Terrible Ideas, Taken Seriously. Peter Boghossian talks to Armstrong & Getty

taken so seriously on college campuses? So I'm Strong and Getty extra large because four hours simply usn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty extra Large. So freaking interesting. We've been fans of these people ever since the grievance studies thing hit last January. Yeah, the fake papers that they got into various journals. Peter Bogo and James Lindsay and how and pluck Rose. They made up just ridiculous crap.

I mean ridiculous, no, as you say, nobody but an academic could believe it, but fall down funny crap and actually got them accepted into various peer review reviewed journals. And the fancy universities across the country. Peter Bogan wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal recently, idea laundering an academia. Peter as an assistant professor of philosophy right

in the belly of the Beast Portland State University. He's also the co author of a book, How to Have Impossible Conversations that we need to talk about at some point down the road, but probably not today. Peter Bagoan joins us, Peter, this is a real pleasure. We've been looking forward to talking to you for some time. I love talking to you, guys, I really do, and I sincerely appreciate your support because I can't do what what

I do without without you. So thanks. Yeah, when the whole grievance studies story hit and we were just so taken with it and it's so exciting for everyone. And I've watched a ton of YouTube is with you and James Lindsay and that over the last year. So, but has any progress been made our universities better off than they were before you did this or that's a good question. No, no, no progress has been made. In fact, um, they've they've doubled down on their nonsense and there you go take

scholarship and attempts to successful attempts to self credential. So the situation as I see it, has actually gotten worse inside the academy, But outside the academy with the Dave Chappelle comedy show or Bill Burr or certain cultural now they want to know a gender Santa claus Um. I think outside the academy you're seeing pushback, but withinside the academy that absolutely it's absolutely gotten worse. Well, and I'm sorry to hear that given the number of dollars American

families are throwing it educating their young ones. Are you surprised to hear that? I'm not surprised at least. I mean, this is the same dynamic of power you seeing government and anywhere else where power and money are at stakes. Self policing rarely works. But I do love the idea,

idea that more and more people are feeling um. I hate to use the term empowered because it's trade out of grieving studies, but they're they're they're feeling more empowered to call bullshit on this stuff and they realize, wait a minute, I'm not a bad person because I think this is goofy um this is goofy right. And not only that you're not a bad person because you're a male, you're also not a rapist because you're a male. You're

not a bad person because you're white. You your your ancestral line has absolutely nothing to do with your decency and dignity as a person. So I think it was the Wall Street Journal that ran your piece about idea laundering where we explained that whole thing, And that's why we wanted to have you on today because I found it's fascinating because I've wondered all along, where do the stuff comes from? How did this stuff catch on? Can you explain idea laundering to us? Yeah, So think about

it this way. This is how they get away with it. This is how they do it, and here's how they do it. To an example, let's say that you let's say the three of us have some kind of moral idea, like, let's just give me a moral idea like you know, um, I don't know, like yeah, it's wrong to steal or I was thinking like something contemporary political issues like you know, uh, you know, impeach Trump for moral senses. Okay, so we have an idea, you know, build a wall. Let's just

use that one. We need to build a wall, or we build a wall, doesn't matter what it is. Okay, you have this strong moral urge, you feel something really strong in your heart. I have this strong moral urge. I'm in the academy. I'm a professor at university. We both know, we both hang out. Maybe we know each other from Twitter, or maybe we know each other. We a life for Facebook? What have you? So we we all you need a couple of other people have these

strong moral urges. What we do is a result of that. Is I a could journal, and in that I call it the journal of you know, um some some fancy academic name. I take papers into my journal that pushed the narrative, whatever moral narrative I want to push. Stealing is wrong, stealing is right. We want to build a wall. Everybody should be polyamorous. Note it doesn't matter what it is. Am I clear? So far? Okay? Cool? We then published

in this journal, my journal that I create. I we take those articles and I start teaching them to my students. So the idea, it's called ideal anders is Brett Wae and my friend Brett Weinstein's idea. He was the professor who was hunted at Evergreen. It comes in as an idea and it goes out as knowledge. So when you ask these people, well, how do you know that obesity is just a narrative? How do you know that there's

white fragility and then all whites are racist? How do you know that whatever insane idea they want to put forth, how do you know there's no such a thing as biological sex. Well, it's in this journal, but the journal itself is bogus. So the whole journal is it's been fabricated.

