 And let me just start by thanking all of you for coming. I know it's a beautiful Saturday, beautiful weather, and I know you have a lot of family and work commitments, so you took time away from today. So we're honored and we're humbled that you would choose to spend today with us. I'm told we have about 19 states represented here today, so we're happy to hear that. We've got someone from Mexico as well. We have 31 students here today on scholarship. So thank you very much for supporting us. We have, and those 31 students represent 19 high schools, universities, and homeschooling groups. So that's great to hear. And I think you'll enjoy our topic today. We decided, instead of doing something more econ-heavy like we're known for, we talk about the Fed and that sort of thing a lot, we thought we'd mix it up a little bit and talk about political correctness, which is something I think is at the forefront of our country today. And it's certainly a virus that infects and affects all of us. So we have two great guests, two Tom's, Tom Woods and Tom Di Lorenzo, who have both done battle in the trenches of academia and I think are very well qualified to speak today about what's going on. And of course, we have our founder and our chairman, Lou Rockwell, perhaps one of the best known anti-state intellectuals in the world today speaking as well. I mentioned that you took time away from your families in this beautiful weather today, but I suspect I know why you did so because you understand that something very troubling is going on, that political correctness represents something very evil in our society and that we need to address it. So I wanted to begin with something I noticed recently. I don't know how it was sent to me, but I saw the filmmaker, John Waters. He's sort of an avant-garde filmmaker from Baltimore. I like him, kind of an intellectual type. He made some films that were pretty famous in the 70s, especially. So he recently was asked to give a commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design in Rhode Island. Now, you think most universities have become very left wing and very PC? Well, you can imagine an art and fashion design school. Fine, the kids are very left, correct left. And the baby boomer parents and attendants who presumably footed the bill for this, we're all in thrall to John Waters. So he comes up and he proceeds to give the most politically correct speech you can imagine. He's trying to show how cool he is, so he laces his commencement speech with profanity, how original. And then he gets into these 60s cliches, the most tired things imaginable, about how these kids should join the system and bring it down, and this sort of thing, and that they should go out in the world, do X, Y, and Z. And then, of course, he goes into the obligatory stuff about, and I want you to fight racism and sexism and homophobia, which I'm sure are just absolutely burning issues on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island. What he ought to be telling these kids is, god, you went to an art school, pray for a job. If he wanted to be on PC, he could have been saying, why don't you mix your art training with something practical like metal fabrication or carpentry work or something where you could be artistic and make a living? But he didn't say any of this. And what struck me about it was throughout the whole commencement speech, he is absolutely convinced that he is still a cultural rebel. He's convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there's some wasp power structure out there that's keeping art students held down from having their hair the way they want it to be. I mean, it was just absurd, the lack of self-awareness and the lack of irony in this guy. He honestly does not understand that people who think and believe just like him control every institution in this country. They control the state, they control government, they control academia, they control media, they control entertainment, they control big business. And he still imagines himself an outsider, a rebel. And I think PC is so prone to this tendency to this lack of self-awareness and this lack of irony. And for us, for people in this room who have a different respect, I find it delicious because it provides a nice target for ridicule. And I think it's deserving of ridicule. So as I mentioned, we do a lot of economics conferences. You might think of the Mises Institute as an organization dedicated to economics. But we're also an organization dedicated to making the most radical case for a free society. And so PC is fundamentally at odds with academic freedom and political freedom. I think it's actually a very good topic for our organization to address. And we have a bit of a pedigree, an anti-PC pedigree. Our namesake Mises himself, of course, fought tooth and nail both against the Marxist and Keynesian orthodoxy of his day, but literally against national socialism. He was forced to flee Austria and later flee Europe altogether, come to the US. His apartment was ransacked by the Nazis. And when he did arrive in the US in the 1950s, he was denouncing what he called pseudo-progressives, who controlled US universities by smearing laissez-faire advocates and keeping them out of academia by terming them reactionaries. And of course, Murray Rothbard, who was a dear friend of Lou Rockwell helped create the Mises Institute. Murray Rothbard was un-PC before the term PC even existed. Okay, in his academic work of speeches, his articles of writing was fearlessly honest. And he was very much a modern make-in. He reveled in showing the reality behind official explanations for things. No matter how ugly that reality might be. In the 1980s and 1990s, he correctly