom from those
negative occurrences so that when you act again in the future you’re much
less likely to repeat errors. And so the purpose of memory is to help you
organize your story so that you can act in the world so that you can get what
you want and need.

Now, there’s a side story here: I’ve been doing business consulting for a long
time, helping people hire better employees. I have a company that does that.
And one of the questions that I kept being asked by the middle managers
32
that I was talking to over decades was, “Well, it’s good to hire good people,
but what do I do with the people that I already have that aren’t performing
very well.” And I never had a really good answer to that, because I didn’t
know of any psychologically valid interventions that could be employed by
managers that would help people struggling.

But after I got asked about the hundredth time, I decided to do an

investigation to see if I could find anything that worked, and I came across
the work of James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. And
Pennebaker showed that if you get university undergraduates to write three
days in a row for 15 minutes about the worst thing that ever happened to
them, that their physical and mental health improved substantially. And he
found when he went back to look at the narratives to see if he could predict
whose health improved the most, it was people who used a lot of words
indicating a dawning understanding or new comprehension or — it was
people who developed a causal model of the negative events that had
befallen them, and that decreased their general stress level, and it was the
decrease in stress level that seemed to produce the health improvement.

So I modified Pennebaker’s approach. Other people who’d followed him had

shown that people who write about uncertainty of any sort, whether it’s past
or present or future for that matter, seem to experience the same health
effects. And so I combined that with this more psychoanalytic narrative
approach, and my business partners and I developed three programs: past
authoring, present authoring, and future authoring.

The past authoring program helps people write an autobiography. It gets

people to break their life into six epochs or sections and then to write about
the most important and emotionally relevant events in each section of their
life. Then the present authoring program helps people use the standard
personality model to evaluate their virtues and their faults and to help them
decide how to capitalize on their virtues and to rectify their faults.

The future authoring program starts out by asking people a pointed question
about each of six dimensions of their life. So you can analyze your life
dimensionally in terms of its function and quality — say, how are you doing
with regards to educational opportunities, career goals, intimate
relationships, family relationships, use of drugs and alcohol, and
maintenance of mental and physical health. If you were structuring your life
optimally, how would you optimize your existence across those six
33
dimensions? So that’s the warm-up question.

And then you’re asked to write for 15 minutes, without being too concerned
with grammar or spelling or structure, about what your life could be like
three to five years in the future, if you were taking care of yourself properly,
and if you were designing your life as if you were someone that you cared for.
And then you’re asked to write for 15 minutes to develop a counter-vision,
which is what your life would be like three to five years down the road if you
let all your bad habits and resentments and hatreds and procrastination and
all of that get out of hand. To some degree what we’re having people do is
specify a heaven to aim at and a hell to avoid.

And that maximizes motivation, because if specify your goals, then you can
clearly see when you’re moving towards them, and that’s where people
derive most of their positive emotion, from evidence that they’re moving
towards valued goals. And if you’re fleeing from something that you really
don’t want and that you hate, then that can put fear behind you, instead of
having it in front of you where it stops you. It can be behind you pushing
you. And then people take their positive vision and develop a comprehensive
plan that includes a justification for all of the sub-steps and a description for
why it would be good for them and their family and for society and how they
would overcome obstacles and how they would keep themselves on track.

We’ve tested this with about 7,000 university students now, although it’s not
designed specifically for university students; it’s designed for everyone. And
most of that work has been out in Holland at the Rotterdam School of
Management at Erasmus University. Michalea Shippers has been doing that.
And we’ve raised the grade point average of their first-year business students
by 20 to 25% and dropped their dropout rate by 20 to 25%. And it’s had the
biggest impact on male students and on non-Western ethnic minority
students, whose performance has radically improved by about 70%. And we
also tested it at a small college in Canada last year as well as another
university here and duplicated the results.

It’s an extremely effective program for helping people specify their goals for
increasing the probability that they’ll move towards the mend for helping
them stick to what can often be difficult, to see their way through difficulties
and to stick to their plans. The program is available online at
SelfAuthoring.com.

34
So we’re hoping that people can use the programs to improve their
effectiveness, productivity, and quality of life as individuals, and you can
think about that as an alternative to adopting a totalitarian mindset or
degenerating to a kind of nihilism. They’re character development programs,
and they were designed specifically for that purpose, to make individuals
stronger, partly because I think that’s the best defense against pathological
political developments.

WOODS: It sounds great. The results sound great. The program sounds
great — to a layman like me, anyway. How labor-intensive is it? I ask that
because I think there a lot of people who are like me: they get excited about
a new thing like this and they’re all gung-ho to get started —

PETERSON: Yeah.

WOODS: — and after a day and a half they stop doing it. It’s too much
work.

PETERSON: When we implemented it at Mohawk College, we had kids

come in for their orientation in the summer, and they did the whole future
authoring program in 60 minutes. And it dropped their dropout rate by
about 50%. So what I would say is, it’s as labor-intensive as you want it to be.
Some people write thousands of words, and additional writing makes it work
better, but I would strongly encourage people to do a bad job and not to be
afraid of it.

First of all, you’re writing for yourself, and if you do a sketchy, bad job, like a
first-pass approximation, that’s way better than not doing it at all. And
perfectionism is definitely your enemy in a program like this, because you’re
not going to get it 100% right. What you’re trying to do is to move yourself
ahead, not to do something perfectly. So I would say if you’re trying to do it
so well that it’s stopping you from doing it, then you’re trying to do it too
well and you should try to do it worse.

WOODS: That’s an interesting way of putting it. I’m also interested in the
recommended age to start this, because it seems to me if you have a real
command over where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going,
that would situate you very well in life. But yet if you’re too young, you
haven’t really been anywhere yet. You can’t really make sense of it. So what
would be ideal?
35
PETERSON: We have two versions. We have an adult version, which is at
SelfAuthoring.com. We’ve developed a high school version, too, for people
who are 13 to 17, and that’s at a website called iViePlan.com. That was
developed by a doctoral student of mine, Christine Brophy, and we’re
implementing that with about 2,000 high school students. We’ve tested it on
high school students already, but we’re implementing it with about 2,000
high school students come January. So if people are interested in the version
for younger people, then they can get a hold of me, and I’ll put them in
touch with Christine Brophy. We haven’t done the follow-up research yet to
see if the effects are as powerful for high school students as they are for older
people, although there’s every reason to expect they will be.

And we built a version for younger people to address exactly the concerns
that you’ve just described, which is younger people. A 13- or a 14-year-old
can’t really think out three to five years into the future in terms of their
identity, because they change so much and they know comparatively so little
about the way the world lays out that that’s an unrealistic timespan. So we
have students with the junior version or with the version for younger people
thinking more like 3 to 6 months out ahead.

WOODS: All right, that’s smart. I ask this because, as I listen to you
describing it, it sounds to me like something I would have benefited from a
lot. I suppose everybody goes through junior high school angst, but these
were rough years for me, and I think as I look back even to my 20s I didn’t
know where I was going or what I was about or who I was. I never took the
time to do something like this.

PETERSON: Well, you know, Tom, it’s so strange, because when I first
started doing this, which would be about ten years ago, I implemented it in
my classes, because I have a class called Maps of Meaning, which is based on
the book I wrote by the same name. It’s about narrative and identity
formulation. One of the things I realized was that I had all these 21-year-old
students in my class, because it’s an advanced undergraduate class, and no
one had ever sat them down and asked them to write out a justification for
their plans for the development of their character and their future, to write
that out and to evaluate it with as much rigor as you might evaluate just an
ordinary essay. And the more I thought about that, the more I thought about
how absurd that was, that we have these students who’ve come through
good schools and then gone to a hypothetically good university, and yet no
36
one’s ever required them to craft and formulate a vision for their own
development.

And it bothered me so much once I realized that, that I went and did some
research into the origin of the public school systems in North America to
find out why in the world that hadn’t been built in at the beginning. And
what I found was that the public school system was developed in Chicago in
the late 1800s, and it was developed by fascists. And I don’t mean that in the
pejorative sense. I mean, this was prior to World War II, but these were
people who were very heavily influenced by the Prussian military model, and
the Prussian state was set up to produce obedience soldiers basically. And
the Japanese of course modeled their school system on the Prussian system
as well, so it wasn’t only in North America.

And the school system was set up fundamentally to train obedient workers,
because people were rushing into the cities because of industrialization.
Their children needed somewhere to go while the parents worked, and the
children were most likely to grow up to be something like factory workers.
So they were trained in basically obedience and time management, and
that’s still the basic underlying structure of the public school system so many
years later. There was no room in that model for producing people who were
autonomous developers of their own destiny, even though that’s
undoubtedly the most important thing that you could possibly guide
someone towards.

So anyway, this is our attempt to rectify that problem. We wanted to make a

solution that everyone could do that was widely distributable, that was low
cost, and that was highly effective. And all of our research indicates that the
program does accomplish those goals. As I said, we’ve improved the
performance of non-Western ethnic minority males in Holland by 70%. They
were radically underperforming — especially the Dutch women at the
business school — and after two years after completing the future authoring
program, they were slightly outperforming the Dutch women, even
though the Dutch women had also improved. And this is also tremendously
interesting, because people think that the failure of immigrant communities,
new immigrant community members to assimilate, say, or their difficulty in
assimilation is a sociological and a sociocultural problem, but we have a
psychological intervention that was targeted directly to the individual, and it
seems to have eradicated the negative effect of the cultural difference.

37
WOODS: Those numbers you’re giving are really astonishing. How do you
account for this? Answer: they went through the program. But what
specifically about it could explain numbers like that?

PETERSON: Well, there are two reasons. I mean, I know a fair bit — I’ve
studied for a very long time to try to understand the positive side of human
motivation. Like people can do things because they’re afraid and they want
to escape from their fear; they can do things because they want to avoid pain
and depression and all the negative emotions. But people also do things
because of positive emotion, and there’s a positive emotion system that runs
on a chemical called dopamine. And the dopamine system is the system that
drugs like cocaine affect positively. You take cocaine because it produces an
activity in the dopaminergic system and you experience that as motivating.
But the dopamine system, what it is centrally does is indicate to you when
your actions are producing consequences that are putting you on a pathway
towards a desired goal.

For example, if you’re hungry and you walk into the kitchen and you can
smell a turkey baking, that’s going to produce a positive emotion because the
smell is an indicator that you’re getting closer to something that you want,
which is dinner. And eating dinner will make you satisfied, but detecting the
possibility of dinner will make you happy, and those are different things.

