The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 442. BILL C-63 - Everything You Need to Know

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00:00:57.420 Hello everybody. I have the opportunity today to speak with two guests.

00:01:14.860 Constantine Kizzen, who is co-host of the podcast Trigonometry in the UK, a popular podcast.

00:01:22.300 He is a speaker and a thinker who deals with cultural war issues, mostly political, insofar as the cultural war issues are political.

00:01:35.740 My other guest is Bruce Pardy.

00:01:38.620 Bruce is a professor at Queen's University, a professor of law at Queen's University in Canada.

00:01:45.240 Recently, the Trudeau woke mob has managed to extend themselves even further into the legal Netherlands with a new bill called C-63,

00:02:00.080 which isn't law in Canada yet, but is soon likely to be.

00:02:04.300 And it is the most totalitarian Western bill I've ever seen by quite a large margin and in multiple dimensions.

00:02:14.020 And that was my conclusion upon reading it, and then my conclusion upon rereading it and rereading it again,

00:02:22.980 because I like to make sure I have these things right.

00:02:24.960 And I thought I'd talk to Bruce about it today, along with Constantine,

00:02:28.840 to see if my understanding of the bill is actually correct with regard to Constantine,

00:02:35.440 how he sees what's happening in Canada reflected in, say, Scotland and in Ireland in particular,

00:02:41.660 in the UK, but also in England.

00:02:45.560 And, well, that's the terrain that we're exploring.

00:02:50.240 So join us.

00:02:52.580 It'll be quite a ride.

00:02:55.360 So, Dr. Pardy, I think we got in touch with each other again most recently

00:03:00.620 because I was obsessing neurotically about a new Canadian bill, C-63,

00:03:08.940 which seemed to me to be a real masterpiece of right-thinking, utopian, resentful foolishness.

00:03:18.800 And I thought it would be real useful to talk to you about that to make sure that I understood it.

00:03:25.500 But I thought I'd start our discussion, or we could start a discussion today,

00:03:30.020 by going back into the past eight years into the legal domain in Canada

00:03:35.100 to discuss Bill C-16, because that's now eight years ago.

00:03:40.280 And in some ways, the bill that was at the origin of the current rat's nest of pathological legislation in Canada.

00:03:50.240 And so, do you want to bring everybody up to date, just to begin with,

00:03:54.680 or remind them, or educate them about what Bill C-16 was,

00:04:00.140 and what the fears were at the time, and whether or not those have been realized?

00:04:05.740 Yes, sure. Thanks, Jordan.

00:04:08.180 Well, C-16 is when you and I met.

00:04:10.260 And you were concerned, as I was, and as others were,

00:04:16.160 not very many others, mind you, but a few others,

00:04:18.580 concerned that these proposed amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act,

00:04:23.680 the inclusion of gender identity and gender expression,

00:04:27.440 would have an effect upon speech,

00:04:30.240 essentially to require people to use the preferred pronouns of other people.

00:04:34.160 And, frankly, the establishment types poo-pooed the idea and called us fear mongers.

00:04:42.700 And, of course, that's turned out to be entirely untrue.

00:04:45.980 You were exactly right in your concerns.

00:04:48.760 That kind of amendment had been made before in provincial human rights code,

00:04:52.900 but this was the federal version.

00:04:55.280 But that's in there now, and we have all kinds of pronoun trouble.

00:04:58.320 But the present bill that you're referred to, C-63, is C-16 on steroids.

00:05:06.520 It's got three categories of bad in it.

00:05:11.180 One's an administrative bad.

00:05:12.820 One is a criminal code bad, criminal law bad.

00:05:15.560 And the other one is, again, like C-16, a Canadian Human Rights Act amendment.

00:05:22.540 So let me do the last one first.

00:05:25.060 And so what's the purported purpose of the law?

00:05:27.420 Well, the purported purpose, it starts with the cover of protecting children from online harm.

00:05:35.800 That's the first administrative law of it.

00:05:37.900 And who could possibly oppose that?

00:05:39.460 This is part of the beauty of the way they go about these things.

00:05:42.660 It's got great cover.

00:05:43.860 And nobody in their right mind would want to come out and say,

00:05:46.460 well, that's not a bad, that's not a good idea.

00:05:48.200 But what that kind of cover enables is basically a crackdown on the very idea of free speech.

00:05:59.940 So let's just take the human rights aspect first.

00:06:04.240 They are returning to the Canadian Human Rights Act, an old section that got thrown out,

00:06:11.260 got repealed during the era of Stephen Harper, when Harper was the prime minister.

00:06:17.580 And it was causing all kinds of nuisance.

00:06:19.460 It was the kind of section, and these kinds of sections also appear in the provincial codes.

00:06:26.360 Every province and the federal government has their own human rights code.

00:06:31.060 And these codes, not all of them, but typically include this kind of restriction on speech.

00:06:38.660 You're not allowed to discriminate in your speech, is what some of them say.

00:06:43.000 And this section basically says that if you use hateful speech that can be taken to vilify an individual or group,

00:06:55.460 then you will be acting discriminatorily and therefore in breach of the code

00:07:00.280 and therefore potentially liable to any of the perceived victims and also potentially to the government itself.

00:07:06.560 And one of the problems with the human rights regime is that complaints can be made very, very easily,

00:07:13.300 without a lawyer, without any cost.

00:07:15.280 So, and because the Canadian federal government has jurisdiction over the internet,

00:07:22.640 this section is going to authorize complaints of all kinds to be made

00:07:27.660 against people who are speaking their minds online about any and everything.

00:07:32.920 So, it's going to have a chilling effect upon speech, no question about it.

00:07:37.880 You put that together with the criminal code amendments.

00:07:41.260 Those criminal code amendments make it, well, they do several things.

00:07:46.240 Here's one extraordinary thing that it does.

00:07:49.100 It makes the sentence, the maximum sentence for any violation of an offense,

00:07:57.340 like any offense, any offense in the criminal code or under federal legislation,

00:08:01.420 any offense that is motivated by hatred will carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

00:08:11.020 Right.

00:08:11.600 Now, the defenders of the bill say, well, don't worry, the judge isn't actually going to give you life.

00:08:18.760 That's not likely to happen.

00:08:20.780 And that may be true, but that's not the point.

00:08:23.020 If you don't mean it in legislation, then don't give the judge the power.

00:08:26.560 If it's in the law, it's likely to happen.

00:08:28.060 If it's in the law, it is going to happen sooner or later,

00:08:31.220 and it is a signal about what is lawful and what is not,

00:08:34.400 and what the proper punishment should be and what is not.

00:08:37.500 So, C63 is a reflection of how, just one more reflection,

00:08:48.320 of how we are losing the law.

00:08:50.780 We are losing, in C63, the idea of free speech itself.

00:08:55.480 You know that old quote that people always refer to from Voltaire's biographer,

00:09:01.120 the one that goes, I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say.

00:09:06.880 I think the reason that that quote is trotted out so often is that when you come right down to it,

00:09:13.560 most people don't agree with that.

00:09:17.920 Everybody says they believe in free speech.

00:09:19.860 Everybody, Justin Trudeau has said he believes in free speech.

00:09:23.500 There's a guarantee of free speech in the Chinese constitution.

00:09:28.100 It's very easy to say.

00:09:29.960 And what they really mean is, yes, I believe in free speech, but.

00:09:34.540 And it's within the but, whether you can find out whether or not they really do believe in free speech.

00:09:39.940 So, for my money, we shouldn't have a law that prohibits hate speech.

00:09:46.240 Hate speech is ugly.

00:09:47.200 But people hate each other.

00:09:50.300 And if they're not allowed to say that they do, well, then their speech is not free.

00:09:56.120 It's also a very difficult and challenging thing to make an emotion illegal.

00:10:01.780 No doubt.

00:10:02.540 And, of course, the definition of what they mean by hate speech is, I mean, it's impossible to tell.

00:10:09.420 And it's going to be under the purview of the judge to decide in any particular case whether or not you've crossed that threshold.

00:10:14.680 Okay, so let's talk about the devil in the details.

00:10:18.500 Because the angel lurking over all of this is fundamentally we're protecting children from being exploited online.

00:10:27.380 Okay, so, while there are children and they are exploited online and they deserve protection, so that's all and good, what steps are taken in the bill to actually protect children who are being exploited online?

00:10:43.240 And then how do we segue from that to hate?

00:10:46.720 Because those aren't the same universe.

00:10:48.500 As I said, there are three bits in the bill, and they're in the same bill, but they're distinct.

00:10:55.380 So there's the human rights aspect, there's the criminal code aspect, and then this third aspect, which is primarily one that's aimed at protecting kids, is an administrative regime that gives an agency the power, essentially, to supervise the online platforms.

00:11:12.740 But it also gives them the power to make the rules.

00:11:16.120 So we don't even know what the rules are going to be.

00:11:18.000 Basically, it just gives the whole control of the thing to a government agency, to the bureaucrats, to do as they think best.

00:11:25.060 Right, so they're establishing an entirely new bureaucracy with an unspecified range of power, with a nonspecific purview that purports to protect children from online exploitation,

00:11:40.660 but has the possibility of turning into a policing state for the internet per se.

00:11:50.400 And this is often how the administrative state works, right?

00:11:53.900 And so this agency will not be policing citizens themselves directly, but they'll be policing the online platforms, and the platforms will thereby censor the people who are using them.

00:12:05.700 So it's a, we're not doing it, we're hands-off, we're two steps removed situation, but in effect, it is the government pulling the strings of the...

00:12:16.600 Okay, so to what degree do you think that even the setup of that new administrative bureaucracy, which has very extensive powers,

00:12:23.540 and very poorly defined powers, as far as I could tell when I read the bill, how much of that do you think is actually devoted genuinely?

00:12:32.580 I know this is a judgment call, obviously, but you have to infer that from the legislation.

00:12:36.880 Right.

00:12:37.060 If the legislation was honest and well-written, it would very specifically target the target of its purported reason for existence.

00:12:52.100 Yes, yes.

00:12:52.560 Right?

00:12:53.120 Yes.

00:12:53.280 If it was designed, for example, to produce a more general regime for online policing, to me, that's what it looks like.

00:13:02.900 And if so, is that a consequence of poor legislative design?

00:13:06.860 Is it a consequence of intent?

00:13:08.260 Like, what do you think's going on there?

00:13:10.020 Well, it's what's going on there is what's been going on inside our law with respect to empowering the administrative state for a long, long time.

00:13:17.980 Right?

00:13:18.140 So standard legislation now, at either the federal or provincial level, is authorizing legislation.

00:13:25.060 Meaning, you pass a bill about a certain subject, and it might contain some rules in it.

00:13:29.240 But it also contains the authority, the delegation of authority to the bureaucrats, to an agency of some kind, to the minister, or to whoever, to a human rights commission, to make policies or guidelines or regulations about certain things.

00:13:43.380 And you can't tell, by reading the statute, what the rules are.

00:13:48.680 And so you've transferred legislative authority, essentially, from the legislature to the bureaucracy.

00:13:57.120 And this is not the bureaucracy stealing it.

00:14:02.240 This is the legislature giving it.

00:14:04.480 Because they don't want the responsibility of doing it.

00:14:07.120 Right, right, right.

00:14:07.500 And they don't want to have to go through the minutia of figuring out what the right rules are.

00:14:11.040 So they just shove it off into the back rooms.

00:14:16.380 And this is the way the administrative state works.

00:14:19.540 Now, if I can say, it's a kind of collusion between the legislature and the courts.

00:14:25.060 So the courts, okay, we have these three branches of government.

00:14:28.040 Yes, we have the legislature, we have the courts, and we have the administrative state.

00:14:32.560 And, you know, the division between them is cleanest in the American version of things.

00:14:37.280 But we, in Canada, in the UK, we have them as well.

00:14:40.900 And the legislature and the courts are together supposed to be supervising what the executive branch, the administrative state, is doing.

00:14:49.460 Because the general rule is supposed to be the administration, which used to be the king, after all,

00:14:55.600 can't do anything that's not authorized by the legislature.

00:14:59.660 Okay, so these three things are checks and balances on each other.

00:15:03.380 Yeah.

00:15:04.100 But now they're all on the same page.

00:15:07.160 And the courts and the legislature are convinced about the need for this expansive, overwhelming administrative state.

00:15:14.940 And so instead of supervising the administrative branch and the courts,

00:15:20.240 instead of making sure that they stick within their powers,

00:15:23.300 the legislature is delegating to it and the courts are deferring to it.

00:15:27.500 And so what we end up with...

00:15:29.760 And the legislators don't have to take responsibility...

00:15:31.540 Exactly.

00:15:32.560 ...in any...

00:15:33.220 In either way.

00:15:34.160 Because we don't...

00:15:34.620 And we can't find who's responsible anymore.

00:15:36.700 Yeah.

00:15:37.000 Right?

00:15:37.260 It's all sort of a mystery.

00:15:38.700 It's a moving ball.

00:15:40.540 And this is the way administrative agencies and government departments and ministries can be, quote, agile.

00:15:49.000 They want to be agile.

00:15:50.000 They want to be able to respond to societal problems quickly.

