 Our next speaker another font a politically correct thought is Tom De Lorenzo a name I'm sure many of you are familiar with you know Tom is one of those rare minds where he's able to work At a very high academic level in two different disciplines in economics and in history Which is which is actually a remarkable achievement in and of itself, but in terms of Of his own life and his own courage. He's taken on two very powerful Groups in America. He's taken on the Hamiltonian Federalists Who still plague us today in a million different guys's and of course? He's taken on the tremendous cult of Lincoln, which in academic circles is basically a firing squad So for that we commend him We're so glad to have dr. Tom De Lorenzo with us today Tom Thank you all for coming and thanks to all the the supporters of the Mises Institute and also the future Supporters who will donate before you leave today that that's a requirement by the way We are not going to let you out of the room And you and you cannot have a lunch either and so well You know when when with the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 80s and early 90s The Marxist left did not just throw in the towel. I remember at the time I was at the University of Tennessee and there was a Marxist Economist on the faculty and I ran into him in the parking lot right in the middle of all this happening with Boris Yeltsin Bombing the Russian Parliament and things like that and and I said John What do you can do now Brick lair carpenter? You know, what's what's what's the future for you? And he said oh no no no we're we're stronger than ever now because we're no longer associated with all these bad guys Chesco and Stalin and all that and so in the and so after after all There are the the Marxist left took two different routes You know, they didn't give up one is they they they paid attention to the socialist economist Robert Heilbrunner Who wrote an article in the New Yorker magazine in 1990? I think it was October 1990 in which he said Yeah, socialism Mises was right I think one of the articles he wrote was actually called the title was Mises was right about socialism And so you would think that meant give up on socialism But but no he said we need that we need to work harder at it We need because it always was about totalitarian control And so it never was about helping the poor helping the laboring class or anything like that So it was always about control and so how do we reassert our control over people's lives? He said well, you know socialism was always sold the name of helping the people and He essentially said people Schmeeple the hell with the people We're for the bugs and the ants and the snakes and all that stuff the planet So let's let's sell socialism now in the name of saving the planet and so and so hence of the watermelons were born a Watermelons or a green on the outside red on the inside And so there's a branch of the Marxist left that all became environmentalists all of a sudden and they're promoting basically centrally planned economies under socialism under the guise of Saving the planet the other branch became cultural Marxist They gave up on the old class struggle between the working class and in the capitalist class and they invented some new classes There's the oppressor class and the oppressed class The oppressors are white heterosexual males and the oppressed class is everybody else Pretty much, you know the whole victim thing and so that's a good way to to to eliminate dissent and and exert totalitarian control over society and so they had those two classes now I've been a university economics professor since 1979 I finished my PhD when I was 24 and I've been at it ever since and all For about the first 30 years of my career every August the university administration, and I've taught at seven different universities The university administration would send out a memo about What the average SAT score is of the incoming freshman and they would usually brag that it's up 10 points or something like that and it would usually be accompanied by a promise that we're going to increase the standards Even more so that we'll have better qualified students and of course the faculty like this Did you hear this and that went on for about 30 years of my career? Do you know year in year out the bragging about? How you know the higher SAT scores and then about six years ago at my current employer Loyola University, Maryland They all of a sudden said we're no longer requiring SAT scores at all as the entrance requirement did away with them and And the result of that I noticed It's been successful Because in the website of the university website this year in August instead of instead of giving us any information About the academic qualifications of the incoming freshman class it said the incoming freshman class is the most diverse class in the history of the college and so that's the objective and so So egalitarianism has become the new secular religion in the the academic seminaries where you send your children and grandchildren and Diversity I think of the word diversity is it's basically some sort of quotas Is really I call it the mating call of the academic administrators and in today's world When the cultural Marxist took over my university about ten years ago the new president came in and He started giving the president's message started saying things like a bemoaning the unequal Distribution of resources around the world all of a sudden and so you know from each according to his ability To each according to his need is his motto. His name is Brian Lanane and His and his academic vice president who's the top academic officer of the university When he had his first meeting with the business school faculty where I teach He looked around the room and he said there are too many people in here who look like me too many white guys in other words and The minority faculty were extremely uncomfortable about that I was looking at my my minority colleagues and they were there was like didn't know where to hide Because what what he was basically saying was he was telling people like me you don't really belong here because you're here