 I want to talk a little bit about cancel culture, which I've not talked about that much. I've talked about a little bit last time, somebody asked me about it, but you know, it really is getting ridiculous. And it really is, I mean, what cancel culture, what jazz, what, I think Black Lives Matter and the response to it, what all of this is kind of adding up to is really, and I was thinking of titling the show this, but it seems a little bit overly dramatic. It really is the death of reason in America. It really is, you know, people don't want to debate, don't want to discuss. There is a new religion in town. It is the religion of whatever the left declares to be necessary, not even true. We saw that yesterday when I talked about anti-racism, the new anti-racism religion, there is a dogma and you must follow the dogma. We cannot have discussions, we cannot have debates. The dogma is not a reason-based dogma. It's not a dogma, dogma never is, in religion ever is, not one to derive from logic, reason, reality. It's one that is focused on emotion and that emotion becomes a religion. And what makes it a religion is that it demands sacrifice. It demands fighting and it demands fighting about the faith. No reason is provided. No justification is needed. All that is demanded is that people go out there and do and say what they're told to do and say. This is blind obedience. That is what the demand is. But what is fascinating about it is, as with all religions, the first step that this culture engages in is in attacking its own, in purifying its ranks. So the first thing it must do is attack other leftists and cancel them, which is silence them, exclude them, fire them, get rid of them in one way or another, eliminate their voice, cancel them out. Now I've got a series of examples here. There's a good article in Reason.com. It's called The 1793 Project. 1793 Project on Mass. This is a response to 1619 Project. You know what 1793 is? Well, it's the French Revolution. It's the guillotine. So like what I talked about the other day about Rousseau and about the kind of culture of eliminating one's enemies and the culture of violence, Reason, you know, this article plays off of that, right? Plays off of that. And it's the same kind of analogy which I have already used by Robbie Soves, S-O-A-V-E. And he gives a number of examples of how, you know, of this just recently and in the past. So I'll give you an example. So there's a guy named David Shaw. David Shaw, 28 years old, political scientist at the Democratic Consulting firm, Civic Analysis. This is a Democrat leftist organization. He is a Democrat leftist. During the demonstrations, he tweeted out observations about the degree to which violence helps a cause or doesn't. The degree to which movements are more or less successful whether they use violence or not. So for example, he shared research by Princeton University professor Omar Wazow, who's found that violent protests back, often backfire, violent protests, nonviolent protests, sorry, nonviolent protests are far more likely to succeed. And I think that's absolutely true. In this case, I think the violence of the rioters in the first few nights of the protests really did the protest harm. And I think the protest would be much more successful by their own standards if there'd be no violence. Because the violence gives an excuse to those who oppose them to say, see, see. So he did this because he believes in the Black Lives Matter cause. And he said, look, if you believe in the Black Lives Matter cause, violence will not help it. So stop it. Just research. Well, he was immediately denounced. Immediately denounced by the progressive activists, by the leftists. They denounced him as a racist. This goes back to my anti-racism comment yesterday. Unless you agree with him completely on everything, you are a racist, including on whether to use violence or not. It turns out. So here's this 28-year-old political scientist doing his best to try to promote the cause and explaining that violence typically doesn't help a cause. And he's denounced as a racist. One activist accused sure of using his anxiety and intellect as a vehicle for anti-Blackness. This is what I meant yesterday by unless you follow their prescription of how to behave as an anti-racist, you are a racist. No matter what your views are, no matter what your opinions are, no matter what the color of your skin is, no matter anything you do, you are racist and that you follow their very clearly delimited agenda. Now, okay. So the guy is attacked. You might say big deal. But in these tweets and attacks, his consulting firm that employs him was tagged and invited, the company was invited to quote, come get your boy. And they fired him. They fired him, right? This is what I mean by the culling their own. The first step in the revolution is get rid of all the weak links. Get rid of all the people who don't follow the dogma, who on your side, but don't follow the dogma. You only want pure, pure of heart or you want to intimidate everybody into following the dogma, whether they agree with it or not, so that there are no dissenting voices on your side. So all the dissenting voices on the other