00:15:53.440 Well, if you're able to respond quickly, that means you have the legislative power in your hands.

00:15:58.980 And that nobody else knows exactly what's going on until it happens.

00:16:02.200 And sometimes not until after the fact, even.

00:16:05.420 Right?

00:16:05.680 So that principle of the rule of law that said the rule applies to everybody, both the ruled and the ruler.

00:16:15.960 However, if you have an agile government making rules up as they go along, well, that means by definition the rules can't apply to them because they have the power to change them whenever they want to.

00:16:26.960 And so we have agile governments who are managing us, managing society, solving social problems.

00:16:35.040 We are in a managerial era in the law.

00:16:38.160 Management, I would put it this way.

00:16:40.560 Management, the ethos of managerialism has supplanted the rule of law as the basic idea.

00:16:50.440 Instead of the rule of law, we have rule by law now, which means that the law is nothing more than a tool for the government to use to create on a whim whenever they need it to make you do this.

00:17:08.080 And there was no better example of all of this than during COVID.

00:17:11.900 You had people standing behind microphones on a Tuesday afternoon saying, well, the rule tomorrow is going to be this.

00:17:17.560 That's agile government.

00:17:18.700 It means the legislature is not taking on its role of making the rules.

00:17:24.080 And the executive branch has taken over making the rules, applying the rules, and enforcing the rules all on its own.

00:17:32.700 And that is not the way the Western legal system used to work.

00:17:38.100 We have managerialism instead of the rule of law.

00:17:40.660 Konstantin, is there anything so far in Bruce's discussion that triggered any echoes about similar situations in the UK?

00:17:54.740 Well, there's a couple of pieces that I would pick up on that I think are relevant.

00:17:59.620 And the first one is what you mentioned about the fact that the bill is quite expansive, yet only a small part of it appears to be dealing with a core issue, which is the protection of children.

00:18:09.680 We had the online harms bill, which was ostensibly about the same thing, but in its original drafting included all sorts of other things, completely unrelated to any of that.

00:18:20.500 And it's not a surprise because what we have seen over and over in the UK is that quite often the attempt to protect people from hate or whatever has actually nothing to do with the trigger that causes it.

00:18:34.020 So I'll give you an example. Sir David Ames was an MP who was murdered by a terrorist.

00:18:40.180 And the next day, all his colleagues went into Parliament and started talking in Parliament about how this shows that we need to tackle online hate.

00:18:48.480 David Ames wasn't killed by online hate. He was killed by an Islamist.

00:18:51.320 Likewise, more recently, Parliament actually, to cut a very long story short, suspended its own rules of procedure because Labour Party MPs feared what would happen to them if they did not vote the correct way on the Israel-Palestine conversation.

00:19:10.200 And again, following the furore that broke out from that, the argument was, well, MPs need to be nicer to each other instead of dealing with the fact that there was a mob outside Parliament who was intimidating the parliamentarians.

00:19:22.200 So very often, it seems to me that a lot of the time the mind has been made up that we need to deal with online hate, whatever that means.

00:19:32.040 And then whatever happens is then used as an excuse to do that.

00:19:36.900 Secondly, it's got to be kind of in the nature of, I think, how tyranny unfolds in the real world.

00:19:44.780 It's something like there's a pre-commitment to a set of ideological axioms.

00:19:51.920 And then whatever crisis comes along is just assimilated to that and used as a shoehorn to move it forward.

00:20:00.000 And so, has there ever been a tyranny that's emerged spontaneously that didn't present itself to begin with as fostering security and improving civic health or public health, for that matter?

00:20:15.500 The Nazis were improving public health like mad throughout the 1930s.

00:20:20.660 I mean, some of that public health improvement was genuine.

00:20:24.080 There's a fair bit of it that wasn't.

00:20:25.680 But the cover story was really solid, right?

00:20:28.560 And it was often compassion, even with the whole Nazi, the catastrophic Nazi policies of euthanasia that culminated in the Holocaust began with the language of compassion, right?

00:20:43.720 Well, quite.

00:20:44.540 And actually, the thing that really revealed to me how much of this is ideological was I was on a British program called Question Time, which you've been on.

00:20:53.820 And what they do is they have a panel of guests.

00:20:57.200 And before the main show starts, they do one question for discussion that is a warm-up that's not recorded.

00:21:03.540 So, people are a little bit more loose in that part of it.

00:21:06.280 And the question at the time was, Donald Trump had just been unbanned from Facebook.

00:21:12.040 You know, was this the right thing to do, whatever?

00:21:13.840 And, you know, they came to me.

00:21:14.960 I made the deeply controversial point that I think the president of the most powerful country in the world should be allowed to speak in public.

00:21:21.380 This didn't go down well.

00:21:22.560 But what happened afterwards, they went to the left-wing politician on the panel, the Labour politician on the panel, you know, and she, without missing a beat when they went to her, she went, we must have the safest internet in the world.

00:21:36.960 And to a round of applause, and what that signalled to me, I think, gentlemen, is that we have completely lost the battle over the way the conversation is being had in being able and willing to say some harm is a consequence of freedom and that's a price that we're willing to pay.

00:21:54.960 And I believe that until we get the conversation onto that footing, we're never going to win this argument because if the argument is about, well, we must make people safe, then that will always necessitate more tyranny by default.

00:22:08.500 Of course.

00:22:08.700 And so I see, certainly in the UK, I wouldn't speak for Canada or the United States, a complete failure of, quote-unquote, our side to make that argument that we are willing to sacrifice some, whatever safety means in the context of words, and that's a whole bunch of BS in my opinion anyway, whatever that means, that has a price and there comes a point where too much safety means too much giving up of freedom and we're not prepared to do that.

00:22:36.800 We haven't been able to make that argument.

00:22:38.120 I agree with you.

00:22:39.720 And I think one of the problems is that we approach that argument from the wrong end.

00:22:45.720 And what I mean by that is I think we should start with the presumption that you're allowed to say anything you want, like anything you want.

00:22:53.920 Now, what might the exceptions to that be?

00:22:57.260 Well, here's one.

00:22:58.460 If I go up to somebody on the sidewalk and say, give me your wallet or I'll stab you.

00:23:04.120 Okay, well, that crosses a line because now I'm threatening imminent violence.

00:23:10.200 That's an assault.

00:23:11.800 And it's okay for us to say, no, that's not allowed because it's violence.

00:23:15.800 But if you start from that end, then you can say, well, are there any other exceptions?

00:23:22.680 And maybe yes and maybe no.

00:23:25.100 If you start at the harm end, I mean, there's all kinds of harm you do just by speaking in ways that are clearly...

00:23:32.580 Anything serious.

00:23:33.960 Anything serious.

00:23:34.480 About anything serious.

00:23:35.040 If you're campaigning to be elected to something, then you are trying to do harm to your opponents.

00:23:42.700 You want to make them lose.

00:23:44.000 Or if you are running a commercial enterprise and you want to outsell your neighboring competitor, you're trying to do them harm.

00:23:53.140 And if you succeed, you will do them harm.

00:23:54.920 Maybe they go out of business.

00:23:55.820 Because that's legit.

00:23:57.860 You are allowed to cause people harm by your speech.

00:24:02.740 Harm is not something that's prohibited.

00:24:06.240 We have to get back to the idea that we live in the world and people succeed and they fail.

00:24:12.220 And sometimes they fail because of what other people do.

00:24:14.860 And too bad because they're free.

00:24:17.140 It's a free world.

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00:26:00.820 So let's go back here now to why, how we get from protecting children against online exploitation,

00:26:14.340 which apparently necessitates, as you pointed out, the construction of a very ill-defined, expensive,

00:26:23.260 and highly autonomous new administrative system, not bound, if I remember correctly, by normal rules of evidence.

00:26:31.720 Well, so, yeah.

00:26:33.160 So, well, number one, that's absolutely true in the administrative realm, but it's also true in the human rights realm, right?

00:26:38.860 So these commissions and tribunals, I sat on a tribunal for a while, they look like sort of courts.

00:26:45.960 Yeah.

00:26:46.700 If you go into the room, it looks like it's set up like a courtroom.

00:26:49.080 You've got a bench and somebody making a decision and witnesses and so on, but they're not courts because,

00:26:54.500 well, for various reasons, they're created by governments, first of all.

00:26:57.380 They're basically a part of the executive branch of government, even though they look like a court.

00:27:01.580 But they don't adhere to normal rules of evidence, and to what extent they do on any particular occasion might vary.

00:27:09.660 It depends upon the rules of that particular tribunal.

00:27:12.400 So, you know, people have called them kangaroo courts.

00:27:14.880 Sometimes that's deserved.

00:27:18.800 But it's part of the trend of taking decisions away from courts and giving them to the executive branch of government.

00:27:25.420 But mind you, the courts haven't been all that good in recent years either.

00:27:31.580 You know, as I've been saying, we are losing the law.

00:27:35.380 Let me put it this way.

00:27:38.540 We've been talking, you've been talking especially for a long time about how institutions in society have been compromised,

00:27:47.920 been taken over by wokeism, by social justice, by critical theory, and so on.

00:27:53.260 Well, the law is an institution.

00:27:57.460 It's one of these social institutions, one of these public institutions.

00:28:01.340 There's no reason why the law should be immune from all those factors as any other institution,

00:28:08.720 like government, like universities, like public schools, like media.

00:28:12.420 It's happening to the law too.

00:28:14.720 It's happening.

00:28:15.680 Now, don't get me wrong.

00:28:16.600 In Canada, we have some terrific judges and we have cases that go the way they're supposed to

00:28:25.180 and they're heard the way they're supposed to with the proper rules of evidence and the proper analysis.

00:28:30.680 And so this is not a black and white thing.

00:28:32.540 But more and more, you are seeing from the courts evidence that the paradigm has changed or is changing

00:28:42.160 from what a lot of people think in their heads is the way the laws work to what actually is the case now.

00:28:48.580 And what's the case now?

00:28:49.960 So let me give you an example.

00:28:50.960 Yeah.

00:28:51.120 So we have a section in our charter that says that everybody is equal under the law.

00:28:58.380 They're entitled to equal protection under the law, which is what the U.S. Constitution says as well.

00:29:04.480 But over the past 40 years of charter jurisprudence by the Supreme Court of Canada,

00:29:11.280 that section now means that people are not entitled to equal protection, that is equal treatment by the law.

00:29:20.300 They're entitled to equal or equivalent outcomes between groups.

00:29:26.760 So let me give you an example of perhaps the most recent important Supreme Court of Canada case on this idea.

00:29:35.460 Many years ago, the RCMP created a job sharing plan wherein full-time members could combine with two or three other members

00:29:43.560 to decide to work part-time.

00:29:45.880 It was voluntary.

00:29:47.220 People who worked part-time.

00:29:48.480 If you want to work part-time and you're working full-time, then we're going to allow you to do that.

00:29:54.180 And we're going to give you a pension as well.

00:29:56.820 And the pension, if you're part-time, will be calculated in the same way that the pension is calculated for the full-time people,

00:30:02.780 which is proportionate to the hours that you work.

00:30:06.000 Okay?

00:30:06.820 Voluntary.

00:30:07.220 Over time, what happens?

00:30:12.180 More women than men voluntarily sign up for the part-time work.

00:30:17.980 Right, of course.

00:30:18.820 And then at the end of the day, that means that more women than men have lower pensions than the men who are working full-time.

00:30:25.780 Yeah.

00:30:26.200 The program is challenged under Section 15-1 of the Charter.

00:30:33.180 The Supreme Court of Canada says unconstitutional.

00:30:36.800 By definition.

00:30:37.700 By definition.

00:30:38.280 You can't have a voluntary equal program that results in different results for women than men.

00:30:47.360 It's a little hard on the whole notion of voluntary there, isn't it?

00:30:50.900 Exactly.

00:30:51.580 Equal rules, voluntary program, open to everybody, treats everybody the same way, not constitutional.

00:30:58.980 Oh, boy.

00:30:59.840 When was that ruling?

00:31:01.640 2019, I believe.

00:31:03.280 Oh, yeah.

00:31:03.900 That's a rough one.

00:31:04.720 Okay, so how did we get from protecting vulnerable children from online sexual exploitation with a gigantic, unnamed bureaucracy with indefinite rights and virtually no responsibility to whatever the hell hateful speech is?

00:31:26.140 I mean, first of all, we might ask ourselves, and Constantine, you can weigh in here, too.

00:31:31.120 The whole notion of hateful speech, that's a troublesome one for me because there's an obvious element of subjective judgment in it, like a clearly obvious one.

00:31:41.640 And the problem for me is always, as soon as someone talks about hateful speech, isn't so much whether or not there are forms of speech that are detestable because you haven't lived if you haven't listened to somebody say something detestable, perhaps sometimes in jest,

00:31:57.960 which is a very interesting, you know, variation of that possibility, but, like, who decides that it's hateful on what grounds?

00:32:07.540 Like, and why do you decide the people who are making that judgment?

00:32:10.200 And then that problem's very much amplified, like very much amplified.

