Trent sits down with Robby Soave, the senior editor of Reason magazine, to talk about how college “cancel culture” went mainstream at a frightening pace and how we should respond to it.
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
I was watching the news recently about protests, about the CHOP or the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone, the autonomous zone in Seattle. You’re hearing things about how language is dangerous for people, words that are creating unsafe spaces and threatening to people. All of it sounded so familiar to me. I was like, “Where have I heard all this before?” I thought, “Wait a minute. I remember right, heard all this before and saw all these antics, when I went to college.” When I went to college, I saw all these kinds of protests and complaints about safe spaces, microaggressions.
I thought today for this episode, I wanted to do just a podcast on, I was going to call it the inmates are running the asylum and I was just going to talk about these things that I’ve come across but decided instead to invite on a guest who I think has a deep insight into what’s happening and can give us a good behind the scenes and some future predictions about discourse in our country and what’s happening where instead of the inmates running the asylum, I think what’s happened now is the millennial snowflakes have turned into a cultural avalanche. That is what we’re going to talk about today, here on the Council of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.
If you want to support what we’re doing so we can share our message to reach lots of people, consider becoming a subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. For as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content, you make the podcast possible, but who knows how long I’m going to be there. We’re currently supported through Patreon at trenthornpodcast.com, but the millennial snowflakes who’ve left college and run things like Patreon are quick to cancel people that they disagree with. If I get cancelled on Patreon, I’ll let you all know and we’ll figure out something else. That’s what we’re talking about today, cancel culture and a lot of the things that have migrated that were once present on university campuses that now we see more in the larger discourse and what should we think about it.
Well, our guest has some good answers on that. His name is Robby Soave. He is a senior editor at Reason. He enjoys writing about culture, politics, education policy, criminal justice reform, television and video games. He’s appeared in The New York Times, US News and World Report, Detroit News. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and now lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Carrie, and their two Yorkies, Cesar and Oliver. I’m a fan of Yorkies as well. His first book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump is currently available for purchase. Robby, welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast.
Robby Soave:
Thank you for having me. Great to talk with you.
Trent Horn:
I’m so glad that you’re here. I really enjoy reading a lot of the takes that you have, on Reason, reason.com. Reason Magazine is a libertarian publication. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything that’s on Reason, but a lot of the takes that you have on there, especially on current events, cancel culture and just where journalism has morphed into activism over the past few years, I think you’ve done a tremendous job with and I’m really looking forward to reading your book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit more about the book and what motivated you to write it?
Robby Soave:
Sure, I’ve been covering the higher education culture beat for a number of years, the free speech, shut downs of invited speakers, that kind of thing. That gradually, as that beat became more interesting and more stories that fell into it and took on a national significance with some of the higher profile, examples of insanity taking place on campus, I ended up turning it into a book that tried to trace the origins of this moment we’re living in and predict where it might go if it would move off the campuses and I predicted it very much would move off the campuses and I think we’re seeing a lot of that happening just right now even though the last few weeks.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. We’ll get to that shortly, but when we look at the origins of this, we’ve seen campus activism, especially in the 2010s increase a lot, but I think there’s a deeper origin to this. A lot of this, it reminds me of a movie that I saw way back in the early ’90s, the 1994 comedy PCU. It stands for Politically Correct University. I forget the actor’s name. I want to say it’s Jeremy Piven is one of the actors in it. He was later in Entourage. It’s a film about, it’s basically lampooning college culture. You have a freshman who shows up at college and everyone is politically correct. This is back in the early ’90s when politically correct became new to the lexicon.
Let me just play a little clip of the trailer here so you can get an idea back in the ’90s how people understood like political correctness was such a new thing.
Speaker 4:
It’s a whole new ballgame on campus these days and they call it PC, politically correct. What happened to the ozone layer? It was last week. Now, it’s me.
Speaker 6:
Gays in the military now.
Speaker 7:
Free Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 6:
They freed him already.
Speaker 4:
Ladies and gentleman, I think it’s time to revive an ancient tradition we seem to have long forgotten.
Speaker 8:
You guys are talking about a party?
Trent Horn:
You can see there, give us some thought on that. Where do you see the origins of The Great Awokening and how it’s related to maybe earlier notions of political correctness?
