Join us as we remember the life and legacy of Peter Cheney and his impact on Canadian public policy, and the world at large. Join us in a moment of silence in honour of the late Peter Cheney, who passed away at the University of Toronto s Roy Thompson Hall during the first Monk Debate Series event on campus on April 30th, 2019, and be sure to remember him in the next episode of the debate series, which will be held on May 1st, 2020, at the U of T s campus in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, where he will be remembered as "Mr. Peter Cheney." Thank you to everyone who attended the debate, and remember Mr. Cheney in memory of him as a great human being and a great Canadian, who made a lasting impact in the world and in public policy and politics, and who left an indelible mark on all of our lives. Thank you also to our virtual audience of over 3,000 people who filled Roy Thompson hall for yet another Monk Debate, and thank you for your support for more and better debate on the big issues of the day! Peace, Blessings, Cheers, EJ, and Cheers! - The Monk Debates - EJ & Melanie Cheney and EJ's Family to Peter Cheney for all of his contributions to Canadian politics, economics, and public policy & the world peace, prosperity, and human rights, and freedom, and dignity, and so much more. - Peter Cheney's legacy, and his passion for all things Canadian, peace, love, and respect, and understanding, and hope, and support for the world, and peace, and love, in the planet, and all things good, everywhere, everywhere. . EJ and Melanie's impact on the world. - Peter's impact, peace and respect for all that we can be heard, everywhere and everywhere, no matter where we go, everywhere we go and everywhere we do it. - Thank you for being heard, Peter Cheney. , EJ. -- Thank you EJ Cheers -- EJ! -- Cheers. and good night, Ej -- OJ -- - OJ, OJ & Melinda , OJ& M.A. & M. CHEERS. (A.S. (Thank you, Melanie Cheney. )
00:03:04.000It's my privilege to have the opportunity to moderate tonight's debate and to act as your organizer.
00:03:10.380I want to start by welcoming the North American-wide television audience tuning in right now across Canada on CPAC, Canada's public affairs channel,
00:03:21.040C-SPAN across the continental United States, and on CBC Radio Ideas.
00:03:26.820A warm hello also to our online audience.
00:03:29.840Watching this debate, over 6,000 streams active at this moment on Facebook Live, Bloomberg.com, and MonkDebates.com.
00:03:39.440It's great to have you as virtual participants in tonight's proceedings.
00:03:43.800And hello to you, the over 3,000 people who filled Roy Thompson Hall for yet another Monk debate.
00:03:51.260Thank you for your support for more and better debate on the big issues of the day.
00:03:58.100This debate marks the start of our 10th season, and we begin this season missing someone who was vital to this debate series in every aspect.
00:04:07.760It was his passion for ideas, his love for debate, that inspired our creation in 2008.
00:04:15.520And it was his energy, his generosity, and his drive that was so important in allowing us to really win international acclaim as one of the world's great debating series.
00:04:27.900His philanthropy, its legacy, wow, it's incredible.
00:04:31.260Last fall, we all remember that $100 million donation to Cardiac Health here in Toronto, transforming the lives of tens of thousands of millions of Canadians to come.
00:04:44.060We are all big fans and supporters of a terrific school for global affairs on the U of T campus, represented here tonight by many students who are in its master's program.
00:05:01.200And also, at a generous endowment last spring to this series that will allow us to organize many evenings like this for many more years to come.
00:05:10.840Now, knowing our benefactor as we do, the last thing he'd want is for us to mark his absence with a moment of silence.
00:06:02.880I know he would have enjoyed that, and I want to just thank Melanie Anthony Cheney for being here tonight to be part of Peter's continuing positive impact on public debate in Canada.
00:06:22.560Thank you, guys, for being here tonight.
00:06:26.060Now, knowing Peter as I did, the first thing on his mind at this point in the debate would be right here, stop talking, get this debate underway, get our debaters out here.
00:06:40.060So we're going to do that right now because we have a terrific debate lined up for you this evening.
00:06:46.000So let's introduce first our pro team arguing for tonight's motion, be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress.
00:06:58.960Please welcome to the stage, he's an award-winning writer, scholar, broadcaster on NPR and sports networks across America, Michael Eric Dyson.
00:07:25.060Michael's debating partner is also an award-winning author.
00:07:30.060She's a columnist at the New York Times and someone who is going to bring a very distinct and powerful perspective tonight, Michelle Goldberg.
00:08:17.860Stephen's teammate is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube sensation, and the author of the big new international bestseller,
00:09:17.740Reflect, input, react to this debate as it unfolds over the next hour and a half.
00:09:23.420My favorite part, aspect of this show that was Peter's brilliance and creation, we have our countdown clock.
00:09:30.800What this does is it keeps our debaters on their toes and our debate on time.
00:09:35.500So when you see these clocks on the screen go down to zero, I wanted you to join me in a warm round of applause and we'll have a debate that ends when it's supposed to end.
00:09:53.220On the way in, we had this audience of roughly 3,000 people here in downtown Toronto vote on, be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress.
00:10:02.440Let's see the agree-disagree on that number.
00:10:12.340Now, we asked you, how many of you were open to changing your vote over the course of debate?
00:10:18.340Are you fixed, agree-disagree, or could you potentially be convinced by one or other of these two teams to move your vote over the next hour and a half?
00:10:51.740As Rudyard knows, I initially balked a little bit at the resolution that we're debating because there are a lot of things that fall under the rubric of political correctness that I don't call progress.
00:11:03.680I don't like no platforming or Twitter or trigger warnings.
00:11:09.140Like a lot of middle-aged liberals, there are many aspects of student social justice culture that I find off-putting.
00:11:16.960Although I'm not sure that that particular generation gap is anything new on the record about the toxicity of social media call-out culture.
00:11:25.920And I think it's good to debate people whose ideas I don't like, which is why I'm here.
00:11:32.220So if there are social justice warriors in the audience, I feel like I should apologize to you because I'm probably not...
00:11:37.600You're probably going to feel like I'm not adequately defending your ideas.
00:11:42.520But the reason I'm on this side of the stage is that political correctness isn't just a term for left-wing excesses on college campuses or people being terrible on Twitter.