00:32:14.720 If you open the door, as this bill does, to anonymous denunciations, right now, everybody, including every school child who's, like, older than three, and maybe even at three, understands that there's almost nothing worse than a snitch.

00:32:30.460 And all children are wise enough to know that even if you are being bullied at school, let's say, it has to get pretty damn brutal and bad before going to report it to the authorities is acceptable or justifiable.

00:32:47.420 Now, you know, you can debate about the conditions under which that should or shouldn't occur.

00:32:50.940 My point is that even kids know that even under dire circumstances, there's almost nothing worse than a snitch.

00:32:58.700 And yet these bills, and we certainly know from places like the Soviet Union, just exactly what happens, or East Germany, what happens when one-third of the citizens, which was the case in East Germany, become government informers.

00:33:11.060 It's like trust's gone.

00:33:12.720 The worst people have the upper hand.

00:33:14.280 It's complete bloody catastrophe.

00:33:15.520 Now, in Bill C-63, you have a concatenation of these problems, like, okay, now hate speech is going to be constrained, and it can be identified by anonymous informants.

00:33:32.160 Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit, if I got that right, first of all.

00:33:36.220 Well, yes, but let's just back up to your children point, right?

00:33:39.260 So part of the problem is the premise, and the premise is widely accepted because we accept this premise generally now in society because this is where we're at.

00:33:52.420 But the premise is that the government is responsible for keeping people safe, including the children, and that's ignoring the best mechanism we already have to keep children safe, which is their parents, right?

00:34:07.400 It's assuming that this is what this state is for.

00:34:10.560 If you went up to somebody on the street, anybody at random, and you said, you know, do you think we should have an expansive administrative state?

00:34:18.340 And by that, I mean, you know, all these government people who do all these things.

00:34:23.160 They'll probably look at you like, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:34:26.120 That's what government is.

00:34:27.960 That's what government's for.

00:34:29.400 What do you mean?

00:34:30.480 What does government do other than solve problems for society by making these rules and doing policy and so on?

00:34:39.640 And we've lost the proposition that we've made a choice to have this large, overwhelming government tell us what to do in place of all of the other things we used to have.

00:34:56.140 Individual decisions, families, communities, churches, all of the non-public institutions, and I mean government institutions.

00:35:05.580 Government just rules the day now.

00:35:09.140 And we're debating about whether or not the government has done this job properly or not well.

00:35:14.480 Well, the problem is the government's doing the job.

00:35:17.020 The government, for my money, shouldn't be in this business.

00:35:20.420 They shouldn't be in the business of regulating speech for hateful impact.

00:35:24.800 Why not?

00:35:25.660 Well, because if we think we live in a free country, if the government's in this business, then we're wrong.

00:35:37.900 So your point is something like that the cost of having the government offer all potential services, say, in relationship to desire and safety is that you lose all your autonomy and your freedom.

00:35:54.140 Well, let's back up.

00:35:56.480 What rights should we have is where we should start.

00:35:59.620 What rights do you have?

00:36:00.480 If you're a free person, what does that mean?

00:36:03.700 I think it means that other people can't coerce you, can't interfere with you, can't take your stuff, can't use force against you.

00:36:14.860 That means you're free.

00:36:15.780 That means other people can't do it.

00:36:17.060 That means the state can't do it.

00:36:19.380 That's the sphere of freedom that you have.

00:36:22.200 That means that the government needs to do one job, which is to make sure other people don't coerce you and use force against you and take your stuff.

00:36:32.240 Job done.

00:36:33.040 If somebody says something you don't like and causes you psychological angst, too bad.

00:36:42.040 The person is free and so are you.

00:36:44.540 Put up with it.

00:36:45.040 It's part of the world.

00:36:46.400 As soon as you get governments overstepping that zone that I just described, you start to move away from that conception of freedom into a different kind of society altogether.

00:36:58.500 And we are so far along that path that I don't know how we can call ourselves a free country, a free people with a straight face.

00:37:08.860 It's just transparently untrue.

00:37:10.760 Bill C-63 certainly is one of the pieces of legislation that make you question that.

00:37:15.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:37:15.840 But Bill C-63 is just one step along the way.

00:37:21.320 And so let's go back to the courts because part of the fault of C-63, it's a government bill, so it's a legislative problem.

00:37:28.720 But the courts, the Supreme Court of Canada, already said, essentially, that this kind of restriction on speech is constitutional.

00:37:39.200 And in fact, in C-63, they've used some of the language the Supreme Court of Canada said was okay.

00:37:45.760 So the Supreme Court of Canada took this charter we have, which says everybody has the right to free speech, and said, well, sure, everyone has the right to free speech, but not this.

00:37:59.020 Well, they used that against me.

00:38:00.660 Of course they did.

00:38:01.520 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:02.160 Of course they did.

00:38:02.660 I'm a direct beneficiary of that line of reasoning.

00:38:05.180 I have freedom of speech, but it's subject to reasonable limitations.

00:38:10.920 And what are those?

00:38:11.860 Well, they're whatever any reasonably constituted bureaucracy deemed they might be.

00:38:17.140 That's basically what they told me.

00:38:18.760 But that makes a mockery of the whole idea of having a constitutional right.

00:38:22.760 Yeah, yeah, of course.

00:38:24.040 I think that was kind of the point.

00:38:25.400 It is the point.

00:38:26.320 The point is that our charter, people think of our charter of rights as the beginning, as the foundation of our legal system.

00:38:34.960 And it's not.

00:38:35.640 But it's a mere gloss on legislative supremacy and now judicial supremacy, because the court can decide what those rights mean, however it wants.

00:38:48.380 Yeah.

00:38:48.500 And more and more, they are less robust individual rights and more and more justifications for the administrative state to do things in the public good.

00:39:00.720 So people are putting much too much faith, weight on the fact that we have a charter.

00:39:06.340 They think it works in the same way as the American Bill of Rights, which has fared much better over time than ours has as much older as well, of course.

00:39:15.160 And much more foundational.

00:39:17.840 Well, yes, but even in the U.S., though, I think we've all made a mistake.

00:39:24.220 In the Anglo world, we've made a mistake.

00:39:26.860 And it's a very, very old mistake.

00:39:30.200 To go back even to the time of the Magna Carta.

00:39:32.600 So the original problem was the king.

00:39:33.980 And the king, depending upon the king, of course, but kings were tyrants.

00:39:39.220 Their word was the law.

00:39:41.940 And then over time, with great difficulty, Magna Carta and then the Civil Rights Act of 1688 and the American Declaration of Independence and so on, over time, what we did was take power away from the king and give it to the legislature.

00:39:58.200 And that's good, right, because the monarch is hereditary and the legislature is elected.

00:40:04.160 So power to the people.

00:40:05.180 Great.

00:40:06.020 Except that over time, legislatures showed that they can be tyrants too.

00:40:15.060 C-63.

00:40:16.260 And all kinds of other things that have happened through the ages.

00:40:18.040 And so the Americans first came along and said, we're going to try and fix that too.

00:40:23.040 So they created a Bill of Rights, which limits what legislatures can do.

00:40:28.820 But to do that, they had to give power to the courts.

00:40:32.000 So from the king to legislature, from legislature to courts, and now the courts are screwing it up.

00:40:37.680 And the courts are giving power back to the administrative state, which is the king.

00:40:43.120 So here's the mistake we made.

00:40:46.300 We've been just moving power around from king to legislature to courts to administrative state.

00:40:57.100 We've been moving it around from place to place instead of taking power away.

00:41:01.780 How about instead of adopting responsibility for?

00:41:09.860 The problem is that in order for that to work, and in order for the rule of law to work,

00:41:14.200 the people in power have to adhere to the idea.

00:41:18.040 So the rule of law worked for quite a while.

00:41:19.980 Like, there were some periods when it was great, right?

00:41:23.240 So the rule of law is restraint on people with power, on legislatures, on executive branch, and even on courts.

00:41:29.200 And as long as the people who occupy those positions believe in the idea, it works.

00:41:38.160 But our people in those positions do not believe in the idea anymore.

00:41:43.600 They have thrown the idea out because it prevents them from doing what they think their job now is,

00:41:50.480 which is to manage stuff.

00:41:51.720 Because management requires agility.

00:41:56.400 It requires responsiveness.

00:41:57.840 It requires you to get in there and muck about with your hands.

00:42:01.920 And that is not the way the rule of law works.

00:42:03.780 The rule of law is this idea that the legislature makes these grand rules based upon important principles.

00:42:11.500 It defines the relationship between state and individual.

00:42:14.740 And we can all tell what it is.

00:42:16.940 We can all go read what they are.

00:42:18.380 It's in the books.

00:42:19.180 The law is there for everybody to know.

00:42:21.420 That is not the way it works now.

00:42:23.700 Now, the law is just for the people in power to control and understand and issue by edict whenever it suits them

00:42:31.700 to make sure that the little people are doing what they're supposed to do.

00:42:34.820 So the rule of law is in direct conflict with what all our rulers think their job now is.

00:42:41.700 Well, there's no glory and virtue to be obtained in applying the law that someone else passed, right?

00:42:46.080 Exactly so.

00:42:46.900 But coming back to your point, Jordan, as well about who decides what hate speech is.

00:42:51.040 I mean, we have this in the UK where for certain offenses, the evidence that the languages are well in,

00:43:00.720 but a non-crime hate incident, which is when you haven't committed any crime,

00:43:06.800 but nonetheless this will be recorded by the police on your record

00:43:09.620 and potentially used against you in employment interviews and so on,

00:43:13.280 is based on your self-perception of what motivated your offender who afflicted you in some way to do what they did.

00:43:23.900 So if you were to make some sort of joke at my expense

00:43:27.080 and I concluded that it was to do with my immigration status or ethnicity or whatever,

00:43:31.320 I could then say, well, this is clearly a hate incident that you've committed.

00:43:35.820 Right, and the rationale for that would be, well,

00:43:38.520 who would know better than the person who was directly affected and who's to question that?

00:43:43.600 Than the victim, we might say.

00:43:45.440 Well, and the answer to that, if you have any sense, is,

00:43:48.580 well, what if the purported victim is a manipulative psychopath?

00:43:53.340 And the general response to that is, well, all those people are just victims too.

00:44:00.900 Right, and so, well, so this will get us back into the hate discussion.

00:44:06.880 How do you define hate?

00:44:08.560 Well, you just said you allow the purported target of the hate to define it.

00:44:12.920 And what they do is they say that they feel hated.

00:44:20.540 So it's a second order form of evidence.

00:44:24.360 The primary evidence in principle is their subjective emotion,

00:44:28.360 but you don't have access to that.

00:44:30.060 So you have to accept their record of their subjective emotion.

00:44:33.060 And you accept that in a manner that isn't questionable.

00:44:36.780 There's no higher authority than their say-so.

00:44:41.400 And the problem with that, it's a variant of the problem with the informants,

00:44:47.340 is that that only works, well, it would never work.

00:44:51.280 Let's get that clear.

00:44:52.540 But that only works in the ideal situation where people have perfect understanding

00:44:58.780 of the motivation of others, which they don't, and also they're not lying.

00:45:03.620 The problem with that definition of subjective harm is it lays the gates wide open

00:45:09.720 to the Machiavellians and the psychopaths.

00:45:12.880 Yes, yes.

00:45:13.760 And you're also touching on two other important things, right?

00:45:17.060 So number one, unlike most criminal offenses, which require intent of some kind,

00:45:25.300 the intent is not on whether the speaker meant to be hateful.

00:45:29.520 Yeah, it's not relevant.

00:45:30.560 Intent is not relevant.

00:45:31.460 Right.

00:45:31.720 Right.

00:45:31.960 That's terrifying.

00:45:32.840 And also, the other thing that's not relevant is truth.

00:45:35.760 If you speak a true fact that is interpreted as a hateful fact and has this effect on somebody,

00:45:43.660 well, that's not going to be a defense either.

00:45:46.020 Right.

00:45:46.260 So essentially, one of the effects of this kind of legislation is to say you are not allowed

00:45:52.380 to speak the truth.

00:45:53.420 Right.

00:45:53.900 Because that truth...

00:45:55.140 Regardless of intent.

00:45:56.240 Regardless of intent.

00:45:57.120 Regardless of intent and regardless of historical fact.

00:45:59.940 Yeah.

00:46:00.420 We are outlawing an effect.

00:46:04.180 Yeah, right, right, right.

00:46:05.680 Absolutely.

00:46:06.780 Okay.

00:46:07.080 And to expand that even further, with comedy, it's interesting because, of course,

00:46:11.460 Scotland, where some of the most ridiculous legislation is being passed,

00:46:15.860 is the place which hosts the biggest arts and comedy festival in the world,

00:46:20.800 the Edinburgh Fringe.

00:46:21.880 Right.

00:46:23.140 And to your point about truth, well, you don't even have to be saying something true.

00:46:28.460 At this point now, they've passed a bill which means that comedians could be investigated

00:46:33.060 for jokes they make.

00:46:35.300 Now, that is a level of detachment from context and reality that is even a level above simply

00:46:42.400 or someone made a true comment.

00:46:43.840 What if I said something sarcastically?

00:46:45.860 Mm-hmm.

