Who Is Teaching Your Kids? | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people.
2. 0:07They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology.
3. 0:12They have made it their life's mission to undermine Western civilization itself,
4. 0:16which they regard as corrupt, oppressive and “patriarchal.”
5. 0:21If you're a taxpayer—or paying for your kid's liberal arts degree—you're underwriting
6. 0:25this gang of nihilists.
7. 0:27You're supporting ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective; that all sex differences
8. 0:32are socially constructed; and that Western imperialism is the sole source
9. 0:37of all Third World problems.
10. 0:39They are the post-modernists, pushing “progressive” activism at a college near you.
11. 0:45They produce the mobs that violently shut down campus speakers; the language police
12. 0:50who enshrine into law use of fabricated gender pronouns; and the deans whose livelihoods
13. 0:55depend on madly rooting out discrimination where little or none exists.
14. 1:01Their thinking took hold in Western universities in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the true believers
15. 1:05of the radical left became the professors of today.
16. 1:09And now we rack up education-related debt—not so that our children learn to think critically,
17. 1:15write clearly, or speak properly, but so they can model their mentors' destructive agenda.
18. 1:21It's now possible to complete an English degree and never encounter Shakespeare—one of those
19. 1:26dead white males whose works underlie our “society of oppression.”
20. 1:30To understand and oppose the post-modernists, the ideas by which they orient themselves
21. 1:35must be clearly identified.
22. 1:37First is their new unholy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion.
23. 1:42Diversity is defined not by opinion, but by race, ethnicity or sexual identity; equity
24. 1:49is no longer the laudable goal of equality of opportunity, but the insistence on equality
25. 1:54of outcome; and inclusion is the use of identity-based quotas to attain this misconceived state of equity.
26. 2:03All the classic rights of the West are to be considered secondary to these new values.
27. 2:08Take, for example, freedom of speech—the very pillar of democracy.
28. 2:12The post-modernists refuse to believe that people of good will can exchange ideas
29. 2:16and reach consensus.
30. 2:18Their world is instead a Hobbesian nightmare of identity groups warring for power.
31. 2:25They don't see ideas that run contrary to their ideology as simply incorrect.
32. 2:29They see them as integral to the oppressive system they wish to supplant, and consider
33. 2:34it a moral obligation to stifle and constrain their expression.
34. 2:38Second is rejection of the free market—of the very idea that free, voluntary trading
35. 2:44benefits everyone.
36. 2:46They won't acknowledge that capitalism has lifted up hundreds of millions of people
37. 2:50so they can for the first time in history afford food, shelter, clothing, transportation
38. 2:55—even entertainment and travel.
39. 2:58Those classified as poor in the US (and, increasingly, everywhere else) are able to meet their basic needs.
40. 3:04Meanwhile, in once-prosperous Venezuela—until recently the poster-child of the campus radicals—
41. 3:11the middle class lines up for toilet paper.
42. 3:15Third, and finally, are the politics of identity.
43. 3:17Post-modernists don't believe in individuals.
44. 3:20You're an exemplar of your race, sex, or sexual preference.
45. 3:24You're also either a victim or an oppressor.
46. 3:27No wrong can be done by anyone in the former group, and no good by the latter.
47. 3:32Such ideas of victimization do nothing but justify the use of power
48. 3:36and engender intergroup conflict.
49. 3:39All these concepts originated with Karl Marx, the 19th-century German philosopher.
50. 3:44Marx viewed the world as a gigantic class struggle—the bourgeoisie against the proletariat;
51. 3:50the grasping rich against the desperate poor.
52. 3:53But wherever his ideas were put into practice—in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia,
53. 3:59to name just a few—whole economies failed, and tens of millions were killed.
54. 4:06We fought a decades-long cold war to stop the spread of those murderous notions.
55. 4:10But they're back, in the new guise of identity politics.
56. 4:14The corrupt ideas of the post-modern neo-Marxists should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
57. 4:20Instead, we underwrite their continuance in the very institutions where the central ideas
58. 4:25of the West should be transmitted across the generations.
59. 4:29Unless we stop, post-modernism will do to America and the entire Western world
60. 4:35what it's already done to its universities.
61. 4:38I'm Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, for Prager University.