Now, one of the corollaries of that is that if you don’t have a goal it’s very
difficult to experience any positive emotions. So no goal, no value structure,
no positive emotion, because your brain can’t calculate when you’re on the
path to somewhere better. So part of the reason the future authoring
program works is that it helps people develop a comprehensive vision of
what their life would be like if their life was put together well. And then by
making that into a detailed plan, they link the things they do from day to
day, which can be kind of trivial and mundane in and of themselves, they
link those directly to higher-order, long-term valued goals, and that tags
them with positive motivation. You can kind of understand that, because
everybody knows that they are a lot more motivated when they know why
they’re doing something, and that means you understand what you’re doing
in relation to a valued goal. So part of it is that we are setting people up so
that they can experience positive emotion.

And then the other part is that if you don’t have a value hierarchy, then
you’re anxious, because you’re being pulled in ten directions all the time, or
38
you’re drowning in chaos because you don’t know what to do. So if you
construct a careful representation of the future that you desire, then that
puts walls around you, but also allows you a clear path forward. And so you
get less anxious and less chaotic and less nihilistic, all of which are very good
thing — so less depressed, as well, and less hopeless. At the same time you
become more motivated in a positive direction, and that’s enough to
produce these huge changes in performance.

One of the things we saw in Holland was that — because we’re trying to
figure out, well, what did the students do differently after they completed
the future authoring program, why did their grades go up so much, and part
of what happens is that more students go and write their finals. A primary
reason that people fail out of university is that they end up getting zeros on
some of their assignments, or they don’t go to their exams and they get
zeros, and then that’s the end of them. I think it was Woody Allen who
said that 99% of life is just showing up. It seems that one of the
consequences of doing this program is that you’re just that much more
likely to put in the additional effort necessary to do the workaday things that
you have to do to thrive and to accomplish your goals.

It makes you tougher as well, because everybody is beset by doubts

whenever they’re pursuing anything. And the doubts are enervating and
draining. And one of the things we ask people to do in the future authoring
program is to come up with a very articulated rationale, a deeply articulated
rationale for why the things they’re doing are important — and then not just
to them but to their family and to the broad community. And so if you’re
going to move forward in life — moving forward is difficult. It’s effortful.
And so you need a compelling reason. And the more your arguments are
lined up behind you, the more doubts and obstacles you can overcome.

WOODS: All right, before I throw the wrap-up question at you, I want to
just selfishly ask you an unrelated question, but about which I’m curious to
know what somebody who’s a professional in psychology would say.

PETERSON: Sure.

WOODS: I hope this doesn’t sound too primitive, but I wonder what
somebody like you thinks about the so-called four temperaments:
melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric? Because they seem to have
tremendous explanatory power, and a mixture of them — and most people
39
are a mixture — does seem to account for practically everybody I know. Is
there anything that anybody ever uses that for?

PETERSON: Well, I would say the newer models, the newest personality
model, is the Big Five model, and it was derived statistically from very, very
large bodies of descriptive adjectives and phrases, and it seems to apply
cross-culturally. And I would say it’s a reasonable analogue to that classic
temperamental theory.

Extroversion is a positive emotional dimension. So extroverts are very

enthusiastic and assertive. They’re always smiling. They dominate social
situations. They’re very talkative. They like to be salespeople.

Neuroticism is the second dimension, and people who are high in

neuroticism feel a lot of anxiety and emotional pain. And so they are more
prone to depression and anxiety disorders, and they’re more concerned with
security and more worried about things.

Agreeable people — that’s the third dimension — agreeable people, that’s a

maternal dimension, and agreeable people are compassionate and polite,
and disagreeable people are competitive and combative. And women are
more agreeable than men by quite a substantial margin, and women also
experience more negative emotion than men. And that seems to be primarily
biological, both of those.

And the fourth dimension is conscientiousness. And conscientious people

are orderly and industrious. Conservatives are more conscientious than
liberals. It’s one of their defining characteristics, especially more orderly.

And the fifth dimension is openness, and openness is a creativity dimension.

People who are open are interested in aesthetics and fiction and literature
and art and also interested in ideas. They’re creative. And liberals are higher
in openness than conservatives, and a lot of that is biological, too.

One of the upshots of this that you might find interesting is that people tend
to vote their temperament. And so open, low-conscientious people vote for
liberal and left parties, and more closed and conscientious people vote for
more right-leaning parties.

And the way that plays out economically is that the liberal types — the types
that are high in creativity and low in conscientiousness — are the artists and
40
the entrepreneurs, and the conservative types, who are high in
conscientiousness and lower in openness, are the managers and
administrators. And so in our modern society, conservatives need liberals to
start companies and to come up with new ideas, and liberals need
conservatives because the conservatives run companies and implement
things. And it’s important that people understand that, because there’s such
a political divide now between the two sides that people forget that an
economy is actually a functioning interdependence of different
temperamental types.

WOODS: I appreciate that answer. Before I let you go, let’s get back to self-
authoring.

PETERSON: Yeah.

WOODS: The biggest objection I bet you’ll get is: this sounds great, but I
have a busy schedule, and I can’t fit it in. I can already anticipate based on
what you said in its favor how you’d answer that, but what’s your pithy
response to “I don’t have time”?

PETERSON: Oh, well, I have a couple of responses to that. The first is that
— this is more practical than philosophical — it’s really useful to make time
to think about the medium to long term. One of the problems that managers
often face in their day-to-day activities is that they’re so busy fighting fires
that they don’t have time to think about what they’re doing in the medium
to long term, so it’s useful to strategize about how to make some time
generally speaking to think about the medium to long term.

The second thing would be: don’t kid yourself; this program will save you
time. It won’t save you time today, because maybe you’ll do it today, but over
any reasonable span of time like three months, you’ll be way ahead in terms
of time-saving if you do it.

And then the final thing most practically is that: do a little bit of it every day
or once a week. Do not sit and wait for a big chunk of time where you can
just concentrate on this, because people don’t get big chunks of time. And it
actually works better if you just hack away at it. So I would say if you don’t
have time, then do it for shorter periods of time, and do it badly, because it
will still pay off in a big way.

41
WOODS: All right, that’s a great pitch. SelfAuthoring.com is what people
should check out, and of course I’m linking to it at TomWoods.com/800.
Isn’t it great and cathartic to be able to talk about your actual work for a
change?

PETERSON: It is. It is really a relief. And you know, it’s related in some way,
because part of the reason I’ve been concerned about political correctness is
that I think it’s an abdication of personal responsibility as well as something
that’s fundamentally totalitarian. And I think the right medication for that
isn’t necessarily counter-political moves, although that may be necessary. I
think the right medication is for individuals to develop their own character
and their skills, because that makes them so powerful that it’s hard to
impede their pathway forward with idiotic political nonsense. It also makes
people much better at defending their own position, and so it fits nicely into
that. That’s partly why we gave away so many of the programs: it’s an
attempt to help people develop their character, to strengthen the political
state through the strengthening of individuals instead of thinking about it
only as a sociological or political problem.

WOODS: Well, thanks again for your time, Professor Peterson.

SelfAuthoring.com, I hope everybody will check that out, and best of luck.
I’m glad you from all appearances have had really one victory after another.
It came with some struggle, but it looks like you came out on top, and we’re
all pleased to hear that.

PETERSON: Yes, well, I’ve been very fortunate, and thank God for that,
because it didn’t necessarily have to turn out that way.

WOODS: No indeed. Thanks again for your time. We appreciate it.

PETERSON: Well, thank you very much.

Enjoyed this chapter? I release a new episode of the Tom Woods Show,
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42
 Chapter 4
Are the Tolerant Millennials the Least Tolerant of All?

April Kelly-Woessner is a professor of political science at Elizabethtown

College. This conversation is taken from episode 512 of the Tom Woods Show
(October 15, 2015).

WOODS: Before we get to your main argument, talk about what we mean by
the idea of political tolerance. I think people assume it just means that you’re
willing to listen to other points of view. To some extent, that is what it
means. But we wouldn’t necessarily say that somebody is tolerant just
because he’s willing to listen to groups toward which he’s already favorable.

KELLY-WOESSNER: Right.

WOODS: It goes well beyond that. So tell us what you mean by it.

KELLY-WOESSNER: It’s a great question, Tom, and it’s a great question

because in the popular press I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the term. An
article in The Economist maybe three weeks ago declared that young people
are more tolerant than ever. This is what I call the myth of youthful
tolerance, the idea that young people are the most tolerant among us. And
people who make that claim are usually defining tolerance in terms of
acceptance of alternative lifestyles. So they look at young people today, and
they see that they’re more accepting of homosexuality and gay marriage than
previous generations. They might be more accepting of minority groups.
They might be more accepting of things like atheism. So they look at these
measures, and they say young people are more tolerant than previous
generations because they’re more accepting of alternative lifestyles and
groups that were historically not accepted into the mainstream.

43
WOODS: I myself might have been inclined to accept that definition, but
when I your work I suddenly realized the real truth of the matter, which is
that we haven’t seen an increase in tolerance at all — since the real issue is
how young people deal with people who disagree with them on all those
issues. That’s the question.

KELLY-WOESSNER: Exactly right. That is what social scientists mean when

they talk about political tolerance. Political tolerance from a social science
definition has been studied for 60 years. It started with looking at people’s
intolerance towards communists during the McCarthy era. And what we
mean by political tolerance is whether or not you’re willing to extend basic
democratic rights — the right to speak, the right to teach college is a
common measure, the right to have your book put in a public library.
Whether or not you’re willing to extend those basic democratic freedoms to
the people you most fundamentally dislike, in other words. So it’s really a
measure of how you treat your political enemies.

So when we look at young people today, the question isn’t whether or not
they like homosexuals and minority groups more. That’s wonderful, but
that’s not a measure of tolerance, because it’s not very tolerant to let your
friends speak and have political power. When we talk about tolerance, we
mean what rights and guarantees you are willing to give to your political
enemies. And that’s where we find that young people tend to be lower now
than previous generations.

WOODS: There’s one example in your chapter that really surprised me as an

example of this, and that has to do with the attitude among young people
toward Islam. Because on the one hand, they appear to be, in The Economist
magazine sense, more tolerant of Islam than their parents and grandparents
are. But on the other hand, when you ask about what you think we ought to
do about a Muslim cleric who is denouncing America, they have no tolerance
at all.

KELLY-WOESSNER: Right. And I know that’s surprising to a lot of people,

because what they expect is that liberals would be intolerant of conservatives
and conservatives would be intolerant of liberals. But if you start looking at
44
the research on political tolerance, it actually doesn’t work that way. There’s
an underlying dimension of tolerance where, if you start denying rights to
one group, you start denying rights to all groups.