Whole clause. You have a bunch of ideologues who get together, who have a moral idea, make a journal, publishing the journal, and it comes out to the other end is knowledge, And I imagine it's chuck full of highly questionable research, generally not even questionable, totally fabricated. The whole thing is fact, the whole it's fabricated, whole cloth. It's no relationship to reality whatsoever. That's no scientific method, there's no control groups,

there's no testing, there's literally nothing. So it's so it's purposeful. Then they make this stuff up because they're so certain of their moral belief that they're they're willing to make this up so that they can teach it. Well, I'm teaching straight out of this journal, right, this review journal, right, and but your pearents are all whack jobs like you, And it's it's even worse listening to you guys. You're just you really are such nice people, and we're talking

about some really vile id logs here. So it's far worse than that characterization. So it's not only that. So the way that this game works, if you get seven papers in seven years, if you're on a tenor track, you you you received tenure. When you receive tenure, that's a job for life. So you have now fabricated a journal. It's totally until the to reality. You're teaching these things to students' knowledge. Those students are getting out and going

to the workplace. They're going to Google, like what they did to the Google engineer James more famous from the now Google memo. They're going to Twitter and the ship shadow banning. They're going to YouTube and institute of trutionalizing them monetization. But even within the academy itself, they institute

mechanisms to restrict speech right biased response teams. A student can anonymously be reported to over two hundred universities have biased response teams, divert offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And these words don't mean what you think they mean. So they institutionalize these deranged ideas that they themselves have

manufactured in journals which are completely unscientific. These are the ramblings of ideologues, and they point to all of this stuff as knowledge, and anybody who questions it is a racist or a bad person, or a homophobe or bigot. Well, and I'd imagine that each iteration of it, each layer of or every semester it's taught, adds to the credibility, right. And one of the things you mentioned in your article is building up over time, over decades or whatever, some

of these whack job ideas. You know, you get more and more articles from multi generations that sign onto this crap that is absolutely correct, And that's how they manufacture a canon of knowledge. This is a completely pretend canon of knowledge. Well, and and honestly, what makes it so terrible and makes me so worried about it is that these ideologies, as you mentioned, are utterly repugnant. If you're a student of of global politics of history or whatever.

You understand that inter ethnic, interracial, inter religious strife is the source of most of the horrors um, you know, putting aside communism, um of of the last several centuries. If you can whip up people to believe that the other is evil, which is what these people are doing all the time, I mean, the results are truly horrific. Right, and again you got your very nice people. It's not

only that they're evil. Privilege is their original sin. But unlike original sin from which you can find redemption through the savior Jesus Christ, there is no redemption for these people. If you were born white and male and cists in hetero I would use a word or on the air beginning with f We can believe you are fucked. There's no redemption. That's it. Yeah, you're you're you're irrevocably stained, indelibly stained by your whiteness, your maleness, your privilege, your heterosexuality,

and your sister genderness. That doesn't sound at all Nazi. So somebody, So somebody could start decades ago, you know, some something about white privilege and and start a journal and by now they're they're a senior member on whatever campus, and they're looked at the here's somebody for twenty five years has been doing research into this completely made up. It's been made up the entire time. And they're an expert.

They're a quote unquote expert, and the media contact them and they teach students, and their students didn't go on at twenty five years. They go on to leadership positions and they sway the academy and they they're the ones that you hear what they're consulted. They're consulted for jury cases.

I'm telling you this is a massive problem. And and the question becomes for the university system is my friend for Oisin said, if you're if you have a dog and your dog has rabies, that's not your dog anymore. If your dog has cancer, then you get the dog treated. Does the university system have rabies or does that have cancer? Interesting? And I think it at this point, the university system has rabies. It's irredeemable and nothing can be done about it.