Robby Soave:
Sure. The late ’80s, early ’90s were a time period of the rise of political correctness on college campuses. Often that took the form of formal policies where there were speech codes on the campuses where if you said something that was offensive, you could be disciplined for it, but a number of public universities did that which has First Amendment Freedom of Speech components of that. They actually got challenged and usually struck down sometimes in court. Sometimes the universities agreed to get rid of them. Some still had them on the books, but didn’t enforce them.
There was this wave of political correctness that was defeated, I guess, or forced back really through lawsuits, and then, things got a little quieter, I think, for a while.
Trent Horn:
Well, Robby, during this time, it also felt like the guardians of culture didn’t agree with this like in films and in television. It was made fun of. I remember, there was a sketch on Saturday Night Live a long time ago with Phil Hartman and Chris Farley and this sketch was called, Is It Date Rape? It begins, “Live from Antioch College in Antioch and your host the dean of intergender relations, Dean Frederick Wickham,” and Phil Hartman would come on, but they were lampooning just this ridiculous code that they have where people for every single romantic encounter you had to ask for verbal explicit permission for every romantic gesture that was offered. It seemed like the larger culture saw that this was just insane.
Robby Soave:
I think that’s absolutely the case and I also think, now, the culture is changing, but of course, it’s a small number of people. That’s the thing I always want to stress, whatever you want to call them, The Wokescolds, The Cancelers, The Social Justice … Whatever your term for them is, there actually aren’t that many of them, even among young people. It’s not like a majority of all college students want to live in this safe space dystopia. Even at Oberlin College or Reed College, it’s still going to be like 20% … At the most woke, liberal, elite, white institution, it’s still going to be a small number of people.
The thing is they are being not just like listened to like people are afraid of them and they’re doing what they want, so they’re getting their way on the campuses. They’ve been getting their way in the campuses. They’re getting their way in the broader culture. People are just cowering, not in front of this vast mob, but from the small number of very militant, angry, very loud people. They command social media. They’re so active on social media that it makes it seem like there’s more of them than they actually are.
Trent Horn:
That’s part of the social media problem. If you look at Twitter, I forget the exact statistics, but something like … Twitter, the voices on Twitter, only about like 20% of the users are responsible for 80% of the tweets. The voices we see on Twitter only represent like 2% of the population as a whole, yet people, even politicians and others, if you get a bad day on Twitter makes it seem like the whole country is mad at you when that’s not the case.
Robby Soave:
Right. The political component of that is because you have these people so visible and so loud on social media, so disproportionately likely to occupy places of significance in media, in media institutions and just vocal places, their views come to dominate because they seem like they’re more prevalent than they actually are. You have a phenomenon where like the Democratic Party will move to the left or will pursue a handful of voters who are like very progressive on gender issues or race issues even though there’s tons more people in the middle of the country who are moderate religious older Democrats. There’s many more of them, but you’re not going to hear from them because they’re not active on Twitter.
Trent Horn:
Right and especially constituents among, let’s say, typical democratic voting communities like African Americans, for example, in traditional African American churches. It’s so funny to me, I’ve seen this where within these groups, it’s okay to rip apart. I think we saw this a lot with the candidacy of Pete Buttigieg, for example, probably the first openly gay candidate to run for president of the United States. There’s an idea that Mike Pence and other white Christians were, well, they’re just bigots and hate mongers if they’re critical of Pete Buttigieg’s lifestyle, but among African American Democrats, the tone would always seem to shift, say, “Well, we have to have more dialogue and there’s understandable concerns here.” It seemed like quite a double standard to me when I would look at how the two groups were interacted with.
Robby Soave:
Absolutely. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not for gay marriage until relatively recently, right? Then, you go way past that with some of the, and I’m broadly speaking of social liberal, I support those policies, but there’s new … Even the language of how you describe gender issues or how you describe a transgender person is something that even the activists have just decided upon like yesterday and there’s an expectation that everyone who’s … Even people who are not currently in their graduate degree program are supposed to understand the exact right language you’re supposed to use to describe all of these things.