side, you can easily argue that they are white supremacists, fascists, racists, whatever. But first thing, you have to cleanse the left. You have to cleanse the left of anybody who doesn't follow the party line, the anti-racist BLM party line, which means you cannot, you cannot say anything disparaging about the demonstrations, the riots, the violence, if the party line says it's inappropriate. It's, you saw this, right? You see this all over the place. Now you saw this in the campus demonstrations, you saw this in the campus silencing of certain speakers, but most of those were conservatives. Now they're going after their own. They have been for a while. Now there was an article in Atlantic a few years ago, I actually did a show on this years ago, by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lucchiana, an excellent article called The Coddling of the American Mind. I mean, I think it's excellent, although it's missing some pieces, but it really is good. And in The Coddling of the American Mind, they talk about this snowflake phenomenon. These young people who can't handle different points of view, different opinions, different ideas, they get offended, they get upset. It's like violence on their soul. And they talk about the fact that the reason that we have all these snowflakes is they grew up as a generation where safety was the primary and emotionalism was the primary. They grew up with a progressive education idea that what education is for is to cultivate your emotions, to cultivate your emotions and to make you feel safe. And their parents, these helicopter parents who took care of everything and didn't allow them to get a scratch on their knee and didn't allow them to do anything that might be a little scary that these parents that kept them safe and cultivated their emotional life and didn't let them cry and didn't let them be upset about anything. That these parents created a whole generation of snowflakes of people afraid to be challenged, afraid to be told they're wrong or afraid, not even to be told they're wrong, to be told that their ideas that might be different than their own. An unthinking generation, a generation that's abandoned reason, a generation that has been told they're smart and they're good and they everybody got ribbons and they all have self-esteem and they're all just wonderful, fantastic people and nobody should ever say anything different. But at the same time they've also been told that if they're white they're guilty of awful racism and they should feel immense guilt and that they're privileged. So this weird, conflicting, strange, emotionalist agenda that they have inside of them doesn't add up to anything, complete disintegration. But the one thing they hold on to is the idea that they need to be safe. They cannot be challenged. And that ideas, that speech is a threat. It's a threat to their safety. They have to run to their safe spaces and cuddle a teddy bear in order to survive an idea that might be different than what they've ever heard before. I'm already getting teary-eyed. Not a fear for these gentle spoiled brats. So they don't want any ideas that might upset them. They don't want any ideas that might challenge them. They don't want any ideas that might be violence on their soul, violence on their emotions. And indeed, when they've gone out and censored people on campuses, they've always used this idea of personal safety. It's not safe for them to hear these ideas. It's not safe for them to have Charles Murray on campus. It's not safe for them to have, I don't know, Jordan Peterson on campus. They feel threatened. Not because anybody's going to punch them in the face, but because the ideas are threatening them. And of course, these kids leave college and they go to the workplace. And maybe some of them go to work for the New York Times. And then the New York Times publishes an op-ed that they don't like, that is offensive to them, that actually says maybe the military should go out there and shut down the protests, agree or disagree written by a U.S. senator. I mean, not a senator I like, not an op-ed I agree with particularly, but yeah, it wasn't super nutty. It was not right, but it wasn't super nutty. But the New York Times staffers, 800 of them, claimed that running this ad put their particularly black staffs' lives in danger. How? It's an idea. You don't like it. Don't agree with it. Reject it. How does an idea that there's not being manifest in reality put your life in danger? Running the peace. Not somebody acting on it, just printing it. They invoked workplace safety. They did not feel safe in the New York Times building in New York. I don't know because they get, I guess, because federal troops, special forces were going to rush into the New York Times because that's where they did. No, I, what? I doesn't make any sense, but that's the point. It doesn't make sense. The emotions are primary. They didn't feel safe. I believe that because they were emotions were hoods. Their emotions were challenged. Their ideas were challenged. And instead of defend themselves, instead of writing an alternative op-ed, instead of saying, Senator Cotton, you're full of it. You're wrong. Instead