In this episode, we take a look at Professor Michael Rechtenwald, who was a Marxist and a communist. He was fired from his job at a liberal college, and now he s suing the school for being a pedophile.
Transcript
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00:00:20.000Live from New York, get off my launch, Gavin, and filling up with gasoline.
00:00:30.000Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying over the luxury disappointment.
00:00:37.000So he walks over and he's trying to sympathise with her.
00:00:43.000thinks to the east and warner that the third world is just around the corner
00:01:00.000In the Soviet Union, a scientist is blinded by the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded that Dr. Oppenheimer's optimism failed at the first hurdle.
00:01:20.000That was Billy Bragg from the album Great Leap Forward, wherein he praises Mao the entire time.
00:02:50.000It ends up recruiting more right-wingers because they're told, if you're not having sex with a trans woman right now and performing fellatio on her penis, then you're a Nazi.
00:03:03.000So people go, I guess I'm a Nazi then.
00:03:28.000It is about the left, the far left, politicizing apolitical people and making them right-wing conservative political activists.
00:03:37.000And it's also about the death of education.
00:03:39.000I honestly think to this day, in this day and age, you are punishing children if you send them to school.
00:03:44.000And I know I'm going to have fights with my liberal wife when my kids are old enough to go to college because she still has this attitude that no matter what you want to take, drama, speech pathology, modern dance, you should go to university and get a good education.
00:03:58.000So mark my words, my daughter's 10 now.
00:04:02.000In eight years, there are going to be some big fights at the McInnis house because I don't want my kids going to college if it's not STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math.
00:04:14.000I bet even then, in eight years, all those will be solid.
00:04:17.000I bet there'll be like trans chemistry class and there'll be math that is friendly to people of color.
00:04:25.000Math for people of color, African math, I bet will be a class.
00:06:15.000It's, uh, and it's slightly, I was never fired, but I was put on paid leave.
00:06:25.000They more or less strong-armed me into taking a paid medical leave.
00:06:31.000So, it is even more interesting than this than you suggested because when my interview appeared in the Washington Square News, in which an NYU student reporter interviewed me after finding out about my Twitter account, I decided to go public and to go on the record as myself because I thought there's nothing objectionable here about what I'm saying.
00:06:54.000This is an alternate perspective that needs to be heard about these bias reporting hotlines, safe spaces, you know, trigger warnings, the whole nine yards.
00:07:05.000And the no platforming of speakers, which you've experienced at NYU yourself.
00:07:15.000Immediately, a committee after this interview had appeared, a committee called the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Group wrote a condemnation of me in which they declared me, quote, guilty for the structure of my thinking, end quote.
00:07:35.000So literally was accused of wrongthink.
00:09:36.000And then immediately, strangely enough, I got a call from the New York Post as soon as that meeting ended as if she had a bug on the wall or something.
00:09:44.000And I told her all about what happened.
00:09:45.000And I said, do you think there's any relationship between this relieve of absence, the interview, you know, and the interview that I had published?
00:10:44.000I wasn't sure I was going to go as myself.
00:10:47.000I wasn't sure that I would actually, you know, become, you know, go out as myself, but I decided to after I did the interview because I thought this is, first of all, I liked some of the things I said.
00:11:00.000I wanted to own them, actually, because I thought they were well said and that they were important.
00:11:05.000And, you know, I just, I said, you know, this, what they're now calling the control left or the alt left is out of control.
00:12:14.000Yeah, I mean, if you talk about, if you look at some of the, for example, just some of the orientation things that are going on at student orientation, freshman orientation, where you can't call a freshman anymore, there's first-year students.
00:16:28.000So at the end, on the very last day of that first semester back, the spring of 2017, an email blizzard started from these people, a contingent of them, blasting me like crazy because I mentioned my book and that I was going to get in advance for it.
00:17:38.000I was a leftist till they drove me out.
00:17:41.000I was a leftist until I saw what totalitarian monsters they are.
00:17:46.000That underneath of this egalitarian rhetoric, you just scrape it just a slight little micro, you know, micrometer, and you find a totalitarian everywhere.
00:18:01.000They're going, I thought we were against racism.
00:18:04.000I thought we felt bad about slavery, and it's become, no, we're enforcing our ideas on innocent people and terrorizing anyone who disagrees.
00:18:12.000And I think a lot of liberals are going, that's not what I signed up for.
00:18:18.000I mean, it was, I mean, because not only was I being besieged by all these colleagues, but thousands and thousands of people on the internet, you know, just attacking me viciously.
00:18:29.000I mean, you know, you can always walk away from that, but it gets pretty ugly.
00:18:32.000And it got, I was a member of a communist group, a left communist group.
00:18:37.000And they actually put me through a cyber show trial, if you will, in which they listed a number of my crimes, which were appearing on Fox News, criticizing the left while Trump was just coming into office, things like that.
00:18:54.000In other words, I wasn't part of the resistance, and that was enough to get me condemned.
00:18:59.000And I said, and they were about to vote, and I said, don't bother.
00:19:26.000And now I could say, I guess I'm a classical liberal.
00:19:29.000I mean, I just believe in, you know, individual rights because, after all, there's nothing else because you can't have group or goodwill or good, you know, common good without individual good rights and individual good.