00:11:53.540Especially as deployed by Mr. Peterson, I think it can be a way to delegitimize any attempt for women and racial and sexual minorities to overcome discrimination or even to argue that such discrimination is real.
00:12:08.420In the New York Times today, Mr. Peterson says, quote,
00:12:13.300The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.
00:12:20.440That sounds particularly insane to me because I'm an American and our president is Donald Trump.
00:12:26.720But it's an assumption that I think underlies a worldview in which any challenges to the current hierarchy are written off as political correctness.
00:12:37.840I also think we should be clear that this isn't really a debate about free speech.
00:12:42.100Mr. Peterson once referred to what he called, quote, the evil trinity of equity, diversity, and inclusivity, and said those three words, if you hear people mouth those three words, equity, diversity, and inclusivity, you know who you're dealing with and you should step away from that because it is not acceptable.
00:12:59.060He argues that the movie Frozen is politically correct propaganda and at one point he floated the idea of creating a database of university course content so students could avoid postmodern critical theory.
00:13:11.640So in the criticism of political correctness, I sometimes hear an urge or an attempt to purge our thought of certain analytical categories that mirrors, I think, the worst caricatures of the social justice left that want to get rid of anything that smacks of colonialism or patriarchy or white supremacy.
00:13:32.100I also don't really think we're debating the value of the Enlightenment, at least not in the way that somebody like Mr. Fry, who I think is a champion of Enlightenment values, frames it.
00:13:42.860The efforts to expand rights and privileges once granted just to landowning white heterosexual men is the Enlightenment, or is very much in keeping with the Enlightenment.
00:13:53.440To quote a dead white man, John Stuart Mill, the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
00:14:04.000I think that some of our opponents, by contrast, frame challenges to the despotism of custom as politically correct attacks on a transcendent natural order.
00:14:15.080To quote Mr. Peterson again, each gender, each sex, has its own unfairness to deal with.
00:14:22.100But to think of it as a consequence of the social structure, it's like, come on, really, what about nature itself?
00:14:29.240But there's an exception to this because he does believe in social interventions to remedy some kinds of unfairness,
00:14:36.320which is why in the New York Times he calls for, quote, enforced monogamy,
00:14:40.060to remedy the woes of men who don't get their equal distribution of sex.
00:14:45.080When it comes to the political correctness debate, we've been exactly here before.
00:14:50.560Alan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, compared the tyranny of feminism in academia to the Khmer Rouge,
00:14:58.220and he was writing at a time when women accounted for 10% of all college-tenured faculty.
00:15:04.660It's worth looking back at what was considered annoyingly, outrageously, politically correct in the 1980s,
00:15:11.400the last time we had this debate, you know, having to call, or not being able to call indigenous people, quote, Indians,
00:15:18.160or having to use hyphenated terms, at least in the United States, of terms like African Americans.
00:15:23.580You know, adding women or people of color to the Western Civ curriculum,
00:15:26.880not making gay jokes or using retard as an epithet.
00:17:24.380We essentially need something approximating a low-resolution grand narrative to unite us.
00:17:30.600And we need a narrative to unite us, because otherwise we don't have peace.
00:17:34.940What's playing out in the universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two fundamental low-resolution narratives,
00:17:43.860neither of which can be completely accurate, because they can't encompass all the details.
00:17:47.860Obviously, human beings have an individual element and a collective element, a group element, let's say.
00:17:52.780The question is, what story should be paramount, and this is how it looks to me.
00:17:57.700In the West, we have reasonably functional, reasonably free, remarkably productive, stable hierarchies that are open to consideration
00:18:09.700consideration of the dispossessed that hierarchies generally create.
00:18:15.540Our societies are freer and functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the world and than any societies ever have.
00:18:25.040And as far as I'm concerned, and I think there's good reason to assume this,
00:18:28.040it's because the fundamental low-resolution grand narrative that we've oriented ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual.
00:18:37.040And it's predicated on the idea that all things considered, the best way for me to interact with someone else is individual to individual.
00:18:44.880And to react to that person as if they're both part of the process, because that's the right way of thinking about it,
00:18:51.880the psychological process by which things we don't understand can yet be explored,
00:18:56.880and by things that aren't properly organized in our society can be yet set right.
00:19:00.880The reason we're valuable as individuals, both with regards to our rights and responsibilities,
00:19:05.880is because that's our essential purpose, and that's our nobility, and that's our function.
00:19:10.880What's happening as far as I'm concerned, in the universities in particular,
00:19:14.880and spreading very rapidly out into the broader world, including the corporate world,
00:19:18.880much to its, much to what should be its chagrin, is a collectivist narrative.
00:19:24.880And of course, there's some utility in a collectivist narrative, because we're all part of groups in different ways.
00:19:30.880But the collectivist narrative that I regard as politically correct is a pastiche of, a strange pastiche of postmodernism and neo-Marxism,
00:19:39.880and its fundamental claim is that, no, you're not essentially an individual, you're essentially a member of a group.
00:19:47.880And that group might be your ethnicity, and it might be your sex, and it might be your race,
00:19:51.880and it might be any of the endless numbers of other potential groups that you belong to, because you belong to many of them.
00:19:57.880And that you should be essentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension, in that group.
00:20:03.880That's proposition number one. Proposition number two is that the proper way to view the world is as a battleground between groups of different power.
00:20:12.880So you define the groups first, and then you assume that you view the individual from the group context,
00:20:18.880you view the battle between groups from the group context, and you view history itself as a consequence of nothing but the power maneuvers between different groups.
00:20:27.880That eliminates any consideration of the individual at a very fundamental level.
00:20:32.880And also, any idea, for example, of free speech, because if you're collectivist at heart, in this manner, there is no such thing as free speech.
00:20:41.880It isn't that it's debated by those on the radical left, and let's say the rest of us, so to speak.
00:20:47.880It's that in that formulation, there's no such thing as free speech, because for an individualist, free speech is how you make sense of the world and reorganize society in a proper manner.
00:20:55.880But for the radical left type collectivist that's associated with this viewpoint of political correctness, when you speak, all you're doing is playing a power game on behalf of your group.
00:21:05.880And there's nothing else that you can do, because that's all there is.
00:21:09.880And not only is that all there is in terms of who you are as an individual now, and how society should be viewed, it's also the fundamental narrative of history.