Are we're going to get worse? Am I correct that? And I'm thinking of um the recent move in the University California system that you must submit a statement of diversity, is that what it's called to get hired. I imagine hiring practices are highly tilted toward recruiting people who are going to tow the party line. Well yeah, okay, so

this isn't another conversation. But you're absolutely correct diversity, equity and inclusion, and we should probably spell those words out at some point, but you have to hire a diversity statement moreover, and I published a using the Philosopher's magazine about this called deluded Departments. Here's how it works. One of the single greatest insights in all of critical thinking comes from the a man by the name of Dr Michael Shermer. Why does smart people believe weird things? Well,

we've answered that question. Here's the answer to it. Because smart people are better at rationalizing bad ideas. In other words, the smarter you are, the better you are at justifying a bad conclusion, and then you convince yourself that it's true. Okay. That same mechanism operates when you have more people involved. So if you have ten people involved, they're better at rationalizing a bad idea. What we have now in the university system is we have entire university departments that are

pumping out justifications complete nonsense. And those justifications are themselves based upon the literature that these people have fabricated. Well, and if it were merely that they were claiming dinosaurs were ancient giant people, I mean that would be idiotic and and and you know, uh, not temptable from an intellectual point of view. But the fact that they're pitching the most horrific sort of ideologies is Yeah, you talk

about being fucked trum. I was watching a YouTube video with I think you and James Lindsay, or maybe it was just James talking about the whole critical race thing and how it's a no win situation and I worry about this raising I got a couple of young white boys, um where either you're you're a racist or you're anti racist in the in the new theory of things, either you're actively working either you admit your racist and you actively work toward being anti racist, which is defined it's

undefined herble and defined by others. They will tell you what it means exactly. You can't ever win and that stuff. It makes my head want to explode, but it seems to actually be happening. Right. It's called a costa trap, and that is so this is the This is the way they view the world. We already know you're a racist, so you should just admit it and work toward it. And if you say no, I'm not a racist, they point to the fact that you said no, I'm not

a racist as evidence that you're a racist. So there's literally nothing that you can do if you start with the idea that someone is a racist, no matter what they say has taken as evidence of their racism. You know, there's there's there's no redens. Let me just let me just go on some My daughter was adopted from China. We got her as a waiting child, which means she's disabled, and I'm not using that as a weapon or touting that around. That's not evidence that you're not a racist.

If my wife were African Americans, she's not. But if you were, that would also not be evidence that you're not. There is no evidence that you can provide somebody that you're not a racist. These starting given is that you're a racist. How many people think like you on college campuses as opposed to the whack jobs. Who's winning this battle in terms of numbers? Yeah, that is a fantastic question.

The part of the problem is We don't know. So we don't know because people are afraid to voice their actual opinions because if they voice their actual opinions, then the mob will come for them. And we have seen over and over and over again. You know, Laura Kitness writes some great stuff about how Title nine has been used. We don't really know how many people hate this. I mean people will come up to me and they'll whisper something, or I'll get emails. Think about this, just really think

about this. I'll get emails anti Trump emails on p s U s UH University server. Now I should say I'm a liberal and I'm an atheist and I don't like Trump to say the least, But that is so inappropriate. It's beyond inappropriate to use university mechanisms to give political opinions. Here's the other thing these people have managed. And I know this is going to sound utterly crazy, but it's true and the evidence bears this out. First, they came

to the conservatives. There's only one person at the entire unipruence a university who I know of who's a conservative. Now there may be others, but they're probably too terrified to speak out. There's one moderate and they've come for him. You should look Bruce Gilly up. He wrote the paper The Case for Colonialism, and they have been greefing him. He this is fascinating. He wanted to have a court. Now again, this is not a conservative, he's a centrist moderate.

But for these people Stephen Pinker calls at the left pole if you're on the left, everybody the far left, everybody looks like they're on the right. So I, as a liberal atheist, look like I'm on the right. They think I'm on the far right. So this guy, Bruce gilly wanted a course in conservative political thought. The university denied it because they said there wasn't enough diversity in

the course. So so they've come for him. The course on irony there at Portland State right now, they're coming for the liberals, right, So now they're coming for people like me because I am a show whatever they want to say. But the but here's the problem with this. Part of the problem is they have created this insane ecosystem where any time you want to voice, any time you even ask somebody for evidence, Hey, what's your evidence for that, that's construed as racist. Think about that. That's

a micro asking someone for evidence as a microaggression. This is the exact opposite of what we should be doing in the university, because evidence and appealing to logic is white paternalism based traditional right, we're screaming away from the Enlightenment back towards somebody at the top gets to decide what's true and what's not exactly, and the idea is you can't disable the master's house with the master's tools. Reason, evidence,

the scientific method. Those are all from white system, heterosexual males. Therefore they're tainted as evil. You know, that's why Hitler hated communism because Marx was a Jew. Right, this is the kind of the same thing that's employed, the same way of thinking that's in place. Wow, it's just it's so true bling. I mean, the idea, the ideology itself is incredibly troubling. The idea that young people at their most vulnerable, vulnerable are being indoctrinated into this is truly disgusting.