Ironically, surprisingly, disappointingly, they are also less likely to exercise

their own political voice. People who deny political expression to others also
perceive that they have less political freedom, so it creates this entire cloud,
if you will, over the perception that there is a value in free speech.

WOODS: Are we measuring this phenomenon via polling data? How are we
saying definitively that in general the younger generation is less tolerant?

KELLY-WOESSNER: There are several ways of measuring it. One of the

standard ones has been to look at a battery of survey questions on the
General Social Survey. These are the ones that have been used since the first
studies that Samuel Stouffer did when he was looking at tolerance towards
communists. The questions have been asked every few years for 60 years. So
we can use that to track tolerance over time.

It gets a little complicated, however, because we discover that the groups

toward whom people are intolerant change over time. We wouldn’t measure
tolerance today about how people treat communists, right? They’re not the
group that people find most threatening. The question about attitudes
toward those anti-American Muslim clerics is a fairly recent question, so it’s
hard to track that measure over time. What we do know, however, is that for
the past 60 years every time we’ve looked at tolerance, no matter how we’ve
measured it, the young people were always more tolerant than previous
generations.

This is the first time we’re seeing evidence that that trend has shifted, so that
is a big shift. So although measures of overall tolerance in a society tend to
go up and down — we become less tolerant during times of international
crisis; during times of war we’re willing to give up more political rights and
freedoms for security — what has always been true since we started studying
it is that no matter where that baseline was, young people were always more
tolerant than their parents. That is no longer the case. The fact that that has
shifted and changed is something worth noting.
45
WOODS: It is something worth noting, and it seems that it would be
something difficult to account for. Are there theories?

KELLY-WOESSNER: Yes. What I think you’re seeing — and I talk about this
a little bit in my blog posts and in the book chapter — is a fundamental shift
in the way the Left views free speech and the tension between free speech
and equality or social justice. If you look at people who are 40 years of age or
older, they tend to reflect and articulate a classical liberal philosophy, where
they argue that free speech rights should be guaranteed even to their
enemies. That older cohort or older group of survey respondents can have a
social justice orientation and be fairly liberal and promote ideas of equality
and social justice without sacrificing free speech.

When you look at young people under the age of 40, those who have a
higher social justice orientation are less tolerant than those who don’t. So
what has happened is that these classical liberal ideas have given way to
ideas that were echoed by the New Left, that there should be an “intolerance
of intolerance,” that if you want to promote social justice, you actually have
to act to silence those who would deny social justice to protect classes of
people.

WOODS: I want to read a passage that you yourself quote in your chapter
from Herbert Marcuse, and maybe you can elaborate on it. He says this: he
regrets that “tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of
behavior which should not be tolerated, because they are impeding if not
destroying the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. This
sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which
authentic liberals protested. Liberating tolerance, then, would mean
intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements
from the Left” So you’re saying that it’s that kind of thinking that is really
coming to the fore.

KELLY-WOESSNER: Yeah. I think you hear that more and more in the
student voices that are being heard on college campuses and in protests
against controversial speakers. In one of the blog posts I wrote, which was a
response to John K. Wilson, I quote a student who was writing for The
46
Harvard Crimson, and I think her language is very much in line with what we
were seeing from Marcuse: the idea that if we want to promote tolerance we
need to stamp out or prevent people from speaking if they are intolerant.
The challenge with that is: who is it we need to stamp out in order to create
a society that promotes social justice?

Consider the question of whether you would allow atheists to speak on

campus or whether you would allow religious people to speak on campus.
Both of those groups are intolerant of something, right? Atheists are
intolerant of religion; religious people are intolerant of atheists. So if we start
taking a position that we’re going to silence anyone who’s intolerant, well,
we can define that to meet our political purposes pretty easily.

WOODS: I know I may get some pushback from people who may be inclined
to say, “A pox on both their houses,” and who will point out that there’s
plenty of obnoxious behavior on both sides of college campuses, but I just
can’t go along with that. I just think back to four solid years of my own
experience. I was a Harvard undergrad from 1990 to 1994. I saw it with my
own eyes.

I was certainly on the right wing. There was no doubt about that. I wrote for
the right-leaning publications. I was in the right-wing groups. That’s where I
was. And it never, ever occurred to us — ever — to disrupt a speaker or to
make jerks out of ourselves or to scream, or get up and be belligerent and
rude and obnoxious in the way we addressed people. That never even
dawned on us.

Whereas on the Left, we saw this as a matter of course. The sorts of speakers
you would get coming to Harvard were a left-wing student’s dream. I
remember at the 1995 commencement ceremony, Angela Davis was there.
She was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List at one point. She was a communist
who won the Lenin Peace Prize, which of course means she’s an opponent of
peace. She’s a horrifying person, and she’s just wandering around. People are
getting autographs from her.

This is not normal. This is a woman who, when she was told that there were
prisoners of conscience behind the Iron Curtain, and asked if maybe she
47
could exert some influence to let them out, said they deserved what they got;
let them remain in prison. This is the woman who is the avatar of toleration
for these people. It’s astonishing.

This went on constantly. We would bring in one or two speakers who were
somewhere in the ballpark of what we believed, and there was always a big
uproar about it. So the fact that they would have 99.998% of all speakers in
line with their views was not enough. They had to stamp out the occasional
dissenter. That’s what we’re talking about here, this basic, totalitarian
instinct and impulse. This is not a matter of, well, the right-wing students do
their thing, and the left-wing students do their thing, and who’s to say who’s
ultimately to blame. I don’t buy that at all. That does not ring true with my
experience or with that of any of my friends.

KELLY-WOESSNER: Right. One of the things I’ve noticed over the past ten,
fifteen years is that the protests against campus speakers today are coming
more and more from the student body. And so I think that what we’re seeing
is this growth in intolerance among students, that they have learned
somewhere along the line that any idea at all that might offend somebody
doesn’t have a place on their campus. So it’s a distrust in their own campus
environment. It’s a distrust in their education, because the classical liberal
view was that even if you disagreed with somebody, the best thing to do was
to let them speak and then use your own ideas to refute theirs.

This idea that ideas are dangerous and shouldn’t even be heard tends to
backfire, because those ideas then fester and are never exposed to the light
or are never involved in that free marketplace of ideas where they’re
supposed to be challenged. We’re not seeing that challenge on college
campuses. And although I know there are lots of conservatives who come
out of college campuses and really feel they didn’t get a fair shake, ironically
I think that the educational disadvantage is to the liberal students whose
ideas are not being challenged, because we know that challenging of ideas is
what makes you a better critical thinker, makes you better able to reason
and to articulate your positions.

WOODS: I know you are a social scientist, and so you have to have a certain
decorum, whereas I’m a podcast host, and I can say what’s on my mind. I
48
think you’re giving too much credit to some of these college vandals — I’ll
just come right out and put it that way — when you say that what concerns
them is that somebody might say something that offends people. I don’t
think that’s true. They obviously have a very, very selective sensitivity about
what offends people. They could not care less if American Southerners are
offended, if evangelicals are offended, if Catholics are offended. I don’t see
any of them saying we need more Scandinavians in the campus orchestra.
Obviously it’s particular causes and particular ways of thinking that they
want to promote. I think it’s raw power.

They use an appeal to our sense of fair play and politeness to make it seem as
if those things are what their movement is all about. But I don’t think at root
that that’s what their movement is all about. I think it’s the exercise of raw
power and intimidation to silence their opponents, so that people will just
keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to be called racists, they
don’t want to be called haters. So they just keep their mouths shut, they nod
their heads, they do their studies, and they leave.

KELLY-WOESSNER: I don’t know that there is something fundamentally

different about liberals and conservatives that causes this difference, but I
think what’s happening is the ideological imbalance on college campuses
creates a situation where liberals are able to shut down ideas much more
effectively than conservatives. And so it’s a problem of faculties being
overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal and the students having the support
of faculties who honestly aren’t engaged with the other side of the issue. And
when we start talking about political tolerance, what we know is that the
more exposed you are to different ideas, the more you’re exposed to
counterarguments, the higher your level of political tolerance. So if you’re in
a very insular environment where you’re never exposed to those alternative
ideas, your tolerance level’s going to be very low.

WOODS: I was very surprised by a conclusion in your paper regarding the

claim that students are being indoctrinated on campus, that they’re
surrounded by, as you say, people who by and large have a particular point of
view. Obviously if you take a sociology course in an American university,
99.9% of the time everybody knows what is about to happen to you. You’re
not going to get a dispassionate overview of American society. Let’s not be
49
silly about this. But you say that by and large when people come out of four
years there, their views are more or less unchanged. I find that extremely
surprising.

KELLY-WOESSNER: Right. My own research shows that, but there’s a

number of other studies that have tracked political views over four years that
find the same thing. What we find is that by the time you’re 18 or 19 years
old, you have a core set of values that is fairly resistant to change. So
students engage in the same type of selective hearing, selective listening that
everybody else does. There’s a reason that liberals don’t listen to Rush
Limbaugh: they don’t want to hear what he has to say. The same thing
happens on a college campus. Students tend to tune out arguments and
ideas that challenge their values. Ideally in an educational environment we
wouldn’t want that to be the case. We’d want those walls to come down. But
what we’re seeing is that students are resistant to arguments that counter
their fundamental core values. So students aren’t moving a lot from
freshman to senior year in terms of their politics.

WOODS: It doesn’t seem to me there’s a whole lot that can be done about
this unless people’s attitudes change. You can’t make people’s attitudes
change just by changing university policies. If they still have this impulse to
silence people and to argue by trying to intimidate people into silence, you’re
just dealing with symptoms rather than the core cause. So it seems like this
is a fairly grim future unless some radical changes of mind occur. How do
you look toward the future in light of what you’ve written?

KELLY-WOESSNER: Um — [laughing] with some concern. One of the

things that comes up in my research that I haven’t talked about in the blogs
is that colleges and universities, although they might have some ability to
counter this — if students were really exposed to a multitude of ideas here,
theoretically they would learn to become more tolerant to those ideas. But it
doesn’t begin in college. We’re seeing students enter college with low levels
of tolerance. I had students in my political science research methods class do
a survey of our own campus last year. They were looking at issues of political
tolerance on campus, and they started to look at tolerance levels by major.
They found that some of the lowest levels of tolerance — and I believe this is
probably true on all campuses; Elizabethtown College is not unlike a lot of
50
our competitors — were coming out of the education majors.

When you look at what’s happening in K-12 and the messages that students
get there about disagreement and about ideas and the exchange of ideas that
might be uncomfortable, I think they’re learning these lessons very early on.
There are strategies and programs that might be directed at K-12 where
people would be taught the value of free speech and those rights that I think
probably are not being taught today the way they once were.