00:46:46.560 On stage as a comedian.

00:46:48.140 And what's interesting is comedy seems to be being very particularly targeted,

00:46:52.340 but nobody goes to Macbeth at the theatre and says,

00:46:56.400 oh, I went to the theatre and then this guy went crazy and stabbed his friend.

00:47:01.820 No one says that.

00:47:02.800 But with comedy, for some reason, the character on stage is increasingly being perceived as

00:47:07.920 having the opinions that he's jokingly saying.

00:47:13.200 And so that's another level.

00:47:15.660 That's right.

00:47:16.020 There's no distinction between the role and the actor.

00:47:18.620 Quite.

00:47:19.240 And what's interesting, if you abstract even further from that, if you've watched Game of Thrones,

00:47:23.200 the scene where you really truly discover that King Joffrey's gone mad is when he cuts off the tongue of the jester in his court.

00:47:32.160 Yeah.

00:47:32.380 Right.

00:47:32.760 And this symbolism is-

00:47:34.700 It's perfect.

00:47:35.540 It's been used throughout history to portray the final conversion into tyranny of a ruler.

00:47:43.240 Well, that's why there was jester in the court.

00:47:45.460 It's like that was one of the ways everybody could tell that the king wasn't a tyrant.

00:47:49.480 Right.

00:47:49.900 Is that he could tolerate his own jester, his own fool, or welcome him, or find him amusing.

00:47:55.340 That would be best.

00:47:56.800 And this is something that happened when Vladimir Putin first came to power in Russia.

00:48:01.020 Under Boris Yeltsin, there was a kind of liberalisation.

00:48:03.560 There was an opening up of-

00:48:05.220 Because in the Soviet Union, you didn't make fun of the political leaders.

00:48:07.660 Nothing was funny in the Soviet Union.

00:48:08.600 Nothing, nothing quite.

00:48:09.740 And that was true.

00:48:10.500 Well, the jokes that people told at the kitchen table were funny, but not in public, of course.

00:48:14.480 But under Boris Yeltsin, there was an opening up, and we had this amazing TV show,

00:48:20.520 which was the equivalent of the British spitting image.

00:48:23.040 I don't know if you had the similar thing.

00:48:24.880 Did you have spitting image?

00:48:25.760 No, no, no.

00:48:26.120 I know of it, though.

00:48:26.740 Yeah.

00:48:27.460 And it was basically puppets portraying the different political characters.

00:48:30.660 And the first thing Vladimir Putin did when he came to power was to shut that down.

00:48:34.340 So historically, throughout literature and other things,

00:48:38.040 if you're looking for symptoms of tyranny, the shutting down of jokes and humor is right.

00:48:44.360 Comedians are canaries in the coal mine.

00:48:46.560 Comedians in automobiles, as far as I'm concerned.

00:48:49.800 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:50.340 Well, they're so emblematic of personal autonomy.

00:48:52.980 Right.

00:48:53.280 Every tyrant hates the automobile.

00:48:55.140 So even though they all want to have one.

00:48:57.200 Okay, so let's delve into the hate issue a bit more, too,

00:49:00.920 because in Canada, we have protected categories of hate, right?

00:49:05.140 So it's a hate crime if it's—I want to make sure I've got this definition right.

00:49:14.040 It's a hate crime if it can be shown—if your utterance can be shown to discriminate against a protected class.

00:49:22.740 Well, yes.

00:49:23.100 Like, it's not merely that you hurt people's feelings, right?

00:49:27.240 It's that you have to hurt them for a particular reason.

00:49:31.020 Well, it's a discriminatory—sorry.

00:49:32.700 So we have these two realms.

00:49:33.960 We have the human rights realm and we have the criminal realm.

00:49:37.340 And we've had hate speech restrictions in our criminal law for a good while.

00:49:41.960 And they're rarely used.

00:49:43.280 The human rights provisions are much more frequently used because they're much less serious and much easier to trigger,

00:49:54.640 much easier to complain about, and they don't go to a court.

00:49:58.340 They go to one of these tribunals, right?

00:50:00.100 But one of the problems is the dovetailing of this hate speech discriminatory practice idea along with the equality problem that I was describing before.

00:50:13.280 Right?

00:50:13.640 So, as with any rule, this rule is going to be applied and interpreted in one direction and not the other.

00:50:22.760 What I mean by that is, if you go around saying that white people are hateful or privileged or colonists or whatever the case may be,

00:50:34.860 that's pretty hateful.

00:50:35.860 If you say that all—you know, if you're white, you are X, you're being stereotypical and you're making a blanket statement about all these people who are white.

00:50:44.860 That's not going to be entertained as hate speech because of the way that our equality law has been interpreted,

00:50:52.300 which is—and this is one thing that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal said fairly recently.

00:50:56.500 They said, people who are white cannot be discriminated against.

00:51:02.180 Yeah, yeah, I really—

00:51:03.180 But you're not a protected group.

00:51:04.380 They are not a protected group.

00:51:05.760 Some people—some animals are more equal than others.

00:51:07.920 Exactly so.

00:51:08.600 So, this kind of law, the hate speech law, is likely to be interpreted in that way, which is, oh, you can only utter hate speech against protected groups

00:51:20.860 if you utter hate speech against those other people who are not in one of those groups.

00:51:24.860 There's no hate speech against the oppressor classes.

00:51:27.380 It doesn't qualify.

00:51:28.240 And by the way, this isn't theory.

00:51:30.000 No.

00:51:30.180 This is—so, in Scotland, for example, they passed this bill on the 1st of April.

00:51:35.300 Of course, they did recently.

00:51:37.160 And in the first week of it being passed, there were more reports of hate speech than there had been in the previous several years.

00:51:46.400 And the reason was that many, many people reported a speech given by Hamza Youssef, the first minister of Scotland,

00:51:54.000 in which he was being openly racist against white people.

00:51:57.300 Right.

00:51:57.420 And, of course, this isn't considered a hate crime.

00:52:01.940 And, you know, it was—the BBC interviewed Hamza Youssef, where the interviewer and he himself laughed sort of, you know, almost gratuitously.

00:52:11.300 Oh, how silly.

00:52:13.640 You know, people would say, of course, this is complete nonsense.

00:52:16.020 And frankly, he said, I'm not aware of anyone who's not on the far right who would report this as hate speech.

00:52:22.480 Right.

00:52:22.720 It's an absolute case of some animals more equal than others.

00:52:25.920 And the law, as I'm sure you would agree, is written specifically to create that situation.

00:52:30.460 Absolutely.

00:52:31.360 Yeah.

00:52:31.640 Well, not originally written, but now interpreted, and now this idea has taken place.

00:52:36.860 Well, look, once you create the idea of protected groups and—

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00:53:48.140 Some animals are inevitably more equal than others, right?

00:53:51.820 Okay, so now we have a dynamic where in order for there to be hate, there has to be an oppressor-oppressor dimension.

00:54:03.280 And so you identify the dimension, could be sex, could be race, could be ethnicity, could be gender expression,

00:54:10.320 could be gender identity because those were added.

00:54:12.380 Then you have a situation where the oppressed end of that distribution can accuse the oppressor end of that distribution of hate speech, but not the reverse, right?

00:54:24.320 So that's basically the game that's being played here.

00:54:26.540 Okay, so how does Bill C-16 tie into Bill C-63 then?

00:54:31.740 Well, one way is this as far as I'm concerned.

00:54:34.240 So one of the things I was very concerned about back in 2016 was that I looked into gender expression because that became a new category of grouphood, essentially, in Canada, insofar as that was a protected class.

00:54:48.340 So a protected class is a reality that's now got legal protections.

00:54:53.400 That's pretty damn real as far as the law goes.

00:54:55.740 But I couldn't distinguish, find any distinction whatsoever between gender expression and fashion.

00:55:02.200 In fact, most of the definitions that I found, mostly from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, because a lot of this mess came out of them, was the explicit insistence that gender expression was fashion.

00:55:17.380 Because, well, because gender is nothing but fashion.

00:55:24.060 It's a social construct anyways.

00:55:25.520 It's a role that you play.

00:55:27.160 It's a disguise that you put on.

00:55:29.160 It doesn't reflect any deeper underlying reality.

00:55:31.300 Well, okay, that's complete nonsense, but that's okay.

00:55:36.120 Why is that a problem in this case?

00:55:38.220 Well, if fashion criticism, there's no limit to what constitutes a hate crime if fashion criticism is one of its valid manifestations, right?

00:55:49.020 Clearly.

00:55:49.700 There's almost nothing I could do to you that would be less harmful than, you know, having a good laugh about your trousers.

00:55:57.780 Sure.

00:55:59.520 But one thing that you're referring to there, alluding to, is the weaponization of human rights.

00:56:05.920 Yes.

00:56:06.220 So, if you go to an earlier conception of human rights, you can describe them as the right not to be abused by your government, you know, not to be thrown in jail without due process, not to be censored for this and that, not to be tortured.

00:56:22.000 Those are human rights.

00:56:24.600 But today, human rights consists of the rights of some people in groups to insist that other people-

00:56:34.100 In groups.

00:56:34.800 In groups.

00:56:36.460 Embrace their own decisions.

00:56:39.340 Yes.

00:56:39.820 Right?

00:56:40.220 Or else.

00:56:40.780 So, if I decide that I'm a man and you don't call me by my pronouns, then you are guilty of a violation of my human rights.

00:56:52.000 That's a very new idea.

00:56:54.460 That is not where we started with this.

00:56:56.500 That's a weaponization because it means that human rights are a zero-sum game.

00:57:00.980 If I have human rights, that means you have less because I can insist that you behave in a certain way.

00:57:05.820 This is about individuals now being able to determine how other individuals will behave.

00:57:14.340 It's incredible.

00:57:15.180 Okay.

00:57:15.420 So, now we have another conjunction of pathological enabling here that I'd like to dwell on for a moment.

00:57:23.460 So, one of the things we alluded to earlier was the fact that Bill C-63 also opens up the door, it facilitates, enables, and outright encourages anonymous denunciations.

00:57:38.880 Now, the good thinkers would say, well, you want to put as few barriers in the way of the oppressed seeking redress for their victimization as possible.

00:57:49.900 But that omits one very important detail, which is that if you can denounce for zero cost, then you weaponize denunciation and you put an immense, you put the entire power of the state in the hands of anyone who wants it.

00:58:15.240 Yeah.

00:58:15.480 And it's anonymous.

00:58:17.580 And so, to what degree in Bill C-63 do you get to face your accuser, right?

00:58:22.960 You don't even know who it is.

00:58:24.200 So, you can be accused regardless of your intent, regardless of the factual reality of your utterance by people who do not have to identify themselves or take any responsibility whatsoever if their denunciation turns out to be false, who are rewarded for doing so, who you do not get to confront.

00:58:47.620 Well, at that point, I don't see you have a loss system at all.

00:58:50.780 You have rule, you don't even have rule by mob, you have rule by the worst elements of the mob, and the worst elements are going to be those who will come crawling out of the woodwork like mad to weaponize their resentment by using the state's power they now have at their disposal, right?

00:59:13.220 And rub their hands in glee at every opportunity to do that.

00:59:16.440 There will be specialists in denunciation in no time flat.

00:59:21.120 Okay, so that goes along with that.

00:59:24.960 When you divide the world into oppressed and oppressor, you fail to notice that in the hypothetically oppressed class, there are going to be those who use that narrative as a way of justifying their vengeance.

00:59:50.460 They're not good people who are victims, they're not good people who are victims, they're people who are using that story to get exactly what the hell they want from you right now or else.

00:59:59.460 And certainly the Human Rights Commissions in Canada have been weaponized to that degree.

01:00:03.400 I mean, in my situation, since we'll make it personal, I suppose for a moment, anybody in the world can bring out a complaint against me for any reason, right?

01:00:15.500 And it's at the, the complaint doesn't have to proceed, that's at the decision, judgment, it's the judgment of the Ontario College of Psychologists, the regulatory board that determines whether or not that complaint can proceed.

01:00:31.920 Right.

01:00:32.040 But that's, like, it's an entirely political decision.

01:00:37.140 But this is part and parcel, though, of those trends I was describing earlier, which is to give these administrative bodies, the professional regulator being one, the human rights tribunal being another, the deference to do as they think best.

01:00:52.760 And yes, you can take, as you know, you can take them to, for review in front of a court, but the court tends to defer to them and just, and they have the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court about the charter anyway.

01:01:05.900 And so you put those two things together and it basically means that these administrative bodies have a great deal of latitude to do basically whatever they think is right in the public good.

01:01:15.120 Yeah.

01:01:15.760 Right?

01:01:16.280 And so that means you don't have a rule of law.

01:01:18.200 Well, you certainly don't have any, if you're a thing, if you're a professional in Canada and you think your charter rights to free speech mean anything, you're sadly deluded because they certainly don't.

01:01:28.700 So.

01:01:28.860 Right.

01:01:29.240 Okay, so let's go to the next most fun thing about Bill C-63.

01:01:34.860 This is the part where it moves from sort of jaw-droppingly incomprehensible to absolute theatre of the absurd.