I don't you know, I'm glad we have a voice and a and a reasonably you know, significant one. This is incredibly disturbing. Yeah, and I really this is the message I really want to get to people, and I hope that I articulate this to do you guys know what phrenology is? Yeah? I think so reading the lumps on people's heads is that what that is? Yeah? Okay, So let's say that these lunatics were had journals of phrenology. That's ideal laundering, right. They write about phrenology and they

know it's true. They say, how do you know it's true? They point to all these articles in the Journal of Chronology, and then they start, you know, not only testing people's skulls, but they start assigning scholarships on the basis of the protrubances in your head, like, oh, this guy is a bump at L seven or whatever, you know, put him

in engineering. Okay. So, if the people in power who are advocating phrenology are liberals, and I call out phrenology as not having enough evidence, that does not make me a conservative. That just makes me someone who doesn't think there's enough evidence to institutionalize and insane idea. If the people in power are conservatives and I call it out, it doesn't matter their political orientation. They're peddling bad ideas. And this is not a matter of right or left

or liberal or atheist. Or believer. It's none of that. This stuff is pure unadulterated bullshit, and their teaching as to kids as knowledge, and it's got to stop. To what extent does this sort of thing resemble a religious cult and it's norms and its enforcement mechanisms and the rest, it's a complete religious cult in James Lindsay and Helen clock Rose and I have written about that extensively. You know, they have the same mechanisms. Blasphemy is big in the

religious space. They have the same mechanisms with political correctness. This case, however, they can actually enforce those mechanisms, enforce blasphemy or political correctness with the university mechanisms, and at some point, let's do let's do this. Let's okay. There are two things going on we haven't talked about, but I think are very important. One is, if you just think about this issue as a free speech issue, you're not understanding the whole thing. These people do not just

want to take away your freedom of speech. This is an issue of cognitive liberty. They want you to think a very certain way, and if you don't do that, they will punish you. And when you understand the problem like that, you understand how unbelievably serious it is and why these ideologues have to be stopped. That's some damn interesting stuff. Man. Okay, what what was the second point you said? He had to Well, okay, yeah, I have to so you know, Okay, it's very complicated. What they've

managed to do. Why this is so difficult is if I say the word to you social justice mostly of course on for sociive. Who isn't for social justice. It's like the word affirmative action. Of course I'm for affirmative action. Of course I'm for positive action. But the words don't mean what people think they mean. So when you say do you want you know, the big push on universities now is to have inclusion, right, And if you just look at the word inclusion, like, well, inclusion, who what

kind of every same person should want inclusion? Well, yeah, every same person should want inclusion. If someone is a minority or sexual minority or transfer, of course they should be included in the conversation. Of course they should feel welcomed. But that's not what inclusion is. Okay, So inclusion means welcoming, all right, Just the definition of what does what does to include? Someone needs to make them feel welcome. But if somebody says something that could make someone feel unwelcome,

then this space isn't inclusive anymore. So what we need to do is to restrict speech so that people won't say anything that makes other people feel unwelcome. So when you hear the word inclusion, what that should translate that in your head is restricted speech. That's what the word inclusion means. And that's another way to rob people of their cognitive liberty. Wow, wow, good stuff. Um, you know, I think the best thing we can do is to recommend folks, uh follow you and and James and Helen

on the Twitter and read the stuff. You're right, and we'll certainly bring it to people's attention as it comes out. Keep fighting the good fighting. We'll stay in touch. I love watching the videos, I love reading your stuff. You know, well, thank you. We we appreciate your support. And what I said the beginning of the hours true, We're just we can't do that. I'm trying to fight a whole university system, and I'm trying to take on a system of indoctrination.

And you know, most people they don't even know what a peer of you paper is and when I call out this nonsense, they come for me. So when I have the support of you guys, that's a huge deal. That that that makes it possible for me to fight keep fighting this fight. So I am incredibly grateful. We'll use us like garden tools, Peter, because we we believe that stuff and we're with you. Well, thank you. I sincerely appreciate that. It's always great to talk. Thanks a

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