If you don’t already intuitively know what the right language is, well, a, you’re not supposed to ask anyone because it’s not their job to educate you, but, b, you’re just hateful for not knowing it automatically. I think that’s really unfair and frustrating.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely. Let’s talk about some tipping points then in this canceling mentality. Two that jumped out to me recently where in 2017, I think his name is Bret Weinstein at Evergreen College. He’s a professor there who spoke out against the students who were demanding a day of racial solidarity saying that, “All the white students and professors should leave campus and be exiled from campus to make it a safe space.” He called that out as being ridiculous and then mob shouted him down.
Then, the other example would be in 2016, Nicholas Christakis, faculty member at Yale University, his wife had sent an email saying that, “Maybe adults should be free to wear what Halloween costumes they want. If you take offense, that’s fine, but it’s not our job to police what everybody wears on Halloween. We’re all adults here,” and the students became apoplectic and accused them, I think, of almost like committing violence against them. I’ll play a clip here for everyone to hear. These are a collected clip of some of the interactions where Christakis is trying to talk to this mob that is encircled him that demonstrates a lot of this kind of language and rhetoric. So let meplay that.
Speaker 9:
That has been my biggest reaction from this email is that you’re not listening. It is no longer a safe space for me. I find that incredibly depressing.
Speaker 10:
Even if you don’t feel what I feel ever, even if nobody’s ever been racist to you because they can’t be racist to you, that doesn’t mean that you can just act like you’re not being racist.
Speaker 11:
And you cannot come in here and change things. This has been our home. Do you understand that?
Speaker 12:
It’s in the concept of gaslighting because that is what you are doing.
Speaker 13:
You strip people of their humanity. That’s not the same as not playing an instrument.
Nicholas Christakis:
I’m making an analogy.
Speaker 13:
You have created space for violence-
Nicholas Christakis:
I disagree with that. I disagree with that.
Trent Horn:
A lot of what you just heard there, that should sound pretty familiar, right?
Robby Soave:
Those two, I’ve written about both of those incidents at great length in my book and in my writing at reason.com and they’re very much, a, they’re kind of things you need to grapple with to understand what we’re facing now. By the way, both of those people, Bret Weinstein, Nicholas Christakis are brilliant independent thinkers who I don’t agree with on everything. Bret Weinstein was a Bernie Sanders supporter, but they’re like thoughtful people whose opinions just don’t always fall in line with one side or camp or another. On some level, that’s why these mobs of people didn’t like them because they occasionally have a different point of view.
Trent Horn:
It just amazes me, Robby, that these same people, encircling them, would go to their Yale European history class and scoff about the Inquisition of the Middle Ages and how close minded people, and yet, that’s what they’re doing. They can’t even see the irony of it.
Robby Soave:
The metaphor I’m partial to these days, this is like a cultural French Revolution which is yes, hyperbole, no one is actually like losing their heads, thank God, but there’s just an effort right now to get everyone who bothered you or offended you for any reason fired from their job at least which is a pretty heavy consequence to pay.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Robby Soave:
You dig up something unwise they said on social media like a decade ago or a costume they wore a Halloween party and you can get this person fired like that with a snap of your fingers. Sometimes, this is happening to people. This is happening to non-famous people too. This is happening to people you’ve never heard of, just like a bus driver or-
Trent Horn:
That’s what-
Robby Soave:
It’s happening to them based on things they’ve said when we’re kids sometimes which is the thing that infuriates me the most like not good language they use as 13 year olds which is just a standard that no one, no one should be reasonably held to.
Trent Horn:
Right. That’s what’s interesting here, this idea of the news has turned into something where stories will develop and be covered by major national news organizations that have no merit. They don’t involve anything that is newsworthy, even if it were a local news level which we’ll get into here shortly with some of these examples. Because it’s funny as I always thought, when I would see this on campus, I went to Arizona State, you would see this stuff as well, you would hear things, I would see this stuff and read stories about and say, “Well, college administrators will let people get away with this nonsense because they’re spineless bureaucrats, administrators,” but when these kids get out of in the real world, they’ll …
I always thought this, I think many people thought this, when you get in the real world, you see that you can’t just demand that everyone agree with your point of view and shout people down and form this mob. You have to learn to live and let live with people who disagree with you, but now, I feel like I’m wrong. I think a lot of us are wrong who thought about that because … I think this is the point you make in your book that these people who were students at these Ivy League schools and other schools pushing this Great Awokening, now they have assumed positions of leadership in prominent media like The New York Times, Washington Post. They’ve worked for political campaigns. They ran for political office and win in primaries against well-termed incumbents.
