Jack Posobiec sits down with an old college friend to talk about his time at the University of Pennsylvania, and the fallout from his decision to speak out against affirmative action at his alma-mater, Harvard Law School.
00:03:27.000The hatchet didn't fall at that point, but I started to be trolled.
00:03:33.000There are a lot of people on campus who don't have enough to do.
00:03:38.000And what they spend their time doing is digging dirt on individuals like me who dare to challenge the orthodoxy on campus.
00:03:48.000And it didn't take long before some of my other offending statements were unearthed.
00:03:57.000Things that I had said in my podcast with Glenn Lowry and the like.
00:04:01.000What I had said at the National Conservatism Convention, my immigration restrictionist views, my observations about differences, not unexpected under affirmative action,
00:04:16.000between black student performance and other groups' performance, my general observations, all of that added up to my dean, who was maybe the worst law dean in the entire country,
00:04:33.000a guy named Ted Ruger, bringing charges against me, those charges were heard by a faculty committee.
00:04:42.000I had lots and lots of due process, take my word for it, none of it meaningful at all.
00:04:48.000Resulted in my being sanctioned a few months ago, finally, after many appeals.
00:04:57.000A year-long suspension, they picked my pocket.
00:05:02.000Other recommendations like, you need to move this woman out of the building because she makes students feel unsafe, stuff like that.
00:05:12.000And what is it all about at the end of the day?
00:05:18.000Well, it's all about the woke takeover of our elite college campuses.
00:05:25.000The takeover of an ideology which brooks no dissent, the centerpiece of which is what I call the bias narrative.
00:05:36.000And, you know, they accuse the right of being obsessed with race.
00:05:41.000Well, the left is totally obsessed with race, which of course, according to them, doesn't exist.
00:05:49.000So, they're obsessed with something that they themselves don't think exists, which really is a scrambler.
00:05:55.000And the bias narrative is that all differences in outcomes, disadvantages between groups, racial groups, ethnic groups, other groups, they're all due to white supremacy, white racism, white bias and discrimination.
00:06:15.000It's all the fault of white people and no other explanation is permitted.
00:06:22.000Certainly, no explanation grounded in human freedom, human agency, behavior and choices that people make, which is what, of course, makes us human and gives us dignity.
00:06:37.000And if you challenge that narrative, you sooner or later will get into trouble.
00:06:46.000And this, you know, what happened to me is not about me primarily because if you look on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, so-called FIRE, a wonderful organization,
00:07:00.000you will see that there are literally hundreds of academics and now non-academics, people working for corporations, nonprofits, journalists, other organizations,
00:07:15.000who are being persecuted, penalized and punished for deviating from this very narrow, rigid world view.
00:07:28.000And as Steve Saylor would say, noticing.
00:07:33.000Noticing what is in front of their eyes.
00:07:36.000Noticing things in the world around them.
00:07:39.000And offering possible alternative explanations for it.
00:07:45.000Explanations that have important public policy implications.
00:07:51.000Implications that we, of course, can discuss and argue over and we should.
00:07:56.000And it's sad and a shame that those thoughts, those ideas, can no longer be expressed in our great universities.
00:08:09.000I guess I'll close this discourse and I know people will have comments and questions.
00:08:15.000By saying that in my perception, and I have really looked into this and thought about it quite a bit because of my experience,
00:08:25.000my experience, which as I say, isn't really about me, it's about other people and our institutions, our education system is a horrible mess.