of that, they just said, we need to shut him up. And of course, the victim here didn't land up being Tom Cotton, the Senator, Republican Senator from Arkansas. No. He's not the target at all. He's not the one they're after. What the whole cancel culture is about is silencing the voices from within, silencing the left's voices that are not towing the line. So who got sacrificed here? Who lost this job here? Not Tom Cotton, but the editor of the op-ed page of the New York Times lost his job over this. Now, was the editor of the op-ed page of the New York Times some crazy right wing white supremacist? No. Did the editor of the op-ed page of the New York Times agree with Tom Cotton's op-ed? Clearly, no. He was a leftist, but he was a leftist that believed that the op-ed page of the New York Times should reflect diverse opinions in the culture of people with influence, because it's good for the readers of the New York Times to know what people are thinking and what ideas, what scope, range of ideas are out there. He's the one who lost his job. For them, to be safe is to be coddled. To be safe is to be hugged. To be safe is to be affirmed. Safety means being told that you're right, being told that you're good, being told that you're a winner. Safety means getting a ribbon. And when somebody comes up to you and says, I disagree, oh my God, that is offensive. I know, by the way, all kinds of people don't like when people say, I disagree. I love it when people say to me, I disagree. Great, why? Tell me, why? Let me learn something or not. But I'm not offended by you disagreeing with me. I'm indeed shocked. If you agree with me too much, you see LA this last week. Suspended Electra Gordon Klein. After he declined the demand that he make a final exam, no harm. This is again from the Reason article. That is an exam that could only improve your grade for students of color who might have been traumatized by events in Minneapolis. So the idea is, because of what happened in Minneapolis, students at UCLA might be traumatized, might be very, very upset. And therefore, they should be allowed to take an exam that only improves their grades. Not everybody else who's not traumatized. I don't know if this would apply to whites who are traumatized. I don't know. They can't get that benefit. Only the students of color who claim to be traumatized get the benefit of a freebie, a free exam that can only improve your grade. Talk about discrimination. Talk about racism. Talk about appeal to emotion. Talk about coddling snowflakes. In Israel, in college, we would do, in a minute of college, you would be called up to the Army. We're all in reserve. Everybody's on reserve. You'd go for a month. Maybe you'd go for a month to the West Bank of the Gaza Strip, or in my day, or to Lebanon even. And you might be engaged in literal life-or-death situations. And when you came back, you expected to catch up on your studies and take exams even if you had been traumatized by what had occurred wherever you were. Now remember, these UCLA kids were in LA when this thing happened in Minneapolis. Now I get it that they might be upset, but grow a spine, grow some balls. I'll get to growing balls in a minute, but come on. Now Klein refused to allow this to happen. And by the way, this is according to UCLA guidelines, which do not allow forgiving leeway like this on exams. The activists got a petition together and he got suspended. And my guess is Klein is a leftist. But you got to cleanse. Cleanse your ranks. And this goes on and on and on and on, where people are losing their employment, losing their social standing, being harassed on Twitter and Facebook, being shamed and ridiculed and threatened. And yeah, they're not being guillotined, they're not being killed, they're not being bitten up yet. Yet we'll see what happens. But it's people's jobs, it's people's livelihood. And what effect that this has and will have and continues to have is that it causes people to be silent. It causes people to not object. It causes people to not discuss, not debate. And as a consequence, you get the sense that, or the idea is to give the impression that everybody agrees, that everybody's on the same page, that everybody buys into this radical nutty agenda and just accept. And then when we look at it, it looks like everybody, let's say in academia agrees with these people, but it's not true. There are plenty of people in academia who don't agree with these nuts. But they can't speak up. If they did, they'd lose their job, or lose their standing, or be kicked out of a journal, or not be allowed their papers to be published, they would be penalized. So what is happening now now is silencing the dissenters, silencing those who might stand up against the emerging dominant view on the extreme left. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism, and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Using the super chat, and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time, so I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to youronbrookshow.com, slash support, or go to subscribestar.com, your onbrookshow, and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next-