The idea that it would just get sniffed out, extinguished in college, it wasn’t true. It’s moved into these broader institutions. Would you agree with that?
Robby Soave:
Absolutely. Major companies are battling to these people. Netflix was taking down episodes of, 30 Rock or maybe it was Hulu, whatever major streaming service 30 Rock is on and the show Community, it was Netflix, episodes in which the characters had darkened makeup which is blackface, but of course, none of these cases where it was being done to mock black people in the way blackface was done in the early 20th century, but in fact it was like mocking the concept, it was a commentary on that right.
Those episodes have been down the memory hole and no one actually even said, “I’m offended. You have to do something about this.” “This is like proactive in case they come for us.” That’s how scared major companies are.
Trent Horn:
Well, I just found out today, Hulu pulled an episode of The Golden Girls because there was a scene where they come out and they’re wearing a mud facial mask. They come out of the bathroom and they’re just wearing a regular facial mask and they meet an African American friend, and then, it appears it’s just very awkward to meet someone because it looks like you’re in blackface, but you’re just wearing a facial beauty mask. It’s like brown mud. You’re right. What seems to be happening is this idea that was popular among college activists, which is, “It doesn’t matter what’s true, what matters is how I interpret it. If I interpret it in the least charitable or most racist or offensive way possible, then that is the way it is.”
Then, it seems to promote this idea that with news or politics, it’s not about finding out what’s true, it’s just more about promoting our idea of how we see the world and what we think the world should be. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
Robby Soave:
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s it goes to like people are … People have to suffer for these wrongs even if these wrongs were slight. Then, it’s the job of the activists to force them to or even the public … This was the story, this Washington Post story recently where they talked about this woman who had attended a Washington Post party three years ago and she had done a costume that was commentary on Megyn Kelly’s then controversial remarks about blackface, but it involved wearing blackface. It was a costume party. It was a Halloween party.
This offended two young woke activist-type women who are not Post staffers but happened to be at this party, and then three years later, so just like last week, they basically extorted the Post into writing an article about it because they emailed Post people and were like, “We’re essentially going to say you’re complicit in the systemic racism of this woman unless you write a 3,000-word article destroying her life,” this non-famous non-important person three years later. Sure enough, that’s what they did. Part of the justification …
In the story, it’s like, “Well, has she suffered? She wasn’t punished for this,” but why should she be punished at all? This isn’t a politician in a sex scandal or something. This is someone who wore a Halloween costume three years ago.
Trent Horn:
Right. This idea and this segues well into the next thing, the topic that I want to discuss of news using even trivial stories to try to just push a particular narrative. Now, I’d encourage our readers to check out your coverage to cases of media malpractice you covered very well. One is the Jackie rape case in Rolling Stone and those completely unsubstantiated and you did a good job poking holes in that. I encourage our listeners to go and check out your work on the Jackie case. Just look up Robby Soave, Jackie, Rolling Stone, you’ll find it quickly.
The other one is the story of Covington Catholic. That’s when it was interesting and we all remember what happened there. You had Nick Sandmann and his friends out at the March for Life wearing Make America Great Again red hats and there was just one piece of footage that came on air of, I think it’s Nathan Phillips, Nathan Phillips, the Native American man, beating a drum and Nick Sandmann is standing there looking at him with a smile on his face and people went hysterical about it. Here’s a mob of boys standing around a Native American man intimidating him.
Even if that were the case, which it wasn’t, as you’ll explain to our listeners, even if that were the case, there was no violence. No one was hurt, nothing happened, but it was turned into a major news story because these kids were wearing red MAGA hats. I’m sure you can fill us in a bit more on that, how you’re involved in the story and how the media completely botched this one.
Robby Soave:
The Nick Sandmann case, unlike the Rolling Stone story was an organic social media disaster moment. What happened in the Jackie case was like a failure of journalism principally because Rolling Stone just wrote this terrible story that was completely untrue, that had lots of problems with it, and where if they had done their normal fact check, even slight journalistic integrity, the story would have fallen apart that this woman had obviously made this up. They didn’t try to verify the identity of the man who attacked her even though she knew who it was, according to her story. Her story was she was on a date with this guy, so she knew who it was and they didn’t press her for his name.