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51
 Chapter 5
Feminism, Women’s Studies, and the University

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise

Institute, and author of Who Stole Feminism?

WOODS: I was a Harvard undergrad from ‘90 to ‘94, and there was a
women’s studies department there. At first I thought this was a department
where they taught the history of women, maybe the economic position of
women or whatever. And it was about a year, year and a half into this naiveté
of mine that I realized that this department exists for the sole purpose of
confirming the ideological prejudices of the people in that department.

There’s no way I’d be able to have a department like that in a university, that
would just confirm me in my existing views, but that’s more or less what
women’s studies departments are. And in fact, when I had Milo
Yiannopoulos on not too long ago, I said: what do you think the chances are
that Christina Hoff Sommers would be able to get a position in a omen’s
studies department in an American university? And of course it was a
rhetorical question. What can you tell us about the very phenomenon of
women’s studies?

SOMMERS: Well, from the beginning women’s studies has been highly
politicized. Now, I will tell you there are serious scholars that teach under
the rubric of women’s studies, so you will find experts on women in classical
Greece or women in the 19th century, 19th-century women novelists. But
overall the tone is set by the feminist theorists, and you are exactly right:
they built a department around their own political dogmas. No one else
would be allowed to do that, except maybe in ethnic studies. But in women’s
studies they’ve perfected it, and they don’t allow critics.

And this is very bad for our society, because unfortunately these gender
52
scholars in our universities, they kind of have a monopoly on the brain trust
on information about women. So when politicians, journalists, anyone, they
want to find out what’s happening with women in the economy, what’s
happening with women in psychology, what’s happening with women in
education, they turn to these scholars who are actually ideologues and who
aren’t reliable. They’re simply not reliable as a group. Some of them might be
individually.

WOODS: I remember looking through the course catalog at one of the

courses, and it was talking about all of the topics that would be covered, and
it used the term “anti-choice” to refer to the pro-life movement. Now, it’s
considered to be good form to refer to a movement by the name it chooses
for itself. The pro-life movement does not call itself the “anti-choice
movement” So right there in the description of the course was an ideological
stake in the ground.

I realize we’re generalizing here, but let’s just take the typical, if there is such
a thing, women’s studies department. What’s the picture of the condition of
women in America and in the world that people would get if their only
source of information were courses in that department?

SOMMERS: Well, I can tell you that, because over the years I have
continued to gather the curricula from women’s studies courses and
textbooks; I try to keep up on the readings.

WOODS: Oh, that’s great. Good for you.

SOMMERS: If anything, it’s worse than ever. They now have turned to
something called intersectionality. That’s all the rage. It’s the idea that you
don’t really focus on gender; you have to focus on race, class, and gender, as
well as other social pathologies that they see. Like lookism. Do you know
what that is?

WOODS: If somebody’s unattractive I might discriminate against them?

SOMMERS: Right.

53
WOODS: Okay.

SOMMERS: And even neuroatypicalism and heightism. There are a lot of -

isms that have been brought into it.

WOODS: I’ve suffered from heightism my whole life. I’m 5’6”.

SOMMERS: (laughing) I suffer from ageism, as a woman of a certain age.

WOODS: But we’ve overcome, haven’t we?

SOMMERS: Who cares? Life’s too short.

WOODS: (laughing) Yeah, life’s too short, and so am I, unfortunately.

SOMMERS: (laughing) Right. And no, it grows. They have something that
they call a matrix of oppression —

WOODS: Ugh.

SOMMERS: — or an axis of — oh, I forget. It’s elaborate. But you’re

absolutely right that the underlying theme is just everything is bad for
women and getting worse. You would think that in the United States women
are living in a state of siege, male predation; everywhere we’re being
battered; we’re being raped; we’re being denied healthy food by the
patriarchy that insists on slender standards of female beauty. On and on and
on. Is any of it true? No, it’s not. Women have problems; so do men. They
take problems, and they exaggerate them, and then they produce advocacy
research to make their findings look credible.

WOODS: If you have all this raw material, though — you’ve got textbooks;
you’ve got syllabi, all these things from these departments, then it seems to
me you’ve got the guts of a great book right there. Just a book about the
insane people in these departments. The last thing in the world they really
want is for mainstream America to know everything that goes on in these
classes, because of course we’re not quite enlightened enough to be able to
appreciate it. To me that would be a tremendous service. It’s easy for me as
the host of the show to ask other people to perform tremendous services, but
54
it seems somebody ought to do this.

SOMMERS: Well, here’s the sad thing. I wrote this book many years ago. I
wrote it in 1994. The Atlantic sent me out to do an article on gender studies
— it was called women’s studies mostly then. And I went to conferences; I
read all the textbooks. I think I figured it all out. I think I was right, and I
wrote Who Stole Feminism?

WOODS: Oh, that’s what that was. All right.

SOMMERS: And then I wrote The War Against Boys, because that was a
kind of a follow-up on Who Stole Feminism?, because I found that the worst
mistakes they were making, the feminist establishment, was in the area of
education and not noticing that boys, not the girls, were the have-nots. But
it’s just disheartening to have done that research, have basically any I think
any fair-minded person, liberal or conservative, review Who Stole Feminism?,
look at the arguments, would say that I was right. But it didn’t matter,
because I may have won the argument — it wasn’t just me; there were
several of us that were sort of dissident feminist scholars at the time. We
won the argument, but the other side won the assistant professorships. And
so they’ve been there all along. I should probably rewrite Who Stole
Feminism?, just update it, because I don’t have to change the themes of the
arguments, just more evidence.

WOODS: Yeah, just make them 40% crazier.

SOMMERS: [laughing] Right, exactly. But the problem is that everything

that people think they know about gender is just wrong. It’s sort of like those
credit default swaps that were everywhere, you know, they corrupted
everything, the economy. Well, this information I think has corrupted the
spirit of the country, because women are bitter; they’re going around
thinking they’re being cheated out of almost a quarter of their salary.

WOODS: Yeah, give us a few examples. I’ve talked about the gender pay gap,
so called, and I’ve had Mark Perry on, but what are some things that women
are being led to believe about themselves that have no basis in fact?

55
SOMMERS: Oh, well, that one in five girls on campus is going to be sexually
assaulted.

WOODS: Yeah, they were saying that even when I was in school X number
of years ago. They were already saying that.

SOMMERS: Oh yeah, well, when I wrote Who Stole Feminism? in ’94, it was
one in four.

WOODS: That’s what I remember on campus. So are you telling me they’ve

gotten slightly more reasonable?

SOMMERS: No, they just have different studies. But all the studies make the
same mistake. If you look to reliable statistical gathering agencies, like the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, they find that sexual assault on campus is
relatively rare and that to the extent that anyone’s at risk, women are far
more at risk in poor neighborhoods and high-crime areas. Overall, crime has
gone down, and that includes rape, which is a very good thing. But on the
campus, it’s the rarest of all.

How did we persuade ourselves or persuade how many otherwise sensible

people, including so many journalists and young women, that schools like
Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Yale, that these are rape cultures? And it was done
because this point of view, this very grim world view, a grim view about men,
viewing American society as a frightening and oppressive place for women.
They started out with that view long ago. The feminist establishment started
out with that view, and they’ve just been trying to prove it ever since.
They’ve gotten very good at it, except for the fact that it doesn’t exist, this
oppressive, nightmarish, patriarchal male hegemony. It does not exist, not in
the United States. Maybe other countries.

WOODS: In other words, if you start off with that presumption, that that’s
the nature of American society, then it’s easier to persuade yourself of wildly
implausible statistics about rapes on campus. But are they also just defining
rape in a way that’s different from how normal people define it?

SOMMERS: Yes, they’re doing a few things. They have enlarged the meaning

56
of rape or sexual assault to include things that most of us would not call
rape. So even an unwanted kiss in some surveys counts as sexual violence, as
well as rape while you’re inebriated. I think we would all agree that if you
were so drunk you were passing out and someone took advantage of you, we
might call that rape, and in many cases we certainly would, but what if
you’re just drunk and you’re using bad judgment and you hook up with
someone? Well, the male will be called a rapist.

I find this whole thing sexist, because why is he the rapist? If I’m drunk and
he’s drunk, we’re both drunk, we have sex, and we both agree to it under the
conditions of inebriation, why does he get called the rapist?

I don’t understand that, but that’s part of the logic of this — there’s a new
thing going on on campus now. I call it fainting couch feminism. I don’t
know exactly where it came from, but it’s all these girls that have trigger
warnings and safe spaces and they’re constantly being put upon by men and
everything — it’s the opposite of women’s liberation. But it was all fostered
by this sort of paranoid theory.

Oh, and I should have told you one thing in the beginning. When they came
up with these dogmatic theories, they have a kind of strange epistemology
where it was very hard to get real knowledge of what was going on. It was
hidden. So women had to get together in safe spaces and talk to each other,
and then you would get the truth. So they were already protected from
criticism in the ‘90s, because if you came along and said, well, I don’t see
this, I don’t see American women living in a state of siege, I don’t see what
you’re saying is true, the fact that you don’t see it is proof of how insidious it
is.

WOODS: Yeah.

SOMMERS: Or proof that you’re part of the problem they’re trying to

overcome.

WOODS: So it’s not falsifiable. There is no way —

SOMMERS: It is not falsifiable. This is a little strong, and I don’t like to use

57
language this way, but I’ve come to the point where I think I’m right: I think
on campus, not for all students but for a fair number of students, today
feminism is a cult.

WOODS: I can understand how that type of language would be used

because of the non-falsifiability of some of the claims and because, well —

SOMMERS: A conspiracy theory?

WOODS: Yes.

SOMMERS: You know, it’s a conspiracy theory about the patriarchy, and
only you understand the evidence; it’s secret evidence only available to those
who’ve already been enlightened to the truth.

WOODS: Yeah, and it’s evidently not even available to all women, because
they wouldn’t allow you in their safe space.

SOMMERS: (laughing) Oh, no. When I spoke at Oberlin and at Georgetown

last spring, they organized safe rooms where they could flee in case I said
something that invalidated their experience. That’s the worst thing you can
do, is to invalidate their experience. I thought that was one of the many
purposes of a college education, to have your assumptions challenged.

WOODS: Yeah, no, it’s just not.

SOMMERS: (laughing)

WOODS: (laughing) Maybe at some point it was, but boy, that is the last
thing in the world these totalitarians want. Thinking about these delicate
flowers with their safe rooms calls to mind my own college experience, when
if we got one slightly right-of-center speaker every three semesters, it was a
miracle. To the contrary, they got all their prejudices confirmed by every
speaker who came through. We barely had one, and they would be
screaming and making a production during that one.