00:21:17.880For example, it's widely assumed in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive, male-dominated patriarchy,
00:21:28.880and that the best way to construe relationships between men and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by men.
00:21:35.880And it's like, well, look, no hierarchy is without its tyranny.
00:21:42.880That's an axiomatic truth. People have recognized that literally for thousands of years.
00:21:47.880And hierarchies do tend towards tyranny, and they tend towards the usurpation by people with power.
00:21:54.880But that only happens when they become corrupt.
00:21:56.880We have mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably corrupt, and they actually work pretty well.
00:22:08.880You know, don't be thinking that this is a debate about whether empathy is useful or not.
00:22:13.880Or that the people on the con side of the argument are not empathetic.
00:22:16.880I know perfectly well, as I'm sure Mr. Fry does, that hierarchies tend to produce situations where people stack up at the bottom.
00:22:24.880And that the dispossessed in hierarchies need a political voice, which is the proper voice of the left, by the way, and the necessary voice of the left.
00:22:30.880But that is not the same as proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the groups that we belong to,
00:22:41.880and to construe the entire world as the battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence of that group affiliation.
00:22:49.880And to the degree that we play out that narrative, that won't be progress, believe me.
00:22:55.880And we certainly haven't seen that progress in the universities.
00:22:58.880We've seen situations like what happened at Wilfrid Laurier University instead.
00:23:38.880Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:23:41.880you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:23:46.880And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:23:49.880With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
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00:26:05.880Michael Eric Dyson, your six minutes starts now.
00:26:09.880Thank you very kindly. Wonderful opportunity to be here in Canada.
00:26:14.880Thank you so much. I'm going to stand here at the podium. I'm a preacher.
00:26:21.880And I will ask for an offering at the end of my presentation.
00:26:26.880This is the swimsuit competition of the intellectual beauty pageant.
00:26:31.880So let me show you the curves of my thought.
00:26:34.880Oh my God, was that a politically incorrect statement I just made?
00:26:38.880How did we get to the point where the hijacking of the discourse on political correctness has become a kind of mannequin distinction between us and them?
00:26:50.880The abortive fantasy just presented is remarkable for both its clarity and yet the muddiness of the context from which it has emerged.
00:26:59.880What's interesting to me is that when we look at the radical left, I'm saying, where they at? I want to join them.
00:27:06.880They ain't running nothing. I'm from a country where a man stands up every day to tweet the moral mendacity of his viciousness into a nation he has turned into his psychic commode.
00:28:34.880Patriarchy was the demand of men to have their exclusive vision presented.
00:28:39.880The beauty of feminism is it's not going to resolve differences between men and women.
00:28:43.880It just says men don't automatically get the last word.
00:28:48.880Of course in my career they never did.
00:28:51.880And so identity politics has been generated as a bet noire of the right and yet the right doesn't understand the degree to which identity has been foisted upon black people and brown people and people of color from the very beginning on women and trans people.
00:29:04.880You think that I want to be part of a group that is constantly abhorred by people at Starbucks?
00:29:37.880And the problem is that our friends don't want to acknowledge is that the hegemony, the dominance of that group has been so vicious that it has denied us the opportunity to exist as individuals.
00:29:50.880Individualism is the characteristic moment in modernity.
00:29:55.880The development of the individual, however, is predicated upon notions of intelligence.
00:30:00.880Immanuel Kant and David Hume and others.
00:30:02.880Philosophically, Descartes comes along introducing knowledge into the fray saying that knowledge is based upon a kind of reference to the golden intelligence, the reflective glass that one possesses.
00:30:16.880And yet he got rooted in the very ground of our existence.
00:30:21.880And what I'm saying to you, the knowledge that I bring as a person of color makes a difference in my body because I know what people think of me and I know how they respond to me.
00:31:01.880Some of it is ridiculous, I understand.
00:31:03.880I believe that the classroom is a robust place for serious learning.
00:31:06.880I believe in the interrogation of knowledge based upon our understanding mutually of the edifying proposition of enlightenment.
00:31:13.880At the same time, some people ain't as equal as others.
00:31:16.880So we have to understand the conditions under which they have emerged and in which they have been benighted and attacked by their own culture.
00:31:23.880And I ain't seen nobody be a bigger snowflake than white men who complain.
00:31:28.880Mommy, mommy, they won't let us play and have everything we used to have under the old regime where we were right racists and supremacists and dominant and patriarchs and hated gays and lesbians and transsexuals that, yeah, you gotta share.
00:32:24.880We're going to put six minutes on the clock, and please start.
00:32:27.880I'll try and be as quick as possible, because if I miss that plane to London, I won't half hear the end of it from the bridegroom's mother.
00:32:35.880Now, in agreeing to participate in this debate and stand on this side of the argument, I'm fully aware that many people who choose incorrectly, in my view, to seek this issue in terms of left and right, devalued and exploded terms, as I think they are, will believe that I am betraying myself and such causes and values that I have espoused over the years.
00:33:02.880I've been given huge grief already, simply because I'm standing here next to Professor Peterson, which is the very reason that I am standing here in the first place.
00:33:12.880I'm standing next to someone with whom I have, you know, differences, shall we say, in terms of politics and all kinds of other things, precisely because I think all this has got to stop.
00:33:26.880This rage, resentment, hostility, intolerance, above all this with us or against us, certainty.
00:33:36.880A grand canyon has opened up in our world. The fissure, the crack, grows wider every day.
00:33:42.880Neither on each side can hear a word that the other shrieks and nor do they want to.
00:33:48.880While these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash, down below in the enormous space between the two sides, the people of the world try to get on with their lives,
00:33:59.880alternately baffled, bored, and betrayed by the horrible noises and explosions that echo all around.
00:34:06.880I think it's time for this toxic, binary, zero-sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves.
00:34:14.880I'd better nail my colours to the mast before I get any further in this. It's only polite to give you a sense of where I come from.
00:34:25.880All my adult life I have been what you might call a lefty, a soft lefty, a liberal of the most hand-wringing milksop, milquetoast variety.
00:34:35.880Not a burning man-the-barricade socialist, not even really a progressive worth the name.