because of white privilege and Also, he was telling the minority faculty. Well, maybe you don't belong here either because you're here from affirmative action You know, you don't really belong there, you know, and so You know, so I think that's why one of the reasons why they seem so so uncomfortable And so and then he denounced he announced that diversity would be his number one goal in his you know In his reign as academic vice vice president So that's become the sort of the number one objective of a lot of universities You know more than academics or learning education education Schmeducation is as the attitude some of these people seem to have When they when they do that That's why and I I did call it the mating call of academic administrators in an article on blue Rockwell comm Referring to this guy as Tim Snyder is his name Timothy Snyder and he's no longer the academic vice president of my university He's gonna He's done his thing And so so and so silencing dissent is now praised and taught It's taught to students and it's praised as the morally right thing to do a lot of my students are totally unaware of the case the argument for free speech and academic freedom and in one of the one person who's responsible for this and Unless you know this starts really starts I think in the 60s as a lot of bad things Started in the 60s and there's an academic who's described on the on the web Variously as the evangelist of cultural Marxism He's also called a celebrated intellectual who taught at Harvard Yale in Columbia. His name is Herbert Markuza Mar see you se And he was he's really is sort of one of the gurus of political correctness among the the academic elites that run today's most of today's universities in the United States and How did he become a celebrated intellectual? Well? He wrote a 1955 book called Eros and civilization in which he advised young people the following and I quote Don't work have sex And I guess it never occurred to him that the two things are not mutually exclusive But so so it's idiocy like this that makes you a celebrated intellectual in Harvard I guess and He also denounced the scientific method in science the science and the scientific method are the enemy He called it quote the enemy because quote it denies the reality of utopia and by utopia He meant communism. He was a common. He was a Self-described communist and so it denies the reality of communism what sure does Especially economic science, you know Macy's great book socialism explained that a long long time ago Socialism can never work as an economic system Okay, he opposed freedom of speech and academic freedom for the same reason that it produced too many criticisms of communism You know and so let's just shut everybody up about this and and only give our students positive images of it And it reminds me of my university. I've created a new course called capitalism and its critics It was my way of sneaking Austrian economics into the curriculum and and it's been around I've had it for about 10 years now the this this this course and I use one, you know, sometimes I've used the communist manifesto, you know I I teach the students here's what the bad guys have said and then here's what Macy says about this or anything So go back and forth. Here's what the environmental lunatics say and use there's George recent over here Something like that and and so when I use the communist manifesto, I had a student tell me, you know, please This is the fifth time I've been assigned the communist manifesto at this University But but all all his other professors in philosophy and history Use it as sort of a roadmap to the future, you know, they I use it as a historical artifact and But but to the others the other people said, you know, wouldn't be nice if we had a society like this This student told me what his philosophy professor said and so so too many criticisms He also said this there's no need for logic debate and free exchange of ideas for Marxism provides the answers It reminds me of Al Gore's statement that there's settled science about global warming, you know And I mean the whole I the whole phrase of settled science is is it's so anti science. It's it's It's unbelievable. There's nothing is ever settled in science because all these statistical studies are based on probabilities You know statistics is not it's not physics. It's all based on probabilities And there's always a new hypothesis to come around the corner to question the established view view point That's how we progress in our learning. And so this whole idea that science can ever be totally settled It's pretty dubious. You know, it is in some areas, you know in physics, especially but but not not something like the climate And so and so other views like conservative and libertarian views the views of people like myself and Jeff and Tom Woods Should not be tolerated on campus. Markuza said because they support the status quo And and this has led to the widespread belief in academia today in the United States That only the oppressed deserve tolerance and free speech and academic freedom That's why when they waged these malicious and vicious campaigns of libel and slander Against campus speakers who with whom they oppose they think they're doing the morally righteous thing You know because you know if someone like me shows up at an Ivy League school And they work on organize a protest or shop me down or the campus police have to have to come in or something Ruin the event now. They think that's the morally righteous thing to do because I'm a spokesman for the oppressor class And and I'm going to criticize the oppressed and that was one of Markuza's ideas And he also said that students especially must be indoctrinated in this type of thinking that that only the oppressed deserve free speech That's how we can overturn the status quo And I see all of this fully in place It's so many American universities these days that this and this all comes from this this character Herbert Markuza Another person who I call the high priestess of cultural Marxism is a woman named Catherine McKinnon Is a law professor at the University of Southern California at least