saw that the then burgeoning culture of victimhood was actually neo-puretin in its roots and would have this corrosive effect on the American spirit. So, not coincidentally, Murray's great protege, Hans-Herman Hoppe, was later purged by PC enforcers from his purge at UNLV. And today, of course, Professor Hoppe is a Mises Institute senior fellow and also one of the most radical and un-PC scholars in the world. And so I would like to say that the Mises Institute has resistance to DNA, excuse me, resistance to PC who are woven in our DNA. So I thought that I would like to speak today a bit about what PC is and what it is not. But first, let's talk about what PC is not, at least in its modern version. And then later, we can talk a bit about what we might do to fight against it. So to begin with, please understand that political correctness is not about being nice. Okay, it's not simply a social issue. It's not a subset of the culture wars. It's not about politeness or inclusiveness or etiquette. It's not about being respectful towards your fellow humans or about being sensitive or caring or avoiding hurt feelings and unpleasant slurs. It's not about any of these things, despite, of course, what our progressive friends insist PC is really about. And as a side, I'm not just singling out left progressives. There are right progressives too. Right progressive are generally known as neo-conservatives and they share the same goal as the left progressive that we're all sort of evolving towards this new man who is going to better serve the state. So please don't feel I'm unduly picking on our progressive friends from the left. But I'm sure you've heard this argument. PC is about respect and inclusiveness, they tell us. As though we need the modern left in America, the cultural enforcers to help us understand that we shouldn't call someone retarded or that we shouldn't use the N word or make hurtful comments about someone's physical appearance or encourage bullying. If PC was about kindness and respect, it wouldn't need to be imposed on us, right? After all, we already have a mechanism in society for the social cohesion that PC has said to represent. It's called manners. And we already have specific individuals, thankfully, who are charged with ensuring that good manners are instilled and upheld. Those individuals are called parents. I'm sure some of you in this room can relate. I struggle with that on a daily basis. Does anybody here really believe that our PC culture, aggressively secular, dominated by empty pop music and derivative crass TV and music and movies, mindless social media produces virtually no important literature to speak of? Does anyone here really believe that our culture is nicer than that of our decidedly non-PC grandparents? Of course not. The PC in the West is not nice and neither are its enforcers. On the contrary, PC is degraded and reshaped Western culture into something purposely ugly, something that insults the eye, insults the ear and the mind. And yet for all of its lack of personal restraint and emphasis on individual feelings, PC culture is somehow decidedly sterile and conformist. So no, the PC world that we all live in today is not a nice one because PC is not about being nice. So it's not about being nice or inclusive. What exactly is PC? Well, I'm gonna take a stab, bear with me. I'm gonna take a stab at a definition of it. I'm gonna define it as such. Political correctness is the conscious, designed manipulation of language, intended to change the way people speak, write, think, feel and act, all in furtherism and agenda. That's a mouthful, I understand. But if you put it all together, I think PC is best understood as propaganda. That's how I suggest we approach it and understand it. But unlike ordinary propaganda, which historically has been used by governments to win favor for a particular campaign like a war effort, PC is all-encompassing, right? It seeks nothing less than to mold us, to reshape us into modern versions of Marx's idea of an unalienated man, freed of all of his social pretensions and humdrum social conventions. So like all propaganda, PC fundamentally is a lie, right? It's about refusing to deal with the underlying nature of reality and in fact, attempting to alter that reality by legislative or social or cultural fiat. So in PC, A is no longer A. And just recently, the aforementioned Hans Hoppe had a great quote about this. He's talking about the masters, meaning what I call the state linguistic complex. He says, the master stipulated that aggression, invasion, murder and war are actually self-defense, whereas self-defense is aggression, invasion, murder and war. Freedom is coercion and coercion is freedom. Saving an investment or consumption, consumption is saving an investment. Money is paper and paper is money. Taxes are voluntary payments and voluntarily paid prices are exploitative taxes. Contracts are no contracts and no contracts are contracts. Producers are parasites and parasites are producers. Indeed, what we can see here or otherwise sense does not exist. And that which we cannot see here or otherwise sense does. The normal is A normal. Black is white and white is black, et cetera. So in a PC world as Hoppe sees it, metaphysics, metaphysics is actually diverted and rerouted. Truth becomes malleable and just truth just serves a bigger purpose, determined of course by our superiors. So political correctness means suspending disbelief to advance an agenda that none of us asked for, none of us voted for, none of us sought in the marketplace and none of us want for our kids. So PC is nothing new, right? When we try to struggle with where did this all come from? It seems to have snuck up on us. How