You would have to do that to verify that this person just exists even if you’re not seeking comment and they didn’t do that. This is why ultimately they were sued and they lost because it was that egregious. The Covington story is a little different and there were plenty of media journalism failings involved in it, but they were not the first movers here, right? The first mover is the organic social media reaction to seeing this short clip. Short, you don’t see what happens before it or what happens after it that struck a lot of people like, “Oh, well, he’s harassing this man.
Then of course, Nathan Phillips, the activist, immediately starts talking to media outlets, claiming he was remaking this just totally untrue story. Then you have journalists cover it, and unfortunately, there was a lot of additional context to take into consideration. At the time, I’d sat down to write an article about it. I saw that now there was an hour additional footage of what happened between the high school student and the Native American or what was going on before that, it turns out there was another group, this crazy-
Trent Horn:
The Black Hebrew Israelites.
Robby Soave:
The Black Hebrew Israelites and they had been harassing the Catholic school boys for like an hour and the teenagers hadn’t really done anything. They hadn’t done anything offensive or wrong about it. They just ignored them or joked back at them. Then, they were doing a cheer to drown out this really like racist kook hatred coming from the Black Hebrew Israelites and it was at that moment that Nathan Phillips decides to intervene on behalf of the unhinged crazy Black Hebrew Israelite people. What happened was not the way it was-
Trent Horn:
It was not a group of white racist boys encircling a Native American who is just on the Washington Mall playing his drum. He walks up to them. He goes to where they are, beating a drum and they’re confused and wondering, “Who is this guy? Is he with the Black Hebrew Israelites?” and in the midst of their cheers and he walks right up to Sandmann and is beating a drum right in his face. You can actually see Sandmann’s eyes blink every time the drum is beating because it’s loud and it’s strange and he just stood there and he had a smile on his face because he just wanted to show that he’s not scared and he’s not intimidated. He’s just trying to process what is going on here.
What I thought was interesting in your coverage of the story was that even after these facts came out, showing that the original narrative was wrong. It’s amazing to me that the media and this would not have happened, I truly believe this would not have happened if the boys were not wearing Make America Great Again hats because the media was so committed to the narrative that these boys are in lieu with President Trump or his ideology and we have to paint them as villains somehow, that you did a good job covering where the media continued to double down even in the face of overwhelming evidence showing that their narrative was wrong.
I’ll play a clip from an MSNBC interview with Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post. This is after everything had come to light. He still found it to be problematic. Let me play this for everyone to see what happens.
Speaker 15:
Joining me now to help us unpack all of this, Washington Post opinion writer, Jonathan Capehart. You wrote a very powerful piece today, Jonathan, with the headline, Nothing Justifies What the Covington Students Did and I take it that Nick Sandmann’s interview this morning didn’t change your mind.
Jonathan Capehart:
No, it didn’t because at the very end, after walking readers through various videos that I had watched, including one that was put out there an hour and 46 minutes long taped by the Black Hebrew Israelites, the ultimate point I was making was respect for your elders was something that was drummed into me at home by relatives, by the nuns at the Catholic school I went to during my elementary years and that a child and an adult are not on the same field. They’re not on equal playing ground. My upbringing would inform me that if Nathan Phillips had walked up to me, as a child, I would know it was my responsibility and duty to move out of the way because this is someone who is older than me and I’m supposed to accord respect to my elders. That’s what has bothered me through this entire situation and even more so after Savannah Guthrie’s interview with Nick Sandmann.
Trent Horn:
That’s what I call grasping at straws. It seemed like you noticed the same thing happening a lot with what the media was doing.
Robby Soave:
Actually, I remember reading that article and I think listening to that interview which is just a travesty. I believe in being respectful to people as well, but they really weren’t particularly disrespectful to this group of people. They were doing their own thing and these people came up to them, and then, they thought they were joining in the cheering. Then, there’s a tense moment earlier where one of the members of Nathan Phillips’ entourage, like trying to argue that weird, nonhistorical things about where the origins of human civilization are, like kook things and one of the boys says, “Well, we all come from Africa,” and the Native American guy disagrees with that.