she was last time I looked her up on the web I'm who knows we academics are sort of in a sort of like nomads sometimes and skip around different places and And she's known for the view that it has been embraced by a lot of universities that that dissenting views can create a hostile work environment and If you create a hostile work environment for your co-workers that is so hostile that they are incapable of performing their job Then you can be fired That's that's the new the new the thing and in and I was told I was Warned about this myself by Timothy Snyder the academic vice president. I mentioned it at the beginning After after the the president of my university maliciously libeled to Walter Block My friend Walter Block in a speech he gave at my university years ago You know, I've set up a meeting with Snyder that talk talk about this and And and so and I you know in the meantime after Walter was libeled, which I'll explain it in a few minutes What the university didn't understand was that one of my very good friends in Baltimore It was a the radio talk show hoe the late Ron Smith who had a three-hour talk show drive time three to six every day And it was broadcast all the way up to New York and Connecticut You know the big radio station and Ron had Walter and me on for six hours Just just lambasting and destroying these people in their in their their antics And so you so the academic vice president wanted to talk to me about this And he told me that all this was creating a hostile work environment And I told him my response was that I'm the one who now has the hostile work environment And it's because of you that's exactly exactly what I told him You know the day before this happened I had a good work environment, but now you know the whole university Was you know in an uproar over Walter's Tribial comments that were blown up into something evil, but I'll explain that in a little bit And so so dissenting views create a hostile work environment. So essentially what what she's saying Is that you should teach your children sticks and stones will break my bones But names and words are even worse So that's that's the new motto that we should that we should teach And another trick that the academic bureaucrats use and they use this at my University during this whole fiasco with Walter Block was to make grandiose speeches In favor of academic freedom So they'll get the president or some of the academic vice president or something like that To make a speech or issue a an article on the student newspaper about their everlasting devotion to academic freedom and free speech As they crush academic freedom free speech among those who disagree with their extreme left-wing crazy views of political correctness And so and they've developed the the tactic that no student should ever Hear anything That is insensitive or may hurt his or her feelings It's the the infantilization of college students is the business american universities are in these days as a result Even the new york times has protested this if you can believe that In an article on march 21st of this year in the new york times Was about Some things have been going on at brown university brown university has as one of the universities that has led the way in politically correct insanity and what they do if a If a controversial speaker is about to show up, you know, if if god forbid tom woods would ever be invited to brown university This is what might happen They set up what's called a safe room Safe room you go to this room and you can feel safe From from tom from whatever tom would have to say Okay, and this is from the new york times i'm reading this and what is in this safe room So students can say oh my god tom woods is coming to campus. I better head for the safe room lock the door I'm not making this up. This is from the new york times. There are cookies cookies coloring books Play dough calming music calming music pillows Blankets videos of frolicking puppies Of course trauma experts. We got trauma experts So new york times march 21st of this year trauma experts You know just in case some dissenting views and of course, uh, the faculty are now Taught that if there's anything controversial on your syllabus You know the the students are asked to read put a trigger warning on it You know warning warning you might this you might something might be insensitive here Of course, this doesn't apply to all the left wing clap trap that they read You know if you sign the communist manifesto or or dos capital these are you don't need a trigger warning for that What could be controversial about that? Nothing and so so the so and so the and so the academic left has adopted all kinds of mascots And you can never criticize anything a mascot says or does And uh, and if and if and if anything that you say can be construed However remotely to be critical of one of the mascots Well, then you will be granted as a racist the sexist a homophobe and on and on and on Those are these are the tools of the libeler And so and you know and you've all heard examples of this. I guess you know our friend haunts hoppa Who uh who was mentioned earlier? Giving a lecture to an economics class at the unlv where he taught for 20 years And he was giving a lecture on time preference And he was given examples of a high time preference of the type of people who don't save very much for the future And who spend a little more of their money now and he had a long list of the type of people that you might expect You know elderly people who have already put their kids through school and so forth. They're not saving a lot anymore People who never had children They're not saving for their children's education because they never had children things like that and he included homosexuals in there Who don't have children. He said homosexuals with children Different different group and of course the lesson was that there's nothing inherently good or bad about high time preference low time preference It's just your preference And he was basically kicked out of unlv for that some some one student in the class Went to the university administration and complained that it was insensitive to to