And I thought: if these people ever got into power, what would they be like

58
when their attitude is that we can’t listen even to one slight deviation from
orthodoxy? If I had to flee to a safe space every time I heard a crazy view that
invalidated my experience, I would have been in a cocoon my entire college
career.

Have you had any other oddball experiences when you’ve been a speaker on
college campuses?

SOMMERS: Oh yes, I only have oddball experiences.

WOODS: I guess that was a rhetorical question.

SOMMERS: (laughing) I went recently to the University of Minnesota, and I

was there with Milo Yiannopoulos. We spoke together.

WOODS: (laughing) Oh my gosh, you’d need a safe space with steel beams
or something like that.

SOMMERS: I know, well, they were definitely triggered, and members of the
audience — people came to protest. They set off these little sirens while we
were talking.

Every time I’m with Milo — we went to a panel in Florida; there was a bomb
scare. We had a gamer meetup in Washington; there were threats and they
had to bring in dogs because of another bomb scare.

So bomb threats, bomb scares, threats of mass murder. Milo got an email
saying someone was going to come in, shoot up the place. So those are the
extreme examples.

WOODS: You could think of any feminist speaker; if there had been such an
email to that person, the whole country would know about it and we’d never
hear the end of it.

SOMMERS: Exactly. That’s what shocked me. Just a few weeks before we got
that email, Anita Sarkeesian got a threat of that sort at a university, and yes,
we have heard about it over and over again. We never stop hearing about it.
Some victims of threats count more than others.
59
WOODS: I want to shift gears. The fact that women are not represented in
the sciences anywhere near their proportion in the population can be
understood and interpreted in different ways, but of course in the modern
feminist point of view this is obviously because of social expectations or
discrimination or oppression or patriarchy or outright exclusion or whatever.
What do you think the real truth of the matter is?

SOMMERS: I think the truth of the matter is that women on average prefer
other subjects. So if you have a young woman with the skills to be a physicist
or a computer scientist, she’s more likely than a similarly skilled young man
to just choose something else. She might choose cognitive psychology; she
might choose art history. Women major in far more subjects than men, and
they dominate in the humanities and the social sciences. And we know that
a little girl who is a — let’s say she’s a math prodigy. Well, girls who are math
prodigies are often also verbally at the very high end of ability. They score at
the very high end. So they have more options in what they can do. You just
don’t get as many women choosing that field. And again, this selective
inattention. All the activists want to say, well, what are we going to do about
this crisis of so few women in physics? Well, what about so few men in
psychology?

WOODS: That seems like a pretty good point to me, and it also seems kind
of odd to be constantly badgering women with these women-in-science
programs. As if women aren’t going to be aware of the existence of chemistry
unless we launch an awareness campaign directed at them. It seems a little
bit patronizing.

SOMMERS: It is patronizing. It’s also unnecessary, because there are girls

who are brilliant and are flourishing in the sciences. There just aren’t as
many, because it’s almost as if these activists believe that until there is
statistical parity in the areas that they want — they don’t want statistical
parity with window washers. That’s fine that that’s all men. Or roofers, coal
miners, or sewage workers. But if it’s something that they think is desirable
and it’s not 50/50, they’re not happy.

And by the way, if it becomes imbalanced in favor of women — so our

60
colleges are approaching, what is it lately? It’s getting close to 60% female at
many schools and only 40% male. They don’t mind that. That doesn’t create
an equity issue. It’s only when they don’t have statistical parity in something
that they value.

WOODS: You obviously know an awful lot about all the different strains of
feminism. I remember just in college there were so-called difference
feminists, who would admit that men and women were different, and then
there were feminists who more or less thought that men and women were
the same and that the differences were just environmental.

SOMMERS: Right.

WOODS: But there must be many other flavors. What would you say is the
dominant strain, if there is one, today in feminism?

SOMMERS: Well, first of all, I just want to tell you the difference feminists
thought that men and women were different and that women were better.

WOODS: Oh, I forgot that.

SOMMERS: (laughing) I’ve always called them superiority feminism.

WOODS: That’s better.

SOMMERS: I believe the sexes are different and equal, and that’s fine, and I
don’t require statistical parity, but what I would ask is to prove that there’s
equality of opportunity. If a young woman or a young man has the
opportunity if they so desire to study psychology or to study physics or
whatever, then that’s all I ask. But they ask much more. Now, what’s
happening today is a shift from when you were in school, and it’s this, what I
mentioned before, intersectionality.

This theory developed from a group of African American women in the ‘70s,
scholars, activists, who initially had a reasonable complaint. They felt that
the women’s movement, the organized women’s movement, as well as the
scholarship money, excluded black women and that middle-class, fairly well
fixed white women were defining “woman” as all inclusive but leaving them
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out. And so they demanded attention, which was fine. It makes sense that
they would do that.

But their movement gained momentum, and now in many gender studies
departments, it’s not all. They would take what’s called a sort of
intersectional approach, and that means that you can’t simply look at race
and class and gender; you have to look at how they are mutually reinforcing.
They say they give various kinds of benefits and burdens. So a black male
would be burdened by race but benefited by his gender. A lesbian woman
would be burdened by her having an atypical orientation and she’s burdened
by being a woman, but she’d be benefited by her class.

And so these theorists, Patricia Collins and Bell Hooks and several others,
they did think that because African American women were the least
advantaged, this gave them a privileged standpoint, a privileged source of
knowledge and wisdom. And so the idea of intersectionality is that everyone
should identify their privileges and their burdens, and they should listen to
those who are more oppressed than they are. So white males should listen to
white females; white females should listen to black females; black females
who are heteronormative should listen to lesbian black females. There’s a
hierarchy of wisdom, of prestige, and to me it looks like the opposite of
liberalism because it’s tribalism.

There’s also a kind of collective guilt, because all men bear the guilt.
According to intersectionality, it’s not just that you’re privileged, but that
you got your privilege by oppressing other people. You have what’s called
unearned advantage, and you’ve got to confront that. You’ve got to just be
quiet and listen and learn, but basically shut up. Now, this doesn’t create a
very happy environment on the campus. This is strong right now. I’ve just
done a new episode in my — I have this series called The Factual Feminist. I
try to correct a feminist myth every week or two.

WOODS: We’re going to link to that, by the way. That’s going to be linked at
TomWoods.com/625. People have got to tune in to that.

SOMMERS: Yeah, I forget; I think I have about 45 videos. And when I first
started correcting feminist myths, my mother said, wait a minute, you’re
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going to run out.

WOODS: Yeah.

SOMMERS: (laughing) No, because they’ve been doing this since the 1980s,
even the ‘70s. There’s a lot to correct. But anyway, sometimes I don’t just
correct facts; I expose the fallacies of theories. So lately I’ve been looking at
intersectionality, and it’s full of fallacies. It also doesn’t really improve social
relations. It doesn’t do much to alleviate oppression. But it’s a permission to
be a bully.

WOODS: That raises a question. Given that this is a libertarian show, there
may be some people in my audience who say, I’ll grant you this is a lot of
crazy belief and crazy behavior, but as long as it doesn’t spill over into
government policy then it doesn’t really affect me any. But does it in fact
influence government policy?

SOMMERS: Well, it really didn’t until a few years ago. There were always
crazy feminists on campus who were over the top, and then I consider myself
a feminist in the reasonable sense of wanting basic fairness and equal liberty
for women and so forth. But in 2011, because these groups pressured — they
do pressure politicians, these feminist groups. And they pressured the
Department of Education to change the rules on campus, so that a young
man or anybody who offended them would be violating Title IX. Let’s say
you told a dirty joke in their presence or did something they found offensive
or hurtful around gender. Because of these new regulations, the school has
to come down hard on the kids, the transgressor.

So they’ve changed the rules on college campuses. Almost everything you

hear about the crazy that’s going on on campus was because the government
got involved and the government basically took the side of the intersectional
feminists, and the schools were afraid they’d lose their funding if they didn’t
punish speech that offended or triggered someone. So the schools are
rushing to not run afoul of Title IX as it was interpreted in 2011 by the
Department of Education.

WOODS: I bet there’s one other area where they could have an impact on

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government policy. We’re hearing both Hillary and Bernie talking about the
gender pay gap, and as I said, we’ve covered that on the show, and there’s no
reason to believe it in the way that they’re describing it. And they’re both
pledging to correct it. What would that look like?

SOMMERS: Oh, you can’t imagine how much this influences government.
They’re going to correct the pay gap.

WOODS: How?

SOMMERS: In absurd ways. They’re going to punish employers or threaten

employers for something that is not the responsibility of the employer,
because the employers didn’t create the pay gap. The pay gap has to do with
what women mostly — not entirely, but mostly —study in college, where
they go to work, what sector they work in, what job they work at. And men
and women do not take the same jobs. They don’t even work on average the
same number of hours. Men work more hours. Men are also far more willing
to take dangerous jobs in faraway places. They’re more willing to take jobs
with crazy schedules where you have to work five days a week away from
home, and all these things. Now, you can say that’s because of gender role
socialization. Okay, maybe, but that’s not the fault of employers.

WOODS: Right, so why should it be on their shoulders?

SOMMERS: It shouldn’t, but this is the power of the feminist establishment

to take something that’s not true, insist that it’s true, and then pressure
politicians to come up for a solution for this false claim of an injustice.

WOODS: Your colleague Mark Perry went and did the numbers, because
you’re right, if we just look at full time workers, that’s not accurate. You’ve
got to disaggregate that, because full time is 35 hours plus. Well, there are a
lot of women between 35 and 40 hours, but there are a lot of men at 40 and
over —

SOMMERS: Exactly.

WOODS: — so when you correct for that, this gets the so-called pay gap

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down to about 12%, and as Mark found, that’s exactly the gender pay gap
that existed in the Obama White House. And so when they were confronted
by this, their response was, well, men and women have different jobs in the
Obama White House. Yeah, no kidding. That’s what every private employer
has been trying to tell you (laughing).

SOMMERS: (laughing) Exactly right. So it’s a game. It’s also in education.

We have a huge problem with male underachievement. And it’s most acute
with African American males, but it’s working class — in general, boys don’t
do as well in school, but there’s a large cohort of young men who are going
to have trouble graduating high school; they’re going to have trouble finding
a place for themselves in the information economy.

Similar things are happening in Britain and Australia, France. The young
men are struggling, and they have all sorts of efforts to strengthen their
literacy, and that’s the key thing, to get kids to read and read a lot. And we
need programs like that, and our schools need to focus on educating boys
and realizing it’s a bigger challenge to engage a male child in school than to
engage a female child.