00:34:41.880I've been on marches, but I've never quite dared wave placards or banners.
00:34:46.880Am I a loathed member of that band, an SJW, a social justice worrier?
00:34:53.880I don't think highly of social injustice, I have to say, but I character myself mostly as a social justice worrier.
00:35:03.880My intellectual heroes growing up were Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, liberal thinkers, people like that,
00:35:09.880writers like E.M. Forster. I believed and I think I still do believe in the sanctity of human relations,
00:35:16.880of the primacy of the heart and friendship and love and common interest.
00:35:21.880These are more personal interior beliefs than they are political exterior convictions,
00:35:28.880more a humanistic version of a religious impulse, I suppose.
00:35:31.880I trust in humanity, I believe in humanity, I think I do, despite all that has happened in the 40 years of my adulthood.
00:35:39.880I am soft and I can easily be swept away by harder hearts and harder intellects.
00:35:44.880I'm sometimes surprised to be described as an activist, but over time I have energetically involved myself with what you might call causes.
00:35:50.880I grew up knowing that I was gay. Well, in fact, from the very first I knew I was gay, I remember when I was born looking up and saying,
00:35:58.880that's the last time I'm going up one of those.
00:36:00.880I'm Jewish. I'm Jewish, so I have a natural horror of racism.
00:36:11.880Naturally, I want racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, bullying, bigotry, intolerance of all human kinds to end.
00:36:21.880That's surely a given amongst all of us. The question is how such a golden aim is to be achieved.
00:36:27.880My ultimate objection to political correctness is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing,
00:36:35.880preachiness with great respect, piety, self-righteousness, heresy hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence,
00:36:47.880accusation, inquisition, censoring. That's not why I'm incurring the wrath of my fellow liberals by standing on this side of the house.
00:36:57.880My real objection is that I don't think political correctness works.
00:37:02.880I want to achieve, I want to get to the golden hill, but I don't think that's the way to get there.
00:37:07.880I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective.
00:37:17.880And political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking of how effective it might be.
00:37:26.880I wouldn't class myself as a classical libertarian, but I do relish transgression,
00:37:33.880and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy.
00:37:39.880Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality,
00:37:44.880but, to paraphrase Yevgeny Zemyatin, by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
00:37:51.880I may be wrong. I hope to learn this evening. I really do think I may be wrong,
00:38:02.880but I'm prepared to entertain the possibility that political correctness will bring us more tolerance and a better world.
00:38:11.880But I'm not sure, and I would like this quotation from my hero Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening.
00:38:17.880One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid,
00:38:24.880and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
00:38:31.880So, great set of opening statements to set the scene.
00:38:45.880We're now going to go into a round of rebuttals to allow each of our presenters three minutes to reflect on what they've heard and to make some additional points.
00:38:53.880We're going to do that in the same order that we had the opening statement.
00:38:57.880So, Michelle, you're up first. We'll put three minutes on the clock for you.
00:39:01.880So, first I would say that I think that the attempt to draw a dichotomy between individual rights and group rights is a little bit misleading.
00:39:13.880Traditionally, there have been large groups of people who have not been able to exercise their individual rights,
00:39:24.880and I think that a lot of the claims that are being made on behalf of what we politically correct types call marginalized groups
00:39:32.880are claims that people who have identities that have not traditionally been at the center of our culture or been at the top of our hierarchies have as much right to exercise their individual talents and realize their individual ambitions.
00:39:51.880Right? When we say that we want more women in power or more people of color voices in the canon or in the curriculum or directing movies, all of these things are not because, at least on my part, I'm interested in some sort of very crude equity,
00:40:09.880but because there are a lot of people who have not traditionally been able to realize themselves as individuals.
00:40:19.880That's what the women's movement was. That's what the civil rights movement was. That's what the gay rights movement was. That's in some ways what the trans rights movement was.
00:40:27.880I mean, far from a collectivist movement, this is kind of liberalism, classical liberalism, pushed to its extreme, right?
00:40:36.880These are people saying, I have the right to define my identity against the one that was collectively assigned to me.
00:40:44.880Finally, I would say, you know, a lot of the things that Stephen Fry said, you know, and particularly his temperament, were probably in agreement.
00:40:53.880But this inquisition, this censoriousness, on the one hand, I'm sort of, I see where he's coming from, but I think it's a little bit virtual, right?
00:41:04.880I mean, who's really censoring you? I understand what it feels like to feel censored. I understand what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a Twitter mob or get a lot of nasty comments.
00:41:17.880But, and that's a bad feeling, you know, and it's a counterproductive tactic. But that's not censorship. You know, and again, it's especially strange coming from a country where, you know, the President of the United States is trying to levy additional postal rates on the owner of the Washington Post, you know, in revenge for its reporting.
00:41:42.880And people who have kneeled to protest police brutality at football games have seen their careers explode, you know, or people who have, you know, women who have challenged Mr. Peterson has been hounded by threats and trolls and misogynist invective.
00:42:08.880Jordan, we're going to have three minutes up on the screen there. Please respond to what you've heard.
00:42:14.880Well, I guess I would like to set out a challenge in somewhat the same format as Mr. Fry did to people on the moderate left.
00:42:24.880I mean, I've studied totalitarianism for a very long time, both on the left and on the right in various forms, and I think we've done a pretty decent job of determining when right-wing beliefs become dangerous.
00:42:39.880I think that they become dangerous when the people who stand on the right evoke notions of racial superiority or ethnic superiority, something like that.
00:42:49.880It's fairly easy to draw a box around them and place them to one side, and necessary.
00:42:54.880And I think we've done a pretty good job of that.
00:42:56.880What I fail to see happening on the left, and this is with regards to the sensible left, because such a thing exists, is for the same thing to happen with regards to the radical leftists.
00:43:05.880Okay, so here's an open question. If it's not diversity, inclusivity, and equity as a triumvirate that mark out the too excessive left, and with equity defined, by the way, not as equality of opportunity, which is an absolutely laudable goal, but as equality of outcome, which is how it's defined, then exactly how do we demarcate the too extreme left?
00:43:30.880What do we do? We say, well, there's no such thing as the too extreme left?