01:01:44.460 I had to reread this section like three times before I could believe it was true.

01:01:51.700 I thought I must be misunderstanding this.

01:01:53.560 I had the same experience with Bill C-16, I guess, when I read about gender expression.

01:01:58.440 Yeah.

01:01:58.620 I thought, surely this can't mean fashion because it certainly looks like it means fashion.

01:02:03.640 There's no way it means fashion.

01:02:05.680 It's like, nope, definitely means fashion and purposefully so.

01:02:10.140 It's like, okay, fair enough.

01:02:11.540 Okay, so what have we got on the absolutely absurd side of things?

01:02:16.420 Okay, so this is my understanding and I'm not a lawyer, so maybe you can help me weed out any inaccuracies in my representation.

01:02:23.360 So my understanding is that I can go to a provincial magistrate and I can say that I have, I fear that someone I know may commit a hate crime, let's say this year.

01:02:39.800 I have good reason, the good reason would be my fear.

01:02:44.240 So that would be my proclamation that my emotional reaction to this person's possible misbehavior is real.

01:02:53.120 Not even that the threat is real, but that I'm afraid that it might be real.

01:02:56.780 And that magistrate can act on that by, well, the penalty laid out in the bill, as far as I can tell, was, well, if you're the person who is eliciting the fear, then you get to have an ankle bracelet on for a year.

01:03:17.760 And you can be essentially confined to your house and the court can determine who you can talk to and who you can't talk to.

01:03:28.740 And they can also require you to have your bodily fluids monitored.

01:03:35.020 This is one of the elements of the bill I didn't understand at all.

01:03:38.000 It's like, where the hell did that come from?

01:03:40.560 So they could put restrictions on your right to consume alcohol, for example.

01:03:46.320 I suppose marijuana will probably still be okay as long as the liberals are in power.

01:03:50.580 But anything that would, in principle, heighten the probability that you might commit the hate speech.

01:03:57.040 And so, and the penalties, well, that's basically that.

01:04:01.700 That's basically that part of the bill.

01:04:03.180 Now, that doesn't seem, that's a pre-crime.

01:04:05.780 It's a pre-crime.

01:04:07.020 It's pre-crime.

01:04:08.000 Now, it's not like this is a brand new idea.

01:04:11.260 So there are already provisions in the code that allow for pre-crime solutions before a crime happens in some circumstances, for some crimes, if a court is satisfied that there is a threat.

01:04:26.860 But what's happening here is they've taken that idea and they've combined it with this speech idea to create the scenario you're describing, which is, you've got to be kidding me.

01:04:36.400 It is now possible for a magistrate to put me under house arrest because of something that he thinks I might say.

01:04:45.520 That's where we're at.

01:04:46.920 Right, right.

01:04:47.460 So the other circumstances you're referring to, I presume, would be something like someone has made repeated threats of domestic violence that appear credible.

01:04:54.520 Correct.

01:04:54.980 Right.

01:04:55.300 That's right.

01:04:55.780 Right.

01:04:56.180 A credible threat of actual violence, for example.

01:05:00.980 Which in itself, though, constitutes a crime, doesn't it?

01:05:04.500 Well, if you committed it.

01:05:06.360 But if I threaten you directly with a crime.

01:05:11.680 If you make the threat, that's a crime.

01:05:13.520 Yes, correct.

01:05:14.620 Right.

01:05:15.080 Okay.

01:05:15.520 Okay.

01:05:16.000 So that's right.

01:05:16.940 So in that situation, the threat itself is also a crime.

01:05:20.560 Well, it could be, so you could have an actual prosecution for the threat, but if there are circumstances where, for some reason, that there hasn't been a threat, but there's still a danger that the evidence shows exists, maybe because there have been previous crimes committed by that individual against that individual, and the victim of those crimes is concerned because it looks like it's going to happen again.

01:05:43.340 There are circumstances under which the court can do this kind of thing, but the combination of that power with this kind of action.

01:05:54.820 The bastard child of those two laws.

01:05:56.860 Exactly.

01:05:57.700 Yeah.

01:05:57.940 Very well put.

01:05:58.700 Yeah.

01:05:59.840 Okay.

01:06:00.400 So I've got that right.

01:06:01.420 That is how this.

01:06:02.080 Oh, yes.

01:06:02.860 Yeah.

01:06:03.580 And these can also be brought forward anonymously.

01:06:06.420 Well, well, see that, so the, the, the, the, the anonymous power is, um, most noticeable in the bill under the human rights part.

01:06:17.700 So the criminal code aspect is, is, is, is the way it's always done.

01:06:21.120 And sometimes in that situation, I'm not a criminal lawyer, but as I understand it, there are circumstances in which complainants can be, can be protected from exposure to the alleged perpetrator.

01:06:34.000 But the real anonymity problem lies within the, the, the criminal, the, the human rights tribunal part of the, of the, of the, of the statute.

01:06:44.340 Okay.

01:06:44.860 Okay.

01:06:45.320 Okay.

01:06:46.540 Okay.

01:06:47.180 But, but, but, but so if I can, we can step back for a moment.

01:06:50.620 And part of the lesson in this, I think, is that the people who have put this together and are supporting it have an entirely different vision of what they think the law is for and how it's supposed to work.

01:07:10.060 Like, this seems outrageous to us because we still have an idea about the old paradigm, like how this is supposed to, how this is supposed to work.

01:07:17.100 And they don't have that idea anymore.

01:07:21.420 This, this is a project to make certain kinds of behavior illegitimate, like actually illegitimate.

01:07:30.720 And the fact that it happens to be speech, it's no concern of theirs because it's illegitimate.

01:07:36.000 Speaking a true fact, it was going to have an effect on people, is illegitimate.

01:07:42.200 They are changing the paradigm.

01:07:44.100 They are changing the, they're reframing the whole enterprise of the law.

01:07:50.320 Yeah, this is a very fundamental transformation.

01:07:52.160 This is something surface.

01:07:54.320 Not surface.

01:07:55.320 It is, it goes to the root of the way the law works.

01:07:59.260 And, and, and those of us who are clinging to the old idea and thinking, well, this is an aberration.

01:08:05.200 It's an outrageous aberration, but it's an aberration.

01:08:07.360 It's not an aberration anymore.

01:08:08.900 It, it, it, this is becoming that, that, the disease that the law is now subject to.

01:08:15.720 Everything is, the law is shifting beneath our feet.

01:08:18.620 Claudine Gay wasn't an aberration.

01:08:20.440 Correct.

01:08:20.660 In the universities.

01:08:21.640 That's right.

01:08:22.040 No, she's emblematic of the universities.

01:08:23.700 That's right.

01:08:24.180 And in the same way that.

01:08:24.860 Which is why she was president of Harvard.

01:08:25.960 In the same way that she was emblematic of the universities, this is becoming emblematic of the law.

01:08:30.700 Okay, so, you speak about this.

01:08:34.960 Where's the rest of the lawyers?

01:08:38.580 Well, I'm not alone.

01:08:40.240 Yeah, right.

01:08:41.280 I'm not alone.

01:08:41.840 Right.

01:08:42.560 Our good friend, Jared Brown, has been, has been speaking out on this ever since.

01:08:47.400 Oh, that's two.

01:08:48.480 I know.

01:08:49.300 And I have, I have, I have handfuls of friends that do the same, but it's only a handful.

01:08:57.420 And it's, it's pretty small.

01:08:58.740 If you compare that handful and the numbers of people who are on this page to the numbers of lawyers overall, I mean, it's a, it's a tiny wee slice.

01:09:10.460 Okay, so I've, the same problem obtains on the psychological end of things.

01:09:14.480 Right.

01:09:14.980 Except maybe there are fewer of us, even.

01:09:18.720 Yeah, there are, there are, there aren't, there aren't nearly as many as there ought to be.

01:09:22.080 Right, and there's almost none who've stood up against so-called gender affirming care.

01:09:26.540 Right.

01:09:26.900 Even though I know perfectly well that all of them who are even remotely educated know that every single bit of that is a lie.

01:09:33.220 Yes.

01:09:33.560 Okay, so, but the logical, the logical suspicion that might arise in the mind of anybody watching this is, well, if it's like you and two other people on the legal side,

01:09:45.160 and it's Dr. Peterson on the clinical side, and maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much, why do you think you're not the aberration?

01:09:56.440 I mean, the problem I've always had with you, fundamentally, so I met Bruce under very interesting circumstances, eh?

01:10:04.660 So, I went, I offered to go to Queen's University.

01:10:10.120 Right.

01:10:10.300 And debate anyone at the law school about Bill C-16, which I thought was a pretty good offer on my part, because I'm not a lawyer,

01:10:17.820 and I thought there must be some lawyer at the law school who'll jump, chance to give me a good savaging, because what the hell do I know?

01:10:25.760 And the only one who stepped forward was Bruce.

01:10:29.280 And I don't think I knew at the beginning of that, maybe I knew.

01:10:32.260 I leaned over to you before we started, and introduced myself, because we hadn't met before.

01:10:36.260 Yeah.

01:10:36.860 And I said, I just want you to know, I agree with you.

01:10:39.940 Yeah, right, that's how it happened.

01:10:41.400 I'm playing the devil.

01:10:42.280 Yep, so then, so there was one who stepped forward, and he was playing devil's advocate.

01:10:45.540 And I only stepped forward, because nobody else would do it.

01:10:47.600 Right, right.

01:10:49.160 And I wanted to give you a platform to say what you wanted to say.

01:10:53.640 Yeah, more indication of your unreliability.

01:10:57.280 So, I played the part.

01:10:59.360 Yeah.

01:10:59.580 And it was good fun.

01:11:00.880 But that's where we're at.

01:11:05.160 Okay, so let's go back to the same issue.

01:11:07.780 So, why the hell aren't more people in the legal community cognizant of this danger, and willing to speak about it if it's so fundamental?

01:11:20.180 Which it seems fundamental, so like, what the hell?

01:11:22.680 What's going on here?

01:11:24.400 So, there's lots of reasons, but let me just talk about a couple.

01:11:28.720 Well, the problem is fundamental, and it's been around for a long time, much longer than it seems.

01:11:38.900 I mean, CIL 63 is not a long time.

01:11:42.920 C16 is not a long time.

01:11:44.220 But in the big scheme of things, these trends have been going on for a long time.

01:11:48.620 So, for example, so we have a huge access to justice problem, meaning that if you are involved in a dispute of some kind, that the cost involved in getting a lawyer and then getting access to a court within a certain period of time, numbered in years, almost impossible.

01:12:05.700 Unless you're very rich or very poor, access to the courts is very unlikely.

01:12:10.600 Now, why is that?

01:12:11.540 Well, partly because that in order to get a dispute resolved, you have to go to a court.

01:12:15.980 And what I mean by that is, if we had laws that were clear, then you wouldn't need to go to a court.

01:12:24.260 Because everybody would know what the law was, and you would know what would happen when you went to a court.

01:12:28.700 Every time you go to a court, it's a crapshoot.

01:12:31.780 You don't know what's going to happen.

01:12:33.180 So you have to go to the court to find out what's going to happen, which means we need more courts and more judges and more time and more lawyers.

01:12:39.820 And it's not clear because of all of the things I alluded to earlier, which is we don't just have broad principles in our law.

01:12:47.940 We don't have statutes with rules in them.

01:12:49.840 We don't have cases that are consistent from case to case to case to case.

01:12:54.240 We have one-offs.

01:12:55.380 We have regulations.

01:12:56.200 We have guidelines.

01:12:56.700 We have lots and lots of rules about everything, and you still don't know what the story is.

01:13:05.620 Because the laws move over time, and they won't tell you what the law is right now, and you don't know where the law is or who's making it.

01:13:13.540 The whole thing's a mess.

01:13:15.780 And this state of things has existed for quite a while, quite a while.

01:13:21.560 It's the ocean in which lawyers swim.

01:13:24.600 They're the fish in the water.

01:13:27.380 They don't see the water.

01:13:29.220 It's just the life that they are used to.

01:13:31.800 They think their job is to make their way through that ocean for that client.

01:13:36.160 Okay, so that's sort of the run-of-the-mill lawyers.

01:13:38.220 Well, it's not just the run-of-the-mill lawyers.

01:13:40.640 It's even, I mean, look, we have a lot of good lawyers who are very skilled at what they do.

01:13:45.480 But they're skilled within a certain system, the system that we have.

01:13:49.180 And questioning that system is not part of the job of being a lawyer in the normal sense.

01:13:55.040 Yeah, fair enough.

01:13:55.900 Right?

01:13:56.220 Yeah.

01:13:56.360 So it's not about competence.

01:13:58.520 It's about having the time and energy and perception and caring.

01:14:04.300 How many experts in constitutional law, in the history of constitutional law, are there in Canada?

01:14:08.900 Oh, dozens, hundreds.

01:14:11.760 So what's up with them?

01:14:13.300 Well, they largely embrace the going story.

01:14:19.700 How did that happen?

01:14:20.900 Well, it has partly to do with legal education.

01:14:24.720 The law schools, for the most part, have become captured, like all other institutions, by a certain kind of ideology, critical theory, social justice, and so on, that we know very well.