do we get to the point where we can't even speak freely in our own country? Well, PC in all of its various forms is nothing new under the sun. I think we can safely assume that feudal chiefs and kings and emperors and politicians have ever and always wanted to control the language and the thoughts and thus the actions of their subjects. I think some version of thought police has always existed, but it is interesting to consider because I think the better we understand political correctness, the better we fight it. If success has a thousand fathers then so does modern political correctness. And let's not kid ourselves about the degree to which it is successful. We can judge that by the degree to which it's ingrained in the West. So to understand its origins, we might go back to the aforementioned Marx. We might read or learn about the historical Frankfurt School. Marxist we may consider from the right, the work of Leo Strauss for his impact on this war hungry right wing think tank world that we have. We might study the deceptive, purposely deceptive slogan earring of a Saul Alinsky, Hillary's great mentor in effect. We might read about or you might be interested to know that the French philosopher Foucault talked about political correctness in the 60s but he talked about it. He used the term political correctness as a criticism because he said so much of what Marxism was is not scientifically correct, it's just based on dogma. So if something's going to be politically correct it ought to be scientifically correct. And then of course moving forward a bit to understand PC we might look at the new left that emerged in the 1970s, particularly modern feminists and race obsessives who to their credit at least at the beginning of this term you oftentimes used it ironically amongst themselves. And then if we move forward into the 1990s we might look to the emergent culture wars of that period when Patty Cannon had his famous speech at the Republican convention, right wing writer Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book about PC and really gave it sort of a better shape in its holistic modern sense. Understanding PC is a political, legal, cultural, social, psychological, linguistic phenomenon. But I'm gonna make my own recommendation if you really want to understand the black art of PC propaganda. Let me suggest someone else to use one of its foremost practitioners, a man named Edward Bernays. Now Bernays literally wrote the book on propaganda and its softer incarnation of public relations. Remarkable man, he's actually little discussed in the West today despite being I think the godfather of modern spin. And he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and much like Mises, he was born in Austria in the late 19th centuries. But unlike Mises, he came to the US fortuitously for him as an infant, about one year old and then proceeded to live another astonishing 103 years until 1995. So the guy had something ticking inside him. And one of his first jobs was as a press agent for President Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information, which was an agency designed to gin up popular support for World War I, which was deeply unpopular at the time in the US, especially among German Americans who didn't wanna fight their fatherland and among Irish Americans who weren't crazy about the idea of being allied with the English. So Bernays is credited with coming up at this time that the phrase make the world safe for democracy. And that came back around for us in the Bush Gulf War, that's for sure. So after the war ends, he asked himself, could we apply similar techniques to the problems of peace? This sounds like a neocon, doesn't it? The problems of peace. But by problems, he meant selling stuff. So he directed some hugely successful ad campaigns amongst them Ivory Soap. He, for I think the egg grower folks, he directed a campaign recommending bacon and eggs for breakfast as a healthy thing, which turned out to be true. And he was a big promoter, did a big ad campaign for ballet that brought ballet more to the fore in New York City. But his biggest success for which he's known was making smoking acceptable for American women. See, up until then, smoking was seen as a dirty habit and hence a male habit, right? And women could even be arrested for smoking in certain public areas. But you know, you get into the 20s and the flapper era and the old pre-war social modes are breaking down. So at the behest of his client Lucky Strike, Bernays arranged for a group of glamorous women to march in the 1929 New York Easter Parade. And they were smoking in this parade what they called torches of freedom. Kind of randy and, you know, it's glow on the end of your thing. And so, well, you can imagine what happened after that, these glamorous New York ladies smoking. So the stigma quickly evaporated and Lucky Strike found itself with a whole new base of potential customers. And ironically, years later, Bernays' wife would die of lung cancer and he would publicly profess regret at his role in glamorizing smoking. But he was proud and open of the term manufacturing of consent. This was a term coined by a British surgeon and psychologist named Wilfred Trotter who wrote a book called Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War in 1919. So Bernays really took this concept to heart. You know, the herd instinct entails the deep-seated psychological need that we all have to win approval of our social group. And the herd overwhelms any other influence. As social beings, you know, our need to fit in is paramount. But however ingrained it might be in us in Bernays' view, the herd instinct cannot be trusted, right? The herd is irrational