00:43:35.880Well, that's certainly something that characterized much of intellectual thinking for the 20th century, as our high-order intellectuals, especially in places like France, did everything they could to bend over backwards to ignore absolutely everything that was happening.
00:43:48.880In the catastrophic left world, in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China, not least, we've done a terrible job of determining how to demarcate what's useful from the left from what's pathological.
00:43:59.880And so it's perfectly okay for someone to criticize my attempts to identify something like a boundary, we could say diversity, inclusivity, and equity, especially equity, which is in fact equality of outcome, which is an absolutely abhorrent notion.
00:44:13.880If you know anything about history, you know that. And I'm perfectly willing to hear some reasonable alternatives.
00:44:18.880But what I hear continually from people on the left, first of all, as my opponents did, to construe every argument that is possibly able to be construed on the axis of group identification,
00:44:29.880and to fail to help the rest of us differentiate the reasonable left, which stands for the oppressed, necessarily, from the pathological left that's capable of unbelievable destruction.
00:44:43.880And what I see happening in the university campuses in particular, where the leftists absolutely predominate, and that's certainly not my imagination,
00:44:51.880that's well documented by perfectly reasonable people like Jonathan Haidt, is an absolute failure to make precisely that distinction.
00:44:58.880And I see the same thing echoed tonight. Thank you.
00:45:20.880I don't know what mythological collective Mr. Peterson refers to. I'm part of the left. They're cantankerous. When they have a firing squad, it's usually in a semicircle.
00:45:38.880Part of the skepticism of rationality was predicated upon the Enlightenment project, which says we're no longer going to be subordinate to skepticism, to superstition.
00:45:49.880We're going to think, and we're going to think well.
00:45:52.880Thomas Jefferson was one of the great arbiters of rationality, but he was also a man who was a slave owner.
00:45:58.880How do you reconcile that? That's the complication I'm speaking about. That's not either or. That's not a collective identity.
00:46:03.880Thomas Jefferson believed in a collective identity. That is during the day.
00:46:07.880At night, he got some Luther Vandross songs, went out to the slave quarter, and engaged in sexual relations and had many children with Sally Hemings.
00:46:19.880His loins trumped his logic. And when he talks about postmodernism, I don't know who he's talking about. I teach postmodernism. It's kind of fun.
00:46:30.880Jacques Derrida, just to say his name is beautiful.
00:46:33.880Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault talked about the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.
00:46:38.880People who had been marginalized now begin to speak. The subaltern, as Gayatri Spivak, talks about it in postcolonial theory.
00:46:44.880The reason these people grew up and grew into existence and had a voice is because they were denied.
00:46:49.880As Miss Goldberg said, our group identity was foisted upon us. We were not seen as individuals.
00:46:55.880Babe Ruth, when he broke the home run record, he didn't bat against all best ballplayers.
00:47:00.880He batted against the best white ballplayers. When it's been rigged in your favor from the very beginning, it's hard for you to understand how much you've been rigged.
00:47:07.880You're born on third base and think you hit a triple at the Toronto Blue Jays game.
00:47:15.880And here we are deriving our sense of identity from the very culture that we ignore.
00:47:19.880Look at the indigenous names and the First Nation names.
00:47:22.880Toronto, Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, Tim Hortons.
00:47:26.880But I'll tell you there's an envy of the kind of freedom and liberty that people of color and other minorities bring because we bring the depth of knowledge in our body.
00:47:40.880There's a kind of jealousy of that. As the greatest living Canadian philosopher Aubrey Drake Graham says, jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.
00:47:49.880And so for me, I think it's necessary. I agree with Mr. Fry. We shouldn't be nasty and combative.
00:47:56.880And yet, I don't see nastiness and combativeness from people. I see them making a desire to have their individual identities respected.
00:48:04.880When I get shot down for no other reason than I'm black, when I get categorized for no other reason than my color,
00:48:10.880I am living in a culture that refuses to see me as a great individual.
00:48:30.880It's interesting to hear that there really doesn't seem to be a problem, but yet I think we all instinctively know that there is some kind of problem.
00:48:38.880There isn't censorship. Of course not in the way that there is in Russia.
00:48:42.880I've been to Russia. I faced off with a deeply homophobic and unpleasant man.
00:48:47.880And there's political correctness in Russia. It's just political correctness on the right.
00:48:51.880And that's what I grew up with, political correctness, which meant that you couldn't say certain things on television.
00:48:57.880You couldn't say fuck, for example, on television, because it was incorrect to do so.
00:49:02.880And as always, the same reason was that someone would appear and say, I'm not shocked.
00:49:07.880Oh, of course, no, I'm not shocked. I'm not offended. I'm offended on behalf of others, young, impressionable, plastic minds, the vulnerable.
00:49:15.880And that's not good enough. It's so often people are saying, you see, I don't mind being called a faggot or a kike or a mad person because I've got mental health issues.
00:49:25.880I don't mind people insulting me. And people say, well, that's all right for you, Stephen, because, you know, you're strong.
00:49:30.880Well, I don't feel particularly strong. And I don't know that I like being called a faggot and a kite particularly.
00:49:36.880But I don't believe that the advances in my culture that have allowed me to marry, as I have now been for three years to someone of my gender,
00:49:45.880I don't believe they are a result of political correctness.
00:49:49.880And maybe political correctness is actually just some sort of live trout that the harder we squeeze it, the further it goes away.
00:49:55.880And you will be saying, I'm not talking about political correctness, you're talking about social justice,
00:50:00.880with which I agree with whether you want to call it identity politics or the history of your people or the history of my people.
00:50:05.880My people were slaves as well. Both the British were slaves of Romans and the Jews were slaves of the Egyptians.
00:50:10.880All human beings have been slaves at some point and we all, in that sense, share that knowledge of how important it is to speak up.
00:50:18.880But Russell Means, who was a friend of mine towards the end who founded the American Indian Movement, he said,
00:50:23.880Oh, for God's sake, call me an Indian or a Lakota Sioux or Russell, I don't care what you call me, it's how we're treated that matters.
00:50:30.880And so I'm really addressing a more popular idea, also actually in Barrow, Alaska, an Inupiat said, call me an Eskimo.
00:50:41.880It's obviously easier for you because you keep mispronouncing Inupiat.