00:10:00.000so so that didn't realize we got to the q a yet but here we are and that's all right that's all
00:10:12.800right we don't mind we don't mind he's noticing something we're noticing things as well and and
00:10:18.080so the question i'll repeat this for the stream um and and because uh lomas was saying that he
00:10:22.480wanted to uh cut off the question so the question was um essentially you know if the republicans
00:10:28.400well the statement what do we do because if the republicans are our only hope he was saying
00:10:33.680that we are then doomed well first of all it's a vicious circle because the education system has
00:10:41.600you know distorted people's minds and perceptions and that's across the political spectrum i readily
00:10:48.720admit that all right so that's disabled them from reforming the education system so how do we break
00:10:56.240into that uh i just think yeah people need to develop some spine be more courageous be less
00:11:05.120selfish excuse my language strap on some balls and you know men need to speak up
00:11:15.520because they're the ones who've let this happen you know they they've allowed these noble lies to take
00:11:22.320over i will say there is one glimmer of hope i probably won't please this audience by saying this but
00:11:30.480i will say that you know i was kind of partial during the early primaries to ronda santus because he at
00:11:39.360least took this seriously he at least knows what time it is about education and he tried to you know
00:11:52.640make some headway against the woke takeover the horrible distortions and lies
00:11:59.760and you know misrepresentations that are poisoning our education system
00:12:06.320uh obviously his success has been very mixed and there are legal limits to what you can do at least at
00:12:13.680the higher ed level um it's a big challenge because our k-12 system which is where all the trouble starts
00:12:22.320is decentralized it's localized and conservatives generally do favor that that's called devolution
00:12:31.120but it means to quote oscar wilde that to reform the system takes too many evenings
00:12:38.080because you have to go school district by school district so it's it's a battle for hearts and minds i i
00:12:44.320don't have a magical solution well let me let me sort of go to steve then and and similar ask the
00:12:51.200question but maybe in a non-partisan way that you know your book starts in with a i think the first
00:12:56.480essay is 1973 um and which of course you wrote when you're in first grade and then you go on to through
00:13:05.440you mentioned you started writing publicly in the 90s and you mentioned that you've won a lot of the
00:13:09.920arguments since then you look around the room and i'll just say for the purposes of the stream we
00:13:15.520have several thousand people that are here tonight and have you begun to see have you begun to notice
00:13:23.200that these issues are gaining more traction and gaining more following and more purchase than they
00:13:28.800did when you first started it yeah it's a tough question i mean in in part
00:13:36.640when i started writing regularly in the seven in the 90s i wrote one one paragraph letter to the editor
00:13:47.040in 1973 when i was 14 and they posted i i put that in my book to extend the span to 50 years because it
00:13:58.400pretty much just summed up what i was going to say for the next 50 years i'm not that original um all right
00:14:05.840so in the 90s you had an upsurge in political correctness the beginning of the decade and it
00:14:15.600was pretty similar to woke periods but it was more restricted to campus what we're seeing now what
00:14:22.080we've seen over the last dozen years of the great awokening is kind of the people who were students on
00:14:32.640campus taking the dumbest courses in 1990 now becoming the professors on campus and there's just general
00:14:44.640been a an overall dumbing down of american discourse now in some ways 2020 pushed it too far and
00:14:55.120you know we've seen the biden administration it seemed like sometime in about mid-2022 they started
00:15:04.800putting out the word to the media like oh you know this whole racial reckoning thing that we've been
00:15:11.040talking about non-stop for two years that's not going to do us any good in the midterm election
00:15:17.440and so you've seen a general backing off of that but on the other hand is this a a widespread permanent
00:15:29.280change in the zeitgeist to some extent the fact that i'm now allowed out in public
00:15:36.880um has more to do with a few brave individuals like my publisher lomez uh anna from the red scare
00:15:48.400podcast quite a few of you all out here in the audience uh so it's it's a lot of it's just individuals
00:16:01.440standing up for honesty and being interesting so i don't know where it's going to go next
00:16:12.880we'll see well i'll throw that to amy then and and by the way i'm sure the the dumbing down and
00:16:17.680the courses that you were just speaking of those weren't any of amy's students right yes there's been
00:16:23.520there's been a lot i'm old enough to have noticed a great deal of dumbing down but amy this over many
00:16:29.760decades there was something that steve mentioned going through 2020 that and i remember you
00:16:34.640mentioned this i've heard you mention it publicly as well it's this then this notion that i think
00:16:38.480he's speaking around uh of peak woke are we at peak woke are we starting to see peak woke is peak
00:16:45.280woke real what's your sense of this i don't i think we are at peak woke but i don't see it declining
00:16:53.440i actually think you know this is you know the pessimist in me of course that the fact that they're