But we can’t do it, because as soon as you try to do something for boys, if you
try to separate the boys and give them a program, the women’s council at the
ACLU will sue and call it gender apartheid. There’s endless nonsense and
shenanigans, and we can’t do a thing. We cannot address the problem,
which may be one of the most serious problems, a real problem around
gender, which is male disengagement, and especially poor boys, and that
includes many African American, Hispanic, and white boys who are by far
the greatest risk. We can’t do anything, because these groups stop it.

Things like that, it’s just exhausting, because they have misinformation; they
believe it. I don’t say that they’re lying; I think they’re just self-deceived.
They’ve bought in to their own ideology. They’re members of their own cult.

WOODS: Christina, if somebody wanted to jump into your work, especially

after hearing this conversation, what would you say would be the first book
to read?

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SOMMERS: Well, I did a new edition of The War Against Boys a couple of
years ago, so they might want to look at that if they have a son. Anyone with
a son or a little brother or a little boy they love should read my book,
because they should know that schools can be a very hostile environment for
little boys. Their way of playing, their way of being is not appreciated in
many classrooms. It’s been interpreted politically in the very feminist-
dominated schools of education. So a little boy who likes — even the level of
the stories he writes. In my book I tell stories about a little boy who might
want to write about monsters devouring a city. Well, that’s thought to be
predictive of violence; why are they destroying the city? And the kid will get
in trouble. Of course everybody’s heard about these little boys who get
suspended from school for making their fingers into the shape of a gun or
chewing a pop tart into the shape of a weapon. Little boys will do these
things. Girls do them too, but boys do it more, and they’re the ones getting
in trouble. A friend of mine, an educational psychologist, said that today in
the United States the schools for the most part are run by women for girls.

WOODS: Well, I’m going to link to a bunch of your stuff at

TomWoods.com/625. Is there a website also that you direct people to?

SOMMERS: Well, yeah, they’d want to go to YouTube and just Google

“Factual Feminist,” and I’ve made these videos. Some of my videos have had
over a million views. They’re popular. There’s one called “The War Against
Boys”; there’s one called “Feminism Versus Truth” But then the Factual
Feminist series has everything.

Enjoyed this chapter? I release a new episode of the Tom Woods Show,
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66
 Chapter 6
The Cult of Diversity Must Never Be Questioned

Anthony Esolen has been a professor of literature at Furman University,

Providence College, and Thomas More College. In 2016 he wrote, “What counts
for them as ‘diversity’ is governed entirely by a monotonous and predictable
list of current political concerns. If you read a short story written in English by
a Latina author living up the road in Worcester, that counts as ‘diverse,’ but if
you read a romance written in Spanish by a Spanish author living in Spain four
hundred years ago, that does not count as ‘diverse.’“ This conversation is taken
from episode 782 of the Tom Woods Show (November 14, 2016).

WOODS: Let’s talk about what’s been going on with you at Providence
College. I’ve long respected you from a distance. I was talking to Brad Birzer
on a previous episode and we were talking about The Divine Comedy, and we
all said that people should read your translation. Ever since then I’ve
thought: I should have this guy on the show. Little did I know it would be
under these circumstances. Can you describe what’s been going on?

ESOLEN: Oh, dear. Well, first of all, thanks to Brad Birzer for that plug. It
buys a few pizzas at the Esolen household.

WOODS: (laughing) Right.

ESOLEN: Well, in recent years at Providence College, I think the Catholic

faculty have felt themselves increasingly in the minority — that is, the
faithful Catholic faculty, for whom the Catholic mission of the college really
means a lot. And they’ve been the subject of some pretty severe attacks from
their secular colleagues. I mean attacks that might jeopardize their careers.
And I’ve been growing tired of it and have frankly had enough of it.

So I wrote a couple of articles, one in the spring, one this fall, on basically
67
what it is that we mean by diversity and what that has to do with a classical
liberal arts education and of the Catholic character of the college, the
Catholic faith.

And the odd thing is that as a Roman Catholic I belong to the most culturally
diverse institution in the history of the world, but secular people I think
don’t understand that. They don’t know what’s going on or what has gone on
in the Catholic faith for 2,000 years, so they view everything in the light of
current American politics. It’s hard for us to talk the same language when
Catholics try to view everything in the light of the history of salvation and
eternity.

So anyway, I wrote these two articles, and I’ve come under fire for — it’s the
usual accusations — I’m this, that, and the other that’s evil — and have had
students protesting. And the fact that the president of the college singled me
out in front of the whole student body and the faculty for reproach, and I
basically have been called a racist and a sexist and a this-and-thatist. And it’s
been kind of ugly.

WOODS: Well, when you’re on the sidelines and you’re not involved and
you see somebody else being accused of these names, it’s easy to think that
when you’re called those names these days it’s almost always a medal on
your chest. It just means that you were just doing your job as a scholar. It’s
easy to say that when you’re on the sidelines. Bbut when you’re involved in
it, and it’s an attack on you at an institution where you’ve poured 20 years of
your life, I suppose, it must not be so easy.

ESOLEN: Yeah, 27 years.

WOODS: Wow, 27.

ESOLEN: Yeah, this is my 27th year.

WOODS: Have you always had a decent rapport with the other faculty?

ESOLEN: Well, yeah, I would say until the last maybe two years or so. Now,
see, at Providence College we have this two-year-long Development of
Western Civilization program that all freshmen and all sophomores have to
take. And it’s been a little bit watered down for the non-honors students, but
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basically it covers in four semesters the whole history of the West, a wide
variety of cultures. It’s taught by teams of professors, so you’ve got different
disciplines: philosophy, theology, history, literature, and art lectures and
music lectures when we can smuggle them in.

And this has been under attack at Providence College from the secular left,
especially in the social sciences, for 35, 40 years. And I’ve seen it in my own
person for the last quarter-century, a little bit more. And you know, this is
just one continuing battle. So if you defend that program vocally, loudly, you
will be accused by certain professors in the social sciences. A few very loud
professors in the social sciences are going to accuse you of being all those
nasty things just because you defend a program in which they say students
read dead white males. That’s a language that is foul in my mouth, but they
are the ones who talk that language.

So that’s part of this fight here. The fight for the Catholic identity of he
college is all tangled up with how we value what used to called liberal arts
education, a classical liberal arts education. So the battle lines kind of form
along those issues.

WOODS: Why don’t we get into the specifics of what you said in the article
that caused so much offense? Did you think it would ruffle these feathers?
You may have figured that a lot of these people don’t even read the sorts of
websites and publications that you and I would write for.

ESOLEN: Yeah, well, I’m writing for Crisis magazine, so I’m writing for an
orthodox Catholic audience. I figured that nobody here but maybe two or
three Catholic professors is going to read an article like that. So I don’t know
how the students got hold of it. I don’t think really that the students
understood what I was getting at —

WOODS: Oh, you think? (laughing) Really?

ESOLEN: Yeah, you know, one of the points that I make in the article is that
I’m actually a great believer in cultural diversity. I think I believe in it more
ardently than they do, because I believe in the study of a wide variety of
cultures. And you’re going to get that variety these days not in the current
world, where everything is being homogenized. You’re going to get it from
the study of the past. And it’s very precious not to let these past cultures be
69
forgotten, but to learn from them, both their successes and their mistakes.

I mean, here’s this professor, right? I stumble around in ten languages, but
I’m called xenophobic, you know? I spend my summers in a part of the
world, French Canada — well, I’m in a foreign country among people who
don’t speak English as their first language, but I get called xenophobic. That
doesn’t make any sense. It’s very strange. So you have people on the social
science side saying we need cultural diversity, but all they really study is
current events from the point of view of a secular Westerner. How is that an
experience of diversity? That’s one of the questions I’m asking in the article.

Another question is: how can you be talking about diversity when you want
this college, this Catholic college, to be like every other college? Isn’t it more
a celebration of diversity to have colleges be distinct? I don’t tell other
colleges what they have to teach. But why should Providence College be just
like them? They have no answers to this really, because, well, I think if you’re
a secular your ceiling is actually pretty low.

WOODS: So what you’ve been focusing on, or one of your points in your
article, is that the current-day obsession with bean-counting ethnic diversity
interferes with the type of unity that the Catholic world — and of course the
word “catholic” means universal —

ESOLEN: Right.

WOODS: — is ultimately striving for. And that unity points toward eternity,
whereas the current fake unity is extremely present-oriented and tied up in
politics and ephemera.

ESOLEN: Yes, all that, and I would just add that in the unity of the Catholic
Church, there is no homogenization. There’s no reduction of everybody to
the same sort of global standard. The saints are sharply distinct from one
another. The Catholic Church has been an uplifter and elevator, a purifier,
and a preserver of cultures. This is the great missionary problem: how to
bring the Catholic faith to a culture that’s very different from your own. And
the Catholic answer has consistently been to purify the culture, to respect
what is good in it and beautiful and to celebrate that — not to make
everybody into Englishmen or everybody into Italians, but to make them
more themselves than they perhaps ever were. But that’s something also that
70
the secular people would not be able to see.

WOODS: So you say that the administration has been unfriendly and there
have been protests. What else, if anything, has gone on, and do you feel
comfortable on campus? Have they created a hostile work environment for
you?

ESOLEN: Yes, I think they have. I think they’ve intended to. Certainly if you
want to make somebody comfortable on campus you don’t do what was
done to me. The faculty met with the president a week or so ago and had a
60-minute hate fest, and another letter went out from one of the vice
presidents of the college that was as damning or even a little bit more
damning than the letter that came out from the president was. So basically
yeah, I’ve been singled out; I’ve had a bullseye painted on my back for the
crime of, as I believe it, actually believing in diversity in ways that my
opponents do not understand.

But you know, the students are caught in the crosshairs here, because I think
they are just being used as political players. The students don’t have the big
picture. They’re too young. They don’t have experience yet. So they’re easily
led. They’re young. They’re full of energy. They want to go forth and
promote something, and they want to feel that they’re part of something big,
some cause or other. And they can be used by professors who have political
agendas, and unfortunately that has happened here. It’s not a pretty sight.

WOODS: But what could be bigger than defending Western civilization, for
heaven’s sake? At what point are some students going to wake up and say, If
I want to belong to something bigger than myself, how about that?

ESOLEN: They’ve been told that all of Western civilization has been one
long, miserable tale of oppression. It’s the strangest thing, you know?

WOODS: Have they visited a lot of African countries, these kids?

ESOLEN: No, no, they haven’t.

WOODS: Yeah, okay.

ESOLEN: No. And you know, they’d be shocked to find out that a person like
71
me holds out very deep, dear hopes that Africa will end up being the
salvation of the world.