00:50:44.880You know, words do matter. I'll just end with a quick story.
00:50:51.880Gay rights came about in England because we slowly and persistently knocked on the door of people in power.
00:50:57.880We didn't shout, we didn't scream. People like Ian McKellen eventually got to see the Prime Minister.
00:51:02.880And then the Queen signed in the Royal Assent, as she has to, for the bill allowing equality of marriage.
00:51:08.880She said, Lord, you know, I couldn't imagine this in 1953.
00:51:15.880It really is extraordinary, isn't it? Just wonderful, and handed it over.
00:51:20.880Now, it's a nice story and I hope it's true, but it's nothing to do with political correctness.
00:51:25.880It's to do with human decency. It's that simple.
00:51:36.880So, some great rebuttals there, strong opening statements.
00:51:40.880Let's move now into the moderated cross-examination portion of this debate
00:51:45.880and get both sides engaging on some of the key issues here.
00:51:50.880And I think what we've heard here is a bit of a tension.
00:51:53.880Let's draw it out a bit more between the rights of groups to feel included,
00:51:58.880to have, in your words, Michelle, the opportunity for individuality,
00:52:02.880and a belief on the other side that there's something at threat here
00:52:06.880when these groups are overly privileged through affirmative action
00:55:58.880Good point. Jordan, let's have you jump in on this idea of what you see as the pernicious danger of groupthink
00:56:04.880when it comes to ethnicity, when it comes to gender. Why do you think that that's one of the primal sins,
00:56:10.880in your view, of, quote, political correctness?
00:56:13.880Well, I think it's one of the primal sins of identity politics players on the left and the right, just to be clear about that.
00:56:20.880Personally, since this has got personal at times, I'm no fan of the identitarian right.
00:56:25.880I think that anybody who plays a game, a conceptual game, where group identity comes first and foremost risks an exacerbation of tribalism.
00:56:33.880It doesn't matter whether it's on the left or the right.
00:56:37.880With regards to the idea of group rights, well, there's a fundamental, and this is something we've fallen into terribly in Canada,
00:56:43.880not least because we had to contend with the threat of Quebec separatism.
00:56:47.880But the idea of group rights is extraordinarily problematic because the obverse of the coin of individual rights is individual responsibilities.
00:56:57.880And you can hold an individual responsible, and an individual can be responsible.
00:57:02.880And so that's partly why individuals have rights.
00:57:05.880But groups, how do you hold a group responsible?
00:57:09.880I mean, the whole idea is not, it's not a good idea to hold a group responsible.
00:57:13.880First of all, it flies in the face of the idea of the sort of justice systems that we've laid out in the West
00:57:18.880that are essentially predicated first on the assumption of individual innocence,
00:57:22.880but also on the possibility of individual guilt, not group guilt.
00:57:26.880We saw what happened in the 20th century many, many times when the idea of group guilt was enabled to get a foothold,
00:57:34.880let's say, in the polity and in the justice system. It was absolutely catastrophic.
00:57:47.880And how are you going to keep, how are you going to hold your groups responsible?
00:57:50.880Well, we don't have to talk about that because we're too concerned with rectifying hypothetical,
00:57:55.880rectifying historical injustices, hypothetical and otherwise.
00:57:59.880And that's certainly not to say that there weren't any shortage of absolutely catastrophic historical injustices.
00:58:05.880That's not the point. The point is how you view the situation at the most fundamental level.
00:58:11.880And group rights are an absolute catastrophe in my opinion.
00:58:14.880Come on, let's, Michelle, come in on that point.
00:58:16.880This is something you've written about.
00:58:19.880The idea that, you know, in identity politics, the identity of the group is absolutely a valid part of the discourse.
00:58:29.880And individuals could and should be seen and participate in groups as they enter into the civic space.
00:58:36.880I'm not sure that we necessarily have to analogize from the opposite of individual rights is individual responsibility.
00:58:45.880I'm not sure that that analogy necessarily holds for the groups.
00:58:49.880I mean, in the United States, and one of the things that I think is complicated about this discussion is that we're talking about three very different cultural contexts,
00:58:57.880three different histories, three different kind of legal regimes.
00:59:00.880But in the United States, a great, a huge part of our politics has been groups struggling for rights for their individual members, right?
00:59:14.880I mean, so women in the United States, you know, seeking the right to reproductive control of their body.
00:59:21.880You know, African Americans in the United States seeking redress from police brutality or discrimination or simply the kind of tendency in America of white people to call the police whenever they see an African American in a place where they don't think that they're supposed to be.
00:59:40.880And you simply, I don't see how you can contend with any of those social problems if you see society as just an ocean of atomized individuals.
00:59:51.880You know, and I just, again, I don't think there's anything pernicious about people banding together on the basis of their common identity to seek redress for discrimination and exclusion.
01:00:09.880I mean, I think that that is everything that's best about our democracy.
01:00:16.880And so again, I just, I keep stumbling with the idea that this is somehow tyrannical or that way lies Stalinism.
01:00:26.880And, you know, a lot of times people who are opposed to political correctness talk about the concept of category creep or is it, is it, no, no.
01:00:36.880Yeah, category creep, which is a concept that was originated by, I believe, an Australian academic.
01:00:42.880And it's basically kind of a failure to draw distinctions, right, so that you kind of can't see the difference between, say, a KKK grand wizard and a conservative like, say, Ben Shapiro.
01:00:55.880Or, you know, that you kind of see everybody to your right as, you know, fascist, sexist, totalitarian, intolerable.
01:01:04.880And I think that that is a real thing that happens in part because, you know, undergraduates often think in broad and slightly overwrought categories.
01:01:15.880I know I did when I was, when I was a kid, you know, maybe still do, but, but I, I hear a lot of category creep in, again, the argument against political correctness or against seeking group redress.
01:01:28.880The idea that kind of that way lies to humanization or, you know, that you're kind of one minute, you're asking.
01:04:15.880I'm talking about America, first of all.
01:04:17.880I'm talking about the American society, first of all.
01:04:18.880I'm talking about the Northern Hemisphere.
01:04:20.880I'm talking about every society where enslavement has existed.
01:04:23.880But I'm speaking specifically of the repudiation of individual rights among people of color in America
01:04:30.880who were denied the opportunity to be individuals.
