Greg Lukianoff: evaluation

Transcript context

…It’s really weird how that happened. Maybe you can explore why a thing that has, kind of sounds good at first, can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people. I mean, this is what you described with a perfect rhetorical fortress, which is a set of questions. Maybe you can elaborate on what the perfect rhetorical fortress is. So the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that’s been developed on the left to not ever get to someone’s actual- … on the left to not ever get to someone’s actual argument. I want to make a flow chart of this about here’s the argument and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument. I started to notice this certainly when I was in law school, that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people. Perfect rhetorical fortress step one, and I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well, that you can dismiss people if you can argue that they’re conservative. They don’t have to be conservative, to be clear. You just have to say that they are. I never read Thomas Sowell because he was a right-winger. I didn’t read Camille Paglia because someone had convinced me she was a right-winger. There were lots of authors when I was in law school among a lot of very bright people. It really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something conservative, then you didn’t really have to think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously. That’s a childish way of arguing, but nonetheless, I engaged in it. It was a common tactic. I even mentioned in the book there was a time when a gay activist friend, who I think decided to lean to my left, but nonetheless had that pragmatic experience of actually being an activist, said something like, “Well, just because someone’s conservative doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” and I remember feeling scandalized at some level of just being like, “Well, no, it’s not the whole thing. What we’re saying is that they’re just kind of bad people with bad ideas.” You can just throw, “Oh, that guy’s a right-winger.” You can just throw that.…

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