Then, Nick Sandmann makes like just-cut-it-out gesture to his friend like, “We shouldn’t escalate this.” This is the person who is apparently engaged in deliberate racial harassment and provocation, was actually the one saying like, “We should just probably not engage these people.” These people were looking for being the Native American group, but looking for a spectacle or a fight or some way to play the victim and they got it briefly at least, and then, some people are still trying to portray them as the victims here which was very, very frustrating.
The additional coverage from Slate, Splinter, a couple other places the mainstream coverage for the most part, they admitted that they had gotten it wrong, although Capehart is part of the Washington Post, so that was frustrating spin that he put on it.
Trent Horn:
Right. I think that it’s emblematic of a larger movement in media, both news media and also in late night talk shows. I think a big thing we’re seeing that’s coming out of this millennial cancel culture, millennial wokeness that you saw in early university settings, migrating into the main culture. I think another theme that’s come out of it is this idea of Silence is Violence. We’re seeing it now with Black Lives Matter. This idea that if you just try to be neutral, if you try to not comment on these events, you’re considered to be complicit and to be involved in it.
Now, when someone sees this on social media which is just a regular social media story, news media has to say something even though it’s not newsworthy, late night talk show hosts and celebrities who would normally … Even late night talk shows if you look at the old episodes of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson where something that all Americans could kind of watch, but I think ever since Trump was elected, it’s like we have to draw a line in the sand that we’re not just entertainers or activists. I feel like Jon Stewart and The Daily Show basically changed all that.
Now, this idea that you can’t just be an entertainer, you can’t just be a reporter, you have to be an activist. It’s like they’ve completely imbibed Marx’s idea, “The philosopher’s always talk about the world, but they don’t want to change it.” Do you see that?
Robby Soave:
Yeah, I could make a very long list of the things that have been described as violence recently. Silence is a form of violence, but also words are violence. I saw lack of nuance … This is a direct verbatim from some professor of something, “Lack of nuance and how we characterize issues is a form of violence, like everything’s a form of violence,” which is actually a very important distinction between actions and words that is vital to the enlightenment or post-enlightenment liberalism. If you think throughout most of human history, there was no difference between action and words, right?
If you offended your neighbors, you could be challenged to a duel. You would have some bloody conflict with them, up through the medieval period, you can be executed for saying something against the king because your words we’re a form of violence against the king. It was only until very recently we’ve decided that, “I may disagree with you, but you have a right to speak and it’s not the same thing as physically fighting. I’m allowed to defend myself if you take physical action against me, but your words are not a form of assault.” That’s a very new-
Trent Horn:
That’s classic Voltaire.
Robby Soave:
Right. This is a very, very, very new idea that is precious and important for not having just like war and violence about everything and it’s a fragile … It’s an alien idea. It is not native to humanity or something. I think it is dangerous to want to get rid of it or to want to say … I’ve talked to activists who will say like, “My safety requires that I am not just physically safe from harm, but then I am affirmed in everything that I do, when I leave my house that I feel comforted and affirmed in all the choices and decisions I make.” That’s just such an unreasonable understanding of what the obligations that other people have to you to keep you safe. I don’t know how we could function as a society if that were the case.
Trent Horn:
Right. People take the idea that there is no freedom of speech or rather people have some kind of right to not be offended, though what is ironic of course is that for many of these people, they will put forward ideas like, “For I myself as a Catholic, I am rightly offended by. I am offended by the notion of legal abortion. I am offended by the idea of redefining marriage from its sociological and frankly religious roots, though even anthropological roots of what marriage is for to create family stability and conjugal unions.” I know many people disagree. I know you disagree with me on these things from your previous writings.
Trent Horn:
Guess what? What’s great is someone like you or me could sit down what makes the culture we live, what makes it good is we sit down and we talk about these things and we come to better understandings of one another and we learn how to live with one another in that regard. That’s what I really hope we can find some return to. I want to bring up another example though, just because it was such a memory flash for me when I saw the CHOP occupation in Seattle which was originally CHAZ, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and became Capitol Hill Occupied Protests where you have people taking over police station, taking over six city blocks until their demands for police abolition were met.
“I’m going to take over this space and I’m not going to leave until you give me what I want” which is definitely the opposite of having an enlightened view of the world. It reminded me of the 2009 occupation of the Kimmel Center at New York University where, once again, we see this bleeding from the colleges into the mainstream where a bunch of students demanded NYU do all this stuff, stop funding certain departments and long list of demands. “We’re going to take over the Kimmel Center.”