and dangerous and must be steered by wiser men in a thousand imperceptible ways. And to Bernays, this was key. They shouldn't know that they're being steered. So to Bernays, what we call public relations was much deeper than what we think than PR today. He didn't see himself as an ad man. He saw himself as a creator, a transcendent creator who shaped events and perceptions at all levels of society. And this is his daughter Ann talking about him after he died. He said, the public's democratic judgment is not to be relied on. They could easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing. So if they had to be guided from above, this guidance was a sort of enlightened despotism. Excuse me. So this is his own daughter describing him. But the techniques that Bernays employed are still very much being used today to shape political correctness. Now, first, he understood how all powerful the herd mind and the herd instinct really is. You know, despite our nature, we all think we're special snowflakes, right? Well, to Bernays, we're timorous and malleable creatures who desperately wanna fit in and win acceptance. So as a result, humans naturally seek out a tribe, whether it's familiar or social or religious or ethnic or political. And this actually raises a very important question for us as libertarians. If there really is something deeply rooted in many of our DNA that makes us gravitate towards collectivism, you know, as a tactical matter, what does that all mean for us as libertarians? Are we trying to overcome something that's actually quite innate, at least in many humans? So second, he understood the critical importance of using third-party authority to promote causes or products, right? We see this all the time. Celebrities, athletes, models, politicians, wealthy elites, these are the people from whom the herd takes its cues. So whether they're endorsing transgender awareness or selling luxury automobiles. When we see George Clooney or Kim Kardashian or, and this pains me, or Robert De Niro endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, which all three have done. It resonates with the herd, it does. And third, Bernays really understood the role that emotions play in our tastes and in our preferences. It's not a particular candidate or a cigarette or a watch or a handbag that we really want when we see the commercial. It's the emotional component of the ad, the whole lifestyle it appears to entail that affects us, however, subconsciously. So I encourage you to read more about Edward Bernays if you're so inclined. He's a fascinating man. And I think you won't come away disappointed. And you'll come away definitely with a much better understanding of PC causes and how they've managed to weave themselves into the fabric of our culture. So let's talk a little bit about how we might fight back, right? That's always the question at libertarian conferences, I've been, I've sat through a million of them. And there's always something somewhat unsatisfying. The speaker can never give you that level of specificity you're looking for. Like if there was some 800 number, you could call. Someone would come to your home with a trunk full of AK-47s or something. I don't know. But what can we do as individuals with finite amount of time and resources, with obligations to our families, to our loved ones, to our jobs, what can we do to reverse this growing tide of darkness? Well, of course, only you can assess your situation, what might be best for you. The best we can hope to do today is to inspire action on your part. But let me offer in closing a few modest suggestions. First, and this really can't be overstated. I see this in liberty-minded people all the time, is understand that we're in a fight. It's a real fight. It's not just rhetorical. Okay, PC represents a war for our hearts, our minds, our souls. And the other side understands this. And so should you. Okay, the fight is taking place on multiple fronts. It's not just the state. There's a whole complex of government at all levels, academia, media, the business world, churches, synagogue, nonprofits, NGOs. All of these forces are aligned against you, and they're all pushing PC down our throats. And the Obama team in the White House employs a huge group of social psychologists. And that's all they do. They work on engineering the herd. That's their job. And they help people like Hillary Clinton overcome cognitive dissidents, right? When Hillary Clinton rails against Wall Street. Wait, aren't you and your grift or husband the biggest beneficiaries of Wall Street largesse in the history of humanity? Well, for most people that cause cognitive dissonance, right? Enter social psychologists. So these are experts, folks. Okay, we're being outgunned and outmanned. Now understand that the PC enforcers, they're not asking you to accept this. They're not debating you. They don't care about your vote, okay? They don't care whether they can win this at the ballot box. Don't care if they have to use extra legal means, stroke of a pan, executive order. Okay, they're in it to win. There are millions of progressives in the US who absolutely would criminalize speech that doesn't comport with their sense of social justice. Don't kid yourself. Okay, one poll recently suggested 51% of Democrats and one third of all Americans would absolutely favor criminalizing hate speech, so-called hate speech. Okay, the other side is fighting deliberately and tactically. So my single biggest piece of advice is realize you're in a fight. Then arm yourself, equip yourself and fight back. Culturally, this is a matter of life and death. The second thing I might say tactically in closing is that realize that we still have tremendous