You've been effectively driven out of your own university as an undergraduate,
standing up against racism.
Indeed.
These people had flipped the script and said,
if you don't sign up for our racism,
you're a racist.
To the extent that I am recognized,
it is typically as a result of the meltdown at
evergreen and my stance.
It's evergreen state called evergreen state college in Olympia,
Washington,
where I taught for 14 years along with my wife,
Heather highing,
who taught there for 15 years we faced a mob of
people who accused me of racism.
And these were students.
They were students I had never met.
And the event was so colorful.
And eventually when the world caught on to the fact that the protesters who
became writers had uploaded footage to the net.
And so the whole event could effectively be seen from their perspective.
It raised interest in some other quadrants.
So for example,
I ended up on Joe Rogan's program,
which is the place I'm.
Probably most recognized from.
And you know,
my first appearance there,
we talked about the evergreen situation.
And anyway,
that's a,
that's the bulk of how people know me.
Alright,
so you were a biologist teaching at a relatively
obscure college that had previously been known for social
activism.
And I didn't love your intro introduction because when you say,
well,
the students accused me of racism that leaves sort of a
weird question.
Like why was he accused of racism?
Let me solve the puzzle just immediately.
Maybe you can't do this because that was the closest we'd seen to a
Maoist takeover inside of the United States of America ever.
Like it was a case of mass insanity and the videos showed it to be mass
insanity.
And unless you had been indoctrinated to believe that Maoism of
some form malice,
reeducation was normal,
the rest of the world said,
OMG,
what the heck is going on at this completely insane.
It wasn't just like one of these college craziness pieces,
this is really an episode of broad
institutional madness that was localized there.
And I just,
I want to take it to be self evident because it is self-evident the video
exists.
And if you took the people who were trying to pretend that you were
a racist in their own terms,
that was sufficient to,
it was like the unreliable narrator.
They were,
they were debunking themselves in the eyes of everyone who hadn't come
under the spell of this particular kind of madness.
Well,
there's a little,
a little more to it.
In the sense that they were entirely unprepared
for a white.
Guy,
willing to say,
no,
I'm simply not a racist.
And it just didn't occur to them that that was going to happen.
And it didn't occur to them that my own students weren't going to
flee to their side at the point that they leveled their accusation because those
things would have been normal in this environment.
But in my case,
I grew up in a home.
There were plenty of flaws in that home,
as you know,
but one of the places I don't think it was flawed was that it was very clear
headed about issues of inequality,
race justice.
And so I,
I really have the sense that it's,
these issues were really not new to me.
And I had a long history at the college,
lots of students of color.
Blaming too much.
I don't mean to be rude about it,
but they were just crazy.
They were crazy.
But my point is the accusation is in and of itself.
So powerful in modern circumstances that people,
the idea of standing up to it doesn't occur to most people.
And the fact is I was not well enough positioned
the thing descended into madness.
It descended into literal anarchy with armed students,
roving the campus.
The same mob was looking for me,
searching car to car.
For example,
it was a very dangerous situation,
baseball bats,
but,
but what I'm getting at is
I checked with myself and did not feel vulnerable to this accusation.
I felt most people could not endure it,
but I was in a position to,
and in an odd way.
Had been effectively driven out of your own university as an undergraduate,
standing up against racism.
Indeed,
these people had flipped the script and said,
if you don't sign up for our racism,
you're a racist.
Yeah,
they didn't.
I don't,
you know,
here's the thing.
I,
I have two documents that I've studied that have a lot of longevity to them.
One begins with,
we hold these truths to be self evident and the other one begins with in the
beginning.
And I think we've made a huge mistake taking this as an argument.
It's a non-serious position held by morons and idiots or people who have been
indoctrinated and infected with an idea that there's something left wing
about being a racist.
I'm not interested in it.
And I also think that it's really important to stop giving these people their
due.
Like it's really important to exclude them from the conversation,
because if you have to have a three day symposium as to whether or
not racism can be redefined in a way that
makes it impossible for certain people to be racist,
but impossible for other people not to be racist,
there's just no point.
It's just,
it just needs to be thrown in the garbage because it just,
it's a suicide idea that wastes everyone's time and plunges the world into
stupidity madness and hatred.
Well,
you and I are in total agreement about the necessity to shut the bad actors out
of the,
the conversation.
I do have some concern about a large number of people who fall into one of two
camps.
They're either confused or they suffer from so much cowardice that they will
sign up for ideas that they ought to know are wrong.
Yeah.
But I think you're not getting the message.
We've made a huge mistake.
And I refuse to spend time because these people have
decided that this is a text that we should pay,
that they have a serious point.
It's a non serious point.
It's a terrifying moronic,
non serious point that you can redefine racism to be anti-racism and anti-racism
to be racist.
Nobody knows this better than me.