01:04:33.880See, I obviously and ideally, and I think Michelle Goldberg does too, agree with the emphasis on individuals.
01:04:39.880What we're saying to you is that we have not been permitted to be individuals.
01:04:43.880We have not been permitted to exercise our individual autonomy and authority.
01:04:47.880And the refusal to do so, to recognize me as an individual means when you roll up on me and I'm a 12-year-old boy in a park,
01:04:54.880and you shoot first in ways you do to black kids that you don't do to white kids, you are not treating that person as an individual.
01:05:01.880If we're living in a society where women are subject to aberrant forms of horrid, patriarchal, sexist, and misogynist behavior,
01:05:11.880you are not acknowledging the centrality of the individuality of women.
01:05:15.880You are treating them according to a group dynamic.
01:05:18.880And if we get beyond the ability of people on the right to understand the degree to which they have operated from the basis of benefit from group identity,
01:11:32.880And I have never seen so much wine and snowflaking.
01:11:39.880There's enough wine in here to start a vineyard.
01:11:42.880And what I'm saying to you empirically and precisely when you ask the question about white privilege,
01:11:48.880the fact that you ask it in the way you did, dismissive, pseudoscientific, non-empirical, and without justification,
01:11:55.880A, the truth is that white privilege doesn't act according to quantifiable segments.
01:12:01.880It's about the degree to which we are willing as a society to grapple with the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality upon which it's based.
01:12:10.880Number two, what's interesting to me, you're talking about not having a collective identity.
01:12:22.880When America formed its union, it did so in opposition to another group.
01:12:29.880So the reality is that those who are part of group identities and politics deny the legitimacy and validity of those groups
01:12:36.880and the fact that they have been created thusly and then have resentment against others.
01:12:42.880All I'm asking for is the opportunity.
01:12:45.880The quotation you talk about, the difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity,
01:12:51.880that's a staid and retried argument, hackneyed phrase derived from the halcyon days of the debate over affirmative action.
01:12:58.880Are you looking for outcomes that can be determined equally or are you looking for opportunity?
01:13:03.880If you free a person after a whole long time of oppression and say now you are free to survive,
01:13:10.880if you have no skills, if you have no quantifiable means of existence, what you have done is liberated them into oppression.
01:13:17.880And all I'm suggesting to you, Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of our great presidents said,
01:13:21.880if you start a man in a race a hundred years behind, it is awfully difficult to catch up.
01:13:27.880So I don't think Jordan Peterson is suffering from anything except an exaggerated sense of entitlement and resentment.
01:13:35.880And his own privilege is invisible to him and it's manifest with lethal intensity and ferocity right here on stage.
01:13:42.880Jordan, I'm going to have to let you respond to that if you like.
01:13:51.880Well, what I derived from that series of rebuttals, let's say, is twofold.
01:13:57.880The first is that saying that the radical left goes too far when they engage in violence is not a sufficient response by any stretch of the imagination,
01:14:07.880because there are sets of ideas in radical leftist thinking that led to the catastrophes of the 20th century.
01:14:13.880And that was at the level of idea, not at the level of violent action.
01:14:17.880It's a very straightforward thing to say you're against violence. It's like being against poverty.
01:14:21.880It's like, you know, generically speaking, decent people are against poverty and violence.
01:14:27.880It doesn't address the issue in the least.
01:14:30.880And with regards to my privilege or lack thereof, I mean, I'm not making the case that I haven't had advantages in my life and disadvantages in my life like most people.
01:14:40.880You don't know anything about my background or where I came from.
01:14:42.880It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man.
01:14:46.880That's a hell of a thing to say in a debate.
01:15:30.880Let's talk about another big factor of the so-called politically correct movement right now, which is the Me Too movement.
01:15:37.880And the extent to which we've seen this resurgence, this awakening around what have been a horrible series of systemic abuses and injustices towards women.
01:15:49.880Some people though, Michelle, would say that we're in a cultural panic now.
01:15:53.880That the pendulum has swung too far and that there is a dangerous overreaction going on where people's rights, reputations, due process has been thrown to the wind.
01:16:21.880Which was something quite new that men with histories of really serious predatory behavior were suddenly losing their jobs.
01:16:27.880You know, everybody had known about it for a long time and there had been a sort of implicit impunity and suddenly that was taken away and it created this cultural earthquake.
01:16:36.880And as soon as it did, it created a lot of anxiety.
01:16:41.880You know, I mean, the Me Too movement was only a couple of months old when my newspaper started running columns from people saying, why can't I criticize Me Too?
01:16:52.880Which they were doing in my newspaper.
01:16:54.880So, on the one hand, yes, of course, is due process important?
01:17:00.880I think that when you look at who has actually lost their jobs, who's actually lost their livelihoods, I mean, look around.
01:17:09.880It's people, it's not people in general on a, you know, McCarthyist rumor.
01:17:14.880It's people who took their dicks out at work.
01:17:16.880It's people who, you know, there, it's people who there was, you know, tens of millions of dollars of settlements and they lost their job for four months and now they're staging comebacks.
01:17:28.880You know, Bill O'Reilly is about to get a TV show on a new network.
01:17:32.880So, the idea that, again, this idea that kind of like men everywhere feel like they can't talk anymore and everybody's walking on eggshells and I don't know, maybe that's true in your offices.
01:17:44.880It's not true where I live, you know, and the Me Too movement has been particularly active in media.
01:17:54.880You know, there was this thing, I don't know how many of you guys read about the shitty media men list.
01:17:59.880A woman wrote about, she started this sort of open source document where women could list men in media that everybody knew about but nobody had ever done anything about.
01:18:10.880And it very quickly went public and there was something sort of disturbing in it, right?
01:18:15.880You don't like these anonymous accusations floating around.
01:18:18.880Most feminists I know, including myself, were kind of, you know, freaked out by it and thought it was unfair to have people's reputations held up like this.
01:18:29.880But if you look at what happened to the men on the list, nothing.
01:20:09.880And I think that's obvious that someone in that position, abusing and threatening and hindering the livelihood of women, is grotesque in the extreme.
01:20:20.880But I have to tell you, there is genuine feeling amongst many people I know, that we can't speak our minds.