There’s a great video. I’ll post it to you online at trenthornpodcast.com if anybody would like to see it to watch for themselves and it’s titled the painful last moments of the occupation. I’ll play it here. You have the leader with his cell phone as NYU officials come, break down their barricade and put the student occupation to rest.
Speaker 17:
We would prefer if you release them. We’re using democratic process here. I don’t know if you guys understand that, but what we’re using-
Speaker 18:
We’re not releasing them. They’re talking about being suspended.
Speaker 19:
What are you doing?
Speaker 18:
You cannot come in here. This is students’ free space. Excuse me.
Speaker 20:
Hands off me.
Speaker 18:
Excuse me, brutality here. You’re on camera. You’re on camera. You’re on camera. Well, we’re here in this room and we’re welcoming discussion and dialogue on that and we will not cooperate with you. I don’t know. We need to use a consensus process to go move forward. You guys need to give us some time. This is directly democratic and you’re making everyone very upset. It’s very much impossible for us to proceed and we cannot guarantee cooperation from every individual in the room until we-
Speaker 21:
There’s no cooperation. You guys need to leave.
Speaker 18:
All right. We need to democratically decide on that on how to proceed.
Speaker 21:
I’d like you first to identify yourselves.
Trent Horn:
First in that clip, I love the security officer brought in, “There’s nothing democratic here. You have to go. You can’t be here,” but the main student narrating this and filming it on his cellphone, to me, it’s almost like progressive woke millennialism condensed into a person even with the tone of voice that he uses. “We’re using a democratic process here if you don’t understand that,” like everything he heard his intersectional injustice class at NYU. It’s hard, Robby. I remember watching this when it first happened and being amused by it, but this idea that I can do whatever I want to get what I want, it’s left the campus, right?
Robby Soave:
Well, yeah, it has. By the way, the false characterization of that is democracy or something like … That’s not democracy. I have plenty of concerns about how democracy can sometimes override individual as someone who’s really big about individual rights. You can have individual rights voted away by a majority people and have to be a problem. I’m not one to fetishize democracy in other words is what I’m saying, but they do, and yet, then, they’ll say, “Well, we can just go and knock down the statue of,” whoever it is, Andrew Jackson, whatever.
That’s not democracy. Don’t we have to have a vote or the society has to decide to do that. You’re just a bunch of people who said you could do that. It’s actually covering will to power thing where they’re just claiming it’s democracy, but it’s not popular. It’s not something that most people would think. They’re totally ignorant to the fact that there’s millions of people in the country who disagree with so much of these foundational things that they’re asserting about the language about what’s offensive, about what’s allowed and they act like they’re the majority, but they’re really not.
Trent Horn:
Well, I remember the first time I ever went to New York City. I was in college and it was 2005. I had a friend going to NYU and I went and visited and introduced me to them as his conservative Catholic friend, so someone who attends mass weekly who holds socially conservative views on abortion, marriage sexuality. I remember I went there and I was concerned that they would be very feisty and a lot of contentiousness as I met my NYU friends, fellow students and we were all hanging out. It was strange to me, this was back in 2005, I don’t think it may not be the same today, but it wasn’t contentious as much as they treated me as if I was like an exhibit in a zoo.
They were baffled to meet someone in real life that they only heard of in books or on the internet who held these kind of views like this is an insular bubble like, “Oh, wow. A real one of them in real life,” as if they were just amazed by it that it seems like a lot of the people who embrace this mindset and I think a lot of people who also oppose this mindset are guilty of the same sin. They get wrapped in this echo chamber and this bubble and they can’t get out of it. Do you think that’s a problem keeping us from having a better free market of ideas that people are just stuck in these bubbles?
Robby Soave:
Well, I think it’s a problem in these spaces we’re describing, maybe it’s college campuses, that they are too at least would agree, especially we’re talking about the kind of elite liberal arts institutions. You’re talking about places that are very, very much bubbles of far left progressive thought, wholly unreflective of what the rest of the culture or the rest of the country is like and you do see … You’ve seen there are studies, there are some scientific evidence that these kinds of far left liberals do a very bad job or have a low grasp or understanding of what people on the right think that is not necessarily true in the other direction.