00:19:43.000After all, they just use the common common will crush you every time.
00:19:47.000Yeah, well, equality means everyone's life is equally shitty.
00:19:52.000They just reduce every, it's, I call it subtractive egalitarianism.
00:19:57.000Yeah, some people get the extraordinary by, yeah, by taking things away and taking privileges, so-called privileges away from everybody, just reduce, reduce, reduce everyone down.
00:22:00.000I can see what happened to me and why, in fact, I got into, you know, so deeply indoctrinated because they make it a requirement professionally.
00:22:10.000You can't advance professionally unless you buy into leftist dogma.
00:22:48.000I agree, because if you just ascent a seed and go along with it, you're helping produce this culture, which is completely, you know, it's completely tilted, utterly, completely biased.
00:23:07.000Well, I've noticed white men in college, when they stand up to say something, they have this caveat they have to introduce before they open their mouths.
00:23:16.000And it says, hi, I understand that I'm a white male and I grew up middle class and I am speaking from a position of privilege, but do you know where the restrooms are?
00:23:36.000I'm at the point now where I think it's child abuse to send your kid to school because he's going, especially NYU with his 40 grand a year or whatever it is, you're going like 100 grand in debt to come out stupider.
00:24:34.000That poor handicapped black girl in the chair is just like, okay, well, the answer to that question is that the hedgehog, like she must have a sore throat by the end of every class because she's got to answer every single question.
00:24:49.000And they don't like this either because this is ridiculously highlighting their – It's embarrassing and it's uncomfortable.
00:25:08.000They don't want to talk about this stuff all day.
00:25:10.000Nobody wants to talk about, of course, the advocates and the activists do.
00:25:15.000Yeah, out of the few black people I hang out with, if there's one thing they don't want to talk about, it's how black they are and their blackness and blackety black, black and Malcolm X. Blacketty, black, black, black.
00:28:33.000And that's what I did wrong when I came out with that interview is I stopped groveling and I started to say things that I said, because I'm a white straight male, I'm deemed ethically very, I'm very low on the ethical totem pole.
00:28:50.000And then they verified that and said, yes, you are very low on the ethical totem pole.
00:28:54.000Yeah, you say it as an insult and they repeat it back as a fact.
00:29:01.000Okay, we've gone way over time here because you're too interesting, but I think it's important in all interviews to bring it back to what really matters, which is me.
00:29:36.000I had taught in that exact building before the event, and I went to the event.
00:29:42.000And after they started into the chants, which really infuriated me, I started yelling at the students saying, you know, you're a bunch of robots.
00:30:06.000And then they interviewed me, the New York University student newspaper, the Washington Square News, after, and they started, while they were interviewing me, one student kept calling me, you're a Nazi, you're a Nazi, you're a Nazi.
00:30:19.000And let's put it this way, if he hadn't been a student, he would have been on the floor.
00:31:20.000But this is why people say, oh, this is, you know, when I first came out against this, a lot of leftists said, you know, this is just a small phenomenon at, you know, twinky colleges full of blue-haired kids that means nothing.
00:31:34.000This is producing ideology for the whole society.
00:31:48.000The SPLC is pretty much as radical as Antifa when it comes to deciding who a Nazi is.
00:31:54.000So we essentially have Antifa running Google, and we have CNN talking about how they achieve peace through violence, which isn't that literally in 1984?
00:32:09.000I mean, you have, if you've looked at the James Damore law case, you know, the claim, the complaint, you have him being fired for saying there's a difference between men and women.
00:32:21.000And there are people there at Google who identify as a wingless yellow dragonfly and the side of An ornate building.
00:33:40.000So, I mean, here's people that say there's no such thing as binaries and gender, but they're the most binary thinking people on earth.
00:33:48.000I mean, everything is binary to them, except gender, which is a, you know, a spectrum.
00:33:55.000And I say that, you know, it's the new, it's the new, you know, it's the new monastic declaration is how many, how many genders can fit on a spectrum rather than how many angels on the head of a pin.
00:35:25.000Chanting and idiotic phrase mongering.
00:35:28.000You know, I said that about the committee that wrote that condemnation.
00:35:32.000I said all these phrases, plug-and-play memes that they pull off the web, you know, like there's just this, there's this concatenation of idiotic phrases that they grab and plug together.
00:35:43.000And they're charged language and it's supposed to mean something.
00:35:46.000It sort of vibrates at a higher radioactive frequency than other language, but otherwise it's meaningless.
00:35:52.000You know, it's just like, they just plug and play all this stuff, throw it together, and that's voila.
00:36:03.000In your class, I want a semblance of hope here.
00:36:07.000What percentage of your students in any particular class have some sort of genuine curiosity and are not dogmatic and generally want to learn truthful statements?
00:36:19.000I could qualify that by saying in the first year students, among the first year students, the percentage is about 80.
00:36:26.000Okay, but after they become indoctrinated into the junior and senior years, the minds close and narrow ever so gradually, but quite frankly, dramatically in the end.
00:37:45.000No, I remember at my talk, the professor was telling everyone to be quiet, but it was almost like a nudge, nudge, wink, wink, don't be quiet.
00:38:59.000So what you do is you put it in boiling water and you put your head under the towel and you breathe it in and it goes right down into your lungs and cleans you out for an hour or so.