01:20:28.880We can't actually speak to the true nuance, the true depth of sexual, romantic feeling between men and women.
01:20:37.880It's not a subject I'm absolutely expert on, but it counts between men and men as well.
01:20:42.880Though I know when it's men and men, you might say, well, that's different, because women have had a different experience in history,
01:20:48.880and I don't want to enter that particular field.
01:20:51.880But I would say that there is real fear in my business, which is where this all started, show business, acting, and so on.
01:21:00.880Yeah, people are rather afraid to speak about a piece of, you know, publicity that's come out or a statement that's been made.
01:21:09.880You just go, yep, absolutely, and wait for the people to leave the room before you can speak honestly with your friends.
01:21:16.880And that's, I've never experienced that in my entire 60 years on this planet.
01:21:21.880This feeling that, and I'm not characterizing feminists as East German, but it's like that, the stars are listening.
01:21:29.880You better be careful, they're listening.
01:21:33.880I'm saying that with my hand of my heart.
01:21:35.880I'm not saying it to make a point other than the fact that it's true and it's worrying.
01:21:40.880But the sexual misadventures and horror experience is worrying too.
01:21:44.880So there are two worries and they're not solved.
01:21:46.880Let's bring Jordan in on this because you've written and commented about a lot.
01:21:49.880But Stephen, thank you for having me ready.
01:21:54.880Well, I think I'm going to point out two things again.
01:21:58.880The first is that my question about when the left goes too far still hasn't been answered.
01:22:03.880And then the second thing I'm going to point out is that, you know, it's conceivable that I am a mean man.
01:22:10.880You know, I mean, maybe I'm meaner than some people and not as mean as others.
01:22:14.880I think that's probably more the case.
01:22:16.880But I would say the fact that race got dragged into that particular comment is a better exemplar of what the hell I think is wrong with the politically correct left than anything else that could have possibly happened.
01:22:26.880Imagine the hurt, the anxiety, the insult that you might genuinely feel according to what I felt was an appropriate comment of description at the moment of its expression.
01:23:13.880It's that whatever nontraditional feelings of empathy you endure at this particular point.
01:23:20.880The point is imagine then the horrors that so many other others have had to put up with for so long when they are refused to acknowledge their humanity.
01:23:51.880Well, what's interesting is that you may have felt that you were being ascribed to group identity to which you do not subscribe.
01:24:00.880You may have felt that you were being unfairly judged according to your particular race.
01:24:04.880You may have felt that your individual identity was being besmirched by my rather careless characterization of you.
01:24:10.880All of which qualifies for a legitimate, you know, response to me, but also the point we've been trying to make about the refusal to see our individual existence as women, as people of color, as First Nation people and the like.
01:24:25.880My point simply has been the reason I talked about race and that particular characterization because there's a particular way in which I have come to a city.
01:24:35.880I don't know if there are a lot of black people out here.
01:24:39.880But I constantly come to places and spaces that are not my natural habitat other than intellectual engagement and the love and the fury of rhetorical engagement.
01:24:51.880But I often go into hostile spaces where people will not vote in favor from my particular viewpoint because I'm interested as an individual of breaking down barriers so that people can understand just how complicated it is.
01:25:04.880So what I'm saying to you is that I would invite you in terms of the surrender of your privilege to give you a specific response.
01:25:11.880Come with me to a black Baptist church.
01:25:14.880Come with me to a historically black college.
01:25:17.880Come to me to an indigenous or First Nations community where we're able to engage in some of the lovely conversation, but also to listen and hear.
01:25:30.880And when I added race to that, I was talking about the historically evinced inability to acknowledge others' pains equally to the one that they are presently enduring.
01:25:39.880So, as a human being, as a human being, I love you as my brother, but I stand by my comment.
01:25:45.880Well, I've seen the sorts of things that you're talking about.
01:25:48.880I happen to be an honorary member of an indigenous family.
01:25:51.880So don't tell me about what I should go see with regards to oppression.
02:00:17.600One very focused more on identity politics, group identity, you, in a sense, having an argument really more about the larger culture itself
02:00:25.440and the tenor and tone of the conversation within it.
02:00:27.580I worried that I was being a little kind of scattergun, really, both scattergun and too specific,
02:00:32.980that I had just taken very literally the popular idea of political correctness as being a kind of control of language
02:00:39.560and a shutting down of certain phrases or an introduction of others.
02:00:43.760And the kind of day-to-day, as I say, human resource departments of corporations and that sort of thing.
02:00:51.640And so I was slightly disappointed that it just became a debate about race and about gender and so on.
02:04:10.580But any unsaid thoughts, anything that you want to put a point on now?
02:04:16.700I think you have to hold people intellectually accountable.
02:04:20.060And to deny some of the things to Michelle that he said and to present himself, Mr. Peterson, in a certain way
02:04:26.580without seeing some of the abhorrent things he said about women and other minorities, I think, demands an engaged response to him.
02:04:36.000And I think that the idea itself, as Michelle stated repeatedly, and Mr. Fry talked about his frustration.
02:04:42.840He said, we talk about everything but political correctness.
02:04:45.580Well, the reality is political correctness resides, I mean, rests upon some serious political work in this culture,
02:04:52.960in Canada and in America that needs to be done.
02:04:55.340And what I tried to, in terms of giving a brief genealogy, we didn't have political correctness as long as white, straight men were in charge.
02:05:02.260There was no argument about let's get this right.
02:05:05.720But when people who exercise power no longer exercise absolute power, still predominant power, then there's an argument.
02:05:13.800And I think, to Michelle's point, about gender, about the workplace, about race, about sexuality and the like,
02:05:21.440I just think that it was a unnecessarily vigorous and sometimes sharply worded debate between us all.
02:05:45.040I don't know, but, and I guess, again, you know, me and Stephen Fry probably could have sat on the same side of another debate.
02:05:56.120But, again, I feel like the phrase political correctness has expanded to cover a whole range of challenges to,
02:06:05.820I thought it was really interesting how much people were talking about their feelings.
02:06:09.100Because when women talk about their feelings, right, that is politically correct excess.
02:06:16.280And when men talk about this feeling that they can't empirically define, we should all, I guess, I don't know, change in deference to that.