01:14:37.280 So really, once that's got the universities, that's pretty much game over.

01:14:40.860 A lot of this trouble can be traced back to the universities.

01:14:45.160 That's where the social justice, critical theory stuff began.

01:14:49.220 When it came over from Germany, you know, where it started between the two world wars, and then you can trace that back to Marxism.

01:14:58.760 I mean, it's a whole long story, and I'm not a sociologist, but you know the story better than I do.

01:15:03.000 But, yeah, the universities are a main source of all the trouble.

01:15:08.980 And they've been graduating generations of students who have these ideas in their heads, and not just lawyers, but people of all kinds, right, who now occupy the professions and the governments and the public schools.

01:15:22.300 They certainly make up the managerial class.

01:15:24.360 Exactly so.

01:15:25.320 And the managerial class is our elite.

01:15:28.520 People think that our elite are the widely successful entrepreneurs, and there are a few of those.

01:15:34.140 But our actual elite is the managerial class, the ones who decide—

01:15:40.380 The ones still, like, getting honked out in Ottawa.

01:15:42.500 Exactly.

01:15:43.300 The ones who decide how society is going to run.

01:15:45.420 And those people are—and their interests, the interests of those individual people are in having this system carry on.

01:15:58.360 And that includes a lot of lawyers.

01:16:00.140 So, I was talking—I mentioned, you know, the problem I had with you, and the problem I had with you is that you don't make a very convincing right-wing crackpot.

01:16:09.720 Well, I mean that, like, you know, you don't fit the mold.

01:16:13.720 Because the logical thing to do, to assume, if someone is standing up against the consensus, generally speaking, is that they're wrong.

01:16:23.860 Now, sometimes they're right.

01:16:25.480 Sure.

01:16:25.780 Right?

01:16:26.080 And that's the problem.

01:16:27.660 Right.

01:16:27.840 And, you know, you've always struck me as, let's say, suspiciously reasonable, right?

01:16:38.080 In the way that the demagogue types just aren't.

01:16:42.580 And so—and you've already explained why your view on such things, which you did make evident.

01:16:53.460 And in a really minority fashion—and I'm trying to think of other lawyers that I knew, certainly university lawyers.

01:17:02.220 There was no university lawyers.

01:17:04.680 No members of faculties of law at universities had anything to do with me in Canada.

01:17:10.940 It was you, and that was it.

01:17:12.560 You know, and you played devil's advocate, which I thought was very funny once I figured out what was going on.

01:17:17.640 But, okay, so why do you think you can see this?

01:17:23.340 Why are you willing to see this?

01:17:25.740 And, yeah, yeah, what distinguishes you in your training, your outlook, from the other lawyers who apparently aren't or won't?

01:17:37.860 Oh, I don't know.

01:17:38.580 I can't—I can't tell you that.

01:17:40.580 I don't—I'm not inside their heads.

01:17:41.820 I don't—I don't really know.

01:17:44.580 I've always been suspicious of government.

01:17:46.300 I was—so I was suspicious of government authority ever since I can remember.

01:17:55.140 I think when I was in public school, I thought, how awful to have this person at the front of the class who's not that smart and yet has power over me.

01:18:03.220 So some underlying suspicion of authority as such.

01:18:07.020 Sure.

01:18:07.860 Right.

01:18:08.860 Right.

01:18:09.300 But you still went off through university to—

01:18:11.900 See, I wanted to go to law school, not first and foremost to be a lawyer.

01:18:16.060 I wanted to go to law school to find out what the rules were so that I could tell people who wanted to interfere with me what the rules are and had to back off.

01:18:25.000 Right.

01:18:25.620 I see.

01:18:26.120 And that's a different motivation.

01:18:27.480 But what I discovered was there are no such rules.

01:18:32.360 There are no such rules, as it turns out, that prevents government authorities from backing off because the whole system is designed to give them authority to do that.

01:18:42.060 So how did you manage with that attitude to have a successful career in academia in faculty of law?

01:18:50.580 I mean, you've had a very successful career.

01:18:53.380 You have a very—you're actually not canceled even.

01:18:57.140 That's true.

01:18:57.900 Yeah.

01:18:58.320 Yeah.

01:18:58.480 So how do you survive at Queen's or even thrive, and how did you manage to have this attitude and also manage a career in that environment?

01:19:11.340 You have to—I think you have to enjoy the exercise of trying to figure things out and then point it out, even if the people you're pointing it out to aren't listening.

01:19:21.460 And I know that doesn't sound like very much.

01:19:22.820 Well, yeah, but that usually just gets people canceled.

01:19:25.560 Well, not if you do it in a certain way.

01:19:27.360 Yeah, that's what I'm asking.

01:19:28.900 Yeah.

01:19:29.160 What's the way?

01:19:31.880 You can never make it personal.

01:19:34.640 It's not about that person over there who thinks X.

01:19:39.140 They can think whatever they want.

01:19:40.520 See, I'm an actual libertarian.

01:19:42.800 I think it's fine if people believe what they believe, and they want to do what they want to do.

01:19:46.660 I'm totally fine with that.

01:19:48.520 Okay, I want to torture you about that.

01:19:50.560 If their opinion is diametrically opposed to mine, I'm totally fine with that.

01:19:54.560 The only moments when I have trouble with it is when they start to step on my toes.

01:20:01.440 But as long as they're not doing that, I'm cool.

01:20:04.140 I'm cool, right?

01:20:05.000 And this is one of the things I think that distinguishes—and you know what?

01:20:10.300 Libertarian has become a bad label because libertarians did very, very badly during COVID.

01:20:13.840 Very badly.

01:20:14.340 Yeah.

01:20:14.500 They dropped the ball horribly, and it turns out they have a lot of strange ideas.

01:20:19.440 So I tend not to use that label anymore, but I understand what I mean.

01:20:23.380 But there's a huge divide between the libertarian-minded people, or the liberals—if I can use that word, liberals—the original classical liberals—and the conservatives.

01:20:34.400 And in a sense, you're standing astride, the chasm between these two groups, right?

01:20:43.280 Because the conservatives have a very—a lot of them have a very clear idea about what they think is right.

01:20:50.900 Fair enough.

01:20:51.860 People should have an idea about what they think is right.

01:20:53.620 And the classical liberals know what they think about the law.

01:20:59.040 And the mistake, for my money, that the conservatives make is that they fail to distinguish between two different questions.

01:21:06.000 The first question, which is entirely legitimate, which is, what should people do?

01:21:11.140 How should people behave?

01:21:13.380 Okay, let's hear how you think people should behave.

01:21:16.800 Totally fine with that.

01:21:17.620 The next question is not the same question, which is, how must people behave?

01:21:25.180 There's a conservative inclination to want to take their philosophy and make it into law, and to make people do what they think is right.

01:21:37.660 Right, and that's often what made the conservatives, what would you say, undesirable to the more classic liberal type.

01:21:47.620 That was the place that put those two camps at odds.

01:21:51.000 Yes, and it's one reason why I think the progressives today, the ones who are now in power, why they carry such an animus against conservatives.

01:22:00.000 Because there is some kind of a memory there.

01:22:02.840 Of force.

01:22:03.340 Of force.

01:22:03.940 When the conservatives were ascendant, here's the kinds of things that you did.

01:22:07.720 You know, you outlawed gay sex.

01:22:09.480 You centered us about pornography and obscenity and heresy and sedition, and you prohibited alcohol.

01:22:19.960 And the conservative record on freedom is not very good.

01:22:24.580 And so, from a libertarian or a classical liberal point of view, they're missing the boat.

01:22:29.540 And yet, the conservatives and the liberals, the original liberals, are the two forces trying to work together to push back on the woke.

01:22:38.940 Yeah, trying to figure out how to do that.

01:22:40.500 But their analysis of what's wrong is completely different.

01:22:44.240 Right?

01:22:44.520 So, if I can put it this way, and I'm sure you've heard conservatives say this too.

01:22:48.560 So, from a classical liberal point of view, the problem that the woke has created is too little freedom.

01:22:57.220 You know, they have us under their thumb.

01:22:59.180 They want us to do this and do that, use pronouns, not to say this, hate speech, yada, yada, yada.

01:23:03.960 Okay?

01:23:04.300 Not enough freedom.

01:23:06.780 I've heard lots of conservatives say, no, no, no.

01:23:10.060 The problem under the woke is too much freedom.

01:23:15.260 You have the freedom to change your gender.

01:23:17.180 You have the freedom to say you're this and not that.

01:23:20.000 You have the freedom to do this.

01:23:21.460 That freedom should not exist.

01:23:23.540 So, we agree about the fact that the woke is a problem, but we disagree about what the problem is.

01:23:31.820 And our solution is divergently both.

01:23:33.500 Well, that's going to make us weak too.

01:23:35.140 Absolutely.

01:23:35.940 Okay, so let me offer two contradictory responses to that conundrum.

01:23:43.520 Yeah.

01:23:43.720 So, for a long time, I, by temperament, have this libertarian twist, which is, you can go to hell in a handbasket your particular way if you so desire.

01:23:57.740 And that's, you know, that's within your bailiwick.

01:24:01.300 Right.

01:24:01.580 Have at her.

01:24:02.300 Yeah.

01:24:02.580 But I've rethought that to some degree in the aftermath of the gender-affirming debacle.

01:24:08.700 Aha, yes.

01:24:09.580 Right.

01:24:09.680 So, for a while, I was thinking, with regards to so-called gender-affirming care, I'm not exactly sure even what terminology to use.

01:24:22.680 It's, it's what?

01:24:28.980 It's surgical mutilation, essentially.

01:24:31.240 Yeah.

01:24:31.540 Hormonal manipulation and surgical mutilation.

01:24:34.340 Yeah.

01:24:34.460 Okay, should you have the right to do that to yourself as an adult?

01:24:38.020 Yes.

01:24:38.560 I thought, sure, why not?

01:24:41.720 Knock yourself out.

01:24:42.760 Yep.

01:24:43.360 But, you know, I'm starting to wonder about that.

01:24:47.540 There's two ways you can approach that.

01:24:49.280 One would be, well, you might be able to request it, but that doesn't mean the surgeon should be allowed to provide it.

01:24:54.660 Oh, sure.

01:24:55.200 Right.

01:24:55.380 And I think they've actually showed their absolute inability and unwillingness to police themselves in that regard.

01:25:01.200 That's just clear.

01:25:02.920 And then it's also the case that you don't know the limits to what people are willing to do to themselves to stand out.

01:25:10.740 Sure.

01:25:10.940 And the answer to that is there are no limits.

01:25:13.160 So, you saw the recent case in Canada, I presume, where we have a diaper fetishist, because that's a fun class of people, who's just pursuing his own thing, after all, who wants to have a neo-vagina created somewhere down below while maintaining his penis intact.

01:25:33.520 And he couldn't find anyone skillful enough to perform that particular act of butchery on him in Canada, found someone in Texas, and then sued the Canadian government for paying for it.

01:25:47.200 Right.

01:25:48.000 And that's the key.

01:25:49.560 And they're going to.

01:25:50.340 That's the key.

01:25:51.080 That's the key for me, though.

01:25:52.100 Right.

01:25:52.320 So, all right.

01:25:53.300 So, at some point, I'm sort of thinking, no, we're done with all this.

01:25:59.300 We're just not doing sex reassignment.

01:26:01.540 I don't care if you're 90.

01:26:03.180 Right.

01:26:03.900 There's no surgeons that have the right to do that to another person.

01:26:08.060 So, now, and is it a slippery slope argument?

01:26:12.600 Well, for me, it's sort of, for me, it's more like I've just had enough of this argument.

01:26:17.980 I saw where this went.

01:26:19.120 We started with this in 1960, something or other, with the first sex change operation, which I think was a dubious enterprise back then.

01:26:26.480 And the cascading consequence of this has been, like, the worst medical practice in maybe ever?

01:26:36.040 Mm-hmm.

01:26:36.940 Probably not.

01:26:38.140 You know?

01:26:38.780 Sure.

01:26:38.960 Because ever is a long time, and there's been some dark things done.

01:26:41.800 Yep.

01:26:41.920 In terms of mass assault on children, it's certainly in the top two.

01:26:46.760 But children are different.

01:26:47.760 Right, right.

01:26:48.360 Right.

01:26:48.580 But that's the thing, is that, you know, at what point does your, the perversity of your desire to go to hell in a handbasket, your own particular way, start to actually become in and of itself a social threat?

01:27:02.380 Okay, well, yeah, but let's put the kids aside, because the kids are a special case, right?

01:27:10.860 And you've got, then you've got the problem of, you know, who gets to decide, the parents or the state.

01:27:14.760 The easiest case to resolve and find agreement on are with adults.

01:27:20.080 So, let's ask this question.

01:27:24.100 Is there anything that a, of age adult, full adult, competent, should not be allowed to do to themselves if they're not imposing upon other people, not coercing them, not interfering with them, not taking their stuff?

01:27:40.680 And my answer is, nothing.

01:27:43.040 I can't think of anything.

01:27:44.040 Now, that does not mean that I think the state should be involved as in running the healthcare system.