gay people To to suggest that they might have a high time preference And so and it ended up You know causing him great grief for an entire year There was an international letter writing campaign on haunts's behalf Even the secretary of state of italy wrote a letter to the who haunts knows Wrote a letter to the unlv administration telling them to you know, cut it out. This is ridiculous And but it didn't matter it didn't matter It was all they they they wanted they they thought they could get him Because of his economic views this this this had nothing to do with what haunts said in that one class You know they were they were out You know murray rothbard was gone by this time and he taught at unlv also But haunts was the one outlier. You know, he was the one dissenter that they they just could not tolerate having him there And with the walter block fiasco in my university Walter gave a very mainstream talk on the economics of discrimination. It's a very simple theory It says basically say i'm a if i'm a misogynist I hate women and I have and I have an accounting firm And I have I have a male and a female employee And they can both create a hundred thousand dollars a year for me in revenue with all their billings So they're equally qualified. Okay. I pay the man 90,000 a year and I pay the woman 50,000 a year because i'm discriminating Well, I create a profit opportunity for my competitors who can who can hire the women the woman away at 60 And they still make a 40 thousand dollar a year profit because she can generate a hundred thousand in revenue And then somebody else will hire her away at 70 or 80 and that's how competition in the marketplace Deloots the effect of discrimination. It does it doesn't eliminate it You know people have been discriminating against each other for thousands of years in one way or another But that's how the market penalizes Racial discrimination or sex discrimination in the job place. That's all he said And and again one student was sent there. It was all a setup He was sent there to try to detect something insensitive And so he went to the cultural marxist gang on campus Not me. I was a sponsor of the lecture He went to the cultural marxist gang and said it was insensitive You know what Walter blocks and then so the president of the university sent out an email to all faculty staff students and alumni Apologizing for the insensitive remark that was made, but he never said what the remark was That was made and so that's how they operate. That's how they operate But uh, but we we Walter and I prevailed in the end. We went on the radio for six hours We wrote dozens of articles on lou rockwell.com So much so that one of my students told me that the administration sent a memo to students saying don't read do lou rockwell.com It's a it's a hate speech Thing of course that that guaranteed that every single student would look up lou rockwell.com didn't it So lou probably has hundreds of additional readers as a result of of the of this this When the american enterprise institute Sponsored a debate a public debate on immigration policy The soviet poverty law center, which some people call southern poverty laws Although they don't practice law and they have an endowment of over 20 million dollars So they obviously don't help poor people either or they would give some of that away to poor people in montgomery where they're Alabama where they're located They they they said that a e i was mainstreaming hate You know mainstreaming hate by a debate when a group of police and military officers formed this group called oath keepers And what's the oath they said well? We all take an oath to defend the constitution And we're going to reaffirm that oath That's it. That's all we're doing They're a hate group. They lay the soviet poverty law center label them a hate group and the media and akadim by the way They treat the soviet poverty law center like they treat the pope You know these i have the greatest respect for these They call it the southern poverty law center and then they they say the a hate group. They'll call oath keepers a hate group When when ron paul was running for president the department of homeland security excuse me Under under jen and napolitano Issued a statement of press release saying that Cars with a ron paul for president bumper sticker Could be could i you could identify these people as likely terrorist threats And that came from the soviet poverty law center and and of course the big furor was Was dusted up over that and so they backed off and rescinded that they they took that off the website of the department of fatherland security you know And all of this is why chris rock and jerry seinfeld no longer perform their comedy acts on college campuses They gave up on it, you know, they're these are humorless Stalinists that run the college campuses these days And so there's no place for chris rock or jerry seinfeld On there seinfeld even had some 20 year old 20 year old nitwit write him a letter Instructing him on the proper way to deliver comedy to an audience if you can What what kind of education that that is that kid have to think that he had the the ability to lecture Jerry seinfeld on comedy Okay The final thing i want to say is you know, you know preparing this talk You know i taught a course on under the auspices of the mesis academy several times on high x famous book the road to serfdom I first taught it after Tom tom and tom woods and urie malzef our friend urie malzef appeared on glenn becks television show And talked about the road to serfdom In glenn beckett such a big audience it went to number one in sales on amazon.com the next day And so like that very day i put together a five week online course on the road to serfdom I thought it'd be very very popular and i taught it a few times And there's a chapter near the end of the road to serfdom called the end of truth And there are some good nuggets there that hayek wrote that i think are very very telling and educational about uh political correctness and the cultural marxists that run the american universities and so i'm going to read just a few of these things Hayek wrote that totalitarian