The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness
has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be...
I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes
from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right,
internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill,
as the saying goes, the allusion from The Matrix.
When they are exposed the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in
college campuses or in The New York Times or in respectable media, that are almost like
a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they're immediately infected with both
the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them
to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.
Let me give you some examples.
Here is a fact that's gonna sound ragingly controversial but is not, and that is that
capitalist societies are better than communist ones.
If you doubt it, then just ask yourself the question:
Would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea?
Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany or in the 1960s?
I submit that this is actually not a controversial statement, but in university campuses, it
would be considered flamingly radical.
Here's another one.
Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality,
in their tastes and interests.
This is not controversial to anyone who has even glanced at the data.
The kind of vocational interest tests of the kind that your high school guidance counselor
gave you were given to millions of people, and men and women give different answers as
to what they wanna do for a living and how much time they want to allocate
to family versus career and so on.
But you can't say it.
A very famous person on this campus did say it, and we all know what happened to him.
He's no longer, well, he is on this campus, but no longer in the same office.
Here's a third fact that is just not controversial, although it sounds controversial, and that
is that different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.
You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Look it up on their website.
The homicide rate among African Americans is about seven or eight times higher than
it is among European Americans.
And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist Database, and you find that worldwide the
overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist acts are committed by Islamist extremist groups.
If you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them or someone mentions
them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions, such as that women are inferior,
that African Americans are naturally violent, that we all ought to be Anarcho-capitalists
and do away with all regulation and social safety nets, that most terrorism in this country
is the fault of Muslims.
These are unwarranted conclusions because for each one of these facts there are very
powerful counterarguments for why they don't license racism and sexism
and Anarcho-capitalism and so on.
The fact that men and women aren't identical has no implications for whether we should
discriminate against women for a number of reasons.
One of them is for any traits in which the sex is different, and two distributions have
enormous amounts of overlap, so that you can't draw a reliable conclusion
about any individual from group averages.
Number two, the principle of opposition to racism and sexism is not a factual claim that
the sexes and races are indistinguishable in every aspect.
It's a political and moral commitment to treat people as individuals, as opposed to pre-judging them
by the statistics of their group.
Third, we know that some of the statistical generalizations
about races and sexes change over time.
So, what is true now may not necessarily be true in 10 or 20 years.
These are all reasons why you can believe that the sexes are different and be a very
strong feminist, why you can believe that differences between the races exist and be
very strongly opposed to any form of racism.
In the case of, say, rates of violent crime, it used to be, go back 100 years, the rate
of violent crime among Irish Americans was far higher than among other ethnic groups.
That obviously changed.
There's no reason that that can't change in the case of current racial differences.
In the case of terrorism, the majority of domestic terrorism is committed by Right-Wing
extremist groups, not by Islamic groups within this country.
Of course, through much of its history Islam was far more enlightened than Christendom.
There was no equivalent of the Inquisition.
There was no equivalent of the wars of religion in the classical history of Islam.
Finally, in the case of the fact that capitalism is really a better system than Marxism, every
successful capitalist society has regulation, has a social safety net, and, in fact, some
of the countries with the strongest social safety nets are also the countries that are
most market-friendly, that have the greatest degree of economic freedom.
These are all reasons why you can believe all of these
and not necessarily drift toward extremist positions.
In fact, why you can be a Progressive, a Centrist, a Liberal, even a Leftist, and believe all
of these because you're exposed not only to the facts but how to put them in context.
Now let's say that you have never even heard anyone mention these facts.
The first time you hear them, you're apt to say, number one, the truth has been withheld
from me by universities, by mainstream media, and, moreover, you will be vindicated when
people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted, all the more reason
to believe that the Left, that the mainstream media, that universities
can't handle the truth.
So, you get vindicated over and over again, but, worst of all, you're never exposed to
the ways of putting these facts into context so that they don't lead to racism and sexism
and extreme forms of Anarcho-Libertarianism.
So, the politically correct Left is doing itself an enormous disservice when it renders
certain topics undiscussable, especially when the facts are clearly behind them because
they leave people defenseless the first time they hear them against the most extreme and
indefensible conclusions possible.
If they were exposed, then the rationale for putting them into proper political and moral
context could also be articulated, and I don't think you would have quite the extreme backlash.