When the whole Western world goes insane, Africa will pull the world back
to sanity. They wouldn’t get that at all. They wouldn’t understand what I was
talking about at all. I’m talking mainly about faculty members here and not
about students. Faculty don’t necessarily have a very broad education in the
liberal arts.

WOODS: That’s an interesting thing to say. You’re talking about faculty who
were in other disciplines —

ESOLEN: Yeah.

WOODS: — or faculty within the liberal arts?

ESOLEN: Well, sometimes it’s faculty in the liberal arts themselves — less so
here than at most places. But the strange thing is that even faculty in the
liberal arts at most American colleges right now do not have a particularly
broad education. You can’t even depend upon it — let’s say that you have an
English professor teaching at Land Grant State University, someplace in the
US. Does that English professor have a broad and deep knowledge of English
literature? And the answer to that question is maybe yes, maybe no. It’s a
toss-up. Maybe it’s even worse than a toss-up, that it’s actually more likely
that that professor of English does not have a broad education in English
literature. Then forget about it once you leave that department. So education
has become increasingly specialized and narrow.

WOODS: What do you think happens next for you now?

ESOLEN: Oh, I don’t know. So far I’ve been denied the chance to write to all
of the students directly to make a plea. I’ve appealed to them through the
student newspaper; it’s been the only avenue open to me. So we’ll see. I plan
to give a talk on Christ and the meaning of cultural diversity in the coming
weeks. I wanted to give it today. I was told that if I tried to give it maybe the
students would shut it down. I don’t think that that’s actually going to
happen. I would like to say to them things that they’ve never heard before,
and welcome them into this great education that we have to offer them. And
not to have their heads turned by campus politicians who have not had this
72
education, who don’t really know, in their own persons don’t really know
how to value it, because they’ve never experienced it.

WOODS: You could make a YouTube video that wouldn’t, it’s true, be
emailed to every student. I guarantee you that thing would get around,
because at the very least Crisis magazine would pick it up —

ESOLEN: Right.

WOODS: — which means CampusReform.org would pick it up, which

means the same way they found out about your article they’d find out about
the video.

ESOLEN: Now that is a thought. I had not thought about that.

WOODS: That’s what I’m here for.

ESOLEN: (laughing) There you go, yeah. I had not thought about that. That
might be — yeah, let me think that one over.

WOODS: Because at the very least it rallies the whole country to your side,
even if it accomplishes nothing at Providence College.

ESOLEN: Yeah, which would be very unfortunate as far as Providence

College is concerned. You know, we never did lose our Catholic identity, and
in many ways it’s a really good college. I used to say, until about a year or so
ago, I said all the time to anybody who asked me, I said that I thought that I
had the best academic job of anybody I knew in the United States, because I
got to teach at a Catholic college that affirmed my freedom. I got to teach
Homer, Augustine, Aquinas, Milton, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Johann
Sebastian Bach, Dante, you name it. I got to teach all these wonderful things
to all these cheerful young people. And I could speak my mind, not that — I
don’t politicize in classes at all, and I don’t hide the fact that I’m Roman
Catholic, but I had freedom to talk about anything. I didn’t have to worry.
Until about a year or so ago. We’ll see how this shakes out. My colleagues
who do teach in philosophy and theology have been under the gun for a little
bit longer, because they — you know, they’re really out on the line, right?
They’ve got to teach the Catholic teachings, and most of the secular faculty
finds those teachings abominable.
73
WOODS: Now, what about the possibility — this depends, of course, on
your tolerance level for abuse, which may be low —

ESOLEN: Yeah.

WOODS: Have you considered taking the offending articles you wrote and,
in light of your experiences, developing a whole book out of it, doubling
down on it?

ESOLEN: No, I haven’t thought about that yet. You know, the strange thing
about all of this is that I know very well that if I could have students in small
groups — because when you’re a big group, the big group dynamic then
takes over. But I could talk to any students about anything. It’s faculty that
are hardened in their ideologies. Students are fine, you know? If I could have
the opportunity to speak to them, then all this would become very different.
But they’re being encouraged by people from the outside not to talk to me.
They have a Facebook page calling for boycotts of my classes. My gosh. I
mean, I have wonderful things to teach these kids. All they have to come and
do is ask, you know? It’s right there. And it’s not going to hurt me personally;
it just hurts them. So people who are urging them to do this don’t have their
best interests in mind.

WOODS: And unfortunately, as you say, what a narrow — in fact, “narrow”

is not a good enough word here — stilted?...I still can’t quite come up with
the word — way to look at the world, that all you can do when looking at the
world or history or other cultures is to view everything through a 21st-
century left-liberal lens in left-liberal categories. You can’t even understand
other people. For all their talk about diversity, how could they understand
almost any of the other cultures of the world if all they can think about is
gender oppression?

ESOLEN: Yeah, well, that’s one of the beauties of studying ancient cultures
and medieval cultures and Renaissance cultures. You’re forced out of your
grid, the current political grid. And then — well, that’s the great beauty of a
liberal arts education. It liberates you. Newman said this. Aall the great
thinkers about liberal arts education in the last 150 years said the same thing:
it liberates you from the narrow confines of your own place, your own time,
even your own culture. And that is all to the good.
74
And that of course is what I have to offer all kids here. I don’t care who
comes to my office wanting this sort of education. I welcome everybody. I’m
not the one who thinks in terms of ethnicity and the other stuff. They are.
The irony is just incredible.

WOODS: You have a book called, among your many books, The Politically
Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization —

ESOLEN: Right.

WOODS: — and that’s of course a series of books I’ve contributed to. Now,
in that book you teach a lot of things that, as you say, the typical college
student or even in some cases college professor has not learned. Now, when I
usually encounter defenses of Western civilization against leftist attacks,
they very often take the form of defending Enlightenment views, as if the
Enlightenment is Western civilization, and then they go and smack down
the left that way.

ESOLEN: Right.

WOODS: What’s your approach?

ESOLEN: Well, the Enlightenment is a narrow slice of Western civilization

and, in many ways, not a particularly nice one. The way we teach Western
civilization, we go back all the way — some of the teams in our Western
civilization program go all the way back to the Babylonians to pick up the
Epic of Gilgamesh and then begin to compare it with very the different Book
of Genesis. We take them all the way back at least to the ancient Hebrews,
perhaps even beyond the ancient Hebrews.

So by the time they get to the Enlightenment, our students should have a
fund of knowledge about the world before so that Enlightenment pretenses
will ring a little bit hollow. I mean, what’s the great art that the
Enlightenment produced? We got Beethoven; we got some pretty good
poetry. But generally when it comes to that sort of thing, the Enlightenment
is rather thin. And the thinking in the Enlightenment is rather narrow — its
philosophy, in any case. And we hope the students will be able to see around
it, beyond it, something other than it. It’s got its limitations, but if that’s what
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you mean by Western civilization, the Enlightenment, that’s very little; that’s
pretty narrow.

WOODS: What’s wrong, then, with the typical student view of the way
Western civilization has gone, that, okay, we had backward, superstitious
people for 1700, 1800 years, and then all of a sudden, people threw this off
and said: this is nonsense; we need science and microscopes and magnifying
glasses. What’s wrong with that?

ESOLEN: Well, first of all, what’s wrong with that is somebody who talks
that way really doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They have no great
knowledge of the ancient world or Middle Ages or the Renaissance. They
have at best a comic book set of bigotries about that — as you said, it was
1700 years of ignorance. It’s crazy: all I have to do is say to people, look, I’m
going to show you the greatest folk art in the history of the world — that is,
folk art, it comes from the lived experience of the people; it’s produced by
very ordinary people, many of whom do not know how to read, yet it
expresses their loves and their deepest longings as people. They are the
Gothic cathedrals that are spread all over Europe during the High Middle
Ages. That is folk art. So there you have the greatest folk art in the history of
the world by far, I think, and arguably the most beautiful buildings that
mankind has ever produced, more beautiful in the Middle Ages before the
Industrial Revolution put a lot of grime on their outsides. So these places
shone like jewels.

And so you’re telling me that that whole era is to be dismissed? It’s the era
that invented the university system that you supposedly love so much. What,
do you think it was invented during the time of Immanuel Kant? I could just
point over and over. If these people were such dummies, how come they
produced what Henry Adams said? And he wasn’t even a believer. If these
times were so dark, how come they produced four-fifths of the world’s
greatest art? That’s Henry Adams. I don’t know that I would go so far as to
say four-fifths, but you see the argument, right? How come they produced
people whose names are Dante, Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Bernard of
Clairvaux, and so on? I mean, the people who talk as if the West began with
the Enlightenment are just ignorant.

WOODS: But unfortunately, I think that’s the view that not only the left has
of — well, you have different kinds of the left. You have the left that is anti-
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Enlightenment in some ways; you have the left that is pro-Enlightenment,
and you have the right that thinks the Enlightenment is all there is to
Western civilization. And then you have a small sliver of people who actually
are interested in all of Western civilization — not to say that everything in it
is defensible —

ESOLEN: Right.

WOODS: — but to say that it began in the 18th century and that Voltaire is
one of the great figures of all history is extremely impoverished, to put it
mildly.

ESOLEN: Right, and it involved terrible people, too, who wrote one half-
decent book. Yeah, I will take — I wouldn’t trade one paragraph of Thomas
Aquinas or one canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy for the collected works of
Voltaire, a narrow and somewhat bigoted man. Yeah, the funny thing is that
the people on the right who think they are conservative, whose ideas of
Western civilization spring almost completely from the Enlightenment, what
they actually are are classical 19th-century liberals. The true conservative
sees the limitations of 19th-century liberalism that now goes by the name of
conservatism. So they’re people like Russell Kirk and all that, who want to
recover the whole breadth and depth of Western civilization, which of
course includes the Hebrew Scriptures, which don’t come from Europe at all
but come from Asia, the Near East. Yeah, that part I suppose is an in-house
fight on the right, but you know, it does frustrate me too to hear people on
the so-called right talking as if they were coming right out of a salon in Paris
in 1780.

WOODS: And yet, the interesting thing is that when you look at Russell
Kirk’s political views and what he’s calling for in A Program for
Conservatives, and he even wrote a book on economics, it’s basically pretty
laissez faire.

ESOLEN: Yeah.

WOODS: The political program he favors is not a million miles away from
what a 19th-century liberal would favor.

ESOLEN: Yeah, I kind of blame him for that (laughing). Yeah, economics is
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not my strong suit, so I sit on the fence there. I know that that wouldn’t
please my friends at the Acton Institute. I remain unpersuaded of the 19th-
century liberal case, which is now conservative, for laissez faire economics.