01:27:51.980 I don't think they should be funding it.

01:27:53.720 I don't think they should be providing services.

01:27:55.560 I mean, we shouldn't have, from my mind, we shouldn't have a public healthcare system.

01:27:59.200 But, so if you take that away, it's like, in other words, you should be allowed to go, if you can find a doctor to do this strange thing that you want done to yourself,

01:28:08.000 and the doctor agrees of his own free will, and you agree of your own free will, and you're willing to pay the doctor, as far as I'm concerned,

01:28:16.280 the fact that I think it's weird and strange and wrong and harmful, I'm not the king.

01:28:23.440 So, I don't think my opinion about it has any relevance to it.

01:28:27.980 And that applies to gender surgery, it applies to suicide, it applies to prostitution, it applies to drugs, it applies to anything.

01:28:37.360 Because it's not my life.

01:28:40.120 It's their life, and I don't want to impose my-

01:28:42.260 Well, there's also the danger there of deciding who's going to make the judge.

01:28:46.600 Exactly.

01:28:46.860 It's not like it's a risk-free prohibition.

01:28:49.100 There's no prohibition that's risk-free.

01:28:51.200 Right.

01:28:51.360 It's just, see, the problem I'm having with that more and more, Bruce, is that there's kind of no end to the number of monsters

01:29:00.140 who are going to crawl out from underneath the woodwork, as we've seen, and that's going to get worse.

01:29:04.560 Yes, yes.

01:29:05.080 And so, you know, you say, if you can find a doctor who will do that, I mean, I could, I would respond,

01:29:14.880 if I was making the contrary case, is that there are things that if they were actually doctors, they wouldn't do.

01:29:21.360 Right.

01:29:21.780 Right.

01:29:22.200 And so, we already saw in Canada, I think, the removal of two fingers.

01:29:27.920 That was a month ago.

01:29:29.200 Could be.

01:29:29.540 Right, because the person had a form of body dysmorphia and claimed to be at suicide risk unless the fingers were removed.

01:29:38.460 Well, let's take an easier one, then.

01:29:40.460 How about assisted suicide?

01:29:42.780 Now, there are three models of assisted suicide.

01:29:46.140 The conservative one is, no, can't do that.

01:29:50.900 It's not, not moral.

01:29:52.580 Can't.

01:29:53.300 Outlawed.

01:29:54.300 No assisted suicide.

01:29:56.680 The progressive version is the one we have in Canada, which is, it's publicly funded.

01:30:03.160 The government provides it, directs it, supports it, promotes it, pays for it.

01:30:07.880 And it comes with a free rainbow unicorn.

01:30:11.620 Kill yourself, we'll help you.

01:30:12.980 And they encourage it by not giving you timely service on other things that you really need,

01:30:19.000 so that your life becomes miserable, and so the best way out is to kill yourself.

01:30:23.320 That's untenable.

01:30:24.960 Okay?

01:30:25.220 I am not advocating that at all.

01:30:27.280 The third version is, the government has nothing to do with it.

01:30:30.700 If you want to kill yourself with the help of a doctor, that is your business.

01:30:37.640 And I might not approve, but it's got nothing to do with me.

01:30:42.380 Well, that's kind of where we were before the assisted suicide.

01:30:45.240 Sure.

01:30:46.020 Practically, that's kind of where it had landed.

01:30:47.380 Right, but the conservatives will not put up with that.

01:30:48.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:30:49.500 Right?

01:30:49.800 Yeah, yeah.

01:30:50.040 So if I'm in my old age, and I have some kind of difficulty, and I'm not having any fun anymore,

01:30:55.520 I want to be able to kill myself, and I do not want to be under the thumb of conservatives

01:31:01.120 any more than I want to be under the thumb of the woke.

01:31:04.880 And this is the problem that we have between these two philosophies.

01:31:10.820 The conservatives portray themselves sometimes as virtue people.

01:31:17.080 I've called them that, virtue people, in the sense that they put virtue before freedom.

01:31:21.280 And there's something to be said for that.

01:31:23.220 So here's the way the argument goes.

01:31:24.660 In order to be truly free in your own heart or your own mind, you have to be virtuous

01:31:31.240 in your own heart.

01:31:32.120 You have to understand things.

01:31:33.040 You have to have discipline.

01:31:33.920 You have to understand the good or some notion of it.

01:31:36.540 You have to have faith in something in order to-

01:31:39.160 It's even the purpose of freedom.

01:31:40.420 Exactly.

01:31:40.920 You have to have meaning so that you don't give in to your base desires and your animal

01:31:44.120 instincts.

01:31:44.780 Okay.

01:31:45.960 But that's not about the law.

01:31:49.020 And the conservatives, a lot of them anyway, say, no.

01:31:53.700 The law should make you behave virtuously.

01:31:57.580 Yeah.

01:31:58.120 Enforced virtue.

01:31:59.200 Enforced virtue.

01:32:00.080 And my answer to that is, enforced virtue is not virtuous.

01:32:03.760 It's obedience.

01:32:05.360 In order to be virtuous, you have to decide.

01:32:07.360 You have to have free will to decide between dark and light.

01:32:10.980 And if you don't have the choice, then the fact that you are made to behave in this way-

01:32:16.280 Right.

01:32:16.760 So part of the reading of your more libertarian argument there would be, I guess part of the

01:32:24.540 reason that I've often always believed that people should be allowed to go to hell in a

01:32:28.640 handbasket in their own particular manner is because you're going to learn.

01:32:34.620 You are going to learn.

01:32:35.600 That's right.

01:32:36.280 And then you'll know.

01:32:37.820 Absolutely.

01:32:38.340 And that's the libertarian version of responsibility.

01:32:40.340 Yes.

01:32:40.720 Right.

01:32:40.940 Right.

01:32:41.220 Right.

01:32:41.360 The state's not going to come in and rescue you.

01:32:43.500 This is really your choice.

01:32:44.360 Well, and then you actually have the knowledge.

01:32:46.240 Absolutely.

01:32:46.760 There is perhaps, and by the way, I come, I think, as closely from the, as much from

01:32:51.540 the classical liberal position as possible on this.

01:32:54.060 But I think there is a test case that's currently happening on the streets of every major city

01:32:58.800 and it certainly feels like the United States.

01:33:01.000 Right.

01:33:01.580 Where I don't know if this is necessarily accurate exactly, but it sort of feels like the

01:33:07.780 libertarian argument has been taken to its logical conclusion.

01:33:11.600 Ignoring elements of reality.

01:33:13.940 So that's why you have mentally ill people on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco

01:33:18.620 and New York and elsewhere because, well, they've got to be free.

01:33:21.540 Right.

01:33:21.760 We can't put them in a mental health hospital because that, and those hospitals used to be

01:33:25.900 terrible objectively.

01:33:26.920 Right.

01:33:27.060 So getting people out of the tyranny of that institution, I guess, was a good thing.

01:33:33.420 But now they're on the street taking drugs.

01:33:36.940 And the question is, is that freedom?

01:33:41.160 Because I don't know that you are free when you're hooked.

01:33:43.480 Well, define freedom for us, though.

01:33:45.340 Well, it feels to me like part of the conversation around freedom has to involve an element of agency.

01:33:53.620 And then the question is, do you have agency if you're so, let's say, traumatized or so addicted

01:34:00.000 or whatever that is that's causing you to effectively be unable to live a human life?

01:34:05.560 Right.

01:34:05.860 If you're living in Skid Row, I don't think that's what freedom looks like.

01:34:10.140 I'm not sure that's true.

01:34:12.940 What are they learning exactly?

01:34:15.040 See, that's what sparked my thought.

01:34:17.120 What are they learning?

01:34:19.120 Well, I would suppose that they are learning that the choices that they made didn't work very well.

01:34:26.460 Well, and some people do hit bottom and bounce up.

01:34:29.280 Yes, they do.

01:34:29.820 You know, I mean, even though we don't know how to help people recover from alcoholism, really, many people do.

01:34:40.020 And they often do after rubbing their face along a very rough sidewalk for a very long period of time.

01:34:48.880 It's certainly not a pleasant form of freedom.

01:34:53.540 I mean, I'm also not suggesting that, you know, there's a simple solution to the problem of having deinstitutionalized.

01:35:00.700 Well, see, this is my point is I think that...

01:35:04.640 There may just not, there may not be any...

01:35:06.960 The thing is, the question is whether there's a better solution.

01:35:10.260 If you have an IQ of 50, do you have freedom?

01:35:13.660 Yes.

01:35:15.300 Sure you do.

01:35:15.980 If you are not being opposed upon by other people or the state, then by definition, you have freedom.

01:35:22.280 The fact that you are not able to exercise it in the same way as the next guy doesn't mean you're not free.

01:35:27.960 It means you're free to make mistakes.

01:35:29.940 Listen, free freedom has good and bad.

01:35:33.500 Yes.

01:35:34.220 It enables you to sometimes be successful and sometimes to fail.

01:35:39.120 And that's part of the package.

01:35:41.080 You can't make it just one way and not the other way because that's not what it is.

01:35:44.240 Well, there's another dimension to the conversation about homelessness and drug addiction and so on, which is, I think it's very difficult to argue that that is consequence-free for the rest of society.

01:35:55.100 So, we recognize that there are limits to our freedom when we start to impact on others.

01:36:00.580 And that's a very good example, I think, where that trade-off seems to me to be being got wrong.

01:36:05.560 But there is a progressive idea that has become mainstream and mainstream, especially amongst conservatives.

01:36:13.120 And that is this, that the state is the savior.

01:36:19.220 That is, if you want to solve a problem, it has to be the state to come in to fix it.

01:36:24.820 I mean, this is an idea, a professor at Hillsdale College put it this way when he was talking about Woodrow Wilson, who was the first progressive American president.

01:36:34.280 Woodrow Wilson, he says, changed the idea from the government as servant to government as savior.

01:36:46.000 As in, if we're going to fix our problems, it's got to be the government who does it.

01:36:50.560 Well, yeah, with the corresponding assumption that if there's a problem, that's evidence of government inadequacy.

01:36:58.280 Right, right, right, exactly so.

01:37:00.260 And part of the reason we think that so thoroughly now is that all those other institutions that used to exist are gone.

01:37:06.340 Because the government came in and pushed them all out, right?

01:37:08.600 So when you have people on the streets, the only place to turn to is the state.

01:37:13.200 And that doesn't mean it's a good call.

01:37:16.340 I think it's a terrible idea.

01:37:17.780 Because everything the government touches goes to rot.

01:37:20.220 Even stuff that's already rotting.

01:37:21.720 I mean, part of the reason those people are there to start with is because we have an overwhelming, expansive administrative state.

01:37:28.320 And so to suggest that that state, more of that is going to fix it, no, it's not going to happen.

01:37:34.140 No, I certainly wasn't suggesting that.

01:37:35.800 But I do think it's an interesting case for the libertarian argument where it starts to break down.

01:37:40.800 I used to be pro-decriminalizing all drugs.

01:37:43.900 I think increasingly that conversation about how certain things impact your agency is important.

01:37:51.500 Try that with alcohol, though.

01:37:52.700 Because alcohol, so part of the rationale claimed for prohibition was that alcohol can lead to very bad societal effects.

01:38:03.260 Which it can.

01:38:03.820 Which it can, for sure.

01:38:04.880 For some people, it can be devastating.

01:38:06.640 And yet for a lot of people, not so.

01:38:09.520 So are we going to ban alcohol so as to avoid the catastrophic effects on some people?

01:38:15.600 No.

01:38:16.520 No.

01:38:17.320 No.

01:38:18.420 No.

01:38:19.000 Same with prostitution.

01:38:20.480 Right now, sometimes people who are in favor, again, tend to be conservatives, say, you know, we should ban prostitution.

01:38:27.700 Make it illegal.

01:38:28.580 Because sometimes prostitution happens without consent.

01:38:32.380 And people get into dangerous situations.

01:38:34.300 And there's sexual assault.

01:38:35.600 And that's true.

01:38:37.280 But that is also true with just plain old sex.

01:38:40.400 Where there's no transaction going on financially.

01:38:42.520 It's just an encounter.

01:38:44.380 You get sexual assault in that situation, too.

01:38:46.440 Are we going to extrapolate and say, well, because that happens just in ordinary sex, we're going to outlaw that, too.

01:38:52.940 So as to avoid the downside scenarios.

01:38:56.240 No.

01:38:56.960 No.

01:38:57.420 If you have two people who have agency and consent to a transaction, who is going to come in and say, sorry, you can't do that?

01:39:08.260 Not me.

01:39:09.880 So one of the things that I've been trying to do in my lecture tour that's germane to the point that you raised about, you know, if there's a problem, it's indicative of the insufficiency of the state.

01:39:25.200 Yeah.

01:39:25.560 Right?

01:39:25.860 Sort of as an axiomatic presumption.

01:39:29.380 Right.

01:39:29.480 Well, if that's not the case, then what's the proper replacement presumption?

01:39:35.240 Yeah.

01:39:35.400 If there's a problem, who should be doing something about it?

01:39:41.180 I'd like you to tell me what you think about this.