propaganda Is destructive of all morals Because it undermines one of the foundations of all morals the sense of and the respect for the truth You know if we if we quit searching for the truth with all this censorship It just it doesn't just undermine the truth about whatever the subject is you're studying It's destructive of all morals because it's destructive of the sense and respect for the truth Another thing hayek said that's relevant i think He said in the disciplines dealing directly with human affairs and therefore most immediately affecting political views such as history law or economics The disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed in a totalitarian system These disciplines have in all totalitarian countries become the most fertile factories for the official myths Which the rulers use to guide the minds and wills of their subjects official myths And of course, that's one of the things the mesis institute has been doing for for 30 years 30 some years now is is Abolishing and destroying a lot of these myths And and searching for truth That's one of the things that really attracted me to the austrian school as a young student I was I was forced to read paul samuelson and all of the mainstream kansians And then I came across the austrians and it was even when I was 18 19 20 years old as a college student It was it was very apparent to me that there's a different approach here I thought these mainstream guys They're sort of just bragging about how much math they know and how much how confusing they can make the world seem But the austrians were very different They were all they had this relentless pursuit of the truth and they blended economics and history and philosophy and statistics and And that it was very obvious to me And so and so and so that's why I've been associated with the mesis institute for about almost for about 30 years now Because that's the enterprise It's it's confronting these official myths and through economic education And of course we stand on some very big shoulders of Of von mesis and hayek and rothbard and others Another thing hayek said in the road to serfdom. He said the word truth itself Causes to have its Ceases to have its old meaning It describes no longer something to be found With the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of weather in any particular instance the evidence warrants a belief It becomes something to be laid down by authority Okay, it's laid down by authority. They politically correct way of thinking In the walter block case, for example, you know why they why they became incensed over walter giving a very mainstream Talk about the economics of discrimination And by the way, walter blocks dissertation chairman at columbia many many years ago was gary becker And gary becker's doctoral dissertation at the university of chicago Was turned into a book called the economics of discrimination. So here's that his second generation economics professor basically repeating what he was taught in graduate school 40 years earlier And and he was maliciously libeled By university president for for it okay, and so Anyway, I just wanted to bring that point up and the final thing the hayek says is intolerance is openly extolled as I said at the beginning In this hayek writing this in 1943 And so and then the herbert marcusa back in the 60s was saying we should uh extoll or praise intolerance And and that's exactly what has happened now as far as as far as what can be done Well, of course speaking truth to power is what we do at the mesis institute In many ways with our educational programs, especially with young people and young people students I think are they are Incensed as much as anybody is when they understand that they've been lied to Used as political pawns Miseducated They don't like it And a lot of them sit back and tolerate all this political correctness has been my experience But they know what's going on A lot of them do not all of them are fooled by by by this relentless Drum beat of of political correctness at the universities a lot of my students that I've talked to they laugh at it They've seen us another another antique of the of the Of the campus socialists and things like that And so so it's not as hard as you would think to turn things around through education Because especially in economics Even just one simple example is not only the left wingers. I had one student who became my american economic history class And he was he was astounded. He said he said i'm a senior economics major I've taken all the economics courses except this one and I never knew there were criticisms of the fed that existed You know, you know, I've had money in banking monetary theory macroeconomics one macroeconomics two I didn't know there was criticisms of the fed And so so and he totally turned around he came to mesi's university and and and so And so he educated himself So we use economic education Economic education and in austrian economics is like To in the academic world is like flashing a christian cross in front of dracula That's the way i've always looked at it. That's why paul even paul krugman gets so upset It's some of the ideas of austrian economics, you know, why should he get upset? He you know, he makes all this money. He's a new york times columnist. He's a columbia university professor now Why should he get upset over toms tom wood's book meltdown about the great recession or or anything? our friend bob murphy writes about About business cycles or something like that. He does the final Point i'll make about what can be done is ridicule I mean the story about the frolicking puppies at brown university and things like that We need to ridicule these things these people are doing as much as humanly possible or herbert marcusa saying Well, you can you can choose work or you can choose sex, but you can't have both You know, I think we need we need to ridicule a lot of what they're saying because it's very easy to ridicule that And uh, and that's been one of my main occupations for a long time is as a is ridicule Of these some of these bad ideas. So thank you very much for coming. I hope you have a good good afternoon