freedom to act. You know, as bad as PC contamination might be at this point, we still have an enormous amount of freedom in elbow room available to us if we still choose to seize it. You know, none of us here are literally Mises fleeing the Nazis a few days ahead. You know, we still have tremendous resources at our disposal in a digital age. We can communicate globally. We can create communities about spoken anti-PC voices. We can still read and share the anti-state, the great anti-state books and articles of our time. We can still read real history. We can still read the great un-PC literary classics and share them with our kids. We can still homeschool those kids. And we can still, for the moment, hold events like this one today. So just as the state is really largely an illusion, it's based on maintaining its legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We should ask ourselves, you know, have the PC walls really closed in as tight as we think? Or is it us? Have we failed to grab all the room, all the space that's still available to us? And one way I might suggest grabbing that space is to use humor and ridicule against PC. You know, PC is absurd. When you really get down to it, it's absurd. And most people sense this. Most people of goodwill do sense this still. And so it's, as I mentioned with John Waters, it's practitioners suffer from this comical lack of self-awareness and irony. So use every tool at your disposal to expose PC in your personal relationships, online, in your family, your friends. We should really steadfastly refuse to bow to it in our personal lives. Fight it wherever and whenever and however you can. Spread awareness of how we're being manipulated. Because that's really the first step. Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy. You know, bucking PC absolutely can hurt you. The possible loss of one's job, reputation, friends, even family. It's just serious. But I don't think defeatism is called for. And I think it makes us unworthy of our ancestors if we succumb to it. Now also realize that change can actually come very quickly. We tend to think that these things evolve were such a long period of time, but never forget, the society can change very rapidly in the wake of certain precipitating events. And, you know, we certainly hope no great calamity befalls the US economic disaster, our currency collapse, energy crisis, a disruption in entitlement payments, civil unrest, anything like that. But we can't discount the possibility that these things happen, happening. And if they do, I would suggest that PC is one of the modern adornments that would be among the first things to go. Only rich modern societies can afford this luxury of a mindset that doesn't comport with reality. So that mindset might disintegrate very rapidly if conditions, which is to say wealth, phrase in the West. I think men and women might start to realize that they need each other and compliment each other. If the welfare state breaks down. Hours and hours spent on mindless social media might give way to actually rebuilding those family and social connections that matter very much when the chips are down. And more productive pursuits like arts and crafts and languages and electronics and gardening and cooking and repair and program. Now these things in hard times might replace diversions like Tinder and Instagram. And I think more traditional family structures, multi-generational living, et cetera, might suddenly seem less oppressive in the face of great economic uncertainty. And schools and universities might rediscover the value of teaching practical skills instead of whitewashed history and victimhood, grievance studies. One's sexual preferences might no longer loom as large in the scheme of things in a poorer world. And the rule of law might actually become, once again, something to be followed rather than just an abstraction that can be discarded at whim to further the social justice movement and to die supposed privilege. So in other words, hard times just might make us rediscover the true meaning of justice, which is the granting of the earned. Hard times might help us rediscover ourselves. The spirit of Americans, described by AE Jeffcoat in his great book, stubborn, hard-boiled optimists with a deep and abiding pioneer spirit rather than the soft, whiny narcissists we become in this PC world of feelings and constant umbrage. So play the long game. It might not be popular to say so, but if we hang in there and do everything we can, I'm convinced that the tide may just turn on our direction. But we don't have a lot of time to spare, ladies and gentlemen, if you think that the day is not coming soon when you might wake up and websites like mises.org and rockwell.com are simply not available any longer or the day might come when those websites are not findable using search engines. If you think that day is far off, I suggest you think again, the head Facebook creep Zuckerberg was just at a UN conference and he was overheard on a mic talking to Angela Merkel, giving her every assurance that Facebook was working on it. And what he meant by that was they were helping to tamp down criticisms by German Facebook users of what the German government was doing in response to this latest refugee crisis. And Facebook actually came out with a statement, a public press release. Edward Bernays wasn't there to help. So we are committed to working closely with the German government to find the best solution to this important issue. So we all know what that might be. It's chilling, isn't it? And I'm convinced it is coming soon to a server near you unless we all get busy. So let's get busy and thank you so much for your attention this morning.