01:39:43.440 Okay.

01:39:44.220 Because this isn't exactly a libertarian freedom from argument.

01:39:49.200 It's more of a responsibility argument.

01:39:52.620 I'm never sure where the libertarians sit on that side.

01:39:55.320 Okay.

01:39:55.580 If you can see a problem, that's your problem.

01:40:04.280 And you might say, well, how do you know that?

01:40:06.460 And the answer is something like, well, it bothers you.

01:40:10.140 So there's a new cardinal, Cardinal Newman, who is famous for his defense of the idea of God.

01:40:19.520 And he, there's a long line of theological speculation that one of the ways that the spirit of the cosmos makes itself manifest is in the voice of conscience.

01:40:35.780 It's a very old idea.

01:40:37.080 It goes back to the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, who was the prophet who defeated the nature gods, which is very interesting.

01:40:45.500 He replaced the God of nature, which is back at full force now with the notion that the spirit, the ancestral God of the Israelites was the still small voice within, right?

01:40:59.540 It was conscience.

01:41:01.200 And if you see a problem in the world and it bothers you, that's a direct indication that you have something to do.

01:41:09.260 It's part of, I would say it's part of the landscape of meaning that reveals itself to you.

01:41:13.600 It's part of your responsibility.

01:41:15.620 You might say, well, what can I do about it?

01:41:18.120 Which is a perfectly reasonable objection.

01:41:19.780 But the right response to that is, that's your problem.

01:41:24.240 And you might say, well, why should it be my problem?

01:41:27.140 And one answer to that is, well, you need something to do.

01:41:30.220 So, well, seriously, like, because there's...

01:41:32.180 But I think this has a very simple answer.

01:41:35.000 My simple answer would be this.

01:41:37.340 You know, you asked me, is that my responsibility?

01:41:39.780 And my answer would be, morally, maybe so.

01:41:44.200 Legally, no.

01:41:45.280 No, no, I wouldn't.

01:41:46.140 And I'm not saying that at all.

01:41:47.340 And that's all I'm saying.

01:41:48.060 All I'm saying is legally.

01:41:50.140 I am not making a moral argument here at all about the drugs or anything else.

01:41:52.660 I don't think it could legally be made your responsibility.

01:41:55.640 It could be made your obligation.

01:41:57.380 Well, you could be...

01:41:59.200 Well, if you're talking a legal obligation, that's your responsibility.

01:42:01.480 Yeah, fine, fine, fine.

01:42:03.260 But this is the conservative argument about the prostitution.

01:42:05.560 Yeah.

01:42:06.080 Right?

01:42:06.600 It's that if you see a problem, that not only should you do something about it,

01:42:11.020 you should make a law that does something about it.

01:42:13.760 Yeah.

01:42:14.040 If you see prostitution going on, we can't have that.

01:42:16.680 This is the finger wagon stuff.

01:42:18.180 Yeah.

01:42:18.500 Right?

01:42:18.940 Yeah, and it's not effective.

01:42:19.800 It's not effective.

01:42:21.100 No.

01:42:21.320 But it's also...

01:42:22.020 It's not even the most...

01:42:23.380 It does push people away from conservatism, especially if they're young.

01:42:27.140 And it's actually not the most...

01:42:29.660 But it's also arrogant.

01:42:31.200 It's arrogant in this sense.

01:42:32.760 It assumes...

01:42:33.780 It's a top-down thing.

01:42:34.700 It's like, well, there's a few of us...

01:42:36.660 It's the religious hypocrite.

01:42:37.640 There's a few of us up here who understand what's best for everybody.

01:42:40.800 So we're going to make the rules from now on.

01:42:42.440 Which sounds a lot like the progressives.

01:42:44.000 Exactly my point.

01:42:45.360 Exactly my point.

01:42:46.420 Yeah.

01:42:46.520 The progressives and the conservatives of this ilk, anyway, have a common idea.

01:42:51.680 I mean, now...

01:42:52.420 Yeah, right.

01:42:52.780 The particular virtues they believe in are completely different.

01:42:55.640 Yeah.

01:42:56.160 But the idea is the same.

01:42:59.320 Yeah, yeah.

01:42:59.960 If you give me enough power, I'll fix it.

01:43:01.860 Exactly.

01:43:02.340 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:03.200 It's just that the right people have to have the power.

01:43:05.640 Right?

01:43:05.780 That's right.

01:43:06.180 Right?

01:43:06.460 Whereas your argument, I think, is one I'm very sympathetic to, is we should have laws

01:43:10.440 that protect our basic rights and let's get on with it.

01:43:14.060 Yeah.

01:43:14.200 Well, and then what I've been attempting to suggest to people is that it's in taking up

01:43:22.020 that mantle of problem personally that you find the meaning of your life.

01:43:28.820 Genuinely, that's actually where it lurks.

01:43:30.900 But that's also what protects you against tyranny because if everyone did in their local environments

01:43:39.660 what they're called upon to do, there wouldn't be a lot of unsolved problems lying around

01:43:46.040 for the tyrants to point to, freak out about, and mop up.

01:43:50.380 Right.

01:43:50.940 Right?

01:43:51.340 So there's a real, in the Old Testament story, in the Exodus story, there's a dynamism between

01:43:59.580 slave and tyrant, right?

01:44:01.160 Yeah.

01:44:01.480 One needs the other.

01:44:02.660 Right.

01:44:02.800 One produces the other.

01:44:04.080 The slaves call for the tyrant to emerge.

01:44:06.820 And the tyrant becomes contemptuous of the slaves and ever more tyrannical.

01:44:10.860 It's a dance.

01:44:11.740 And the way that's technically solved in the Exodus story is it's solved by Moses' brother

01:44:19.320 and father-in-law who sees the Israelites trying to make Moses into a new pharaoh because

01:44:25.300 they're all slaves and whining about and being victims and, you know, pining for the tyranny.

01:44:30.960 And he basically tells them that, he tells Moses to make a hierarchy of distributed responsibility.

01:44:37.300 Uh-huh.

01:44:38.040 Right?

01:44:38.300 To break his people up into tens and hundreds and thousands and so forth.

01:44:43.880 Uh-huh.

01:44:44.160 All the way up to the top.

01:44:45.700 To allocate responsible decision-making down as far down that hierarchy as possible.

01:44:50.820 Right?

01:44:51.940 And to only adjudicate, speaking to Moses, those disputes that can't be adjudicated lower.

01:44:59.120 Well, why?

01:45:00.100 Well, Jethro says there's two reasons for that.

01:45:03.000 The first is, well, you'll stress yourself out because no one can take the responsibility

01:45:08.260 for governing an entire people.

01:45:09.860 So, it's just not bearable and you'll turn into a tyrant and that's not good either.

01:45:16.060 But worse, and this is the more subtle point, is that if you alleviate the people of that

01:45:23.860 responsibility, they'll just stay slaves.

01:45:27.160 Yes.

01:45:27.560 Yeah.

01:45:27.940 Yes.

01:45:28.580 Absolutely.

01:45:29.020 Well, I think that's exactly right.

01:45:30.640 Right.

01:45:30.660 Is that, and so, and that's a more responsible libertarian argument.

01:45:35.440 And it's like, well, you need to be able to learn from your mistakes, which is why you

01:45:38.620 should be able to make them.

01:45:39.960 Right.

01:45:40.120 Right.

01:45:40.400 You still have that problem of, well, how big a mistake till you start taking other people

01:45:44.640 out?

01:45:45.080 You know, and that's something I think that's subject to continual negotiation.

01:45:48.640 But I don't think there is a substitute for a distributed hierarchy of responsibility.

01:45:55.380 And so, what that seems to imply is, well, as marriage decays, so people abdicate responsibility

01:46:01.940 for that, as the nuclear family decays, because people abdicate responsibility for that, and

01:46:07.060 local community organizations, and the church, all of that abdicated responsibility is vacuumed

01:46:15.240 up by the state.

01:46:15.980 Yes.

01:46:16.420 Right.

01:46:16.800 Yes.

01:46:17.080 Yeah.

01:46:17.560 Exactly.

01:46:18.280 Right.

01:46:18.520 Yeah.

01:46:18.660 And in fact, I would say that the state is largely responsible for the disintegration

01:46:26.840 of those things in the first place.

01:46:28.060 Yeah.

01:46:28.380 Right?

01:46:28.560 So, you cause the problem, and then you vacuum up what's left of it afterwards.

01:46:32.000 Yeah.

01:46:32.660 Yeah.

01:46:33.060 Well, I wrote a paper with Jonathan Pazio for the Ark on the symbolism of the horror of

01:46:40.760 Babylon and the scarlet beast in Revelation.

01:46:44.800 Uh-huh.

01:46:45.340 And so, it's an image of the end times, right?

01:46:48.100 And the end times has two archetypal elements.

01:46:51.340 So, the scarlet beast is a blood-colored beast.

01:46:55.040 It's the blood-colored beast of the state, basically, multiple heads.

01:46:58.720 So, it's a degenerate state, because a unified state has one head.

01:47:02.080 Yes.

01:47:02.260 It's like seven heads, all male, pointing in different directions, right?

01:47:06.060 So, it's a degenerate patriarchy, all right?

01:47:09.740 And on the back of the scarlet beast, which is the degenerate masculine spirit, is the

01:47:18.080 whore of Babylon, which is the degenerate feminine spirit, because, you know, no one sex

01:47:24.340 doesn't go wrong without the other sex going wrong.

01:47:26.780 What happens?

01:47:27.840 Well, in the degenerate state, female sexuality is commodified.

01:47:35.180 Hmm.

01:47:36.860 Right.

01:47:37.320 Right, right, right.

01:47:38.120 And so, you get that dance, you know, of hedonism.

01:47:40.940 Right, right, right, right, right, sure.

01:47:41.960 Yeah, but it's worse, you see, because the story has a particular ending.

01:47:45.480 Uh-huh.

01:47:46.200 The beast kills the prostitute.

01:47:48.860 So, what the implication there is that the state will, as it disintegrates, it offers more

01:47:54.780 and more hedonistic gratification as enticement, but it ends up destroying all gratification

01:48:00.620 whatsoever, because it can't sustain the promises that it offers.

01:48:05.580 Bread and circuses.

01:48:06.080 Which brings us all the way back to the very beginning.

01:48:08.340 Yeah, until there's no bread.

01:48:08.580 Exactly.

01:48:09.020 That's right, exactly, yeah.

01:48:10.080 And it brings us all the way back to the beginning, because as all of these institutions

01:48:13.420 that traditionally used to regulate relationships between human beings crumble, we need more

01:48:18.840 and more laws.

01:48:19.700 Yeah, right, that's exactly.

01:48:21.000 Whereas in the past, if Barry said something offensive, well, Barry's a bit of a dick.

01:48:24.420 Right, right.

01:48:25.140 You know, what's for dinner?

01:48:26.980 Now it's, well, Barry's a bit of a dick.

01:48:28.560 We've got to legislate, because we can't have-

01:48:30.080 You've got to phone the hate crime unit.

01:48:31.360 That's right.

01:48:31.920 Exactly.

01:48:32.140 Because we are not self-regulating all of those relationships, and now we need daddy

01:48:36.440 to come in.

01:48:36.900 We need departments of social work to come and be the worst possible foster parents imaginable.

01:48:42.380 That's right.

01:48:43.020 All right, gentlemen, we should probably draw this to a halt.

01:48:46.320 For those of you watching and listening, most of you know that I generally continue these

01:48:50.460 interviews for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus side of things.

01:48:53.720 And I think what we might turn to in this particular occasion is solutions, potential solutions,

01:49:00.940 which we didn't have an opportunity to discuss, concentrating more on laying out the apocalyptic

01:49:07.780 landscape, so to speak, particularly in Canada, but in a manner that's, like, illustrative

01:49:13.300 of what's happening, I would say, generally in the West.

01:49:16.500 So, thank you, Dr. Party, very much for participating in that, Constantine.

01:49:21.620 All those of you who are watching and listening, your time and attention is much appreciated

01:49:26.180 to the Daily Wire Plus people for making this possible.

01:49:29.460 That's also much appreciated to film crew here in Dallas.

01:49:33.920 Thank you for your help, guys.

01:49:35.160 That went very well.

01:49:36.320 And drop over to the Daily Wire Plus side if you want to see this continue.

01:49:42.680 Bye-bye.

01:49:43.300 Bye-bye.

01:49:52.940 Bye-bye.

01:49:55.120 Bye-bye.

01:50:03.640 Bye.

01:50:06.020 Bye.

01:50:06.160 Bye-bye.

01:50:06.980 Bye.

01:50:07.380 Bye-bye.

01:50:07.400 Bye-bye.

01:50:07.600 Bye.

01:50:08.100 Bye-bye.

01:50:08.480 Bye-bye.

01:50:08.500 Bye-bye.

01:50:09.120 Bye-bye.

01:50:09.260 Bye-bye.

01:50:09.400 Bye-bye.

01:50:13.260 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 22, 2024

442. BILL C-63 - Everything You Need to Know ｜ Bruce Pardy & Konstantin Kisin

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