I think it’s part of the fraying that is occurring or the lack of ability to have a conversation about anything because people are so far apart or they can find their own like-minded community, I guess. It’s very easy to wall yourself off from discussions with others where over time people get pretty good at sorting into the right club, the right tribe, the right identity and you can pretty much just interact with people you completely agree. On social media, there are tools to allow you to do this if that’s what you want to do, that campus environment provides that.
Then increasingly, you’re seeing the small number of people I’m criticizing trying to make the workplace one of their spaces and using … I haven’t really talked about this as much yet but threatening to invoke the formal legal system to get it. That’s part of the story of what we’ve seen on campus is formal rules against harassment being weaponized, just way beyond the way they are intended to be used to just chill any meaningful human interaction or discussion that is at all offensive to anyone for any reason.
Trent Horn:
Right, that someone will take harassment, they just define it as, “Anything that makes me feel harassed or even harangued or challenged, that if I have to be challenged and that produces negative emotions and feelings inside of me from your viewpoint that I don’t agree with it, then it’s considered harassment.” It just means you’re free from the actual criminal definitions of what harassment are, not from being adults in a marketplace of ideas, engaging one another with our differences. Last question I have for you as we come to a close, do you see any hope in reviving a true sense of liberalism in the sense of using liberty for all of us to approach the truth closer together and to have this marketplace of ideas where we see one another as people and can learn to live with one another with our disagreements and even modify our views based on interactions with one another?
Robby Soave:
I think right now is a very discouraging time and it’s going to get a little bit worse at least before there’s any hope that it could get better, but at some point, someone is going to have to take a stand. Well, plenty of individuals have taken stands, but like people, managers are going to have to say, “No, you know what? I’m not bowing to you, and if you have a problem with that, then we’re going to have a dispute, but I’m not just giving you everything you want.” Companies are going to have to do that. College campuses are going to have to do that more than they are currently. There’s been some effort, I think, to have better free speech norms at, at least, some institutions that might curb this problem so that we don’t have another outbreak of this years from now, but in the immediate future and social media just being such a pernicious influence on all of this.
I think unless there’s a concerted effort to guard people’s privacy a little bit better in our social media and just plain media environment, so that could make a difference if we decided, “You know what? We’re just statute of limitations even for not obviously the law, but even for social canceling of anything you did before you were 18. If we could just agree to that you wouldn’t have any more news stories about it, you wouldn’t try to do it. If that took hold, that would be a tremendously positive thing. Will it happen? Certainly not for sure, but it’s possible. I hope it’s possible.
Trent Horn:
I hope so too. I’d also give advice to those on the other side who embraces cancel culture that honestly if they just let people have their say with views you disagree with, I think what’s going to happen they think like, “Well, if I cancel you, then the views go away,” well, what I think happens is they become more malignant that if someone feels persecuted and unjustly treated, then they’re just going to retreat to the darkened corners of the internet where their view which they may have disagreed with but metastasizes and becomes legitimately hateful or awful because they develop this persecution complex. I think the other thing people can do is let people have their say, otherwise, you’re going to pressure them to go into these darkened areas and become something much worse. Robby … Go ahead.
Robby Soave:
As the right increasingly borrows this tactic and starts using it against the left, like the end of the Reign of Terror is Robespierre getting marched to the guillotine too, right? This could fall out of favor with the left because it’s used against them aggressive.
Trent Horn:
Right, absolutely. Your new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, where can people get a copy?
Robby Soave:
Wherever books are sold. Amazon is a speedy delivery process, but it’s also in bookstores.
Trent Horn:
Wonderful. Where can people go to learn more about you and check out your work?
Robby Soave:
Yes, reason.com and you can follow me on Twitter just my name @robbysoave where I post most of my articles and my thoughts on these matters and others.
Trent Horn:
Wonderful. Robby, thank you so much for stopping by at the Council of Trent Podcast.
Robby Soave:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Trent Horn:
All right and thank you all for hanging out with us to this interview. Be sure to check out the links in our description at trenthornpodcast.com You can get access to those show resources, the ability to exclusively comment and lots of other good stuff. If you become a Patreon at trenthornpodcast.com for as little as $5 a month. Be sure to support us, help us to reach more people. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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