00:16:58.800letting steve sailor out in public is just a sign that we all love and are very glad of
00:17:07.120is a sign that they you know realize that they've pretty much taken over the commanding heights of
00:17:13.440the culture and they've you know got control of all the big institutions they've got a lock on them
00:17:20.400and so they can afford to you know ease up a little bit i mean just recently the obama administration
00:17:27.520with their obsession with equity throughout a firefighter's exam because too many black people
00:17:35.040flunked it uh and too many white people passed it i mean they are continuing to do this sort of thing
00:17:43.520full throttle and as long as they are in power they will push the equity agenda to the max now there is
00:17:54.400one tiny little hopeful sign i think which is that harris in her campaigning has really soft peddled
00:18:04.000a lot of these racial agenda transgender agenda equity issues tries to keep them out of the limelight
00:18:13.280of course that's just gaslighting to the max because you know if and when she's elected they're all going to
00:18:20.640come roaring back but the fact that it's being you know soft peddled pushed off stage i think represents
00:18:30.080a fear anyway that people are kind of fed up with woke uh but once again they're just trying to get
00:18:40.080these marginal voters who are clueless about what the democrats are doing and what they really intend to
00:18:47.920do a lot of it is just sneakiness they're being sneaky uh about their their woke agenda which they're
00:18:55.120working on you know across the board and across all of the institutions so we'll see and of course they're
00:19:02.880using the uh the alpha male vitality and masculinity of tim walls to really cover up
00:19:09.360the uh the uh the deficiencies what what's everyone laughing about actually speaking of tim walls that
00:19:15.680that leads me to my next question for steve because there was a a question or sort of a comment that
00:19:22.640tim walls made as an aside at his recent vice presidential debate with jd vance which jd vance won handily
00:19:30.320where they were talking about the question of crime and they were talking about the question of
00:19:41.680shootings specifically public shootings and he mentioned that his teenage son had witnessed a
00:19:48.240shooting i think it was at a either ymca or a gym and then he also mentioned that tim walls apparently we
00:19:55.920know about these 30 trips to china that he's taken but he's also spent a lot of time i didn't realize
00:20:00.640this until then in finland and tim walls posed a question why don't we see these types of things in
00:20:07.920finland and the the moderators didn't seem to have any answers so i was wondering well if we've got the
00:20:16.560detective of demographics right here why don't i ask steve sailor the same question yeah i mean
00:20:26.640i i put forward about five years ago the the sailor law of mass shootings because it turns it turns out
00:20:35.280that there's two different kinds and they're both really bad and i'm against both of them and wish we
00:20:44.400could like to see more done to lower the numbers of both but typically if there are
00:20:55.680are if there are more dead than wounded in a mass shooting then the shooter is probably white or
00:21:07.840increasingly latino asian transgender you know these are these are the columbine type mass shootings
00:21:18.320and they're just horrible we we didn't have them a half century ago we had lots of political
00:21:25.760assassinations then then for some reason the political assassinations went away and we got
00:21:32.320the school shootings and so forth of course those are back now too yeah so now we got the
00:21:37.120worst of both worlds uh if on the other hand if there are say there are four casualties in a mass
00:21:46.240shooting and they're more wounded than dead then it's probably a black on black uh incident the new york times in 2016 looked at a year's worth of four or more casualty mass shootings and reported yeah it's about
00:22:04.960almost 75 percent black on black and it's just a different thing it's uh it's basically whether the shooter
00:22:16.640wants to get away are they going to stick around and finish off the wounded while they can hear the sirens
00:22:24.080approaching or are they just going to shoot shoot in the general direction of some guy who dissed them
00:22:31.920and then run for it uh so yeah there there's two different kinds like that and they're both really
00:22:40.480bad and there's probably things we can do about both of them uh the issues i i'd also recommend the distinction
00:22:49.440to be made in thinking about gun control uh between two types of gun control one is point of purchase gun control
00:22:59.440and the democrats tend to focus on that because they're they're basically really concerned about
00:23:07.520deplorable rednecks buying rifles at walmart and that's what they want to stomp on the other is point of use gun
00:23:17.920control you know the the nypd uh did a great job starting in the 90s of driving down
00:23:27.680the murder rate in new york city by enforcing laws against people carrying illegal handguns
00:23:39.360on the street or in their cars and you know there's a lot we can all learn from what new york politicians
00:23:48.480like rudy giuliani michael bloomberg uh bill braddon the police chief under both giuliani and de blasio
00:23:57.280accomplished it's a great thing but it involves like drawing distinctions and really paying attention to
00:24:05.760what's going on so thanks that's exactly right and i wish that uh for those of you who live in or work
00:24:14.320in dc right now i think we can all agree that we would love to see some of those policies returned here