WOODS: Ah, this would have been a good conversation.

ESOLEN: Yeah, my great man, Charles Dickens, was no fan of it.

WOODS: Oh yeah, but — no, no, no, I can’t start in on Charles Dickens. He
was just such a horrible moralizer.

ESOLEN: (laughing)

WOODS: But the thing is, I have a lot of friends — well, I don’t know if they
would — I think of myself as their friend (laughing). I don’t know how they
feel about me. But for a long time I wrote for the traditional Catholic press, so
Crisis magazine we would have viewed as squishy, you know? But a lot of
them — not all, but a lot of them just couldn’t take — because I do basically
favor laissez faire economics, but instead of well, let’s talk this out; we’re all
friends, it really became like an excommunication. But at least they didn’t
excommunicate me the way — there were no protests; there were no
bullhorns.

ESOLEN: Right, yeah.

WOODS: It was just: we’d rather that you not publish with us anymore. And
if that’s the way people want to disagree with each other, I’m totally in favor
of that.

ESOLEN: Yeah.

WOODS: But I know that group of people. I understand what their

arguments are. I wrote a book called The Church and the Market. It was
really not aimed at socialists; it really was aimed at traditional Catholics who
have a different criticism. They’re not critiquing the market economy for the
reasons that Hillary Clinton might.

ESOLEN: Right.

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WOODS: I’m much more sympathetic to their arguments, which is why I
wanted to take them seriously. Whereas most of the time, as you probably
know, if you’re right of center and you’re skeptical of the market economy,
you get treated like you’re Bernie Sanders. And that’s not what you’re saying,
and that’s not where you’re coming from.

ESOLEN: No, no, no. This should be a very cordial, friendly, in-house
discussion among Catholics about just what it is that a free economy is
supposed to provide, and I think the Church does teach that there ought to
be very broad freedoms in the economy. You’ll find that in the writings of
Pope Leo XII, whom I wrote a book about. And we always have to ask the
question that an ideologue would not want to ask, which is: exactly how does
this policy here play itself out in terms of the human good, in terms of the
common good? And that may differ, actually, from place to place and time to
time, from situation to situation. But those are questions that deal with
pragmatics and less with ideology.

So though I am very sympathetic to the Acton Institute — and I hope they

hire me, actually — but I’ve also got that distributist part of me, too, from
Chesterton and Belloc and the others. And I always want to keep asking the
question: in these particular circumstances, what economic policies should
we follow in order to produce the good society, to bring about the common
good? I don’t think that’s a question that can be answered in the abstract; I
think it has to be rooted in time and place. But that’s an argument that we
can have amongst ourselves.

WOODS: Yeah, and I always wanted to have that discussion. I really did. I
thought it would be fruitful and it would force me to think a little bit harder
about a lot of things. Unfortunately I was just more or less expelled from that
particular group. And a guy I had once written a book with wrote an entire
book denouncing me. A whole book, so in a way I was flattered that I was
worth a whole book.

ESOLEN: Who was that?

WOODS: Chris Ferrara. Does that name ring a bell?

ESOLEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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WOODS: Yeah, all right, so let’s not — I’m not about personalities here on
the show. I’m really about the ideas.

ESOLEN: Well, that’s a shame; that’s a shame. You know, a Robert Sirico
and a Dale Ahlquist should be able to talk to each other. We should all be
able to talk to each other about these things —

WOODS: Yeah.

ESOLEN: — because basically we all believe the same things. If we’re

Catholics and we’re interested in politics, economics, and the common good
— we basically agree on what this life is all about, where it’s aimed; we have
broad agreements on what actually constitutes the common good — then
our question is how do you practically achieve it, how do you bring it about.
And as I said, those are questions that deal with pragmatics, situations.
We’ve got to see. But that should be a very friendly argument. What’s going
on here is not a friendly argument.

WOODS: No, it’s not. This all took place pretty much at the end of John
Paul’s pontificate and during Benedict. And when Benedict became pope, I
think a lot of orthodox Catholics breathed a bit of a sigh of relief. Things
seemed more normal now in the Catholic Church. Maybe normality will be
restored. But frankly — and I don’t expect you to comment on this — in the
Catholic world of Pope Francis, the idea that a free-market Catholic is your
biggest enemy is absurd. The idea that I would be expelled — not that I’m
particularly keen on getting back in — is ridiculous. You can’t pick your
battles?

ESOLEN: And you know what I always say to faithful Catholics and faithful
Christians of other communions? I say all the time — and this comes from
my experience at Touchstone magazine, which is edited by Catholics and
Eastern Orthodox and conservative Protestants. I say, look, we’ve got a
whole lot of enemies out there who just want to crush us. They don’t want to
hear anything about Christianity at all. There’s a lot of bad stuff out there
and a lot of harmful stuff for humanity. Aim your guns at that. Don’t aim
your guns at each other.

What do I care, really, if the uniform of the guy whose rifle is aimed in the
same direction as my rifle is aimed, his uniform is a little bit different than
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mine? I’ll let the captain, Jesus Christ, sort that out in the end. But he’s my
ally. Anybody right now who is resisting the secular imperialism of the West,
that person to that extent is my ally. If he’s a Christian, he believes in Christ,
he’s really my ally. He’s my brother. But that Catholics who are orthodox
should be denouncing one another because of differences of opinion on such
a thing as economics, that’s appalling to me. That’s absolutely appalling.

WOODS: I want to make sure and link on the show notes page — this is
Episode 782, so TomWoods.com/782, I will link to — I want people to be
able to read the articles that you wrote that caused all this ruckus, because I
want them to read them and then say, “That’s it? That’s what led people to
protest?”

ESOLEN: I know.

WOODS: People have got to see this.

ESOLEN: They’re very mild, and the students are hardly in them at all.
They’re mainly aimed at faculty members, and they ask questions about
what we mean by diversity, the questions that nobody asks. So I asked them.

WOODS: Yeah, the sorts of things you’re supposed to — I feel silly even
saying this anymore — the sorts of questions you’re supposed to ask when
you’re in college. You’re supposed to be open-minded. What a farce that
turned out to be, unfortunately. What a shame.

ESOLEN: That’s part of the problem when you have — I mean, we believe in
the three-personed God. We are oriented towards eternity. If you lack that,
then current politics takes over, I think, and it becomes of ultimate concern.
It becomes a matter of life and death, when there are 50 things more
important in any given day than current national politics or should be in
your life. One of the cures for being really upset about the recent election is
to go to church, but they don’t have that available to them. That’s too bad.
And so when they get to college, they’re not grounded enough to be able to
ask questions that would change their points of view about these secondary
matters like politics, because it’s been elevated to a religion.

WOODS: Well, that’s just it, because it’s not a secondary matter to them —

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ESOLEN: No, it’s not secondary.

WOODS: — this is everything to them, and they have made it into a god.
And before we started recording, I said the election of Trump would be for
them like if Lady Gaga somehow became pope. It would totally disorient the
Catholic world. No one would really be able to understand — it would be
hard to make sense of your life under those circumstances. And even crazier
when you make the state into your ultimate, and such a result happens, of
course all there can be is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

And just today, I saw somebody on Facebook, a leftist, saying: well, I’ve been
apathetic up to now, but now I’m going to get involved. And of course, what
does “get involved” mean? Wave signs, sign petitions, call your congressman.
And I said there are so many other, vastly more meaningful ways to “get
involved” where you would really influence and help people and change
people’s lives, and all you can think of is signing a darn petition.

ESOLEN: I know; I know. Yeah, you love mankind? Do the dishes.

WOODS: Exactly right.

ESOLEN: Actually do something good for somebody today. And maybe you
could start cleaning up your own life, because your life is probably a mess.
Everybody’s a sinner, after all. But when politics is your god, then you can
project onto your political opponents every evil. You don’t have to look in
the mirror and say, you know what? I’m actually kind of a rat. I say bad
things about my enemies, I tell lies, I waste my time, I click on things online
that I shouldn’t be looking at. There all a lot of things about me that need
purifying, that I need to atone for and to confess. No, you don’t have to do
any of that. If politics is your god, all you have to do is check the right items
on a list of political opinions.

WOODS: Exactly.

ESOLEN: And if you do that, then you are justified. You are righteous. And
so you can treat your enemies with contempt. You can do anything you
please. But then when you become disappointed by political events, what’s
left? It’s like the world has come to an end. It’s crazy.

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WOODS: This is why it’s impossible to imagine progressives sitting down
and really trying to have a meeting of the minds with somebody who
disagrees with them, because politics is their ultimate, this is where good
and evil meet. This is Manichaeism. If you are opposed to me, you are evil.
You don’t have a perspective. I don’t sit down with Satan and say, What do
you think about such and such? What do you think about our highway
policy? I wouldn’t even think to do that. And so likewise, that can’t happen
between progressives and reprobates (as they view the rest of us). And again,
it’s because this sacralizing of the secular has taken place. You can’t even
meet each other on common ground and say: let’s try to talk about our
differences. That can’t even happen.

ESOLEN: Right. No. It can’t. It’s a cosmic battle. In the recent

unpleasantness — that is finally over, Deo gratias, hallelujah — you wouldn’t
even be able to say — supposing that you believed this, but you wouldn’t
even be able to say to them, look, we’ve got two buffoons running for
president. They would rebel against that. What do you mean? You would
offend them by shrugging and taking politics lightly.

Now, of course it can’t be taken that lightly, either; it does have

consequences for human life, for life in the United States. But in a certain
sense it’s healthy to take it lightly, because there are infinitely more
important things.

So if you laugh at their political preoccupations, they get very angry. But they
need to hear that laughter. I mean, come on. You’ve got somebody
hyperventilating because the election went in the opposite way from what he
wanted? Is that really a sign of somebody who’s healthy? Isn’t that ipso facto
a sign of somebody who’s got his priorities mixed up? They don’t see it. My
gosh, it’s holy water and all the sacraments put together for them.

WOODS: Well, everybody, I want you to go to the show notes page for this
episode, TomWoods.com/782, read the articles we’ve been talking about,
and while you’re at it, although Tony has a lot of books, pick up his
translation of The Divine Comedy, because that’s a way — could there be a
more delicious rebuke of the present American political system than to
withdraw and simply read Dante? Go and do that and read it with a beautiful
translation that you will love and you’ll learn a tremendous amount from.

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Well, best of luck, Tony. I hope everything turns out well. You deserve the
best possible resolution, and I hope that comes. And think about that
YouTube video.

ESOLEN: Thank you, Tom. I think that is a great idea. That is a great idea.
People have not gotten it into their heads — I guess I haven’t gotten it into
my head — right now we’ve got ways of getting ideas out there.

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